The soda fountain, the 19th century American combination of the coffeehouse’s “get yourself caffeinated” with the saloon’s “stand up drinking and socializing until you have to go piss”
I think our Civil War leaves Americans underappreciative of the disruption of civil war ‘cause there was actually pretty little disruption of government continuity here. The CSA was a new form, but it was in fact a confederation of states, “The Government of the State of Alabama, which already has an established relationship with every entity in Alabama, can raise taxes and men that they can combine into an armed force” was not at all novel, and most people’s only relationship with the federal level of government was the post office
Designer babies and genetically modifying human beings in an effort to “improve” us is a terrifying concept for many reasons, and I hope that the world does not ever need to implement such technology.
But in a purely hypothetical situation where there are no consequences for playing God whatsoever, I think the genes to make my own Vitamin C in my body would be convenient to have back (humans had them before, but lost them long ago). I would also like some shiny feathers, for purely aesthetic purposes.
What abilities or genetic code would you splice into yourself?
I just want to point out that the phrases “designer babies” and “designer genes” are ultimately artifacts of the fact that in-vitro fertilization first debuted contemporary with American culture’s adoption of denim jeans as a mature fashion
What is the mechanism of action you propose made Philadelphia turn out differently than Camden. Like you said the water cannons and riot cops. But what did those do exactly? Do you mean that by reacting harshly to black rioting, it leads to a tamping down/demoralizing of local black integrationist activism and a reduction in the penetration of local institutions by black middle-class liberals? Or is it something else?
Like “if you the roll the tanks in to Harlem in 1968, in the long term you prevent someone like David Dinkins from getting elected mayor of New York”?
And then if the Dinkinses of the world become mayors, what do they do differently in power than their white predecessors? What policies lead to urban decay and surging crime?
Well when it came down to it Philly was a major finance/law/government agency office tower historic core city and Camden was the outer borough fringe; Manhattan got bad but did not burn like the Bronx.
Philly had a strong white ethnic unionized machine base (incl. the police under commissioner-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo) which maintained a hold on power across black popular majorities; though Philly had a black mayor 84-92 there was a sense that only with the 2000 election of John Street had black political power arrived (the time when the police, largely autonomously, firebombed a black radical group from the air was under that first black mayor. It was basically a guerilla revolutionary cult that had been loudly aiming towards a big apocalyptic showdown all along from a fortified block; given experiences ranging from the Karl-Marx-Hof in the Austrian Civil War to contemporary radical base shootouts in LA it was entirely reasonable to conclude it could not be stormed without significant casualties; this is basically what SWAT units would go on to get body armor and tanks for)
Like, imagine if the Bronx was not even part of the same city or state as Manhattan, so when the tax base fell apart they didn’t even have Fort Apache
I know security and foreign policy are complicated issues but it does sound a bit odd to hear Sogavare say he’s standing up against the liberal hegemony of Australia not building military bases in the Solomon Islands. His whole grievance is that Australia wasn’t occupying SI, and someone has to do it, so he’s going with China.
Was remembering that the last time the Solomon Islands popped up is was them requesting Australian troops to put down some rioting, guess they didn’t provide enough
back in the day Australia wanted to treat the South Pacific much like the way America treats the Caribbean; I mean it still does but now it’s not clear how.
Historically our approach was “take on the Old Man (Spain) and win, claim his holdings, and establish a naval base at Guantanamo Bay”
Increasingly realizing my utility, in a political sense, is I’m still young enough to keep in touch with things but old enough to retain sone sense of the last social cycle.
Like, I saw NYC before Giuliani. I was in SF looking at colleges and it was full of street people, but then moving out west in I guess the second, 2000s tech bubble, it wasn’t.
The young generation has this hagiographic sense of the civil rights era and the integration of cities – which was exactly what conservatives were worried about with MLK Day – o, how anything is justified in its name, o how unthinkably terrible that government would do anything to resist it. And by the way why doesn’t everybody live in a city?
And I saw the wreckage of Camden, and the lines of horseback cops and water cannon tanks Philly kept to avoid going that far down, and I lived among the white-flight families who had maybe even been positive towards liberalism and racial integration until they had the experience of their city being occupied by a hostile, violent, teeming mass that could not be usefully reached as individuals in enough scale before they tore the city apart, while being supported by the government that claimed to reign in their name.
We’ve had a fairly peaceful interregnum since the ‘90s, and especially given how people tend towards historical understanding by projecting an eternal present back in time, we might have lost a sense of how this stuff works. This is why I spent the early 2010s worried that the counterforces weren’t kicking in yet but confident that once they did the channels were already worn in and they would kick hard.
To understand how this happened, and how the United States got into this mess in the first place, you need to be aware of how we came to create such a system.
i learned that tamales were once as popular across America as hamburgers and hotdogs. And the height of their popularity was known as The Tamale Wars, as vendors at times were so competitive that it caused murders, riots, and shoot outs (x)
Yeah, I suppose it’s kinda weird The Convenience Food In A Corn Husk isn’t a bigger thing in the corn-growing regions of the US
I'm telling you, man, we gotta make blacks illegal
That was, basically, how we pulled this coming turn last time (and several times before that, though the 1950s one went the other way)
(also AIDS terminating a nascent queer arc and damping the spirit of free love in general, in addition to the rise of evangelical Christianity which was really about the integration of poor Southern whites into the modern economy. Actually the 1920s one was pretty down on fundamentalists in the first place, and the 1950s one was certainly experienced badly by poor Southern whites)
reconstruction, the later part of the oregon trail era and especially the hatfield-mccoy feud, were all contemporaneous with the widespread adoption of the bolt action rifle. you're just racist
Yeah, that’s the marginal overlap where they would be futuristic. Freedmen, backwoods yahoos, and economic migrants are not the populations you’d expect to have of-the-moment tech
One important thing to understand about America is that before recent overland waves from the south, arriving immigrants tended to be fairly well off, relatively. We were an ocean away from our main font in Europe (and also for the historical sidebar of West Coast Asian immigration), and arrivals were definitionally those with the means – which often included support from source country communities they might later try to repay with remittances or support of further migration – to get here.
Huddled masses, wretched refuse at Ellis Island, yeah, yeah. That was a reflection of general post-peasant immigrant lowliness that we still were getting the cream from. Those who couldn’t swing making it here after the failure of the 1848 uprisings, or Russian pogroms, or advancing Nazis ended up in Liverpool, or Berlin, or Treblinka.
Irish Famine refugees, taking “coffin ships” known for shoddy conditions, were some of the worst we saw, but that was just testament to the general condition of the Irish people at the time that those were still the lucky
Why do comedians think their jobs are so important? I mean I like stand-up as much as the next guy but in terms of “jobs that could be eliminated without any real consequences” it’s near the top of the list
Unironically, because stand-up comedy in the late ‘70s into the early '90s was an important mechanism of how the boomers rallied and reconsolidated for another, successful, push
As continuity with the immediate post-war urban world, this was like, Woody Allen’s thing
Huh, maybe I need to integrate the particularity of Chicago and the brick wall stage backdrop into the postwar urban appropriation angle here
Now I definitely need to integrate Seinfeld as peak product of the '90s back-to-the-city wave, Larry David understanding urban life as essentially secular Jewish but seeing that as rabbinical quibbling over everyday affairs, in contrast to Woody’s midcentury psychoanalytic take
Why do comedians think their jobs are so important? I mean I like stand-up as much as the next guy but in terms of “jobs that could be eliminated without any real consequences” it’s near the top of the list
Unironically, because stand-up comedy in the late ‘70s into the early '90s was an important mechanism of how the boomers rallied and reconsolidated for another, successful, push
As continuity with the immediate post-war urban world, this was like, Woody Allen’s thing
Huh, maybe I need to integrate the particularity of Chicago and the brick wall stage backdrop into the postwar urban appropriation angle here
Why do comedians think their jobs are so important? I mean I like stand-up as much as the next guy but in terms of “jobs that could be eliminated without any real consequences” it’s near the top of the list
Unironically, because stand-up comedy in the late ‘70s into the early '90s was an important mechanism of how the boomers rallied and reconsolidated for another, successful, push
As continuity with the immediate post-war urban world, this was like, Woody Allen’s thing
The government taking “Havana syndrome” seriously is in part a result of having “learned the lessons” of “Gulf War Syndrome” which honestly at the time felt like a reenactment of Vietnam Agent Orange stuff
(Another connection? Paraquat! The government sponsored aerial spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with defoliant, which then caused marijuana-smoker paranoia about exposure and an industry of gimcrack woo to detect/cleanse it [sprayed plants did not flower and get harvested, defoliant killed them])
Why do comedians think their jobs are so important? I mean I like stand-up as much as the next guy but in terms of “jobs that could be eliminated without any real consequences” it’s near the top of the list
Unironically, because stand-up comedy in the late ‘70s into the early '90s was an important mechanism of how the boomers rallied and reconsolidated for another, successful, push
You don’t see leather elbow patches sewn into sweaters as a professorial signifier anymore
Oh, for the ages: this was absolutely not understood as a marking of distinction, the idea was that given their low income given status ranking they’d reinforce the vulnerable parts of high-but-not-rich-high class clothing with durable material to make them last
Like the association of sweaters and college and football in old cartoons isn’t an accident, those things were pretty equivalent class signifiers in early 20th century America
The underlying issue is that by the ‘90s White America had learned the Lesson of America’s Race Issues – as the synthesis to the thesis of Jim Crow and the antithesis of 60s-80s upsetting of settled order – as “black people can be just as capital-W White as the Irish, if you give them half a chance”
I think what modern filmmakers keep forgetting (especially disney affiliated productions) is that actors used to have a much more hands on and involved part. they weren’t just reading lines handed to them in a dark alley ten minutes before filming. they suggested script revisions and could improvise lines on the spot bc they knew their characters.
if mark hamill says “that’s not my luke skywalker” that’s a problem. if temuera morrison had insight into boba fett’s character the producers shouldn’t have just told him to deal with the script he was given. if seb stan was concerned about the lack of closure in the steve bucky relationship that’s an issue! the insane levels of secrecy and treating actors like the only thing they are good for is regurgitating lines is so detrimental to modern film/television
Something to bear in mind is that this isn’t our first turn on this particular merry-go-round.
Back in the early days of Hollywood, when vertically integrated monopolies were the norm and studios, distributors and theatre chains were all owned by the same parent companies, actors were basically treated like cattle, locked into exploitative multi-film contracts, routinely kept in the dark and lied to, and – apart from a handful of the very largest stars – had very little creative input. This would remain the case until a series of massive antitrust lawsuits in the 1930s and 1940s forced the studio monopolies to break up.
Now we’re seeing a shift back toward all film production being controlled by a tiny handful of companies, employing abusive booking practices to push the theatre chains around and exercise de facto control over theatre booking decisions in spite of technically being unaffiliated – and we’re also seeing a shift back toward how actors were treated under the old studio monopolies.
Like, this isn’t just a problem with the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not just a matter of people forgetting how to make good films. There are concrete economic incentives that lead to this sort of behaviour – and just like the first time around, it’s probably not going to get solved any way other than at legislative gunpoint.
