I'm on a Horse

No, not really.

• Well, we really can't pretend to be better than totalitarian/authoritarian regimes now, can we.  (And just because they claim not to be logging content doesn't mean they're not logging content. So s p e a k  s  l  o  w  l  y, your security apparatchiks are listening, and they don't get big words.)
• "Trained for Totalitarianism" takes you through the history of why there has not been a huge uproar and riots in the streets (you weren't really expecting the Tea Partiers to protest, now, were you?); this game goes way back:

  I don't think it is possible to overstate the significance of this early childhood training. Of equal significance is the fact that these issues are almost never discussed in the course of political analysis. Yet there is a profound sense in which authoritarianism (and even totalitarianism) feel right to many people -- "right" in the sense that it is very familiar, that it is the environment in which they were first made to function.

  Arthur Silber, the clearest voice we've got. Yes, the article is long. Your eyes and brain need the exercise.
• Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism presents Dave Dayen on student loans as medieval indenture and why heavy student debt is a bad idea.

  Fixing the student debt problem is not going to be easy. But student debt penury is having enough of a macroeconomic impact to be capturing the attention of policymakers and possible real economy allies, such as consumer goods companies. But the biggest wake-up call has already come in the form of declining enrollments for law schools and other programs which were once seen as sure-fire routes to a middle class or better lifestyle.

• An appreciation of Iain Banks at Vagabond Scholar (Mr. Banks has terminal cancer).  Because you deserve a short break from banality.
• South Carolina, what can one say?  (Daisy Deadhead says it.)
• Speaking of South Carolina...  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Monsanto doesn't want anyone to know food was genetically tampered with.
• Political cowardice.

  The way I see it, if you can’t look the people in the eye and listen to them then you don’t belong in public office.
  
  [...]
  
  When you don’t have a good argument for doing something, the last thing you want to do is be confronted by thousands of people asking why the hell your ass is blocking Medicaid expansion.
  
  Still, it was a shocking display of tuck tail and run.
  
  Anyhoo, the people will not be ignored.
  
  Cue Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones and his magical fantastical listening, but not to you, tour of 2013. Missourians have been following Speaker Jones all over the state in an attempt to get him to listen to them about Medicaid Expansion. By the time the tour reached Eureka, Speaker Jones was so moved that he closed an open meeting.

  [clucking noises]  If they can't face their constituents with their shiv-the-poor program, perhaps they should rethink the shiv-the-poor program.  Just saying.
• Melissa McEwan on the constant unrelenting pressure on women to have children, even when they clearly don't want to.  I have a rantlet suggesting that the abstinence-only crap is a way of trapping women into pregnancy, and that abstinence-only is prima facie misogyny, but it starts getting into mouth-frothing and spittle shortly after that.
• There is still racism.

I think that's enough for one day.