Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

This blog will pay for itself.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

No Justins, No Peace

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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Late Night Open Thread

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Don’t let these angelic faces fool you:

bixby-and-bailey-12-12-161

There was quite the row tonight. I thought there would be blood. I was working on separating them when Emma, my 8 lb calico (see her here) came running down the hall, full furred and yowling like Linda Blair. She was about to wade into the fray to break them up. I’m not sure if she was doing it to rescue me, or more likely, and funnier, rescue her beloved Bixby. I put a quick stop to that and threw Bixby outside and Bailey into the dining area. Still not sure what set them off, but they’ve been grumpy with each other all night. I also explained to Emma that she was not to do that again.

There are more photos and update here.

ETA: That white sheet? It is covering up the cushion Bailey ATE. It will be a while before the livingroom gets real furniture.

I thought we could use an open thread….

Reader Interactions

113Comments

  4. 4.

    lamh36

    @rikyrah:

    Labor Secretary Thomas Perez Is Said to Plan Run to Lead D.N.C.

    the article did mention that he had been mulling a run for Maryland gov… but maybe they figured the internals and time wasn’t right?

    But who knows…he may announce that he will pursue Maryland gov instead.

    But I also like that we could get an Obama stalwart in the DNC that we didn’t have before. Since PBO can’t be chair, I’d love to see someone with a close tie to PBO in there…

    Not that Ellison doesn’t, but he’s a Bernie guy…and no offense, DNC has done enough for/with the Bernie folks…

    But hey…either one, I think, would be fine…right…but I do like Perez…

  7. 7.

    trollhattan

    @lamh36:
    Perez is personable, smart and soon to be looking for work, so I have zero qualms presuming the cat herd will pay attention. Can we buy him a laser pointer?

  9. 9.

    Mnemosyne

    FWIW, cats usually have a pretty decent idea of what they can get away with when it comes to dogs. Emma knew there was a good chance that barreling down at them like that would startle them enough that they would break apart, and they’re not maneuverable enough to grab her.

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    Pondering how the 7MO puppeh will handle sharing space with a Christmas tree. We’re going to find out soon enough.

  13. 13.

    Juju

    You can buy reasonably priced slipcovers to hide the eaten cushion. I’ve done that myself. Google slipcovers.

  14. 14.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @trollhattan: I kept any and all breakable ornaments off mine this year – and it’s between the couches – not that it would stop these two. Friends lent me an unused fake tree and I think that’s helped, too – no tree smell to entice anyone to chew it.

  16. 16.

    TaMara (HFG)

    @Juju: Oh, I have slipcovers, I put them on when fancy company comes over. Otherwise, she’s been trying to eat them, too. So they’re in the cedar chest until Christmas Eve company comes over. LOL. Puppehs.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne

    @lamh36:

    As I’ve been saying for a few days now, the only remaining question in my mind is whether GG is dupe for Russia or an actual paid operative. Since spymasters can apparently be pretty subtle, it’s possible that he’s not sure himself.

  19. 19.

    Anne Laurie

    Still not sure what set them off, but they’ve been grumpy with each other all night.

    Full supermoon tomorrow night.

    I thought the ‘lunatic’ folklore was silly, too, until I started taking weekly dog-training classes. Fights, melt-downs, and general doggie weirdness was way more common when classes fell within a couple days of a full moon — dogs that were normally sane & reliable would flake out, and dogs that were a little goofy would go full werewolf. And of course rescue dogs were extra likely to go a little ‘loony’… we used to argue about whether that was because rescue dogs were more susceptible to very tiny environmental changes, or if dogs ended up in rescue situations because they were a little too susceptible to those almost-imperceptible challenges…

    Our rescue cat Rocket the Viking (red tabby oriental shorthair) always hustles onto the scene when two of our three little rescue dogs decide to start a slanging match. Since Rocky doesn’t care for any of them, we assume it’s because he hopes to witness some carnage.

  20. 20.

    lamh36

    Anyone watch POTUS on Daily Show? I been stop watching TDS years ago…and I’m not starting now…if so how was it?

  21. 21.

    Percysowner

    If you want a happy story, here’s an animal rescue story from Akron, Oh. Dogged rescuer wouldn’t give up on runaway Sheldon.

    Basically a 10 year old puppy mill survivor, Sheldon, slipped his leash a few days after going to his foster, ran to the local metro park and hid for two months. A dog rescuer in Ohio came up to save him. It’s touching and heart warming. This woman is an angel.

  24. 24.

    TaMara (HFG)

    Since Rocky doesn’t care for any of them, we assume it’s because he hopes to witness some carnage.

    @Anne Laurie: LOL. And you reminded me that the cats went at it in the middle of the night last night, too. They haven’t done that since we’ve moved here. So I agree, it must be the moon.

  26. 26.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    So I’ve been reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, and there are so many good tidbits. Two that are particularly interesting, given our current situation, is that the Nazi’s elevated “toughness” to a virtue. It was widely used in their propaganda–that the country needed to be “tough”. Hadn’t realized that.

    The second tidbit is that the “Final Solution” ran into a roadblock in France when they attempted to denaturalize French Jews for exportation to the east. At this point, the rumors of what resettlement entailed had reached France, and even the Vichy anti-Semites flatly refused to cooperate. Without their cooperation, few French Jews were murdered in the death camps. Moral of the story was, despite their “toughness”, when the French stood up to them, they couldn’t enforce at all.

  29. 29.

    Anne Laurie

    @trollhattan:

    Pondering how the 7MO puppeh will handle sharing space with a Christmas tree. We’re going to find out soon enough.

    You may want to anchor the top of the tree to the ceiling with some fishing line, if you can.

    And don’t put out any breakable ornaments, or ornaments you’d seriously regret losing, until you find out from experience just how high on the tree puppy can reach (which will be higher than you could possibly predict).

    Also, you may need to prevent him from drinking out of the tree stand, not to mention discouraging him from doing what dogs naturally do around tree trunks. (“Finally! Indoor plumbing, for me!”)

    Different dogs have different temperaments, of course. Some take a few sniffs and never go near the silly thing again. Others — even when mature enough & certified enough that one would expect better — can only be trusted for brief supervised visits with the Indoor Tree.

  30. 30.

    brendancalling

    I’ve asked this same question at other sites.

    Dilemma: I love my job at RS, but by the end of the day I am POOPED OUT on news.

    Because I spend all day working from home, at night I go out to bars. I have a bit of social anxiety and I don’t do small talk with strangers well. So I bury myself in my phone, where I OD on news and politics.

    My one respite is Comics Curmudgeon . It’s not enough. So at the risk of threadjacking, anyone have some favorite non-politics sites they recommend?

  34. 34.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @lamh36: Simon Maloy ‏@ SimonMaloy 1h1 hour ago
    you won’t find a better summation of the Obama-Trump transition than a nuclear physicist being replaced by a Dancing With The Stars washout

  36. 36.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Omnes Omnibus: I don’t know the truth of the assertion. It is limited to the denaturalization and forced emigration of French citizens (not the stateless Jewish population). I’m sure historical accounts are much, much better now.

    Regardless, the Nazis weren’t able to make France “judenrein” due to the refusal to fully cooperate, right? At least, that’s what she’s asserting.

  38. 38.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Well, kind of — basically, the Vichy government was happy to send foreign or stateless refugee Jews off to the death camps, and only balked when the Germans started targeting French citizen Jews. But there were a whole lot of people murdered thanks to the Vichy regime.

    It’s alluded to in the article, but Italy was a place where deportation of Jews was strongly resisted by their armed forces the whole time. Mussolini didn’t have any problem with instituting Nuremberg Laws and stealing property from rich Jewish families, but he drew the line at deportations. The Germans were really only able to get deportations going after they took over Italy in 1943.

  41. 41.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lamh36: Perry’s claim to fame was getting rid of all industrial safety regulations when he was governor of Texas. Given that the Secretary of Energy’s main job is overseeing the US’s nuclear energy and nuclear weapons capacity what could go wrong?

  44. 44.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Dog Dawg Damn: Oh for fuck’s sake! I am a Francophile, but, I know history. France did not do well. I don’t denigrate the French. It is hard to make that that call.

  46. 46.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Omnes Omnibus: @Dog Dawg Damn: @Mnemosyne: The short answer is they turned Jews over, both French citizens and the stateless refugees, in order to buy space from the Germans. Here’s the accurate info from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. There’s even more at the link.
    https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005429

    VICHY REGIME
    Until November 1942, southern and eastern France remained unoccupied. A French collaborationist government, headquartered in the city of Vichy, in the Auvergne, governed unoccupied France.

    In July 1940, the French National Assembly voted to suspend the constitution of the Third Republic and placed the new “Vichy regime” under the leadership of the aging Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, French hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Pierre Laval, a former Socialist politician who cultivated good relations with Otto Abetz (the German Foreign Office representative in Paris), functioned as the acting chief of government for most of the period of German occupation.

    In theory, measures of the Vichy government applied to all of France. However, only in unoccupied France could the new government actually govern autonomously. Officially neutral, Vichy France collaborated closely with Germany. Under Petain and Laval, the Vichy government followed a nationalist and “pre-French Revolutionary” agenda, replacing the ideals of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” [“Liberté, égalité, fraternité!”] with “work, family, and country.”

    In the autumn of 1940, Vichy administrators promulgated antisemitic legislation, closely patterned on that of German anti-Jewish decrees and ordinances in place in the German-occupied zone. The so-called “Statut des Juifs” (“Jewish Statute”), passed in two sections in October 1940 and June 1941, excluded Jews from public life, regulated their dismissal from positions in the civil service and the military, and barred them from occupations in industry, commerce, and the free professions (including medicine, law, and teaching).

    In March 1941, the Vichy government created a central agency, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), to coordinate anti-Jewish legislation and policy. Anxious to ensure that material goods and assets confiscated from the Jewish population did not fall into German hands, the Laval government, in July 1941, instituted an extensive program of “Aryanization,” appropriating Jewish-owned property for the French state. Aryanization left most Jews in France destitute, affecting foreign Jews particularly severely. French authorities interned thousands of Jews under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps—Gurs, Saint-Cyprien, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, and Les Milles—where at least 3,000 individuals died during the war years.

    DEPORTATIONS
    Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, German authorities prepared for the deportation of Jews from France and other western European countries. The appointment of Oberg in March 1942 accelerated the process: an initial transport of more than 1,000 Jews left from Compiègne for Auschwitz on March 27, 1942. On May 29, 1942, German authorities issued a decree—to take effect on June 7—that Jews in occupied France wear the yellow star.

    After securing the agreement of the Vichy government, German officials and French police conducted round-ups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. Under the direction of Rene Bousquet, Secretary General of the Vichy police, French police arrested 13,000 Jews in Paris on July 16 and 17, 1942, interning them for several days under appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports arena. As Vichy policy dictated that initial deportation convoys from France carry only adult Jews to the East, police razzias literally tore families apart, as parents, grandparents, and elder siblings were separated from younger children at collection points and at French or German assembly camps.

    By late summer, French authorities altered their policy in favor of deporting whole families. After this time transports included children and juveniles in convoys to the east.

    By the autumn of 1942, some 42,000 Jews had passed through the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. Nearly one third of these individuals came from unoccupied France. A significant percentage of these victims were foreign or stateless Jews, sacrificed by the Vichy government in a vain attempt to spare France’s indigenous Jewish population. The final destination of these deportees was Auschwitz, where the SS murdered the vast majority by means of poison gas shortly after their arrival.

    Deportations of Jews from France in the summer and fall of 1942 spurred significant protest within the Catholic Church, a mainstay of the Petain regime, and among the general population. The brutal nature of the roundups, such as the razzia and incarceration in the Velodrome d’Hiver, stirred public anger. The initial decision to separate children from their families during the deportation process met with particular criticism.

    The calculated strategy of the Vichy administration to collaborate with German deportation efforts in order to gain more independence for unoccupied France had failed. The Petain government’s willingness to surrender foreign Jews in hopes of shielding French Jewish nationals had increasingly obligated Vichy officials to fill all deportation quotas demanded by German authorities, who did not concern themselves with the niceties of nationality and citizenship.

    ITALIAN ZONE
    In November 1942, German troops occupied Vichy’s formerly “free zone.” As German allies, Italian forces had occupied the southeastern corner of France in 1940. As elsewhere in territories they controlled, Italian authorities refused to enforce antisemitic legislation seriously, or to hand over Jews to Germans officials, despite repeated German demands. Thousands of Jews sought and received protection in the Italian zone until its occupation by German forces with Italy’s surrender in September 1943.

    RESUMPTION OF DEPORTATIONS
    German authorities reinstituted transports of Jews from France in January 1943 and continued the deportations until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished in concentration camps and killing centers—the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz—or died in detention on French soil. One third of these victims were French citizens.

    While French officials did not hesitate to meet German quotas for deportations with foreign or stateless Jews living on their soil, they were less enthusiastic in sacrificing French Jews to German demands. As deportations resumed in 1943, German administrators noted that French police seemed less committed to rounding up indigenous Jews, while Laval himself refused to strip French Jews of their citizenship to facilitate deportation. Thanks to the obstruction of French officials, the vast majority of Jews with French citizenship survived the Holocaust.

    Yet the cost paid in lives was still enormous. Historian Michael Marrus has noted that although the “’Final Solution’ in France was a Nazi project from beginning to end,” it is unlikely that German authorities would have been successful in deporting such a large number of Jews from France without the aid and cooperation of French police and administrators.

  48. 48.

    Feathers

    @brendancalling: Following knitters, sewers and other crafters on Instagram is my non-politics thing, don’t know if that will work for you. I also try to follow at least some science folk on twitter, so that not everything is politics. My twitter list grows and shrinks, but is basically all politics and knitting/sewing right now. But science blogs I like are The Science of Us, from New York Magazine, iO9, which is Gawkers science/sci fi blog, and Tor, which is science fiction/fantasy, but with a fair bit of actual science. If you are looking for Good Things for your phone, a subscription to The New Yorker is a good amount of reading of the entertaining yet educational kind, delivered weekly.

  49. 49.

    Lizzy L

    @Adam L Silverman: When I saw that he’d been picked I dropped over to Wikipedia and read through his bio. It did not give me any comfort, at all. There’s no arena of government in which I would trust this man.

    We’re about to enter Bizarro-world.

  52. 52.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just relating what Hannah Arendt says in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Not a Francophile here. Not an interested party. Just learning.

  55. 55.

    divF

    @lamh36: Perry is just reversion to the mean for Energy secretaries. For years I kept a clipping in my desk of a Washington Post editorial from the beginning of the Reagan administration excoriating the choice of James Edwards, a dentist by profession and a former governor of South Carolina.

    The Department of Energy is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to a Ministry of Science. We were very fortunate to have Moniz, a fist-class scientist and a first-class policy person. He was a key player in the negotiations with Iran.

  57. 57.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Italy is a weird and interesting case — as I mentioned, the Italian Fascists were perfectly happy to be assholes to Italian Jews and steal their stuff, but they didn’t want the Germans to take them anywhere. I’ve never seen it, but there’s a famous Italian film from the 1970s called The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis that deals with it.

    (Please note the spelling of the movie title may be slightly off.)

  58. 58.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    So she is correct that “the vast majority of Jews with French citizenship survived the Holocaust.”

    Of course, no one comes off well there. Though it appears Italy is going to be a better example of resistance.

    EDIT: The narrative is more about how the Nazis breezed through deportation of stateless Jews and over-reached when they asked for more. She’s noting a crucial error and Eichmann’s response to it.

    Something else I’ve learned is that the “Final Solution” was the third solution, of sorts. With resettlement to Israel, Madagascar, the east, etc. used as interim solutions to fool the gullible and provide a smokescreen / plausible narrative for the public while resistance could be measured.

    She notes that Eichmann was too naive to realize that the machinations of Madagascar and Israel and the deportation of foreign nationals residing in Germany was a probing campaign to test what resistance they would face when implementing larger plans. Fascinating stuff.

  61. 61.

    MoxieM

    Oh I love big dogs. Even when they’re being trouble. I was in the vet one time, and a fellow came in with one of his 4 (formerly 5!) danes–not breeders, just enthusiasts with what I assume was gigantic house. Or a small house with one gigantic room… A couple of the bitches had gotten into it, and one needed stitches (surface wound). Even with Newfies, it’s always the bitches starting trouble. I have a crafty hussy snoring in the next room.

  62. 62.

    Kropadope

    @rikyrah:

    Tom Perez is running for DNC Chair.

    Are Perez and Ellison the only candidates? I’m pretty damn happy with both of them as prospects. Whoever it is has their work cut out for him or her.

  63. 63.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dog Dawg Damn: Arendt was not a particularly good historian. She was a good political theorist/moral philosopher. There are numerous factual/historical problems with Eichmann in Jerusalem.

  64. 64.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: What you want is a book entitled Black Sabbath. It recounts the NAZI driven and backed Italian round up of the Jews of Italy. The Jews of Rome were wiped out almost to a person. Even the ones that had fled ahead of time. The reason for this is they had a distinct dialect, Judeo-Italian, that they spoke among themselves and it came with a very distinctive accent within the various accents of those from Rome. So they were easily identifiable.

  65. 65.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dog Dawg Damn: Start here:
    https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/1451651686

    Then go here:
    https://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Jews-1933-1945/dp/055334532X/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=055334532X&pd_rd_r=8YPTH5J0FPXNRY8VPJ5M&pd_rd_w=SiBHA&pd_rd_wg=uTyt6&psc=1&refRID=8YPTH5J0FPXNRY8VPJ5M

    And here:
    https://www.amazon.com/Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders-Catastrophe-1933-1945/dp/0060995076/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0060995076&pd_rd_r=X15ADYVABQ242CK19VXE&pd_rd_w=siJx7&pd_rd_wg=AeEQR&psc=1&refRID=X15ADYVABQ242CK19VXE

    And here:
    https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Europe-World-Jews-1918/dp/0205568416/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481608602&sr=1-1&keywords=Norman+J+Goda

    And here:
    https://www.amazon.com/U-S-Intelligence-Nazis-Richard-Breitman/dp/0521617944/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481608602&sr=1-2&keywords=Norman+J+Goda

    And here:
    https://www.amazon.com/HITLERS-SHADOW-Nazi-Criminals-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B008GX3SPW/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481608602&sr=1-4&keywords=Norman+J+Goda

    And finally here:
    https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481608473&sr=1-1&keywords=hitler%27s+willing+executioners

    I know Davidowicz, met her once. I also know Goda and Breitman.

  67. 67.

    Anne Laurie

    @MoxieM:

    Even with Newfies, it’s always the bitches starting trouble.

    Yeah, male-on-male doggie disagreements seem to involve a lot of “display” up front — the equivalent of two humans snarling yo momma! and hold me back! at each other, squaring up & showing hackle.

    Bitch-on-bitch, you’re lucky if you spot the raised lip before She goes after Her. And while male dogs, in general social settings, will content themselves with a lot of spittle & bitey-mouth posturing, the ladies want a souvenir (in the form of scars & or stitches).

  68. 68.

    Mnemosyne

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    Since Adam leans towards the scholarly and comprehensive, I’ll give you a book that will have the basics without being able to double as a doorstop: The Nazis: A Warning From History, which is the companion book to the BBC series of the same name. It has really good coverage of some of the more recent (as of 20 years ago) Holocaust scholarship. The vast majority of the evidence does now point to the Final Solution being a lot more ad hoc and haphazard than it was given credit for directly after the war.

  70. 70.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    True story: since G and I met through a personal ad on the internet, our first meeting was at a coffee place that I went to a lot. When he came in, I was reading a book with a big swastika on the front — I don’t remember which one, but I was reading a lot about Nazi social history for a script I was writing that never quite came together.

    And yet he came up and talked to me anyway, and here we are 16 years later. ?

  74. 74.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: Goda and Breitman are the senior historians affiliated with the US Holocaust Museum. The two books of their’s I recommended were funded by the US government and delve into what FDR knew, when he knew it, what he did about it, as well as what the US did in pursuit of intelligence superiority after the war. Davidowicz is the historian that sued and beat that idiot from England for libel over his attacks on her as part of his Holocaust denialism.

  75. 75.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Mnemosyne: Greenwald still has a lot of influence on large swaths of the left, particularly the dudebro contingent, and I guarantee I’ll be seeing this content in the coming days if Perez is a serious contender. If you prefer to ignore that, that’s fine, and I apologize for bringing it up.

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Nah, I’m just joshin’ you. It’s good to be prepared for what comes out of GG’s propaganda shop so you can counter it.

    I’m just pointing out once again that GG is either a Russian dupe or a paid operative. I don’t know which, and I’m not sure I care since the final effect is essentially the same.

  81. 81.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    So, yeah, suitable for a backgrounder and overview before the deep dive. That’s why I recommended the book.

    And did Deborah Lipstadt get married and change her name? I thought she was the one who went toe to toe with that asshole David Irving.

  82. 82.

    LesGS

    A few months ago, my boy cat, Max (~22lb ragdoll), was sleeping peacefully at my feet, when my girl cat, Wander (~8lb orange longhair), jumped up almost on top of him. He, of course, was startled, and she doesn’t like him, so they started going at it, right on top of me.

    Without even thinking about it, I whipped the face-mask of my APAP machine off my face and blasted them with a loud, jetting, hissing gust of air. They both freaked and ran, and ever since then, space sharing on my bed has been negotiated with a careful detente on both their parts.

  83. 83.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Mnemosyne: You’re right, late night brain fart. Didn’t meant to confuse her and Davidowicz. Both have written excellent histories dealing with the Holocaust.

    Clearly time for bed!

  84. 84.

    SWMBO

    @LesGS: My husband and I both have CPAP machines. It was over a year before we let the pups in on the bed because of that. Now they ignore them until I take my mask off. They leave me alone without playing or wrasslin’ on the bed while I’m sleeping. Once the mask comes off, it’s the Wrasslin’ Wallendas and they will roll each other around until I stand up. Then they take the stairs and race me to the door to go out.

  85. 85.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @lamh36:

    “[. . .] a man who couldn’t even remember the DOE as a department of the government”—that he wanted to get rid of.

  87. 87.

    Juju

    @TaMara (HFG): Thanks. That makes me laugh. I guess it makes sense. If she’s going to eat a cushion, why wouldn’t she eat a slipcover as well? What we do for our dogs. ?

  88. 88.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    The Sorrow and the Pity was on TCM about a month ago, maybe a little before the election. It is even more depressing in retrospect, in light of our current situation.

  91. 91.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Thanks for the book recommends. I’ve so far only read Rise and Fall of third Reich and the Richard Evans trilogy, which I abandoned halfway through the second book, probably due to its subject-matter organization.

    I’m going to check these out. And there is now a growing list of balloon-juice bookmarks on my browser just for book suggestions from Adam Silverman.

  92. 92.

    Redshift

    It seems one of the most persistent bits of stupidity among higher level wingnuts is the assumption that the Department of Energy must deal with the oil industry and stuff. Hard to imagine any other reason for picking Perry, especially for an uninformed “gut feeling” type of guy like Trump.

  97. 97.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Steeplejack (phone): Really? That quote was from the US Holocaust museum’s statement, above. Certainly those scholars wouldn’t categorize it as a success. Sorry if I gave off the impression that anyone does.

    You’re wrong about the distinction being obscene. It’s a historical narrative and shows how statelessness affected the outcome. An extremely important discussion to have as we see the threat of denaturalization and persecution of essentially stateless refugees rise world-wide. Not obscene at all. This is important to discuss. Citizenship can protect people. (It also cannot.) But it is worthwhile to for the younger generation to be informed as we have been down this road before.

  99. 99.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Mnemosyne:

    It’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, by Vittorio De Sica—an excellent movie—but the denouement is considerably darker then you seem to suggest. The Italian fascists were fine with the Jews being removed. The particular tragedy of the film is that the Finzi-Continis are wealthy, cultured, assimilated, so it couldn’t really happen to them, could it?

  100. 100.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Keith P.: This is hitting him hard…..I’ve been rallying people on Facebook to call Congresscritters about this.

    Even if inevitably it doesn’t do anything now, it will give the “good Republicans” an out (for themselves, which they will need, we’ll never forget), and it also legitimizes his win.

  101. 101.

    Yarrow

    @Keith P.: Joe Walsh has been all over this for awhile now. I think he’s legitimately appalled. Interesting to watch.

    @Steeplejack (phone): That’s what all of the rich, well-connected folks are thinking. The Republicans who are supporting this coup by Russia. They’ll be fine. Nothing can happen to them. They’re so naive and stupid if they think that. Nothing will protect them. The Russians don’t mess around. They are not safe. Their families are not safe.

  102. 102.

    Larkspur

    @Adam L Silverman: I suggest caution with Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. The author’s thesis – that German antisemitism was a unique, deep-seated, virulent hatred specific to the German people, who he contended were not normal Europeans – is contested by many respected scholars. When I was reading it, I wondered at his footnotes, in which he sharply criticized some leading historians like Lucy Dawidowicz and Christopher Browning, and that made me read more about Goldhagen’s book, and that made me question his contention that Germans were uniformly committed to murdering Jews and were willing and eager to do so, ever since Luther’s polemics in the 16th century. Browning and others examine the “willingness” of German participation in the genocide in terms of the effectiveness of Nazi indoctrination and the relentless pressure on the populace to passively accept, or passively endorse the process of making Germany “Judenfrei” without attributing this participation, or lack of resistance, to a uniquely Germanic obsession. It’s a worthwhile book to read because of its meticulous historical detail, but based on the objections of other scholars, I’d be wary of accepting his thesis uncritically. Or at least you should check out the intense argument that occurred after the publication of the Goldhagen book – it was a really big deal.

    Unrelated to Goldhagen, Charlotte Debro’s memoir, Auschwitz and After, is a valuable source of information about the holocaust from her experience as a French anti-Nazi resistance fighter, not Jewish, who was arrested by collaborating French police, along with other women in the resistance. (Their husbands were also arrested but were soon executed by firing squad.) This group of women were “disappeared” as victims of the Nazi “Nacht und Nebel” decree in 1941 (“Night and Fog”), which was meant to intimidate the populace by a different tactic from the sheer terrorism of executing groups of civilians in response to displays of French resistance.

    Debro and her group, who struggled mightily to stay together, ended up at Auschwitz. Many of them died from beatings, hunger, and illness, but as political prisoners, were not subject to the routine, horrific “selection” for extermination as were the Jews arriving at Auschwitz. Her memoir is extraordinary: a combination of poetry, philosophy, and stark recounting of events. She survived the war and died years later, although she sometimes felt, in the words of another survivor, that “I died in Auschwitz and no one knows it”.

    tl;dr, but do make an effort to find Debro’s book. It’s worth it.

  103. 103.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @NotMax:

    Two different subjects. The Sorrow and the Pity, while it is intimately connected with the Holocaust, has as its main subject the fact of France’s collaboration with the Nazis.

  104. 104.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the movie had anything but a dark and depressing ending. But relatively speaking, Italy was not as bad as many other places in Europe — fewer than 9,000 Jewish people were sent to concentration or death camps from Italy, and at least some of them were refugees from other areas, including Libya.

    And, as I said, the Italian fascists were perfectly happy to rob and persecute Italian Jews in Italy. They were merely unwilling to ship them away for the Germans to kill. There are documented cases of Italian soldiers stopping German convoys from leaving Italy with Jewish prisoners.

    ETA: Last note — all of this only applies until 1943, which was when the Nazis basically overthrew the Italian government and made Mussolini a puppet figurehead. That was when regular deportations began, though even then bystanders tried to thwart them.

  105. 105.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Larkspur: Such a good thread. So many literate people here.

    I wonder if Goldhagen’s Worse Than War book tackles that argument more head-on?

  106. 106.

    Mnemosyne

    @Larkspur:

    There is a documentary film by Alain Resnais called Night and Fog that Resnais assembled from actual footage from the concentration camps. It is truly horrifying, and while it is a great work of cinema, it’s something you can only watch once.

    Not coincidentally, Spielberg replicates a famous sequence from it in Schindler’s List, and it immediately gave me vivid flashbacks to the Resnais film. There’s a reason why the American filmmakers who documented what they found at the camps (including director George Stevens) were forever changed by what they saw and preserved on film.

  107. 107.

    Larkspur

    @Mnemosyne: There’s a well-researched novel by Mary Doria Russell on exactly this topic of Jews in Italy called A Thread of Grace. Really really good.
    @Dog Dawg Damn: I get so many reading tips from this place! But I haven’t read Worse Than War yet.

  108. 108.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Dog Dawg Damn:

    What is obscene is the idea that the Vichy French officials retained some shred of integrity by “protecting” Jews who were French citizens, denoted by killing or deporting a smaller percentage of them.

    Take a look at The Sorrow and the Pity. There are several full-length versions of it on YouTube; I have not vetted them to see how complete they are.

    France collaborated, by and large. And in some ways the Vichy bureaucracy and police were more “efficient” than the Germans.

  109. 109.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    @Steeplejack (phone): Definitely going to check it out. Title sounds very familiar, I may have seen it a long time ago.

    I don’t think they have dignity. Didn’t mean to convey that. Arendt certainly didn’t say that. More along lines of “oh, resistance could have worked, see, here, it worked some, should have been pursued more”.

  111. 111.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    For those who are interested, a fitting bookend to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is The Conformist, by the now universally reviled Bernardo Bertolucci. Both were released in 1970, featured Dominique Sanda and had Oscar-nominated screenplays. (Neither won.)

    The Conformist is visually stunning and tells the story of a fascist apparatchik in the years leading up to World War II.

    ETA: Trailers and possibly the whole film available on YouTube.

  112. 112.

    Pogonip

    @brendancalling: Install a Monopoly game on your phone. The bank can’t run out of money, so the game can go on as long as you need it to. My record is $29K and change.

    The Thimble seems programmed to win most of the time, so if you want more challenge, make it one of your opponents.

  113. 113.

    Larkspur

    @Mnemosyne: Don’t know if you are still checking this thread, but thanks! It means a lot coming from you because you are very smart.

    On the same topic, while I was reading about the disagreements and quarrels about the Goldhagen book, I came across some comments, but I can’t cite them because I can’t remember exactly where they were made. But the gist is that someone remarked how amazing it was that these same Germans were able to vanquish their centuries’ old ingrained eliminationist antisemitism within a few years after the war, and Goldhagen or a surrogate purportedly attributed that social victory to the great healing influence of occupation by the United States, bestowing, magnanimously, democracy and American values, and that’s why Germany is okay again now. A beautiful miracle.

    Damn. I grew up with kids whose parents had been in the camps, or had narrowly escaped them, kids whose only relatives were their parents because everyone else died. I traveled to Israel a long long time ago (1968), and the tattooed numbers on so many arms still haunt me. And the historical research still goes on. They are still finding evidence, especially in Poland, of sites of satellite camps and killing grounds they didn’t know existed.

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