Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Not Necessarily Good Posts with 12 notes
You see the ironic thing is the association with Fortunate Son is probably going to be one of the last things about the Vietnam War to fade from memory.
Like how people remembered “Remember the Alamo!” long after they, in fact, remembered the Alamo.
Do you think Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio” will last?
not nearly as long as that one photo
and mostly as trivia to it
Post with 12 notes
You see the ironic thing is the association with Fortunate Son is probably going to be one of the last things about the Vietnam War to fade from memory.
Like how people remembered “Remember the Alamo!” long after they, in fact, remembered the Alamo.
Post reblogged from Guy Typologist with 17 notes
“gen z is so loud and rude and disrespectful!” good. they might actually accomplish something.
– Gen Z
Seriously, from over-drawing lessons from the 60s – and specifically, the 90s’ reinterpretation of the 60s to flatter and intellectualize the Boomers fully coming into their own as heirs to the country, and the lessons learned under later periods built on that 90s understanding – there’s this widespread youth sense that “if I’m not getting my way, it’s because I haven’t been enough of a brat about it!”
But that understanding could only bear so much weight, the 2010s was a festival of putting too much on it, and now it’s fallen through. And the rest of society has realized it doesn’t need to placate those brats, or win an argument against them, just stop taking them seriously and let it wither on the vine. You already saw it with “defund the police”!
And reimplement the pre-60s – pre-90s, really – understanding of things, which is, “you act in a way acceptable to the rest of society, and in particular your seniors running the established order, or the hammer comes down”
Post reblogged from Maybe-Mathematical Musings with 167 notes
The drafters of the Constitution were fluent in Greek and Latin. George Washington’s speeches read like they’re in fucking Latin, translated into English.
But you know what else feels like a Latin construction?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
I wonder if this was entirely unambiguous to Madison because of how his brain parsed Latin grammar?
This had never occurred to me, but now that you mention it I can’t unsee it. The grammar looks so incredibly Latin.
The first half is an ablative absolute. The second half is a fucking gerundive. The sentence looks like it was translated from Latin, but as an exercise where you’re trying to prove you can read the Latin and so you’re not even trying to render it into idiomatic English. No wonder it’s confusing!
(This article makes the same observation, and argues that this implies the second amendment is only protecting militias; I don’t think the piece is quite right, though. It says the ablative absolute gives the “reason” for the following clause, but I think the Dickinson College link I gave, which is not trying to discuss politics, gives a better account: it’s the cause or circumstances of the following clause, which is much less specific. You can see this article arguing for the opposite conclusion and also name-checking the ablative absolute, but I think it’s a less persuasive case—even though I’m not really persuaded by the first one either.)
But yeah, no wonder the amendment seems weird. It is! It’s not really written in English.
—
But then I look at the rest of the Bill of Rights and I get basically the same vibes from all of it. It’s all super weird.
One thing I notice is how much of it is in the passive voice. The First Amendment is active (and not coincidentally probably the easiest to read and parse); the Sixth is formally active but has a lot of passive voice in it; and all the others are straight up passive voice. “No soldier shall…be quartered in any house”; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons…shall not be violated”; “Excessive bail shall not be required”; etc. You also get the sort of baroque nested clauses and running series of conjunctions that comes up a lot in Latin.
And something like the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
reads like a passage from Cicero, where he stacks up ten clauses in one sentence and you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about until you get to the end.
Post reblogged from i am reginald reagan aka RAGIN' RAYGUNS with 10 notes
i’ve read two Philip K Dick novels, both of which involved the Earth being gradually abandoned as it becomes uninhabitable, in one of them because of radioactive dust, in the other because of global warming. Recently I started on a book of his short stories, and a lot of them involve people living in the aftermath of apocalyptic wars. It seems similar, but neither of the novels involve wars. The radioactive dust in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was unexplained iirc, whereas one of the short stories I read had the world becoming uninhabitable due to radioactive fallout from a nuclear war. Anyway, more of a fixation than id realized, though idk exactly a fixation on what
Dick’s mind is really in the period from the end of WWII to the consolidation of the Cold War in the ‘50s, I’d say it’s a projection of the pre-ICBM fear of nuclear war as the inevitable third step of progression in World War strategic bombing which would finish off the entire old European system of civilization
Post with 6 notes
This bar playing Motown and Camelot-era pop and it’s like… do you realize how much of the Boomers’ senses of the ambient culture they were born into was actually derived from these Jewish songwriters ventriloquizing Negros?
Post with 2 notes
Louis & Clark Expedition setting out with a Corps of Discovery logo in the NASA “worm” style
Post reblogged from 100% Pure americanism with 105 notes
Compared to ecologically and topographically similar regions of Europe or east Asia, the northeastern United States is unusually heavily forested. One might think “well, yeah, the U.S. hasn’t been settled by agriculturalists for as long and is less densely populated, obviously there’s going to be less percent land cleared for farms,” but this is not so! Everywhere in the northeast, our forests rise from what were once old fields. In 1860, for instance, Maine was only 60% forested by land area. Today, that proportion is closer to 90%.
We owe our current landscape to two great waves (and several smaller ones) of farm abandonment. The first happened in the decades after the Civil War, when for various reasons* northeasterners (mostly from New England) packed up their pitchforks and decamped to the midwest. This had been going on before the war too, of course, but up until then it had not been in numbers enough that the northeastern farms stopped being worked. There was always a son or two left to till up more stones from the Vermont field. But that changed after the war, and the fields started to revert to oak and maple and pine. Indeed, much of the early formal scientific study of American forestry and ecology happened in these old Yankee fields and young Yankee forests, by outdoorsy young men from Harvard with names like a Lovecraft protagonist.
The second great wave was in the Great Depression and World War 2, when for various reasons** people from all the rougher sorts of terrain the east has to offer - from West Virginia to Indiana’s Brown County to the Ozarks and back to the Catskills - left their farms to come down and seek work in the then-thriving industrial cities. Much of the hilly landscape of the east that had previously been dotted with small subsistence farms, full of exactly the barefoot gap-toothed hillbillies who captured the imagination of urban popular culture with their exotic poverty and folkways when they suddenly appeared in Cleveland, or wherever, in 1933.
These pulses of farm abandonment have left very specific patterns written in the ecologies of the northeast. For instance, the fact that the poor ridgetop farms that were once extremely common in Southern Ohio and Indiana were nearly all abandoned in the 1930s and ‘40s means that the forests that now grow there are uniformly approaching their first century (excepting, of course, where there’s been logging in the meantime.) This is almost exactly long enough for the process of ecological succession to complete itself, and the forests to move into their mature phase.
And so you read books written in the '50s, '60s, or '70s about these areas, and you notice how common early successional species are, everywhere chokecherry and black birch. Whereas today the only evidence you may see of the forest’s relative youthfulness is a few very large bigtooth aspens nearing the end of their lives, surrounded by tulip poplars and chestnut oaks that will endure for many years after all the aspens are dead.
*Young men returning from war with a restlessness and a desire to leave home again; those same young men posted far from home during the war and realizing just how awful the New England soil is, lmao; Republican government policy writtrn explicitly to favor small homesteaders heading west; the late 19thc. crash in agricultural prices (as, in a few short decades, the Great Plains, the Australian wheat belt, parts of the Kazakh and Siberian steppes, the plains of South Africa, and the Argentine pampas were all put under the plow for the first time, and during an era of global free trade) making many small farms entirely unsustainable.
**Years of erosion on fields carelessly laid out on steep terrain; the Great Depression making running a small farm, ah, difficult; economic modernisation making staying as a subsistence farmer a damn foolish thing to do; new roads and automobiles making fleeing to the city easier than ever; and the TVA and other federal land grabs displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Post reblogged from Spirit Becoming a Stranger to Itself with 84 notes
I mean, the British did spend three centuries trying to genocide my ancestors and all, but they didn’t succeed and seem to have stopped trying. And it sure is convenient that we all speak their language now.
And you can hate on America all you want for literally anything else, but postwar Britain becoming a vassal state to the former British colony my great-*grandparents fled to will never not be funny to me. Hard not to read the American reception of the British monarchy as essentially “Oh, how quaint, those posh little vassals of ours have still got themselves a king, that’s adorable.” I still think they should kill him though.
I do like how America’s all gruff like “hon hon hon, our founding involved freeing ourselves from a king, so anti-monarchism is a key part of our national traditions”, and then look at the UK and be like “but not this one, this one’s quaint and charming” when like, that one was the one!
Post with 11 notes
Occasional reminder that the American intervention into WWI really was to secure our investments, American money had funded the war but it was necessary to conclude things before the European nations were totally exhausted if the loans were ever to be repaid (between the Dawes, Young, and Marshall Plans, many were not!)
Occasional reminder that America invested the payment on this debt on industrialization that first yielded the Roaring 20s boom but went on to enable the country to serve as the WWII arms-producing “Arsenal of Democracy” and produce a postwar Golden Age of consumer bounty, which is to say this expenditure of American lives to fatten bondholders’ pockets really was key, as much as (rather, continuous with, as a succession crisis of the global order) WW2, to its later global dominance and world-beating quality of life
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