Most of those politicians and pundits agree with him.
In every time, in every place, the deeds of man remain the same. (He/Him). WEBSITE: https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/
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Most of those politicians and pundits agree with him.
Read theory.
It's pretty grim that "we need to comprehensively purge public and private society of anybody woke" is now being deemed responsible statesmanship because the alternate proposal on the intellectual Right is absolute techno-monarchy.
Bluesky is never going to be cool because unironic, sincere liberalism is never going to be cool, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Keir Stsrmer in 1936, after the Battle of Cable Street: "Uniforms serve to provide institutional and organizational cohesion to groups, which is why so many different people wear them! I stand firmly in support of the concept of uniforms."
Ok look here buddy
Comprehensive write-up of this scenario and world is here, for those interested. 😊
Happy (belated) #MapMonday! I've always been fascinated by Atlantropa, an incredibly insane idea that sums up both the utopian and dystopian zeitgeist of the early 20th century like nothing else.
I keep saying this, but if there is a sharp rise in skepticism or negativity towards the military among liberals because of these occupations, it will be treated as a problem that Democratic leaders need to answer and apologize for, not a crisis that the military or US government needs to address.
🚨🚨🚨APOLOGIES THIS IS A VAGUEPOST ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE IT IS NOT COMMENTARY ON EVENTS OF PUBLIC INTEREST PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR NORMALLY-SCHEDULED BUSINESS🚨🚨🚨
Honestly, it's what we deserve.
Personal decision that I have been very stressed about and finally actually took the first step; cannot talk about it in detail yet! 😅
alea iacta est
Woof woof woof, bark bark bark, arf arf arf.
An entertainer going into politics isn't inherently bad if they want to say or do something serious, but transitioning back just shows that politics is another branch of entertainment.
these boys have got it down/oughta be a one of these in every town/these boys have got the touch/clean as a whistle and it don't cost much/wham bam, don't take long/shakes, fries, patty and gone/and whatabout that friendly name?/heck every little thing oughta stay the same
You can see this very clearly with crime; cities that have actually made progress on reducing it get scolded for "not taking it seriously" if they try and talk about that, while hysterical fearmongering is lauded as responsible statesmanship.
I don't think Arnold Schwarzenegger going into politics was inherently bad for America, but I think in retrospect, that era when he went back to doing action movies for a few years after being governor was a leading indicator of the collapse of American democracy.
I was recommended this by multiple people and I am very eager to return the favor! It's worth it!
ICYMI:
Increasingly feel like BABYLON 5 S2 E18 "Confessions and Lamentations" is the most helpful lens for understanding why COVID response drove everybody insane.
Just realized that it's on Disney+ and that I can go back and see how much of it I actually remember and how much I hallucinated.
People really, really, really hate the urban cosmopolitan class who are earnestly sincere about liberalism. Just on a pure interpersonal level, transcending ideology, if you're a "woke" millennial who genuinely believes in making the country better the entire intelligentsia wants to kill you.
I think it works better as a trope when it can't be quantified; when you're dealing with genuinely unknowable forces that operate according to an opaque logic. One of the things that Devereaux talks about is how the exactitude of ritual is so important because it is KNOWN to work, even just by rote.
Oh, I see how it is. Everyone is like "This show is just the same as the movies, what's the point?" and then we do something new and and fresh and innovative like make Hagrid a time-traveling cybernetic assassin from the future and y'all complain about that too? Smh. 😤😤😤
A lot of people take anything "woke" as a direct personal insult while registering the nazi shit as something purely academic, even if they theoretically disagree with it.
Eduard Habsburg goes back in time and does a Guns of the South.
Same! It's such a great self-contained story, but it left me really wanting to know more about that world.
A BETTER WORLD WAS POSSIBLE
NEW BLOG POST! I talk about one of the best books I've read recently, and why I think it's such a masterpiece.
So, uhhh, I actually kind of wrote a fanfic about that? (archiveofourown.org/works/65274991)
gotta give the men credit where credit is due
I think there's an implied progression where we go from completely disconnected, separate rebel groups to some kind of loose front coordinated by Luthen, to an actual formalized military with a political wing led by Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, and Saw clearly falls out of the process at some point.
I can't wait until Mon Mothma maneuvers her faction to a majority vote in the Fifth General Party Congress and purges all your asses for revisionism.
He's not even that random! The Vice President follows him on Twitter!
I do think we should have gotten more Saw content in ANDOR S2, but specifically what I wanted was an episode about the formal creation of the Rebel Alliance where he breaks from the united front because he's incapable of sharing leadership with anybody else.
Ok, but it's pretty funny how basically every piece of media about this guy has consistently portrayed him a paranoid, reckless loose canon incapable of leading a functional movement, and people keep being like "Ok but where's the REAL Saw Gerrera?"
Yes, there's just a complete rejection of the concept of individual morality, replaced with an allegiance to some amorphous sense of "public opinion". You can actually just have opinions about people! And act on those! That is, in fact, how this whole fucking system is supposed to work!!!
At some point you have to just admit that the reason this endless farrago of hatred and filth from the intelligentsia of the modern Right doesn't inspire rejection from the media, commentariat, or political elite writ large is that they don't consider it particularly bad.
Just incredibly fucking insulting that we all have to do this "Hmmm, the Emperor smiled when Deputy Chief of the Household Department Sima presented him with a new concubine, perhaps this means he favors the Eastern Faction's proposal for an invasion of Mongolia" shit.
Ooooh can I see it?
Had a thread about this last year, and it's one of my favorite things about LOTR.
I mean, I think the formalization of institutions is pretty important, but also that degree of continuity is kind of what I'm talking about! That even before modern police systems, societies had coercive mechanisms of maintaining public order, they just looked and operated differently.
In his notes, Tolkien talks about why he has human and Hobbit characters call it "Rivendell" but the Elves all speak of "Imladris", and he said he wanted to give the impression that it was like if you met someone and asked for directions to Winchester and they were like "Oh, you mean Camelot?"
But the key point is that private prosecution between individuals was how criminal justice was typically handled.
I think Greek and Roman law was different on this point; Roman law accepted the idea of different classes of citizenship with different rights, whereas usually Greek law had fundamental equality of citizens but also massive restriction of that status to a chosen few.
Mutually Assured Destruction, which is a little bit facetious, but I do think gets at the purpose that multi-generational blood feuds actually did serve.
Yes, but this was the point I was making: the state didn't need the kind of professional investigatory bodies we think of today because so much of what we think of as "criminal justice" was being done by private or local power structures that the state sat atop of.
I feel like these discussions treat feuds and socially-sanctioned lynch mobs as the *failure state* of a stateless society (or weak state), instead of just how these things tend to develop. People aren't stupid, and institutions evolve for a reason.
Yeah, but it was a very different system, one that was more akin to mediating between family groups. There was not a professional force of investigators with theoretically impartial authority.
In Greek and Roman law, IIRC, most forms of law enforcement were civil cases, they took the form of suits filed by representatives of one family against another in court, because those were understood as the fundamental building blocks of society with legitimacy to oversee their own members.
It's bad form to quote somebody quoting me, but I do think this captures (one of!) the key dynamics that you see in pre-modern societies, with another one being the use of wergild and blood-feuds between kinship groups to regulate violence. It's just MAD dynamics on an interpersonal level.
Part of why "professional law enforcement bodies" are a pretty recent invention is that, historically, most people were locked into various forms of private supervision or control via family institutions, feudal nobility, slavery, or patron-client relationships that filled most of that role.
Reading about the War of the Roses has really made me think that the theme from BARRAYAR of Cordelia conceptualizing hereditary monarchy as a venereal disease is one of the most insightful points I've ever read.
Pretty much! The actual backstory is that it's me trying to imagine what one of those infinitely large space empires would "realistically" look like in practice.
Decided this government wasn't cursed enough, and so decided to overhaul the Grand Secretary of War's departments.
There really is no constituency left in American politics that affirmatively supports basic republicanism, and it's a serious problem.
Woof woof woof, bark bark bark, arf arf arf.
Looking into this.
Groundbreaking new advances being made in Charlie Brown Ho Science every day, revolutionizing the field.
Ugh, I'm gonna end up getting a CrunchyRoll subscription just to watch THE APOTHECARY DIARIES S2, aren't I?? 😭😭😭
I think there's a certain point past the event horizon where ideology just becomes a matter of aesthetics.
I promise you, you are putting more thought into this than anybody else.
Post a meme made by you:
Meanwhile, they just gave Lambert Simnel a job in the castle kitchens when they caught him. Apparently he eventually got promoted to falconer!
A few centuries later, but the fake Peter III who took over Montenegro is my favorite one of these.
The reluctance of official sources to confirm Trump's death (usually believed to have occurred in April 2027) made the following chaos inevitable; as at least eight known pretenders came forward over the next two decades, claiming the presidency in his name.
Can't wait for the 6-3 SCOTUS decision that the 22nd amendment doesn't apply to clones.
Donald Trump will never die, as his spirit is sustained by your hatred.
I think I overall enjoyed JENTRY CHAU VS THE UNDERWORLD, but never quite as much as I wanted to. I liked everything it did in theory, but it somehow rarely managed to click as a gestalt, I keep thinking "Oh, this is a cool idea" instead of just experiencing it emotionally.
It depends on how you define "liberals", "fascism", and "socialism", all of which get used in so many contradictory ways that they're simply useless as signifiers without extensive commentary and clarification.
THE WARS OF THE ROSES: THE FALL OF THE PLANTAGENETS AND THE RISE OF THE TUDORS, by Dan Jones.
you said it brother
Honestly, this is true about most media debates; the answer to "Is it better to do X or Y in my story?" is almost always that you can get away with anything if you do it well, and you know what you're doing.
I'm concerned that not enough people know this.
The thing is, Gondorian expeditions to the "new lands in the West" that arose after the sinking of Numenor are actually established in-text, so it is totally plausible that the Hobbits would have access to New World crops like tobacco and potatoes.
It really is so hilarious, you get absolutely zero background on Sauron or the One Ring in it, but he does provide extensive notes on Hobbit ethnography, gaslights the reader about what happened in THE HOBBIT, and explains what pipeweed is as if you've never heard of *the concept* of smoking before.
Tolkien taking a moment in the introduction to LOTR to explain that the authorities eventually ruled that OBVIOUSLY, that's not a riddle, and Gollum would have been fully within his rights to reject it, but BECAUSE he answered it, he accepted it as valid, is one of his funnier moments.
This was the stakes during the last budget fight, and we already made our choice. Once you've de facto accepted impoundment as acceptable, you can't go back to calling it unconstitutional later. You've made it clear that you don't really care.
I promise you, this is the result of many, many years of gradual acquisition that I am posting here, not my own current reading list. 😅
Interesting how this book's interpretation of the War of the Roses kinda goes the opposite way you'd expect; he argues against attempts to impose a structural, dynastic, economic or societal explanation on the dynastic collapse, and that it really was just that Henry VI was a dipshit.
Apropos of nothing, but it's funny how "using astrology to predict the date of death of the king" used to be one of those perennial treason charges.
356. The anime LEGENDS OF THE GALACTIC HEROES is one of my all-time favorite pieces of media, and I really enjoyed the first two novels too; they convey the same themes and scope, with room for more detail and nuance. I should really read the rest of the series at some point.
355. A noir detective story set in a city under occupation by mushrooms. Like everything Vandermeer writes, it's beautifully, unforgettably strange.
354. I maintain that the first AVATAR movie holds up; it's a very well-structured, well-designed genre science fiction movie that does everything you want it to. I liked it enough when I saw it to buy this, which is mostly forgettable, but does have some very cool art and designs.
The vague thought process is that Henry V lives longer and consolidates control over Northern France, which ends up establishing enough institutions that when the Plantagenets lose control of it the House of Burgundy-Valois is able to establish its own northern kingdom.
"The French Partitions of the 15th century had never ceased to one of the most contentious issues of Continental politics, even as English influence in Burgundy waned. But First Consul Napoleon's invasion of 1798 would still prove unprecedented in the chaos that it unleashed for decades to come."
"I curse you, and the fruit of your loins, for nine generations I lay this mark upon your line, may you find no respite, no sanctuary, no peace, and no rest, may thee and thy children's children wander the Earth in toil and lie in unquiet graves, until the price of thy sins is paid in blood, fully."
354. Mentioned INKHEART way up-thread; but while that's one of my all-time favorite books, I think the sequels fall a little bit short. They're not *bad*, but they feel more like typical YA fantasy, whereas the first book has a genuine sense of awe and terror about it.
353. Been a long, long time since I read this, but I remember really liking it. Masterclass in telling a multilayered, multigenerational story with dozens of moving parts and characters that still always has a sense of connectivity and motion. Brilliant historical fiction.
Which is fucking wild given that the existing world in question (Ankh-Morpek) is already a new world he built inside of an existing world!!
IDK, I was thinking about the letter he wrote when he was asked to prove he had pure Arayan ancestry in order to publish The Hobbit in Germany.
J.R.R. Tolkien's evil twin.
352. Shelby Foote's analysis is increasingly, uhh, Old Fashioned, let's say, but it's hard to beat him in terms of narrative ability. Easy to read, despite the length, and quite engrossing, which is probably why it was one of the first "serious" history books that I remember reading.
351. I think only Terry Pratchett would have thought to write a comedy about central banking in his fantasy world that's also a pretty good primer about how and why modern financial systems work.
The reason you hire Skadden et al is BECAUSE they've successfully bribed the government. That expertise in negotiated surrender, and access to the people responsible, is what you're paying for, and it's why they think it's worth it.
I am a broken record about this, but the American intelligentsia convinced itself that a debating salon was the model of how the free marketplace of ideas was supposed to work, and they are about as wrong as you can possibly be about something, and the consequences have been catastrophic.
350. One of my favorite Discworlds, a book that is about the challenges and triumphs of cosmopolitan civilization, and that treats "the city" with the kind of respect that most fantasy treats "the kingdom". Also, the Summoning Dark is Pratchett doing eldritch horror at his lowkey best.
349. This was pretty fun, Middle Eastern-inspired fantasy, with some very cool ideas and twists and an ending I didn't expect. Felt like it was setting up sequels that never came, though, and I've never felt the need to revisit it.
