For precedent, consider midcentury nudist/naturist culture, or even compare to other forces downstream of the early 20th century German “Wandervogel” movement, like hippies or liberatory pop-Freudianism!
So I see people complain about the ACLU losing its way in a woke era, I guess by contrast with the 90s Nadine Strossen version, not living up to the legacy of Skokie, etc.
So let me explain to you a thing.
In my youth you’d still hear about the commie “ACLJew”, from “Jew York City”. And… yes! It came out of the heavily Jewish New York City leftist world in reaction to the First Red Scare as a legal defense force for a world that wasn’t all “Communist” as in agent-of-the-Comintern, many “fellow travelers” who just wanted a world (and supported methods of bringing it about) were communist as an adjective.
And one tactic of theirs was generating defensive precedent using clients as fronts. NAACP v. Alabama, 1958, the Supreme Court defending activist groups’ membership lists from inspection by a repressive state. Using a plaintiff sympathetic to Northern establishmentarians, but generating a precedent usable by…? Communists. Or at least leftists, the ACLU base’s was shaken by the OG tankie split same as the rest of American leftism.
Skokie, “the government may not suppress political marches even if the ideology is locally feared and loathed”, in 1977 who do you think that was really for? And damned if “those Jewish lawyers are just defending Nazis for their own communist ends” doesn’t sound incoherent, even where it’s true!
The ACLU was as real a part of the American left as anyone, it made an idealistic cultural turn after the ‘60s too, and after the end of the Cold War, when funds needed raising and cultural liberalism was the new boomer mainstream they oriented around that.
But like, “adopting contemporary pan-leftist positioning and intervening in current controversies towards the end of empowering forces seeking to destabilize the government and remake the country” is absolutely consistent with ACLU tradition
“Stefan Zweig, who was nineteen in 1900, has left a picture of his carefree youth. His family was prosperous and indulgent and let him do whatever he pleased at the university in Vienna. […] In the last thing he ever wrote, The World of Yesterday, he chose to call the time of his youth before the Great War ‘The Golden Age of Security’. For the middle classes in particular, their world was just like the Hapsburg monarchy, seemingly stable and permanent. Savings were secure and property was something to be passed down safely from one generation to the next. Humanity, especially European humanity, was clearly moving to a higher plane of development. Societies was not only increasingly prosperous and better organized, but their members were kinder and more rational. To Zweig’s parents and their friends the past was something to be deplored while the future was increasingly bright. ‘People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches, our fathers were unfailingly convinced of the binding power of tolerance and conciliation.’ (At the start of 1941 Zweig, by now in exile in Brazil, sent his manuscript to his publisher. A few weeks later he and his second wife committed suicide.)”
— Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace (via st-just)
The trouble began in June 1967. Egypt and Israel went to war in what’s now called the Six-Day War. Though that specific conflict only lasted six days, the fallout from it would stretch on for decades. Peter Flack was serving as the third mate on the British ship the MS Agapenor. “The captain, communicating by pipe and whistle, called up to tell me he’d just heard that war had broken out between Israel and the Arab states,” Flack told author Cath Senker for the book Stranded in the Six-Day War. “If you see anything unusual, please let me know but don’t tell the Egyptian pilot.”
As part of the conflict, Egypt blockaded the Suez Canal. It blocked both ends of the canal with scuttled ships, debris, and sea mines to prevent its use by Israeli forces. The Agapenor and other ships sailing from West Germany, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and the United States were stranded. The ships floated in the canal and watched the war unfold around them.
The world was less connected in 1967 than it is today. The ships had access to radios and were able to call home, but Egyptian authorities eventually asked them to stop. As the crisis wore on, the Canadian government negotiated the exchange of crews from the ships. Supplies came in from Egypt, some sailors went home and others stayed on, but Egypt would not allow the ships to leave the canal.
Over the next eight years, a weird system developed. The companies that owned the ships were allowed to cycle crews through the ships, maintaining skeleton crews to keep them afloat, but weren’t allowed to sail the ships out of the canal. As time passed, the ships communicated with each other and grew into a community. They formed the Great Bitter Lake Association to administer to the needs of the crew.
According to a TIME article from 1969, the crew’s biggest problem was boredom. “To while away the time, they take part in lifeboat races and play soccer on the broad deck of the largest ship, the British bulk carrier Invercargill,” TIME said. “They attend church services on the West German motorship Nordwind and watch movies on the Bulgarian freighter Vasil Levsky. The Polish freighter Djakarta even prints stamps for the marooned vessels. Egyptian postal authorities graciously allowed the stamps to be used as legal postage; they have become collector’s items. Immense amounts of beer are consumed in the heat. Says one crewman: ‘There must be five feet worth of beer bottles on the bottom around each hull by now.’”
The ships pooled resources, including food and beer, and developed a system to keep everyone fed during the crisis. In addition to stamps, the sailors created dinnerware and patches to show their association with the GBLA. In 1968, the GBLA ran its own Olympic Games 10 days ahead of the real thing. The crews competed in 14 events, including diving, sprinting, high jump, archery, and water polo. Polish crews even minted medals to hand out at an awards ceremony. A soccer playing dog named Bullbul participated in the games and was awarded a medal.
Things continued this way aboard the ships until 1975 when Egypt lifted the blockade at the end of the Yom Kippur War. Only two of the ships were able to leave on their own power. Weather, neglect, and repeated salvage operations had worn out the other 12. Fifty years on, the surviving crew of the ships meets infrequently and keeps the story alive online. Many of them describe the period as one of the happiest of their lives.
Incidentally the Suez Canal itself was the obstacle trapping 15 ships when it was closed for several years between the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, serving as a hostile border.
Hey so a little PSA from your friendly neighbourhood history geek:
when you see one of those long tumblr posts that lays out a dizzying array of innovations the ancient world supposedly had, with the heavy implication that Schools Did Not Teach You The Real Version Of History… a lot of the time those posts are inaccurate, sensationalised, or both.
FOR EXAMPLE:
claim: the Romans had technology that you were never taught about, including steam power!
critical thinking: wait, steam power? that’s the kind of technology that fundamentally changes a society. if the Romans had steam power, they would have spammed it like mad. we’d be digging up roman railroad tracks or dredging up Roman steam ships everywhere in the Mediterranean.
fact-check: the Romans had a doohickey called an aeolipile, which does use steam power to drive a very small turbine. we’re talking “smaller than a breadbox” here. according to Wikipedia, the Romans mostly thought of the aeolipile as a neat demonstration of certain natural laws, with maybe a side of party trick thrown in.
reality: the Romans had steam power in approximately the same way that folks in the 1600s had electricity. ie: they didn’t, really. they weren’t stupid- far, far from it!- but they just didn’t have all the pieces in place that you need to have steam power.
i’m fact-checking a specific claim from one of them here, but this thought process holds true for basically every wild claim that you see on Tumblr. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I mean I’ll agree that those posts are not contextualizing properly and you’ll end up with worse understanding for hearing them out, but I think they’re calling attention to something real – the Romans DID have steam power.
Like, the idea that you could use fire to heat water into steam and direct its expansion into motive power – that existed! The aeolipile testifies to that, just like Mesosmerican children’s toys testify they were able to figure out the wheel-on-axle as a bearing mechanism
But that didn’t become a thing. Which testifies to the notion that individual invention matters, that Newcomen and Watt weren’t just the ones taking credit for innovation that would inevitably be made, and that it’s still possible that there are known elements of contemporary life waiting for equivalent innovation.
With the Americans closing on the Home Islands one of the big hopes the Japanese were trying to hold them off to buy time for was magnetically guided bombs, which, it was theorized, would radically increase the effectiveness of air-to-sea attacks
Oh just had occasion to realize this wasn’t common Amhist knowledge – there were three distinct foundings of the Ku Klux Klan with no actual continuity between them
The first one was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, measures were aimed at them by Reconstruction troops but it was really later, broader (less upper-class) groups like the White League and rifle clubs that overturned it and restored local white control
The second one in the 1910s was the one that really mattered, this important early movie “Birth of a Nation” retold a myth of the first one, added voguish Scottish historical romance elements (the movie invented those white hood costumes and cross-burning), and it was a huge cultural event.
Then someone built like, a mail-order fanclub (then a cutting edge thing!) around it, and then that got used as a critical element of a huge reactionary repressive wave that was so successful people don’t believe that like, utopian pacifist socialist internationalist feminism had been a big thing before WWI. Anyway the second KKK effectively controlled many cities and even states.
The third one, inspired by the first two, the second having firmly set itself in mind as the idiom of the volk, was founded to resist the Civil Rights Movement but was cargo-culty and incompetent, not realizing what the second had done to succeed (articulate with other power centers, co-opt government) or even that the first failed. Modern groups are considered to come from the third founding.
Oh also if you’re like “what is up with how newspapers used to have all these tiny little quips like in @yesterdaysprint?”
Before compositing software, matching the printed length of stories to the physical length of columns of type was a skilled craft, and the compositors kept little short squibs like these on hand as shims to fill a bit of unused white space.
Using your staff’s idle thoughts for this – which could be prepared ahead of time and deployed as needed – was cheaper than subscribing to wire reports and having rewriters chop interesting ones down to fit fresh each day, as better-resourced papers did.
(This was the origin of the journalist in-joke tradition of the “bus plunge” story, where every report of a bus tumbling off a mountainside road anywhere in the world would be run at some length, using the verb “plunge”)
I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.
Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
The world may never know…
Maybe it’s something mathematical?
I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.
Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.
I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.
Most of the characters used like this have their genesis in the pre www internet tbh
starting to realize the importance that as far as the US Navy was concerned, WWII was a Pacific war against Japan
I thought that was obvious, what’s the importance?
It’s still narrativized in America as a continuation of European history, the point in fact where America took over that narrative, and the Pacific theater is extensively told in fact but the themes - of Japan and the US competing to take over from the European empires as regional hegemon, of the imperative to take a transcontinental forward basing position if only to prevent someone from taking it on you - are underexplored in terms of how they prefigured the world to come
So much of medieval European history comes down to the Catholic Church cornering the technology of storing and retrieving information and communicating with someone not directly present and the major exception being Jews
From Chapter 2 of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern:
Italians had been book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch’s achievement had inspired others to seek out lost classics that had been lying unread, often for centuries. The recovered texts were copied, edited, commented upon, and eagerly exchanged, conferring distinction on those who had found them and forming the basis for what became known as the “study of the humanities.”
The “humanists,” as those who were devoted to this study were called, knew from carefully poring over the texts that had survived from classical Rome that many once famous books or parts of books were still missing. Occasionally, the ancient authors whom Poggio and his fellow humanists eagerly read gave tantalizing quotations from these books, often accompanying extravagant praise or vituperative attacks. Alongside discussions of Virgil and Ovid, for example, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that “Macer and Lucretius are certainly worth reading,” and went on to discuss Varro of Atax, Cornelius Severus, Saleius Bassus, Gaius Rabirius, Albinovanus Pedo, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius, Marcus Pacuvius, and others whose works he greatly admired. The humanists knew that some of these missing works were likely to have been lost forever—as it turned out, with the exception of Lucretius, all of the authors just mentioned have been lost—but they suspected that others, perhaps many others, were hidden away in dark places, not only in Italy but across the Alps. After all, Petrarch had found the manuscript of Cicero’s Pro Archia in Liège, in Belgium, and the Propertius manuscript in Paris.
The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.
But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,
“they shall give him twenty Psalms or two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read. (Rule 139)”
“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought. Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading—“prayerful reading,” as he put it—as well as manual labor. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict’s time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary. The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:
Above all, one or two seniors must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so acediosus as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others. (49:17–18)
Acediosus, sometimes translated as “apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.
“He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.”
Such a monk—and there were evidently many of them—had succumbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression. Cassian called the disease “the noonday demon,” and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.
“If such a monk is found—God forbid—he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.”
A refusal to read at the prescribed time—whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair—would thus be visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical pain. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return—in principle at least—to his “prayerful reading.”
There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was assigned, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this assignment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: “Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that God may shield him from the feeling of elation.” He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: “Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking—only the reader’s voice should be heard there.” But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: “No one should presume to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given.”
“Lest occasion be given”: the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase “to the devil” and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.
Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: “The superior,” the Rule allows, “may wish to say a few words of instruction.” Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise, was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as “It is not as you say,” there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.” The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks—the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip—were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.
All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.
> abortion has been a tool of the ruling class to manage their potential population
I am absolutely a class-first materialist type, and everything I say should be taken as coming from inside the house, so to speak, but – man, what is it with large swaths of the materialist left and their need to simp for tradcath gender norms?
I mean, part of the development of Japan as an industrial power was this land reform that encouraged peasants to clear waste ground and put it under cultivation (my loose memory was they paid the first 2-5 harvests to the central government but then it was just theirs with normal taxes from then out?)
But simultaneously imposed strict nonpartible primogeniture, and one of the effects was excess kids going to the cities for industry (like enclosure in the UK!) but part was breaking out of the Malthusian trap with a shit-ton of abortion
Like China’s “one-child” thing as a mechanism of Asian agricultural–>industrial development? Precedented!
so why are Koreans into chilli when Japanese aren’t
Because they’re different countries with different culinary cultures?
yeh but why
from the Japanese perspective, Korea is associated with abundance of red meat
I mean from the English perspective, Ireland was the land of butter and beef, or abundant wheat, even as the Irish associated the colonial period with cheap starches like potatoes and oats, or starvation
