Two brothers guilty about their sports hunting past are making amends in any way they can. One of them is creating a special train of canines that’s become the talk of the town. Steve Hartman shows how train travel has gone to the dogs.
The link in that paragraph goes to “The Far Right’s Fear of ‘Glowies,’” a January 20, 2021, article in The Atlantic by Olga Khazan that explains the origins and meaning of glowie. It’s the term, Khazan writes, that far-right groups use “to describe people they suspect of being federal law-enforcement agents or informants infiltrating their communication channels, trying to catch them plotting violence, or prodding them into illegal acts.”
Joe Biden recently appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel late night show for an interview that lasted nearly 20 minutes but must have seemed like twice that to anyone watching and waiting for the President to express himself clearly and succinctly without fits and starts or rambling incoherently. At one point Kimmel even felt compelled to interrupt the President and throw to commercial just to put a temporary stop to the cringe. Jimmy and his panel of The Dive’s Jackson Hinkle and American Comedian Kurt Metzger review Biden’s performance and how well Kimmel was able to cover for the increasingly doddering President.
STEPHEN GOWANS—The narrative used to explain the need for intervention in Libya is that a peaceful uprising of democracy-loving Libyans against the Gaddafi dictatorship was about to be crushed in blood. A narrative that navigates closer to the truth is that the uprising, touched off by surrounding events in Tunisia and Egypt, originates in the longstanding rift between a nationalist, government on the one hand, and Islamists and comprador elements on the other. While this fails to explain the uprising in full, it explains a good part of it. Is the repression of reactionary forces that threaten the state a crime? If you’re a Libyan Islamist, monarchist or CIA-backed exile, the answer is yes, just as it is if you’re an ideologue for this particular imperialist intervention. But if you’re Gaddafi, and his nationalist supporters, the answer is no.
STEPHEN GOWANS—The Stone and Kuznick view is, really, rather quite silly. They believe that Mao and Kim decided to become guerrillas, and Stalin, a Bolshevik, because these were routes to the acquisition of personal power, self-aggrandizement, and iron-fisted control. Yet, at the time, guerrilla and underground revolutionary were hardly the most promising career paths for people who lusted for power and self-aggrandizement. If Stalin really lusted after these things, why didn’t he link up with Tsarist forces, rather than the Bolsheviks, which until mid-1917 were a minor political force that no one (including many Bolsheviks) expected to take power?