Vintage Lego battle: Space Police vs. ragtag anarchist protester fleet
Who will win??
"ACAB!!!" the anarchists shout over the subspace network as they bravely dive their homemade fighter craft at the massive police battlecruiser
The Space Police have bulked up their armaments, due to years of surplus military equipment getting dumped on the market after the war against the Star Wars Lego sets
Independent investigations have caught the Space Police keeping prisoners in highly inhumane conditions, in flagrant violation of interstellar conventions
This is Steve, from the planet New Portland. He built his fighter with spare parts from his dad's out-of-business service station. In his spare time he enjoys hoverbiking, asteroid climbing, and campaigning for robots' rights.
This is Janice, Steve's sort-of-ex (it's complicated). When she's not battling interstellar fascism, she enjoys making holograms of her cat, earning money as a zero-G burlesque dancer, and discussing YA literature online.
This is Space Police Sergeant Jim Jackendorf. He loves his job, even though he believes the government has been taken over by slug-beings from the Magellanic Clouds. He's definitely not species-ist, BUT
The anarchists unfortunately lost this ship when it turned out that a design flaw led to a zeon missile being mounted directly in the path of the ship's main laser cannon... 😫
But despite setbacks, the nimble anarchists eventually outmaneuver the slower, bulkier Space Police cruisers.
It helps that the Space Police are only given 45 minutes of training before starting on the job.
Even the Space Police's hideously expensive battlecruiser is outmatched when the anarchists receive timely reinforcements from the Blacktron Bloc
But the thrill of the anarchist victory is short-lived, after they fall to infighting over whether using robots in space combat represents uncompensated extraction of their labor...
And despite their humiliating defeat, the Space Police have the last laugh, when New Portland elects Baron Konrad von Dethkampe as their new prelate, and he raises the Space Police budget by 1200%!
(end)
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Russia's empire is a nested hierarchy. At the center is Moscow. Under them are mid-tier Russian cities and rural areas, then subject peoples like the Buryats, Sakha, and these African folks.
The closer you are to the center, the less fighting you do, and the more money you get.
In fact, the circles of Russian hierarchy don't stop at Moscow. There are privileged subgroups of Muscovites, then more privileged groups inside that circle, all the way up to the Tsar himself.
The principle still holds: Closer to the center = less fighting, more money.
The advantage of this organizational structure is that the more power you have, the less likely you are to ever suffer negative consequences from adverse shocks or bad decisions. All the losses from failed wars, bad economic decisions, etc. get taken by the less powerful.
In fact, it's not law even now. This executive order is (sadly) AGAINST the law and will probably be struck down, because our asylum law says we can't discriminate against asylum claimants for crossing the border illegally. That law needs to be changed by Congress.
The problem is that the U.S. is a party to the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which says that your asylum system can't discriminate against people for being in the country illegally. We wrote our domestic law to comply with that treaty.
The non-discrimination provision is obviously stupid, so what we need to do is flout the 1967 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, and simply amend our domestic law to say "You can't claim asylum if you crossed illegally". But this would require an act of Congress.
About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.
Most weebs don't actually want to live in Japan. They want to live in a local subculture of their own creation, whose values are based on gentleness and romance -- the ideals that attracted them to Japanese fantasies and made those fantasies resonate.
Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the Woke Era get laughed at. The Woke Era didn't use violence, of course. But the *motivation* of people wanting to overturn social hierarchies, especially students wanting to overturn academic hierarchies, is recognizably similar.
In 2010s America, there was a widespread desire to overturn local social hierarchies -- the classroom authority of teachers and professors, the cultural power of entertainment stars, the authority of nonprofit execs and heads of civic organizations.
In 1960s China, overturning local hierarchies happened via physical mob violence. In 2010, it happened through online mobs destroying people's reputations on social media. Obviously, the second is far preferable to the first. This is why economic development is good!