all governments lie, as howard zinn says, since “if they told people the truth they wouldn’t last very long”, but if you read the press, you get the impression that only foreign ones do systematically.
Friendly reminder that both 1956 Hungary and 1968 Czechoslovakia saw moves away from alignment with Moscow in ways that cheered the west (and the west cheered on) but were ultimately crushed by occupying armored columns while the Americans declined to intervene because they knew better than to kick off direct conflict with the Russians
people keep comparing russia invading ukraine to nazi germany invading their neighbors, or to the china taiwan situation. and it’s like. those aren’t great analogies but also there aren’t a lot of options. There just aren’t that many major military powers.
we coudl generate a stadard library of maybe 1000 political situations by realistic wargaming perhaps, and refer to those?
i wouldn’t read them though, im not that interested
or Russia invading Poland? England invading Scotland? Norway invading England? Japan invading China? France invading Russia?
japan and korea? iraq and kuwait? You know even out of what’s available people are leaning heavily on one or two
oh, saudi arabia yemen, i’ve heard that brought up, you used that well as a counterexample to the claim tht americans will not buy oil from a country that invades its neighbors
that kenyan representative compared the situation to kenya!
ASSIGNMENT: Compare and contrast russia’s invasion of ukraine with at least 12 other political situations
ok haha wait i dont even want to do that
im gonna uh. Wasn’t there something i was supposed to be doing? Oh right i have a JOB seeya
the American Union vs. the American Confederacy
Azerbaijan vs. Armenia
Argentina vs. United Kingdom (Falklands)
humans be invading things
I keep saying the situation (smaller entity used to be explicitly under territorial jurisdiction of adjacent larger but gained sovereignty on expectations of relations so friendly the larger one kept its naval base from which it dominated the regional sea, but then friendly administration was replaced by one making overtures to a rival great power bloc) is pretty Cuba/USA so like… a Bay of Pigs they didn’t wave off?
Becoming clear that the vulnerability of trans stuff in America is it doesn’t have state-level infrastructure: the last decade saw an upsurge on the not-actually-a-government Everywhere of the internet, and signing-on of national groups that honestly needed a purpose to still exist after gay marriage, but there’s no state-by-state stuff, and the legacy queer orgs coming onsides for structural reasons means the organizational commitment isn’t matched at the grassroots
Meanwhile since the ‘70s social conservative pressure organizations have drawn on church congregations, which beyond representing a particular sect or interpretation and thus ideology, exist in a particular geographical location and have connections and influence on that basis. And strong local networks help in national-level operations because social issue affiliation is heterogeneous and even if you’re not ready to fight at national level you can identify more friendly territory to focus on, develop, recruit from, and pioneer policy in
should lead to increasing divergence across countries as well
Going differently in the UK is absolutely about structural factors: they don’t have autonomous lower-level state government (well, Scottish devolution maybe?) but also they have a much more nationalized journalism sector where pretty right-populist tabloids exist in the same infosphere as the elite stuff, so there was less running room to put new gender understandings over on a top-down basis in the first place before it was noticed and challenged in a way all public figures were answerable to
Britain also has the NHS, I assume that would come into play at some point.
Oh, yeah. American me could leave the front door, turn either way on the street, and get prescribed hormones on an informed consent basis in screaming range of my house.
One of those is a Planned Parenthood, one is a dedicated transing clinic opened a few years ago. I’ve been seeing stuff off and on since late oughts radfems (which… now that I think of it, I found hopscotching out from the period boom of feminist blogs. Someone blame TERFs on '00 feminist blogging, it’ll be funny and true) presenting trans specialists as greedily trying to lure people in (vs. pro-trans narratives of liberating missionaries) but it is, I think, significant that at that point it was a wide-open field where there wasn’t much between entry and the top, and that influenced some economic, political, and personal dynamics.
I’d say any reward there would probably be more ego (“here is a way I can make a difference in the world in line with high-status contemporary trends, while also developing a thriving practice at a young age!”) than money. It’s a vulnerability though, “running the only abortion clinic in the whole state” is often so unappealing retiring operators struggle to find successors
well, doctors providing abortion services in America are regularly shot, so you can understand why; crazy to have a specific building just for doctors that crackpots want to kill.
Like, all the stuff with trans pushback laws in Texas and Idaho and wherever…
The thing is, the ‘10s wave where ah, left-coded identities were gaining cultural ground peaked, and now we see what survives the backlash and you get to keep long-term!
From the '70s peak through the subsequent trough you managed to hold on to the idea that transition was a thing, in a transmed truscum way that required you to buy indulgence from both the midcentury medical priesthoods of surgery and psychiatry out-of-pocket (while the humanities extracted significant volumes of gender, feminist, and identity theory) and was gatekept on passing so thoroughly that not only any individual transgender person but the entire concept of transgender people were effectively stealth.
You’ll almost certainly come through this one holding better ground. It won’t be the paradise you dreamed of on 2014 tumblr.
I see stuff like “but what does the new wave of national leaders even have to offer people for the future?”
Not being destroyed
Or at least being relegated down to supporting cast
This was WWII! Germany, Japan, and Italy were the major powers who modernized too late to grab empires from terra nullis, they saw that continuing on cruise control would leave them also-rans so made a gamble
This was how we got Trump.Flight 93 Election, charge the cockpit and you might die but don’t and you definitely will, remember?
what if in like the 90s-00s a bunch of municipal libraries offered a small amount of web hosting as a service you could access with your library card and each library had like a server closet and a guy working to administer the service as a public service and the software all those guys came up with was what had evolved into social media instead
I mean this is basically how the 80s-90s internet started through universities
I mean when you see Russians use “fascist” to just mean “anti-Russian” as a legacy of the mass ideology they developed out of WWII to make sense of the Cold War…
The ladder of promotion was marked out in a straightforward, arithmetical way: the taking of captives – in single combat, and scored as to quality – for presentation for death on the killing stone. The first captive so offered made one a ‘leading youth’, a ‘captor’, marked by appropriate face paint, the right to wear a breechclout with handsomely long ends instead of the brief boyish affairs of the novices, and a cape bearing a design in place of a plain mantle: no small reward in self-conscious and narcissistic youth. The ‘leading youth’ also enjoyed perfect powers and privileges within the warrior house, and could anticipate marriage, as his parents began to cast around for a suitable wife and to save against the expense of the elaborate feast which would buy his release from the full jurisdiction of the House of Youth. (It is possible that marriage could end commitment to the warrior house for some men, but it remained the locus of male social action, excitement, and reward.) Two captives presented to the gods brought further elaboration in dress and privileges. Three, and the way was opened to the office of Master of Youth, authorized instructor in the warrior way, with the privilege of wielding authority over the junior warriors, and of dancing, displaying, and even drinking at certain festivals. Four captives taken, and one entered the select ranks of the ‘seasoned warriors’, the ‘veterans’ or ‘professionals’ as we might say, privileged to have their own unchallenged seat within the warrior house, and to wear the most coveted warrior insignia: the long lip-plugs and the headbands with eagle-feather tassels which spoke of their great deeds.
At that point the upward trajectory could falter if one were to capture mere Huaxtecs, or other unregarded barbarians. Rewards, honour, and the delights of re-animated reputation came only with the taking of captives from Nahuatl cities – tough warriors, with much the same system shaping their training and aspirations. If a man took his fifth captive from among these formidable opponents he was acknowledged a quauchic, and distinguished on dress occasions by his vivid red netting cape, blue lip-plug, and most dramatically by his head, naked of hair save for the single warrior lock bound with red cord floating above the shaven pate. Two such distinguished victims, and he could wear at will either the long blue or the yellow lip-plug, the breechclout with the eagle-claw or marketplace design, the red or orange leather sandals, the elaborate headdress. When so arrayed ‘he filled everyone with awe’. These were the greatest of warriors, ‘each of whom was considered [equal to] a battle squadron, who did not hide themselves behind something in war; they who turned [the enemy] back, they who wheeled them around’. From among such legendary warriors the ‘general’ and the ‘commanding general’ were selected.
The fundamental human desire to unlock new outfits like in a video game
For a while the US Army Special Forces got to wear a unique hat, the “green beret”, but after the Army standardized berets generally they’re more visually distinguished by uniquely maintaining bushy beards, facial hair being a well-precedented mark of elite troops.
He thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze. “American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,” he riffs, plus a return to a more fragmented culture. “People going off in a lot of different directions because it doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent, singular vision for music or fashion.” He sees Substacks and podcasts as the new blogs and a move away from Silicon Valley’s interest in optimizing workflow, “which is just so anti-decadence.” Most promisingly, he predicts a return of irony.
This is a PR submarine. This guy is not predicting the next big thing, he is pulling the levers of power to make people think this is the next bug thing. He is ON SUBSTACK for crying out loud
Yes, declarations of a new thing are often performative, and can serve as a planted flag for those who simply want a new thing to rally around and from getting a sense of their number and momentum take courage and take forward stance to create new things and new scenes
The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) has the speaker Phaidros in his dialogue The Symposion say that Achilles and Patroklos were lovers. Contrary to Aischylos, however, Phaidros insists that Achilles was the eromenos and Patroklos was the erastes. Here is what Phaidros says, as translated by Benjamin Jowett:
“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroklos—his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroklos was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aischylos has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far). And greatly as the gods honour the virtue of love, still the return of love on the part of the beloved to the lover is more admired and valued and rewarded by them, for the lover is more divine; because he is inspired by God.”
very happy to learn that the ancient Greeks also had seme-uke discourse
Our Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology “food” isn’t very distinguished from specifically “rice” until it was pointed out to us that in English “meal” is “loose roughly ground grain”
humans be like staple crop
Obviously “cornmeal” comes this way, but also “oatmeal”. Wheat meal dishes are usually known as “porridge” or “gruel”
He thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze. “American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,” he riffs, plus a return to a more fragmented culture. “People going off in a lot of different directions because it doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent, singular vision for music or fashion.” He sees Substacks and podcasts as the new blogs and a move away from Silicon Valley’s interest in optimizing workflow, “which is just so anti-decadence.” Most promisingly, he predicts a return of irony.
we need a tiktok microcelebrity to romanticize using headphones instead of watching vids out loud on the bus
immediately after posting this someone sat down next to me blasting music and with their backpack taking up half of MY seat pinning me against the window. got so overwhelmed I just got off at the next stop 20 min away from my apartment. I hate to be the kind of guy to care about manners suddenly but can we normalize fucking MANNERS. I was standing next to someone who pulled down their mask and started smoking on a packed bus just yesterday too.
people in the notes like “be annoying back!!!!!!!” ok idk where u live, but where I live that is how fights happen. <3
Yo “tensions regarding people playing things out loud on the bus” used to be a thing back in the boom box era – there’s a scene about this in Star Trek IV! Since the Walkman that went away, but apparently now it’s back!
Catholicism is like the contested borderlands in leftie twitblr religion discourse. I’ve noticed over the years the has been a shifting ‘mood’ between either seeing Catholicism as the most sympathetic Christian denomination or the most evil one
I think what modern filmmakers keep forgetting (especially disney affiliated productions) is that actors used to have a much more hands on and involved part. they weren’t just reading lines handed to them in a dark alley ten minutes before filming. they suggested script revisions and could improvise lines on the spot bc they knew their characters.
if mark hamill says “that’s not my luke skywalker” that’s a problem. if temuera morrison had insight into boba fett’s character the producers shouldn’t have just told him to deal with the script he was given. if seb stan was concerned about the lack of closure in the steve bucky relationship that’s an issue! the insane levels of secrecy and treating actors like the only thing they are good for is regurgitating lines is so detrimental to modern film/television
Something to bear in mind is that this isn’t our first turn on this particular merry-go-round.
Back in the early days of Hollywood, when vertically integrated monopolies were the norm and studios, distributors and theatre chains were all owned by the same parent companies, actors were basically treated like cattle, locked into exploitative multi-film contracts, routinely kept in the dark and lied to, and – apart from a handful of the very largest stars – had very little creative input. This would remain the case until a series of massive antitrust lawsuits in the 1930s and 1940s forced the studio monopolies to break up.
Now we’re seeing a shift back toward all film production being controlled by a tiny handful of companies, employing abusive booking practices to push the theatre chains around and exercise de facto control over theatre booking decisions in spite of technically being unaffiliated – and we’re also seeing a shift back toward how actors were treated under the old studio monopolies.
Like, this isn’t just a problem with the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not just a matter of people forgetting how to make good films. There are concrete economic incentives that lead to this sort of behaviour – and just like the first time around, it’s probably not going to get solved any way other than at legislative gunpoint.
