ultramega posted:imagine putting donald trump in the same category of world-historical figure as napoleon or hegel. can't wait for the official hagiographies and soft-pedalled biopics.
ultramega posted:imagine putting donald trump in the same category of world-historical figure as napoleon or hegel. can't wait for the official hagiographies and soft-pedalled biopics.
given the climate cliff-edge we're already half-over, trump is actually more significant by some distance than napoleon
psychicdriver posted:odo and quark are gay.
bashir and garak are gay. dukat is gay for sisko but sisko is not gay for him. kira and dax, are gay. o'brien and bashir are straight but with mutual JO no eye contact
trakfactri posted:This is morbid to note but I rent a place in a neighborhood full of elderly people who have been heading off to meet their maker at a steady clip. A company runs estate sales at most of these properties so I, like a horrible furniture vampire, have filled my pad with their furniture bought at affordable prices; an '80s vintage alarm clock, etc. Anyways you're usually guaranteed to see one of these presidential hagiographies sitting on a shelf. One guy went down in a plane crash (he was the pilot) and had his Bush books along with titles like "MiG Alley: Air War Over 'Nam" and the collected works of Tom Clancy.
i live near a surprisingly good secondhand book store and all the political hagiographies / autobiographies of obscure Australian politicians (who werent that obscure in their time of course) are the ones that never, ever, ever sell. like there's a Don Chipp autobio that's been sitting there for at least the 7 or so years i've been going there. kinda curious about some of them to be honest. i got a couple things written by Jim Cairns to satiate this curiosity but i doubt i'll ever actually read them.
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i live near a surprisingly good secondhand book store and all the political hagiographies / autobiographies of obscure Australian politicians (who werent that obscure in their time of course) are the ones that never, ever, ever sell. like there's a Don Chipp autobio that's been sitting there for at least the 7 or so years i've been going there. kinda curious about some of them to be honest. i got a couple things written by Jim Cairns to satiate this curiosity but i doubt i'll ever actually read them.
There's a bookstore like that in my area. The presidential hagiography business might be more of an American thing. Dunno really. I know this old-school Kennedy Democrat in her eighties and I remember seeing her rack of hagiographies and memoirs of the Kennedys, Clintons and Obama in her apartment. Mostly books about Frank Sinatra, though, which along with her love for Democrats means she idolizes white-collar criminals instead of blue-collar ones like the people who put up posters of Al Pacino in Scarface.
toyotathon posted:reading about what the teens are up to, http://joshuacitarella.com/_pdf/Politigram_Post-left_2018_short.pdf
i'm not sure that any significant fraction of teenagers anywhere in the world would have any idea what this stuff is
cars posted:really, that document reminds me more than anything of the "post-left" anarchist Internet circa 1999-2000, meaning, before today's teens were even born
it's so quaint lol
cars posted:really, that document reminds me more than anything of the "post-left" anarchist Internet circa 1999-2000, meaning, before today's teens were even born
the retro angle
toyotathon posted:reading about what the teens are up to, http://joshuacitarella.com/_pdf/Politigram_Post-left_2018_short.pdf
we've all been waiting for an explanation of the internet left by guys who have worms in their brain, and its finally here
psychicdriver posted:cars posted:really, that document reminds me more than anything of the "post-left" anarchist Internet circa 1999-2000, meaning, before today's teens were even born
the retro angle
they're even politically degenerate pro-pedophiles, though I suppose that's inevitable when you adopt lederhosen romance such as "deep green", primitivism, stirnerism, etc... first as tragedy, then as farce. Speaking of, you know who else was really into German romanticism,
cars posted:the Recycle Bin of history
dont think i'd ever seen it conceptualised this way well done
kinch posted:theres some usenet community from 1988 linking to the rhizzone and laughing about how behind the times we are
That's the charm, ya humbugs!
blinkandwheeze posted:in two years these kids will suddenly discover Hardt & Negri lol.
The New York Times, 05/10/2016: When Jimmy Kimmel asked Hillary Clinton in a late-night TV interview about U.F.O.s, she quickly corrected his terminology.
“You know, there’s a new name,” Mrs. Clinton said in the March appearance. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “U.A.P. That’s the latest nomenclature.”
Known for her grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential campaign on topics as diverse as Alzheimer’s research and military tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of voters.
“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials.
Mrs. Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.
She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51, the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub where the government stores classified information about aliens and U.F.O.s.
In a radio interview last month, she said, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” Asked if she believed in U.F.O.s, Mrs. Clinton said: “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.”
In 1996, Mrs. Clinton was ridiculed after Bob Woodward reported, in his book “The Choice,” that as first lady she had held discussions with her deceased role models, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The tabloid Weekly World News dreamed up sensational headlines about Mrs. Clinton’s adopting an alien baby and having a “U.F.O. love nest.”
The Clinton presidency also coincided with the hit television series “The X-Files” and movies like “Independence Day,” which gave way to an era of fascination with the existence of aliens and the possibility of a government cover-up.
Mr. Podesta , an “X-Files” fanatic, ran a fan club for the show in the Clinton White House. “The ‘X-Files’ fan club would like to invite you and Mulder to lunch at the White House. Don’t let the boss know,” he wrote in a 1998 email, referring to the show’s fictional F.B.I. agent Fox Mulder, according to White House documents. In 1999, Mr. Podesta had an “X-Files”-themed 50th birthday party that the Clintons attended.
When Mr. Podesta left the White House last year, he posted on Twitter: “Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the U.F.O. files. #thetruthisstilloutthere.”
Mr. Podesta declined to comment for this article.
Mrs. Clinton, who speaks frequently about her childhood aspirations to be a NASA astronaut, has been sympathetic to Mr. Podesta’s efforts.
In 1995, when she was photographed visiting Laurance S. Rockefeller, a billionaire philanthropist, in Jackson Hole, Wyo., she had tucked under her arm a copy of “Are We Alone?: Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life,” by Paul Davies.
Her interest in UFOs and communicating with spirits I thought was quirky ... and added personality. Very funky and '70s. Better than "Wall Street warhawk." Her campaign should've played it up more IMO.
The Congressman in that transcript is technically wrong, because while I.S. Shklovsky and Carl Sagan were friends (Shklovsky is obviously the main inspiration for the USSR astronomer in Contact) and Sagan got a lot of shit for palling around with Communists, the book with their names on their cover isn't really a collaboration.
Instead, it's Paula Fern's English translation of Shklovsky's Universe, Life, Intelligence—published four years earlier by the USSR science press—with substantial interpolations by Sagan to update and comment on the material, all of which are set apart visually and unmistakably from the translated text by printed symbols used as brackets. Some of the contents are years out of date given later discoveries in planetary science, but those parts are easy for laypersons to spot, and it's a good, hard-nosed overview of both the topic and what questions experts wanted to investigate during the early years of planning exploratory space programs.
It's also pretty fun because Sagan and Shklovsky were fun guys who liked to get fucked up, so both they take a little time to discuss what they thought at the time to be the most plausible of the weirder and wilder speculations about extraterrestrial visitations in prehistory, though it's all very tongue-in-cheek given the UFO skepticism shared by Sagan and pretty much the entirety of Soviet Union academia, including Shklovsky. (Sagan talks about the possibility that a Sumerian fish-god was a visitor from another world, while Shklovsky discusses, in a pre-Mars-exploration context, how then-current estimations of the density of one of Mars's moons could be explained if it were a hollowed-out space station in disguise.)
A big reason I recommend the book is that it's hard to find texts like it in English outside of opportunistic excerpts from lurid post-Soviet-era journalism. But in Intelligent Life in the Universe, rather than cut a bunch of stuff aimed at a USSR audience from Shklovsky's existing text—including statements about the priorities of the U.S. space program that would have alarmed a lot of English-language readers in 1966—Sagan and Fern leave it all in there, and Sagan explains in his introduction that he figures people reading the book are smart enough to figure things out for themselves. That probably didn't do him a lot of favors among the Red-baiters after him who bothered to investigate his connections to his USSR colleagues in that much detail.
toyotathon posted:caliban hits all 3 of those w/ the colonial interaction in the andes and brazil like forcing women to follow behind their men on the way to the mines, and exporting the witch trial method to the southern americas, and women's methods for preserving banned culture in secret, transition of the medical profession in post black death era, and the focus of the book is a history of women in witch trial times and the class interaction (^ birthrate after black death) to keep the peasantry hungry again and grow the population to the limit.
thx for the response. makes me wanna read it all the more.