The mister and I made a big mistake last night: As we were gearing up to watch President Obama on Hardball, we decided to play a drinking game with shots consumed for every time Tweety interrupted the president or worked himself, Tip O’Neill, the Peace Corps and JFK into the conversation. The shots were of a particularly high alcohol content homemade cider.
Well! Tweety compelled the president (and us) to watch a clip of a JFK speech! Which meant we had to chug cider for the duration. Things got fuzzy after that. They’re STILL fuzzy. But I thought the above clip on the Snowden leaks had something for everyone. Cheers!
Keith G
Betty, please share your recipe.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
What’s wrong with Obama? I thought you were supposed to punish yourself during Lent, not during the Christmas season.
Cassidy
Any RW freak outs over the flag being at half mast today?
bnut
Anyone in my demographic (Millenials) who doesn’t think that texts, FB, Twitter, Vine(?), etc., isn’t a) being monitored, b) going to hurt your future job prospects, c) hurt your social life, and d) going to be the laughingstock of all your children and future generations that will access it are dumber than rocks.
OzarkHillbilly
That was either very brave or very stupid. Not even sure there is a difference. Hopefully your liver will forgive you some day.
Alexandra
@Cassidy:
Yes. Over at Freepervile, some said they’re going to fly the Confederate flag instead.
Cacti
@Alexandra:
How would that be different than any other day for them?
Bob
@bnut: Sure thing. Couldn’t he, the Prez, just say “you should have no expectation of privacy.”
Cacti
Also too, unemployment dropped 0.3% in November.
Any word from the “Obamacare is killing jobs” crowd?
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
all i see is an ad for GE.
Cassidy
@Alexandra: @Cacti: Ha! I was thinking the same thing.
Funny story, since we moved back to the South, one of my daughters asked me what the flag meant, while in a crowded restaurant. The looks on the nearby occupants faces when I said “treason” was priceless.
Betty Cracker
@Keith G: It’s from valued commenter Betsy here.
Alexandra
@Cacti: @Cacti:
Not sure. Am glad I don’t have to think through the weird prisms of their bitter bigotry. Must be awfully tiring.
Visited South Africa in the early-70s as a ten-year old. For a couple of days, with the family, walked across the railyard footbridges in Cape Town, to and fro from our ship. Along those bridges were benches to sit upon, most of them labelled with Sleg Blankes (Whites Only)… something I’ll never forget.
But what I didn’t know at the time, was that only a few miles away, as I was looking at these peculiar signs, in the bay beyond where our ship was docked, Nelson Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island.
bnut
@Bob: Of course. He could also say that Israel has nukes. That we had Osama at Tora Bora. That Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture over Shakespeare In Love. Some things a President won’t say, but we all know are true.
Cacti
And for our friends across the pond…may the world also remember what a little shit the college-aged David Cameron was re: Nelson Mandela.
Cameron was a member of the Federation of Conservative Students, a group known for placing “Hang Mandela” posters on university campuses, and printing t-shirts bearing the same.
In 1989, as a 20-something, he also went on an anti-sanctions “fact finding mission” sponsored by the Tory Policy Unit and a Botha-employed lobbying firm.
mai naem
@bnut: Not in your demographic. Yes, I think it will hurt your future job prospects – you have no idea what turns off/on people. It could be something as stupid as a picture of you rock climbing and a future employer thinking that’s a dangerous sport or you being a fan of a future employers arch enemy sports team or you attending some religious event. Why hand info over to a future employer that they’ll use to discriminate against you?
mai naem
@Cacti: Wow, I saw a couple of tweets ripping him a new one but I didn’t know the background. My sister is older than Cameron and went to uni in the UK and even in the mid seventies they had corp boycotts relating to apartheid. My sis never banked with Barclays because they did business in SA.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I’m glad to hear you survived your
bravedangerous at WTF level drinking game.Patricia Kayden
@Cacti: Wow. Had no idea about Cameron’s background. Just goes to show that conservatives are douches wherever they are found.
Patricia Kayden
@Cassidy: That’s mighty brave of you. I would have feared a violent reaction.
Bob
@bnut: I think your first example, Israel and nukes, is objectively true. The other two, however, are obviously subjective.
Cassidy
@Patricia Kayden: Nah. These are my people and I know how they’ll react. It helps that I’m 6’0″ and 230.
Dead Ernest
@Cassidy:
Funny story.
Admirable too.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
Glad to have Betsy’s recipe.
Where does one get champagne or ale yeast? Health food store? Brewing supplies place?
OzarkHillbilly
@Cassidy: I’m 5’8 and 150+ (150 is my fighting weight so I say it that way so nobody knows how fat I really am these days), but I get the same priceless reactions when I say those things. People from St Louis thought I was really ballsy having a “Redneck 4 Obama” bumper sticker on my truck in 2011 but it’s not really brave, just acceptance of the price of a new windshield or 2.
bnut
@Bob: I know.
Betsy
Wowp! You is makin a lot of cider.
lurker dean
can’t believe cruz did something half decent. the wingnut tears in the comments are tasty.
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle: I get it at a brew supply place I know, but you can also order it online.
Betty Cracker
@Betsy: It’s SO much better than the dreck for sale at the grocery store and WAY cheaper! I’m a convert!
Betsy
@Betty Cracker: so glad to see the continuing promulgation of happiness. That recipe sure went a fur piece.
lamh36
Good morning.
Was listening to my daily radio program this morning and Amd Andrew Young was on talking about Mandela. It was a great chat.
Afterward Tom posed a very thought provoking question. Nelson Mandela spent all those years in prison and never once renounced his beliefs. He said he was willing to die for his beliefs, even if he died in prison.
So Tom asked the question, “What is something, cause or belief, that you would be willing to die for or endure 27 years of imprisonment for?”
The common answer was of course “my children”, but IDK I see that as the easy answer. But what if like me you have no children what then would I be willing to die for?
I’m still sitting here about 1hr later and I really have no idea what my answer is?
So I was wondering what’s yall answer? Let’s assume dying for ur kids is a given.
draftmama
We refused to watch since Tweety makes us both barf. Anyway, his thunder was completely stolen by the passing of Mandela – we could imagine him screaming – why couldn’t he have WAITED – no one is paying any attention to ME interviewing the President bwaaa
Elizabelle
@lamh36:
If people can’t find a cause bigger than their own family, there is your problem right there.
I’d say free and fair voting, wresting back control from the 1-5% and corporate media, ridding ourselves (peacefully) of the Roberts Supreme Court miscreants (corporations are people; money is free speech; voting is a privilege but gun arsenal owning is a right).
What show were you listening to? Sounds interesting.
Gene108
@Cacti:
Obamacare killed all the jobs. What you are seeing now are the zombies come back from the dead to kill the rest of us.
TS
@draftmama:
Someone on the ball would have worked out a way to have a tribute to Mandela and played the interview (which presumably was pre-recorded) at another time.
Elizabelle
@Cassidy:
Your kid is going to have some great “life with the old man” anecdotes. Maybe enough to turn professional!
Seeing the confederate flag as treason, and not as heritage, will go a long way to a fairer society. I think the heritage folks are outliers, although they swim together in a smallish pond, so it does not seem so to them.
Cervantes
@TS: I don’t know … I think they’d have been criticized either way.
OzarkHillbilly
@lamh36: Other people’s children.
Elizabelle
@OzarkHillbilly:
well said.
lurker dean
@lurker dean: hmm, not sure why the link didn’t post, try again.
http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2013-12-06/conservatives-blast-cruz-for-praising-mandela/
Southern Beale
Ohio bloggers take note:
My Ohio friends tell me Finney is an anti-tax zealot. Tax breaks for me but not for thee, same as it ever was.
TS
@Cervantes: The only people criticizing would be those who wanted to attack anything the President had to say. To me, the whole idea of cable/political media is to react to current events – which should include more than discussing and/or attacking the President of the United States. For the past 5 years the latter seems to be all that they can do.
Patricia Kayden
@draftmama: That made me laugh. I watched half of Matthews’ interview — it was okay. I’m sure it will be repeated on MSNBC in the near future.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Southern Beale: Ha ha!
Redshirt
@Cacti:
Many Bothans died to bring us this news.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think this guy may actually be dumber than Palin, even if he does manage to frame his lunacy in grammatically correct complete sentences
Cassidy
@Elizabelle: I try. Growing up was a stressful experience to say the least, so I try to make sure my kids have nice things to say in therapy. When I was a teenager, growing up here, I sympathized with the heritage outlook, but not anymore. Once I was educated on what it stood for and where it came from, there is no way I could keep understanding that.
Yatsuno
@lurker dean: It did and it didn’t. It’s a FYWP error.
And yes even Rafael has lost his sainted wingnut purity status.
cmorenc
@Elizabelle: Seeing the confederate flag as treason, and not as heritage, will go a long way to a fairer society. I think the heritage folks are outliers
Villago Delenda Est
@lamh36:
Roasting George Lucas over an open pit for his destruction of his own franchise to indulge his love for superfluous special effects over storytelling.
scav
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And doing so to attract the base that has swarmed elsewhere in a brave digital lather because Cruz said something non-ravening about the nasty socialist terrorist communist who singlehandedly brought down the edenic shangri la promised land of apartheid South Africa.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cassidy:
Well, the historical facts are that they declared their whole section of the country was no longer part of the United States, then invaded the United States, because they demanded that black people could not be free anywhere in the United States. Yep, sounds like treason.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Actually, I think this is the core of current wingnut thought. Obamacare is the evidence and symbol of Obama’s power. If it can’t be destroyed, then a black man is more powerful than they are. In their twisted hate freak minds, that means they’re second class citizens and blacks are about to do to them what they so gleefully did to blacks.
EDIT – @Villago Delenda Est:
I disagree. Lucas proved long ago that he will turn his magnum opus into a whore – and a cheap whore at that – for any buck offered. He has no respect for his own continuity whatsoever, creating or allowing others to create hordes of merchandise spinoffs no two of which agree, all with his official approval. He’s even declared some of them officially canon, then gone back on it. As a writer, I loathe him.
Patrick
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Of course it is. Giving people with pre-existing conditions the chance to finally obtain health insurance is, if anything, worse than apartheid. And just like Mandela, people who are against Obamacare, have been in prison for decades.
Yes, indeed the fight against Obamacare is exactly like the fight against Apartheid…
Ben Cisco
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: HOEKSTROIKA!!
handsmile
Two opinion pieces/tributes on the death of Nelson Mandela from writers one would expect to be incisive, reflective, rewarding:
Gary Younge: “Mandela was never a revolutionary, always a radical”:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/06/mandela-radical
(The Guardian’s website, of course, is replete with articles, photo displays, live blogs, etc. on the life, death, and legacy of Mandela.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Apartheid’s Useful Idiots”:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/apartheids-useful-idiots/282114/
(Importantly, Coates punctures the sanctimony and historical white-washing so evident in much of the Village media coverage of Mandela’s death by lacerating today’s WSJ editorial on the subject.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Obama, President Blackmun, Democrats, liberals, yeah. The roots of the irrational hatred varies, but Republican opposition to Obamacare has little or nothing to do with the actual content of the law. Brian Beutler had a good piece the other day framing Obamacare as the new battlefield in the culture war
Chris
@cmorenc:
Weren’t a lot of those bubba-rednecks actively against the Confederacy? Especially in the mountain areas like West Virginia, East Tennessee, and the west of Georgia and the Carolinas? I remember reading that it was only after the war that these groups bought into the Confederate mythology. (Makes no sense, but then neither do the people who fly Confederate flags north of the Potomac – and there are MANY of them).
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Obamacare IS Obama. It’s a black man in charge who wants to help people, especially the poor. They can’t separate it and him. Obamacare and Obama are everything they abhor, and they’re terrified of this new world that they don’t control.
Elizabelle
@Cassidy:
My BIL, great guy — truly, still believes the “it was states’ rights” argument. Raised in the confederate states.
Wonder how long it will take him to lose that one.
Good on you for evolving quicker.
(I bought him a copy of “What this cruel war was over” for Christmas, but open to suggestions on a less scholarly book that makes the same point …)
Redshirt
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’d go with “Being digested in the belly of the Saarlac for a thousand years”.
Elizabelle
@handsmile:
Take it away, Ta Nehisi. Post wasn’t up when I checked earlier. Over to check it out. Thank yew!
Elizabelle
@cmorenc:
Linky, please. Looks worth a closer look.
kindness
@Cassidy: My family lost kin on both sides in the war (Virginia). I grew up up north so I didn’t have an issue with thinkin’ like a Yankee. My wife’s family does have several good ole Okie boys in it. We’ve come to a truce. They no longer use the N word in my presence and they know I won’t take any of their shit when they say the brain dead things they say. So they don’t say all that much at the family gatherings any more. Took a while to get to this spot though. They did not like hearing what I had to tell them. Too bad for them.
handsmile
@Villago Delenda Est:
Never took you to be a man who would suffer for art. True aesthetes are so rare nowadays, mon semblable, mon frere!
Elizabelle
@Frankensteinbeck:
They might get some fight out of Kentucky. Bluegrass State denizens are thrilled to get some decent healthcare.
A Democratic governor saw that their state website works well, and word is getting out.
Hope that causes conniptions for Turtle McConnell.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
Good read (TNC). Glad that there are people calling out the assholes who supported Apartheid and are now canonizing Mandela for the lying sacks of shit they are.
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle: Just send him a link to the CSA constitution. It’s all right there.
Elizabelle
How does the wingnut Americanus, confederate class, square characterizing Nelson Mandela as a communist terrorist, now to be reviled on [unmoderated] newspaper comment sites and wingnut blogs, when he went on to become a beloved president of his nation?
While also characterizing Robert E Lee as a patriot, and a soldier’s soldier, noble cause, blah blah blah.
One of these is not like the other.
Betty Cracker
@handsmile: From TNC’s piece:
I didn’t expect that from the senior senatortoise from KY…good for him.
hitchhiker
@Elizabelle:
Which right were they trying to protect?
I’ve had this conversation with a number of friends raised in the south, and I always ask this question when the states rights/not slavery rationale comes up.
Cassidy
@Elizabelle: Like Betty said. There’s too many records and archived correspondence to say it wasn’t about slavery. I’m of the belief that anyone who says otherwise knows that, but they’re still trying to convince themselves otherwise.
@kindness: I’m a first generation Southerner. My family is transplanted from Ohio thanks to the US Navy, but I’ve been raised here. That has a lot to do with my evolution as the bigoted aspects of being Southern wasn’t in my house growing up.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker:
For you to understand, maybe. (sigh)
[memo to self: hunt down CSA constitution, if only for entertainment value]
To give my BIL props, he did vote for Obama in 2008. And then back to Romney in 2012, because Obama had not solved all our problems in the time allotted him. By my BIL.
Not a gentleman well versed in historic or current events, but a fine person, even so.
(He voted Democratic in our recent Virginia gubernatorial elections. FYI, formal recount for AG to begin around December 18, I believe.)
Elizabelle
@hitchhiker:
Um, tariffs, right?
Agreed. It’s like debating whether water is wet. He’ll get there one of these days. If we all live long enough …
Drive By Wisdom
I see Obama has rediscovered the illegal alien uncle he lived with that he says he never knew.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: Sure. He just never imagined such a thing might happen in this country some day.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Mustard was once a new battlefield in the culture war, simply because the black president liked it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
I live in Kentucky, and spent all of my adolescence here. The state seethes with hate. My guess is that the majority will cling to what Obamacare has given them while still frothing at the mouth about the need to repeal Obamacare. They won’t see any conflict.
Cassidy
@Elizabelle: Honestly, I’ve got several friends who believe the same way and they’re not active bigots. The whole thing has been romanticized.
Elizabelle
@Cassidy:
Maybe I’ll give him a DVD of “Django Unchained”. Gets past the moonlight and magnolias real quick.
Now with 250% more blood splatter too.
“12 Years a Slave” is harder to watch, because not the humorous deflections and killer soundtrack. [ETA: Duh. And a real story based on a real person.]
It is something to marvel at, romanticizing a society based on slavery. Yet it was accomplished.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck:
OK, we may not concur entirely about the nature of the crime (but you make a strong case for your indictment) but we do agree that some sort of sanctions are required here?
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle:
Four words:
Gone With The Wind.
Chris
@Elizabelle:
Bingo. In my experience, they usually babble something about tariffs.
handsmile
@Betty Cracker:
Agree on both the expectation and the kudos. Now I wonder if Matt Bevin will attack him for the heresy. (and if so, whether McTurtle will reconsider)
Cassidy
@Elizabelle: Yeah. Fiction and nonfiction both depict the generals as educated noble gentlemen fighting for what they believe in and all that garbage.
Mnemosyne
@handsmile:
Reading about Mandela today, many conservatives were and still are in denial about what his actual aim and goal was: racial equality, not revenge. Mandela stayed focused on that goal his whole life and was willing to use any means (including, yes, violence) to reach that goal.
As I said yesterday, what conservatives are so pissed off about is that they were wrong about Mandela and his ability to negotiate peace. Wrong in every part, on every count, absolutely and indisputably wrong. And there is nothing they hate more than that.
Frankensteinbeck
@Villago Delenda Est:
Absolutely. This is truly a bipartisan issue.
Villago Delenda Est
@hitchhiker:
They certainly weren’t in favor of the rights of states that prohibited slavery from imposing their laws on escaped slaves.
So much of the modern popular notion of the Civil War (aka War of Northern Aggression) was shaped by revisionist crap that was offered up before the ink was dry on Lee’s signature at Appomattox.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne: You’d think they’d be used to it.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
One fought to change the status quo, the other fought to preserve the status quo. Therefore, the preserver of the status quo is the hero. QED.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
Well, let’s be brutally frank here.
The “conservatives” don’t like the idea of egalitarianism, be it based on skin color, place of birth, whose uterus you popped out of, or how big your daddy’s bank account is, one bit. And that’s what Mandela was obviously aiming for.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Honestly, I don’t think they are used to being proven wrong, because they almost always manage to find some loophole, some wiggle room to prove that they were the ones who were right all along. Look at the post-Iraq the dirty hippies were right for the wrong reasons rationalizations. There’s always some secret reason or way that conservatives were the ones who were right the whole time.
Unlike, say, their claims about abortion or evolution, we have factual proof that they were wrong that they have no way to contest. That’s what’s pissing them off.
burnspbesq
OT, breaking news: US hosed in World Cup draw. Germany, Portugal, Ghana.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq:
“Hosed” is not strong enough. Germany is certain death.
As certain as the Chudley Cannons finishing at the bottom of the league.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
The ability of losers, let alone separatist traitors, to write the history books and claim uber-patriot status remains one of the weirdest and most fucked-up aspects of American politics for me.
Say what you want about the tenets of Corsican nationalism, Dude, at least I don’t have to listen to them talk my ear off about how they’re the Frenchest Frenchmen who ever French’d (let alone write the history books for the entire republic). Ditto their Irish, Basque and other counterparts in other countries. There’s something truly bizarre about the level of American deference, even subservience, to the country’s most infamous separatist movement.
Elmo
@Chris:
I usually counter with, Which states were trying to impose their values on the others by force of law? Does the Fugitive Slave Act ring a bell?
People in the North were subject to forcible conscription, dragooned into service to find and return Southerners’ escaped property – against their will and against the laws of their own states. Tell me again about states rights.
Patrick
@Villago Delenda Est:
Don’t forget Portugal with Ronaldo. Will be very tough to finish in the top 2.
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
Indeed, that is a very laudable position, and a laudable statement.
Wonder what happened to him since then? Re-education camp? A trip to Manchuria to rewire his brain?
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
Actually, it’s more recent than that — the Dunning School of revisionism about the Civil War arose during the wave of white supremacism that happened in the early 1900s. That’s also when the worst of the Jim Crow laws were passed. Virginia didn’t codify the “one drop rule” until 1924, in large part because of the new “science” of eugenics.
Revisionists like to pretend that it’s all oh-so-historical, but most of it happened well after the war ended.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patrick:
Indeed.
For Team USA, it’s kick the ball around a bit when required to, and seek out as much local tail as possible when not kicking the ball around to make for a good experience.
handsmile
@Elizabelle:
Don’t know (but suspect not) if this is any “less scholarly,” but this book comes highly regarded from my American historian friends, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-House-Dixie-Transformed/dp/1400067030
I’ll assume if your b-i-l has an interest in the Civil War, he’s read/familiar with James McPherson’s magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, the one essential book on the subject.
And while not specifically on the topic of its causes, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight is my own favorite book to give to those with that interest. Blight examines social/cultural interpretations of the Civil War in both the North and South (and now nation-wide) from the immediate postwar period to the present day.
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Reunion-Civil-American-Memory/dp/0674008197
Also too, your link (#60) goes to the Ambrose Bierce Project! I am absolutely thrilled to learn about this!
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
Oh, I meant that the foundations for all those events were laid right after the conclusion of the suppression of the rebellion, in which the existence of the “peculiar institution” was merely a sideshow to the legitimate grievances of “state’s rights” and oppressive tariffs harshing cotillions.
It was an ongoing process.
Ben Cisco
@Betty Cracker: Yertle, before the walls fell.
? Martin
@Cassidy:
FFS, most of the articles of secession specifically and unequivocally say it was about slavery. Here’s what Florida had to say:
The Tea Party vocabulary today is different, but the message hasn’t changed one iota.
scav
Well, the nice safe thing about having Lost that War and Cause is all the low caste crackers can imagine the lost golden age that never really was when the gennelmen with the acreage and porticos accepted them as social equals instead of the barely noticed paler riff-raff trusted to go off and tote rifles for the propertied class.
and OT Brilliance! in Climatology Today award goes to Profs Lunt and Radagast the Brown of Bristol University for modelling Middle Earth climates and providing Dwarvish and Elvish translations of same.
Continuing to speak of mythical lands, bien sûr. The other, of course, involves Orcs.
? Martin
@burnspbesq:
If they’re hosed by that draw, then they were hosed the moment they qualified.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
Conservatives like to pretend that their ‘family values’ are traditional, but they’re all products of the 1950s. Before the 50s extended families were the norm, not nuclear. Homosexuality was an embarrassment, not a horrible crime. We’d already had the sexual revolution around 1920, and while women weren’t economically or politically equal, they had sexual freedom that rivals (although very different in details) today. Only those evil papists were completely freaking out about sexual degeneracy in our culture.
Villago Delenda Est
@scav:
The essence of modern “conservatism”…the pining to “get our country back” from its resting place in the fiction section of the local library.
handsmile
@burnspbesq: et al
Hard to see how it’s not three games and home. June 26 (USA v. Portugal) will be the key match in all likelihood.
Argentina, Belgium, and France all blessed by the football gods in the group stage draw.
And whether it will Spain or Holland atop Group B is the tastiest dish of all.
ETA: Martin (#105): with respect, um, no.
srv
Just have any states-rights nut read these articles of secession:
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html
Georgia:
That would be slavery.
MIssissippi:
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: True, but it’s more likely to be in with the old videotapes, not those complicated elitist things with spines ‘n’ letters ‘n’ all — and that’s if they’ll patronize the socialist shared-thing community institution at all! Minor quibble.
Another Holocene Human
@bnut: Any Millennial that can’t manipulate the fuck out of privacy settings IS an idiot.
My generation used munging and pseuds.
Isn’t your generation rather ambivalent towards Facebook (which is constantly dicking with those settings without user consent) also, too?
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck:
LOLWUT?
catclub
@Chris: I suspect all those groups, except for the South, were not fighting for the rights of the upper class.
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
I understand about flappers and all, but it wasn’t until the birth control pill came along that freed women from their own biology in regards to sex.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
Swear to god. Women were allowed to sleep around, and if anything guilted less about it.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
You wouldn’t believe it after the crackdown of the 1950s, but he’s right. The Pill of the 1920s was the diaphragm. The organization that would become Planned Parenthood was founded in 1916.
It’s the strong media censorship that started in 1934 that makes you think differently about the past. In practical terms, a woman in 1930 had more sexual freedom than one in 1950.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
And the media censorship was a sop to keep the Catholics from boycotting. The rest of the nation cared far less.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
Nope. It was the diaphragm. The Pill gets more press because it was invented after the Comstock Laws that prohibited distribution of information about birth control were repealed, but the diaphragm was the first real step in separating sex and pregnancy.
MikeJ
@handsmile:
For people that are really interested, Blight’s lectures from his class at Yale are all available online.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
I sit corrected.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne:
That may be so, but to claim sexual freedom in the 1930s rivals today’s strains credulity. Mine, anyway.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
Why? If you want to see social attitudes in action, compare television and books now with movies and books in the 30s. Lots of women flirting with the specific intention of non-marital sex, and without the constant implication that women who have sex are sluts. Go back before the Hayes Commission, and you’ll see a lot more than just flirting.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Come read my blog! No, seriously, the films of the early 1930s are pretty shocking to today’s eyes, because you have women who have sex (and even babies) out of wedlock who are not punished at the end of the film. Sympathetic prostitutes, and not because they have hearts of gold. Barbara Stanwyck spitting, “I’ll hate you till the day I die!” at the father who’s been prostituting her since she was 14.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
That makes sense to me. I would imagine that in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the memory would probably still be raw enough that Northerners, particularly all the veterans, would be infuriated to see a popular narrative coddling the traitors that they’d just spent four years fighting and bleeding to put down in order to save the Union. The farther the memory of the war, the easier the revisionism.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne:
And of course, Mae West.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: One often sits up a little straighter after realizing one has actually learned something unexpected. Me, too.
Ben Cisco
@Villago Delenda Est:
Brilliant! Imma go ahead and “borrow” this…
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
Absolutely.
Had a thought last night about the term linked. As in we are all linked together in life. Thinking only of one’s self breaks that link. Conservatism breaks that link by only looking backwards towards what might have been or never was, and never forward about what could be, and be better.
The broken link is much harder to repair than to maintain a continuous link. And that is where we are as a country now. The link between all of us is broken, by the last 60 yrs of conservatism, not that it wasn’t always trying to break it. I’ve just never understood what the point of conservatism is. Because it never looks forward, like time or life actually work.
Mnemosyne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Heck, there’s a whole slew of early 1930s actresses who are mostly forgotten today, led by Norma Shearer. After seeing her in films like The Divorcee or A Free Soul (where she sleeps with gangster Clark Gable for kicks, refuses to marry him, and is exonerated at the end of the film), her role in The Women looks like punishment.
ETA: I really need to get back to my Pre-Code blog, don’t I?
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Hard for them to see the error of their ways with their heads up their asses.
Shorter:
When you have shit in your eyes the whole world stinks and you hate the color brown.
handsmile
@? Martin:
This isn’t at all important and you may have well left the premises, but the flippancy of my reply to you (#109) began to bug me (in defense, it was the last seconds of the WP edit limit) so….
While I don’t have a high opinion of the USMNT, their chances of success at the 2014 World Cup could have been much improved by being part of a less competitive group in the initial stage of the tournament. e.g., Group C:
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/dec/06/england-world-cup-2014-draw-brazil-italy-manaus
Germany is, by all accounts, at least one of the two best teams in the world now and Portugal is a stronger, better-balanced, far more experienced squad than the US. There are a number of other nations who have qualified for the tournament (e.g., Australia, Iran, Algeria, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Cameroon, Honduras) against which the US would be much better matched for victory. As Ghana has had a poor qualifying campaign, it is now expected that the US will end up third in that group next summer.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: Short answer (because I’m too busy for a longer one at the moment — stupid job!): Without economic freedom, there’s no real sexual freedom, at least not for us ladyfolks.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Even that was (a little) better pre-1950s, though. A little worse during the height of the Depression, much better during the war when employers couldn’t be picky about the gender of their employees and still meet wartime production goals.
Post-War, women were pressured to leave the workplace to make room for returning veterans, and a lot of them were vocally unhappy about it, to no avail at the time. Stephanie Koontz has some really good books about this, especially The Way We Never Were.
ETA: To be clear, the 1930s and 1940s were economically better for women than the 1950s, not better than today. Though a lot of women war workers were nostalgic for the free daycare their kids got during the war.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
Shorter me overall: one of the reasons conservatives long for the 1950s is that it was a low point for women’s rights. A lot of the advances that had been made were reversed.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
The arc of history is long, but it’s not an arc – it’s a fucking zig-zagging line that’ll make your eyes bleed if you look at it for too long, where you hope that the average point on the zig-zagging line bends more in a justicey direction than not over the long run.
Same with rights for black people. Things are shit during slavery, then get much better during Reconstruction, then much worse during the Gilded Age, then even worse than that during the early twentieth century, then better with the civil rights victories of the fifties and sixties, then reverse course again with the white backlash, the war on drugs, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and then you get to the present day where there’s a black man in the White House and nonwhites, if not blacks, are becoming a voting force too large for white racists and milquetoast moderates to ignore anymore.
The basic idea is to make sure that the “backlash” periods don’t take you so far away from the “justice” direction that they completely overwrite the “victory” period that came before.
? Martin
@handsmile:
Don’t worry about it. I didn’t take it personally.
My attitude here is that if the likelihood of a team making it to the end depends on a weak draw and a sufficient layout such that the other stronger teams take each other out before you have to face them, then you were fucked before you showed up. You aren’t the best team if you are relying literally, on the luck of the draw to get you to the end.
Betsy
@Cassidy: heh. Just because the cat had kittens in the oven, doesn’t make them biscuits.
‘St sayin’
Kathleen
@Southern Beale: Finney is a teabagger who has insinuated his way into Cincinnati City government via Councillman Chris Smitherman and new “Democratic” mayor John Cranley. Finney’s anti-tax group COAST has been actively campaigining against Cincinnati’s streetcar, which now has been put “on hold”. Stopping the street car was the platform Smitherman and Cranley ran on. COAST also provided money (as did Rethuglicans) to elect Cranley, who has been trying to distance himself from both. It will be a very long 4 years.
Socoolsofresh
Ha, amazing. No one on this thread is talking about the subject of this post. I guess you guys feel if you ignore it enough, the issue will go away. Or I guess people are so upset with Obama admitting that Snowden might have raised legitimate concerns that people just can’t handle it since it doesn’t fit their narrative. Whatever, you guys continue to be hilarious.
jc
What’s really scary to think about is what that interview would look like if Bush were president when Snowden revealed his secrets.
And how do you trust someone who had a huge secret that they had no intention of telling you? Oh, I forgot to mention that I’ve installed a telescope that looks into your bedroom, but I promise I’ll never peep at you late at night. Trust me.
liberal
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yeah. My dad was dealt a real blow when his grandmother died when he was 13, because she was to some extent the person who raised him, not his mother (who was around but working).
fuckwit
Cassidy: you win one (1) internet