“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.
Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority
Nah. America had Nazis in the 30s too. We’re immune to the most rabid varieties of fascism and authoritarianism because they don’t produce all the cool products Americans demand.
Americans might be plagued with racism and bigotry, but we’re way too lazy and invested in our own lives for a coup. Literally our bread and circuses are way too good.
It seems pretty common for travelers to lament the lack of good bread like at home. Bread basically a living organism that is ultra local. Good bread like at home really only exists at home. Local water, temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors seem to play a big part.
Ask anyone from New York or New Jersey about getting a good pizza or bagel in another state. It doesn’t matter who makes it or if they’re using the exact same recipe, perfect bread can evidently not be replicated outside the region. There is even a bagel company in south Florida, catering to snowbirds turned transplants, that claims to use water from that region to make their bagels.
It’s not as delicate a matter as you make it out to be. I was just looking for a kind that isn’t mushy like toast or full of sugar like a bagle. If classic sourdough or whole grain with an actual crust exist in the US it’s not trivial to find for foreign visitors.
Yeah, good food isn’t trivial to find when you travel. I’m empathetic to that frustration. But judging all bread based on the cheapest abundant and easy to find bread a foreigner can find without any apparent effort seems like a mistake to me. I certainly wouldn’t judge all Italian food by what I found in my hotel in Venice. I wouldn’t judge NY bagels by what I found during my layover at La Guardia. And I wouldn’t judge an entire countries bread based on what I found in the grocery store.
Whole Foods has a great bakery. It was a loaf I bought there that inspired me to start making sourdough. Locally, we have “Cuban bread” that I’m pretty sure is really Tampa bread, if you get it at the right bakeries it’s great. Supermarket bread is mostly nonsense, is that not true elsewhere?
I’m in VA and I have a couple of spots that sell their food “from NY water shipped daily.” Idk it is bomb ass bagels and pizza though. I’m not sure what the water does but I enjoy eating it.
It’s selection bias. Folks who resist get stomped on. The folks that remain are increasingly docile.
Repeat this process over and over again - from the Palmer Raids to the Blacklists to the crushing of the Civil Rights / Antiwar movements to the Drug Wars and Terror Wars - until your culture is properly domesticated and you can do whatever you want to them.
I think the anti-war movement - more specifically specifically the anti-draft movement - caused a lot of unintended damage. By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have been met with a lot more resistance. If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration. That would have gotten a generation politically active and would have prevented a lot of what’s happening today.
By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.
I don’t buy that theory, as the broader global economic forces were a bigger influence on GenX / Millennial youth than any particular US military hot zone. And I loathe to think how the Bush/Obama admins would have responded to Afghanistan/Iraq if they thought they had unlimited free conscripts to throw at the problem forever, rather than a depleted reserve of voluntary enlistees and national guard troops to draw from.
If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration.
I don’t think Bush could have been meaningfully less popular with youth voters by 2004. His approval rating was already under 40% in the 18-24 demographic. Young people were regularly in the streets in protest all through 03-04. I was in college at the time, and there were parades of protesters running through the quad at the start of every term. But it was the Boomer voters who dictated the direction of the country, and their hatred of brown skinned foreigners was matched only slightly by their disgust towards Millennials.
The groundswell of opposition to Bush kept piling up until it fully materialized in the 2009 Dem super majority, but then… Obama didn’t get us out of Iraq. Hell, the reason he beat Hillary was because he came out as staunchly against Iraq while she waffled. The antiwar movement was widespread in 2008 and continued to truck on through 2012. But it wasn’t voluntary enlistment that strangled the war. It was a big wave of ostensibly antiwar Democrats taking office and then not ending it.
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.
Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority
Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me
Only this time instead of a silly mustache model, we have a cheeto baked rolley-polley.
What a wonderfully horrifying quote
Waking up? I’m pretty sure we’ve been well aware sense the civil war. Most of us are just Squidward.
Werner Herzog did not say that.
TIL updated my post to reflect that
Nah. America had Nazis in the 30s too. We’re immune to the most rabid varieties of fascism and authoritarianism because they don’t produce all the cool products Americans demand.
Americans might be plagued with racism and bigotry, but we’re way too lazy and invested in our own lives for a coup. Literally our bread and circuses are way too good.
Your bread is pretty shit though. One of the things I miss when I’m over for more than a week is actual, good bread.
Good bread is expensive or made yourself.
It seems pretty common for travelers to lament the lack of good bread like at home. Bread basically a living organism that is ultra local. Good bread like at home really only exists at home. Local water, temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors seem to play a big part.
Ask anyone from New York or New Jersey about getting a good pizza or bagel in another state. It doesn’t matter who makes it or if they’re using the exact same recipe, perfect bread can evidently not be replicated outside the region. There is even a bagel company in south Florida, catering to snowbirds turned transplants, that claims to use water from that region to make their bagels.
It’s not as delicate a matter as you make it out to be. I was just looking for a kind that isn’t mushy like toast or full of sugar like a bagle. If classic sourdough or whole grain with an actual crust exist in the US it’s not trivial to find for foreign visitors.
Yeah, good food isn’t trivial to find when you travel. I’m empathetic to that frustration. But judging all bread based on the cheapest abundant and easy to find bread a foreigner can find without any apparent effort seems like a mistake to me. I certainly wouldn’t judge all Italian food by what I found in my hotel in Venice. I wouldn’t judge NY bagels by what I found during my layover at La Guardia. And I wouldn’t judge an entire countries bread based on what I found in the grocery store.
Sorry, but two disagreements—good food is trivial to find when you travel in Italy lol and American bread is bad without question
Whole Foods has a great bakery. It was a loaf I bought there that inspired me to start making sourdough. Locally, we have “Cuban bread” that I’m pretty sure is really Tampa bread, if you get it at the right bakeries it’s great. Supermarket bread is mostly nonsense, is that not true elsewhere?
Or at a quality bakery. But those aren’t nearly as profitable as fast food joints.
Old-style Korean bakery goods… yummy…
I’m in VA and I have a couple of spots that sell their food “from NY water shipped daily.” Idk it is bomb ass bagels and pizza though. I’m not sure what the water does but I enjoy eating it.
That describes the 2/3rds that’s watching or being killed. Our complacency is what makes us vulnerable.
It’s selection bias. Folks who resist get stomped on. The folks that remain are increasingly docile.
Repeat this process over and over again - from the Palmer Raids to the Blacklists to the crushing of the Civil Rights / Antiwar movements to the Drug Wars and Terror Wars - until your culture is properly domesticated and you can do whatever you want to them.
I think the anti-war movement - more specifically specifically the anti-draft movement - caused a lot of unintended damage. By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars would have been met with a lot more resistance. If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration. That would have gotten a generation politically active and would have prevented a lot of what’s happening today.
I don’t buy that theory, as the broader global economic forces were a bigger influence on GenX / Millennial youth than any particular US military hot zone. And I loathe to think how the Bush/Obama admins would have responded to Afghanistan/Iraq if they thought they had unlimited free conscripts to throw at the problem forever, rather than a depleted reserve of voluntary enlistees and national guard troops to draw from.
I don’t think Bush could have been meaningfully less popular with youth voters by 2004. His approval rating was already under 40% in the 18-24 demographic. Young people were regularly in the streets in protest all through 03-04. I was in college at the time, and there were parades of protesters running through the quad at the start of every term. But it was the Boomer voters who dictated the direction of the country, and their hatred of brown skinned foreigners was matched only slightly by their disgust towards Millennials.
The groundswell of opposition to Bush kept piling up until it fully materialized in the 2009 Dem super majority, but then… Obama didn’t get us out of Iraq. Hell, the reason he beat Hillary was because he came out as staunchly against Iraq while she waffled. The antiwar movement was widespread in 2008 and continued to truck on through 2012. But it wasn’t voluntary enlistment that strangled the war. It was a big wave of ostensibly antiwar Democrats taking office and then not ending it.
Bush would have been voted out in 2004 of the young people had actually voted.
Shame they’d all been disenfranchised by voter registration purges that year.
Doubt.jpeg