🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸

McKinney TX native, Dallas and U of A sports fan

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

Vigilantes Inc. — Full Movie https://t.co/gROoDJYYBA via @YouTube

Jim Crow 2.0

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

People defend capitalism because they confuse it with commerce. They believe “capitalism” is when people start businesses and sell things.

If people understood that the thing they call capitalism and love so much is actually just commerce and that it’s not the same thing as capitalism, they would feel very different.

This is because a local baker selling bread, a mechanic fixing cars, or an artisan selling wares on a digital storefront is a sign of commerce in a market economy, which is simply a mechanism for exchanging goods and services based on supply and demand.

Needless to say, this has existed for thousands of years before capitalism was created.

As economic historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, commerce and capitalism are not only distinct; but historically, they have often operated at cross-purposes.

According to Braudel, ordinary commerce is competitive and transparent, while capitalism is anti-competitive and deliberately opaque, making it a zone of privilege held by a small elite who bend the rules in their favour.

Braudel further argues that commerce, or the market, is horizontal, transparent, and competitive and as old as civilization itself. It involves individuals or small groups trading goods, where barriers to entry are low, no single player dominates, and profit is a reward for fulfilling a specific need.

Capitalism, meanwhile, is a specific institutional arrangement that emerged relatively recently in human history, around the 16th to 17th centuries. It is NOT just people “trading stuff”. It is instead the legal and financial system where the means of production are privately owned, and the primary objective is the continuous, infinite accumulation of capital.

Because of this accumulation-obssessed nature of capitalism, when it scales up, it seeks to eliminate the free play of commerce to protect its investments. True market competition is risky for massive capital as it drives prices down and threatens profit margins.

Braudel contended that capitalism only begins where commerce ends. It is the zone of high finance and state collusion. Because it operates across vast distances such as the 17th-century spice trade, information takes months to travel, which creates a deliberate lack of transparency.

Braudel noted that the great capitalists of the early modern era in Madeira and Venice or the Dutch East India Company, never wanted to compete in a fair, transparent market because competition slices profit margins to the bone. Instead, they secured royal charters, exclusive trading rights, and naval protection. At the same time, the state granted them legal monopolies, effectively outlawing competition.

Therefore, capitalism naturally trends toward creating monopolies and securing state interventions like bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture to shield itself from the very market forces it claims to champion. In fact, the most important takeaway from Braudel’s analysis is that capitalism is NOT the natural evolution or the highest form of the free market, it is its dark shadow.

So, when our lizard overlords use “free market” and “capitalism” interchangeably, they’re deliberately hiding this distinction and using the moral legitimacy of the hard-working, transparent business owner to defend the structural privileges of the protected financial elite and its regulatory capture.

If ordinary people could comprehend these distinctions, many self-described “capitalists” would realise they are just pro-commerce, and actually anti-capitalist, because it would be clear that defending “capitalism” means defending the right of a small parasite class to bypass the market entirely.

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@RNSiahn @candidatechains I was thinking the clouds

[LPC @landpalestine]

BREAKING: 8 people have been sentenced combined 450 years in prison for peacefully protesting outside ICE Facility

More years than any American has been sentenced over the Epstein Files

[Coinvo @Coinvo]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Analysts believe wage theft is 'mathematically the largest form of theft' in the U.S.

"Companies stealing employee wages is almost a norm."

[It's politics @uspolitics1111]

All eyes afterwards on MO-4 congressional candidate Hartzell.

Hartzell Gray is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and explicitly identifies as a democratic socialist.

He's running on ;
1. Housing as a Human Right.
2. Ending Extreme Wealth Hoarding (100% Tax Bracket).
3. Medicare for All.

The primary election for Hartzell Gray will take place on August 4, 2026.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En el partido de esta noche entre Congo y Colombia en el Mundial, un hombre congoleño se quedó inmóvil durante los 90 minutos imitando el saludo del líder anticolonial congoleño, Patrice Lumumba.

Lumumba fue descuartizado y disuelto en ácido por EEUU y Bélgica en 1961 por conseguir la independencia del Congo ante el colonialismo y negarse a que los imperialistas siguieran saqueando los recursos de su pais.

Aunque los imperialistas disolvieron su cuerpo, no pudieron borrarlo de la historia, 65 años después, Lumumba sigue presente para millones de personas.

[NYC-DSA 🌹 @nycDSA]

Tomorrow, democratic socialism is on the ballot. All across the city we have a chance to send new leaders to Albany and DC to tax the rich, block the bombs, and build an affordable New York for all.

Find your poll site and candidates at https://t.co/xc5s1GUTGM 🌹

[regular guy @regularguyguns]

Maybe you wonder why I, a mere gun blog, makes a big deal about Flock and similar tech?

OK here’s a real world situation that can easily happen and has likely happened.

Unfortunately to drive on public roads without getting hassled by the cops, your car needs a license plate. That’s tied to you, the owner of the vehicle.

Flock isn’t just a traffic camera, it’s an AI/ML enabled (wait for it) flock of cameras that transmit all their video and audio to the mothership. Not a government server somewhere but, to keep it simple, a big giant cloud computer instance owned and run by Flock, the company.

Government users, as well as Flock employees here in the US and overseas, can log in and query the system based on license plate number or even vehicle description and get a full history of that vehicle’s movements throughout the Flock network over multiple jurisdictions. Someone in New York can track a car from Armonk all the way to Homestead FL if they feel like it from the comfort of their desk.

On a daily level, someone can get a pretty accurate picture of someone’s life just by monitoring their movements via Flock. And I’m using this example to rattle the cage of the “back the blue unconditionally” crowd in 2A.

OK - your car has license plate ABC 123 - and Flock knows this. Someone can enter your tag in Flock and see what you are doing on a daily basis. You leave your home where the neighborhood is under the Flock panopticon. Flock sees you drive to Dunkin’ on Main Street, then you drop your kid off at XYZ Daycare. Then you go to work at the local IT consulting firm in ZZZ industrial park. You go pick up a quick deli sandwich for lunch at Food Lion. You go back to work. On the way home you stop off at Bob’s Guns, and stay for 20 minutes while buying some ammo. Then you go home. Everywhere there’s a Flock camera.

Now Flock knows the following about you:

- You live at 123 Wisteria Lane
- Your kid is in daycare (means he’s likely under 5)
- You work at ZZZ
- You go cheap on lunch
- You own at least one gun

Your license plate is tied to you so they now have your name and assumed-to-be-private details of your life, like that you are armed.

On the reverse of that, the Flock camera outside of Bob’s Guns has been recording the plates of everyone going into the parking lot. No need for a firearms registry when Flock is doing the work.

All of this is done without a warrant and the data is available to anyone with a certain level of access to the system, whether it’s a cop, or a Flock technician in the Philippines. FYI Flock uses overseas contractors for support and AI annotation.

The 2018 Carpenter decision at SCOTUS ruled that pervasive surveillance where one can divine private details of someone’s life is a 4th Amendment violation in absence of a specific warrant.

Flock is illegal, unconstitutional and immoral.

And a danger to everyone, not just gun owners.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Hawai’i just passed a bill that undermine Citizens United.

The bill establishes corporations as “artificial persons” without the right to spend money on elections.

The bill could limit the influence of super PACs and be a model to challenge the influence of money in politics.

[Texas Rangers @Rangers]

Red Fridays are back!

In celebration of our City Connect debut tonight, repost for a chance to win this merch pack 🔥

[Clarence Thomas the Tank Engine @TheRealJChubby]

He's not wrong and it's not even close.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Buttigieg: Some people say there’s nothing you can do about it unless you have a constitutional amendment. Well, guess what? If that’s true, we ought to have a constitutional amendment.

Remember, that didn’t used to be considered impossible. We’ve had about 30 of them. Some of the things we take for granted as core to the Constitution—it’s right in there, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment—the word “amendment” means it wasn’t even in the original text. Amendments have always been a critically important part of how our Constitution is supposed to work. We just forgot about it.

We amended our Constitution for prohibition. We changed our Constitution so you couldn’t have a beer. And then we thought that’s a bad idea, and we changed it back. Don’t tell me we can’t change the Constitution to get money out of politics.

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@YoKush77 Szn 3 so peak 😭 agreed szn 2 is worst so far

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@MLB @tonysuperfan27 @Rangers Looks excellent I’ll take it

[MLB @MLB]

A Texas-sized giveaway 👏

We are giving away a new Rangers City Connect jersey just for you! Repost and reply for your chance to win!

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

.@ChefJoseAndres: I am a cook and I know there is no America without immigrants. There is no food at our table without immigrants. There is no farm without immigrants. There are no kitchens without immigrants.

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@nazzobetweeting This isn’t dramatic his description of highways applies to literally anywhere in the United States

[Hogballburner @Hogballburner]

I will never forget this season

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@FanDuel Thank you

[🇵🇸🇸🇩🇨🇩🇺🇸 @Dallasenjoyer]

@Lizzie_Baseball 😂 real