Thinking about Lincoln for some reason.

Lincoln did not free the slaves; he merely improved their conditions, and a big part of that was tricking many of them into believing they were free, and an even bigger part of it was distributing more of the slavery across other ethnicities instead of just the black ones.

Everyone remembers him for "freeing the slaves" as in using force to stop people who would use force to stop black people from moving around freely. Today, people are learning you can have some purported "freedom of movement" and still be a slave. It's nice to be able to move around more freely, of course, but it might not be a complete assurance of all human rights.

Tricking them into believing they're free was a really shitty thing to do, but it was a very simple way to make them feel good. All Lincoln had to do was fill the discourse with phrases like "forty acres and a mule" to give people false hope.

Distributing more of the slavery across other races was what really made a difference - that redistribution wasn't just a simple way to make the slaves feel good, it was a hard-won effort to change how people lived. It involved implementing income taxes and other measures to make it so the rich could share everyone as slaves, rather than directly owning individual black people.

The slavery of everyday Americans has kept getting worse ever since then, to the point where many black people in recent decades have been saying they're not sure if there has been any real progress for them in hundreds of years.

Our psychopathic rulers have chosen to keep breeding more slaves for their convenience - all the while lying about the climate change, oil prices, and other issues this would cause. Now we face a global crisis worse than World War 2 and billions of people live traumatized, broken lives watching their bloodlines be wiped out. The greatest comfort for many people is knowing someday this will get bad enough to impact rich people too.

Trump's Supreme Court ruling against homeless encampments (under Biden's Presidency) was a huge reaffirmation of the new slave paradigm. The idea that you are allowed to live independently on American land was taken away.

Remember that there are states in the US where inmates are "legally" considered slaves, and the federal courts pretend to consider that "legal" based on the 13th Amendment, because it's part of their bigger goal to pretend the US follows its Constitution at all.

But if you're not an inmate, you can become an inmate because you refuse to work for the oligarchs. It's just as criminalized to refuse the work outside of prison as it is in prison, but the arrest adds extra steps by taking away your housing first. This is supposed to make it look less like slavery because instead of saying "you're under arrest for not doing this work" and leaving it at that, they can say "you have to either kill yourself or set up a tent somewhere because you won't do this work, and we arrest people for trying to kill themselves or set up tents, so we're going to wait until you choose whether to set up a tent or kill yourself, and then arrest you for whichever thing, unless you do whatever work we demand you to do. Oh, what was that work again? Helping us bomb brown kids in the middle east, of course."

You're a slave to begin with, before being convicted of any crime.

You can no longer pretend in good faith this has anything to do with the 13th Amendment or any other Constitutional justification, but when did the Supreme Court or the American voter base say anything about good faith? When America's delusions can't be upheld in good faith, America is happy to just pretend in bad faith.

Digit deserves a better environment than this. I want to watch millions of Americans die while she survives to see a future where the survivors are actually worth her time.