if Omar was *currently in* Somalia she would be just as capable as anyone else, and substantially more capable than Samuel Alito, of understanding what the Constitution means

you’re telling me Americans view low-level employees as equivalent to objects, and thus morally neutral to mistreat? never.

“the customer is always right”

we're all trying to find the guy who did this

sadistic assholes are the most well-represented type of person in this country—someone like you currently sits in the White House, so i’m not sure what you’re even mad about

it costs you literally nothing to be nice, it is better for everybody involved, and it’s better at *getting what you want*, assuming what you want is actual change and not the sadistic rush of yelling at someone who isn’t allowed to talk back to you

they care about doing their job, which tends to explicitly include “filter out bad-faith and worthless calls and only pass on meaningful feedback”

person *they work for, dammit

this isn’t substantively different to Luigiposting—aimless flailing because “it doesn’t matter if my activism is remotely effective, it’s morally wrong to ask me to care about effectiveness, i want to feel good”

the intern is probably not going to pass your comment on to the person you work for, thus defeating the entire purpose of calling in the first place

people want him to be the black napoleon, in reality he is perhaps closer to a black jefferson—a hypocrite whose worst failings, betrayals, and brutalities would forever stain the ideals he fought for, and almost summarize in themselves the fundamental contradiction of his national mythology.

also, frankly, there is a wide gap between “descendants of the nation that he, however brutally, did in fact secure the independence of can have a complicated historical relationship to him” and “dessalines was entirely good, actually”

i mean i think key to the whole project is “being able to send any combination of these forces to handle cases where we aren’t sure if we’ll need force”, but that’s dispatch’s job, and you need to make sure that whoever’s in charge isn’t from the force-dispenser parts

another key component of this is land and labor—the average American freeholder was much wealthier than the average French peasant, and the American aristocracy had enslaved people to exploit and to whom the rights of revolution initially did not meaningfully extend to.

this isn’t entirely the revolutionaries fault, either—it is objectively true that the King actually was conspiring with foreign aristocrats to suppress the Revolution, and everyone would have had a much easier time had he just… not done that

the french ended up very quickly with a bunch of guys whose primary motivation for getting into power was “fuck those guys”, and while this gave them generational talents like Napoleon, it also meant said talents already felt like nobody and nothing could justly stand in their way

i mean that right there also sums up part of why the American republic lasted and the French one would take another few tries—the American republic had buy-in opportunities for existing, skilled elites, who in turn were less floridly insane than Louis XVI and the rest of the French reactionaries