A funny thing about social media is that before the Internet, making a point of showing your acquaintances pictures of your family (as wallet photos) or of the interesting, exotic place you just visited (as vacation slides) was the stereotypical mark of a boorish, boring person
me: I wonder what’s going to come of all these cosplay camgirls when they get too old to make a living by dressing up as D.Va and masturbating
also me: I dunno, what happened to the dirty old Times Square peep show workers when they got too old to make a living by dressing up as schoolgirls and masturbating?
• Christ is born and HE is savior! (Levant, 00-100)
• The day of his birth is a holiday called Christmas (Rome, 300s)
• Nicholas is sainted in his name (Anatolia, 400-500)
• St. Nicholas is “Santa Claus”, bringer of presents! (Dutch-American legend, NYC, USA, early 19th cen.)
• Santa Claus fills stockings riding a sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer (Clement Clarke Moore, USA, 1823)
• Christmas is a day where capitalist magnates are inspired away from profit-maximization by popular sentiment (Charles Dickens, London, UK, 1843)
• Christmas is a holiday where you erect a lit pine tree and trade store-bought presents (mid-late 19th cen., German lands)
• Santa Claus wears a red cap and suit (Coca-Cola and others, USA, 1930s)
• Santa has a 9th reindeer, a pathetic runt named Rudolph (Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, USA, 1939)
• Christmas is a day where people erect evergreen trees and exchange presents but a fuzzy green monster representing capitalism wears a red suit and teams with an ersatz runt reindeer to undermine it, but popular sentiment inspires him away (Theodore Geisel as “Dr. Seuss”, La Jolla California, USA, 1957)
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — More than two months have passed since the assassination of Marielle Franco,
a human rights defender who was a member of Rio’s City Council. But the
killing remains unsolved. The most probable hypothesis, according to
Brazil’s public security minister, Raul Jungmann, is that local militias
were behind her death.
Militias in Brazil
are different from paramilitary groups in other countries. Their
origins here can be traced back to the 1970s, the days of the military
dictatorship, when off-duty police officers formed death squads to
execute criminals and political opponents, according to José Cláudio Souza Alves, a sociologist who studies the groups.
In
their current form, militias were established in Rio de Janeiro in the
late ’90s and early 2000s, under the pretext that they were protecting
residents from drug traffickers. Although more civilians are joining,
the militias have been dominated by active-duty and retired police
officers, who essentially assume control of suburban slums, or favelas,
under the guise of defending them.
Once
they have a foothold in the community, militia members extort money
from residents and shopkeepers (in other words, they demand payments
that are partly for protection against themselves). They also control
local unlicensed public transportation, since city buses are scarce or
nonexistent in remote areas. They offer illegal internet and television
connections, charge commissions on real estate deals, and control the
supply of gas and water. In the Gardênia Azul favela, for example,
militia members collect money from street vendors and even popcorn
carts.
One of them is irony. After careful
deliberation with their accountants (at least that’s what I imagine),
and in the name of business diversification, some militias have entered
the field of drug trafficking. Others have decided to work with their former rivals from drug gangs, selling them weapons and recruiting members from their ranks. In 2015, according to the newspaper O Dia,
a militia “sold” the area of Morro do Jordão to a drug gang for three
million Brazilian reais, or about $800,000. So much for the righteous
excuse of vigilante justice.
According to the news website G1, two million people in the Rio metropolitan area live in territories controlled by militias. A 2013 academic report concluded
that of the roughly 1,000 favelas in the city, 45 percent are
controlled by militia organizations and 37 percent by drug gangs. The
main difference is that police brutality is less common in
militia-controlled neighborhoods, probably because those groups have
strong ties to the official state security apparatus.
Another
feature that they share with the Italian mafia is that they have
infiltrated political institutions. In 2008, Ms. Franco was an aide on a
parliamentary commission that investigated the involvement of
politicians in Rio’s militias, whose findings led to the arrest of
roughly a dozen members of the City Council and two state congressmen.
The commission had found that during election years, militia groups try
to field their own candidates for office, and threaten voters and even
kill competitors. In 2016, at least six candidates running for City
Council were executed by militia members in the area of Baixada
Fluminense.
Which bring us back to
the militias’ original configuration as extralegal death squads. Their
cold-blooded concern for public safety has been converted into a
businesslike approach to protecting their criminal assets. According to
Rio’s Homicide Division, militia-controlled neighborhoods generally have
the highest homicide rates.
@jaherafi pointed me to this which has implications for the upcoming election where Bolsonaro has promised to give the police a free hand.
Man you’re asking how history will judge us for not signing on to your crusade to Protect Women
like Prohibition, the Mann Act, obscenity laws, the armed suppression of Mormon polygamy, in parentis loco campus parietal rules, the 1980s Moral Majority, the “drinking age” of 21 years
America entered World War One in the face of a lot more ferociously opposed pacifist, socialist, anti-imperialist sentiment than our school books emphasized (they emphasized “isolationism”, foolish from the perspective of the Cold War empire)
And after the war there was a hard backlash against American entry, that it had been in the interest of rich Europe- and coastal city-based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers
(Sub rosa, America had lent to everyone and intervened before anyone’s homeland got too rekt to repay; the flood of repayments inflated the Gatsby-ass Roaring Twenties but also funded the factory build-out that allowed the US to be the WWII Arsenal of Democracy and postwar consumer cornucopia/labor aristocracy)
That’s a big part of why interwar America was so entranced by buisnessman-public intellectuals associated with the new modern industries where domestic producers led the field, figures like aviation superstar Charles Lindbergh, assembly-line innovator Henry Ford, and Hollywood animation maestro Walt Disney!
I see people responding positively without any sense of irony so: anti-semitism. The joke is anti-semitism; that Walt Disney, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford’s political interventions were known for it, and who do you think “Europe and coastal-city based traders, investors, and transatlantic shippers” were
Like anti-semitism was big in early 20th century American business, the only recent depiction I can remember is Herbert Moon from Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games is our new Scorcese, specializing in violent tales set in very specific periods of American history)
A lot of that was related to the rise of scale, related to the anti-chain store thing (A&P pre-super markets were the original WalMart). The concern was Jews had preferential access to Jewish-dominated networks of capital and trade that traces back to the great banking houses and manufacture/trade magnates of Europe
And I mean Jews did dominate the new form of department stores, super-retailers that dominated with their superior access to capital and goods markets
And the classic NYC Jewish housewife slogan, “never pay retail!” didn’t mean “wait for sales” or “clip coupons” but “pump your neighborhood (ethnic) connections for manufacturers/wholesalers who’ll sell to you at cost”, so if the whole “Jews favor other Jews in trade networks” was a made-up calumny, it somehow fooled the Jewish community of America’s major trade port/manufacturing center
How was this resolved? It wasn’t! The Depression->WWII cycle radically limited the role of European capital and manufacturing in the American economy, and later it came back much attenuated with the role and influence of Jews greatly reduced
at this point I’m starting to wonder if there was ever at any point a mainstream American ideology that wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint over “I hate Jews and foreigners”
Well the Anti-Masonic movement is interesting because it was “our urban educated elites are bound together in a Christ-rejecting cabal and use their influence in media, politics, law, and business to corruptly benefit each other at the expense of hearty God-fearing common folk” but not about Jews
American lawyer Delbert Smith said the telecommunications revolution is about control and power. “Hell is a loss of privacy, and nothing brings us closer to hell than telecommunications technology,” he said. “We will all end up consumers with no privacy in a technological world with no protections.”
This quote is old enough to drink.
Debaters said that while the so-called information superhighway improves access to information, it also could destroy jobs, isolate women, and possibly lead to anarchy.
John Eger, communications and public policy professor at San Diego State University, warned against what he called the divisive power of telecommunications. He said religious, linguistic and tribal conflicts throughout the world have been started and fueled to some extent by the spread of telecommunications, which he said can easily promote sensationalism and propaganda.
“This is the hell…that we must be most concerned about,” he cautioned. “This is the hell that we must do something about if we are to succeed and survive in the new global information economy and society.
The world is literally ON FIRE right now so pardon me if I’m not getting all worked up about the ‘plight’ of the privileged white woman whose credit card I stole and used to buy an absolutely epicsauce $12,000 PC gaming rig.
