“Russian is patriotic! Learning languages is how you know you beat someone, just like how we won the Revolutionary War and then took over English. USA! USA! USA!”
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I spent five years learning Russian in Middle and High school in the 80s.
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Sure, because you saw that documentary Red Dawn. Makes sense.
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Wait, are you a sleeper agent and were in Russia at the time?
Asking for a friend.
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'tis true.
I should have taken Spanish instead.
Close. Utah.
Midvale Middle School. We had a Russian language program, as did my High School in Seattle (taught by the grandson of a Russian Count).
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Wow…
A total smoking gun for the fact that authoritarian fuckwits only think what they’re told by the scum they choose to follow.
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It’s a good article, but I still had to get past my knee-jerk reaction of ignoring any link that includes unlabled arrows pointing to different points on a chart or picture.
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Speaking of which…what is GOP media saying about PEEOTUS’ latest adventures? Anyone been subjected to Fox or Limbaugh lately?
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And yet, even after all this time, you guys have never quite gotten the hang of it… 
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Or in other words: these white men are afraid that they will be treated by blacks, browns and women the same way that they treat blacks, browns and women.
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This is a bit conspiratorial, but I really think the rise in “conservative” media was in response to ESPN being successful and cable news/radio wanting money. It happened around the same time as athlete worship, Reagan comes into office around the same time as ESPN hitting the air, and the list of complaints is shockingly similar:
For radio mix in the Howard Stern/shock jock formula and you get Rush Limbaugh. When you present politics as “teams” and present getting officials elected as “winning” you get rabid fans.
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They don’t as far as I can tell. Honestly, both the actual left media and the far right media are still fixated on the election itself.
Regarding the article, it just goes to show something that I’ve been saying for a while: In the US, we don’t have actual conservatives anymore, beyond a few aberrations. Instead, we have reactionaries who identify as conservatives, but don’t actually have consistent principles that they stand for and work towards, but instead define themselves by what they’re against.
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Don’t get angry at us about how we made it gooder.
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If you’re looking for my proposed solution to this problem, I don’t have one. It took decades to tie this Gordian Knot, and we’re not going to loosen it overnight. This is a serious, long-term project, and it’s not going to be easy.
I’m not sure about his analogy here; wasn’t the whole point of the Gordian Knot that there was a simple and quick way to loosen it?
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Yes, but that required a direct and, shall we say, martial method. Extending the metaphor results in unfortunate implications in how to resolve the issue.
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That’s what I was thinking – “it’s too complex and being careful will not work here” seems more like the implication.
I don’t know though; the obstructionism is really entrenched and it would be almost impossible for the Democrats to build any bridges. In many ways, Obama was about as good a chance as is likely for a while – a good speaker, moderate, positive and willing to cooperate. The fact that the knot has only got tighter is not a good sign.
The one thing I can think of is that some people identify with certain groups for specific reasons, often based on perceived shared values. I don’t want to wish for a bad presidency, but maybe that would help people to leave in larger numbers.
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When I was in college in the 1990s it was recommended that STEM majors take Russian or German as their foreign language. I’m guessing this is because of the esoteric technical literature only available in Russian or German at that time, but I really have no idea.
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Interesting idea. Another key event from that same era was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine that required all news outlets to provide competing points of view instead of just one side. I’m not sure the Fairness Doctrine could be brought back, or if it would make a difference since so many people just pass links around on social media, and would it apply to someone’s personal blog?
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I don’t know if that can help anymore, the nature of the media is to provide “balance” which is at best offering two partisan extremes. I think election reform is the major thing needed, and to prevent third party PACs from ruining any chance of a independent candidate from winning state or local elections, along with making voting more fairly represent the interests of the public.
Fixing media in a good way that doesn’t risk making everything worse of give more authoritarian tools to the government seems impossible. Maybe if they could tie a lot of money (most likely tax incentives) to the fairness doctrine to drive corporate media to want to meet its requirements or else be forced to pay more. Publishing the appraisals would help too, but even then the media would attack the appraisal as censorship which is one of the critical issues with assholes that tends to gain steam with the public.
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