This has been an ongoing annoyance for me, for pretty much as long as I’ve been paying attention to U.S. politics. The U.S. militia movement is never around when they might actually be useful. Seriously, this is an active political…
Legal Bribery: Big Law Pays Protection
This particular story is getting some press, but no one’s mentioning the bribery aspect. And it’s definitely bribery. Even under the Supreme Court’s corrupt “it’s only bribery if you explicitly say so in advance” standard this is bribery. And abuse…
Change Is Hard: Designing A Path For Change Is Harder
Even if you ignore the “convincing everyone else to go along with it” part. Which is frankly the hardest bit. The easy part is identifying something you don’t like about the world as it is. And it’s not really that…
Hitting Escape: Like Marriages, Sometimes Countries Need To End
Situations change, people change, governments change; and now the United States is not the country they taught you that it was back in grade school civics. And it needs to just end. To be honest, the U.S. has never actually…
Look Outward And Up: Some New Role Models For Americans
It has been quite a year already, and it’s only March. We’ve got even more quite-a-year ahead of us. But these problems aren’t limited to the U.S.; most of the globe is seeing similar autocratic movements and uprisings these days.…
No Delegation: The State Should Do Its Own Work
I’m not optimistic on anything being fixable at this point, but we should still think about how to do better next time. Because there will (eventually) be a next time. And when it comes time to write the constitution for…
Authoritarians United: Most Courts Will Be Too Slow To Matter
If the police are mostly on the wrong side, then it shouldn’t be surprising that most courts will be too. It’s where their class affinities lie, after all. Judges are wealthy and, for the most part, they grew up that…
Left Authoritarianism: Stop Asking For Leaders
Yeah, I agree: Chuck Schumer sux0rs and he totally screwed over the last chance congressional Democrats had to put the brakes on Trump Coup.0’s stripping the federal government for parts. But calling for new leadership is not the way to…
Authoritarians United: Most Police Will Be On The Wrong Side
Police organization in the U.S. are no more democratic than the military. Which is to say: not democratic at all. Officers are trained to obey, and to have no role in choosing their leaders (and no role in interpreting the…
Parallel Organizing: Build Your Own Society
Coming up with a title got that song stuck in my head, so now it can be in yours too. You’re welcome. Now is probably a good time for us all to take a long, hard look at our communities…