what was that about zeitgeists again

[maradydd]

Warren Ellis, in Planetary #7, January 2000:Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like [in Britain] in the darkest parts of the eighties

Comments

[docstrange]

People lose it when they think they've lost everything?

[barbarienne]

Well, Falklands vs Iraq, I think there's no comparison. Theirs was small, short-lived, had fewer than 1000 dead all around, and fought to maintain control of territory the British had controlled for a couple hundred years already. Also, they won. The Iraq war is now 7 years old and continuing, with hundreds of thousands of dead, and was started with no real plan and was only justifiable with lies and sophistry. Also, we don't really have a definition for what will count as a "win" here, other than "all the locals miraculously stop behaving in a manner contrary to the preceding 10,000 years of their history."

Thatcher and her crowd were evil, but they were focused evil with a concrete plan. Bush's puppeteers have lost control of their mob and now it's running amok. I don't think we can compare until we see the end of the Teabagger situation. How long that takes and how much damage they do before the end will determine which was worse.

I hope like hell that Thatcher "wins" this comparison.

[heron61]

Thatcher and her crowd were evil, but they were focused evil with a concrete plan.

I think that this is the key. Thatcher and company were deeply evil, but they had clear goals and were fairly good at attaining them. They were crazy in the socipathic sense, but that's about it. Shrub and company were both sociopaths and also provably delusional. They were exceedingly ineffective at gaining most of their goals, but caused truly impressive amounts of havoc and managed to create two wars that cannot be won, while assuming that both would be easy victories.

In any case, I'm hoping that the teabaggers will end up being a net good, in that they're in an excellent position to split the Republican Party and thus render it largely ineffective as anything other than a nationally powerless & purely regional party and that would be an exceedingly good thing indeed. OTOH, we could also be looking at a round of anti-government and racist violence by teabagger wackballs, and that's a very disturbing thought.

[barbarienne]

I keep waiting for the sane portions of the Republican party to repudiate their crazy counterparts.

Yet it says something that when I watch The McLoughlin Group, I can't stop thinking that Pat Buchanan is starting to look sane in comparison to Monica Crowley. That's when I have to leave the room and get a cup of tea.

[whswhs]

I read that bit, and I thought Ellis was way off the deep end. Stylistically, it was the equivalent of John Galt's Speech, but without such careful efforts to motivate it or make it fit the character giving it. And as for content . . . what, we're being told that Thatcher didn't count as a woman because people disagreed with her political ideas? I don't agree with radical feminism and think its proponents do major harm, but I would think it arrogant to claim that they aren't women. Ellis struck me as having falling into the classic in-group/out-group thinking that dehumanizes the people one disagrees with; the spirit wasn't much different from Nazis calling Jews "vermin," or from the racist delusions for which Ellis rightly mocked H. P. Lovecraft.

Personally, I'd rather have Thatcher; I didn't follow her years in power closely, but it sounded as if she at least made some effort to reduce the size of the British state. Bush spent his presidency expanding the American state.

[darthzeth]

Thatcher, Reagen, Bush Jr, and Obama are far from the worst leaders, and their administrations are far from the worst administrations. I'm all for taking strong political stands and pushing for the direction you want the society to go. Their policies might not have been good, and we can always fight for a more perfect world.

But people in the first world complaining about the 'darkness' of the 80s is bunk. It annoys me to hear rich people whine about the state of the world.

[heron61]

I can't really offer a position on Thatcher because I have never lived in the UK and have only visited for short periods of time. As for the rest, Obama is a mediocre president and Reagan was a bad president, but definitely far from the worst of world leaders. However, Bush II is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people (in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans), and he helped seriously set back civil rights and individual freedom in the US as well as helping to wreck the US economy and impoverish hundreds of thousands. Also, it looks fairly clear that his handlers were looking for something not far from a fascist takeover of the US. The only good thing that can be said about them is that they were largely fools who believed their own lies and so were singularly ineffective at many of their goals. He's by far the worst US president since WWII and possibly in the last century.

[darthzeth]

it looks fairly clear that his handlers were looking for something not far from a fascist takeover of the US.Right, and Obama and his handlers are orchestrating a communist takeover of the US! according to his critics, anyway. I've heard this crap about presidents and their opponents since I've been paying attention to politics

[darthzeth]

*lack perspective about how dark it can really get, anyway.

[siliconshaman]

Having lived though both, yeah, there are similarities. However, while Thatcher was evil, and competent enough to avoid pissing people off too much. Bush was an idiot, and his people actually believed what they were saying. Hence why the 'short victorious war' was anything but.

Also is that Bush's backers haven't gone anywhere, they're still there and looking to get back in control, by hook or by crook. The corporate puppet masters behind Thatcher have gone elsewhere, the Tories being a busted flush... which may go some way as to explaining why New Labour ended up looking so much like Old Tories.

Of course, the real difference is that Britain isn't America...and couldn't impose it's will on the entire world. Which is pretty much what they'll do, replicating their culture of sociopathic control world-wide.

[siliconshaman]

Could someone please cite the quote(s),from the exact source(s), where it was promised or assured that either OEF, OIF, or the overall WoT were going to be 'short victorious war'?
If anything, former Pres. Bush, et al were always saying the *opposite*....