this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Today I Learned (TIL)

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[–] quill7513@anarchist.nexus 37 points 1 week ago (4 children)

our prisons, mental institutions, and boarding schools are all reflective of the European patriarchal colonial system that composes the framework of the foundation of the united states. just as Phoenicia made a colony so huge it supplanted Phoenicia's empire in Carthage, so too has America shifted the center of the eurocentric settler colonial project. you ask why America is why it is, the answer is because Europeans were so sure of the righteousness and superiority of their civilizations that they traveled to this continent and raped, killed, and enslaved the societies they found here.

[–] Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Nah, Europe, Mexico and Canada all had the same influence but managed to avoid the prison/slavery complex with profit driven sexual torture, there's probably something else at work in the US

[–] quill7513@anarchist.nexus 30 points 1 week ago (3 children)

this is a form of American Exceptionalism that ignores that Mexico and Canada both have legacies of prison/slavery complexes with profit driven sexual torture. Mexican people have reduced (perhaps even eliminated, i'm not an expert on current Mexican affairs) the presence of this influence through generations of education, healing, and resistance to imperialist tendencies coming into mesoamerica to extract everything of value. In Canada the scars of the provincial school system are still felt today with the last residential school having closed in 1997, 29 years ago. There are 34 year olds alive today who remember first hand the sexual violence they experienced at the hands of Canadian sponsored torture facilities. Canadian police continue the practice of driving indigenous women far away from the warmth of their homes, forcing them to walk through the cold, condemning them to death.

There is nothing special that makes America more wrong than any other State. it is merely a coagulation of the worst tendencies present in all states concentrated by the capitalist necessity to extract everything of value from the land and people. The solution is for the people of the world, everywhere they are, to block the barricades until Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine, the Dakotas, and everywhere else the imperial tendencies of the global north torture, lynch, and enslave the people are free. America's torture is resistable just like the tortures conducted in Mexico and Canada.

[–] edible_funk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah but the US did it at a scale an order of magnitude greater. We have more prisoners than most of the world combined.

[–] quill7513@anarchist.nexus 3 points 1 week ago

absolutely. the extractive capitalist imperial project found safe haven in our governments hall's (more arguably, founded and defined our government since the origins of the US are an alliance of Virginia's purely capitalist project and Massachusetts' purely theocratic project)

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It’s just the place where those forces were concentrated the strongest. It could have happened anywhere but it happened in the USA.

[–] Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Lol, and it just so happened that everywhere else has had the self control and ethical standards to avoid it.

The US sure is supremely and consistently unlucky in that regard

[–] baines@lemmy.cafe 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

that’s revisionist as fuck

east India company anyone?

what about the literal Aztec empire and human slave sacrifice

we just tend to be temporally biased

[–] Brainsploosh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Neither have had for-profit prisons with systematised sexual torture, but even if they did I'd lean into the recency bias and ask: if they could move past it, why did the US double down when faced with better alternatives?

[–] baines@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 week ago

wait you think east india wasnt about profit and had no sexual abuse?

they didn’t ‘move past it’

the British got fucked militarily and aztec society collapsed

we’re on schedule for either end atm

the us isnt gonna stop doing any of this before them either

rich abusive fucks wont stop because you protest peacefully or virtue signal on the interwebs

[–] MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's Europe's fault that transgender persons are assigned to rapey cellmates in us prisons? That is the dumbest fucking shit I have ever read, but I guess in a weird way you did answer my question.

[–] quill7513@anarchist.nexus 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not present day Europe's, but we have to understand what the outcomes and origins of settler colonialism are in order to understand how to resist it. American Exceptionalism is rooted in the notion the white Europeans are superior to Black Africans, indigenous Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islander people. There is an America today because in the 1500-1700s the European monarchies under the protocapitalist framework of mercantilism sought to own the entire world, including the inhabitants therein. America's founding fathers were Europeans influenced by the enlightenment movement, and the country they built was reflective of the Eurosupremacism of the time, which quickly gave way to scientific racism formulated by anglosphere thinkers to justify the industrialized rape of Africa in the 1800s.

All I'm saying is that to resist these things we have to look at the history of how they started and then resist the tendencies that brought them about

[–] Rothe@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That is some primary grade deflection. Imagine being so far up the ass of their own country that they can't even admit that their country has problems of its own that needs fixing.

All this fucking shit happens in the US, and not to the same extent in most European countries, so much for your precious "it's all Europe's fault" theory.

[–] quill7513@anarchist.nexus 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i have not said that the US does not problems. far from it. I even said it is a coagulation of all the things that make States bad and wrong. what needs to happen is the power of the authority of the United States must be dissolved so that the process of communal healing can actually begin. the settler colonial tendencies that america promotes in the world will continue to go on unabated, just as they have for the last 6000 years, unless we resist these tendencies together