"Every Political System Is The Same Prison"

"Every time someone says "we need a better government," what I hear is "we need more comfortable handcuffs."

When I was a kid I lined up all the political systems in my head trying to find the one that worked. I never found it. Not because I didn't look hard enough — because the question was wrong. You can't find a working political system for the same reason you can't find a working perpetual motion machine.

Every durable large-scale system built on ruling territory has run on the same four things. Not most of them. All four, every time: violence, resource extraction, hierarchy, and artificial scarcity. Run any -ism through these four and the pattern holds. The labels are arguments about which version of the same machine to run. The machine itself is never on the table."

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=yf5_fnvrblk

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https://youtu.be/yf5_fnvrblk)

#MarinaKarlova #Maledicta #Author
10-sided dice are marvelous cat toys. Also very effective Anglo-Saxon generators. #Maledicta #SwearsOfManyLands
Sawbones, croakers, shrinks—English abounds with insulting terms for doctors. Now try your hand at identifying some German ones, courtesy of the late Reinhold Aman, in my latest @Babelzine puzzle, "Medical #Maledicta": https://cloud.3dissue.com/18743/41457/106040/issue30/index.html?page=24
Babel: the language magazine

My memorial article on Reinhold Aman, the world's foremost authority on #swearing, appears in the latest issue of #WordWays. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5905&context=wordways #maledicta
Ah, excellent—my scientific literature has arrived! :) #Maledicta #logology