Comments on: It’s the Little Things

By: j.c.

j.c. — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:29:24 +0000

Total—assuming that your mildly sanctimonious claim about “focusing on what’s important” is correct, why does that necessarily exclude also checking for misspellings? Why can’t one pay attention to both the apostrophe and the car wreck? For all you know, after Kieran Healy logs off of CT at night he puts a cape on and pulls babies out of burning buildings. I think you missed the point of Josh’s comment(48); there is a time and place for everything (except,possibly in the hideously drab Total world where we always only pull people from important fires…)

By: paul

paul — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:04:01 +0000

total’s claim has a noble history, of course:

“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’”

By: Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:46:51 +0000

Laughing all the way to the bank…What’s Jonah’s
second act?

By: novakant

novakant — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:15:40 +0000

Let’s just scrap both fascism and socialism from our vocabulary – decades of misuse have drained these terms of all explanatory power. I’ll make an exception for serious social scientists and historians trying to delineate certain movements in the past with descriptive rather than polemical intent and willing and able to spend a few pages on semantics.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:32:47 +0000

Doesn’t Facebook deserve at least some of the blame for the resurgence of facism?

By: Ben Alpers

Ben Alpers — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:58:42 +0000

I can only hope that Mr. Goldberg has determined that the great leader is Noam Chomsky (although I suppose Jimmy Carter would also do).

It’s got to be teh Clenis! (Actually, Hillary was in one of the first iterations of the subtitle.)

By: Shelby

Shelby — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:54:40 +0000

Despite all the foregoing, the funniest thing on this page remains Goldberg’s jacket-copy quote. That probably doesn’t mean much, but I’m just sayin’.

By: JakeB

JakeB — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:23:48 +0000

re #51—
John Emerson—
Another thing that fascism needs is a cult of personality. I can only hope that Mr. Goldberg has determined that the great leader is Noam Chomsky (although I suppose Jimmy Carter would also do).

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:54:26 +0000

“Populist” as I used it was a descriptive term for a style of politics, not the political party (which didn’t survive WWI). After that point most populists were Democrats, though in Minnesota and Wisconsin new third parties arose. And some populists were liberals.

By: Josh R.

Josh R. — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:47:38 +0000

MikeJ,

Not only that, Mike, but there’s that whole party realignment thing that began to occur AFTER World War II, in which [conservative] Southern Democrats white flighted their butts to the GOP over civil rights. How many of them were isolationist, and against US entry into the War? That’s another important consideration to, well, consider.

By: MikeJ

MikeJ — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:46:05 +0000

Populists ne liberal ne Democrat. Which of course was pretty obviously the point of my comment.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:22:10 +0000

“Left Minnesota as the most liberal state in the union”.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:21:31 +0000

The populist Democrats were often pretty liberal. I understand that liberals have a fainting terror of populism, but that’s part of the weakness of the Democrats today. The populist FL party was more liberal, by present standards, than any other party in the US at that time, and left the US as the most liberal state in the union. (It was Humphrey, who engineeried the Democrat / FL merger) whose civil rights proposals triggered the Dixiecrat revolt in 1948. Hofstadter got a lot of stuff wrong, and people read him too uncritically.

Goldberg is a fool, but these questions are more complicated than the knee-jerk liberal can understand.

By: Ben Alpers

Ben Alpers — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:59:15 +0000

There actually are serious books that draw parallels between the New Deal, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, e.g. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939.

It’s actually a pretty interesting book.

However, Schivelbusch does not argue that these regimes were equivalent, let alone that the New Deal was fascist or Nazism left-wing.

By: Total

Total — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:54:06 +0000

I don’t think “fixated” means what you think it means, total.

I think “fixated” means exactly what I think it means, kieran.