It was a Facebook group in 2019

Episode 232: US Meddling, the Limits of ‘Agency’ Discourse and How Media Chooses Which ‘Voices’ To Center

Corn Pop was a bad dude

I want to nominate an older example, which is all the more insidious because it comes from great German and Austrian Jewish emigre filmmakers who made this anti-Communist garbage in 1939, when you’d think they’d have more urgent enemies to prioritize. The film is Ninotchka, by Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder co-wrote the screenplay, and Greta Garbo stars in the title role. It’s a romantic comedy about a White Russian aristocrat (Melvyn Douglas) trying to stop the Soviets from selling his family jewels. He falls for the humorless envoy (Garbo) who arrives to facilitate the sale.

Sally Jane Black, on Letterboxd, has an excellent review that I’ll quote at length because the filter won’t let me link directly to her profile. At the moment it’s the fourth review from the top on this page.

In 1939, Ernst Lubtisch, Billy Wilder, and a handful of other bootlicking hacks made Ninotchka, which paints the Soviet Union as drab, dull, inadequate, patronizing, heartless, loveless, and cold. It might have sometime been cold, I admit. This was, after all, before capitalists had inflicted the level of pollution and destruction that would bring about climate change.

But loveless and heartless? How dare they. To read Marx’s words on love is to understand a love greater than any individualistic lie capitalism has produced. To be a communist is to be driven by love for humanity beyond anything a capitalist is capable of. No one who thrives off the work of others while those workers starve is a person who knows love.

Patronizing? This is fundamentally opposed to the proletariat’s interests. It is capitalists–who often style themselves as philanthropists–who are patronizing. It is this film that is patronizing in its portrayal of a Soviet woman who speaks to a man in a robotic, monotone, direct manner that is lifeless, as if she is inhuman and must be taught to love.

“Will you smile?” At least it captures bourgeois misogyny.

The one time in American history when a state militia was on the side of good:

It resulted in a victory for the union and was followed in 1903 by the Colorado Labor Wars. It is notable for being the only time in United States history when a state militia was called out (May/June 1894) in support of striking workers.

The strike was characterized by firefights and use of dynamite, and ended after a standoff between the Colorado state militia and a private force working for owners of the mines. In the years after the strike, the WFM’s popularity and power increased significantly through the region.

Davis Waite, a Populist, was the governor who called in the militia. He was ratfucked by his Republican legislature and lost a close election later that year. Ten years later, when a pro-miners’ union candidate was close to winning the governor’s office, they outright stole the election:

Peabody ran for a second term in 1904, but was vilified by his opponents, who declared “Anybody but Peabody!” and felt that he was in league with the mine owners. Peabody’s opponent, Democrat Alva Adams, ripped into his handling of the Cripple Creek strike and insisted that he could handle Colorado’s vicious “industrial warfare.” After the election, it appeared Adams had won, but Republicans, who still controlled the state legislature, insisted that significant fraud and corruption had conspired to steal the election from Peabody (in reality, both sides had committed major violations of election law). On the day that Adams took office (March 17, 1905), the Republican-controlled legislature voted to remove him from office and reinstall Peabody, on the condition that Peabody immediately resign. He did so,[1] and at day’s end it was Peabody’s lieutenant governor, Jesse McDonald, who occupied the governor’s mansion in Denver – thus making Colorado the only state to have three different governors (Adams, Peabody, McDonald) on the same day.

A classic example from From Here to Eternity:

In the novel, Captain Holmes ironically receives his desired promotion, and is transferred out of the company. In the film, Holmes is forced to resign from the Army under threat of court-martial for his ill-treatment of Prewitt. The Army insisted on this change, which the filmmakers reluctantly made. Director Zinnemann later complained that the scene where Holmes is reprimanded was “the worst moment in the film, resembling a recruiting short”, and wrote, “It makes me sick every time I see it.”

Behind Blue Lines

Perfect

How do all of the “everything is so complicated and nuanced” people even get out of bed in the morning?

:kelly: Buridan’s assholes

Trotsky said, in 1930, “Fascism in Germany has become a real danger, as an acute expression of the helpless position of the bourgeois regime, the conservative role of the social democracy in this regime, and the accumulated powerlessness of the Communist Party to abolish it. Whoever denies this is either blind or a braggart …” (emphasis his)

We’d all be just a little more sure of how many days there are in a week

She had a six-year-old child, who has now lost both parents. (Source)

This notion that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.