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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Schmoo@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlPerspectives about life
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    13 days ago

    You don’t have to believe me, I just found it amusing. I remember seeing it and I can also see the hammer and sickle in this one is sharper than the rest of the image, meaning it was pasted over something. Don’t know if OP edited it or found it already edited, but I know the original is out there somewhere.




  • The last image is likely referring to this. Contracting prisoners out to private companies is a common practice all across the US, but particularly in Alabama and other former chattel slave economies. Southern slave plantations continued operating during reconstruction by using prison labor. The reason we have the largest per capita prison population in the world is because slavery never truly ended, it just adapted.




  • It’s also the origin of some anti-semitic tropes. After Christianity rose to prominence in the Roman Empire, Christians considered lending money with interest to be a sin, so they were forbidden from working related jobs. This resulted in Jews, who were forbidden from owning land and many other professions, taking up the role of merchants, money lenders, and tax collectors. In the Christian view of the time, they were doing the “dirty work” because they were immoral and sinful, and the nature of the work made them easy scapegoats for many of society’s ills. The reputation has followed Jews into modernity.


  • Dictators don’t just pop into existence with total authoritarian control, it takes the support of already powerful people to erode the checks on their power bit by bit, which Donald Trump has been doing with the support of his billionaire donors. Fascism emerges out of capitalist republics and has to overcome various obstacles to achieve total authority for the leader. Trump does not yet have total dictatorial power because there are still checks on the presidency that he and his movement have not yet succeeded in eroding.