Southern Democrats, as racist as they were, probably would have supported a European style welfare state right after WWII. It was really the Republicans who stopped it on purely ideological grounds. By the time the Democrats had come back to power though, the leadership had for some reason abandoned the idea of a…

Sanders for President

My favorite Soviet dissident writer is undoubtedly Eduard Limonov. He didn't do much Samizdat though. He did early in his career when he just wrote poetry but later on his work took on a character which put him at odds with the typical Samizdat readership. He immigrated to the United States, was shocked that he didn't…

Czech Republic just isn't a very religious country. I think it might be the only country where atheists (not just the religiously ambivalent but outright atheists) are a plurality.

Truman basically was going to go full Clement Attlee after WWII but his popularity plummeted because of the Korean War and he lost control of Congress. So in a way, still the Communists fault.

Yeasayer, MGMT, and Vivian Girls were among the first "current" bands I listened to, after spending my youth listening mostly to classic rock and/or 80s punk. It's a weird feeling in the last couple of months to realize that all that shit came out more than 5 years ago.

Yeah, they are pretty terrible. Kids like that type of shit, hyperactive delivery though. Just like Disney Channel sitcoms. Maybe it's because they're young and too dumb to understand nuance. They can't tell how the person on screen is supposed to be feeling unless they are hamming it the fuck up.

I saw Upset when they were on tour with Colleen Green. Didn't even know who they were when they got on stage but they were very good and won me over. They have a nice ballad called "Wonder" about drifting away from your normie friends after high school.

I guessed she was the drummer because the fat girl in Vivian Girls was the drummer. Regardless, rhythm section.

Russia still does it to this day. During the Crimea referendum, they were calling the Ukrainian government Nazis while simultaneously inviting the Hungarian Jobbik party and the French National Front to monitor the voting.

The fascination carries over to all indigenous people. See Werner Herzog's hilariously patronizing Where the Green Ants Dream.

I've never caught Russia Today straight making up facts on any subject besides Ukraine (where their lies are laughably transparent "concentration camps for Russian speakers" and so fourth). The main problem with RT is that they legitimately do not understand American politics. They give way too much attention to…

I think whether North and South Korea unify is legitimately up in the air. They might go through with it in a haze of euphoria following whatever brings down the Kim regime, but if they do it will be a fucking disaster. About half the population of East Germany moved to West Germany after unification, the migration…

Iraq and Libya were on the State Department list of state sponsors of terror but it's a stretch to say they were "among the biggest state sponsors of terror" That list was always kind of stupid. North Korea is on there for baking the Japanese Red Army, which hasn't done an attack in more than 30 years. Saudi Arabia…

As it stands though, Trump does have the endorsement of Jean Marie Le Pen and Vojislav Sesell, the leader of the Serb Radical Party. I'm sure Zhirinovsky also lines up with Trump pretty well, but he hasn't made it official.

Zhirinovsky famously endorsed Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Republican primary. Buchanan, who is on record as thinking Hitler wasn't that bad, rejected Zhirinovsky's endorsement.

Dude, most Republicans don't even defend the Iraq War anymore. Are you Dick Cheney?

A particularly amusing example of how Glasnost was actually a plan to sure up Communist Party rule was the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. Gorbachev announced that opposition political parties would be allowed to exist in the Soviet Union for the first time. The first one registered was the…

In terms of news, my problem with the BBC is that it is cautious to comical level. One example, there was a stabbing at some school in England. The English newspapers all just ran the story on the websites. The BBC just reported it as "an incident at a school somewhere in England but the police have asked us not to…

I honestly can't tell if the BBC is declining or if it always sucked. I remember thinking it was great in the early 2000s but 1) I was in high school and 2) it was pretty much the ONLY English language source for international news at that time.