The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.

No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.

Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.

Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.

But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.

Lot of cops out with tear gas, body armor, and live ammo to address these non-insurrections

its citizens refuse to rise up

Americans routinely go through periods of insurrection and revolt. We had Occupy. We had the BLM protests. We had the anti-war movement stretching from early 2003 to 2012. We had anti-genocide protests. We’ve had No Kings marches - massive parades of people in the street shouting and marching. We had the J6 riot at the capital. We’ve had militia movements all through the Midwest and Gulf Coast. We have cartels and mafias that periodically pick fights with local, state, and federal police. Biker riots and Tea Party marches and tax revolts and race riots.

The problem isn’t that Americans won’t rise up. The problem is that we also have an enormous, incredibly well-armed and exhaustively well-trained policing bureaucracy. Over 700,000 professional cops, plus sheriff’s deputies and national guardsmen and private security guards and mercenaries and bounty hunters. We’ve got a hundred billion dollar prison industrial complex. We’ve got a multi-trillion dollar surveillance state. We invest staggering amounts of labor and capital into keeping American citizens repressed.

When Americans rise up, other Americans press down.

Well, but that’s impossible. In China, he won’t have any freedom. He needs to stay in the United States where he can pursue research into biology and medic- door bang

shouts of military police

repeated gunfire

screams of terrified research assistants

confused orders from multiple officers at once

more gunfire

moaning from injured civilians

more gunfire

radio chatter from officers

“Yeah, they were armed. Looks like syringes and a bunson burner. Yes. All illegal. Yes, we’re cleaning up now. No need to report this up the chain, they already know. Signing out.”

As I understand it currently, the Straight of Hormuz is open for people not currently at war with Iran.

You can reach out to the IRGC, put in a request to traverse the Straight, validate that you are not currently an agent of a belligerent in their unlawful bombing and attempted occupation, and then receive a confirmation notice along with a bill for safe passage.

Iran Charges $1 Per Barrel Toll via Yuan, Stablecoins

Earlier, the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee announced on the 30th of last month that it would legislate the strait passage fees. According to the details of the plan reported by Bloomberg, shipping operators wishing to navigate the strait must contact a brokerage company linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and submit details including the ship’s ownership structure, shipping documents, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, and automatic identification system (AIS) data.

The brokerage company forwards these documents to the Hormozgan Province Command of the Revolutionary Guard’s Navy, which then verifies whether the vessel has any connections to countries Iran considers hostile, such as Israel and the United States. Once this inspection is passed, toll negotiations begin. Iran has categorized countries into grades 1 through 5, with vessels from more friendly nations receiving more favorable terms.

The initial negotiation price is typically around 1 U.S. dollar per barrel, payable in Chinese yuan or stablecoins. Stablecoins are digital assets pegged 1:1 to the value of fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar or Korean won. Given that a very large crude carrier typically carries 2 million barrels, the toll is expected to be set at a similar level to 2 million U.S. dollars (approximately 3 billion Korean won).

So it appears that Trump has gotten exactly what he set out to accomplish. Congratulations. Get that man on the deck of the Gerald R. Ford to celebrate.

In fact, they go back to being slaves because then they don’t have to worry anymore.

This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.

Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.

The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.

Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.

The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.

But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

– Joey S

Idk what that does to the suicide rate

but let’s put things in perspective here…

“Hey, listen, we’re only talking about John Wayne Gacy here. He’s no Green River Killer.”

Okay, but then you’re not talking about reincarnation in the Hindu/Buddhist sense. You’re talking about the kind of Past Lives shit that western spiritualists are into.

Except Dems always play by the rules

No they don’t!

They say they do, but they routinely break conventions and norms and laws and constitutional amendments when it’s convenient for them and their donor base.

More often than not, they wait for a Republican to do it first and then just keep on keeping on.

But they don’t follow the rules. They use the rules to excuse why they refuse to enact popular policies. They deflect and defer and soccer-flop.

“they go low, we go high”

Obama did drone strikes on children.

That cuts both ways.

everything is just getting worse

The planet is in its sixth major extinction event - one that’s been ongoing for roughly 12,000 years. And yet we’re finally achieving a kind of universal consciousness regarding the impact we’re collectively imposing on the world and the methodologies we can employ to respond to it.

I don’t think I’d call that “getting worse”. No other lifeforms have ever had the opportunity to know they’re going extinct before it happens, much less the faculties to do something about it.

This is a pivotal epoch in Earth’s multi-billion year history. I would not say things are getting worse. I would say things have the potential to move in a direction no planet in the Solar System has had the opportunity to move since it was created. That potential creates a great deal of anxiety and fear, because it is much easier to be ignorant - a dinosaur unaware of the looming comet - than faced with the foreknowledge of catastrophe. But it is that shared anxiety that creates the social pressure for universal change.

Reincarnation into what?

“Hey, if you die in this life, you can come back as a bug that gets eaten by another bug shortly after hatching. And then you can do this for the next 10,000 years until you get lucky enough to come back as something remotely sentient.”

Sounds like that shit sucks, man. You have a real pivotal moment in this life to embrace dharma and appeal to heaven for a higher place in the great pattern. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a mystic, but I don’t think eating a bullet after a night spent guzzling whiskey is what gets you up the ladder.

They can. But will they? These post offices are run by the same people doing the voting, after all.

It’s one thing to tell a post office in Utah to trash all the ballots and just hand the keys of state off to the local Mormon Bishopry. Very much another to give the order in Washington State.

From the GOP perspective, this explains why Colorado is a Democratic island

Colorado isn’t a Democratic island. New Mexico and Arizona are also blue states. Nevada’s solid purple, regularly sending up a mix of Ds and Rs. There’s no shortage of conservatives in Colorado, either. Lauren Boebert is from Colorado, ffs. She’s got an enormous constituency of evangelical lunatic supporters and die-hard Republicans. Trump lost Colorado in 2016 by a Gary Johnson’s margin. It was straight up winnable back under Compassionate Conservative Bush Jr.

They probably tell each other that without all the fake, mail-in ballots, Colorado would be as red as Wyoming and Utah.

Sure. And Democrats keep insisting Texas is winnable if all the non-voters turn out, nevermind how a rising volume of overall voters only ever breaks for Republicans.

Nevertheless, shutting down mail-in voting in Colorado won’t benefit Republicans in any meaningful way.

The effect is sowing further distrust in voting by mail

Colorado and Oregon consistently have some of the highest voter turnout in the country.

Idk if this works in practice.

I love that the noose of reality is tightening around this regime’s neck

I mean, I remember this gleeful enthusiasm back in 2006 and 2018. Very likely there’s a bloodbath in the next election. But… what comes next?

Will Dems actually be in charge of the Senate? Or do we get the “John Fetterman Says No” show for the next two years?

Does the House try and rein in the President or just double down on war funding while doing photo ops of Hakeem Jeffries shrugging impotently?

Go back to Pelosi’s House under Bush. And Pelosi/Schumer under Trump 1. These were not inspiring moments of liberal leadership. More often than not, Dems don’t stop the fascism. They just cash in and become complicit.

after it has had the effect they wanted on the upcoming election

I don’t think the anti-GOP sentiment is confined to elderly liberal voters.

Also, Eight states – California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – conduct what is commonly referred to as an all-mail election, or universal mail-in voting. In these states, voting is conducted primarily by mail, and all eligible voters receive a ballot by default

I’m not sure how post offices in these states could even respond.