“American Justice” should always be scare-quoted. If you didn’t notice, the justice system has been dragooned into being part of a general push for voter suppression and forced labor that is highly racialized. It has also become a means of farming poor people for money – there are ridiculous crimes like “jaywalking”, and speed traps a’plenty to make sure that a steady stream of fines flows into the coffers of the police.
Around 1994, I attended a small conference in Washington, DC; it was memorable because it was at that event that I really understood that the US imperial war faction intended to militarize cyberspace. At the time, I thought that was just their way of spending the “peace dividend.” Perhaps it was that, too.
The US empire was forged in Pittsburgh, and in Bethlehem, and Baltimore’s Sparrow’s Point. The plant at Bethlehem was huge; I spent a day wandering inside the year before it was finally torn down.
Blogging forces your own adequacy in your face, and if you’re a skeptical blogger, you wind up examining it closely to make sure your assessment of your own mediocrity is not too full of confirmation bias. Then, you turn to the list of things in your head that you want to write about, and wonder if you can do them justice.
Now, when there is a mass shooting incident, a new strategy has begun to appear; it’s a form of “what about-ism” – delaying having to do anything by throwing up a barrage of problems with every possibility that anyone offers.
Some political analysts have described the Badgerian political system as “passive aggressive,” though most would say that it relies on “fail soft” behaviors. While American Thomas Jefferson might say, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs” that sounds like a great deal of fuss to a Badgerian, who would probably re-phrase that as “neglect may kill tyranny as surely as revolution, it’s just slower.”
Political legitimacy is achieved by having a system of government in which the people agree to it, giving up a bit of their autonomy in order to gain the benefits of participating in the collective.
Walter Mosley could have been channeling the founding archons of Badgeria when he said:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” – Winston Churchill
Churchill, an aristocrat, imperialist, racist, and militarist, was arguably part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The first moment where I started to wonder was in 6th or 7th grade social studies. We had a textbook about “geography” which included some geopolitics; a picture on one page of Uncle Sam sitting in a circle with characteristic (even stereotypical) kids of various ethnicities. It wasn’t quite as bad as that the kid from Africa had a bone through his nose – not quite. The caption read “Americans want to be friends with everyone.” And when the page was turned, the picture was of a Red Army soldier in WWII uniform, with a ppsh tommygun held at port arms, “The Soviets want to rule the world.”
Elsewhere I have implied that the US, UK, Russia, and China are (to some degree or another) oligarchies masquerading as democracies. They probably could be ordered on a scale from greater to lesser – but that’s a debate for another day. Today, we’re going to consider some of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as reported by Will Durant in Story of Philosophy. [amazon]