laxam
4d 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
4d 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
8d 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
13d 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
16d 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
21d ago
I don't know about 'horrifically riven' but it did have plenty of civil war and strife over the years.
laxam
25d 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
29d ago
It looks like 'direction or control' usually means some sort of formal relationship. So, a contract that gives voting power over a company or something like that.
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.
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