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I apologize in advance if I don't do this right, first time posting here. I think this is culture since this is part of an ongoing arguementation between "Classical Liberals" and "Liberal Conservatives" vs "Religious/Social Conservatives" to "Post-Liberals"

The True Con

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>Though Will still claims to be a conservative, he has radically changed what he means by that term. In 1983’s Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will argued that government inevitably does legislate morality, and indeed “should do so more often.” He rejected “the idea that governments should be neutral in major conflicts about social values.” He denied that “the public interest is produced by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals making arrangements in free markets.” He confessed his “deviation from laissez-faire orthodoxy,” and announced, “It is time to come up from individualism.”
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>In 2019’s The Conservative Sensibility, Will employs the same gentlemanly prose—to opposite ends. He states that government should refrain from “imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue.” He maintains that men should be “free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preference.” He concludes that the public interest can, after all, be achieved “in the spontaneous order of a lightly governed society.” He frets over the fact that the poor pay no income tax, and describes the rich and corporations as “unpopular minorities.” He champions “individualism and the rights of the individual.”
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>Will has remained remarkably consistent in his self-styling. In 1983, he lamented that America contained “almost no conservatives, properly understood.” Today, he again calls conservatism “a persuasion without a party.” His positions have changed, but his pose has not. He is still the lone True Conservative.
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>In both, America is conflated with liberal individualism. In Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will therefore concludes that America was “ill founded.” In The Conservative Sensibility, he instead celebrates the founding as the first inbreaking of Hayek’s transcendent philosophy. In both cases, America is not so much a nation as an idea. This is Will’s one fixed point—and his fundamental error.
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>Our foundations are broader and deeper than a single “founding” moment, tendentiously identified with the views of a few deistic slavers. William Bradford was one of our founders. So was Lord Baltimore. These men were communalists, not individualists; Christians, not liberals. For Will, they might as well not exist. He has spent his otherwise incoherent career propounding what Barry Shain, a professor of political science at Colgate University, calls “the myth of American individualism”—a myth that cannot survive contact with reality … the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the founding considered the individual “radically incomplete living outside an enveloping and ethically intensive community.” They believed that “the common or public good enjoyed preeminence over the immediate interests of individuals.”
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>These Americans believed that property was not an absolute right, but a trust received from God to be used for all. The Vermont Declaration of Rights stated that “private property ought to be subservient to public use.” Benjamin Franklin, the most commercial of the framers, believed men had a natural right to whatever property was necessary “for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species.” But he also believed that “all property superfluous to such services is property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it.”
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>...
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>Will labors to discredit Chambers and Kirk because they challenge his claim that America is univocally liberal and ultimately secular. Like many other True Cons, he has chosen to ignore ... what Shain calls the “enduring, democratic, Christian, and communal” tradition of America.
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>Will's praise of liberalism would be more convincing if he did not claim for it the virtues of other things. He opens his book by describing the Battle of Princeton as an “illustration of the history-making role of individual agency.” The selfless deaths of American patriots are thus enlisted for the ­ideology of self-interest.
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>He says that the universe itself is a testament to the godless miracle of spontaneous order, thereby giving his economic ideas an unearned religious sheen. He questions tradition, hierarchy, and religion, but seeks to drape their prestige around his ... philosophy

Well, the all-caps titles here are panel titles, the names quoted are panelists and the stuff quoted after their names are generally presentations or, at best, working paper titles. A lot of it probably doesn't exist anymore, outside the pages of these programs. I don't know where you could find an archive of these programs outside of the personal files of people who attended these things, except perhaps in a special collections department somewhere or maybe the NWSA archives. University libraries are gold mines but finding out what they even have can be tricky, and getting access to it can, too.

The books are a bit easier, often they are available on Amazon. Marxism and the Oppression of Women is still in print, as is The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Patriarchal Precedents is not, and so you can guess that it shows up less in the gender studies curriculum today.

I personally would be very interested in minutes from the panel entitled "BUILDING FEMINIST THEORY," since it was a discussion including Sandra Harding (now at UCLA), Mary O'Brien (who founded the Feminist Party of Canada), and Nancy Hartsock (who authored a book subtitled Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism), and they were talking about

> how feminist theory should reconstitute progressive politics in general--not just "women's issues"--while also transcending the limitations of Marxism.

There's just so much to unpack there--obviously it's pretty silly to aim at "transcending the limits" of Marxism if one does not feel limited by it, and one would not feel limited by it were one not a somewhat conscientious adherent! And indeed feminist theory has in many ways reconstituted progressive politics in general since the 1980s. So it's very, very frustrating to me when people make these sweeping claims about what is or is not "influential" as if they have any real idea where ideological trends come from. Almost everything we think is the result of someone making a concerted effort to get lots of people to think that thing, but it is usually someone who has long since been forgotten (or memory-holed), and it is almost always an irrelevant academic before it is a politician who gets their name put into the books. Maybe it has always been thus; I sometimes wonder if we would be quite so cognizant of Aristotle, had there not been an Alexander the Great.

Anyway, I am rambling. If you have a particular thing you're looking for, pay a visit to a quality university library--state libraries might do in a pinch, but universities are the real repositories of knowledge. Inter-library loan is a researcher's best friend, second only to a good special collections librarian. Amazon is sometimes helpful also, though certain texts have gotten remarkable pricey over the years, I've found!

>I'm not much of a gamer in this sense, but 40K always sounded kind of interesting. Where does one start with such a vast shared universe? Even the books; there's what, a couple hundred tie-in novels at this point?

Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill's books tend to hold up pretty well as works of pulp sci-fi/planetary romance in their own right, and those are where I'd recommend you start. Abnett's Brothers of the Snake (currently free on audible) is a one-off that makes for an excellent introduction to the setting and I'm pretty sure someone has already recommended The Priests of Mars.

I expect a number of people to recommend Sandy Mitchell's HERO OF THE IMPERIUM and to be fair it is really good but it also depends a bit more on the reader having a working knowledge of the setting.

>Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man pretending to be a cis man to seduce a woman, and had hardcore-enough sex scenes to receive an NC-17 rating on its first cut.

There's a film called "this film Is Not Yet Rated" that examines the MPAA and how subjective it is as a control system for what gets into the public's eye. A segment of this film discussed the MPAA's issues with Boys Don't Cry.

From a blogger:

>In addition, the MPAA system often fails to take context into account. For instance - as director Kimberly Peirce comments in "This Film is Not Yet Rated" - the MPAA threatened Peirce's brilliant "Boys Don't Cry" with an NC-17 rating based in part on the very rape scene that is directly central to the movie. In the scene, the protagonist is raped as a brutal "punishment" for what her attackers see as her impersonation of a boy. Here, the MPAA's rating seems especially senseless: How could it hurt a sixteen-year-old's psyche to see a depiction of a brutal hate crime, presented as exactly what it is? If anything, the film is rightly educational.

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From Roger Ebert:

>"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a catalog of grievances against the MPAA: The membership of the ratings board is anonymous, so the filmmakers have no right to appeal directly to the people who are judging their work. The ratings board is supposed to be comprised of "parents" -- but hardly any have children under 18, which is the only age group to whom the ratings apply. Although the MPAA ratings were allegedly created as a way of heading off government censorship, some say that has always been a ruse -- and, besides, a government system would actually require rules, documentation, transparency, accountability and due process. These are not things the secretive MPAA is fond of.
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>And although the MPAA ratings are supposedly "voluntary," agreements between the studios that fund the organization, the exhibitors who show their films, and the media in which those films are advertised, make it something less than optional for most films. Check your newspaper to see if "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is playing in your town. If that newspaper accepts advertising for unrated films ("This Film" was originally awarded an NC-17 for "graphic sexual content," but the rating was "surrendered"), you'll see that "This Film" is not playing at one of the studio-owned theater chains.
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>The whole kangaroo court is founded on a doozy of a Catch-22: The MPAA insists that it has procedures that it applies evenhandedly. But the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are. If something is not allowed, it's because it's against the invisible rules.
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>So, how do you make sense out of the MPAA's decisions? As "This Film" demonstrates, you don't. The Kafkaesque absurdity behind the movie ratings is beyond belief. Matt Stone ("South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "Team America: World Police") testifies from experience that studio pictures are treated a lot more kindly than independently financed and distributed ones. Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") and Wayne Kramer and Maria Bello ("The Cooler"), intuit that the raters are uncomfortable with depictions of female sexual pleasure, while Allison Anders("Grace Of My Heart") suggests that orgasms of any kind are frowned upon (although women's do tend to last longer, and may therefore make the raters more uncomfortable), and that the male body is even more verboten that the female body. And everybody agrees that the MPAA is very liberal when it comes to violence, and conservative when it comes to sex.

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the MPAA is important to this discussion largely due to their rating influence which affects the marketing and release of a film. This is why you hear so much about the studio trying to get a 'PG-13' rating instead of an 'R' (or in the case of Boys Don't Cry, trying to get an 'R' rating, settling for 'NC-17' after making cuts to shake the 'X' rating). The biggest issue issue sin't necessarily the rating system, but the power enshrined in a select group of anonymous and unaccountable influencers. It's pretty eye opening to see how much power they have over culture.

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link to film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpbxzP2mkoA

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Great write up!

Also, I'm a Gen-Xer and recall all of thee films and the milieu very well. It's interesting to see analysis from a younger viewer.

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If you like this topic I'd also suggest "Pictures At a Revolution" which discusses the 5 Best film nominations of the 1967 Oscars, and how these films changed the Hollywood. It's a nice context for how we got to 1999.

>In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittle signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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As a supplement, I also suggest Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which goes into detail about the rise of various media, how they supplanted the old media (i.e. telephone vs. telegraph; broadcast tv vs. Cable tv) and were in turn supplanted by other technological industries. There is a bit about the various takeovers of the film industry in the mid 90's that set the stage for the making of these films and the subsequent dawn of the Internet age. It's probably in need of a new edition now, but I really enjoyed reading about media and technological history in this context.

There is an academic who has been gaining in popularity somewhat recently for his foray into non-pc topics such as his book published for general audiences called How to Judge People by What they Look Like.
While watching a few of his videos, I was struck by an issue that he brought up in his critique of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. I have timestamp the video, and the transcription is below. The issue is the direct opposition between the necessities for robust evolutionary selection and the "objectively good things" that individuals desire in their lives.

>He(Pinker) ultimately ends his book by saying” life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, knowledge is better than superstition.”

>Yes that is the case at the individual level. But what he evidently fails to understand, what he willfully doesn’t want to understand, is the importance of group selection. The fact that we know that we can pass on our genes directly by having children, at the kin level by looking after our kin, and at the ethnic level by looking after our group which is an extended genotype. We know from computer models that, all else being equal, it is the more positively and negatively ethnocentric group that will triumph. And therefore if you want to preserve civilization, the only way to do that is to balance enlightenment values with these ethnocentric values which allow the more intelligent society to defend itself against the potentially more ethnocentric enemy at the gate. You have to have that balance right, or you are in serious trouble.

>At the level of group selection, life is not necessarily better than death: It is good to have an optimum number of people willing to lay down their lives for society. Health is not necessarily better than sickness: If you are under conditions of harsh Darwinian selection, and the sick are selected against, then you will become healthier including more mentally healthy and thus more likely to win the battle of group selection. Abundance is not better than want because when groups have abundance the intense Darwinian selection pressures are reduced, and they become less adaptive, less intelligent, and less able to survive in certain conditions. Freedom is not necessarily better than coercion: If everybody is free and nobody is coerced into doing anything then nobody will fight for the good of the society. Happiness is certainly not necessarily better than suffering at the group level because those who are happy can become decadent and can therefore just let things wash over them whereas to those who suffer, it can act as a motivator to great things; it can act as a motivator to genius and great art, and it can make the group less decadent and more warlike and more likely to survive the battle of group selection. Knowledge is not necessarily better than superstition if that superstition holds the group together, elevates its ethnocentrism, and makes it more likely to win the battle of group selection for that reason. And it is not better if that superstition is the thing that motivates people towards Truth.

>He ends by saying (paraphrasing) “the story of knowledge is the story of every tribe, every part of humanity.” Clearly that is not true. Clearly there are some groups who have contributed disproportionally to human endeavor, and they have done so because of the optimum combination of high intelligence, of a sort of pro-social cooperative personality that has managed to produce a society where people have impulse control and can look to the future and can plan and can discover things because it has an optimum level of genius that’s adaptive.

>It’s nonsense. This book is not a defense of science. It’s a defense of a sort of ideology, of a Christian theology without belief in God which has developed out of science. And there is a degree to which it is the enemy of science, and it is the enemy of the kind of society that would be able to sustain civilization and sustain science.


So what would the standards of such a society be? In other videos he admits that increased group intelligence inevitably leads to less superstition and less group selection which nearly always leads to social collapse and then to being overtaken by a less intelligent, more-group-selected tribe. I have not heard him give a definitive answer to this problem, but I agree with him that Pinker is mostly wrong in the above assertions.

Is there some steady state of society in which science and group selection are promoted or did the scientific revolution bring about an inherently unstable state? Is it just the nature of a civilizations to be cyclic in this way?

Very cool article. As someone who's passionate about meditation and has studied it intensely I think it's important to realize that meditation is (1) not for everyone and (2) to be very cautious about what mindfulness has actually been able to help with. Mindfulness Based Stress Relief and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy have repeatedly been shown to be effective. However, these types of studies rarely have adequate controls so it is difficult to make the strong claim that mindfulness itself is the cause of these seen benefits. Likewise, claims that mindfulness can treat more extreme disorders like PTSD are often banded about, but the research on these claims is thin.

Two books on this I would recommend:

Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism:

>Practicing mindfulness can be an effective adjunct in treating psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. But have we gone too far with mindfulness? Recent books on the topic reveal a troubling corruption of mindfulness practice for commercial gain, with self-help celebrities hawking mindfulness as the next "miracle drug." Furthermore, common misunderstanding of what mindfulness really is seems to be fueled by a widespread cultural trend toward narcissism, egocentricity, and self-absorption.

>Thomas Joiner's Mindlessness chronicles the promising rise of mindfulness and its perhaps inevitable degradation. Giving mindfulness its full due, both as a useful philosophical vantage point and as a means to address various life challenges, Joiner mercilessly charts how narcissism has intertwined with and co-opted the practice to create a Frankenstein's monster of cultural solipsism and self-importance. He examines the dispiriting consequences for many sectors of society (e.g., mental health, education, politics) and ponders ways to mitigate, if not undo, them. Mining a rich body of research, Joiner also makes use of material from popular culture, literature, social media, and personal experience in order to expose the misuse of mindfulness and to consider how we as a society can back away from the brink, salvaging a potentially valuable technique for improving mental and physical wellbeing.

Joiner is one of, if not the most famous researcher on suicide in the world. One of the things he talks about, for example, he talks about how many depressed individuals struggle greatly with rumination, and not much has been done about the fact that meditation tends to make rumination worse for many people.

I also greatly enjoy Daniel Goleman's Altered Traits. Many are quick to point out that "thousands" of research articles have been published on mindfulness meditation. These guys are upfront and critical of the fact that, well, most of these studies are absolute trash with either biased experimenters, poorly defined definitons, and lack of proper controls (They're extremely critical of their own somewhat sloppy mindfulness research in the 70's - a refreshing moment of humbleness). They review over 1,000 studies and do a literature review of the 50 or so highest quality ones.

There really does seem to be an effect at work here with mindfulness. However, people often fail to differentiate between state effects and trait effects. For many beginners, Mindfulness is no different than a drug - you get a bump of relaxation and positive feeling when you're meditating, and then no difference when you resume your life. Real, permanent, lasting change is seemingly, but only after long, continued practice - not just glancing at a 10-minute mindfulness app on your phone three times a week.

They also mention how easy the news media and other snake oil salesmen can misrepresent research: a famous finding like meditation can increase the length of telomeres, a process related to cellular aging is reported as "Mindfulness is going to make you live much longer!!" And of course there's always companies trying to make a quick buck: A related example is the company Luminosity, a company that vaguely throws around the word "neuroplasticity" as proof playing their games will make you smarter, a claim not supported by much evidence.

Above all I think it helps to have a skeptical eye. Mindfulness has become an extremely hot topic in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a self selection effect where most researchers really, really want mindfulness to be scientifically valid, and so they aren't really as critical of the research as they should be. Combine that with the fact that science journalism generally isn't great at actually reporting science, and marketing companies even less so, and that leads to a lot of misinformation floating around.

>Shepple

Did anyone else enjoy the amusing coincidence that her name is one letter from the Internet-word for "unwitting follower"?

>developed a script for masculinity that I was comfortable performing

Would you mind elaborating on this a bit? Or pointing towards a source that might help me make sense of the "everything is performative" mindset in less than 10,000 pages of overblown prose? Perhaps there's some factor to it that is fundamentally impossible to communicate, but I've long found that phrasing strange and uncomfortable, likely because I associate it with performing-as-acting, and thus as-lying.

>I wonder if there's some kind of body or gender dysmorphia that leaves certain people uncomfortable with whatever body they find themselves in

Almost definitely. I think a dose of Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis or maybe even Irvine's Guide to Stoicism would do people with this "generalized discomfort" much more good than the solutions they're finding (and regretting) now. Or since you mentioned the title phrase, John Kabat-Zinn's famed guide to mindfulness meditation. I say that as someone who found these books quite helpful over the years, dealing with my own concerns, and retrospectively quite glad of the culture in which I was raised rather than one more "do as thou wilt."

Edit: Thank you for sharing your story.

Even in the west, it depends enormously on context. Vern Bengtson has been running a longitudinal study of faith transmission over the past 35 years and touching on four generations, and he concludes that the overall inheritance of faith has been stable at approximately 60% since 1970, but higher for evangelicals, mormons and jews and dramatically lower for the mainline protestant denominations, who seem to be the source of most of the growing "nones" category that Robert Putnam described in 2011. This still sounds like it's bad for religion, but remember that "none" is a category of parental faith as well - which means that a fraction of children raised in secular families turn to religion as adults, and the "prodigal" phenomenon of adolescent wandering followed by a return to the faith in adulthood is common.

I do expect the "nones" to increase into the immediate future at the mainline protestant denominations continue to secularize, though this growth curve is likely to flatten as the baby boom echo of the millennial generation enters middle age and the prodigals begin to return. The evangelical churches seem to be stabilizing with the assistance of immigration and will likely persist well into the future when reproductive competition becomes more of a factor.

Finally, the God Gene may have been a bit overblown, but religiosity as a personality trait is unequivocally heritable in part (as are other personality traits), with limited twin studies indicating an approximately 40% heritability in adulthood. If reproductive trends persist into the future, in the long-long term, society may undergo a genetically determined shift towards increased religiosity.

This all sounds correct to me.

Miller is gunning pretty hard for a particular kind of poly configuration, one with a committed primary partnership and rotating secondary partners. One problem is that this seems like a much better fit for men's average-case sexual preferences than it does for women's. In particular, this argument of Miller's does not sound like a realistic account of most cishet women's preferences to me:

>Polygyny makes it harder for lower-mate-value men to find partners, but polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.

As Regnerus observed, gay male sexuality resembles straight male sexuality, and lesbian sexuality resembles straight female sexuality. So it's not a coincidence that Miller is citing the popularity of Dan Savage's "monogamish" norm among gay men, as opposed to lesbians, as a model for straight marriage.

In terms of the "conventional" view, and also as an example of good sociology, I would recommend MacKenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

>Elite private education in America is on the cusp of this new era. The controversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. . . Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity. . .

This post from Instapundit earlier today just seems apropos: Prosperity breeds idiots

" At the start of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, a Soviet diplomat on home leave in Moscow tries to make an anonymous call to the U.S. embassy. His purpose: warning the Americans of a Soviet theft of atomic secrets. But he gets a dull-witted, indifferent embassy staffer on the line, and the call goes nowhere. Or almost nowhere. The call is monitored by Soviet security. Arrested and imprisoned at the end of the novel, the diplomat’s final thought about Americans is that “prosperity breeds idiots.”

Solzhenitsyn’s diplomat channels views that were clearly held by the author himself. Comfort and safety, enjoyed too long in the West, invite complacency—and complacency leads to stupidity. As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. "

Got through most of it, ended around here: "BAP asserts an inherent connection between physical health, good looks, and human worth. No 'eye of the beholder' clichés here! I suppose this is the place to note that one constant in BAP’s Twitter feed is pictures of muscled, shirtless beefcake"


Celebrities tend to have predictably progressive politics. What to make of them, then? They'd balk at BAP.


Also, reminds me of this book How to Judge People by What They Look Like.

This is far from the only resource available to refute the claims you are making that life is getting worse, but it is recent and full of graphs and citations. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525427570/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_1F1CCbEF8C1QJ

When you use buzzwords like "elites" and "Goldman Sachs", it doesn't reinforce your point, it sounds neophyte.

The reason I hate the Nazi analogy, besides the fact that it’s overused, is that it just is not apt. 1920’s Germany was pro-Jewish, only compared to other countries. Being anti-Semitic was not a career ending move and plenty of people in power vocally hated them, even if something like Holocaust was not on their mind. People should actually learn something about early Nazi history before making this comparison. Even if they weren’t popular before right before their rise to power, they were considered more like rabble rousers, not pariahs. I recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans to get an understanding of what led to their assuming and consolidating power.

Have you seen Gangs of New York? There is a short scene in there about the moralizers of the upper class coming into to clean out 'dens of iniquity' and fix the 'moral problems of the lower classes' like by fighting against alcohol or drug consumption. Those sorts of movements by upper class people that see poverty as a sort of moral failing and that people could simply 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' if they work hard enough and follow something like the Protestant work ethic are as old as time.

The modern 'SJW' type of identity politics from the upper class isn't really new, it has has a long pedigree and lets the upper classes feel less guilty about their wealth in times of increasing income/wealth inequality and poverty, as they conceptualize it being about moral failings of some kind rather than them being the recipients of the real unearned privilege and propagating the systems the not only keep it in place, but in fact deepen it.

On the right wing side of things there is also a history to try and enhance the position of wealthy through populism that this book covers: https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Peoples-Movements-Grassroots-Development/dp/0199928991

Apparently they even tried to use the women's suffrage movement at one point.

When I read this book, The World Remade: America in World War I, I learned that there was a period of over a month where the President was essentially an invalid and unable to govern. Nobody really knows who (if anyone) was running the executive branch of the government at the time. The accepted theory is that it was his wife, but nobody knows 100% because everyone with knowledge of it took the secret to the grave. This was also during one of the most important times in American History when we were deciding whether or not to join the League of Nations. Crazy stuff with huge implications.

I'm reading The World Remade: America in World War I right now, and one of the things that opponents of the League of Nations worried about was loss over immigration control. Well, looking at the UN and all of these refugee treaties we signed, that turned out to be 100% correct.

>I, along with many others, have been concerned about Trump's behavior here. Gary Brecher has been shouting that the long-awaited betrayal of the Kurds is upon us (to be fair, he's said that before several times).

I don't have anywhere else to share since no one in real life knows who Brecher is so this sub gets to be subjected to my random factoids.

My girlfriend was reading a horse training book. Knowing these type of communities I was sure there are people who hate Monty Roberts and his methods, and that interested me for some reason. One of his greatest nemesis is John Dolan, they have hated each other for decades. I google John Dolan and my mind is blown to find out that John Dolan is Gary Brecher's real name.

TLDR: The War Nerd has been in a decades long feud with my girlfriend's favorite horse trainer.