It’s Easter, let’s talk Scientology.

So, one thing you should first understand is that historically, Southern California is the second-richest wellspring of new religious enthusiasm in America, after the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York. Other prominent religious movements to come out of LA include Pentecostalism and the Foursquare Church, and there’s a ton less famous.

If you loosen up your definition of religion, throw out the requirement of a cosmological mythology (and Scientology’s cosmological mythology was kind of an afterthought), and accept things that present as philosophies or best practices for life, you can add in stuff like Objectivism.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that when it started out Scientology was more of a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. The… okay, wait, that’s maybe the third thing.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that the founder of Scientology, pulp author L. Ron Hubbard, was part of the Los Angeles literary scene. Yes, LA had a literary scene, and yes, it was pulp authors and screenwriters, because obviously. This being before the internet, they had salons and cocktail parties, ideas passed around and people trying to top each other. Raymond Chandler used to be part of this scene.

Yes, this is kind of ridiculous, yes, now is your time to bring out the (accurate) line about how no one reads in LA (though they do have a very good book fair). But those hack writers managed to create Scientology and Objectivism and and a bunch of good movies, which is at least on a level with the rival and ~better accredited~ New York novelists and critics of the time who gave us neoconservatism (by way of Trotskyism + Zionism + resentment of uppity Negroes), a bunch of boring books about academic politics and adultery, and a bunch of little magazines with an increasingly tedious Holocaust obsession. Meanwhile you, reader, have given us jack shit so show some respect.

Anyway, back in the ‘50s some of the bigger hobbyhorses on this scene were Freudian psychology and Huxleyite psychedelic mysticism. The ‘50s LA intelligentsia was basically the first place LSD came into regular use, which actually explains a *lot* of things.

(Ayn Rand, who had been a screenwriter, was more oriented towards the more practical drug vogue of the time, amphetamines, which accounts both for her disinterest in mystical nature-of-reality-and-consciousness stuff and for the thousand-page books with hundred-page speeches about how everyone else in the world should just shut the fuck up and defer completely to your obvious innate superiority.)

Okay so that brings us to the third thing it’s worth understanding, that when it started out it was more a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. That it was conceived towards the same end as Freudian analysis - a method to enable people to overcome internal limitations and achieve full potential - but in opposition to its premises and methods. The funny thing is that if Hubbard thought “I’ve got a better way of doing psychology”, most modern psychologists would agree with him. You hear stories about Scientology practices that involve a mentor identifying trauma in their mentee and directing them “Focus on a thing. Touch a thing. Repeat. For hours.” as a way to overcome it?

Haha what bunk right? Except that’s basically cognitive behavioral therapy, which since then has almost completely eclipsed analysis as the standard practice of mainstream psychology, because it has a track record of producing results. It works by basically exploiting bugs in human mental processing

(Actually maybe I shouldn’t wander too far into the programming metaphor, under the frame of cybernetics that was actually an active and competing (Northern) Californian theory/praxis of mind - Lily’s “human biocomputer” model, Leary’s 8-circuit model. Basically, later on Silicon Valley techies also decided to drop acid and investigate the nature of human consciousness, with programming rather than psychiatry as their lexifier. A lot of stuff that today seems aligned with “hard science” materialist atheism - stuff like artificial intelligence, SETI, transhumanism - used to be linked with this ‘70s technomysticism, with the ’80s-‘90s Mondo 2000/WIRED/Web 1.0 cyberpunk technoshamanism as the intermediate link.)

And the “thetan” thing, well, I’ll get into mentioning the mythology, but the concept - that “you” are not actually an integrated whole, the coherency of your sense of self is actually a narrative wrapper around a set of scattered drives and aversions that are only in coincidental proximity if not active tension - well, in addition to bearing some similarities to the Freudian id/ego/superego model, I mean, if you’ve never done psychedelic drugs, well. I’ve tripped out for maybe 50 hours in my life, spent maybe 10 minutes dealing with visual hallucinations, and the rest of it was just grappling with this realization and trying to figure out what to do with it.

Deconstruction and continental literary postmodernism also incorporates a lot of psychedelic insight. It’s very true what they say, that most avant-garde stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s makes a lot more sense if you’ve ever used psychedelics, and that gets treated as a knock on said avant-garde stuff when it’s really a strong argument for the psychedelic experience.

This - psychology as the core of Scientology - is why the biggest bete noire of Scientologists is psychiatry, because Freudian analysis having fallen, it’s mental pharmacology, not, say, Christianity, that’s their real major rival.

Okay that’s a treatment of Scientology as an ideology. As an institution - well, people say it’s a cult and obviously they’re right. “Cult” is the infant stage of religion, a bunch of people gathering around and giving control of their lives over to a charismatic figure with radical new teachings. The Twelve Apostles were a cult. As Hubbard’s following grew, I mean, he liked it. Who wouldn’t. And as it grew past Dunbar’s number he realized he had to create some sort of structure, and so he kind of slapped one together ad-hoc. Dude was in fact a science fiction author and the whole worldbuilding aspect of “what are some plausible alternate social structures humans could arrange themselves in” was something he’d spent time thinking about, and reading other people’s ideas, but in a pinch he drew heavily on the one top-down functional hierarchy he’d had extensive personal experience with - the U.S. Navy. Which is why the ecclesiarchy is called “Sea Org” and wears uniforms rather than robes.

And then, as it goes with cults, the founder dies and maybe a charismatic successor can step in, and that chain can go for a while if the successors are competent enough, but if the cult survives it eventually switches its power source from personal charisma for institutional charisma and settles as a stable(ish) church. From what I hear, people are realizing the current head figure Miscavige is kind of an incompetent jackass and trying to figure out how to edge him out or route around him or practice Scientology outside of the structures he dominates, so I’d say we’re in that process now.

Now finally the mythology - Xenu and the volcano and all that - is dumb. I’m not going to pretend it’s not dumb. It’s batshit stupid. It was kind of an afterthought - like I said, Scientology is first of all a theory and practice of mind, and the cosmology is exactly what it looks like - a halfassed effort by a SF hack made to make the whole thing more closely fit the expectation of what a religion looks like, mostly so it could claim the tax exemption and general shielding from government oversight traditionally granted to American religions. And it worked well enough I guess, backed up with an admirable dedication to lawfare on behalf of the Scientologists that basically made it not worth the effort for the government to deny them.

(The legal system likes to put on airs of majesty and absolutism and meaning, but anyone who’s been in contact with it long enough realizes its just an organization of finite resources and internal politics same as anything else, and like feudal succession crises you need a plausible enough claim to legitimate a campaign, but past that success really comes down to how much resources each side is willing to spend.)

Scientologists as individuals - not lying they can be a little weird, though I think a lot of that is that converts to any religion are a little off-puttingly intense, and as a young religion that puts a lot of energy into recruitment (also like the law, evangelism likes to pretend that it’s a matter of having a more correct understanding but in practice mostly comes down to how much time and money and effort you’re willing to put into it), they’ve got a pretty high share of first-generation converts in their ranks. In LA I knew a few Scientologists who were born into the church, and they were actually some of the chillest bros I’ve ever met.

And while we’re talking about the conquest of frontier land from aboriginal inhabitants:

People deploring the Trail of Tears, Indian Removal and all that - I don’t think the national government really had a choice on that one. Or rather, to the extent they had a choice, it wasn’t between ethnic cleansing and peaceful coexistence; it was between ethnic cleansing by expulsion by the federal government and ethnic cleansing by extermination by independent settler warlords, who would have then established their own sovereign states, shattering federal unity and leaving Anglo-America vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics from European powers. (Remember, in 1812 the British fielded a successful expeditionary force, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight - and federal unity - clear that they wouldn’t come back to finish the job.)

The American founders were thoroughly bourgeois, in both the sense of “well-off merchants” and the more literal one of inhabiting and drawing power from the developed coastal cities. As soon as the revolution ended and the federal government was established, tensions between the mercantile coasts and agricultural interior came to the fore, most prominently in Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellions.

(The whiskey tax at the heart of the latter was considered on the urban coast as a sin tax to be passed on to consumers, but in the interior where a lack of transport options made bulky unrefined grain an uneconomical commodity and a lack of specie prompted a turn to liquor as an alternate store of value, it was effectively an income tax and a drag on every aspect of the economy.)

A policy of coexistence with natives seems noble and honorable to moderns, and indeed it was the noble and honorable policy of the coastal elite of the time, who preferred a policy continuous with the Proclamation of 1763, disfavoring Anglo settlement of native-inhabited lands. To frontier settlers, however, this policy, by cutting off the possibility of further homesteading, meant that with the natural growth of the settler population, family holdings would either have to be further subdivided or surplus population shunted into unlanded migrant labor, reducing the agricultural population to a state of European-style peasant immiseration for the benefit of natives who were even at the most charitable not their fellow countrymen.

Settlers chafed at this and before Indian removal became a federal policy local militias in Georgia and Florida - militia being, of course, a fancy term for “whoever shows up with guns” - were of their own initiative conducting extermination campaigns against local tribes. The Creek and Seminole wars were basically a nationalization of these campaigns, as a reactive attempt by the federal government to keep control of the southeast from being wrested away by either the tribes and their escaped slave allies on one hand, or by independent settler armies on the other. “There go the people. We must follow them, for we are their leaders.”

In the end Andrew Jackson, hero of these wars, was elected President, broke the coastal mercantile hold on the federal government, and pursued a federal policy of Indian Removal. But he was elected President, with emphasis on “elected” and “President”. By coopting settler genocide the United States remained intact under the aegis of the federal government (well, for a generation). The notion of some alternate history in which the federal government holds firm and the settler militias just slink away saying “sorry” is inane. We aren’t Canadians, after all. (And even the Canadians, so proud of their First Nations relations, are changing spots now those relations are getting in the way of their petrochemical economy.) The only possible timeline that would leave the natives in control of their lands is one in which the coastal merchant classes allied with the tribes to militarily suppress their own countrymen (and even then, I’m not sure they would have had the money and manpower to pull it off).

People say “violence never solves anything”, which is insane, holding only for ridiculous definitions of “solves”. And even if, for those definitions, it doesn’t solve problems, it at least makes them stop being problems. Throughout American history, there was a regularly recurring problem: “I want that land, but it’s got injuns on it.” And so each time we applied violence, and that’s not a problem anyone faces anymore. Have you ever seen the land that’s got injuns on it these days? No one wants that land.

pureamericanism:

One effect of these policies [preserving domestic peace and minimizing foreign contact] was to preclude a common solution to the problems caused by resource overexploitation: seizing neighboring territory to compensate for what one’s own area no longer provides. The people of Tokugawa Japan, high and low alike, had to make do with what they had and what they could acquire peacefully, and they knew it. These government policies had the additional effects of preventing the introduction from abroad of disequilibrating technology and ideas and of sustaining at home a general faith in the immutable nature of the social order. People simply took it for granted that the essential character of the future was knowable: they could prepare for it, but they must do so with the resources at hand.

From The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan by Conrad Totman

This is a little questionable - the Tokugawa era was when Hokkaido was really brought into the Japanese fold and developed for farming, a process that involved suppressing native Ainu unrest by force.

There’d been Yamato presence on Hokkaido before (the Yamato are the ethnic group generally thought of as “Japanese”, there are a few other groups indigenous to the islands and scholars outside the particularly nationalist Japanese academy generally agree that the Yamato culture came from the Korean peninsula), but they’d settled the island in the same sense the French settled North America - very lightly, for the purpose of trade with the natives. Hokkaido is the least mountainous of the home islands and thus the most agriculturally productive, with a climate suitable for the cultivation of wheat and barley.

Home to everything you ever wanted to know about railroad history West of the Hudson and Around New York State railroad, history in Chicago and the Midwest, Connecticut, Links to some great WebSites of New York State railroads. An index of the railroads of New York State. Railroads in Mechanicville and Ballston Spa.

Hey, take a look at this website. It’s… I don’t know what it is, really.

My first instinct is to say with the cluttered, hand-coded look, in-line off-brand ads, ancient clip art, and the assembly of hobbyist knowledge in a non-interactive, idiosyncratically paginated and directoried, personally hosted site, it’s a perfect example of the Internet 1.0 of the late 1990s.

But that’s not true, is it. If you follow links - and there are a lot of them - the “site” sprawls over multiple domains, with the same appearance, but unique (and honestly interesting) content. All kinds of railroad stuff, but also things like French golf courses.

The more I look at it the more it seems to be mid to late-2000s SEO-optimization, which would explain the network of links to related pages which might or might not themselves be optimization platforms. It definitely postdates (or at least has been updated since) the development of Facebook and Twitter integration. But by the standards of SEO optimization it seems awfully artisan - the material’s higher quality than I expect from content farms, and seems personally curated and to maintain some semblance of a coherent voice, plus it doesn’t follow the one page per topic, cranked-out and autoformatted for digestibility format I’m used to. Plus, optimizing for what? The ads are a total dog’s breakfast - the only recurring product that seems to be “in-house” are logistics services, so that might be it.

The more I follow links - half because I’m fascinated about the material discussed, half because of the page itself - the more I’m amazed at how much train content there is out there - it seriously outpaces the pop culture products I’m used to as icons of fandom content saturation. Then again, “trainspotting” was one of the original pre-internet models for anorak/otakudom. I guess it’s well-positioned for that - trains tie into pretty much every aspect of Industrial Era life, and are full of little whorled and niched aspects packed with arbitrarily large yet still finite - and well-documented - volumes of information. The kind of field anyone could enter, would take years to master, and yet could never be feasibly completely conquered. Always one more fact to track down; one more source to unearth; one more person to contact, learn from, credit, integrate into the society…

Man.

Dashiell Hammett was one of the only pulp detective authors to have actually worked as a detective, with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, back when it was basically a countrywide mercenary police organization. The Pinkertons were actually closer to modern police than their official contemporaries in the machine politics era, who tended to fall somewhere between patronage-hire watchmen and the mayor (or sheriff)’s sanctioned gang. The establishment of the FBI was in many ways a nationalization of the Pinkertons, with key figures brought on as advisors, replicating the network of local bureaus with focuses on both investigation and the infiltration and undermining of labor radicalism. Big city police forces then remodeled themselves after the FBI - famously the LAPD under William Parker (the NYPD had professionalized already under Teddy Roosevelt, and Chicago managed to preserve its machine structure).

This process continued into the early 1970s, as the RFK/FBI-led attempt to shatter the Mafia shook out. This was part of the mid-20th century American centralization of power. If you’re ever tempted to look with contempt upon modern African states, or pre-Mao China, or pre-unification Germany, keep in mind that America was largely structured as a loose coalition of local bandit-warlords until the 1960s. At the national level, civil rights laws and the attempt to merge the two (black/white) American nations were as much a cynical front for advancing this centralization as they were an honest idealism. And not without cost - organized crime, and the permeable borders between that and urban politics, were one of the major mechanisms by which immigrant groups were integrated to and advanced within the American system, a way to translate sheer numbers and cultural affinity into structural power. American blacks largely fit the immigrant pattern, if you date “arrival” to the Great Migration, but then stall out in the ‘70s-‘80s, and a lot of that has to do with RICO laws, post-60s reformist idealism, and the nationally-sponsored “war on crime” blocking this path. In an earlier world, black local politicians and street gangs would form alliances, eventually using patronage to co-opt and take over police forces, and extract rents that would be partially redistributed down the machine ladder. As is, you still have corruption, but it accrues to politicians, pastors and other organizers, and white property developers, without trickling down to street level.

You can quote me on that - the sorry state of American blacks is because criminal gangs are too weak and police aren’t corrupt and brutally extralegal enough.

What was I saying? Dashiell Hammett. Lived in San Francisco and set his fiction there. Was an actual private investigator, and accordingly has a strong focus on tradecraft, especially with the nameless “Continental Op”, employee of a fictionalized Pinkerton, protagonist of some of his books and most of his stories. Though the climaxes could get colorful, the Op’s assignments - quietly track down a runaway heiress, locate a fled embezzler - and methods - use 3-man teams to tail people on the street, question and dig up background on the target’s acquaintances, sit around and eavesdrop on conversations - were true to actual practice. (Hammett said the major difference is that what his characters accomplished in a week would in reality take several months, while they worked multiple cases in between).

While the Op was proudly professional (a recurring theme being his contempt for hotel staff “detectives”) but otherwise opaque, Hammett pioneered detective characterization with other characters. Where the Op was based on actual detectives he worked with, Sam Spade (protagonist of The Maltese Falcon) was based on those detectives’ romantic self-image, and his stoic facade, cynical chivalry, and romantic entanglements were a *huge* influence on later writers. Nick and Nora Charles, based on Hammet and his beloved, playwright Lillian Hellman, mixed investigation with screwball banter in a more lighthearted tone, and can be considered the predecessor of Maddie and David (of Moonlighting), Mulder & Scully, and even non-(explicitly-)romantic buddy partnerships like Crockett & Tubbs.

Hammett’s real-life experience exposed him to less picturesque aspects of the private investigator’s role in society as well. He complained that employers doing background checks were interested in issues of moral character that, gambling debts aside, had no correlation to trustworthiness, and he especially disliked working to suppress labor agitation. Starting as a Pinkerton agent, Hammett ended up being blacklisted and imprisoned as an enthusiastic communist activist.


Next is Raymond Chandler, the most literary of the detective greats. Where Hammett had been an actual PI, and reflected it in his writing, Chandler was a cuttingly observant man who retreated into drink because he was way too intelligent and cynical for Los Angeles, and reflected it in his. His Phillip Marlowe inhabited a thinly-to-the-point-of-pointlessly veiled LA, and passes through it with gimlet eye and poison tongue, all backhanded compliments and sideways insults. Hard-boiled fiction’s love of brilliant turns of phrase, of meandering digressions that end with a surprise punch to the gut, largely comes from him.

While at first glance Marlowe might seem to perform the duties of a detective same as the Op, on close examination you realize that none of what transpires has anything to do with his intentions, and that the plot is moved along by coincidences he encounters while out on assignment, with the ultimate plot of a tale usually about as unrelated to the inciting incident as in golden age Simpsons. This is equally true of The Big Lebowski, which is a loving Chandler tribute, and Chandler himself parodies this (and his/Marlowe’s booziness) in one of his later stories in which the plot is advanced by the things his protagonist literally runs into while drunk driving around LA.

Chandler’s novels are usually composed of the plots of 3 or 4 of his short stories banged together, but that’s fine, because the plot was never the thing, the meat being the wonderful language, setting, and characterizations, which were crafted anew. You can still to this day drive around LA and discover most of the places he described, looking exactly as stated. And while I can’t speak to his period accuracy, I was myself once a too intelligent, cynical Angelino writer for a while, to the point I avoided leaving home sober, and I can confirm that the kind of person who inhabits LA, their nature and motivations, are exactly as he laid out back then.

Chandler’s output eventually trailed off. One story, appearing years after any others, reads like absolutely terrible Chandler pastiche. Scholars disagree whether this was the product of an alcoholic wreck of a man who had known better than to try to publish anything for years but needed the money, or his wife pretending to be him because he was an alcoholic wreck of a man incapable of even writing anymore but needed the money.

If you’re only going to read one of these three, read Chandler.


Finally, a bit of a contrast in Mickey Spillane. Spillane’s famous recurring detective character was Mike Hammer. Given the name, you might not be surprised to learn he spent less time in cautiously piecing together mysteries than punching communists in the jaw, in much the same way Captain America spent a lot of time punching Nazis in the jaw. Actually, Spillane had been a writer for Captain America in the ‘40s. Actually, the character was originally written as a comic book protagonist named “Mike Danger”. Beyond communism, Hammer often found himself arrayed against such other corrupt and corrupting trappings of the decadent elite as drugs, psychotherapy, and trial by jury.

Spillane’s writing was, I’ll say, not up to the level of Hammett or Chandler, though he has been favorably cited by prominent writers like Ayn Rand and Frank Miller. If you look at pulp of the time though, he’s appreciably above average. Pulp… basically the closest parallel we have to pulp today is fanfiction, in terms of its average quality, low cost of production and consumption, sheer volume, and the rate at which it produces critical and commercial successes. And dear god, the smuttiness. Mike Hammer banged a lot of the broads he ran into. Before barefacedly honest pornography became as ubiquitous as it is, pulp filled the role of mainstream erotic product, with much detective pulp serving the same “drugstore-available erotica” role for men that romance pulp did for women. (Appreciating this makes the “Seduction of the Innocent” comic book scare about drugstore-available pulp for kids a bit more comprehensible).

This crossed over into other formats like cinema - Deep Throat, Beyond the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones were all received as at least in the same ballpark as mainstream releases, and up into the ’80s, pornographic movies had plots and runtimes that roughly approximated Hollywood product, and even in the ‘90s, softcore product at least had narrative framing devices. Between gonzo and DVD nonlinearity and the internet and the collapse of obscenity prosecution against which to offer artistic content as defense that’s faded, though as the Valley studio system’s share of the industry shrinks you’re seeing them play to their strengths in production values and plot (particularly with parody content, Tijuana Bible/H-Doujinshi-style).

On the other hand you had whole parapornographic mainstream subgenres as the erotic thriller, the rape-revenge drama, the teen sex comedy - American Pie was released in 1999, which was really pushing the limit at which it was worth it to watch 90 minutes of material for the chance to briefly see a bare-chested girl masturbating. (It’s still worth it to hear Alyson Hannigan talking dirty, though.)

The one thing that pulp still has a hold on is violence. (In addition to the jaw, there are many loving passages of Hammer battering guys in the crotch.) While splatter-horror may be a flourishing niche genre, with regular DVD releases, it’s still that, a niche genre, and not the mega-industry of pornography. Video games yes, but detective pulp and “true crime” genres have mostly just migrated to another medium and become hourlong police procedurals like CSI or Law & Order, offering the same thrills of vicarious brutality masked by the fig leaf of nominal identification with the forces of law and order. (Though cable antihero dramas and serial killer procedurals like Dexter and Hannibal seem to be moving a half- to full step beyond that.)

Mickey Spillane. Ah, fuck it, I don’t have anything else to say about Mickey Spillane.

jakke:

shorterexcerpts replied to your post: “A 2006 survey by the Metro Atlan…

More not-so-fun facts about my city: rich assholes in north Fulton county have been agitating about splitting the county into “north and south fulton” for years. And GA has more counties than any state besides TX. Despite not being that big.

What even is the point of a county, if it’s not doing efficiencies-of-scale type services for an area larger than a municipality (e.g. garbage trucks or snowplows or libraries)? Like, if there are two dozen counties in a single metro area, it’s clear that they’re not doing anything radically different than municipalities would be. So why not just abolish the counties and run everything through your municipal governments anyway?

When states were first set up with administrative subdivisions they didn’t have many transport links - no railroads, no canals, few navigable rivers between the frontier and centers of trade, few roads (native trails having been unpaved and often overgrown by the time settlers arrived in great number, and in any case never designed for wheeled traffic)

Up until the early 20th century, when railroads networked the national economy together, national income taxes were established, and the country entered a European war, the county was basically the highest level of government the average farmer (which was most citizens) would have contact with, with the exception of the post office and possibly the “revenuers” who attempted to enforce federal liquor taxes.

(Which were themselves kind of a proto-income tax - between the aforementioned lack of transport connections and the volume-reducing, value-adding effect of distilling, whiskey became both a major object and medium of trade in the currency-starved backcountry. This made liquor very cheap, and combined with the homestead rather than village settlement patterns meant the drinking culture was less “pints at the tavern, and singing songs with your friends” than “straight whiskey at home, and abusing your family”, which is why abstinence and prohibition had always been so popular among rural female-dominated institutions like the temperance movement and various churches)

Anyway yeah they’re still useful in rural areas and while some cities have reworked the system (New York City contains 5 counties, 1 for each borough; Portland’s “Metro” system is a level of government for the multi-county region), they largely survive because all the people tied into them, who are by definition people with influence and political expertise, stand to lose from their abolition.

And yeah one of the major uses of unconsolidated metropolitan governance is to allow people to participate in the urban economy without being fully subject to the governance of regional majorities, in a way that’s often racialized. One of the major tensions in American democracy, or rather democracy in any multicultural polity, has always been that the most popular policy is always to formalize the supremacy of the electorate’s ethnoreligious majority.

The idea that the writer-soldiers of WWI were united in their scribblings about the horrific meaningless of war - is that even true of England? Or is that just the understanding in (politically) popular fashion when the canon of New Criticsm was set in ‘40s America, and still taught in high schools out of inertia? And how much should that supposed consensus be asterisked by factors like the state of poetic fashion under the Bloomsbury Set, and the marginality of land warfare in the English imaginary such that the rah-rah Kipling types tended to the Colonial Service and not the Army?

Because I mean, god knows that’s not the lesson your d’Annunzios and Jüngers took from the experience. On the Continent it seems a lot of clever men returned from the front quite impressed by war and its potential as a means of resolving politics, seeing no reason to confine this potential to foreign affairs.

And it’s not like they were wrong!

For ages wise minds had mulled over the great Social Questions - the Labor Question, the National Question, the Jewish Question - without ever resolving anything, but the Bolsheviks established that with sufficient force they were amenable to a simple “Yes”. And then the Sparticists mistook this for an endorsement of “Yes” and failed in their weakness, only to see the Nazis prove that strength was the decisive factor, with which “No” was equally viable.

koboldandthebeautiful:

the ancient and medieval worlds actually often had somewhat organized urban piss recovery or depositing due to the value of urine for dry cleaning wool and in the tanning industry. for a very long time britain’s most valuable industry was its wool exports. therefore, it naturally follows that british people would have a deep cultural fear of their piss being thieved, feeling that it in some way undermines their national economy even though these days the use of piss is pretty much limited to politicians and business executives drinking it.

In Tokugawa Japan, fertilizer was in such high demand that urban investors would build public lavatories in exchange for the opportunity to sell the accumulated human waste. In turn, it became a serious problem that thieves would steal waste from the cesspits. Using mouth siphons.

They were called “Chautauquas”

Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.

National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.

And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.

“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.

You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.

(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)

It’s fascinating watching, in meatspace and on the internet, in terms of personal life and political ideology, the completely different idioms but fundamentally similar functions by which people respond to the same stimulus — the experience of having gone from a period of economic expansion to one of contraction. My understanding of history has always been cyclic and more so as I learn and experience more, and living through the 90s-10s progression definitely gives me a better feel for, say, 10s-30s, or 50s-70s. Like they say, those who study history are doomed to watch it repeat.

Haha the French riot all the time yes well the foundational event of the French nation was rioting so it becomes sanctified as the national legitimating idiom

Well our national legitimating idiom is writing angry essays until someone starts a romantic war of secession and it’s not like that never bites us in the ass

danbutt:

Samuel Hahnemann, often referred to as the father of classical homeopathy

during the late 1700s, while translating medical texts between german and english, he read about the use of cinchona bark for the treatment of malaria. the bark was said to be effective against malaria because of its bitter and astringent taste (the real reason is because cinchona bark contains quinine, which is still used today, but mostly in tonic water), but this seemed preposterous to hahnemann, and he decided to try and discover the real reason for the cinchona bark’s efficacy.

to do this, he took increasing doses of the bark, and as the doses got higher, he noticed that he began to experience fevers, chills and sweats, symptoms, known collectively as the ague, very similar to those of malaria itself. he had observed that while higher doses of cinchona bark caused the ague, lower doses treated it, and from that information he developed the Principle of Similars, or “like cures like”

hahnemann continued his research by giving himself and healthy volunteers increasing doses of other natural substances, and noting their effects. he called the set of effects caused by each substance a “drug picture”. from then on, his process of deciding which treatment would be appropriate for a patient involved matching the patients symptoms (the “symptom picture”) as closely as possible to a drug picture (the diagnosis also took into account other factors such as mental and physical healthy, food preferences, and even the weather)

the second principle of classical homeopathy that hahnemann put forward was the Principle of the Minimal Dose or “theory of infinitesimals”. because such small quantities of the cinchona bark had been effective in treating malaria, hahnemann hypothesised that as dose decreases, efficacy increases, and he went on to dilute solutions down to negligible, or even non-existent, concentrations. he also believed that with each dilution of a medicine, it had to be shaken vigorously (a process called “succussion”) to cause the molecules to leave an imprint of themselves onto the solvent. each dilution/succussion process increased the solutions potency

the third principle of classical homeopathy is the Principle of the Single Remedy, which basically means that a person should be given no more than one medication at any time, and the choice of medication should be based on not only the symptoms the patient displays, but also many other factors, which i’ve already mentioned above

it’s interesting how homeopathy has changed over the centuries to what we know today, the third principle is generally disregarded, as is the first, to a certain extent. the only principle of classical homeopathy that is still relevant today is the second principle, as most homeopathic remedies are highly dilute. 

if you look at the packaging of a homeopathic product, you might notice that instead of standard concentrations for each ingredient, there will be something like “200X” or “100C”, this shows how many times the product has been diluted, and what the dilution factor was. eg 200X means the product was diluted 200 times by a factor of 10 (X = 10, C = 100, etc). the number of times the solution has been diluted and undergone succussion determines the potency of the product, rather than the true concentration of active ingredient in the solution. for example if you had two solutions, one 3C and one 6X, both would have theoretically been diluted by a factor of 1,000,000, the 6X product would still be more potent because it underwent a greater number of dilutions and succussions

most of this was off the top of my head so hopefully it’s all correct  and clear and maybe you learned something interesting tonight, and please keep in mind that none of hahnemann’s findings have any relevant scientific basis, and that anyone who knows even the slightest about the nature of chemistry and biology will tell you that homeopathy isn’t, and never will be, a viable alternative to actual real medicine

I heard someone talking once about “what businessmen can learn from Jesus” but it was this ass-backwards reading of his parables for people steeped in Protestant gospel-reading Christianity where the spiritual reading (which they were familiar with) was used to introduce the business reading.

Like, you realize we’re the same species as back then, and things like “the trust fund hipster wasting his time and money in the city” and “the principal-agent problem” and “guests who don’t really appreciate how fucking expensive this wedding reception is” are not novel?

I think it is kind of a corrective to the image of Christianity as the natural religion of the downtrodden that, in his own day, Jesus in trying to communicate with his target audience tended towards this sort of little-bourgeois-things idiom. Dude was in fact a Hebrew nationalist against Roman imperialism and it’s really kind of the natural religion of local elites, which if you look at how Christianity’s functioned and spread for thousands of years makes hella sense. Of course, in a reasonable world its institutional form would be called “The Pauline Church” (oh wait it is) but hey.

If you’ve never seen one of Ronald Reagan’s press briefings you really should. The man was a master. He’d take a question, ricochet it off two completely unrelated talking points, and then reveal he’d been setting up a joke at liberals’ expense that was so legitimately funny that the whole room cracked up and even if you were specifically looking he’d be on to the next one before you noticed he hadn’t actually answered it at all.

Sliced white bread as we know it today is the product of early twentieth-century streamlined design. It is the Zephyr train of food. But, in the American imagination, industrial loaves are more typically associated with the late ’50s and early ’60s—the Beaver Cleaver days of Baby Boomer…

Pretty good nugget of history, read the whole article.

Motoring my way very slowly around Los Santos in a submersible turns my mind to the geography of LA.

LA has no natural harbor, the LA/Long Beach port is protected by artificial breakwaters. The natural seaport of the region is San Diego, and indeed SD used to be the power center of SoCal. LA was founded because the seasonal LA river allowed crops to be grown for the nearby missions, and this origin in a command economy meant it didn’t initially develop the market institutions that characterize regional capitals.

What really did it is that when the southern transcontinental railroad was planned it was originally supposed to have its western terminus in San Diego, but state legislators from SF, the Gold Rush-swollen power center of California, feared this would shift power south and redirected it to LA on the premise that such a desert hellscape could never grow into a rival.

The funny thing is that from this to the streetcars (built by land developers to increase the value of their holdings in distant suburbs like Hollywood, then abandoned as unscaleable and unprofitable) to the subways (planned to alleviate gridlock between the eastside and westside, then redirected up into the valley instead because riches vs. poors) to the green line (going from nowhere in particular almost to the airport as a sop to the black neighborhoods cut down for a freeway) to the proposed high speed rail lines (connecting SF and Vegas to like an hour out of town), the development of LA has been almost entirely driven by laying rails in the obviously wrong places.

skullgreymom:

[Thomas] Culpeper was able to provide his services for free. This, and a willingness to examine patients in person rather than simply examining their urine (in his opinion, “as much piss as the Thames might hold” did not help in diagnosis), 

The colorful American nutritional reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century like Kellogg and Graham look a little quacky from today but it should be remembered that they were at the time on the cutting edge - the very concept of vitamins, nutrients, and even calories were being pioneered, and the notion of matching specific ailments to specific deficiencies - or contrariwise, health to particular - was revolutionary. Nutrition was high tech and you see echoes of this golden age in pop culture still - the notion of spinach making Popeye super-strong, or even the atompunk meal-in-a-pill.

For reasons of settlement patterns, Americans had always enjoyed a much higher share of meat - and lower of greens - in their diet than Europeans, and this high-protein, low-fiber diet did in fact contribute to widespread problems of digestion to which bran and enemas, the nutritionists’ panaceas, were actually reasonable responses.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is that when Kellogg first set up operations he had people mail him stool samples to diagnose, until the Battle Creek postmaster got tired of working in an unrefrigerated office full of human shit.

So I’ve mentioned that I found the British left’s long-planned celebration on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death to be quite endearing. American liberals seem a bit more subdued - the thing they most regularly seem to snipe about her was her refusal to yield to the 1981 Irish hunger strike. The strike, in which imprisoned Irish republican insurgents lead by Bobby Sands refused to eat until they were recognized as Special Category Status political prisoners - domestic POWs, essentially - and not common criminals, ultimately failed after 10 died.

I think this is actually a little odd, given the American left’s complaint about the use of military tribunals and military imprisonment as part of the “war on terror” for acts of insurgency, especially when committed by American citizens or on American soil.

Now there are some distinctions to be noted. One is that SCS would improve the position of the strikers - whereas the use of the tribunal/Guantanamo system rather than standard civilian process is generally considered to leave internees worse off.

In fact, SCS was introduced after a previous period of arrest and imprisonment without trial and tortuous interrogations, similar to the initial state of the American WoT system. Later on, republican militants were processed by the formal justice system, with trials and convictions.

(Thatcher’s steeliness here, like her war in the Falklands and her moves to undermine Scottish political and economic autonomy, were part of an effort to finally put a brake on the trend of post-WWII decolonization before the once-mighty British Empire was reduced to a pre-1707 rump of England and Wales)

Civilianization and SCS were two different solutions to the same problem of unchecked authority, and honestly in demanding the benefits of both the strikers were really overplaying their hand. So liberals who want American civilianization (and not SCS-style formalization of extrajudicial internment, with protection against abuses) should consider that that’s exactly the position Thatcher was defending.

Two is the fact in the midst of the strike Bobby Sands had been elected as an MP (for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, a nationalist constituency) and the claim that he should have been given greater deference, having been democratically sanctified by an electoral majority.

Following this logic, though, would lead at the least to a doctrine of parliamentary immunity, and further on to a doctrine of nullification, by which local majorities would be empowered to grant exemption to or suspension of national laws. I think there’s something to be said for local nullifying forces - the Roman tribunes seem like a cool institution, and I’ve previously appreciated the historic role of elected county officials as populist nullifiers in America.

But it’s a position typically anathematized in modern American liberalism, and some of the writers knocking Thatcher for this - like Charles Pierce, a man fond of Homeric epithets who seems to have chosen the Sands thing for use with her, specifically take nullification as one of their bête noirs.

In the end I’m with Thatcher on this one because Blazing Saddles was, in fact, a farce, and allowing people to extract concessions by holding themselves hostage is fundamentally pathetic.

That said, when I was in LA I was always, always waiting for some New Yorker to ask “what’s Echo Park got that Brooklyn doesn’t?”, just so I could respond “The Dodgers?”

(Lore is that LA destroyed a thriving Latino community in Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. That’s not true, they destroyed it to build public housing, but then didn’t because that’s communism. Then later hey, there’s all this open space going to waste & a desire to show off that LA Is A Real City Now)