I watched the entire series, The Americans. It's thrilling and well-crafted television, but totally bogus as a representation of how illegals worked in the USA.
Illegals were/are special assets that would never be concurrently running so many different operations and engaging in risky wet (i.e. assassination) operations right and left. More likely they would spend many boring years cultivating their positions in society and a select few important contacts. That doesn't make for good television.
Typically the best television stories are taking an entire organizations stories and distilling it down to just a few people. Easier to develop characters that way and keep the audience from being confused by actors that don't contribute much.
A good 101 on an illegal story is by Jack Barsky, on his own account. He wrote a book on it, there's various interviews with him, a podcast series (The Agent) and he got interviewed by Lex Fridman (#301). I recomment The Agent podcast series [1] on his (life) story. Also available on Apple Podcast.
You could also have no "true taxes" and just print money and have everyone else pay for it in inflation (tax) to give handouts to incentivize what you want.
This is more and more a problem, not just with images. Even most of the higher quality (better researched) Youtube channels are fast and loose about using irrelevant stock footage to go along with their narration. Of course the channels with AI voice-over are universally terrible at this. I know a lot of this is content creators have limited access to good visual content. A naval historiographer I follow will show, for instance, ship photos or archival video that is not exactly the ship or event he is describing. He's probably a solo creator and I'm sure constrained by archival access, and frankly time.
One notable exception I have found is this channel https://www.youtube.com/@wildwestfaces The narration is often of first person memoirs of historic events and the images are relevant and sync well with the narration.
>> A naval historiographer I follow will show, for instance, ship photos or archival video that is not exactly the ship or event he is describing.
It isn't about money or resources. Even the biggest budget Hollywood productions regularly pass off incorrect ships in full understanding that most viewers cannot tell a sloop from a brig. Sometimes it is about cost or practicality, but more often it is about which ship comports with audience expectations.
Which, in my books, invalidates either as a learning resource.
I mean, as a viewer, if I spot a naval historiographer routinely using wrong footage, then how certain can I be they're not also playing fast and loose with what they're saying? After all, the only piece of clear evidence that I have points towards them not caring.
As for what "comports with audience expectations", maybe this is an extreme position, but to me, intentionally choosing something incorrect but more recognizable is gaslighting at scale - it reinforces the misconception in those already exposed, and introduces it to those new (usually young) to a topic.
Like in Master and Commander when they swapped out the American ship for a french ship as american audiances dont like seeing american ships as the bad guys.
The real Master and Commander story, https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Cruise-CLASSICS-NAVAL-LITERAT..., is from the American perspective and is way better than the fictional one. To do it justice it would have to be done as a mini-series because it would be too long for a movie.
Drachinifel is pretty darned knowledgeable. I imagine its not that easy to get enough footage of some American WWII destroyer that is NOT a Fletcher class, (as a made up example), to fill out an entire 45 minute narration. And there's a shit ton of work that goes into a video that long for a solo creator.
Now, the abysmal nature of name brand corporate history videos is another matter.
acoup typically shows whatever image he can, and then states how close it is to the actual thing he was trying to talk about (and where it deviates) in roughly a single sentence — I’m not sure it’s actually that hard to fit in. In a video format, I’d probably expect it as a text-disclaimer on the image for anyone who cared.
Not doing so is exactly the same as the Hollywood thing; focusing on the narrative rather than the actual teaching, which seems to me psychotic behavior for anything purporting to teach. If you’re misrepresenting the image of the object for narrative convenience, the immediate question is how much of the other material has been butchered for that same convenience? The priorities are out of order.
It’s a violation of viewer trust, and it’s only acceptable in the sense that the viewer often doesn’t know they’ve been tricked… because they were viewing it for the precise reason that they don’t have the knowledge to differentiate between a truth and a lie on that subject
A former Oakland PD officer shared with me insight into how police intelligence worked back in the day. And I'm sure this still goes on.
It was back in the time of the SLA terrorism and Patty Hearst kidnapping. One of the brothers in East Oakland casually mentioned to a cop "What are all these hippies doing in our neighborhood?" (It turns out they were having a strategy meeting.) This got reported up the chain of command and OPD intelligence set up traffic stops all around the neighborhood perimeter. That was it. They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them, with special interest in anyone White.
When the sh!t hit the fan and the FBI got involved (soon thereafter) the OPD chief told the FBI they knew exactly who was involved. The FBI was dismissive and wasted valuable time. When the FBI hit a blank wall in regards to identifying SLA members they finally swallowed their pride and asked the OPD for the list. That's how the SLA membership was identified.
Anyone unfamiliar with the Patty Hearst kidnapping may want to read the excellent book Days of Rage [0]. I started reading it after it was recommended by another user on this forum a long time ago.
No. There was no reason for this ex-cop to tell me the story 5 years ago about something that happened 45 years earlier. And he didn't make a career as a cop, so he wasn't protecting anyone.
> It was back in the time of the SLA terrorism and Patty Hearst kidnapping. One of the brothers in East Oakland casually mentioned to a cop "What are all these hippies doing in our neighborhood?" (It turns out they were having a strategy meeting.)
The SLA only had one black member, who at the time was an escaped convict. Why would a half-dozen white hippies, and one black fugitive, leave their safehouse to hold a strategy meeting in East Oakland?
Because they are under the (mostly correct assumption) that poorer neighborhoods (which are often, but not exclusively, minority neighborhoods) have lower police presence.
And also that radical hippies tend not to have a lot of money, so it's not unusual for them to live in low income neighborhoods (i.e. some members likely lived there anyways).
This is an infamous and reasonably well documented small group of people. You don’t need to speculate about their socioeconomic status because we know who they were and can count them on two hands.
TL;DR none of what you said remotely applies. They were middle-upper-class with access to resources and lived in Berkeley before moving to a notorious Concord safehouse in August ‘73, about 3 months before anything in this story takes place.
They had not kidnapped Patty at that point. The only thing the SLA was taking credit for at that time was the Marcus Foster murder. They probably thought they had a safe house in east Oakland, which is why all the hippies (as described by the bystander) went there for the meeting.
> The only thing the SLA was taking credit for at that time was the Marcus Foster murder.
The only thing? That murder was a huge deal, and what got the FBI involved. We're talking about the assassination of Oakland's first black school superintendent. By self described marxist/lenninist/maoist terrorists and using cyanide laced bullets. The headlines write themselves.
Now is there not only a fugitive in the group, but they're all fresh off making national news for political violence? Violence that wildly alienated the black community? At which point they choose to leave their actual safehouse to go to a "we think its safe" house in said community for a brief meeting? Did they forget their fake IDs? OPD is looking for (literal) leftist terrorists and don't find a single excuse to detain 6 hippies and a black man?
I don't doubt you're sharing this in good faith, but If I'm gonna keep it a buck, none of this passes the smell test for me. That said, I guess it would track in a way. The whole SLA affair has a stranger than fiction vibe to it from start to finish.
A bit of a self-satisfied, everyone-else-is-a-fool, told-you-so story for the teller. IME, those are signals that the story reveals the teller, the culture of the teller, but not facts.
Of course, I don't know. I think the hard thing in these situations is that we humans tend to trust personal stories like this one - it's rude not to. My comment is rude, in a sense, transgressing in this social interaction. But the accurate, truthful course is to treat the facts as [edit:] nothing - not as maybe true, etc., but as if they were never said.
It's a slippery slope. Mussolini defeated the Mafia in southern Italy. However, his gov't did it in a brutal manner. Lots of innocent people rounded up too.
"The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead."
--The Grey Monk, William Blake
Fascism is popular everywhere right now, so it's not dependant on the location (Sicily in this case). The question is, how did it become popular in so many places simultaneously?
But the modern, far-right neofascists admire Israel more than the Third Reich.
The resurgence of the far-right began in the early 2000s when Jörg Haider‘s Freedom Party took power in Austria and Jean-Marie le Pen made the run-off in France.
It got much more powerful during the financial crisis of 2008 and the migration crisis caused by the Arab Spring in the mid 2010s.
It’s not a mystery why people are pissed off and looking for non-mainstream candidates.
A big mystery is why the far-left has vanished.
The Occupy Protests fizzled out, Jeffrey Corbyn imploded the Labour Party, and Jacobin put up a paywall.
Inflation in basic goods and exorbitant rents mean that a lot of people are struggling far more than GDP-style indicators would imply.
There's also secular decline in a lot of southern european manufacturing, so the economic basis for stable income and family life in a lot of places just isn't there anymore.
> The left wing is also very pro-... globalization.
That conflates the centrists, including left and right (when there was a center-right) with the left. The progressive left was always dubious at best about globalization, iirc.
The migration thing is, to a great extent, people inflaming ethnic hatred. People like open borders when they want to migrate themselves, or hire migrants; it also brings trade and tourism; it brings peace and eliminates pointless political distinctions.
I agree that globalization needs to address the relatively easy mobility of capital relative to labor. But that problem is arguably extreme capitalism - where the capitalists get whatever they want - not globalization. Globalization writ by labor would have looked a lot different.
Actual “labor” has a strong social conservative streak, especially in regards to migration.
Notice the protests by farmers, truckers, etc.
The progressive left in America is formed in heavily globalized universities. They are 100% in support of globalization, as they are beneficiaries and producers of it.
I don’t know where the “heart and soul” of the European progressive left is. Other than Spanish socialists, I don’t think there are many.
> Actual “labor” has a strong social conservative streak, especially in regards to migration.
Eh, this varies. Most people in the labour force are young, and young people are generally leftward-leaning. In some regions of the UK, labour have traditionally been pretty socially progressive.
It's only 'corrupt' though, if there was any expectation that the resources of the state were to be controlled by anyone but the ultimate leader. Therefore, the view of whether a given absolute leader is corrupt or not depends more on the society's expectations of them than it depends on their actions. A monarch in an absolute monarchy can never be considered corrupt, even if widely seen as wicked.
The semantics are not very meaningful; I will concede that :) My point was simply that the concept of democracy isn't necessarily an obvious one. Perhaps in early 20th-century Italy, where there was still a technically supreme monarchy, and the tradition of democratic elections itself was only a few generations old, putting trust in one man alone (Mussolini) might have seemed reasonable or even ideal.
> Perhaps in early 20th-century Italy, where there was still a technically supreme monarchy, and the tradition of democratic elections itself was only a few generations old, putting trust in one man alone (Mussolini) might have seemed reasonable or even ideal.
Might have? Do we have evidence? And if it did, what do you conclude from that?
> the concept of democracy isn't necessarily an obvious one
That was due to the Allied Military post-WW2 occupation of Italy. There are a couple of books on that very subject. These Mafioso presented themselves as anti-fascist and anti-communist to help their appointment into positions of power.
lots of Mafia in the USA placed in positions of authority in labor unions -- see Teamsters. Some US political thinking was to use these harsh, often effective people as a "lesser evil" versus genuine communist-labor organizers. Due to many abuses of workers (see History of Slave or Indentured Labor) there were many communist labor organizers, for real.
> They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them
Ah, the famous American freedom. Papers please.
(in practice, it's practically impossible to stop law enforcement doing this kind of thing at least some of the time, no matter what country you're in or how unconstitutional it is. There will always be groups with little enough political power that they have no redress)
No they don’t. I’ve often put my kids on intercity (really interstate) buses to go visit their grandparents. I’ve never had to show ID and they don’t have ID.
While it is practically impossible in cases like this, there's still a huge difference between the US where police will at best begrudgingly acknowledge your rights and most other countries in the world where you do not have rights to begin with.
On the other hand in the US police routinely kill unarmed people, which seems like it’s much worse for personal freedom. Do you have freedom to consider your rights when doing so gets you self-defenced to death for not cooperating?
Quick question, without looking it up what order of magnitude of unarmed people do you think the US police kill each year? 10s? 100s? 1,000s? 10,000s?
Per WaPo's police shooting database[1], there were 51 last year (going up to 71 if you include unknown, 173 including unknown and undetermined). Filter down to people who were not fleeing or having a mental health crisis and you get 8 (26 including unknown and undetermined). While that still represents a problem in the use of force by cops, to say nothing of the idea that carrying a weapon (which is legal in much of the US) means that your death at the hands of the police is acceptable, killings of unarmed people seem far from routine. I don't think you have any reason to believe you will be killed by the police for not giving them your ID.
I was talking about unarmed people because we're specifically talking about people being shot just for not complying with orders they're not legally required to comply to. I didn't think about the possibility of people being shot and surviving, mainly because cops typically magdump people which seems to be reflected in the stats since the number only goes up by 19. In any case, I don't think the distinction is substantial to this discussion.
Edit: I'm not seeing 1141 anywhere, where did you get that number?
Ah I see, idk how I missed that. I think it's 12 months rolling, and in any case includes things like armed confrontations which is outside the scope of this discussion
I filtered those out because we're specifically talking about people being shot just for not complying with orders they're not legally required to comply to.
I didn't read the parents comment as trying to make a point of nationalistic pride, but to frame the US in the broader international context. There are a lot of countries in the world. The majority of which rank below the US on measurements of corruption, and many on police violence.
This is such a lazy reply. Even 10 seconds Googling would tell you Americans don't need to provide ID to the police (unlike other countries) unless you are operating a motor vehicle.
Comment I was replying to said: "This got reported up the chain of command and OPD intelligence set up traffic stops all around the neighborhood perimeter. That was it. They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them"
>During its existence from 1973 to 1975, the group murdered at least two people, committed armed bank robberies, attempted bombings and other violent crimes, including the kidnapping in 1974 of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.
Just FYI, the selector of the FISA Court Justices is the Chief Justice of SCOTUS. The SCOTUS Chief Justice is selected by the President [with Senate confirmation].
Actually, for the last couple of decades, the primary process in both parties has become very open. There isn't even a requirement to be some sort of formal member of a political party, you only have to be registered (and in some states not even that).
There's a widespread conception that candidates are picked via meetings in smoke filled back rooms - that used to be true, but it isn't true (certainly not in the same way) anymore. Read up on the stories of various "insurgent" candidates in both parties over the last 20 years - the common element is organizing and campaigning so that primary voters actually check the box for you.
Didn't the democratic party just outright state that they could choose who they wanted without any input from the people and had no obligation to run a fair primary election? They went to court to defend their right to keep choosing candidates picked via meetings in smoke filled back rooms
It may not make any significant change in the numbers applying for k-12 positions, but do people really need to go through the torture, indoctrination, and expense of graduate school to teach k-12? Won't a handful of undergrad courses, seminars, and internships suffice in addition to whatever other degree is pursued? As it is now wannabe teachers already have too much time, the most precious of all commodities, invested in ramping up to teaching.
It depends on the state, but in some cases yes. In New York there are undergraduate programs which provide an "initial certification", which is sufficient to teach in a public school for X number of years. However, you must obtain a masters degree before the initial certification expires.
I Googled around a bit. Looks like Connecticut, Maryland, and New York requires them and a small set of other states lock specific licensures behind graduate degrees. I sincerely had no idea this was happening. I have young kids, in California, but we haven't hit kindergarten yet.
States that don’t require higher degrees often have a wall on the pay scale that’s hit early in one’s career, without a graduate degree.
What’s weird about the market for teaching master’s degrees, at least (idk about PhDs) is that this generates a ton of demand for them, but it makes no difference how good the program is. Teachers don’t care because they don’t really matter that much for improving teaching skill. Schools don’t care—pay bump is the same no matter what.
This has all the effects one might guess on the quality of these programs—almost all are very easy, because nobody involved cares how rigorous they are, and one party would generally prefer they not be very difficult. Whole thing’s a joke, total waste of money and teachers’ time.
My guess from what I've seen over the past three decades is that this started because private schools and some public schools in wealthy areas were touting how many of their teachers had master's degrees. Other school systems wanted to compete, so they started offering higher salaries to teachers if they had a master's degree. Soon it became very common for most teachers to have one. Amongst the teachers I know, most have master's degrees from the University of Phoenix because apparently it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to get that credential.
Back when this started, much of the alure of teachers with master's degrees was that they were highly educated in the subject matter they were teaching. It was implied that the chemistry teacher would have an MS in Chemistry. But now all the teachers I know have their MA in either Elementary Education or Secondary Education but none of them are teaching how to be teachers. It's a strange situation and recently one of them was ranting about the pay difference between having a master's degree and just a bachelor's degree had shrunk to nearly nothing. This is probably because the MA in Education has become so ubiquitous that it has little value. What school brags about the percentage of teachers with a master's degree anymore now that almost every school is over 80%-90%?
Spy craft goes way back. You can read about it in Herodotus and the Old Testament.
George Washington was a spy master and much of what we think we know about his operations is dot connecting. This is true of most historical accounts of spying.
A good fictional account of true to life spy craft in the 19th century is Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Some of the characters are based on historical persons in the business.
The OG does well to point out the misconception this is somehow a modern invention. It's interesting to read well-researched accounts of spy craft in different historical eras. Its secrecy at the time makes it hard to find source material. They knew how to keep secrets in olden days and there were not many whistle blowers. A lot of what you come across is just speculation. From the article it appears there is quite a lot of source material for Venice.
Damn long-form journalism takes forever to get to the point, so my skimming sometimes misses something crucial.
With that disclaimer out of the way, (I think) it is distressing and damaging for young people to be doing this job. (And maybe the rest of the article goes on to say something like that.)
Still in today's world it is a job that has to be done. If it is to be done it should be by older more mature people with more life experience under their belts. And it should be revealed up front what the job is and how damaging it can be. I think you would have to be very spiritually grounded and take many breaks to refresh your spirit (mental health) to do this.
The way to determine who sold them the data is a service and agent I've envisioned for a long time, but never had the wherewithal to produce. (I won't go into all the hurdles.)
Everyone should have their own email domain, and an agent that also serves as your email client will generate a proper looking (for some definition of that) email address within your domain for every new correspondent.
Now, whenever you see your identity (email address) associated with anything at all you can determine the original source.
