kontextmaschine:

You know, for all the Waco Branch Davidian raid was ultimately processed as a threatening strike against the right, “a government agency coming out of the ‘80s acts to claim bureaucratic territory and legitimacy by using police force to suppress novel religions and non-nuclear family life structures” was not a very left place to start from

@gattsuru said: It’s a bit like how no one particularly liked Randy Weaver, either: it’s less that it was a strike _against_, so much as who it was _for_, and how they did it.

Yeah and the wild thing is by backing the ATF and trying to cover things up and sweep them under the rug, Clinton and Reno were trying to dispel a negative image of the Democrats as people who would side with a creepy cult against the thuggish police they killed

You know, for all the Waco Branch Davidian raid was ultimately processed as a threatening strike against the right, “a government agency coming out of the ‘80s acts to claim bureaucratic territory and legitimacy by using police force to suppress novel religions and non-nuclear family life structures” was not a very left place to start from

rustingbridges:

top most catholic states:

1. Rhode Island
2. Massachusetts
3. New Jersey
4. New Mexico

least catholic states:

• 45. Alabama

• 46. Tennessee

• 47. West Virginia

• 48. Utah

• 49. Mississippi

what happened to the 50th state? who knows. anyway not what I expected

I like that if you know American history the top 2 are

1. The place Massachusetts WASPs kicked all the Catholics out to
2. Massachusetts, after Irish Catholics displaced the WASPs

ghostpalmtechnique:

kontextmaschine:

Did the Democrats Fuck It Up? | Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman

A “why is Roe about to fall?” article that correctly traces things back to the 1970s collapse of the New Deal coalition and then intriguingly connects that back to the way Democrats became “the feminist party” to begin with, and more broadly an alignment around donor fundraising that necessarily favors the interests of those with disposable income.

To make the thing not so much a knifing of allies, the (preferable) alternative they consider wasn’t “male-oriented unions keep feminists out of the coalition” but “feminist groups focus more on gendered labor and poverty issues, and less on issues of the college-degreed of their day”.

Well okay, but how do they, feminist groups, keep from following the money? Dems’ old funding base of dues-funded union support linked them to the working class, using their scale to compete for poverty, but through a thick and embedded intermediating structure

I guess AARP is an example of an identity category activist group that keeps a pretty materialist focus. Like, “government support for individuals with no other source of income” is very much an AARP issue, but even though COVID is a threat to the elderly I don’t see them moving in that space.

I guess a key there is both the unions and AARP provide valuable service to the member besides interaction with the political system. I know a big part of why the NRA got so big is because guys who aren’t particularly gung-ho will join for the valuable discounts (the hotel and car rental ones mean a life membership pays for itself in like a week of travel), while all the while the NRA gets chances to develop and activate them.

pffft. If Thurgood Marshall had lived just a little longer, we’d have a 7-2 liberal majority on the Supreme Court now.

In that Bush v. Gore would’ve gone the other way? Yeah, they do point his retirement under Bush the Elder (instead of hanging on to his death 4 days into Clinton’s first term) and RBG’s death as the proximate causes.

Did the Democrats Fuck It Up? | Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman

A “why is Roe about to fall?” article that correctly traces things back to the 1970s collapse of the New Deal coalition and then intriguingly connects that back to the way Democrats became “the feminist party” to begin with, and more broadly an alignment around donor fundraising that necessarily favors the interests of those with disposable income.

To make the thing not so much a knifing of allies, the (preferable) alternative they consider wasn’t “male-oriented unions keep feminists out of the coalition” but “feminist groups focus more on gendered labor and poverty issues, and less on college-graduate issues of their day”. Roseanne feminism.

Well okay, but how do they, feminist groups, keep from following the money? Dems’ old funding base of dues-funded union support linked them to the working class, using their scale to compete for poverty, but through a thick and embedded intermediating structure.

I guess AARP is an example of an identity category activist group that keeps a pretty materialist focus. Like, “government support for individuals with no other source of income” is very much an AARP issue, but even though COVID is a threat to the elderly I don’t see them moving in that space. (Which is to say, would an AARPified NOW even have abortion in their issue portfolio?)

I guess a key there is both the unions and AARP provide valuable service to the member besides interaction with the political system. I know a big part of why the NRA got so big is because guys who aren’t particularly gung-ho will join for the valuable discounts (the hotel and car rental ones mean a life membership pays for itself in like a week of travel), while all the while the NRA gets chances to develop and activate them.

Starting to see the old issue where they choose state governors with an eye towards affecting national Presidential elections like we had with state legislatures before popular election of national Senators

Macomb County already went Reagan tho

kontextmaschine:

Ah, the liberals grumbling about how the Republicans haven’t been like, removed from the game, letting them win by default, are all fixated on the fight, the removal in its own right, and aren’t even trying to articulate with anyone who isn’t so fixated but could gain in an environment where the Republicans had been removed. Dismissible.

“I reject the Supreme Court’s legitimacy!” Okay, so? Do you realize how many people did over Roe v. Wade or Engel v. Vitale? Hell, several states did over Brown v. Board. So?

Basically my take on worries about shifting/“collapse” of the American democratic order…

Like, some powers and responsibilities are being evacuated from some elements and agents of the government and broader social structure to others; this is a normal and expected progression in any institutional system. This will leave dynamics of power and government that are different than those I have grown accustomed to or been chatechized in.

But the very irregularity between and within those two categories, mixing quite distinct threads from the founding, Reconstruction, (sotto voce, the WWI war state and 1920s reactionary reconsolidation), New Deal and WWII, Cold War and Civil Rights Era, and post-USSR neoliberalism is testament to the fact this is a recurring process that need not be taken as a rupture of government or social continuity

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

• French Revolution - deposes national government, several waves of terror, co-opted by messianic figure who suppresses unrest with anti-personnel artillery into crusading empire, remakes much of advanced world, ultimately defeated, the heirs of the pre-uprising elites restore the old regime but it’s never the same
• June Rebellion of 1832 (the Les Mis one) - heartwarming unity, suppressed by military force
  
• 1848 Revolutions - suppressed by military force one by one, some advances in bourgeois nationalism, extensive systems of secret police and political crime established to suppress future repeats
• Paris Commune - formed under foreign siege, not applicable
• Russian Revolution of 1905 - after initial attempts at suppression catalyze more unrest, Tsar makes concessions to liberals, managing to split them from radicals. Remnants suppressed with military force but return in 1917.
• Russian Revolution of 1917 - after defeating war-weakened central government and resisting expeditionary forces from foreign states, eventually forms Leninist government
  
• Spartacist Uprising - radicals transition to armed insurrection with partial buy-in from more moderate leftists. Undermanned government suppresses them by loosing private rightist veterans’ militias
• post-war Italy - country held together in very loose federalism with drastic variation in local political climate from hard-right to hard-left, socialists, communists, anarchists, and fascists all maintain organizations, power bases, autonomist zones, and parties. National electoral system is rigged to maintain function as a client state of foreign power anyway. System lubricated by occasional political and state terrorism, extensive corruption, and organized crime.
  

• July Rebellion of 1830 - attempts by king to suppress bourgeois coalition of urban workers and non-noble propertyholders, through force and law, yield further unrest, which escalates to armed mob violence. Regime forces yield, king is deposed, bourgeois government and rights established. With 1832 and 1848, inspires total redesign of city in mid-1800s to render less capturable by mobs.
• May 68 (Paris, 1968) - initial effort at suppression fails, country experiences two-months largely peaceful suspension of regular order, government makes concessions, regular order resumes, event largely understood in cultural terms
  
• Long Hot Summer 1967/MLK Assassination Riots 1968 - unrest aligns along racial lines. Suppressed by military force. Concessions granted in Civil Rights Act of 1968 and others. Whites increasingly leave inner city to blacks, becomes chronic “urban crisis”. Nixon elected, offers mix of concessions and repression while snuffing out resource streams into inner cities. Nixon deposed in parliamentary maneuvering. Intermittent political violence while crime rises. By 1980s black organized crime has established substantial hegemony. Reagan undercuts enforcement mechanisms of civil rights law while continuing blockade on urban funding. In 1992 Clinton elected, government suppresses organized crime with police force, resumes urban funding streams through allied neoliberal “New Democrat” local machines. Cities recover, whites return.
  

• [anon submitted] 1911 (Xinhai) Revolution: Crumbling government falls quickly, mad scramble for power leads to several decades of ineffective military despotism and subversion by “sympathetic” foreign powers, 20+ years of constant warfare, invasion by a nearby state while internal strife leaves the nation unable to defend itself, Communist dictatorship.
• 1973 Athens Polytechnic - suppressed by military force. As the regime moves to reorient itself in response, coup ultimately leads to war with Turkey and the fall of the junta. The successor regime recognizes universities as autonomous of state power. In the form of “Exarcheia”, Athens Polytechnic shelters much of Greece’s anarchist capacity.
• 1989 Tiananmen Square - suppressed by military force. Extensive systems of secret police and political crime reinforced to suppress future repeats, including damnatio memoriae.
  

We ready to write this one down and close the book yet?

cop-disliker69:

So in the last few years, the presidents of both Honduras and the British Virgin Islands have been extradited to the US on drug trafficking charges, and the president of Haiti was assassinated in very unclear circumstances by dudes wearing DEA jackets.

Is the DEA just like the arm of US empire in the Caribbean now? How the hell do you even extradite a president?

::cough:: Manuel Noriega ::cough::

Fellow feeling? Abortion was key through religion to bring the Southern/non-NE-urban-industrial white working class on board to split the South after the VRA, with a dominant position they can coast until internal coalitional tensions bring them down like Dems after FDR

My first introduction to the concept of the Vietnam War was actually the NES platform-adventure adaptation of Rambo II

st-just:

So like, the central organizing idea of Warmth of Other Suns is that the Great Migration can be best understood as fundamentally similar to earlier immigration waves from Ireland or Italy of the Pale of Settlement - in terms of the reasons for it, the experience of the migrants on arrival, the divide between the old and new worlds, and so on.

Which, sure, seems plausible at first blush. But I really hadn’t realized it extended to even, like, ‘the initial generation of migrants was generally composed of the better educated segments of the population back in the old country, and on arrival was pretty quietist politically and focused on self improvement/comparing the shitty conditions to the much shitter conditions back home, while their children tend to be much more politically active and press for, like, actual equal treatment.” (Didn’t quite realize that was a general trend in the immigrant experience, really)

ingolfr:

kontextmaschine:

ingolfr:

swan2swan:

abyssalcorvid:

injuries-in-dust:

Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!

They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.

The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.

“a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants”

people just love to lie on this website

“Chinese immigrants performed the unskilled and even skilled labor around the railroad expansion into Western resource-extraction regions in the late 1800s” is 100% believable

If we grant for sake of argument that the late 1800s wasn’t the end of the Old West but the beginning, that still wouldn’t qualify as “a lot” of it being “founded by Chinese immigrants”.

If it was reached by railroad good chance it was built by chinamen

ingolfr:

swan2swan:

abyssalcorvid:

injuries-in-dust:

Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!

They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.

The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.

“a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants”

people just love to lie on this website

“Chinese immigrants performed the unskilled and even skilled labor around the railroad expansion into Western resource-extraction regions in the late 1800s” is 100% believable

kontextmaschine:

yooterus:

residentgoodgirl:

IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Waited Until My Wedding Night to Lose My Virginity and I Wish I Hadn’t [x]

This is a long read but it’s interesting. Really sad though.

“I am now thoroughly convinced that the entire concept of virginity is used to control female sexuality.”

in early 1900s America, Protestant colleges started giving mandatory courses in how to sex your spouse to deal with this exact issue

Like, this is an underused erotic premise, honestly. College used to for-real have classes on how to fuck.

Like, your spouse, though, it was common for students to marry while attending college, and until student unrest in the 1950s colleges often claimed “in loco parentis” (“in the place of parents”) authority to regulate their lives and conduct to suppress unmarried sexuality.

Uh, the Gilded Age, and the transition between the Civil War and early 20th century urbanized industrial mass culture, aside from railroads, labor issues and Reconstruction/Redemption is probably where I’m weakest.

Dude you don’t have to tell me about the Second Great Awakening

It’s nice that like the one attempt to make a big ceremonial mausoleum for a prominent American national political figure after their death – Grant’s Tomb – is like a footnote of a joke in American history