| ▲ | Frieren 2 days ago |
| Only aristocrats can play that game. The soldier is being punished for doing something not allowed for his class status. This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power. |
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| ▲ | samsari 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| You're almost right, but "class" and "caste" are not synonyms and cannot be used interchangeably. |
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| ▲ | rob74 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, as social mobility between classes becomes increasingly difficult, they become more and more like castes... | | |
| ▲ | 21asdffdsa12 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame. | | | |
| ▲ | baxtr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | OP is right. Status games take many shapes, distinct castes is one special shape. | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Being in Congress is very mobile, and they're the ones with the special exemption. |
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| ▲ | alistairSH 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent). Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown. Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich. It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests. | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased. And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted. |
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| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Medical schools require a lot of volunteering But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades? | | |
| ▲ | Plasmoid 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Because there are so many applicants that have good grades. A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate". | | |
| ▲ | waterhouse 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible. MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think OP's point was that the governing boards don't want the people with the top n grades. They want certain people, and by making the admissions criteria fuzzy, they can pick and choose those certain people and then say "well, our admission criteria is subjective," and "we are looking for 'well rounded people," and all kinds of other vague weasely ways to let them legitimately shape the student body in the way they want. See also: "Cultural fit" when hiring. | | |
| ▲ | BobBagwill 2 days ago | parent [-] | | One of my roommates who was premed had a "hot car" poster as a motivational study aid. After a short term as a candy striper at a local hospital, he changed majors. The system works! ;-) |
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| ▲ | oivey 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either. The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical. | |
| ▲ | andrew_lettuce 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I want a doctor who was a strong student with diverse experiences, lots of soft skills and can handle the entire psychological spectrum of being a doctor, not the doctor who was solely the best at exams. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There are all kinds of doctors though? The ones who don't have soft skills or diverse experiences can go into pathology or other fields that don't involve as much patient interaction. Why lose out on their gifts altogether if they're genuinely interested in medicine. |
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| ▲ | jjmarr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible. I live in Ontario and we're there. 40% of Waterloo students had above a 95% average in high school. The average GPA to get into UofT med school is 3.94/4.00 GPA. What has happened as a result is students killing themselves and each other. If you fail one test in any course, you cannot move to the next level. So, if you go on the UofT subreddit there's endless stories of pre-med students sabotaging each other. Faking friendliness, destroying notes, etc etc. This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA. https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/1sbu811/had_no_idea_t... You don't want this type of person as a doctor. They will sabotage others because that is how they got ahead in the past. In a medical environment that kills people. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Too many kids want to be doctors and have the grades for it? That's an opportunity, not a problem. Training more doctors is just never an option for some reason. Don't build systems that reward amoral psychopaths. | | |
| ▲ | jjmarr 2 days ago | parent [-] | | We've opened a new med school after a decade of planning. 1.5% acceptance rate. |
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| ▲ | waterhouse a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > This is arguably rational because the pool is small and there's little to gain by studying harder if you already have a perfect GPA. So there is a low ceiling, and if they instead used MCAT or something with a higher ceiling (where, apparently, the number of perfect scores is about 50 per year—in America, presumably lower in Canada due to population size), then studying harder would benefit them. That seems like a much better outlet for competitive urges. But also, how small is the pool of qualified applicants? If there were something like "they're going to take n people from your school, at which there are 30 plausible candidates", then sabotaging one might conceivably be worthwhile. But if the pool is—well, Google says 3,000 medical students get accepted each year in Canada (and the qualified applicant pool is presumably at least somewhat larger), and sabotaging one person is extremely unlikely to help you personally. (This is one case where it's good that the expected-value "benefits", of sabotaging person X, are widely distributed among thousands of medical candidates, and thus it's a "free-rider problem" where no individual candidate has a strong motivation to do the work.) Is there some multi-stage thing where they pick 10 people from each high school, or 30 from a town, or something? Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? That seems like how you would get real incentives for this backstabbing behavior. Otherwise, I can't see how it's rational (even to a complete sociopath), and would have to chalk it up to individual miscreants and possibly some kind of culture that encourages it in other ways. | | |
| ▲ | jjmarr 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Or is there major grading on a curve, or a big benefit for being the top person in your classroom of 15? Yes. UofT even has "down curves" where your mark is lowered to ensure the correct distribution. |
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| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Because there are so many applicants that have good grades. So train more doctors. | | |
| ▲ | waterhouse 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That would increase competition and thus depress wages for existing doctors, who are the ones who make the decisions here. I heard, from a medical school attendee, that she overheard some doctors discussing whether it would be a good idea to require a fifth year of medical school to become a general practitioner (luckily, they were like, "Eh... nah"). It did not seem like it bothered them that this would make it even harder for civilians to get medical care. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I thought lawmakers made the decisions. Silly me! :-D | | |
| ▲ | waterhouse 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Theoretically yes. But I think at least part of the decision they've made is to delegate a chunk of the decisionmaking to doctors' guilds. Which—on the one hand, they are experts of a sort, but on the other hand, they have an obvious conflict of interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association#R... Wow. 1997: https://www.baltimoresun.com/1997/03/01/ama-seeks-limit-on-r... > “The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the AMA and five other medical groups said in a joint statement. “The current rate of physician supply — the number of physicians entering the work force each year — is clearly excessive.” > The groups, representing a large segment of the medical establishment, proposed limits on the number of doctors who become residents each year. > The number of medical residents, now 25,000, should be much lower, the groups said. While they did not endorse a specific number, they suggested that 18,700 might be appropriate. | | |
| ▲ | triceratops 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I've read about that before. I personally am of the belief that Medicare funding for residency slots should be eliminated over time. Also freely allow the opening and expansion of medical schools and teaching hospitals. Over time things should settle into a comfortable equilibrium of enough doctors making decent wages for everyone to be treated at a reasonable cost. But maybe that's a free market fantasy. Who knows. Or the alternative. Government-owned everything healthcare - facilities, hospitals, med schools, doctor practices. Doctors only work for the government. The current system is neither here nor there and is designed for maximum profit. |
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| ▲ | vel0city 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Because there are so many applicants that have good grades. Sounds like we need more spots for these people to go |
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| ▲ | andrew_lettuce 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because everybody has the same gamified, inflated high grades |
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| ▲ | Sir_Twist 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people. | | |
| ▲ | mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I can't prove it, but I've heard more than one story of those with relatives in the military managing to get someone to pull rank and put them on better and upwards promoting assignments. |
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| ▲ | majormajor 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >(parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent) That's a pretty wide net. What percentage of the total population has a military connection in that many degrees? | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Obv not a great sample, but within my peer group, none have parents or siblings. I have an uncle. Grandparent is a weird one - for anybody born in the 70s as I was, it’s almost a given to have a grandparent or four who served. Being European, all of mine served at the tail end of WWII or immediate aftermath. |
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| ▲ | pmc123 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've noticed the same trend with SWEs tbh. Many new grads from the top schools have parents who were SWEs or SWE adjaent | | |
| ▲ | red-iron-pine 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | not necessarily SWE but definitely engineering / STEM pedigrees. e.g. my buddy whose grandad was a lineman and later a telephone company manager, and dad was a mechanical engineer, and he ended up SRE / devops | |
| ▲ | wholinator2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could. | | |
| ▲ | Larrikin 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Legacy admission was removed in response to affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration. | | |
| ▲ | gtowey 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions. So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy. | |
| ▲ | RestlessMind 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration. Affirmative action was gutted by SCOTUS when Biden was president. Not that it was popular before. California of all places rejected it by 56-44 margin in 2020. |
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| ▲ | gedy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Joining Military isn't really a "class" thing - unless you mean lower income people join the military more often to get started in life. Military academies are more of a upper class thing though. | | |
| ▲ | ok_dad 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Military academies are not upper class at all, mostly middle class folks. Officers are generally of the same stock as any other white collar job in engineering, law, business, etc. |
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| ▲ | adolph 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind. The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?" | |
| ▲ | themafia 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They are synonyms as that includes "nearly the same." The only difference I can detect is that "class" allows members to move between groups and "castes" do not; however, all the outcomes are identical. So they are absolutely synonymous in most peoples eyes. | |
| ▲ | sleepybrett 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | caste and class reinforce each other. | | | |
| ▲ | tcp_handshaker 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | class, cast, scum... the tokens are not really relevant, only the facts: "‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra... | | |
| ▲ | simonh 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The thing is, a LOT of people voted for this, knowing perfectly well what they were voting for. | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Peace, cheap energy, release of the Epstein files, .. |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sounds like people’s lot in life is becoming hereditary. Caste can be used. |
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| ▲ | Razengan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > their relationship to power The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures: It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to. The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part. |
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| ▲ | rcxdude 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power). | | |
| ▲ | Razengan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's like that image of a horse tied to a little plastic chair and not daring to move away | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | kergonath 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to. What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it. | | |
| ▲ | vlan0 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is true up until it isn't. Their security is through obscurity. Being able to deflect the masses. Manipulating the balance, if you will. But they are not special. They are still unprotected sacks of flesh. And we've recently seen just how vulnerable they are. If that desire spread, you will see more. | | |
| ▲ | kergonath 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > This is true up until it isn't. Indeed. Then, there’s a revolution and heads start rolling. But again, this does not happen when power disappears; it happens when the balance changes, e.g. when a significant chunk of the army sides with a part of the people. > Their security is through obscurity Not at all. They can be very blatant about it. Look at Iran for example. Or Russia. Everyone knows who controls what, there is nothing obscure about it. |
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| ▲ | SJC_Hacker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half” - someone |
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| ▲ | niyikiza 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reminds me of the riddle[1][2] from Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings: Lord Varys: Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?
Tyrion Lannister: Depends on the sellsword.
Lord Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor favor with the gods.
Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death.
Lord Varys: But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else?
Tyrion Lannister: I've decided I don't like riddles.
[pause]
Lord Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2070135/characters/nm0384152/
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/503606-oh-i-think-not-varys... | | | |
| ▲ | jjk166 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 2 days ago | parent [-] | | People vastly overestimate the power of armies. Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice. Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store. | | |
| ▲ | jjk166 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | And how are the people who shot these politicians doing now? How about the US and Japanese governments? Clearly shooting a politician doesn't mean either that you gain their power or that the power structure they led evaporates. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is that an Army can't protect someone that people really want to die. |
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| ▲ | mystraline 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | IsTom 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead. | | |
| ▲ | dctoedt 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead. See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.? | | |
| ▲ | xphos 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State. Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist | | |
| ▲ | QuarterReptile 2 days ago | parent [-] | | In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion. They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy. |
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| ▲ | argomo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up). Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB. | | |
| ▲ | simonh 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked. The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead. | | |
| ▲ | mwigdahl 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence. As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028. | |
| ▲ | cucumber3732842 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead. What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here. In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive. | | |
| ▲ | simonh a day ago | parent [-] | | My point is precisely that the US system is substantially a copy of European stuff. It had some significant innovations for it's time of course, but it's really showing it's age. Meanwhile Parliamentary systems have significantly reformed and further innovated since. |
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| ▲ | QuarterReptile 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario? | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH 2 days ago | parent [-] | | A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason? Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did. |
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| ▲ | vlan0 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly this. They live in houses with glass windows. We could take this world any time we choose. | | |
| ▲ | pavas 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Chill out brother. Life's good. | | |
| ▲ | vlan0 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That is exactly the type of pacificity that plays into their hand. Life is good and bad at the same time. It is important to hold those two at the same time. | | |
| ▲ | pavas a day ago | parent [-] | | I donno for me life's just good. I'm living that Asterix lifestyle lol. |
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| ▲ | lyu07282 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Don't worry nobody here said anything even remotely political, it wouldn't even occur to them, so your status quo is safe. | | |
| ▲ | pavas a day ago | parent [-] | | Ah, "status quo", that's a Latin phrase! I'm particularly fond of "carpe diem": seize the carp! |
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| ▲ | scottyah 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But then you'd have to live in it, and it sounds like you'd have a world where people with nice things don't live long | | |
| ▲ | vlan0 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nah, nothing wrong with nice things. But if those nice things only exist because someone else on the planet had to suffer.... |
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| ▲ | jubilanti 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But the people almost never do, and that reason is power. | | |
| ▲ | mrguyorama 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The reason is gambling. The vast majority of people don't want to take the bet of a tiny chance of doubling their lot in life for the downside risk of literally being tortured and dying and probably ruining the life of any loved ones. Most people aren't degenerate gamblers. The workaround is organization. With sufficient organization, you can start to drag the tiny chance to a slightly bigger chance, and slightly reduce the downside risk maybe. Some parts of American society are absurdly bad at organizing, and basically gave up 60 years ago. |
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| ▲ | bandofthehawk 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow. | | | |
| ▲ | scottyah 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The pen is mightier than the sword. |
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| ▲ | spwa4 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This is how a caste system works. Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them. |
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| ▲ | Fricken 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre | | |
| ▲ | b112 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | rectang 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The broader theme of antagonism to Black success motivating the thoroughness of the destruction is a common observation about Tulsa. | | |
| ▲ | Bnjoroge 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | honestly the entire country up until maybe 40 or so years ago | | |
| ▲ | esseph 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Arguably happening right now due to a joke Obama made about Trump |
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| ▲ | b112 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | notahacker 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Here's a contemporary opinion, from the state attorney general at the time, the highest ranking person in a judicial apparatus that didn't prosecute anyone for participating in it. Looks like the fact that "the Negro" was so rich he didn't "accept the white man as his benefactor" was a pretty big deal... The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have spread the thought of race equality. | | |
| ▲ | b112 a day ago | parent [-] | | There is no discussion of wealth in your quote. And further, that quote supports what I've been saying. It specifically says "the cause of this riot was not Tulsa", and "It might have happened anywhere". If it "might have happened anywhere", it therefore has nothing to do with the unique high-wealth of this area. | | |
| ▲ | notahacker 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to unironically suggest that the axiomatic Southern racist belief that "the Negro" should regard "the white man as his benefactor" has no links to their relative wealth. When you find yourself drawing parallels between your own arguments and those of contemporary white supremacists asserting that the attitudes of local whites were not at all to blame, it's perhaps a good idea to reconsider... |
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| ▲ | shakna 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nice to see sealioning is alive and well on HN. | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 2 days ago | parent [-] | | But do we actually have a proof that ** bombed *, maybe they bombed their own school to make you feel sad? |
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| ▲ | gzread 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Read between the lines. | |
| ▲ | Fricken 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, I am also having trouble with stating it as a fact, that the reason was they were too wealthy. Might have played a role later, but that is not clear to me from what is stated on wiki: "The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse, appearing to have the makings of a lynch mob. A group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Having seen the armed black men, some of the whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. There are conflicting reports about the exact time and nature of the incident, or incidents, that immediately precipitated the massacre. According to the 2001 Commission, "As the black men were leaving, a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out." Then, according to the sheriff, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood." | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 2 days ago | parent [-] | | So you take issue with the idea that an out of mob that burned down 35 blocks of a mid sized city was motivated by envy and resentment of the prosperous black community. Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid. Why is that distinction so important to you? | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I take issue with the statement "There were too many successful black men" and wikipedia as proof for that.
Honest representation of facts is important to me in general. | | |
| ▲ | sdenton4 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre "After an all-night battle on the Frisco Tracks, many residents of Greenwood were taken by surprise as bullets ripped through the walls of their homes in the predawn hours. Biplanes dropped fiery turpentine bombs from the night skies onto their rooftops—the first aerial bombing of an American city in history. A furious mob of thousands of white men then surged over Black homes, killing, destroying, and snatching everything from dining room furniture to piggy banks. Arsonists reportedly waited for white women to fill bags with household loot before setting homes on fire. Tulsa police officers were identified by eyewitnesses as setting fire to Black homes, shooting residents and stealing. Eyewitnesses saw women being chased from their homes naked—some with babies in their arms—as volleys of shots were fired at them. Several Black people were tied to cars and dragged through the streets." --- "One kid groped another kid" is an insufficient explanation of this kind of violence and looting. | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | ""One kid groped another kid" is an insufficient explanation of this kind of violence and looting." I did not offer any explanation, I stated that wikipedia does not offer the one that was claimed here. | |
| ▲ | gadders 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One kid attempted to rape another kid, then two armed gangs of black and white people shot at each other, and then it all kicked off. | |
| ▲ | kitsune1 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | b112 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Oh it was becuase of their race for sure. For the type of man who joins a lynch mob, the only thing worse than a black man being black was him being “uppity”. The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back. It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront. | | | |
| ▲ | Bnjoroge 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | you are incredibly naive, ignorant or oblivious if you dont think a primary reason was because of their race in TULSA in 1921. Cmon man -read some history | | |
| ▲ | b112 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think you're replying to who you think you are, for I've specifically said it was because they were black, and not due to other factors. | | |
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| ▲ | the_gipsy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's... pretty simple. | | |
| ▲ | b112 2 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | uoaei 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Your refusal to interact with subtext has me guffawing. I wonder if you even recognize what you're doing. In the history of revolution, there is never (except in elementary school) all that much weight put on the singular act which instigated the final result. The conditions in place (Jim Crow laws, Southern pride, etc.) lead up to a final moment which our monkey brains like to point to as the cause but in reality there is a simmering cultural froth which could boil over in any number of ways: it just happens that one of the ways is what's described in the Wikipedia article, but it could have started many other ways. All of our understanding about the experience of being Black in the US during that time helps to contextualize the extreme and disproportionate outburst of violence by the White population as racially motivated, serving under an ideology best described as ur-"Great Replacement Theory". In simpler words, the destruction of Black Wall Street is not without precedent, indeed this was merely one of the more famous and complete examples of destroying the wealth that Black people enjoyed, if only briefly due to the hate of those visiting violence upon them. | | |
| ▲ | rithdmc 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > I wonder if you even recognize what you're doing. "Don't feed the trolls". They absolutely do know what they're doing. |
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| ▲ | kennywinker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You really read a single wikipedia article and think you understand what happened and why? Impressive levels of dunning-kruger on display. Go read a book about it, and then if you still want to, you can tell us why this interpretation is wrong. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | cauch 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But you are doing the same as what you are complaining about. Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate". In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof. While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment. To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as:
"A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say)
vs
"A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it". In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up).
Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful). I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people. | | |
| ▲ | Bnjoroge 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It is not difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful contributed to it. In fact, it's the most obvious and straightforward explanation for it, given the fact that it's 1)1921, 4 or so decades before the Civil Rights act, and in freaking TULSA lmao |
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| ▲ | pmc123 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Would you feel bad if it was actually true? Would it pose even a minor inconvenience for your life if that was exactly the case? What's the problem anyway. |
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| ▲ | gadders 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's the urban myth, yes. | | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | kennywinker 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well documented historical events aren’t urban myths. | | |
| ▲ | gadders 2 days ago | parent [-] | | People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape. | | |
| ▲ | kennywinker 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > there was no white supremacism People were murdered and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob because they were black. How is that anything but white supremacy? > There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was one of the wealthiest black communities in america at a time. “Black wall street” was a nickname, not a literal description of a stock exchange. > It was triggered by an attempted rape. No, it was triggered by an attempted lynching of a black man. Or if you want to be more specific, because the community there stood up to protect the arrested man. It was triggered by a black community stopping a lynching. Your assertions are an ahistorical revisionist fantasy. |
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| ▲ | spwa4 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits? | | |
| ▲ | oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Who complained about bringing up the foul stuff that goes on outside the US? | | |
| ▲ | bandofthehawk 2 days ago | parent [-] | | No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else.
That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society. |
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| ▲ | joe_mamba 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | burnt-resistor 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism. Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal. |
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| ▲ | Muromec 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things. | | |
| ▲ | burnt-resistor a day ago | parent [-] | | It's a simplified model to expose unseen hypocrisy and injustice that originated with the persecution of jews in the German Nazi justice system. In reality, 2 or 3 is too simplistic as the US values people differently in different contexts with numerous attribute privilege points. Don't be old, brown, short, homeless, and unattractive in America except to be constantly harassed. |
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| ▲ | pixl97 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” |
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| ▲ | globalnode 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money. |
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| ▲ | roysting 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much. If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge. It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it. And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard. Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game. I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things. |
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| ▲ | vlan0 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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