A lot of the cruft in the American criminal law system has to do with the fact that we’ve got a system nominally dedicated to punishing *wrong acts* (or ~rehabilitating~ the actors, wevs), but there’s such a desire for a system to get rid of *wrong people* that we end up working up kludges to use it that way, and then the True Believers try to apply barriers to that and then there’s more workarounds and back and forth until we’ve got a system that’s at once way too big and intrusive, full of loopholes that allow the resourceful to Do It Wrong in both directions.

Maybe what we need is a system like Athenian ostracism that lets us exile people on the basis that we simply want them out of the way, without bringing process or punishment into things, so it can bear that weight without mucking up the justice system.

Maybe what we need is a gendarmerie - a military force policing in peacetime - because a lot of policing isn’t really a function of delivering someone to the justice system so much as preventing some particular outcome.

It’s kind of counterintuitive to think a force that siezed and held people on the basis of no particular law might improve things, but the situation we’ve hit upon here - passing enough laws that one can be used as pretext at any given time, arresting and holding people then eventually releasing them without charges, or for the longer-term, holding them until a trial the outcome of which is beside the point - doesn’t really seem to differ that much in effect. Worse, even, because there’s the chance that prosecutors and judges might actually take the law and the trial seriously, and attempt to impose punishments superfluous to the actual purpose of destabilizing an unwanted situation. Plus the whole need to create and promulgate ideologies to justify these pretextural laws is kind of warping, whereas people can generally recognize “yeah, okay, the gendarmerie won that fight” unaided.

I can see concerns about militarizing the police but for one wow has that ship sailed. And as before, largely because we don’t have an honest raison d'etat mechanism. We arrived at current state of exception, at Guantanamo Bay, backward from there, a legification of military force, taking the desire for that guy *there* to be *not-there*, and the prerogative of force to make it so, and married it to a farce of a guilt/innocence paradigm, creating a dynamic with the worst of both worlds - “stuck on a remote island, without recourse” AND “penal dehumanization justified by a purpose-built governmentality”.

Meh, honestly I’m not so naive as to think anyone could design a system that couldn’t break or be broken, I think the best system is always “a new one” - dynasties always start fresh and die stale and so does any system, encrusted with cruft and iron triangles. That is to say, so long as the system has a feedback loop in which control is exerted through a mechanism (say, elections, or alternately the military support of lesser lords) that responds to policy.

If you’re going to maintain a republic you need a limited franchise of electors so self-sufficient that they’ll be fine no matter what, that’s been known for millennia.

I guess my ideal government would be one that changes forms randomly and unpredictably as determined by a meta-government. You could maybe even design an electoral system with three modes, in each of which a different leg of Arrow’s impossibility theorum collapses, so long as which mode to be used was determined by some Swiss functionary rolling a die.

radianthour:

Raise hands and assume Praise Pose while reciting the product name incantation to return to beloved image of a man shooting another man through the heart point blank

monetizeyourcat:

juliamaoashdevatgasicia:

SEALAND DOESN’T HAVE ANY MEANS OF PRODUCTION FOR US TO OWN

…a longing by bourgeois capitalists like that one PayPal guy to return to a system of production based on land scarcity - an attempt by capitalism to graft itself onto a new feudalism.

Oh yeah, re-enchanted capitalist feudalism was transparently the appeal of cyberpunk right-accelerationism. (And the associated noir demimonde which made no pretense to resistance, but I guess that’s the “enchantment” part.)

Snow Crash obviously. Shadowrun (which was amazing worldbuilding tied to a system with an awful D6 fetish that left little margin between total success and total failure) had a pretty good backstory whereby a Supreme Court decision immunizing private security forces who had defended an infectious medical waste shipment from mistaken food rioters eventually metastasized into corporate sovereignty.

The corporations left a shell of formal democracy intact because “who really wants to bother themselves with garbage collection?” Well, the Mafia for one which was an oversight, but this was also a lore in which Suddenly Elves. (Really it was all just an excuse for rule-by-keiretsu because Japan Is The Future.)

AC Slater - 60 Minutes of Uplifting Happy Hardcore (Side A)

Back in the day, I was on a US happy hardcore mailing list run by Muppetfucker/Noahphex. AC Slater was a kid on there who started DJing under the influence of his uncle, who spun as Michael Knight. (One of their fellows later topped them both by becoming DJ Tanner).

Back when I was in LA I knew a bunch of DJs and party promoters, and learned that AC Slater was coming through. Guy produced tha club bangers, spun at the kind of places that had their own party photographers for everyone to look at themselves the next day. I figured it was someone else using the same name. Nope. He just quickly mentioned that he was spinning “UK Hardcore” and breezes by. At the time, his freshly killed happycore myspace still outranked his new one on Google.

monetizeyourcat:

a moment of widespread recognition that America Is Rotten turned into Washington Is Rotten because of 1976, it’s actually a huge fucking deal and nobody seems to realize it

Those tall ships really lifted the nation’s spirits after Watergate.

AC Slater - 60 Minutes of Uplifting Happy Hardcore (Side B)

yuria:

アルファルファモザイク - 【画像】食い物で遊ぶな！って言いたいけど凄い

But even as he glorifies war, he does not sanitize it. “He sets the grim package down on the counter the way a merchant lays down a bolt of fabric to be measured by the yard./ These are the remains of Alfredo Barbieri from the Ljubljana mission.” (p. 66) “One barrage of fire had massacred our men./ The bloody pile was far away but seemed to be approaching with a slithering of entrails.” (p.256) He was wounded. His friends and comrades killed. He mourned the fallen with a passion approaching mania. But not only did he glorify war in writing, he begged to fight, and used his fame and influence to secure permission to fly on bombing missions even after his afflicted eye was amputated.

Josh Cook reviews Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio. (via therumpus)

It’s an… ehh article, there’s a few things I’d challenge and the part at the end where he announces that he’s compiled some great quotes and then doesn’t share them is quite an unworthy tease (d'Annunzio gave amazing quote), but it’s always nice to see some anglophone recognition.

angel flare

you reap what you sow

songopaul:

Trigger, Please by Shnabubula

I downloaded this track a few nights ago (along with a ton of other Chrono Trigger remixes) from OC Remix’s site, and this song blew me away when it shifted into a non-Chrono Trigger song.

What song is it? Only my favourite FFV song!

clever, and while they stuff too many embellishments into one track they’re all idiomatic

yeah ok cats

that is all

So the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial age, nationalist age, romantic age, Occidental age, age of progress revalorization of the Norse and Greek myths, right?

in those pantheons the lightning (which is to say, electrical) gods outranked the sun gods. Millennia before electrification and the replacement of agriculture with industry as the human idiom. That’s so obvious someone must have made a thing of it right?

(Or was it one of those things where one just came from an older pantheon in the same mythos? When I was in middle school I felt sooo clever for coming up with the idea that pantheon succession [Titans to Greek gods, etc.] was the result of mythologizers of material culture justifying continuity with the mythologizers from the same culture in previous stages of development and then eventually I discovered Joseph Campell and all that and I was like dang. I still wonder whether that was a parallel discovery or just reverse-engineered from the culture that had already processed the idea.)

[One of my favorite mythological theories I’ve encountered is that the Proto-Semitic pantheon fell out amongst themselves and Yahweh was the trickster who emerged victorious pretending to be the life god. {Now that I type this out it’s glaringly obvious how well this theory itself serves as a nationalist mythologization of the role of Jews in Christendom}]

(The reason that folklore & mythology, and linguistics, and physical anthropology were such a thing was because before radiocarbon dating and the discovery of DNA, that was what we had of prehistory)

In related news I think I might start practicing Ásatrú. It feels right in Portland. When I was in LA I worshipped (distinct from “believed in”, pff) Santa Muerte - the man-scarred desert felt like the right place to revere death.

The way the Facebook notification icon is a pixellated Western hemisphere - does that idiom seem weird to people who don’t live in the Americas?

I knew a girl in college whose parents had met there, years ago. She was an undergrad, he was an astronomy grad student from Brazil. Their first date was all romantic out under the nighttime sky, she asked him to point out some constellations, he said he didn’t recognize any of these stars.