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philipjennings.bsky.social
natasha
@philipjennings.bsky.social
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philipjennings.bsky.social
if we're WWII navalposting, may I humbly submit something I came across while perusing the JFK library's digital archives a couple days ago: JFK's "rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" letter after the sinking of PT-109 during the solomon islands campaign (transcription in alt text:
Dear Folks: This is just a short note to tell you that I am alive and NOT kicking - in spite of any reports that you may happen to hear. It was believed otherwise for a few days - so reports or rumors may have gotten back (cont'd.) to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy - and am back at the base now and [illegible]. As soon as possible I shall try to send you the whole story. Much love to you all, Jack
April 19, 2025 at 1:21 AM
philipjennings.bsky.social
if anyone's curious about exactly how explicit they were, from charles dew's "apostles of disunion: southern secession commissioners and the causes of the civil war":
But as he moved to the climax of his argument, Hale took the rhetorical gloves off. Lincoln's election was "nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans," Hale wrote. "The slave-holder and non- slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country." What Southerner, Hale asked, "can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality?" Abolition would surely mean that “the two races would be continually pressing together”
April 10, 2025 at 5:02 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
From Gellately's "Denunciations and Nazi Germany" in Historische Sozialforschung, 1997:
In the files that begin with a denunciation, the evidence of affective motivation is rare. Affective motives include love of Nazism, patriotism, wish to express support for "law and order," or hatred of social outsiders or others such as the Jews who were defined as enemies. As several studies have shown, on balance the predominant motives of the denouncers — in so far as these were recorded — appear to have been instrumental ones, such as informing on a rival or someone involved in a social dispute. Such instrumental denunciations took place within families, among friends and colleagues, and certainly inside the army, so that no social enclave appears to have been [continued in next image] entirely immune. Denouncers took advantage of the state's means of coercion for selfish purposes, and in that respect at least, citizens in Nazi Germany were not entirely unlike those in other "totalitarian" regimes. They rendered a service by providing the police with information and the state rendered a service to them by settling a conflict or removing one of the parties involved. In all of these systems, citizens lost many of the "traditional" means for resolving conflicts, and soon adapted and relied on unmediated access to the means of coercion. We can find an abundance of evidence of such instrumental denunciations from many parts of Europe in the 20th century. In Nazi Germany, not only did the denouncers go to the police with information, others offered to work for the Gestapo as agents or "V-Leute." Some of the latter were "turned" by the Gestapo to work against the Communist Party and at times their contribution was decisive in finishing off what remained of the local Communist network - as happened in the mid-1930s in Wuppertal, when one agent's information contributed to the arrest and trial of some 1,500 people. But other "V-Leute," like many denouncers, volunteered totally false information to gain personally, even when that meant in one "agent's" case from 1938-39, getting between 50 and 60 innocent people in trouble with the Gestapo in Düsseldorf on the serious charge of high treason.
April 3, 2025 at 1:14 AM
philipjennings.bsky.social
opening your chosen news provider's app like
The emperor Commodus, dressed as a gladiator and threatening the senators in the front-row seats of the Colosseum by waving the head of a decapitated ostrich at them, is often taken to sum up the ludicrous sadism of corrupt autocracy. One eyewitness, describing the incident, admits that he was terrified but, at the same time, so dangerously close to laughter that he had to pluck some laurel leaves from the wreath he was wearing and stuff them in his mouth to stifle the giggles.
December 23, 2024 at 8:36 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
with alt text, from www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
"President Jacques Chirac wanted to know what the hell President Bush had been on about in their last conversation. Bush had then said that when he looked at the Middle East, he saw 'Gog and Magog at work' and the biblical prophecies unfolding. But who the hell were Gog and Magog? Neither Chirac nor his office had any idea. But they knew Bush was an evangelical Christian, so they asked the French Federation of Protestants, who in turn asked Professor Römer."
November 12, 2024 at 7:34 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
the bush administration disputes this sequence of events but mike huckabee is gonna say this shit at a presser
November 12, 2024 at 7:20 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
thinking about charles dew's apostles of disunion, a tiny slip of a book that packs a punch when read in 2024. foul, crude invective from minor men, delivered without regard to how foul and off-putting outsiders may find it, drove the nation to catastrophe, you say?
cover of charles dew's apostles of disunion: southern secession commissioners and the causes of the civil war As sectional tension mounted in late 1860 and early 1861, five states of the lower South - Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana - appointed commissioners to other slave states and instructed them to spread the secessionist message across the entire region. These commissioners often explained in detail why their states were exiting the union, and they did everything in their power to persuade laggard slave states to join the secessionist cause. From December 1860 to April 1861, they carried the gospel of disunion to the far corners of the South. [...] They were often relatively obscure figures [...] In the late nineteenth century when editors at the War Department were assembling a documentary record of the Civil War, they included extensive coverage of the commissioners in the volume dealing with the onset of the conflict - a clear indication that they considered these men to be key players in the sequence of events leading to the war. [...] The commissioner's words convey an unmistakable impression of candor, of white Southerners talking to fellow Southerners with no need to hold back out of deference to outside sensibilities.
October 31, 2024 at 4:42 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
it is her! she posted about it
from insta @diannaagron, with a photo of fellow canvassers: This was my first time canvassing. It's a great way to hear from voters firsthand about how they're feeling and what's driving their political choices. I have many friends who have been doing this for years, and knew by their storytelling that this would be a great day, and a time to learn. I couldn't recommend this experience enough.
October 29, 2024 at 6:58 PM
philipjennings.bsky.social
little snake in charge of daytime selected to succeed weird bug in charge of nighttime
October 16, 2024 at 1:24 AM
philipjennings.bsky.social
Taras Bulba, Gogol trans. Constantine, Modern Library Classics edition, page 20: "The governor's daughter boldly came over to him, placed her sparkling diadem on his head, clipped her earrings on his lips, and slipped onto him her maidenly, flimsy blouse with its frills and gold embroidery"
September 25, 2024 at 1:11 PM