You strumpet!

Imagine you're an ancient king and you wanna invade your neighbor. Your army will need stuff. One thing you could do is enslave blacksmiths and farmers and so on. Slavery is a tough sell though. Slaves tend to resent being slaves, so you get running away behavior. Not to worry, there's a better way. You make coins and you give these coins to your soldiers. Then you tax everyone in your country in those coins, on pain of being eviscerated by your new soldiers. How does everyone get coins? Why, by selling boots and wheat to soldiers. Boom. Your soldiers are supplied. Not only that, but do you notice, you've created a system that people literally buy into. They WANT to supply your soldiers because that's how you get these coins that everybody wants. You know, we could just do that for everybody. We could give everybody money, not just soldiers. Then, boom, you've got the whole country providing for itself. You don't even need to give everybody THAT much. Imagine...

My sister just wrote a post about how diversity isn't enough . She's saying that diversity is wonderful and important, and I totally agree. But she's saying that diversity in-and-of-itself is not THE most important thing, that THE most important thing has something to do with a system that enriches the rich at the expense of the poor. I couldn't agree more. $pread is a best-of anthology of articles written by sex workers. It's my favorite book I've ever read on the topic, probably because it's by sex workers and not by law enforcement. I mean, it's all propaganda all the way down. Movies like Tricked are propaganda for law enforcement and $pread is propaganda for sex workers. But where law enforcement propaganda is universally and transparently self serving, totally misrepresenting and misunderstanding the very people they're trying to "help" and always including a message about how important it is to hire yet more police officers, $prea...

My son mentioned yesterday that they say the pledge of allegiance every day at school. I said, hey, that's something we have in common, because I had to say it every day growing up too. Then I explained propaganda to him. Let's say you're in power. Your job is a lot easier if everybody is on board with you. So you repeat a message over and over about how great everything is, regardless of if it's true. Like, do we actually live in a land "with liberty and justice for all"? Of course not. You don't have to be very old to see through that one. Then he mentioned that they sing, "My country tis of thee sweet land of liberty," every day and we laughed at how that doesn't even make grammatical sense any more. The funny thing of course is that propaganda works sometimes. Repeat that message over and over again and under the right conditions, people will agree. There's probably some underlying physiological explanation, like hearing a repeated...