Thinking about how the comic book collecting boom of the 80s, which our current comic book store infrastructure was built out on and inspired the whole ‘90s endless variant cover issue #1s era, was in part about some golden age fans now being old and wealthy enough to invest in now-rare reminders of their youth, sure, but a lot of it was just the same as the contemporary baseball card boom – which also helped build out later product lines and memorabilia stores – a textbook reaction to early '80s inflation with a flight to nontraditional assets whose appreciation might conceivably outpace inflation, creating a bubble

kontextmaschine:

“a group of self-appointed vigilantes”

It is literally the defining concept of vigilantes that they are self-appointed!

Well, they could be appointed by Committees of Vigilance, which were themselves self-appointed, like the Committee of Public Safety which claimed authority from the people in the French Revolution, which recall was an inspiration in living memory for much of the 19th century apex of American vigilantism (the Southern color line wasn’t the only thing being enforced by mobs and lynch law)

max1461:

max1461:

I’m sure it has been said before, but Chris Rock’s well known bit is deeply reactionary. A whole lot of ideology in that, bad ideology.

And like, perhaps worse, not fucking funny

bcuz the nigger / black guy distinction was particular to the way the ‘90s recovered out of the '80s freefall and to how the '00s had expected a straight-line progression from there

as-if-and-only-if:

radiofreederry:

joofster-deactivated20220923:

I really think you’re a shitty person if you’re pro biden at this point

not pro Biden but this is pretty much straight-up misinformation? this makes it seem like this is a setback for unions, when the opposite is true: unions are largely in favor of this action!

Note that nothing here actually tells you what Biden actually did. What he did was create a board of neutral arbitrators to resolve the dispute and reach an agreement (without striking) within 30 days. Further, if nothing works within 30 days after that, then, as far as I can tell, workers can strike again. This is a delay to allow the chance to resolve the dispute via arbitration, not a quashing of strike power. And the resolution proposed by the arbitrators is entirely voluntary, and can be rejected.

Moreover, it’s not something Biden “just did” with executive power. The provision to create this board is already outlined under the Railway Labor Act. He didn’t say “fuck it” and whip up an all-powerful executive order, because, oh, now he wanted to, as the original tweet seems to imply—everyone expected the executive branch to do this at this point, because him doing this is already part of the law (and has already been done in the past).

In any case, the chance for workers to get the contract they deserve and to get their arguments heard without striking is good, because the immediate effects of a strike in this industry would be terrible for everyone. If the corporations still won’t give them the contracts they deserve, then yes, strike = good. But any other way to get those same contracts is better.

Here’s a statement from TTD, a federation of transportation unions:

We commend President Biden for announcing a board of neutral arbitrators to investigate and report its findings and recommendations to help both parties work toward a resolution.

After nearly three years of bad faith negotiations by the railroads, it is sad but not surprising that we arrived at this point in the bargaining process governed by the Railway Labor Act.

[…]

Quite simply, the facts are on our side and we look forward to the forthcoming recommendations of the presidentially-appointed arbitrators.

(That link and quote contains some more context about how what they really want is a fair contract, and the companies essentially just haven’t been listening.)

Here’s a tweet retweeted by SMART:

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Like, this is very much a “workers getting their day in court” deal, except instead of court it’s a panel of arbitrators appointed by a pro-union president, and if they don’t get the result they want, they don’t have to accept it.

Out of late 19th and early 20th century conflict when the railroads were the lifeblood of the nation, America evolved a system where the federal government has apparatuses taking particular interest in railroad laborers in return for ensuring they do not use their labor power to paralyze the economy. This is, for instance, why railroad workers don’t use Social Security; they’re covered by the previously established railroad retirement system.

California’s two great contributions to postwar American politics were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan

mapsontheweb:

James K. Polk’s expansionist ideas for the United States during Manifest Destiny.

Polk was the “fifty-four forty or fight” guy, that border’s way too far south in Oregon country

I mean mine checked them off, and there was enough WW2 history floating around in the culture that you could sustain a cable channel on running documentaries, so you had a background sense of “what” if not “why” but past that my sense was just

• there just was a “depression”
• then FDR administered a “New Deal”
• then there just was a war
• (unspokenly, this was the foundation of the succeeding order… cuz)

Until at least like AP American History in 9th Grade

You know “we only make it up to WWI every year in (American) history class” is gonna start being weirder as time moves on and the period afterwards drops out of living memory

kontextmaschine:

The left-splinter Change Horses Midstream ‘24 campaign is gonna be interesting

Remember Carter '80 was challenged in a left direction from Ted Kennedy in the primaries and then faced educated-moderate defection to John Anderson in the general

northshorewave:

Interesting review of a book about Jimmy Carter on ACX. Carter is frequently remembered as a hapless dope but you don’t get to be president by being a hapless dope. Some choice quotes:

Keep reading

argumate:

actually one of the funny things about drug use in old stories is they haven’t figured out the Advanced Legal Classification Of Which Drugs Are Bad like we have, so a character who can smoke tobacco and weed and opium and maybe snort a little coke on the side and it’s kind of all treated as being much the same thing, or perhaps the coke is treated as a harmless vice like adderall while the tobacco is a little disreputable, even.

Powder cocaine was very much considered a “soft drug” like weed and unlike say heroin (with pharmaceuticals their own thing) in the late ‘70s/early '80s (but then there was freebasing)

Recent Days

::the New Deal marginalization of conservatism has finally fallen through::

Leftist youth with only a secondhand sense of the 20th century: oh no! Well we used to have a pretty strong antifascist consensus, it’s 80 years old but I’m sure it’s still got some juice in it, I’ll just frame Republicans as fascist!

::the WWII-era antifascist consensus has finally fallen through::

Leftist youth with only a secondhand sense of the 20th century: oh no!

Well, if the independent legislature doctrine captures the Presidency for the state legislatures it’ll be a reassertion of the role in the federal schema they lost with the 17th Amendment taking the Senate from them, allowing FDR’s assertion of the imperial presidency and Executive Branch administrative state. Some of the 1994 “Republican Revolution” that gave Republicans Congress for the first time in decades was powered by promoted state legislators worked up over the federal-state balance; I remember “unfunded mandates” – the federal government committing states to pay for things from their own treasuries – being a particular sore point.

spoondrifts:

natalieironside:

Fun history facts: One of the 31 people arrested at Stonewall on June 28th 1969 was American folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who was not at the Stonewall Inn at the time and was cis & straight as far as I’m aware. He’d been eating dinner at a nearby restaurant when he noticed a riot happening, said “Well I suppose I should go see what the fuss is about,” stepped outside, and immediately started throwing bricks at the cops.

van ronk is quoted as saying about the riots: “as far as I was concerned, anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me.”

mapsontheweb:

“How the War Department sees the country”, 1940

Retrospectively maybe not ideal that the real net-enabled legacy of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign was small-dollar fundraising and not the local, in-person MeetUp gatherings

ghostpalmtechnique:

ALT

View on Twitter

Under-discussed as a source of the problem.

See a lot of people being like “take a page from right/Republican anti-abortion activists, who made bold demands and saw victory!” but I think that overlooks that adopting the abortion issue was a way of pulling realignment for the GOP

Like, in co-opting Catholic and evangelical church structures it offered an established base both in the “white ethnic” industrial north and among the emerging white Southern middle class (this latter just as racial issues and the alignment of enfranchised Blacks with the Democratic Party offered a chance to crack the one-party “Solid South”), while encouraging unity across this confessional divide, whereas earlier religious politics aggravated it.

Like, that’s a pretty special case of things lining up right, as is the loudest abortion-rights types are Democrats already, I don’t see servicing existing constituencies in ways that brings no additional margin playing out the same

afloweroutofstone:

The longer you study the US, the more you realize that we’re nowhere near a “final collapse.” Not even close.

In the early-to-mid 19th century, members of congress were very literally shooting each other in duels and beating each other on the floor of Congress. This was followed by a literal civil war that killed more than 2% of the country. During the Great Depression, unemployment reached 23%. 1968 saw mass rioting and a rapid string of assassinations that killed some of the country’s most famous political leaders. All of this was more destabilizing than anything happening today, and none of it led to the country collapsing.

I’d give the US at least another 100 years, at a minimum. A period of continued democratic backsliding is much more likely.

The US was basically one-party from the 1930s into the 1960s, that was in fact the impetus for the formation of the “conservative movement” that since built to dominance.

official-kircheis:

kontextmaschine:

centrally-unplanned:

bronzeagegattaca-deactivated202:

centrally-unplanned:

official-kircheis:

the thing that gets me the most about the USian attitude towards urban development is the, like, defeatism of it all, oh we could never have amsterdam or hamburg or florence here; like you do realise those places are not naturally occurring features of geography like the grand canyon and the niagara falls, right? you do realise they were built by humans and there’s nothing in the laws of physics that says on your continent you have to build fucking los angeles or houston instead? or are you saying that the united states people are just too dumb and incapable? is that really what you think?

I have been going a bit ~marxist on this one recently in that city planning is on some level, inherently, about building collective value and resolving tragedies of the commons, and combined with the US’s broken local governance system building new cities in the age of financialization of real estate assets doomed the whole project.

Its critical that Canada, while better than the US, *also* kindof sucks about urban design as Not Just Bikes will tell you in extensive detail and is way behind Europe or Japan. Its not just the specific US governance insanity (though, that really really doesn’t help), its a wider story of what the ‘new cities’ were able to build in the halcyon post-war era that locked themselves into awful equilibriums in the modern era. (China is its own complex story, but its oft-awful city design making so many similar US-style mistakes is also suggestive)

If Amsterdam had filled in all its canals and built highways over them - which it planned to do in the 60′s!! - I wonder if there is a tipping point it would have passed, just as an example.

But this is certainly a book-level topic with way more going on that just this.

Can you clarify what you mean by ~Marxist? Seems odd given that you group America, China, and Canada to contrast with Japan & Europe

Partially I am just being flippant, but the other part being that China, America, & Canada in relation to Europe + Japan have made residential real estate relatively more of a financial asset than a useful good - building patterns, city design, etc, caters to the notion that the purpose of city planning is to build housing who’s real estate values go up so they can be sold at a later date for a higher value. When that is your goal things that *cannot* be sold, aka the public infrastructure that makes dense city design functional, is underprovided, and the kind of housing you build is skewed. Referring to this as ‘marxist’ is just a kindof-cute way of pointing out how the economic structure is dictating the urban design, historical materialism baby.

Of course as also mentioned this is just a piece of it, its also contingent on a bunch of other things (real estate in Europe is oft financialized now! But maybe less so at critical moments in building modern city governance, like pre-1980′s UK?). And China of course is its own case, combining a massively financialized hypercapitalist real estate market with government-mandated investment and growth targets propping up their flagging export-oriented economy. Since civilization happens in cities urban design is impacted by pretty much all aspects of civilization, everything is its own case, but there are wider historical forces amoung the details.

Amsterdam and Hamburg and Florence grew in a feudal system where all the land in a city – and certainly in a neighborhood – might originally belong to one person, who often was the local government, this isn’t a dynamic available to America

Right. USians are just too dumb and unvirtuous to form governments that act for the common good.

It really is significant that European nations took their modern forms through national uprisings but America was founded off a liberal uprising.