By David Futrelle
Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a couple of days; I’ve been taking care of some personal stuff (nothing dramatic, just very time-consuming). But there’s so much going on in the world I thought I’d put up an open thread.
Talk about Trump’s shittiness, the shutdown, the dueling Fyre Festival documentaries, the blizzard here in the US, or maybe those snot-nosed racist high school students harassing Native American elder Nathan Phillips, a veteran conducting a ceremony to honor the war dead in DC
On that last point, here are some videos; watch only if you are ready to be enraged. The students, from a Catholic high school, were in DC for the “March for Life,” evidently ran into Phillips by chance, and decided to harass him for being Native American, I guess.
On a somewhat lighter note, there was the whole Ben Shapiro/Baby Hitler thing. Here are several , er, enhanced versions of his remarks at the March for Life on the classic time-travel quandary — “would you kill Hitler when he was a baby?”
Despite Ben’s qualms about killing baby Hitler, he doesn’t actually give a shit about babies and other civilians from enemy countries killed in wars.
In other news:
Speaking of crappy food:
White people shouting “build the wall” at an indigenous person doesn’t really sell the notion that the white race is superior.
The word Backpfeifengesicht was made for little shits like that one in the photo with the Native American man.
Given how much the right likes to talk about supporting the troops and veterans that punk should be in so much trouble from them right . Odds are they’ll flip it to some how blame the left by saying the liberal education systems teaches kids to disrespect veterans and the military with some place like infowars claiming he was a Saros funded false flag.
Snot nosed little shits intimidating people seems to be that schools forte.
http://www.iowastatedaily.com/roe-v-wade-years-later/article_98d090dc-ffdb-11e7-9b69-b73ad29d2953.html
And you won’t be surprised to find out what sort of student that place produces.
https://www.nkytribune.com/2018/12/former-covington-catholic-basketball-player-jacob-walter-jailed-for-alleged-sexual-assault/
And maybe not expect theDiocese of Covington to do much. Funny how they encourage kids to go on demos, yet apparently their students aren’t allowed to be ‘political’.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/05/29/gay-valedictorians-speech-rejected-kentucky-catholic-school-diocese/650814002/
Even though he and the other kids went to a private Catholic school?
I’m hoping against hope these kids are simply ignorant. Wishful thinking, I know.
Hey Alan, good to see you! I think we are going to talk about something on the next open thread? What was it?
Great to see you and read your comments, in any case.
Sorry, that was supposed to be “I think we were going to talk about…” [i.e., were planning to talk about…]
[missed the edit window, but I hate it when I make a typo!]
I couldn’t watch the video of those kids.. Their parents must be the same way.
On another note, I was watching a video about Apple and their pricing system for their products. Someone in the comments made a sarcastic comment about how their parents buy their apple stuff, not them. And the comments below responding to that one where pretty rough directed towards her (everyone assumed the commenter was a girl so there weren’t a shortage of ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ and gendered slurs thrown around.) Final one was a mgtow, unsurprisingly, talking about how the commenter’s mentality is what causes mgtow, that pumping and dumping women are cheaper than relationships and that the original commentor will only be a cum dumpster (EW at that descriptor to the moon and back). It was all so.. unrelated and unnecessary.
Then I remember reading how ex red piller would be encouraged online by being more outrageous than other members by saying the worse things to out-do each other. Believe it’s the same with mgtow, surely?
So the following post is depressing, and also CW for violence and murder.
On Wednesday night (Oz time) a young woman was murdered in Melbourne. The details are heartbreaking (she was on the phone to her sister at the time) and horrific (police have withheld some details of what happened, out of respect to her family).
In the midst of all the discussion online, there’s been angry debate over:
(1) the inevitable #notallmen
(2) Aiia Maasarwe was initially thought to be Israeli, but she was actually an Israeli-Palestinian. Ruby Hamad tweeted about this, for further detail.
Here at WHTM, it’s often been noted how right-wingers, MRAs, and the rest seem to operate with a caricature of “Teh Left” or “SJWs”. This was really underscored for me when a random man on Twitter said:
“Why is the left mourning this girl? She was Israeli, right? You guys fucking hate Israel, I don’t get it.”
I just…wtf.
It’s definitely a weekend for self-care. (Does writing a couple of WtH sea chanteys count as self-care? It was fun!)
@ pavlovs house
Ooh, thanks for reminding me. I don’t want to clutter up this thread. The Covington thing is pretty rage inducing, so I’d like to leave the space for that. But essentially I’m messing around with an old idea I had called Stopline. It’s a silly thing, but I’d like to try to write a sort of factual history of Operation Sealion, even though it never went ahead. But basically as if it was a Stephen Ambrose book or something looking back. So Auxiliary Units, mustard gas on the beaches, the various stoplines etc. Until the Navy come down from Scapa Flow and after the Bismarck gets sunk in the Channel, it’s all over.
If you have any thoughts on that perhaps you’d be kind enough to consider them and we can have a chat in a more trivial thread sometime.
Quote from Scildfreja
Delurking to applaud this site’s recent response to trolling. I have learned quite a bit from the comment section here through the years. The gif choice is quite good too.
I’ve got a dilemma, and I’m hoping for feedback here. It relates to the purpose of this blog, humor, truth, and exposing toxic levels of BS on parts of the internet. I think Carl Jung said some important things about why Western civilization has outbreaks of Nazi fever. I was writing about this, but stalled when I saw JP’s work. JP is like Saruman in the LOTR. He was seduced by what he supposedly meant to stop.
By supporting Jung, I didn’t want to support JP’s politics accidentally.
It would really help me to hear commenter’s take on whether my fear is founded or not. My background is chemistry & IT, not journalism. This could have been fun, but getting to the meat of it will require me to cover some of the same things as JP, but quite different conclusions. Just mentioning this here is loosening the “writer’s block” on this. Thanks.
Man If that were my kid I would’ve gone full Uncle Phil on that little punk with a dash of Hank Hill.
I can’t watch it either. I predict this thread will be particularly hard to keep on topic. People want a distraction.
Hello various Mammotheers
As a long time lurker (and very infrequent poster as I usually don’t open my mouth unless I have something relevant to add, or a good joke) I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you all that I adore reading the posts and all of your comments, especially when trolls/chew toys come out to play and get dunked on hard.
Keep up the good work
I’m not going to judge parents based on their kids, or vice-versa, without a damn good reason. My brother is not a good person – his targets are women and disabled people – and while my parents do have some issues, neither of them are like that and are rather disappointed in him. Admittedly, he’s not a Trumper, though that might be mostly because he thinks Trump is one of “those things” (mentally disabled).
Alan,
Sure, how about I make a start here and we’ll resume later. Honestly, though, for me it’s therapeutic to think like a scholar when confronted with right-wing hate (because perpetrators of the later don’t).
What you want to do sounds interesting and in fact there are a number of published attempts at doing just that.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your own. It might be useful, though, to take a look at the classics in Sea Lion alternate history.
Many such books are ill-founded and based on myth but one by a scholar who grounds his speculation in legitimate research (and is published by legitimate academic press) includes:
Evans, Martin Max. Invasion!: Operation Sea Lion, 1940. New York: Routledge, 2014.
There’s also this; it’s one of the classic attempts at this subject. Frontline isn’t exactly a scholarly press and Macksey isn’t really an academic per se but as a professional soldier and researcher he and his work are still important for the historiography of twentieth-century warfare.
Mackesy, Kenneth. Invasion: An Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July 1940. London: Frontline Books, 2015.
The primary sources are certainly available too. Again, I’m not pointing out the above to suggest “it’s already been done, blah blah…” Not at all. You should certainly join the fray if you wish! It’s a fascinating area to contemplate.
Question about the Democratic women one: what is the problem with the word partner? There’s nothing wrong with any of those facts about the women shown, but the partner one I don’t think I’ve heard before. Here in Australia, at least, it’s completely normal to refer to your romantic other half as your partner, even if married to them. Is that not a thing in the US?
Sorry, one more quick thing.
It’s also useful to place Operation Sea Lion alternate histories in the context of the invasion threat (as perceived by English and British leaders) throughout English and British history across time; from a strategic-level standpoint, a great starter is Herbert Richmond’s The Invasion of Britain: An Account of Plans, Attempts and Counter-Measures from 1586 to 1918 (London, Methuen, 1941).
And, yes, that Richmond is a classic naval writer on naval strategy and the publication date make this one very interesting for present purposes…
Just occurred to me now that it’s kind of ironic that we’re talking about the 1940 Operation Sea Lion and “Sea Lion-ing” is in the English language now as a term for a type of internet trollery…
@Alan Robertshaw religious institutions resist liberalism and feminism. People should end said religious institutions.
The captioned picture of the new Democratic congresswomen came from a World Net Daily post by Jesse Lee Peterson. A shorthand description of Peterson is real life Uncle Ruckus. He’s even appeared on a couple of white racist podcasts, as a guest.
In my early years on the Internet I was a regular on soc.history.what-if. Operation Sea Lion came up more than once. The general consensus of professionals was that if it had actually gone ahead it would have been a major disaster for the Germans.
Did anyone make it out to the women’s march this year? I had to skip because I sprained my toe earlier this week and it’s still too tender to walk on.
@Alan
And…apropos that we happen to be discussing this in an open-thread on a feminist blog…you could see whether previous attempts at invasion of Britain alternate history didn’t account enough for British women in 1940. Maybe yours could do more with the ATS and other women’s participation.
A great starting place on British women in World War II are:
Lang, Caroline. Keep Smiling Through: Women in the Second World War. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.
Hinton, James. Women, social leadership, and the Second World War : continuities of class. Oxford: University Press, 2002.
The UK official histories also cover the ATS, as well, I believe. As far as easily obtainable primary sources, there are also published memoirs and oral histories.
Bad-ass women will not be difficult to encounter in this period. They never are!
If you haven’t read it, this is a pretty good discussion of why Sealion was pretty much doomed from the start: http://www.philmasters.org.uk/SF/Sealion.htm