no

oh! that's beautiful

for unbelievable stupidity
just how tone deaf can people be

so beautiful
is that frost on the ground?

How was slavery ended in other countries without elections?

You mean the abolishment in the US? I'm pretty sure that Lincoln specifically ran on a platform of not interfering with slavery in the southern states. He opposed it in the new territories, which aligned with the interests of the industrialists that supported him. Those industrialists were doing their own exploitation for profit in the north.

In other cases of chattel slavery, I believe that there were reforms in monarchies and empires - or just shifting of power structures - that ended their slave trades.

[this is not my area of expertise... but I'm pretty sure that slavery end in the US was not because of workers rising against wealthy owners]

Chattel slavery is an example of the owning class being stopped by the collective working class?

If that were to happen in our current system, it seems to me that the tools of control just move to a different group of people.

What examples are you thinking of?

It's not just tax dollars. It's debt as well; they're spending money they don't have, and we pay for it through inflation.
Tax dollars to things that benefit citizens sounds good, but 1) I don't see a way for that to happen with our current system and 2) impossible to reach consensus (when the govt extracts your time and energy under threat of violence, who exactly gets to decide where to allocate it?)

There's a reason that so many people want to end the Fed. No money printing, no cantillon effect.

If you're asking for advice, I would continue to reach out. Not to push contact, just to let her know that you're thinking of her and would love to see her again. Nothing heavy that could feel like manipulation to her, but just letters from her father.
I'm sorry. This sucks.

oh 😢
Do you have any common ground? Is there any contact at all?

pretty much everything.... funding contracts for re-building areas that the military helped destroy for instance.

I've started to think that almost everything is an industrial complex - military industrial complex, poverty industrial complex, health industrial complex.

We spend nearly a trillion dollars on medicaid every year. I don't know the breakdown, but insurance companies and hospital complexes tend to come out very nicely, and poor people in the US are sicker than ever. When you add to that the fact that inflation is a deeply regressive tax, you get a terrible situation where poor people can't afford their own healthcare and are nominally getting something "free" but in fact are essentially funding the corporations that profit from medicaid.

That's fraudulent, imho.