mailadreapta:

kontextmaschine:

Los Angeles birthed Pentecostalism and America barely even notices that it has a new religion running free taking over continents

LA was a hot scene in the 20th Century that gave us the Foursquare Church, Objectivism, Scientology and EST, also The Source Family, The Manson Family, Tensegrity, Esalen, New Age cults, UFO cults, Nazi cults, Nazi UFO cults

That’s how these things go, in waves like any other industry, Mormonism was only the most famous thing to come out of the Burnt-Over District in the Third Great Awakening

Christianity was only the most famous thing to come out of Jerusalem of the period, that’s the deepest joke of Life of Brian, that it’s not a joke

Have I mentioned my theory that we’re just waiting for a Mormon Constantine to retake and reform this shuddering American Empire before it collapses entirely, giving it just enough juice to last for another century or so? (I mean, that’s what the first Constantine did, the Empire was dying when he got to it, but he managed to kick the can down the road in the west for another 150 years, which ain’t nothing, and also have you heard of this place called Constantinople? It lasted ~a while~ longer.)

Mormonism has everything that a future Emperor could want: it’s hierarchical, virtuous, enthusiastic, growing, and just old enough. New cults do take a little while to work out the kinks and create a form that can last for centuries, and the Mormonites seem to have reached that age. Also, and this is very important for any American Emperor, it’s extremely American. Much more American than regular Christianity, which is actually mostly European.

SLC is the new Byzantium, is what I’m saying.

In hoc signo vinces

You know about the White Horse Prophecy, right?

“I want to tell you something of the future. I will speak in a parable like unto John the Revelator. You will go to the Rocky Mountains and you will be a great and mighty people established there, which I will call the White Horse of peace and safety.” When the Prophet said, “You will see it,” I said, “Where will you be at that time?” He said, “I shall never go there. Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and they will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two to defend you and throw out the worst parts of the law so they will not hurt you so much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, but they will treat you like strangers and aliens and they will not give you your rights, but will govern you with strangers and commissioners. You will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed. It will hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber.” At that time the Prophet’s countenance became sad, because as he said, “I love the Constitution; it was made by the inspiration of God; and it will be preserved and saved by the efforts of the White Horse, and by the Red Horse who will combine in its defense. The White Horse will find the mountains full of minerals and they will become rich (at this time, it must be remembered, the precious metals were not known to exist in either the Rocky Mountains or California). You will see silver piled up in the streets. You will see the gold shoveled up like sand. Gold will be of little value then, even in a mercantile capacity; for the people of the world will have something else to do in seeking for salvation. The time will come when the banks of every nation will fall and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasure. This place will be the White Horse and England’s vaults. A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such as has never been seen before; for the land will be left without a Supreme Government, and every specie of wickedness will be practiced rampantly in the land. Father will be against son and son against father; mother against daughter and daughter against mother. The most terrible scenes of bloodshed, murder and rape that have ever been imagined or looked upon will take place. People will be taken from the earth and there will be peace and love only in the Rocky Mountains. This will cause many hundreds of thousands of the honest in heart of the world to gather there, not because they would be Saints, but for safety and because they will be so numerous that you will be in danger of famine, but not for want of seed, time and harvest, but because of so many to be fed. Many will come with bundles under their arms to escape the calamities for there will be no escape except only by escaping and fleeing to Zion…

ilgreven:

organasrey:

joshpeck:

Daisy Ridley talking about being in Star Wars in the future is a big mood

daisy ridleys passive acceptance of the possibility of civilisation ending within the next 3 decades is honestly millennial culture

…really? Didn’t everyone think the end of civilization was imminent from pretty much the mid-50s to the mid-80s?  If anything, millennials are only echoing the sentiments that their boomer parents and grandparents lived through during the Cold War…who, come to think of it, were echoing the sentiments that their parents and grandparents lived through during the two World Wars.

>Didn’t everyone think the end of civilization was imminent from pretty much the mid-50s to the mid-80s?

were they wrong?

Los Angeles birthed Pentecostalism and America barely even notices that it has a new religion running free taking over continents

LA was a hot scene in the 20th Century that gave us the Foursquare Church, Objectivism, Scientology and EST, also The Source Family, The Manson Family, Tensegrity, Esalen, New Age cults, UFO cults, Nazi cults, Nazi UFO cults

That’s how these things go, in waves like any other industry, Mormonism was only the most famous thing to come out of the Burnt-Over District in the Third Great Awakening

Christianity was only the most famous thing to come out of Jerusalem of the period, that’s the deepest joke of Life of Brian, that it’s not a joke

femmenietzsche:

trickytalks:

femmenietzsche:

femmenietzsche:

My favorite thing from this book is how Christians keep denouncing these New Age movements as unsophisticated Oriental doomsday cults with dark underbellies of vice and graft.

eternalfarnham said: Ooh, title?

Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, although it’s not great or anything. It should be twice as long as it is and it’s more about society’s reaction to cults than about the cults themselves, which are treated more like cultural background noise than a developing suite of beliefs. It’s fine, but if you’re just looking for a book about the occult in general, I’d recommend The Occult Underground instead.

I’ll add The Occult Underground to my booklist. 

Does the book you’re reading talk about syncreticism and cults in the early 20th century, or does it mostly focus on the 60s and 70s?

It goes all the way back to early anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic propaganda and how those tropes influenced later depictions of cults, but the focus is on the late 1800s to today. The main thesis is that the 60s/70s cults were not actually unique in American history.

ladybubblegum:

stability:

• judgmental as hell
• uses reindeer as slaves
• doesn’t even have a pilot license

i don’t know what made me want to google “does santa claus have a pilot’s license” but i’m really glad i did because apparently he received one from the US assistant secretary of commerce, with the director of aeronautics as a witness, in 1927

source

roninart-tactical:

twentyone-friendsoftheabc:

ultrafacts:

The Fugio Cent is the first official cent of the United States. It was designed by Benjamin Franklin. While very available in lower grades, rare examples in excellent condition are highly sought after by collectors.

Source 

For more facts, follow Ultrafacts

OG America is me

I think we need to bring this back.

You know with Roy Moore in the news I’m surprised I’m not hearing more references to the solid south’s “yellow dog” tradition

(”I would vote for a yellow dog run by my party before I would vote for a member of the out-party”)

It’s not even that archaic a term, it was the linguistic basis for the “Blue Dog” caucus of conservative, mostly southern Democrats that was a force in the ‘90s.

lesbianartandartists:

New York Magazine (May 10, 1993) and Newsweek (June 21, 1993)

Like all other individuals and self-consciously designated “groups” of individuals, lesbians have a history; and it is from history that people construct an awareness not only of who they are, but also of what they want and need from their environment. Situating lesbians as an ahistorical or de-historical group plays an important role in our political subjugation: today’s “lesbian chic” is consistently careful not to present lesbian history. The deliberate erasure of lesbian history from most social, political, artistic and personal records encourages lesbians to consider ourselves excluded from the past, and consequently makes us more willing to accept exclusion from the social and political life of the present. This general elimination of lesbians from popular and academic considerations of what constitutes “the past” also allows non-lesbians to feel justified in continuing to deny the existence of both lesbian lives and lesbian culture.

Laura Cottingham, Lesbians are so chic…that we are not really lesbians at all (London: Cassell, 1996), 11.

Watching the beginning of The Running Man, remembering all those ‘90s Image comics, playing Phantom Pain, remembering all those ‘90s-2000s Space Marines

remembering every other title sequence in the ‘80s

“the story begins with a flyover then aerial insert” is the Vietnam War’s lasting impact on American culture

squareallworthy:

Traffic management that involves prioritizing some throughput over others is the norm, not some weird thing Comcast thought up to make more money. We don’t demand that roads treat all vehicles alike, or that delivery companies treat all packages alike. Yes, as far as a wire is concerned, 01010101 is the same as 11110000, but we don’t have to be limited by a wire’s dumbness. Insisting that the switching system treats them the same ignores what bytes are for. Some information really is more important.

The United States absolutely insisted that railroads treat all cargo alike, that is the foundation of the national regulatory state, even before the New Deal.

Because before it started doing that the dynamic of an open frontier bottlenecked through monopoly routes of transportation made economy of scale so powerful it started a death-spiral of economic centralization, that was where the robber barons and trusts (to later be busted) came from

So much of the 20th century regulatory state was beta tested on 19th century railroads – Social Security (after railroad pensions), workers’ comp and workplace safety law, wire (telegraph and telephone) regulations, public utilities, the trucking and airline regulations that ended under Carter

But yes, we very much have made demands like that for the sake of fending off structural capture tending towards oligarchy

class-struggle-anarchism:

check out the awesome class war shit going on in 1913

“anarchist shoots at king of Italy”

“outlaws shoot judge dead on the bench in court”

“convict mutiny at Nebraska jail”

“miners reject terms of peace in coal fields" 

All on the same front page.

You missed one, the “Schiff-Gans Case”, which was an investigation into a New York banker and his lawyer on claims they’d corrupted the legal system to ensure an excessively long sentence against a fired servant who broke into the banker’s home and attacked him.

Frrrriendly reminder that Saint Ronald Reagan’s administration was hounded by allegations of private collusion with a sovereign country demonized as an Enemy of America (here, the Islamic Republic of Iran), dating back to suspicions that he coordinated with them to first win election, and several of his advisors and cabinet members were investigated and/or indicted and/or tried and/or convicted for related matters only to receive presidential pardons.

yeoldenews:

So a comment in a letter I was reading from 1898 (“To think of you witnessing that row in Congress Wednesday afternoon!”) led me to come across a forgotten episode of history that I feel needs to be re-remembered…

It seems the heated debates in Congress over whether to authorize military intervention in Cuba (the Spanish-American war would be officially declared  12 days later) led to a book/fist fight on the House floor.

Rachel’s cousin Will was on spring break in DC at the time and apparently witnessed the entire thing from the House Gallery.

I read some other letters from that week to see if anyone else mentioned the fight and Will’s cousin Edith had this to say:

“I think it was perfectly disgraceful, think of our dignified American Senators flinging books at each[other], I would liked to see them do it though, if it had to be done.”

argumate:

thenightetc:

argumate:

people seem to enjoy watching charismatic actors playing emotionally resonant characters in a lovingly rendered setting with a consistent and unique aesthetic where the plot is merely a rough scaffolding that makes no real sense

Which is funny, because plot is at least theoretically the cheapest aspect (in some cases it can be done by one person working alone with no special equipment!), and therefore the one it makes the least sense to cut corners on.

But I suppose movies and tv involve a lot of editing, re-takes, doing things out of order for various pragmatic reasons, cutting things out for time or because they didn’t look good onscreen, and with all that maybe it’s not surprising that plot falls by the wayside, because plot is about the gestalt and not about any individual scene.

Plus, it’s easy enough to suspend your disbelief until it’s over–if you’re immersed, you probably won’t worry too much about what seems like minor inconsistencies or whatever, because you’re trusting that by the end it’ll all hang together.  And when you get to the end, well, you may have forgotten or at least no be longer thinking about various quibbles!  So it’s entirely possible to watch a movie, enjoy it, come out of it thinking “gosh that was great, very emotionally satisfying”, and only later go “wait, actually what happened there”… especially if you rewatch it.

that’s just it! you would think that good writing would be prized, considering it’s so cheap relative to a single visual effects shot, but in practice you would rather sacrifice it in favour of literally any other aspect of the production.

“it looked terrible and the acting was wooden and the actors unappealing but gosh that plot was fantastic, 10/10” just isn’t a common review summary

A lot of this just has to do with the structure of filmmaking by which the director is the boss (though accountable to studio funders/moneyman producers)

adjust to the other factors - actors and sets have already been paid for and film has already been shot, actors might be tied to production or promotions deals, but scripts can be rewritten easy separate from all of that, on the fly, even a new writer (this was how Joss Whedon really made his name)

In TV this is different writing has higher priority, some structural reasons relating to time pressure – you NEED to deliver a coherent time block by this deadline, every week, but the sets and actors are paid for for the season, at least the first 13/22s of it

A lot of the “Golden Age” of “Peak TV” has to do with the formation of writers rooms’ and the rise of the showrunner - the head writer who runs the whole production, has approval over casting, writing, directors - in the early ‘80s

Before TV tended to be more like standup comedy or magazines - you might have a core group of staff writers pitching ideas and guiding episodes but they solicited a lot of outside writers to submit stuff, or took pitches on spec, which is why a lot of old shows kind of play like commedia dell’arte, with the characters representing broad types with trademark quirks that any writer can pick up and run with

Then in the ‘80s you started to get more funding for staff, which let you bring on more writers and have them spend more time rewriting what outside stuff you had. That’s when shows started to get more distinct - Miami Vice was an obvious example but that was more in the way the action played to the visuals; that had something to do with writer-showrunner Michael Mann being one of the first-generation film school graduates coming out of the ‘70s, who’d been trained on the field as a tradition to innovate with. This is also how you get the densely knit comedy of early Simpsons, with money into writing

That was well-funded network shows at least, first-run syndicated shows – ones that weren’t run on a network but directly took bids from broadcast stations in each market – tended to be lower-funded genre pulp stuff. But even there there were standouts in the ‘90s, Xena, Babylon 5, even Star Trek: The Next Generation were syndicated

The Star Trek franchise of series was one of the last to take a lot of outside scripts, too, their tradition was always drawing on the wide pool of SF print writers. Anyway the syndicated angle kind of died as FOX and WB and the UPN gathered a lot of spare channels and regularized them, ran stuff like Buffy and Voyager themselves

So as the ‘90s went on you started to see more and more seasonal arcs as shows gained in their narrative capacity, then you saw the premium channels (which had more been doing anthology shows or soft porn for their original series) latch on and away we go

look at this shit

One thing that gets overlooked in discussing “respectability politics”. The civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s? Dominated by the black church, marches dressed all formal? That aesthetic wasn’t just some attempt to prove blacks were bougie enough to deserve rights or something.

The thing about preachers and suit-and-tie types delivering speeches invoking Protestant Christianity and American ideals, arrayed against vulgar, corrupt officials, their brutish followers and police thugs, bound by ethnic solidarity and pursuing their selfish interest through brute, unadorned force?

That was exactly how northern progressives – Republicans and the “good government” Democrats who sometimes joined with them in “fusion coalitions” – understood themselves in contrast to the white ethnic machine politics that dominated big cities.

It was saying to the educated professional elites outside Dixie, “your struggle and our struggle were the same struggle all along”.

This is in contrast to the previous civil rights movement of the 1910-20s, which drew more on the then-contemporary imagery of the revolutionary masses and got absolutely walloped by the powers that be.

argumate:

no doubt the parody, Gang Bang Theory, must already exist.

gonna hijack this post to remind everyone about Tijuana bibles, the American doujinshi-style parodic porn comics from the early 20th century

that ripped/riffed off newspaper comic strips, celebrities, and early sitcoms

only they were fucking

kropotkindersurprise:

The first known incidents of fragging in South Vietnam took place in 1966, but events in 1968 appear to have catalyzed an increase in fragging. After the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968, the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular in the United States and among American soldiers in Vietnam, many of them conscripts. With soldiers reluctant to risk their lives in what was perceived as a lost war, fragging was seen by some enlisted men “as the most effective way to discourage their superiors from showing enthusiasm for combat.“  

 The resentment directed from enlisted men toward older officers was exacerbated by generational gaps, as well as different perceptions of how the military should be conducted. Enforcement of military regulations, especially if done overzealously, led to troops’ complaining and sometimes threats of physical violence directed toward officers.

The total number of known and suspected fragging cases by explosives in Vietnam from 1969 to 1972 totaled nearly 900 with 99 deaths and many injuries.  [video]

So with Trump grumbling about FCC licensing some people are digging up Nixon-era grumbling on the same topic, that’s a start.

But the REAL way that FCC licensing was leveraged was with regards to newspaper companies getting into first radio and then TV. Newspaper barons and editors were always powerful players in the political world, often upstream of senators and even bosses, but negotiations with over the number of stations one company could own, or own in one market gave government the whip hand - newspapers might have high profit margins, especially as the number per city fell, but maximum volume and no room for expansion, while broadcasting was the future.

Liscensing of individual stations would be premised on its being found to serve the public interest, which the bright young things running things since FDR - the open-minded, college-educated, even queer-positive types of their day – might understand as eschewing dangerous politics in favor of What All Right-Thinking People Knew

Weighing heavily on their mind that when Europe just tried to mix democracy with a vibrant and competitive mass media it polarized society into extremisms that turned and fell upon each other in the greatest apocalypse the world had ever seen, so

One Sulzbergerian even-handed newspaper per city and a handful of poorly-differentiated TV networks all pushing the same Postwar Consensus, radio operating under the Fairness Doctrine, a lot of the cultural blandness people associate in retrospect with the ‘50s, that was brought about by effort

The Mayflower Doctrine, I’d never even heard of that before Wikipedia right now. FDR’s regulations on broadcast editorializing, so that they would present responsible takes on public issues, rather than any old (fake news?) ones their (maybe anti-New Deal) owners or advertisers favored.

It was a Postwar Liberal Consensus, that’s why conservatives strained against it, especially after the ‘60s when coalitions and issues had shifted, ESPECIALLY under Reagan, whose victories seemed to affirm them as the proper agents of public authority. That’s why Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine, that’s why so much conservative/Republican infrastructure is alternative channels for mass communication and coordination – AM talk, religious broadcasting, large-scale direct mail, national networks of activist cells piggy-backing off church or housewives’ affinity groups.

So I’ve said a lot of the 80s reaction involved not so much actively suppressing left-aligned segments of the population as writing them out of the polity and exposing them to attrition

I think the emerging narrative of AIDS as something inflicted on the gays by the straights is pretty rich (especially looking at contemporary STD transmission rates among MSM and realizing it’s only time until another long-incubation disease emerges and it happens again) but it’s absolutely true that that was understood (and leveraged) as a way that liberalized sexual and gender norms would “take care of themselves”

And after the fall of formal housing segregation brought blacks into all sorts of urban neighborhood cities were in a sense abandoned - as recently as Nixon, the United States (which was an urbanized country) supported cities at the federal level through extensive grants; Ford’s “drop dead” to New York - refusing to backstop its clientilistic welfare state as the urban industry it drew on declined – was the big turning point, on to Reagan and “managed decline”

When you see things marvelling at how the “War on Drugs” and Clintonite crime measures were supported by black politicians at the time it’s because the absence of aggressive police on city streets, allowing their decline into “urban jungles” was considered a backdoor strike against black communities

And I was wondering if there’d be an equivalent in this cycle and more and more it almost seems like natural disasters (and climate change) might be playing that role but the targets don’t particularly make sense? Like, simply letting Puerto Rico take the hit is the exact kind of thing I’m thinking of, and you can draw lines to Katrina and the “shock doctrine” and rebuilding in a neoliberal way afterwards

But, like, to the extent that our political system was subject to more strain than it could bear and needed to shed load, it wasn’t Puerto Ricans or Houstonians that were a particular burden, or form much of a coherent category that aligns with active issues and partisan cleavages, right?