politics

CNN claims that Dolly Parton remained neutral in culture wars. It's true she was smart enough not to declare a party affiliation, but she made it quite clear that she did that for strategic reasons.

Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms." Check. But what if we examine the question in (slightly) more detail?

Create victimless crimes, imprison people (ideally in privatized prisons from which the ruling class gets kickbacks, or which they own) and then demonize them when they are freed to increase recidivism, because incarcerating the same people over and over minimizes the chance that the voters will notice. This is the right hand of the devil.

This diatribe is a response to a discussion containing repeated assertations of "false equivalence" between the Democrats and Republicans. I don't believe that individual Democrats and Republicans are equivalent, and I don't even believe that left to their own devices, the people who make up these parties wouldn't go in different directions. I believe that we have a system that permits the corporations to juggle us between these two parties, reducing them to a distracting false front that distorts our view of the actual situation: corporate governance.

The short, short form: In order to get vaccinations you must sign on to TRIPS (or provide similar protections for Big Pharma) which prevent your nation from producing medicines needed to save lives because of patent protections.

This is a comment I wanted to leave on Slashdot, but I brought it here instead. It is in response to this particular comment.

From Dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange to corn even rats can't eat, Monsanto wants you dead.