[ID: A tweet from @/ JoshuaPotash reading “The talk about Russian oligarchs is sounding extra hypocritical right now as oligarch Elon Musk buys the biggest share of Twitter and oligarch Jeff Bezos band employees from saying words like “freedom” and “ethics” and “union”” End ID]
If you’re going to talk about “Russian oligarchs” (which you should, because public life in Russia is dominated by corrupt billionaires), then you need to also normalize use of the term “American oligarchs”, since the USA has a higher Gini coefficient than Russia does.
Going to bring this back since apparently the infamous American oligarch Michael Bloomberg is pitching a hissy fit about people pointing out that he’s an oligarch.
the CIA axed op’s link, but the gini coefficient is a commonly used economic measurement like GDP, except for economic inequality.
Whenever an individual’s inalienable rights are transgressed under the implicit or explicit pretext of public-safety or the “greater good”, that individual is then immediately transormed from an autonomous and free being into an object of mere political expediency. In a word, one becomes merely a “thing” - which a state or government or authority can - with impunity - oppress, censure, manipulate, enslave, exploit, incarcerate and if deemed necessary, sacrifice…..and all for the greater good.
You can find uncensored copies (or at least, as uncensored as possible) online. I read the version as close to her original diary as I could find, and it included a forward about Anne’s father and how he had edited it before the diary’s release to the public in order to protect Anne’s name from slander. It’s fascinating to read and really it’s very similar to other coming-of-age stories, with the added appeal of it being an actual diary written by a Jewish teenager during the tumultuous time of WWII. (Her father abridged her diary to protect her privacy and make her message more palatable to some; additionally, Anne edited her own diary - some texts were pasted over and rewritten.)
***Annie’s father once said in an interview that when her diary was first published in the 1940s the content would have been so controversial he thought it would hurt the primary reason he was releasing them in the first place. Anne wanted to be a writer when she grew up and he knew the G-rated content would be well received. ***
It’s funny how when a straight 15-year-old declares that they are attracted to members of the opposite sex, nobody writes long, multi-paragraph comments to say “wait, wait, not so fast…” NOBODY questions the crushes of straight kids even before they’re teenagers, but they question the expressly stated preferences of TEENAGE LGBTQ people. And even into their 20s.
