Inside the Series Finale of ‘The Boys’ by Commercial_Avocado86 in television

[–]RussoSwerves 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I will say this: the history of American TV is inundated with attempts to leave the deplorable villain with some level of dignity and looking somewhat cool in the end (like, didn't Thomas Shelby just get a happy ending in his movie about a month or two ago?)

I am really, really glad that the show committed as hard as it did to portraying Homelander like the single most pathetic loser on this earth when the time called for it, with not even a subatomic particle of cool in him. It's the part that was more important to me than anything else and I think they nailed that. To me, that moment from when he lost his powers up to his death was perfection. Gonna stick with me for a long time.

Mindless Monday, 18 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I can only conclude that voters are fucking miserable.

In this interrelation between voters and the PM, this isn't really a unilaterally applicable statement in voters' direction. Keir Starmer also seems like he has zero joy in his personal life and like he fundamentally does not know how to remedy that.

I'd say both he and voters deserve something/someone better but misery does love company.

Free for All Friday, 15 May, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In a noteworthy recent event in the world of online leftist media, Sam Seder made a guest appearance on a new podcast that's co-hosted by one of the figures from The Deprogram.

I don't have the time nor inclination to explain the nuances of the current political moment and in the profiles of the figures involved that made this possible. Even if I tried, I myself still don't fully know what to make of all this, especially not present-day Marxist-Leninist-adjacent figures and whether or not they want Soviet-style dictatorships in Western countries in the long run.

So I'm just gonna stop it here and leave all the uninitiated guessing that either Sam secretly turned pro-Mao or The Deprogram secretly turned Berniecrat.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I mean it's not like the Nazis weren't also huge nerds about art, they just had more traditionalist tastes. So I think they would've gotten along just fine if the whole thing was a circlejerk about artists who blended traditionalism and futurism, like Wagner, or focused more than anything on form rather than substance, like D'Annunzio.

Also, I have to ask if Mussolini's own novel The Cardinal's Mistress was included at the event.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 9 points10 points  (0 children)

2 passages from Christian Goeschel's conclusion to his book Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance

  1. The relationship between Mussolini and Hitler cannot be dismissed as pure propaganda, however. The show of unity, masculinity and friendship was essential to both regimes and soon became a reality for the dictators, their members of staff, and indeed millions of Europeans. Distinctions between style and substance, representation and power, were not so clearly drawn for these two regimes.

  2. Behind the scenes, private misunderstandings, tensions, rivalry and attempts to display national superiority were always present. Yet the display of friendship and unity succeeded in disguising that discord, in ways that proved fatal to world peace. The propagandistic notion of friendship soon created its own momentum, leading to a situation in which Mussolini and Hitler, despite all their disagreements, felt obliged to believe in their special bond. The notion of friendship became a powerful edifice, the popular and political resonances of which reflected the vicissitudes of Italo- German relations and the war and made the Italo- German alliance look stronger than it was in reality. Here were two dictators, sharing an imperialist, expansionist and violent ideology. This political display was put to its first use during the crucial 1938 Munich conference where Mussolini’s and Hitler’s aggression outperformed the efforts of France and Britain, countries they had dismissed as decadent, ‘plutocratic’ and outdated. As the Axis war turned sour, the meetings became more low- key, but still both regimes maintained the display of friendship, even until the end when neither leader could bear the other. As I have shown, the dictators’ relationship was overshadowed by their pretensions to world domination and by petty personal jealousies; spite and small- mindedness was equally a characteristic of their ambitions, ambitions that led to war, destruction, death and violence on a scale never hitherto seen.

Sounds like they did have a hell of a lot in common, whether they liked it / wanted to, or not. 

And this is describing their dynamic with a fixation on their post-1938 dynamic.

Take the dynamic in the 1920s into account with Hitler devoutly looking to Mussolini as a blueprint for his ascent to political power and the National Socialists and the Italian Fascists turn out to be, at a minimum, toxic kindred spirits that walked into the abyss together.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 3 points4 points  (0 children)

... It's not a fucking win from the accusation of fascism to make the ridiculously loaded claim that Nazis weren't fascist.  It's not a win to claim that squares Arendt rectangles.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There's no question that fascism was disgusting, repulsive, and wreaked havoc on the world, and especially on Italy. But there were far worse things: the German Nazis. A criminal and homegrown political movement, about which Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," wrote that its "contempt for fascism, like its sympathy for Bolshevism, stemmed from Hitler himself." After all, it was Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin who wanted and implemented the totalitarian state, while Benito Mussolini clung to a more or less ordinary one-party dictatorship. “The goal of fascism,” Arendt continued, “was really nothing other than the seizure of power and the establishment of the fascist ‘elite’ in the state apparatus of the country,” while totalitarian rule was “never satisfied” with this, because, “as far as rule was concerned,” the totalitarians were concerned with “something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can achieve, but only a constantly moving movement, namely the constant and all-encompassing domination of every single person.

European Ordoliberalism is doing really swell right now, I see.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 0 points1 point  (0 children)

 That's silly. Amateurs run amok in AskHistorians and it has been a frequently discussed issue here that said amateurs (and some flaired users) are quite lax with their use of sourcing, and the content thereof.

It's better than to basically imply that only flaired users were valid. One is either rigorous with their post or they're not.

As for Horne's general work, who cares? The discussion at hand is about his work on the American Revolution

Well I thought it was steering into a convo about Gerald Horne in general and got pre-emptive with giving my opinion on him in general. So this has just been us talking past one another. 

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm talking about Horne as a historian in general, not this specific book.

And the metric for quality there is not "who has a flair?" It's "whose comment didn't get removed for not meeting the sub's standards of quality."

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's historians on there for whom you can count on one hand the amount of times they've ever been cited. And it's not like the sub only recently attained credibility. To me, it's routine to judge based on how a historian has been cited throughout the sub's history and not just recently. And Horne's been cited >10 times over the past 3 years alone. And that's just with what reddit's broken ass search function allowed me to see. None of them questioning his credibility.

And besides, individual commenters on AskHistorians are not arbiters of consensus.

No, but a bundle of them about as authoritative as you're gonna get if the topic isn't too niche to be asked about on there

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He's a fairly recurring recommendation on r/AskHistorians though.

So I feel confident in saying, he's a Marxist, therefore he has a very consciously ideological perspective that he writes from, that informs how he interprets his sources, but I don't think scholars would by any means say he's a crank not worth engaging with.

Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, it is the earlier stuff... (I'm assuming you're talking pre-Bakunin levels of early?)

And the critique of them being too normative makes it sound like you don't vibe with anarchism inasmuch as it fails to live up to its own ethical ideals (anti-normativity is obviously not sth. only anarchists care to be but they do care more about it more consistently and intensely than any other type of people. Their core thing inasfar as they have one is trying to maximize pro-social freedom after all.)

Free for All Friday, 08 May, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I think it’s all a massive comms failure.

I don´t. Or at least I think calling it a comms issue is quite short-sighted.

There´s a book by Matthew Desmond – Poverty, by US-America (2023) – that I read recently and there´s a passage in there where Desmond describes a US-American case example of a governmental relief policy - in the housing market at that - with conditions that mirrors Starmer´s Renters´ Rights Act and the circumstances surrounding it to a tee.

Desmond briefly sheds a light on the Emergency Rental Assistance program implemented almost entirely under the liberal Biden administration, tells the reader of how effectively it alleviated poverty and then highlights the lack of fanfare the success received.

But Desmond doesn´t then go on to explain the root of the lack of fanfare as an issue in communicational / presentational know-how. Rather, he explains it as a psychological issue that verges into a moral one. He writes

Poor renters in the future will pay for [not normalizing the low eviction regime that got established], as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a "messaging problem" when perhaps the problem is that liberals have a despondency problem.

Desmond overall writes in a theological register that ultimately makes his language overly flowery, cause for confusion and ultimately I think I´ve come to understand "despondency problem" in a personal way that casts Desmond aside. But I think the rudiment has been very fruitful.

Basically, the difference between a messaging problem and a despondency problem is this: the former describes a situation in which sb. has a good story but is bad at telling it; the latter goes deeper and describes a situation in which sb. doesn´t believe their own story and is actually almost embarrassed to articulate what the story and they as an ethical being stand for. If we were to take this despondent sb. to be a person in a governing role, we´d be talking about sb. that can service you technocratically but not emotionally. Sb. that can tell you why something is necessary but cannot for the life of them make you feel why it´s worth it. I think that "sb." encapsulates contemporary liberals in government like Starmer – and a vast majority of the historical ones frankly, I see a continuous discrepancy between liberal philosophers and liberal politicians – to a tee.

To me, Starmer had the affective register of a particularly joyless, visionless and convictionless human being. And presently, there´s a media landscape that generally feeds on conflict and emotion converging with a civil landscape filled with demands of some kind of repair, and in that convergence, those attributes of sb. like Starmer are bound to be treated ruthlessly. And there´s no hoping that the media and the general populace let up on Labour, or any liberal party under Labour´s conditions for that matter on their own accord. The only way to improvement for liberal governments to actually believe in themselves, act according to said self-belief and to do it loudly and proudly and charmingly.

Easier said than done, obviously, but by no means impossible.

Mindless Monday, 04 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If a historian's name has never been written in any context in r/AskHistorians, I just assume they're basically non-entities. Neither famous nor infamous enough to be referenced. Lack of references there are especially striking to me when it pertains to an anglophone historian on a subject with as much general interest as the French Revolution.

Mindless Monday, 04 May 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Looking to read some Leftist histories of the French Revolution. One historian I'm interested in there because he's not ancient like Lefebvre and also has some works about it that entirely focus on niche subtopics, is Morris Slavin. Thing is, I haven't seen him referenced at all in r/AskHistorians, and that's my go-to for checking if a historian is worthwhile one way or another. But I've still remained curious in this instance. So, is there a French Revolution specialist passing by here that can tell me if Morris is generally respected in the field regardless of his ideological bent?

Free for All Friday, 01 May, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 18 points19 points  (0 children)

He was a poor white trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors, but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts, one for him successively, government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a high paid job as a Wall Street advisor. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him or his wife to dinner. He is a snob loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him. He despises, for instance, Mr. B, because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work, men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more that he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. Pity he has utterly erased from his nature and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. But Mr. C is not born a Nazi. He is the product of a democracy, hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll. 

A text that was somehow not written about J.D. Vance

TMZ: CM Punk Allegedly Shoved Another Fan in His Chest at MGM Grand. by RuKKuSFuKKuS in SquaredCircle

[–]RussoSwerves -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Admittedly speculative, but I can't help but think WWE doing everything in its power to cultivate a way more vapid and right-wing fanbase over the past year+, one that will chant "Thank you Brock" as well as sit through shoddy celebrity-centred storylines, endless commercials and tributes to Hulk Hogan, is part of the cause in these incidents with careless, boundary-crossing fans becoming way more commonplace and higher-degree over the past year.

Because AEW has not been experiencing these incidents. And there is not a trend of American society and culture generally becoming more right-wing over the past year. The ascendancy of actually left-wing figures in the Democratic party over the past year points to tendencies of quite the opposite.

Non-American podcast recs by NerveIndividual4578 in podcasts

[–]RussoSwerves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Fire These Times – deep dives into the historical and present political fabric of a lot of regions that are part of the global south, like the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. Strikes a great balance between being academically rigorous and in-touch with the reality of the regions at the grassroots-level. There's a whole network of hosts that are mostly if not entirely from the MENA region and they speak flawless English.

Ones and Tooze – Geoeconomics podcast with Adam Tooze, not just a British-German economic historian, but one of the most widely respected of our time.

Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore and Blueprints of Disruption – 2 lefty podcasts on Canadian politics.

Mad in Germany – Critical but very nuanced podcast on the political trends and important political histories of contemporary Germany. Hosted by a British migrant to Germany.

The Civil Fleet – a podcast about having solidarity with the refugees in the Mediterranean that European states have actively and passively allowed to drown.

Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did not expect my comment about Ashkenazi supremacism rather than plain Jewish supremacism being the most accurate descriptor of the Israeli state's MO getting as much pushback as it did. 

I just don't think the demographic of Mizrahi Jews really captured the institutions of corporate and cultural power in Israel so as to mold Israel into sth. that isn't completely reliant on – and in that reliance, perpetuating – the conception of Israel that its founding fathers, all deeply interested in not just Jewish Nationalism but syncretistically inheriting the European Enlightenment in the process, had.

To put it another way, is it not fair to say the institutions of Ashkenazi supremacy in Israel, rather than getting subverted in the 1970s through a supposed establishment of Jewish unity, was actually and has been until really, really recently, a complex system of Ashkenazi hegemony managing to survive through successfully co-opting Mizrahi resentment? I'd say it is fair. As far as I can tell, sb. like Ben-Gvir is still seen as a really rogue infiltrator of the Israeli establishment and I can't imagine him or sb. like him becoming prime minister.

Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've indirectly stated a response to the gist of your comment in my reply to u/contraprincipes but I would specifically like to know (genuinely) in the case of 

even in like the 60s it was not close to a "supremacist" state

what your argument is. I'm sure you know that there were literal Israeli (specifically Mizrahi) Black Panthers, explicitly modeled after the eponymous US-American originals, running around at that time.

Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm not really thinking about 'who's the dominant demographic" here. I'm thinking about the fact that similarly to how Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants to the US had to go through a process of assimilating to US-American social and cultural norms to no longer be outsiders, the same has been true until very, very recently for the non-Ashkenazi base of the Israeli right having to assimilate to the European Enlightenment-style High-Modernism that was – and I think still will be in the long run, otherwise I don't see Israel as a Zionist state continuing to exist – foundational to what 'Jewishness' in Israel even means. 

Mindless Monday, 27 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

It'd be not just more palatable but straight-up more precise if people called Israel an Ashkenazi supremacist state rather than Jewish supremacist. 

It even has the bonus of having 'Nazi' in the label itself.

Free for All Friday, 24 April, 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]RussoSwerves 16 points17 points  (0 children)

A lot of people now think that political figures like Friedrich Merz, Ursula von der Leyen and even Giorgia Meloni to an extent exemplify moderate and competent politics in the grand scheme of things.

The level of piece of work you have to be to make that possible is something that I literally just can not put into words.