laxam
7d ago
The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?
laxam
11d ago
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing.
Someone has never run into a bunch of people from different Balkan countries online.
laxam
18hr ago
Zionists have always been close to conservatives in many respects
While Zionism has always had a spectrum, up until the 1990's Israel was a pretty left wing country. Early Zionists especially were almost all socialists of one variety or another. The Kibbutzim are communes!
laxam
7d ago
In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania".
I have never heard of that in my life. Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state, with no one party dominating the state government for more than a term in decades (and that was a Republican trifecta) and it being close to a century since there was permanent partisan control of the sort you see in California or Massachusetts.
Overzealous bureaucracy knows no partisan bounds.
laxam
16d ago
You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony.
It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
laxam
19d ago
I can't find the paper right now, but I recall having read one showing that patients tend to conceal that fact from their doctors and form communities where they help each other find willing surgeons and publicize techniques for duping less willing ones into going along with it.
Isn't that the story of the online trans community in the late 2000's/early 2010's?
laxam
28d ago
Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically.
That huge relief of visible suffering was the 'disproof' of the anti-social security argument. That is normally the way these things work: A huge and public argument goes on for quite some time on a particular topic, most often without being settled explicitly by public debate but, instead, by events. While the relation of such 'events' to the previous debate can often be quite tenuous in fact, in the perception of the public it is ultimately all that matters. It has ever been thus. Many public debates in the distant past were settled by the winner of a battle, not because might makes right, but because victory proves the favor of God/the gods. The entire rejection of the small central state/market oriented model in the United States came down to the disaster of the Great Depression, regardless of whether 'free markets' """caused""" the Depression or not.
Good information is expensive.
laxam
2d ago
Also, Scots are Celts
Highlanders, yes. Lowland Scots are Anglos with a funny accent and some Celtic wives.
laxam
2d ago
If anything, it has a lot to do with urbanization and industrialization in general.
laxam
2d ago
Elite Christian culture adopted the Classical heritage before the Roman Empire even fell in the West, so the thing where British imperial administrators learned Latin and Greek and the Classics is just the same Christian tradition that sent them to listen to the softly spoken magic spell every Sunday.
laxam
2d ago
That one guy that used to be a mod is right about the fact that they are much more similar to white progressives than they are to Red Tribe whites in America or working class whites in Europe. The whites they imagine only exist in their head.
Wasn't that the original idea behind Scott's tribal classification? All of these DR people are Blue Tribe, of course they don't like or get along with actual Red Tribers.
laxam
7d ago
There has been no evidence up to even the level of the coup against the Mosaddegh government (ie. not a particularly high bar) that the CIA planned or executed any of it.
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
More options
Context Copy link