Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Plantation America

Here's a thoughtful article about different ideas of wealth, freedom, and politics. I find the argument about Plantation America to be apt, and in fact, those attitudes are why I prefer to avoid certain of my relatives. But it's amazing how much damage the master's tools can do to the master's house if you stick a fork in the microwave or a few words in the right ear.
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  • 2 comments
siege

Regarding uprisings

siege

July 13 2012, 20:56:13 UTC 8 years ago Edited:  July 13 2012, 20:57:05 UTC

It's noted that the attitudes of Southern elites focus on oppression and suppression because they need lots of serfs to do their work.

Now, "throwing a wobbly" is still a phrase for pitching a ridiculous temper tantrum. Most people only hear it when someone British talks about such things.

Here's some history: The Wobblies were one of the most effective groups to organize people for unionization. They wanted to be imprisoned, for example, because that was one of the easier ways for them to spread the word and gain new members.

Memorize a bunch of really catchy tunes, and soon you'd have whole prison populations singing along. Since a punishment-and-control based society is guaranteed to re-imprison the vast majority of anyone who's already been in prison as soon as they get caught doing something illegal (or even just suspicious, a lot of the time), you're not only re-infecting prisons that have already caught the unionization bug, you're infecting new prisons with ideas about personhood, rights and responsibilities, group action, and other unwanted "group liberty" material.

How are you supposed to remain above the law when the whole of the underclass wants to subject you to it?
ysabetwordsmith

Re: Regarding uprisings

ysabetwordsmith

July 13 2012, 21:57:16 UTC 8 years ago

>>It's noted that the attitudes of Southern elites focus on oppression and suppression because they need lots of serfs to do their work.<<

Which actually played into why the North won the Civil War, more than most people realize. It wasn't just about state rights or slavery. It also dealt with industrialization vs. agriculture ... and the fact that neither of those infrastructures work very well if a majority of your people HATE YOU. Southerners often think of blacks as lazy and clumsy because those were effective modes of resistance: work less, break things, lose thing. Spit in the soup, piss in the well, bury bent horseshoe nails under the floorboards in the Big House.

>>The Wobblies were one of the most effective groups to organize people for unionization. They wanted to be imprisoned, for example, because that was one of the easier ways for them to spread the word and gain new members.<<

Also it forces the establishment to exert maximum force for minimum return, and costs them money.

I'm worried about the rise of for-profit prisons, because if crime pays, the owners will ensure "crime" so as to protect their profits. And then it doesn't hurt the system, but benefits the system, if people are arrested. That's modern slavery, and it's a serious problem ...

>>How are you supposed to remain above the law when the whole of the underclass wants to subject you to it?<<

... because if the law doesn't provide justice, people will abandon it en masse and go back to dispensing their own justice with baseball bats and dynamite. We do not want the ship to sink far enough to step up into that lifeboat.