I found the 1965 discourse interesting especially the comment that the husband is “queening” because it ties back to your article about men not dancing. Maybe the fear of being called gay is stopping a man from living like 1965. And not idk “women having rights”
Also this weeks many such takes is the first time I’m discovering these topics - which is awesome cause it means I’ve stopped trawling twitter and am truly out of the loop!
To me it's weird to pick 1965 instead of something more like 1945 to call back to a theoretical more traditional era. 1965 is deep into the Warren Court (1953 to 1969) era, the most liberal era in SCOTUS history in which tons of civil rights changes came down (with which I agree, to be clear). 1965 is also post contraceptive pill. 1965 is also when student protests took off as the US deepened its involvement in Vietnam (Tonkin Resolution).
When it comes to songs rhythm and sound trump accuracy. It's been that way for a while; Balboa discovered the Pacific, not Cortez, but Keats knew what he was doing.
I agree it's really much more of a 50s stereotype, but I'm not also not exactly sure these folks are deeply versed in the timeline of the postwar era. The audience certainly isn't.
Yeah, I'm sure they aren't. Given that some southern congressmen in recent years have spoken fondly of the pre-war South and suggested everyone was happy with that, maybe we should be happy she's not invoking 1865 or 1850 instead of 1965 or 1950.
Right, it doesn't seem right to me. There are some parallels to the present in 1965 too: even though we had a Democratic president, LBJ, who was lifelong committed to Civil Rights Reform (he had just passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 as his first and biggest legislative priority, then the Great Society stuff started rolling out) and improving the lot of the poor, there was a New Left that was deeply and intensely opposed to him. Anger at LBJ from student protesters was absolutely ferocious due to Vietnam and seemed to more than cancel out the sweeping Civil Rights and pro-poor things he did. I think that particular year is very "left-wing-coded" due to that, and due to the intensity of right-wing backlash to the student protesters, especially early in the war in 1965, when the US effort was still very heavily supported by the American public.
If you asked conservatives in 1965 if they were happy, they would have told you everything was going to hell.
The thought that immediately comes to mind for me is that it’s because 1965 is right on the cusp of so many of these things changing in a big way. The ideas were out there, the table was set, but they hadn’t actually worked their way through society yet.
I feel like "caring about the specifics of how left/centre-left politics was evolving in the 60s" is very "the exact kind of centrist-liberal dad I am"-coded. Meet you on the Rest Is History subreddit, am I right?
Yeah, I really should find some history channels to comment on. The only social media of any kind I’ve done in the last 10 years is the 3 Substacks I follow, so I tend to do things like talk about things I want to talk about like the Johnson administration or the Vietnam War on threads that are about other things. I hope the channel owners appreciate my attempts at steering all conversation to things I want to talk about even when they’re only tangentially related. Something annoying I do
I'm glad at least some people appreciate it! One of my best friends also recently read Robert Caro's exhaustive biography of LBJ and he was always talking about LBJ for a while so I leaned on that a bit. LBJ was deeply vexed about what happened to his legacy and was a fascinating character.
Since I'm 69, 1965 is a personally meaningful date to me. I remember being 9 years old and in 4th grade at Cantara Elementary School. If you're a lot younger, 1965 or 1945, or 1745 might be equally abstract . . . at least to most people who are not that into history.
Yeah, I didn't mean to be an excessive scold. I personally would try to understand the year better before picking a certain specific year, but that's because I'm me. I'm not a pop star for many reasons as she is.
Maybe I should pick 1950. Baby boom way underway, but war is in the background. But in 1945 you had lots of young men coming home and pairing off in a still very traditional society.
Can't hate on someone trying to avoid the draft. Unless he is outside the age range (I am not familiar with this song at all and am too busy listening to Black Sabbath to do so.)
Yeah, I would not have wanted to go. But if you just went to college you could defer, and the government was supporting student loans already at that time.
My favorite draft detail that most people don't know is that who had to go was determined based on a lottery by birthday. September 14th was the first date drawn. My birthday got drawn a few years in and I would have had to go if I'd been in the age range: https://mavm.org/storiesarchive/the-1969-draft-lottery/
1965 was a confusing year for me. I was a sophomore in college and draftable. For me and most of my friends, it was the very first time that politics meant anything at all. I don't recall it being a thing for anyone my age or older. All of a sudden, I'm supposed to have an opinion about this war in a country I never heard of.
Prior to this time, the idea of defying my country, refusing to go to war, leaving my country, or even cheating to avoid the draft, all was brand new to me. I was aware of the Civil Rights movement and everyone I knew supported it, but that was a problem for them in the South. The war thing felt different. A lot of people were protesting, but it was never perfectly clear to me why. It took me a long to come up with a reason to oppose the war and oppose my country. I never did anything illegal, but it was encouraged, something I could never bring myself to do.
On top of this, I had my own problems, like a lot of people back then. We were confused about life, what it was about, and what we should do. I'm the last person you'd want to put a gun in his hands and tell him to go kill someone, when I couldn't figure out if my life was worth living. I and my brother ended up dropping out of the college in the middle of the draft. He went to Vietnam and was killed in the Mekong Delta his first day in battle. I was declared unfit by the army and given a 4F. I still feel guilty about that. Neither of us deserved what we received.
I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. That must have been a very scary time to be of draft age and I can imagine made politics very real. I hope one doesn't get enacted again.
I don't know what it's like to lose a close one in a war, but I have also lost a brother: my younger brother who was my close companion and friend in early adulthood committed suicide 13 years ago. Very devastating loss, though different circumstances than death in war.
Hopefully you have positive memories still of your brother and were able to cope with this loss.
Losing my brother by the hands of an anonymous other in a deplorable situation, one that we'd all avoid if we have any marbles in our head, is one thing. Suicide is an entirely different situation. The difference lies in our relationship with the departed.
I have a daughter who has contemplated suicide much of her life. I have prepared in my mind many times and for a long time her funeral. We've talked about it many times. How does someone come to actually do it? Is it mostly impulsive or deliberative? The suicidal person doesn't have to actually kill themselves. Nonetheless, their life is horrible. No better than someone with a terminal illness. I can only presume that you knew of your brother's dismal and dark cloud, an attitude that, despite our best efforts, will not budge. It is an exercise in futility. And yet we go on caring and loving them, as they are, hoping, without compelling. Just being there with and for them.
Yes, I was not surprised when he finally succeeded, having had 4 or 5 failed attempts prior to this. Still, it was quite a hammer.
I've read some books on the topic that came up with lists of preconditions for "success" at this that I think check out: 1) failed belongingness; 2) perceived burdensome; 3) lethal means available. You feel you've failed to belong, you feel you are a burden and others would be better off without you, and critically you have the means to do it. I think it's actually very hard to carry it out, something my brother actually told me after one failed attempt. You can be really committed but it's hard to carry out and actually do it. This is one reason why men are so much more successful at killing themselves than women: they choose more lethal means, notably firearm to the head. Though that is not what my brother did, his method required planning, ordering things off Amazon and elsewhere, in particular, a helium tank. The exit bag method is really really hard to pull off so I am sure he really wanted to go through with it. I'm going to insert here that I'm sorry to CHH for taking her thread in this dark direction but we're having a good conversation here, heh.
Still, it's an insanely disturbing way to go. I've seen people on dignified dying threads here on Substack actually talking about this method as being an easy way to go that's also easier for your family. In particular on a Substack thread of Triggernometry about 6 months ago, I recall, that was about the Canadian assisted suicide law (it was a pretty bad interview actually, the guest was bad, not the hosts). I weighed in that my brother had gone this way, and that if this guy goes through with it, he should definitely make sure it's not his family who finds him. I once saw an episode of X-Files that ends with someone having gone this way and it was so disturbing to me that I almost threw up when I saw the episode end. So it definitely scarred me.
That said, I do think my brother would very likely never have been happy and that it wasn't a totally unreasonable thing for him to want to blink out. Still, I wish he had said something to me because I would have let him come live with me or otherwise support him. It didn't need to happen the way it did, I feel. I think you're right though that all we can do is be there for them. It sounds like you are there for your daughter, which is what counts!
I was just thinking about M*A*S*H and Klinger (of course, the Korean War was meant to represent the Vietnam War). I probably would have ended up 4F like my dad was because of some bad genetics.He was in school but had plans to join the peace corps if he ran out of other options. He was born before the lottery applied so was under the non-random rules.
My birthday skewed late enough that I would not have been called.
Yeah, MASH is a great show. The final episode is still the most watched tv broadcast in history, I believe.
I just redid the Great Courses Vietnam War lecture course (https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-vietnam-war) for the second time about a month ago, and my views on this conflict have evolved a bit after reviewing it in a balanced course a few times recently. You probably know this, but I feel like typing out my thoughts about the Vietnam War because I've been engaging so much with it recently and feel like writing out my thoughts: While I think that, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have gotten involved if we were not willing to fight hard enough to win, I now feel like I understand a little bit better how we got drawn into it slowly and each incremental step did not seem totally insane at the time.
I think people nowadays, when discussing the pragmatics of the winnability of the war (as opposed to the moral question of whether we should have gotten involved at all, which I think is a separate discussion and am not going into here) are too quick to forget what it looked like at the time: we had just saved South Korea from being conquered in the Korean War after all. As I'm sure you know, the South Koreans were extremely close to losing the war before the Incheon landing and would have lost if not for the intervention of US & UN forces. They were absolutely cornered until rescued. South Korea was a military dictatorship at the time and deeply flawed, as the South Vietnamese republic also was at the time we began supporting them, but we now see that South Korea went on to become a super prosperous and innovative democracy eventually, though they didn't throw off dictatorship until the late 80s.
I don't think it was insane to think we could do the same thing for the South Vietnamese at the time. I think the key differences were that we were unable to close off NVA and Vietcong supply lines (Ho Chi Minh Trail) since they ran through Cambodia and Laos whereas Korea is a peninsula. Additionally, the Korean War was much closer to a conventional army vs conventional army conflict that we were far better positioned to win, unlike the guerrilla affair that Vietnam quickly turned into. Even after the US withdrew in early 1973, it took 2 years for the North to conquer the South. The South Vietnamese army was actually more or less the largest and best equipped army in the world at the time the US withdrew, but a huge problem was that they didn't have the technicians to repair all the higher tech weaponry we gave them, so as things broke, they couldn't repair them. And it wasn't just the US involved, South Korean forces and Australians were also there.
And while it’s sorta funny to see what all those 8th grader brain online edgelord are doing with 14 words stuff (not funny in a way they meant btw!), I am very confused why a lot of ppl thought it is a good idea to have those edgelord losers in power
The peak zoomer take on 1965 has gotta be “it’s fine to earnestly call for the end of all women’s rights, but showing sex in a music video is Literal Violence”
Personally I think it would be better to drop the podcast episode in the feed, unless there's a way to manually add it to your Spotify/etc. feed without making it its own post (I have 0 idea how podcasts work). I've really enjoyed a few of your episodes (the one with Matt was absolutely stellar 10/10) so far but realistically I am not going to listen if it isn't on Spotify or another podcast app and I'm sure a lot of people feel similarly.
I would vote for putting the interview into the audio feed also, if you can. Substack isn’t nearly as good as a proper podcast app for listening to a long interview.
The key to the Epstein Files is that Trump and his grifting pals never thought they'd be in a position to see the actual evidence, and have to release it. It was a handy way to keep the Base occupied while Trump was not in power, and Patel, Bongino, et al, made lots of money promoting their conspiracy theories.
Bondi's mistake in saying 'the files are on my desk' and releasing 'Phase One' binders to Influencers got the Base's hopes up that Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and other Democrats would go down. When they compounded their mistake by saying "actually, the files don't exist and Epstein killed himself", and then Trump started calling it a hoax (are you saying you willingly promoted a hoax for years?) followed by throwing the MLK files and 'Obama is a traitor" against the wall... really, only the dumbest MAGA is distracted.
MAGA doesn't really care about the Epstein files, they just want Democrats named and shamed. They want to own the libs. And now Trump will pardon Ghislane Maxwell for saying Trump is an angel who barely knew Epstein, and MAGA will eventually fall in line because Charlie Kirk and Catturd told them to. Ah well.
Between Bondi saying that on TV, and the stupid influencer "Epstein Files phase 1" event and Tulsi referring bogus crap for prosecution -- which she won't be able to actually make a case for -- I think Bondi will be out by the end of the year.
She wasn't even Trump's first choice, and doesn't have Kash or Bongino's deftness in working the MAGA base. She's tried to play catch up by going on Fox News a lot, but hyping up Epstein was a fatal own goal.
Asking a newly-reformed MechaHitler to identify Nazis within the government seems like it could be a decent TV show plot. Of course, the whole background context would need to be rewritten because the reality is far too stupid.
Serial killers and obesity correlation. Neither are funny by themselves. But I have a picture in my mind of a serial killer struggling unsuccessfully to get a very large person into their unmarked van and then giving up.
The weird thing is that decade started by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a movie about a killer targeting bigger women. That guy would have to be deep in some weird online communities to be tweeting that out.
I suppose. But who are the most prominent BlueAnoners? Do any of them work for major media outlets? Do we expect any of them to be elected to Congress or appointed to the next Dem White House?
There's definitely files compiled about Epstein, but I don't think there's a list of Epstein's clients made by him that conveniently details everything they did.
I actually saw that 1965 performance live and it was just bad to me, I wasn't even thinking about what the song was about.
*Griswold v. Connecticut* was decided in 1965. Folks can speculate on whether the singer is endorsing the current situation: *Roe* but not *Griswold* has been overturned. [Obviously, the rejection of *Roe* has had a large and serious impact on a whole lot of people. Depending on what states ended up doing, overturning *Griswold* could impact yet more folks reading these words.]
Also in 1965, the US passed a landmark immigration law which fundamentally changed who could come be part of our national community. This intentional step away from white supremacy was a very big deal, and worth reading up on.
Decades ago there was a film with Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, and Kevin Bacon called *A Few Good Men*. Nicholson is the villain, and is tricked by Cruise into giving a villain's monologue in a climactic courtroom scene. Nicholson get arrested for having confessed. Right wingers have regarded Nicholson as the hero, though, and consider his monologue as vindication. It's not easy to get the right tone with people who want to take it wrong.
To save folks a google, Griswold stands for the proposition that states cannot outlaw contraception. Why would states outlaw contraception? To raise the birth rate and/or eliminate sex for any purpose other than procreation. There are people who want this.
Ted Kennedy on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act:
"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
Wrong on all counts, Ted! He's the worst Kennedy, by far.
The polio vaccine was invented before 1965 and not by an Indian. But if it weren't? Fine, bring that medical researcher over, but leave his convenience store-operating cousins who barely speak English at home.
And yes, a coherent country where people have a lot in common is much better than a place where demographic change is constant and thus, nothing remains stable, from standards to customs to communities.
1. Why would I leave the nation my ancestors built when I can just vote for immigration restrictions?
2. Emigrating does nothing. White flight only leads to a temporary reprieve from diversity and most Western countries are being inundated with the Global South anyways. I'd rather defend what I have.
Because there just *aren’t* a large number of unskilled Indian immigrants in the United States. Granted, there are extremely legitimate problems with tech companies using H1B indentured servitude to drive down wages (which I’ve heard extensively criticised by my Indian-American US-citizen friends). But I live in the US metro with the highest Indian-American percentage, and I’ve never seen an Indian clerk at a convenience store.
Bingo! I know Indian immigration to the US is more skilled and at a lower rate than in Canada, hence, the better reputation, but I believe there are still many cab drivers and especially hotel operators. There's nothing wrong with having these jobs, but they aren't of the utmost importance.
I didn't bring up South Asians first, but it just so happens they are the most prominent demographic of immigrants where I live.
Speaking for myself, I think it makes more sense for the podcast episodes to be separate. Easier to find, and just seems more in line with what other Substacks I follow do.
I had a coming of age experience at a Jessie Murph concert last year. It was the first time that I was old enough to look at a musician and say, wow, you're just a kid. A talented, smart kid to be sure, but what 20 year old ever has their s**t figured out?
Artists should be free to make a creative boondoggle now and then, and the audience should be free to not take their opinions or political messages seriously.
I like Nicholas Decker's argument about the moral argument for having kids, although I suspect most people will find it morally repugnant. The other dimension he didn't mention, that somehow holds water in my moral intuition, is that it's good to "pay it forward" when it comes to being given the chance to exist. Like imagine if there were some incredibly awesome, all-encompassing VR MMORPG that people play for years on end, and new players can only join it by invitation. But extending such an invitation is costly. It requires combining a couple cryptographic keys, usually done by two people teaming up deliberately; sometimes just one can obtain the keys and do the necessary work; and then after inviting a new player, you have to spend years of hard work protecting and training the NOOBiest noob of all time, who's literally just trying to get themselves killed till they can figure out what's going on.
You're only able to spend your life playing this awesome game because one or two (and truly many more) people invested much of their finite, precious time and energy to give you the invite, and protect you and rear you through your noob phase. Isn't it the right thing to do, to turn around and try to pay that forward, and team up with someone to invite at least one more person each into the game?
Having children and raising them into non-shitty adults is literally one of the most pro-social things you can do, probably *the* most pro-social thing most people will accomplish with their lives. Since of course one cannot have a good society without some socii to populate it!
“I feel like this is the liberal version of Qanon, except it’s actually true that a cabal of elite pedophiles (or, well, ephebophiles, akshually)” the right wing has been claiming this for years and told they were crazy(by liberals). Nothing like a lib having stolen valor on conspiracy theories.
No, the right was claiming that the entire mainstream Democratic Party was part of a sex cult, based on nothing whatsoever.
This Epstein stuff is entirely different and given how suspicious the MAGA right is acting right now, the only reason to bring up “the left” at all is to try and change the subject. Trump literally went on TV and told people to do that.
I’m not talking about MAGA I’m talking about people on the right, before maga the conspiratorial right who saw that democrats, republicans, CEOs, Celebrities are all in Cohoots with each other rigging the game. And Epstein was on of the few organizers of that game. Dems and top liberal supporters (celebrities) are going to be just as numerous as republicans and CEOs on the right on that list I’m sure.
I think the piece your otherwise good analysis is that it was originally Trump allies pushing the conspiracy in the first place. And just not peripheral MAGA randos, but literally members of his cabinet. If Trump were deeply implicated, part of the conspiracy himself, why would he surround himself with people swearing to uncover and release “the truth”?
I suspect your original instinct is probably correct: the “Epstein Files” imagined by the conspiracy minded don’t really exist, there are at most some additional details of what we broadly already know (including that people like Clinton and Trump were associated with Epstein, but not in a provably criminal way).
Trump was willing to play along with the conspiracy as long as it was politically advantageous to push the rumors of big name Democrats being sex criminals. But now he’s got to put up or shut up, and it turns out the “Files” don’t have any smoking guns against his enemies to offset the additional embarrassing tidbits about his own acquaintance with Epstein, so he’s trying to shut the whole thing down.
Then perhaps we are in violent agreement! Really the only thing I want to push back on, and perhaps you don’t actually subscribe to this, is the idea that Trump is definitely covering up evidence of his own sex crimes with Epstein. It just seems like Trump would have stayed far far away from Epstein conspiracies if he were clearly implicated, not gone and invited key proponents of the theories into his inner circle. He might be arrogant but I don’t think he’s that stupid, or has that little control of his immediate allies.
Much more likely is he took a bet on there being irrefutable evidence of Clinton criminality and lost.
Agree with you. I dont think anyone could be criminally implicated, there was plausible deniablity.
But Trump even being on a plausible deniability list which he fought his election on will be very bad optics. I am starting to believe maga will splinter on this issue and will lose elections soon.
How little you know your history, when Bush brought and supported war overseas while Americans suffer here for the early 2000s. He’s as ugly as the rest of them
I found the 1965 discourse interesting especially the comment that the husband is “queening” because it ties back to your article about men not dancing. Maybe the fear of being called gay is stopping a man from living like 1965. And not idk “women having rights”
Also this weeks many such takes is the first time I’m discovering these topics - which is awesome cause it means I’ve stopped trawling twitter and am truly out of the loop!
To me it's weird to pick 1965 instead of something more like 1945 to call back to a theoretical more traditional era. 1965 is deep into the Warren Court (1953 to 1969) era, the most liberal era in SCOTUS history in which tons of civil rights changes came down (with which I agree, to be clear). 1965 is also post contraceptive pill. 1965 is also when student protests took off as the US deepened its involvement in Vietnam (Tonkin Resolution).
When it comes to songs rhythm and sound trump accuracy. It's been that way for a while; Balboa discovered the Pacific, not Cortez, but Keats knew what he was doing.
I agree it's really much more of a 50s stereotype, but I'm not also not exactly sure these folks are deeply versed in the timeline of the postwar era. The audience certainly isn't.
Yeah, I'm sure they aren't. Given that some southern congressmen in recent years have spoken fondly of the pre-war South and suggested everyone was happy with that, maybe we should be happy she's not invoking 1865 or 1850 instead of 1965 or 1950.
Yeah, why choose the early days of the hippie counterculture?
Right, it doesn't seem right to me. There are some parallels to the present in 1965 too: even though we had a Democratic president, LBJ, who was lifelong committed to Civil Rights Reform (he had just passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 as his first and biggest legislative priority, then the Great Society stuff started rolling out) and improving the lot of the poor, there was a New Left that was deeply and intensely opposed to him. Anger at LBJ from student protesters was absolutely ferocious due to Vietnam and seemed to more than cancel out the sweeping Civil Rights and pro-poor things he did. I think that particular year is very "left-wing-coded" due to that, and due to the intensity of right-wing backlash to the student protesters, especially early in the war in 1965, when the US effort was still very heavily supported by the American public.
If you asked conservatives in 1965 if they were happy, they would have told you everything was going to hell.
The thought that immediately comes to mind for me is that it’s because 1965 is right on the cusp of so many of these things changing in a big way. The ideas were out there, the table was set, but they hadn’t actually worked their way through society yet.
Fair counterpoint!
I feel like "caring about the specifics of how left/centre-left politics was evolving in the 60s" is very "the exact kind of centrist-liberal dad I am"-coded. Meet you on the Rest Is History subreddit, am I right?
Yeah, I really should find some history channels to comment on. The only social media of any kind I’ve done in the last 10 years is the 3 Substacks I follow, so I tend to do things like talk about things I want to talk about like the Johnson administration or the Vietnam War on threads that are about other things. I hope the channel owners appreciate my attempts at steering all conversation to things I want to talk about even when they’re only tangentially related. Something annoying I do
I appreciate you sharing the details :)
I'm glad at least some people appreciate it! One of my best friends also recently read Robert Caro's exhaustive biography of LBJ and he was always talking about LBJ for a while so I leaned on that a bit. LBJ was deeply vexed about what happened to his legacy and was a fascinating character.
Since I'm 69, 1965 is a personally meaningful date to me. I remember being 9 years old and in 4th grade at Cantara Elementary School. If you're a lot younger, 1965 or 1945, or 1745 might be equally abstract . . . at least to most people who are not that into history.
Yeah, I didn't mean to be an excessive scold. I personally would try to understand the year better before picking a certain specific year, but that's because I'm me. I'm not a pop star for many reasons as she is.
Hmmm maybe because of war the insular people don’t like the 40s?
Maybe I should pick 1950. Baby boom way underway, but war is in the background. But in 1945 you had lots of young men coming home and pairing off in a still very traditional society.
Can't hate on someone trying to avoid the draft. Unless he is outside the age range (I am not familiar with this song at all and am too busy listening to Black Sabbath to do so.)
Yeah, I would not have wanted to go. But if you just went to college you could defer, and the government was supporting student loans already at that time.
My favorite draft detail that most people don't know is that who had to go was determined based on a lottery by birthday. September 14th was the first date drawn. My birthday got drawn a few years in and I would have had to go if I'd been in the age range: https://mavm.org/storiesarchive/the-1969-draft-lottery/
1965 was a confusing year for me. I was a sophomore in college and draftable. For me and most of my friends, it was the very first time that politics meant anything at all. I don't recall it being a thing for anyone my age or older. All of a sudden, I'm supposed to have an opinion about this war in a country I never heard of.
Prior to this time, the idea of defying my country, refusing to go to war, leaving my country, or even cheating to avoid the draft, all was brand new to me. I was aware of the Civil Rights movement and everyone I knew supported it, but that was a problem for them in the South. The war thing felt different. A lot of people were protesting, but it was never perfectly clear to me why. It took me a long to come up with a reason to oppose the war and oppose my country. I never did anything illegal, but it was encouraged, something I could never bring myself to do.
On top of this, I had my own problems, like a lot of people back then. We were confused about life, what it was about, and what we should do. I'm the last person you'd want to put a gun in his hands and tell him to go kill someone, when I couldn't figure out if my life was worth living. I and my brother ended up dropping out of the college in the middle of the draft. He went to Vietnam and was killed in the Mekong Delta his first day in battle. I was declared unfit by the army and given a 4F. I still feel guilty about that. Neither of us deserved what we received.
I'm so sorry to hear about your brother. That must have been a very scary time to be of draft age and I can imagine made politics very real. I hope one doesn't get enacted again.
I don't know what it's like to lose a close one in a war, but I have also lost a brother: my younger brother who was my close companion and friend in early adulthood committed suicide 13 years ago. Very devastating loss, though different circumstances than death in war.
Hopefully you have positive memories still of your brother and were able to cope with this loss.
Losing my brother by the hands of an anonymous other in a deplorable situation, one that we'd all avoid if we have any marbles in our head, is one thing. Suicide is an entirely different situation. The difference lies in our relationship with the departed.
I have a daughter who has contemplated suicide much of her life. I have prepared in my mind many times and for a long time her funeral. We've talked about it many times. How does someone come to actually do it? Is it mostly impulsive or deliberative? The suicidal person doesn't have to actually kill themselves. Nonetheless, their life is horrible. No better than someone with a terminal illness. I can only presume that you knew of your brother's dismal and dark cloud, an attitude that, despite our best efforts, will not budge. It is an exercise in futility. And yet we go on caring and loving them, as they are, hoping, without compelling. Just being there with and for them.
Yes, I was not surprised when he finally succeeded, having had 4 or 5 failed attempts prior to this. Still, it was quite a hammer.
I've read some books on the topic that came up with lists of preconditions for "success" at this that I think check out: 1) failed belongingness; 2) perceived burdensome; 3) lethal means available. You feel you've failed to belong, you feel you are a burden and others would be better off without you, and critically you have the means to do it. I think it's actually very hard to carry it out, something my brother actually told me after one failed attempt. You can be really committed but it's hard to carry out and actually do it. This is one reason why men are so much more successful at killing themselves than women: they choose more lethal means, notably firearm to the head. Though that is not what my brother did, his method required planning, ordering things off Amazon and elsewhere, in particular, a helium tank. The exit bag method is really really hard to pull off so I am sure he really wanted to go through with it. I'm going to insert here that I'm sorry to CHH for taking her thread in this dark direction but we're having a good conversation here, heh.
Still, it's an insanely disturbing way to go. I've seen people on dignified dying threads here on Substack actually talking about this method as being an easy way to go that's also easier for your family. In particular on a Substack thread of Triggernometry about 6 months ago, I recall, that was about the Canadian assisted suicide law (it was a pretty bad interview actually, the guest was bad, not the hosts). I weighed in that my brother had gone this way, and that if this guy goes through with it, he should definitely make sure it's not his family who finds him. I once saw an episode of X-Files that ends with someone having gone this way and it was so disturbing to me that I almost threw up when I saw the episode end. So it definitely scarred me.
That said, I do think my brother would very likely never have been happy and that it wasn't a totally unreasonable thing for him to want to blink out. Still, I wish he had said something to me because I would have let him come live with me or otherwise support him. It didn't need to happen the way it did, I feel. I think you're right though that all we can do is be there for them. It sounds like you are there for your daughter, which is what counts!
I was just thinking about M*A*S*H and Klinger (of course, the Korean War was meant to represent the Vietnam War). I probably would have ended up 4F like my dad was because of some bad genetics.He was in school but had plans to join the peace corps if he ran out of other options. He was born before the lottery applied so was under the non-random rules.
My birthday skewed late enough that I would not have been called.
Yeah, MASH is a great show. The final episode is still the most watched tv broadcast in history, I believe.
I just redid the Great Courses Vietnam War lecture course (https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-vietnam-war) for the second time about a month ago, and my views on this conflict have evolved a bit after reviewing it in a balanced course a few times recently. You probably know this, but I feel like typing out my thoughts about the Vietnam War because I've been engaging so much with it recently and feel like writing out my thoughts: While I think that, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have gotten involved if we were not willing to fight hard enough to win, I now feel like I understand a little bit better how we got drawn into it slowly and each incremental step did not seem totally insane at the time.
I think people nowadays, when discussing the pragmatics of the winnability of the war (as opposed to the moral question of whether we should have gotten involved at all, which I think is a separate discussion and am not going into here) are too quick to forget what it looked like at the time: we had just saved South Korea from being conquered in the Korean War after all. As I'm sure you know, the South Koreans were extremely close to losing the war before the Incheon landing and would have lost if not for the intervention of US & UN forces. They were absolutely cornered until rescued. South Korea was a military dictatorship at the time and deeply flawed, as the South Vietnamese republic also was at the time we began supporting them, but we now see that South Korea went on to become a super prosperous and innovative democracy eventually, though they didn't throw off dictatorship until the late 80s.
I don't think it was insane to think we could do the same thing for the South Vietnamese at the time. I think the key differences were that we were unable to close off NVA and Vietcong supply lines (Ho Chi Minh Trail) since they ran through Cambodia and Laos whereas Korea is a peninsula. Additionally, the Korean War was much closer to a conventional army vs conventional army conflict that we were far better positioned to win, unlike the guerrilla affair that Vietnam quickly turned into. Even after the US withdrew in early 1973, it took 2 years for the North to conquer the South. The South Vietnamese army was actually more or less the largest and best equipped army in the world at the time the US withdrew, but a huge problem was that they didn't have the technicians to repair all the higher tech weaponry we gave them, so as things broke, they couldn't repair them. And it wasn't just the US involved, South Korean forces and Australians were also there.
Lmao at signature as pubic hair lol
And while it’s sorta funny to see what all those 8th grader brain online edgelord are doing with 14 words stuff (not funny in a way they meant btw!), I am very confused why a lot of ppl thought it is a good idea to have those edgelord losers in power
The peak zoomer take on 1965 has gotta be “it’s fine to earnestly call for the end of all women’s rights, but showing sex in a music video is Literal Violence”
Personally I think it would be better to drop the podcast episode in the feed, unless there's a way to manually add it to your Spotify/etc. feed without making it its own post (I have 0 idea how podcasts work). I've really enjoyed a few of your episodes (the one with Matt was absolutely stellar 10/10) so far but realistically I am not going to listen if it isn't on Spotify or another podcast app and I'm sure a lot of people feel similarly.
You can import the podcast feed into the podcast app of your choice.
Does that work when its embedded like this one?
It does not. I might have misinterpreted drop as "remove podcasts from the Substack feed".
I would vote for putting the interview into the audio feed also, if you can. Substack isn’t nearly as good as a proper podcast app for listening to a long interview.
The key to the Epstein Files is that Trump and his grifting pals never thought they'd be in a position to see the actual evidence, and have to release it. It was a handy way to keep the Base occupied while Trump was not in power, and Patel, Bongino, et al, made lots of money promoting their conspiracy theories.
Bondi's mistake in saying 'the files are on my desk' and releasing 'Phase One' binders to Influencers got the Base's hopes up that Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and other Democrats would go down. When they compounded their mistake by saying "actually, the files don't exist and Epstein killed himself", and then Trump started calling it a hoax (are you saying you willingly promoted a hoax for years?) followed by throwing the MLK files and 'Obama is a traitor" against the wall... really, only the dumbest MAGA is distracted.
MAGA doesn't really care about the Epstein files, they just want Democrats named and shamed. They want to own the libs. And now Trump will pardon Ghislane Maxwell for saying Trump is an angel who barely knew Epstein, and MAGA will eventually fall in line because Charlie Kirk and Catturd told them to. Ah well.
Between Bondi saying that on TV, and the stupid influencer "Epstein Files phase 1" event and Tulsi referring bogus crap for prosecution -- which she won't be able to actually make a case for -- I think Bondi will be out by the end of the year.
She wasn't even Trump's first choice, and doesn't have Kash or Bongino's deftness in working the MAGA base. She's tried to play catch up by going on Fox News a lot, but hyping up Epstein was a fatal own goal.
Asking a newly-reformed MechaHitler to identify Nazis within the government seems like it could be a decent TV show plot. Of course, the whole background context would need to be rewritten because the reality is far too stupid.
Serial killers and obesity correlation. Neither are funny by themselves. But I have a picture in my mind of a serial killer struggling unsuccessfully to get a very large person into their unmarked van and then giving up.
Have we considered that serial killers might just not have the physical stamina nowadays for a murder spree?
Can MAHA MSKHA (Make Serial Killers Healthy Again) ?
The weird thing is that decade started by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a movie about a killer targeting bigger women. That guy would have to be deep in some weird online communities to be tweeting that out.
That’s the movie I was thinking about.
You're forgetting that the left already has BlueAnon, which posits that Trump's assassination attempt was faked.
I suppose. But who are the most prominent BlueAnoners? Do any of them work for major media outlets? Do we expect any of them to be elected to Congress or appointed to the next Dem White House?
Not that I know of. I'm not saying they're equivalent to QAnon, only that BlueAnon exists.
There's definitely files compiled about Epstein, but I don't think there's a list of Epstein's clients made by him that conveniently details everything they did.
I actually saw that 1965 performance live and it was just bad to me, I wasn't even thinking about what the song was about.
*Griswold v. Connecticut* was decided in 1965. Folks can speculate on whether the singer is endorsing the current situation: *Roe* but not *Griswold* has been overturned. [Obviously, the rejection of *Roe* has had a large and serious impact on a whole lot of people. Depending on what states ended up doing, overturning *Griswold* could impact yet more folks reading these words.]
Also in 1965, the US passed a landmark immigration law which fundamentally changed who could come be part of our national community. This intentional step away from white supremacy was a very big deal, and worth reading up on.
Decades ago there was a film with Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, and Kevin Bacon called *A Few Good Men*. Nicholson is the villain, and is tricked by Cruise into giving a villain's monologue in a climactic courtroom scene. Nicholson get arrested for having confessed. Right wingers have regarded Nicholson as the hero, though, and consider his monologue as vindication. It's not easy to get the right tone with people who want to take it wrong.
To save folks a google, Griswold stands for the proposition that states cannot outlaw contraception. Why would states outlaw contraception? To raise the birth rate and/or eliminate sex for any purpose other than procreation. There are people who want this.
Ted Kennedy on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act:
"The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
Wrong on all counts, Ted! He's the worst Kennedy, by far.
I guess there really are people who'd rather have an increased risk of polio than allow for people from South Asia to join us.
The polio vaccine was invented before 1965 and not by an Indian. But if it weren't? Fine, bring that medical researcher over, but leave his convenience store-operating cousins who barely speak English at home.
And yes, a coherent country where people have a lot in common is much better than a place where demographic change is constant and thus, nothing remains stable, from standards to customs to communities.
So, emigrate.
1. Why would I leave the nation my ancestors built when I can just vote for immigration restrictions?
2. Emigrating does nothing. White flight only leads to a temporary reprieve from diversity and most Western countries are being inundated with the Global South anyways. I'd rather defend what I have.
Are you by any chance Canadian?
Because there just *aren’t* a large number of unskilled Indian immigrants in the United States. Granted, there are extremely legitimate problems with tech companies using H1B indentured servitude to drive down wages (which I’ve heard extensively criticised by my Indian-American US-citizen friends). But I live in the US metro with the highest Indian-American percentage, and I’ve never seen an Indian clerk at a convenience store.
Bingo! I know Indian immigration to the US is more skilled and at a lower rate than in Canada, hence, the better reputation, but I believe there are still many cab drivers and especially hotel operators. There's nothing wrong with having these jobs, but they aren't of the utmost importance.
I didn't bring up South Asians first, but it just so happens they are the most prominent demographic of immigrants where I live.
Speaking for myself, I think it makes more sense for the podcast episodes to be separate. Easier to find, and just seems more in line with what other Substacks I follow do.
ok the waluigi Mangione made me laugh more than I was supposed to 😭
I had a coming of age experience at a Jessie Murph concert last year. It was the first time that I was old enough to look at a musician and say, wow, you're just a kid. A talented, smart kid to be sure, but what 20 year old ever has their s**t figured out?
Artists should be free to make a creative boondoggle now and then, and the audience should be free to not take their opinions or political messages seriously.
I like Nicholas Decker's argument about the moral argument for having kids, although I suspect most people will find it morally repugnant. The other dimension he didn't mention, that somehow holds water in my moral intuition, is that it's good to "pay it forward" when it comes to being given the chance to exist. Like imagine if there were some incredibly awesome, all-encompassing VR MMORPG that people play for years on end, and new players can only join it by invitation. But extending such an invitation is costly. It requires combining a couple cryptographic keys, usually done by two people teaming up deliberately; sometimes just one can obtain the keys and do the necessary work; and then after inviting a new player, you have to spend years of hard work protecting and training the NOOBiest noob of all time, who's literally just trying to get themselves killed till they can figure out what's going on.
You're only able to spend your life playing this awesome game because one or two (and truly many more) people invested much of their finite, precious time and energy to give you the invite, and protect you and rear you through your noob phase. Isn't it the right thing to do, to turn around and try to pay that forward, and team up with someone to invite at least one more person each into the game?
Having children and raising them into non-shitty adults is literally one of the most pro-social things you can do, probably *the* most pro-social thing most people will accomplish with their lives. Since of course one cannot have a good society without some socii to populate it!
“I feel like this is the liberal version of Qanon, except it’s actually true that a cabal of elite pedophiles (or, well, ephebophiles, akshually)” the right wing has been claiming this for years and told they were crazy(by liberals). Nothing like a lib having stolen valor on conspiracy theories.
No, the right was claiming that the entire mainstream Democratic Party was part of a sex cult, based on nothing whatsoever.
This Epstein stuff is entirely different and given how suspicious the MAGA right is acting right now, the only reason to bring up “the left” at all is to try and change the subject. Trump literally went on TV and told people to do that.
It’s not working.
I’m not talking about MAGA I’m talking about people on the right, before maga the conspiratorial right who saw that democrats, republicans, CEOs, Celebrities are all in Cohoots with each other rigging the game. And Epstein was on of the few organizers of that game. Dems and top liberal supporters (celebrities) are going to be just as numerous as republicans and CEOs on the right on that list I’m sure.
There's a bit of a motte and bailey here. I think you may have a few distinct claims and we're having trouble addressing them separately.
I think the piece your otherwise good analysis is that it was originally Trump allies pushing the conspiracy in the first place. And just not peripheral MAGA randos, but literally members of his cabinet. If Trump were deeply implicated, part of the conspiracy himself, why would he surround himself with people swearing to uncover and release “the truth”?
I suspect your original instinct is probably correct: the “Epstein Files” imagined by the conspiracy minded don’t really exist, there are at most some additional details of what we broadly already know (including that people like Clinton and Trump were associated with Epstein, but not in a provably criminal way).
Trump was willing to play along with the conspiracy as long as it was politically advantageous to push the rumors of big name Democrats being sex criminals. But now he’s got to put up or shut up, and it turns out the “Files” don’t have any smoking guns against his enemies to offset the additional embarrassing tidbits about his own acquaintance with Epstein, so he’s trying to shut the whole thing down.
Then perhaps we are in violent agreement! Really the only thing I want to push back on, and perhaps you don’t actually subscribe to this, is the idea that Trump is definitely covering up evidence of his own sex crimes with Epstein. It just seems like Trump would have stayed far far away from Epstein conspiracies if he were clearly implicated, not gone and invited key proponents of the theories into his inner circle. He might be arrogant but I don’t think he’s that stupid, or has that little control of his immediate allies.
Much more likely is he took a bet on there being irrefutable evidence of Clinton criminality and lost.
Agree with you. I dont think anyone could be criminally implicated, there was plausible deniablity.
But Trump even being on a plausible deniability list which he fought his election on will be very bad optics. I am starting to believe maga will splinter on this issue and will lose elections soon.
Lessgoooooo ( I have a soft spot for Bush though)
How little you know your history, when Bush brought and supported war overseas while Americans suffer here for the early 2000s. He’s as ugly as the rest of them