So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.

Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.

It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.

For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.

For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).

For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.

So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.

Although barely out of adolescence…[Shelley] was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist. Physically, he was rather odd, tall and slim to the point of limpness, with a high-pitched effete voice; but what he lacked in physical bulk he more than made up for in charismatic intensity. Among the earliest witnesses to this intensity were his school fellows at Eton, where he was sent by his landowning father when he was twelve. Initially he was bullied for his refusal to ‘fag’ for older boys, but the bullies soon discovered that in spite of his feeble frame, Shelley was not a boy to succumb quietly to taunts. On the contrary, he could be terrifying when roused, and was quite capable of reciprocal acts of violence. He stabbed one tormentor’s hand with a fork, and others remembered him as an almost unearthly creature, with flashing eyes, wild hair, and deathly white cheeks.

young romantics - daisy hay (via revolutionariess)

#i saw ‘shelley stabbed someone with a fork’ and knew i had to share with the world

that’s it. that’s Romanticist scholarship.

(via marygodwinning)

Could someone please explain what “to fag” means in this context?

(via talkinggorillabutler)

The student bodies of British boarding schools had internal hierarchies - think of Prefects and the Head Boy/Girl in Harry Potter - and part of this involved upperclassmen taking personal charge of younger students as servants/mentees. This would include the younger boys performing petty chores for the older, one of the more common of which was gathering and carrying bundles of firewood - that is to say, faggots - from whence the name, fagging, with the younger boys as fags.

“Ha ha a more innocent time” except no, this is where the slang for men who have sex with men comes from, it was common knowledge that the older boys  would often use their faggot boys for sex or abuse them for sport, sexually or otherwise.

The conditioning process of character-building institutions often begins with a period of abuse, to shatter an acolyte’s existing personality and render them pliable in preparation for the construction of a new one - consider the way that military training begins at boot camp with drill instructors insulting recruits and assigning them impossible tasks so they can be punished for failing.

With male elites this hazing process has often included a catamite dynamic - consider also the citizens of ancient Greece or Rome, cabin boys in the Royal Navy, more recently the Catholic priesthood, Hollywood, and the BBC.

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.

Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.

And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain sovereigns through internal political pressure.

That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.

Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.

The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

The Scotsman asked what was up with “African-American” as distinct from incidentally African “American” and I was like, “Ah, you want to understand race in America? First, you must learn everything.”

There are three classic topics in American history and they go

1. Race, huh?

2. Why no socialism?

3. The frontier, huh?

and basically the answer to any of those is the other two

That post about fibers got some attention - well, 2 likes and 2 reblogs, which is 2/2 more than I expected, so not being one to pass up an opportunity to draw structural connections between things in the format of a story that makes my life sound more interesting than spending so much time on the internet would imply, let’s expand on it.

I went to Maui a few years back to celebrate my mom’s not, after years of treatment, having cancer anymore. She was born on the Big Island as a Navy brat, went back after college as a secretary in a TV station for a few years, so she’s got some history in the area. She was even given a Hawaiian name, which was kind of funny because then she couldn’t find any of those “if this is your real name, this would be your Hawaiian name” keychains at the souvenier stores.

Maui was kind of the boring island; my dad booked the trip (through an honest to god travel agent) and only seems to know how to book golf vacations. I hear it’s a nice golf island.

Things about Hawaii I noticed: even the Haole use native Hawaiian words a lot - not just “aloha” but the top 40 radio in talking about some community event would mention “…and plenty of games and rides for the keiki”, men’s/women’s bathroom signs would be “kane/wahine”. For a while I wondered if this was actual culture or just a schtick everyone agreed to pull, but on thinking of it I guess actual culture is a schtick everyone agrees to pull.

There was plenty of constant road repair and resurfacing, with larger work crews than I’ve ever seen, even though the roads were by any standard perfectly fine to begin with - I guess that’s what happens when you hardly have any roads but still have two senators to claim your share of highway appropriations.

Bunch of Samoans on the island. I’d heard those guys were built big and solid, but holy shit.

Lot of hitchhikers. Apparently land prices and rents are insane anywhere near the centers of the tourist trade, so people commute from hella far out, and car/gas prices are absurd too. Not many bikes though, which is maybe because “hella far out” tends to mean “halfway up a mountain”.

A lot of native/secessionary flags, handpainted signs, etc. in front yards.

A lot of rocks - like, maybe half a car-sized rocks but not otherwise very distinguished - roped off in the middle of, like, someone’s yard with a plaque being all “this is a sacred rock with a proper name, people might come around to hold cultural events here every now and then, but otherwise don’t mess with the rock”.

OK, so this tour. It was an ecotourism/ziplining thing, because why not, because I was getting kind of tired of sitting around on the beach with my parents. We went up a hill and the guides, natives all, pointed out things about the region. Saw a pineapple farm, they talked about how you’d have to harvest them in like, multiple layers of heavy clothing in the hot as fuck sun, because a pineapple farm is basically a field of goddamn razors with fruit in the middle.

I could see why people would grow marijuana on Hawaii, because the whole place was verdant as fuck, full of ridges and hollows, full of native plants that didn’t really look that far off from cannabis from the air, or even up close, to begin with.

Oh and also the plant I mentioned, which grew near the base of these trees near the top of the mountain, had these brown, downy fibers, softest thing I’ve ever felt, the guides said that the locals used to use them to stuff pillows with, but that the government protected them and kept people from exporting or farming them. Which, on the way out of the airport, yeah you passed through 3 different inspections checking your stuff for native plants.

Now that’s nominally about environmental contamination and invasive species, but I was sure there was an economic protection angle and on looking it up, apparently yes, there’s a big thing of industrial espionage agents sneaking into forests and smuggling plants out. But that’s how it’s always been in the tropics - spices, rubber, tea in China, whatever. You want to keep a monopoly on that shit.

I mean it’s not like the Americans are developing that industry, but I guess the idea is to prevent anyone else from developing it instead. Like, we don’t think about it much now but economically speaking fiber is fucking critical. Making clothing is the most fundamental thing distinguishing humans from other animals, textile production has always been the first step of industrialization, and development of a new and better fiber source will FUCK SHIT UP.

Like, China figured out silk production, and it was like “oh, great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a millennia or two”, just the act of moving it from place to place completely dominates the history of western Asia.

Like the British developed a wool industry and it was like “oh great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a few centuries, first we just need to take all these people in Scotland and northern England, kick them off their farmholds, and turn them into a pathetic wreck of a population working in hellish conditions 14 hours a day, wracked by disease, homelesness, addiction, and violence”.

Like, the Americans figured out the cotton gin and were like “oh great, now we can establish a massive feudal slave empire, and kickstart a development process that will end up with us dominating half the fucking world for a century at least”.

And then the British, in order to hold on to their existing half-the-world empire were like “oh fuck, better conquer Egypt and India and place a few hundred million people under the lash to compete”.

Fiber will FUCK SHIT UP, don’t you forget that.

I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing’s his baby by any rights. Never met the guy but in LA I lived down the street from the original store and there were always a bunch of Echo Park fucks who worked with him down at the factory.

If not, hell, hope he comes up here and starts Cascadian Apparel, between the “locally made with skilled labor at good wages”, “hipster as fuck”, “chill casual work culture where everyone has sex with each other”, and “vaguely Canadianish” tones that place was more Portland than LA all along.

Keep in mind that his management style was always to circumvent the Peter Principle by taking people he found interesting, promoting them and putting them in charge of things but then busting them back down or out the door if they didn’t prove competent at it, so the real underlying beef you hear from all these girls filing complaints was that they thought they were sleeping their way to the top only to discover the boss was still judging them on actual job performance.

If you’re young like Tumblr young you might not realize that the t-shirt as everyday clothing staple didn’t exist until the 1990s and was before that more a novelty souvenir item. Some of the credit goes to the beachwear upscaling of ‘80s Miami fashion, but the two big forces behind that development were American Apparel on the wholesale/manufacturing side and Hot Topic on the retail side.

Like, Hot Topic is legitimately more important to the development of American fashion than any and all New York designers, grok that.

Their original angle was being the place you could buy band t-shirts. Like back in maybe ’96 when I was getting the classic Garbage “Hollywood Star” shirt (which I can’t even find a picture of on Google, fuck I’m getting old), our mall didn’t have a Hot Topic yet so since I hadn’t been to an actual concert on that tour to hit up the merch table I had to order from one of the cheap newsprint resellers’ catalogs I picked up at the local record store.

Every so often there’s some post going around Tumblr where some artist is breathlessly reporting that Hot Topic (or Urban Outfitters, sometimes) is selling some product with their art on it, like, without paying or even asking, like ha ha ha Hot Topic has always sold bootleg shit, bands were complaining about this from day one. (The t-shirt industry has never been all that picky about IP, check out the “bootleg Bart” tag.)

If someone makes enough fuss they might pull the product but hey, cost of doing business, it’s basically not worth it to pursue legal action because in any case you wouldn’t be suing the deep-pocketed Hot Topic, Inc. but the fly-by-night company they ordered from. (Just like if someone did a bootleg run of your book you’d be going after the printer, not the bookstores it appeared in.)

Honestly that distinction wouldn’t be an insuperable problem with enough political capital to throw at the issue, but while Hollywood studios contribute enough to trade balance, jobs numbers, and most importantly lobbyist salaries to get pampered on this shit, Deviantart users don’t really have the pull to get the OC Do Not Trace Act of 2014 out of committee.

I noticed this shit in the ’90s, the habilitation of the Gadsden flag in place of the Stars and Bars as an *incidentally* white banner of resistance against the government, and one that maintained continuity with the Founding Fathers mythology. Then the Tea Party claimed it but I mean it was just sitting there and it’s not like they aren’t legitimate heirs of both traditions.

It’s been nice to live up in Cascadia where we have a respected yet virgin imaginary of secessionism. It’s been fingerbanged a few times, though, and pretty curious about the next step.

Anyway the Cascadian flag, the Gadsden flag, the Rebel banner, the ACAB graffiti, it all says the same thing - “we identify with violent opposition to the official order, so you can trust us”.

The interwar bakufu came about because the parliamentary system (like pretty much everything in Meiji Restoration Japan) was based on trying to mirror the German system only with modifications to avoid its known failure modes. One issue was that the Prussian civil service and military tended to capture the electoral system for their own purposes, and so government employees, which included the military, civil servants, teachers, and even postmen were barred from voting.

They didn’t like this so they went about trying to find non-electoral means of capturing the government. There was a government workers’ general strike/insurrection that was put down, but one of the most successful tactics was that the Minister of War was required to be a sitting or former flag officer. The military was small enough that that was a limited pool, and given that they controlled the promotions systems they chose their successors, and eventually the military-supremacy types got to a point where in order to form a government the parliament was required to install one of them and keep them happy lest they resign and force a change of government.

The final straw was basically the military deciding to invade Korea on their own initiative and daring the parliament to not support “our boys overseas”. The parliament blinked and that was that.

It’s commonly accepted that Reagan’s breaking the PATCO strike was a big deal, not for first-order reasons, as with Thatcher and the miners, but for the second-order effect of signaling that this was the new normal, and the private sector had the government’s blessing to break their own unions.

A parallel you don’t see mentioned often is the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher’s best known for her domestic policies, but I’d argue that her most important legacy is in finally halting the erosion of the empire. The Falklands yes, but also rejecting accomodationism in Northern Ireland.

Even some of her most significant “domestic” actions - crushing the miners’ strikes, taking funding streams from the hands of dissident local authorities and concentrating them in Westminster - were in part an attempt to check Scottish autonomy in the face of a very real threat that the United Kingdom might shrink to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales.

It’s not like the British had ever just accepted the postwar dissolution of their colonial empire in the first place. But American support for decolonization was a major check on British power in this regard, particularly in the tipping point of the Suez Crisis, where America wielded its financial influence to veto the attempt to retain control over the Suez Canal. (Some of the most important British colonies mattered less as sources of direct income than for the control they gave over strategically important naval choke points.)

Reagan’s said to have considered exerting a similar pressure on Thatcher. But he didn’t, the war went ahead. Thatcher couldn’t muster the support to go up against China so Hong Kong eventually slipped through Brittania’s fingers, but since then nothing else.

(Scotland’s holding a secession referendum soon, and as of now the result is anyone’s guess. I dunno though, a lot of the motivation seems to come from the fact that the north of Great Britain’s got a stronger leftist tradition than the south, and the expectation that independence would mean trading Tory austerity for social democratic bounty. Though without an empire at its back, the ability to milk The City - the British metonymic equivalent of “Wall Street” - for cash or favorable bond market terms, or even a strong enough navy to enforce claims on maritime resources, I don’t see where they expect to find the money from.)

minutemanworld:

Contemporary reproduction of a composite gun with a “plug bayonet”. Composite guns were manufactured by gunsmiths from pieces of different weapons. In an era before mass production, if a gun broke down you couldn’t just order in replacement part 2384B. It would either need to be fixed or replaced from another gun.

Plug bayonets were the earliest type of bayonets to be used. They get their name because of the design, which requires that the handle of the bayonet be fitted inside the barrel of the gun “plugging” it. 

Of course this prevents the gun from being fired, and alternatives were quickly sought.

This particular example was made by gunsmith Ian Pratt.

Culture, be it material or idealistic, proceeds evolutionarily. Each development is first assessed in light of that which came before, in a way that can easily seem odd in later on retrospect.

To us, rifles with plug bayonets are odd - you can forfeit the entire purpose of a gun in order to stab someone with it. That’s weird. At the time, they were pikes where you could remove the blade and use it as a gun. That was amazing.

I remember in the early 2000s when blogs - warblogs, even - were becoming a thing, the next evolution of the newspaper column. One of the things that aghast heritage media denigrated about blogs was that they would just drop in pictures they found from anywhere. Which from a newspaper office perspective makes sense - hiring photographers, or licensing their work was a big part of their budget, and moreover of their self-narrative.

But from the web-native curatorial perspective that was just insane. Of course there were pictures. Here’s a thing I’m talking about, and there exists in the wild a picture of it, so you can better understand it, so of course the two go together as a matter of basic competency.

But things resolved. Newspapers don’t complain about them anymore. Maybe because there’s no one left with the idle time to complain. Once as a kid I thought I might make a career getting paid to write essays, but then the internet. C'est la vie, it’s unfortunate and they did warn us about this but seriously, fuck Metallica. Those dudes are dicks.

On the other hand, I don’t see blogs, at least the Wordpress-style things that I identify as the platonic figure of a blog, linking inline photos as much anymore. We kind of accepted that the association was the relic of the newspaper, and realized that now that we have the internet instead of a printing press and trucks and newstands, there’s no reason to expect to get photography and essays from the same source anymore.

On the third hand there’s whatever the hell I’m doing, hijacking an only tangentially related photoset for the purpose of an essay.

Like that stuff about how katanas are made by highly trained masters folding steel into a thousand layers and how even then so many attempts failed and had to start over again from step one?

That’s true…ish… enough, but overenthusiasts tend to read that backwards as a sign of the supreme awesomeness of the end product when it’s more a matter of the supreme crappiness of the inputs.

The Japanese islands are notoriously lacking in extractable minerals, which means that traditional metalworking not only used very low quality iron sands as a ferrous source, but had to make do with charcoal rather than bituminous coke (and even that very expensive and thus used as little as possible) as a fuel source and reducing agent for smelting. Applying extensive and elaborate high-skilled labor to these shitty materials wasn’t just a matter of pridefully insisting on a quality product but more a necessity for making something acceptably functional.

So what power shifts have we had lately in the American government?

Well, what with routinizing the 3/5 majority requirement in the Senate, House obstructionism, stonewalling judicial appointments, etc., Congress (at least Republican ones) are clearly trying to establish legislative supremacy over the executive.

The government shutdowns of the Gingrich and modern era, and the impeachments of 1998 and (possibly) 2015 can be read as attempts to bootstrap into existence a vote of no confidence and establish a Parliamentary system.

Clever of them and godspeed, but they’re going to have to routinize it enough to the point where they can drop the figleaf of legitimating impeachments as a response to “high crimes and misdemeanors” by puffing up garden-variety scandals because it’s going to be too hard to nail the president and veep at the same time.

Either that or change the line of succession to skip straight from POTUS to Speaker of the House, formalizing the role of VP as a figurehead of state akin to European presidents and monarchs.

Uhh, what else. There’s the gay marriage thing, where various state executives realized they can nullify plebiscites or the legislature’s laws by inviting a friendly challenge and then declining to defend them, though if that keeps up I’d give it maybe 15 years before the judiciary jury-rigs standing doctrine to give *someone* the ability to defend them.

The Roberts Court’s been doing interesting stuff in rolling back campaign finance law to the 1970 status quo and giving states more latitude to massage voter eligibility but I don’t know if that counts. If they undercut Smith v. Allwright and give parties more latitude to set their own eligibility systems for membership and thus primaries, that might shake things up.

Probably something I forgot.

You know you don’t see the pardon power used much anymore. That’s something that’s been striking to me reading up on 19th century European history, how often you’d see general amnesties, that were kind of used for reconciliation after the suppression of an uprising but also seemed to free people jailed for unrelated criminal matters.

One of my favorite toy ideas is for the executive to totally undercut the judiciary by waking up each morning and pardoning everyone charged with contempt of court. People will moot the idea of the legislature end-running the judiciary by jurisdiction stripping, but no one seems to mention my possibility, even though the idea’s been discussed before

By the time I read A People’s History of the United States I was in the senior year of an undergraduate American Studies major, which made me the exact opposite of the intended audience. It was all “hey, I bet you didn’t know this stuff was part of American history”, but yes, yes I did. More than that, I knew the stuff Zinn didn’t see fit to mention, the context and linkages and contradictions.

So when he tried to build these anecdotes into an indictment of America, in that register of white American post-New Left Zack de la Rocha cod-radicalism that tries to reinvent the wheel of Marxism without the baggage of dusty old discredited notions such as the circle, I noticed that while this conceit rested on a continuity and coherency between the respective “winners” and “losers” of each vignette, in actuality some of the “winners” had actually been the “losers” of other situations, or their (literal or figurative) heirs.

(If your interpretive categories are winners and losers, you can read any and all of history as a conspiracy to valorize the former at the expense of the latter, which as a reading is not so much wrong as so thoroughly, question-beggingly correct as to be worthless.)

I mean hell, the 2nd (okay, 3rd) American nation, that is to say black slaves and their descendants - those guys definitely get the short end of the stick, over and over. But even they occasionally win one. Briefly. In the early ‘70ses, mostly.

I’ve mentioned before, the doctrine of “fringe” groups like Posse Comitatus, sovereign citizens, free men on the land, etc., that the county is properly the preeminent level of government, the elected sheriff the proper authority and repository of civic legitimacy - that’s not coming from nowhere, for most American history and territory (say, everything more than one county away from the big capital or mercantile cities, up until the Civil War, New Deal, or 1970s, depending) that’s a pretty accurate descriptive account of the lived experience of government.

But not a normative account, right? That doesn’t exist as actual American mythology, right? Well then what the fuck do you think is in all those books at the weird booth at the gun show? (“the”, pf). It’s no less American and no less a mythology than the one in your 9th grade social studies textbook.

But throw enough researchers at the issue, you say, and you’ll find most of those ideas date to the 1950s at earliest. (Actually you say “O great Kontextmaschine, if you throw enough researchers at the issue…”, because the fun part of Socratic dialogue is making you look like a huge ass-kisser.)

Well how do you think mythologies, ideologies get established in the first place? Someone, at some specific time, up and decides them.

“But they aren’t the ones to decide!”

What the hell did I just say? Ideologies are established by up and deciding on them, and the first up and decision the up and deciders make is that they’re the ones that get to up and decide.

The “official” American constitutional order as it now stands comes from the Supreme Court, through “Incorporation” doctrine, up and deciding that it had supremacy over the states

Which comes after the FDR-era executive/legislative machine up and decided that it had supremacy over the judiciary

Which comes after the Lincoln-era federal executive up and deciding that it had supremacy over the states

Which comes after Madison v. Marbury where the Supreme Court up and decided that it had supremacy over the legislature*

Which comes after the Constitutional Convention up and decided it had the authority to throw out the Articles of Confederation and write a new Constitution

Which comes after the Continental Congress up and decided it had the authority to kick out the British governors and establish the Articles of Confederation

Which comes after the British governors up and decided to be the authority of the North American Atlantic seaboard

Which comes after the Glorious Revolution when the Parliament up and decided to have supremacy over the throne

Which comes after the Magna Carta when the English lords up and decided that the King didn’t have supremacy over them

Which comes after William the Conqueror up and decided to be the King of England

etc., etc.

Of course, they all had enough power, in various forms - loyalty, ideology, economic power, military power, control over media channels, leverage over other actors with these various things, what the Soviets called the “correlation of forces”, to make their decisions stick. That’s the difference, that’s all the difference, that’s the only difference.




* this is of course nowhere explicitly stated in the Constitution, and as long as we’re freestyling it’s only in retrospective apologetics obvious that the judicial branch should have the power to overturn “wrong” laws, but NOT to depose “wrong” governments or nullify “wrong” elections (a power the judiciaries of countries like Turkey, Thailand, Germany, and Egypt do claim and wield, often in class-based coalition with the military officer corps)

skelenabones:

i find the use of the term “witchcraft” when people are discussing actual popular historical magical practices from the early modern or medieval periods of Europe to be vexing and confusing, because the way people use it tends to carry along an ahistorical set of assumptions that has more to do with early neopagan misunderstandings of history than anything else. namely, when people seek ‘witchcraft’ in these time periods they are usually seeking non-christian folk magical practices and beliefs. a big reason this is the case is because early neopagans like Gardner bought into poor scholarship that suggested that during the period of the witch trials there existed sects of surviving pagan practitioners who did magic, and that often these practitioners were the target of the trials. most people seeking historical witchcraft know this was never true, these witch cults did not exist, but the way they use the term witchcraft means they’re ironically basically looking for the mythical practices Gardner and others believed in. why this is especially vexing is that it causes people interested in ‘witchcraft’ to skip entirely over the large corpus of christian magical practices that are decently well documented and were practiced by people in almost every level of society from the bottom to the top. pro-tip you know who was the most prevalent professional magical practitioner in most medieval western European towns, almost certainly even surpassing wise women and other similar folk? the village priest

We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.

Henry David Thoreau  (via obitchuaries)

I’ve said it before and I’ll now say it again, “the college experience” was always “the ruling class experience”.

But a point worth making is that a liberal arts education isn’t merely about teaching the finer things in life as an end in itself, so that the ruling class might fully realize their potential. It’s about equipping them to claim that ruling position. Chemistry teaches mastery of chemicals, Physics teaches mastery of the physical, the humanities teach mastery of humans. Like,

The humanities tradition in America (and back to its forerunner in England) originates with the training of ministers, because, in pastoral roles, ministers lead humans.

States founded “normal schools” to train teachers of secondary education (these often remain as an intermediate level of state-run higher education, “below” even the satellites of the flagship universities but “above” community colleges, roughly like California’s Cal State system).

The land grant colleges, yeah, focus on the practical arts, agriculture and mining and engineering and everyday life, but even then they didn’t so much teach your average farmer, or pickaxe wielder, or machine operator, or mother so much as your surveyors, your agricultural extension educators, your machine designers, your social workers. Not to mention their entwinement with ROTC programs as a mechanism for cultivating a literal officer class.

(Which has weird side-effects occasionally. The bunk “POW/MIA” notion that after American pullout, the Vietnamese were still keeping American combatants captive for I guess the hell of it drew a lot of strength from the fact that those designated MIA - lost in the jungle where no one could account for them or recover their remains - were disproportionately pilots, and thus officers, and thus college boys and thus mostly scions of the upper-enough classes with the pull to enlist cultural and government support to affirm their denial. The new Battlestar Galactica also had a pretty good episode about the problems with having a guy who specializes in piloting outrank NCOs who lead men. The U.S. Army wisely deals with this by making its [helicopter] pilots warrant officers, but I’m digressing pretty far here.)

The small colleges associated with various Protestant sects in the mid-19th to -20th centuries drew on contemporary missionary fervor, and many of the subjects they were known for - sociology, anthropology, linguistics, comparative religion - were focused on enabling students understand the foreign cultures of the mission field so as better to convert them. (Ironically, these efforts boomeranged and undermined their host religions, producing things like The Golden Bough, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and counterbiblical accounts of human prehistory)

The problem with trying to expand a humanities education to everyone is the classic problem of too many chiefs, not enough indians. You can’t have everyone be a ruler ‘cause then who do they rule? We don’t have a Colonial Service, the classic outlet for surplus elites, and the education system in its expansion has long been recruiting from our internal colonies to train their own elites.

PhD programs are still run to train (and exploit) scholars more than general leaders, I suppose the equivalent might be terminal masters’ degrees like MBAs and nonprofit management programs. (The NGO-industrial complex is actually a pretty clear successor to Prot mission work domestically and abroad, and all of these basically serve(d) in America [in alliance with the U.S. Navy/Marines] as sort of a makeshift Colonial Service)

A weird thing about STEM partisans is when they think that shunting more people into technoscientific training will raise the status and power of people with technoscientific training rather than supply indians for the humanities chiefs.

- - -

I went to an Ivy League college. Cornell, which is in some ways the most marginal of them, but still. College of Arts & Sciences, majored in American Studies (mostly cultural and economic history). Recommend the experience.

And they’d always be bringing in various recognizable names on lecture tours, musicians on performance tours that the comfortable country burg of Ithaca wouldn’t otherwise rank. I went to some of them, but I remember being even more struck when you’d see some guy just hanging around getting coffee or dinner in the same place you did.

But you know, that’s the point. The students aren’t particularly expected to learn much from a lecture or a Q&A with a known name that they couldn’t from some less heralded figure, or these days just read online, the point is really to instantiate the physicality of these demicelebrities to hammer home the point that you are of a kind with them, shared members of the culture of People Who Actually Matter.

I had some great teachers. I had some absolutely great teachers - Stuart Blumin comes immediately to mind - and I learned a lot from my classes, in lectures and in reading that, honestly, I wouldn’t have done (or even been aware of as an option) otherwise. And I appreciate that all the more since I got out and realized that even a lot of the college graduates of my generation never even took classes from full professors until their senior year (or even only from upperclassmen in their freshman year).

But when I was about to graduate, I looked back on my experience and realized that probably the most significant things I picked up were from the shadow curriculum - an accurate geographical sense of Manhattan, a sense of taste in wine*, and a sensibility that *real* people count money in at least tenths of a million.

Of course, I’ve kind of fallen back from that a bit. I went to one of the global cities and hated it, and now reside in one of the merely national cities.


I tinker with an old motorcycle (and Pirsig and Crawford are right, it’s a very rewarding hobby for thinky writey types), take it into the countryside, and swell with pride when I realize I’m passing for redneck. Meanwhile a lot of the most promising people I knew have become corporate lawyers reviewing contracts 80 hours a week and namedropping restaurants and vacation destinations, or preening producers of “content” (I brag and show off, but I do *not* preen). A lot of my fellow graduates went into finance too, but they were the poker-playing frat bros I never respected in the first place.

But still, I mean, here I am, using my humanities knowledge, and my inculcated sense of self as A Leader, to try to influence and educate people that I consider to have a particularly strong potential to influence and educate people in my native culture.

So.




* part of this was just a factor of the one of the guys I hung out with, whose father would ship him cases of wine because… honestly I have no idea why. He wrote an amazing sonnet sequence in the more stable part of an amphetamine madness, that got him into an MFA program where he had, I’m told, an undistinguished turn, and ended up marrying a Canadian oil heiress.

But then, my point is that the point of the Ivy League is that that’s the kind of people you meet. (That’s not even getting into the fact that we had honest to god royalty in our classes. Or, you know, not in our classes, as the case might be.) And even then, part of it is that there’s an honest to god class, Wines, that almost everyone takes senior year. (Cornell, with Berkeley, is basically responsible for the existence of the American wine industry, and the course is in the incongruous Hotel School, which is the most prestigious training ground for the American hospitality industry, so they’ve kind of got an excuse. Kind of.)

Two addenda to that media post:

First, it’s worth noticing that a lot of the best journalistic applecart-tippers come from expat backgrounds. The Exiled guys - Mark Ames, Sasha Levine, John Dolan(/“Gary Brecher”) - came from the eXile, a Moscow expat paper, and if I remember correctly, some of the neoreaction all-stars are expat journalists from the former British Empire outposts of Asia. Hell, I think even a bunch of the Reason guys back in the ‘90s had been expat journalists in Prague (with Suck.com in between).

Second, for my impending doom fetishist followers (coughcoughbloodandhedonismcough… ahem, excuse me. Like bloodandhedonism, I mean to say) it bears pointing out that the Cold War Sulzbergerian/network news model of journalistic outlets with no explicit partisan alignment - just a general consensusist one - and a sentorian from-above tone (“fair and balanced”, you might say)… Well, there were structural factors behind that, yes. A limited number of broadcast networks producing one product for national consumption, before local political cultures had completely come(/been brought) into line with a uniform bipartisan divide; competition from these broadcasters winnowing the vibrant newspaper ecosystem down to one daily paper per city; the Fairness Doctrine. But also*, there was conscious intent at play. Ideological, party-linked newspapers, operating under the pressures of niche journalism for competitive advantage in a for-profit system, had in prewar Europe played a major part in the pillarisation of the populace into different camps - socialist, liberal, christian democrat, fascist, etc. - which would develop their own economies, welfare systems, even paramilitaries, which would occasionally try to swallow the state apparatus (and sometimes succeed). Competitive journalism of the “yellow” type had pushed America into wars before, luckily against an ailing Spanish Empire and her runty spawn that it could defeat handily, but this was seen as a risk to be guarded against. But pf, history.

None of this will something something.



*“but also”. Between the New Deal and WWII the state and nominally extrastate New Class had significantly intertwined - to great success! - in the Atomic Age “best and the brightest” system that Vietnam later undermined. It’s a little specious to make a firm distinction between the two in this period, and the Fairness Doctrine (est. 1949) was just this elite consensus codified into law. Of course, journalism is held sacrosanct from government imbrication, as we’ve all learned from the schools and media, and the consolidation of news outlets in the hands of enthusiastic supporters of this coalition was merely the result of the causeless hand of the free market.

Ech.

Like, I do appreciate both the optics and the reality of armed volunteers staring down government agents until they slink off, that’s kind of cool and it’s a good morale-booster to see that thing pay off.

But really this fight was never really about the people vs. the government, it was another in a very long-running series of range wars of ranchers vs. absolutely everyone else.

From the get-go the idea was always that ranchers could use waste land - low quality scrubland, maybe soil quality and/or water availability too low to bother farming, maybe just butt-far from any settlement or mode of transportation - to run livestock even though they didn’t really pay full value for it or put any effort into improving the land ’cause why the hell not, might as well get some use out of it, let them graze and then drive the cattle on up through the Great American Desert to the railheads in Chicago.

And then inevitably development pushed out a bit further and that land got used for something more useful and the ranchers were angry, were like “well crap, if we can’t trample all the hell through your land and fuck up everything living on it, we won’t be able to continue our traditional lifestyle of trampling all the hell through your land and fucking up everything living on it”, and everyone else was like “yeah, guess so, dipshit”, and then since the ranchers were in the habit of dealing with problems by shooting at them on the assumption that no one would mind, they fought.

And people are like “ooh hoo hoo, see they wanted to kick him off so they could build solar plants on the land” and yes, that makes sense, that is in fact a more useful thing to do with the land that this guy never really put serious money or effort towards.

And I mean, hell, rural right-populism is supposed to love energy extraction projects, right? Energy independence, good jobs for earthy people in a masculine, right-leaning hierarchy running from businessmen down to practical scientists and engineers down to skilled technical laborers down to unskilled jobs for folks with the gumption to do hard work in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Maybe if we called it “drilling for sunshine”?

Dipshits.