Strike Me Down

People Get Ready: Popular Power In The Coming Crisis

(via

anarchistcommunism

In ancient Athens, only the very wealthiest people paid direct taxes, and these went to fund the city-state’s most important national expenses – the navy and honors for the gods. While today it might sound astonishing, most of these top taxpayers not only paid happily, but boasted about how much they paid.

Money was just as important to the ancient Athenians as it is to most people today, so what accounts for this enthusiastic reaction to a large tax bill? The Athenian financial elite felt this way because they earned an invaluable payback: public respect from the other citizens of their democracy.

Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. had a population of free and enslaved people topping 300,000 individuals. The economy mostly focused on international trade, and Athens needed to spend large sums of money to keep things humming – from supporting national defense to the countless public fountains constantly pouring out drinking water all over the city.

Much of this income came from publicly owned farmland and silver mines that were leased to the highest bidders, but Athens also taxed imports and exports and collected fees from immigrants and prostitutes as well as fines imposed on losers in many court cases. In general, there were no direct taxes on income or wealth.

Was told by a crybaby Trump supporter today that I’m “too angry”.

I’m not sure if he was trying to make me feel like somehow being angry and expressing that anger is a bad thing, but I’m not ashamed of my anger.

Here’s what this ignoramus fails to understand.

For decades SJWs, like myself and far better than myself, have been told that unless they protest “quietly” and “peacefully”, they won’t be listened to. They’ve been told that unless they’re calm and demure in their debates, they have no credibility.

But, where has their quiet protest gotten them? Slavery is still legal, and still heavily targets black people and other minorities, though how it is executed has changed. Women are still only meat for the enjoyment of men, as evidenced by the judicial system’s near-complete inability to actually indict and sentence rapists. The rich are still getting richer as the poor continue to get poorer. Gentrification is still destroying black neighborhoods. Redlining is still being executed by banks in order to make it more difficult for people of colour to get mortgages or loans than for white people.

Yet, you hear so many people who’ve grown up blinded by their own privilege saying that these problems don’t exist, or ceased to exist a long time ago, or are suddenly new. No. What’s new is that the protests have ceased to be quiet. SJWs like me, and especially ones far better than me, are making sure their issues are now in your face as much as humanly possible because treating the privileged with kid-gloves for the last however many decades has not been effective.

It is high time for the kid-gloves to come off. It is high time that the people who have been unaware of these ongoing problems have their safe-spaces taken away and have the problems of women, minorities and minority women shoved down their throats until real changes start to happen.