the way I'm increasingly seeing the world is something that people don't really overtly discuss much: as exchanges of power.
→[More:] This idea has a sort of lefty sociology hue but on the contrary I think it's the only thing that matters if you're doing a pragmatic analysis of situations. What does it mean if someone allied with the local government got away with something until there was a national media outcry at which point they got arrested? Earlier they had localized power, later national power overruled the protection they had in their fiefdom. All the other stuff about what's fair, right or wrong was subservient to the power structures in play.