i cannot get over how quickly this is happening. the decline of the other two branches/ascent of the lawless executive is outpacing actual democratic decline, which is usually what precipitates executive consolidation. but in our case, the other two branches are collaborators

ICE is at once Trumpism in its purest form and the endpoint of its progenitor, G*mergate: unqualified 22-year-old couch potatoes, failsons, and self-styled madmen given weapons and complete impunity to play IRL video games with people's lives, to ruin personal enemies or anyone who disdains them.

Precisely the person Justice Kavanaugh said would not be inconvenienced.

my model of marjorie taylor greene is not that she is a committed bigot but that she is a person with a severe axis ii disorder with no fixed beliefs unrelated to her present set of resentments

Most needful of all would be different personnel...

There's a hidden vein of ugly Malthusianism buried just beneath the surface of a lot of this shtick...

tom buchanan should have said this to jay gatsby

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law"

Declaration of Independence: "For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever."

That's fine. I just think it's badly oversold, and that tendency is of a piece with the general steelmanning by pop historians of the cultural and material products of the Nazi regime, whether done in attempt to make the defeated foe more fearsome, or the acquiescence of collaborators less damning.

I'm arguing that there is little novelty in Riefenstahl's technique that had not already been evident in, e.g., Demille or Berkeley's use of set pieces, shot framing, etc. What distinguishes Riefenstahl is having made THE propaganda film for THE dictator people would remember for the next century.

When the truth of the matter, of course, is that these regimes took hold because of callous stupidity, moral cowardice by those who knew better, and mindless resentment turned against easy targets. The death and cruelty weren't a price paid for material goods: they were the ends in and of themselves

In this, it's rather like the illusory reputation of fierce competence for the Wehrmacht, the canard about Italian trains running on time, etc.: ex-post-facto justifications pleading the supposed allure and persuasive power of totalitarian regimes in morally neutral, practical, or exculpatory terms.

It's a holdover from the Victorian age of overwrought solemnity porn...

It really isn't anything special. It serves as an exemplar of propagandistic cinematography mostly because of the speech scenes, but most of the work there was being done by the stadium architecture and rally decorations, and the shot framing was rather rote.

Multiple sources tell NPR that, as part of the Trump administration's latest reduction-in-force, the U.S. Department of Education has gutted the office that handles special education. n.pr/48stHUo

really striking the degree to which not a single person working in the trump administration appears to be interested in serving the american people

Ooh! Thanks for the rec!

As a person who likes being able to recite Chaucer's Prologue as a parlor trick—with what my professor called "the facility of a native speaker" of Middle English—adding Early Modern English to my repertoire, so I can follow it on with some sonnets, would be cool as hell...

I love the work David and his son Ben have done with OP! I was considering buying the dictionary Ben made with the OP for every word appearing in Shakespeare.

I think we favor literature featuring tragedy, trial, and tribulation at the expense of literature depicting farce, comedy, joy, and wonder. We have come to believe the only truly profound literature is dreary and heart-wrenching. Escapism is discouraged, and this is a mistake.

the far left : poverty is always bad and getting worse :: the far right : crime is always bad and getting worse

once you notice this you can't unsee it

and it makes it impossible to take credit for movement on either of these issues because what are you, insensitive to those suffering?

Nevertheless, if reigniting interest in these works is the goal, making an action packed tale of war and betrayal, a saga of monster slaying, or a tale of love, loss, and magic all sound equally like your grandma's Bible is probably not the way to do it.

This is painful, inasmuch as I find the lofty English of the 19th and Early 20th centuries to be beautiful and precise, and as much as I feel we should be educating young people to be comfortable in multiple registers of their native language and able to code-switch.