Episode Transcript:
Intro - 0:00
Hello and welcome to another week. Remember, the work week is a fiction, Monday doubly so; you can get rid of them if you really want to. This is Social Justice Alchemy.
[Me rocking some arpeggios.]
Rant - 0:30
So, just imagine: there you are living your peaceful, happy life here in the US, then in comes an alien invader that kills and enslaves, like, 90% of the US is wiped out through genocide both accidental and deliberate. The aliens move in and start tearing everything apart. Everything we've built is erased, paved over with alien culture and technology. Sights, sounds, smells, everything is this alien cacophony of stink.
The aliens are jerks to each other, too. They're bringing in slaves and servants who they treat like garbage. They live in squalor as bad as yours.
And then the aliens go to war. Not with Canada or Mexico, but with each other. See, while they were slaughtering you and your family, and importing slaves and the servant caste, and setting up these massive estates and fiefdoms, the homeworld was ignoring them. There was no profit in screwing with them. But now? Now they're established and have money.
So what does this war mean for you? Not a damn thing! The local aliens are genocidal slave-owning bastards. The distant aliens are genocidal slave-owning bastards. It's old money alien aristocrats trying to assert control over new money local alien aristocrats. You can try siding with one group or the other, trying to negotiate a better position, but really, what are you really gonna get from slave-owning genocidal bastards?
And then the war's over. Local aliens won. So they go ahead and set up a government giving themselves power, ignoring their servants, their slaves, and you. Since they're not members of the homeworld ruling class, they congratulate themselves for being so forward-thinking. Hooray! They've replaced their old, distant alien aristocracy with a new, local alien aristocracy. Sooo radical.[/sarcasm]
Now, some of you (a lot of you) will have already realized what I'm going for here: the US Revolution was not radical or progressive. It was liberal, in that it set up this individualist pro-capitalist so-called pseudo-democracy. It confirmed the authority of the landed aristocracy that settled itself in the colonies. It gave power only to wealthy white men, ignoring women, people of color, natives, slaves, and the poor.
I mean, the reason the 3/5ths Compromise was acceptable was because the northern nobility were already voting and ruling on behalf of their disenfranchised servants. The reason the northern aristocracy objected to the southern aristocracy being able to vote on behalf of their slaves is because slaves were a lot cheaper than servants, meaning that they could have a lot more slaves. That's it. So the reason they came up with the compromise: that's what they worked out, y'know, what a slave cost versus what a servant cost.
Now, the Patriots didn't call themselves aristocrats; they pretended to meritocracy just like wealthy people do today, that they had "earned" their wealth. They replaced a feudal aristocracy with a capitalist aristocracy.
Revolutions always come back around to where they started. Don't trust them. And don't think of the US as something new, something different, something great. It was a modification of the old to put power into the same hands. That's all. They then set about establishing the exact same kind of evil empire it had just left.
Or in the words of Terry Pratchett: "Ave duci novi, similis duci seneci!" = "Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss!"
The US has never been particularly liberal. It has never been radical or progressive. It has never been great. It's been more of the same. We really need to fundamentally alter the way the United States is set up if we want to see genuine progress, genuine human rights, genuine support for human rights, a genuinely benevolent system of government. Let's move on to the stories.
- Review: The Witcher - 4:45
- I am rage - 6:36
- Ongoing US-Backed Genocide in Yemen - 8:42
- Provocative Posing is the Problem? - 12:10
- What's the difference, I wonder? - 18:00
- Children still separated - 21:07
- Trump finally cancels parade - 23:08
- Healthcare for 500 million - 25:38
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