Mr. T famously advocated for people to not drop out of school with the phrase, “I pity the fool who don’t stay in school.” I always imagined him taking this to absurd degrees. I imagine him harassing and shaming people to endlessly stay in school until they’re enrolled in doctoral programs they have no interest in.

“Leave me alone Mr. T, I don’t want to do a post-doc!”

“I PITY THE FOOL WHO DON’T STAY IN SCHOOL!”

As far as I’m aware, the military, in the best case, will simply refuse to follow unlawful orders. There are formal processes to do so. That’s part of military culture and law. Whether that system will hold up to Trump is unknown. When he issues unlawful orders, will soldiers simply refuse to comply? Unknown.

But one thing is for sure. It’s not part of military culture to actively resist. There is no formal process for that to be protected or OK. That’s simply insurrection and rebellion.

Palestine. Maybe not successfully, but note that the idea that Palestinians have the same natural right to armed self defense as any other group is completely absent from mainstream political discourse. Most simply cannot even comprehend that the Palestinians should have just as much right to kill to defend themselves as Israelis do. Partly this is due to colonialism. Part of it is classism. The violence of the Israelis is clean and high tech. The violence of the Palestinians is crude and performed with simple weapons. We judge the morality of violence based upon the wealth of the people committing the violence.

Or better yet, a simple maximum wealth cap. No one should have more than 1000x the median household income. That’s the kind of fortune that even the most highly paid of doctors and lawyers, if they lived as absolute paupers and invested everything, would struggle to reach within their lifetimes. Even if you earned a salary of $1 million/year and lived like you were a broke college student, you would still be very unlikely to reach that level of wealth, even if you earned that salary from age 20 til death. The only way to amass that kind of fortune is through inheritance or through exploiting the labor of others.

We need a maximum wealth cap. 1000x median household income is incredibly generous, but it would still pale in comparison to even a single billion dollars. Currently, 1000x median household income would be a cap of about $80 million. A cap there still provides great incentive to work and innovate, but it prevents anyone from amassing such a fortune that they become a threat to their nation.