Non themed conversations

Follows from thenextheraldmage.

[prokopetz]

I am currently reading the Eat God playtest (0.6.2), and something I wanted to compliment you on is how directly comprehensible it is. An immense amount of my frustration with D&D is that, starting from the beginning of a PHB and reading forward, large sections frequently prove irrelevant or incomprehensible without later information -- no relevant pages given, of course! This is not confined to D&D, either, I have run across many board games that seem to have picked at random the order in which rules are explained, leading to a great deal of frustration on my part.

I'm always of two minds about comments like this. On the one hand, I appreciate the the vote of confidence that I'm succeeding in making the text approachable. On the other hand, I know that I'm an average technical writer at best, so it feels kind of like I'm benefiting from other people's misfortune on account of the fact that many major tabletop RPG publishers have seemingly never even heard of technical writing!

(Incidentally, Eat God's playtest draft is up to version 0.7.2 at the moment, so if you're a full major version behind, you may wish to pick up the latest – a lot of stuff has been further clarified in the interim.)

[entries-in-marginalia]

Thank you for the update!

I also think that the lack of technical writing skill in the D&D PHBs I have read has helped contribute to the culture of "GM does everything". An experience I have had several times goes roughly as follows:

"Please read the relevant PHB sections."

"Okay, that's great that you read that, and I know it was in the relevant PHB section, but that's not relevant to your character right now, or to this setting we're doing."

"Here are (some of) the differences from the PHB. More will be revealed over time."

Those differences are anything from "microwave ovens exist" to "your character cannot align to a LG/CG deity".

I do not blame the GMs here, they were quite good, but I found that the PHB throwing everything at the reader meant that I eventually came to the conclusion of, "Okay, when necessary, the GM will tell me which parts of this sprawling mess I actually need to acknowledge, let alone care about."

[biglawbear]

I supported single payer style healthcare for nearly 20 years, a decade before Bernie Sanders made Medicare for All a popular progressive stance.

There was a single, little known event last year that has completely changed my mind on single payer:

Federal employee health plans stopped covering gender affirming care.

Few people know about this. It didn't make the news. But in response to trump's executive orders in 2025, all healthcare plans offered to federal employees stopped providing certain healthcare coverage to trans folks at the start of 2026.

The federal government is the largest employer in the country. This affected millions of people overnight.

There is very little legal basis to challenge this. The Supreme Court ruled years ago in Hobby Lobby that employers can choose what coverage to offer their employees. So at the stroke of the pen, the president took away access to certain care for millions of people. And there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

Yes, only a fraction needed that care. But this is the foot in the door. First trans healthcare, then it'll be contraception, then vaccines, then routine care. First federal employees, then medicare and medicaid.

This isn't even getting started on how hospitals and doctors aren't covering any gender affirming care for minors anymore based on threats from the trump admin alone.

And I reiterate: employees can choose what to cover, and there's really nothing you can do about it, except pay out of pocket, buy your own insurance, or go to a different employer.

If the federal government becomes the sole source of healthcare coverage under a single payer system, the federal government can also take it away, and there will be nothing you can do.

Under a single payer system, an insane president or HHS secretary can take away whatever care you depend on at the stroke of a pen. I don't care how strong the enacting laws are. They can just stop paying.

So I can't support single payer anymore. This was the longest and most enduring progressive position I've held, and I can't abide it anymore. Like. This position hurts me to abandon. It was quite possibly my first and strongest political opinion from when I was young and my mother, a single mother and a nurse, taught me about the iniquities of the healthcare system before Obama was even elected and passed the Affordable Care Act. As an economics major, under a rational system, it should make sense and be the most efficient and cost effective. I built my goddamn political identity around single payer when I was in high school before Bernie was even elected to the Senate.

I don't know what the solution is to get to universal healthcare. Healthcare policy is not my forte. I'm still meditating on it now that I can't support M4A. But I don't think single payer is workable or secure enough.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Okay the WEIRDEST THING is going going down right now

So some guy in Michigan in the US has just found a letter in his grandmother’s house; it seems to be a pen pal letter from 1973ish, and it’s from a young Welsh girl. In it, she lists:

Her name, and the names of her brother (Gwynedd) and sister (Catrin)

Their ages

Where she lives in Wales (Denbigh)

Her hobbies, including horse riding and reading pony books.

So this American dude decides to take a photo, whack it on Twitter and ask the only Welsh person he knows if there’s any way to track this Welsh girl down, because you know, ALL WELSH PEOPLE KNOW EACH OTHER, OBVIOUSLY

Except

I am furious to report that it has worked

Welsh person he tags doesn’t know, but takes up the challenge. Someone reckons the Catrin might be a woman who translated a hymn book once, and checks the foreword to see that the dates and ages do seem to be about right. Someone else suddenly has a brainwave - wait, isn’t she the mother of Steff, the comedian?

My husband gets tagged, takes one look at this letter, and is like “That is 1000% my aunt.”

So now it’s 20 to midnight, Steff’s aunt has obviously not yet seen the excited message to put Twitter out of their misery, and my mother-in-law is currently on the phone gleefully telling us that when that letter was written her sister had never sat on a horse in her life before, and she’d lied to an American pen pal for clout before the internet even existed.

[official-wales]

Post Cymru Swyddogol (Official Wales Post)

[official-michigan-posts]

official michigan post

[walsinghamisntdead]

A Welsh comedian, Elis James, does a radio show which has a segment called ‘Cymru Connections’ where another Welsh person calls into the show and he has 1 minute to question them about their life until he finds someone the both know. I’ve never seen him fail.

[prokopetz]

A taxonomy of gameplay videos on YouTube:

1. Player who can’t remember which button is “jump” spends twenty minutes repeatedly attempting the same wrong solution to the world’s easiest puzzle.

2. “Hilarious” quip-a-minute commentary from a guy who sounds like a racist, homophobic version of the parrot from Aladdin.

3. Fourth attempt at annoyingly difficult boss stymied when player character randomly falls through the ground.

4. Gritty combat sim modded so the hero is now a lightsabre-wielding Hatsune Miku riding Twilight Sparkle into battle against Thomas the Tank Engine.

5. Tool-assisted speed runner completes sixty-hour game in four minutes by glitching through the skybox to fight God.

[prokopetz]

More:

6. Glitch exhibition that attempts to explain each exploit in layperson’s terms, but keeps getting distracted by the finer points of integer overflow handling.

7. Player projects their face in the bottom right corner of the video, proceeds to spend the entire run in utterly stone-faced silence.

8. Running commentary wanders off into a twenty-minute anecdote about last year’s Thanksgiving dinner; 85% chance it’s a Zelda game.

9. Demonstration of obscure NES title released circa 1989 whose gameplay objectives remain indecipherable even with detailed explanations.

10. Stark illustration of why Super Mario Maker was a mistake.

[eightyonekilograms]

what should I read if I feel like a hollow vessel with no authentic desires, gliding immaterially through life like a wraith

[entries-in-marginalia]

It depends on how you want to address this. Do you want to continue to feel like a hollow vessel, to outline the shape of it, or do you want to fill and ground yourself, articulating desires and attachment to life?

If you wish for the latter, I will have a different list of recommendations, although of course I do need to know what kind of attachments to life and desire you wish to cultivate.

On that note, here are some works that you might find enjoyable, playing on this theme: Public Domain

Against the Grain, by J.K. Huysmans

Las-Bas, by J.K. Huysmans

Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy

Yeast: A Problem, by Charles Kingsley

An Imaginative Man, by Robert Hichens

Under Copyright, Available for Inexpensive or Free

Goat-Foot God, by Dion Fortune

The Sea-Priestess, by Dion Fortune

Moon Magic, by Dion Fortune

Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

The Story of the Stone, by Barry Hughart

Episode One Journals: Darth Maul, by Jude Watson

Hell House, by Richard Matheson

Under Copyright, Available for Purchase New

The Boy Detective FAILS, by Joe Meno

The Manual of Detection, by Jedidiah Berry

The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula le Guin

The Farthest Shore, by Ursula le Guin

Tehanu, by Ursula le Guin

The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner

Boneland, by Alan Garner

Among Others, by Jo Walton

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 3

From Unicorns, by James Huneker (1917)

A monument should be erected to the memory of the inventor of playing-cards because he did something toward suppressing the free exchange of human imbecility! The Frenchman Huysmans, who wrote this charming sentiment, was not necessarily companionable. He was the most unpleasant among the world's great writers; for as a great master of prose he ranks high in the literature of his country. His detestation of the mediocre became a tormenting fixed idea. Like Flaubert, a neurotic, his digestive organs in a dyspeptic condition, Huysmans pursued the disagreeable with the ardour of a sportsman tracking game. Why precisely such subjects appealed to him must be left to the truffle-hunters of degeneration. Swift is in the same class, but Swift enjoyed scarifying his Yahoos. Huysmans did not. Nor for that matter did Flaubert. [...] He loathed his themes. He was unhappy while developing them. Perhaps the clairvoyance of hatred, which may be a powerful incentive, forced his pen to the task. But the fact remains that, art and religion aside, Huysmans did not love what he transposed from life to his marvellously written pages. His was a veritable Æsthetic of the Ugly and Hateful. Yet he possessed a nature sensitive to the pathological point. And, like Schopenhauer, he masked this undue sensibility with a repelling misanthropy. In a study of him by his disciple, Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai J.-K. Huysmans, with an etched portrait by Raffaelli, we are shown some intimate characteristics. Huysmans never beat about the social ambush, but freely expressed his opinions concerning contemporaries; indeed, a phrase of the Goncourts might have been his, "Je vomis mes contemporains." He has been called an "exasperated Goncourt," which is putting it mildly. However, it must not be supposed that he was a roaring egoist, hitting out blindly. He seems, according to the account of Coquiot and Remy de Gourmont, to have been an unassuming and industrious functionary in the Ministry of the Interior, and even when aroused not so truculent as sarcastic. The Dutch and Flemish base to his temperament endowed him with considerable phlegm; he was never demonstrative, disliked effusiveness in life and literature, and only in his ironical speech lurked the distilled bitterness of his prejudices. He had many. Yet, fearful of a literary career, with its poverty and disillusionments, he endured the ennui and fatigues of thirty-two years of office work, and, a model clerk, he was decorated when he left his bureau in the Ministry. That is, decorated for his zeal and punctuality, not for his books. Numberless are the jokes made about the Legion of Honour, yet none contain such subacid irony as this one. Huysmans the irascible among decorated philistines!

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 2

From Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons (1916)

"To Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition of the ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the disagreeable only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange disorder of vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with that of a drop of impure water under the microscope. 'Nature seen through a temperament' is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans. To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. 'He gave me the impression of a cat,' some interviewer once wrote of him; 'courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least word.' And, indeed, there is something of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert, with a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace, the features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or the Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression, that look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office—he is an employé in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have seen him in a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X. moves about with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of bric-à-brac. The spoils of all the world are there, in that incredibly tiny salon; they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to screens, brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese toy, the other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the rainbow clash in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this fantastic room, Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the air of one perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is said by my learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or perhaps it is the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or (if that were not impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies me; and Huysmans, without looking up, and without taking the trouble to speak very distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more likely transpierces it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human imbecility."

[entries-in-marginalia]

On Huysmans, Part 1

From Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons (1916)

Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation—and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world appears to be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a certain solace in various forms of art, and certain possibilities of at least temporary escape. Part of his work presents to us a picture of ordinary life as he conceives it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness; in another part he has made experiment in directions which have seemed to promise escape, relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself the delight of his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself would be the first to acknowledge—indeed, practically, he has acknowledged—that the particular way in which he sees life is a matter of personal temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves."

[prokopetz]

Essential genres of webcomics, updated for 2024:

Gag-a-day strip with the art and writing of a forgettable newspaper comic, but which inexplicably has 25 years worth of intricate setting lore and requires a day-long archive binge to fully understand the context of a grade-school pun.

Self-proclaimed deconstruction of superhero comics or giant robot anime or magical girls or something that has the exact same plot beats as every other self-proclaimed deconstruction of superhero comics or giant robot anime or magical girls or something. If you support the artist's Patreon you can download alternate versions of selected pages where the protagonist has their tits out.

Webtoon that sprang into existence complete with a hundred thousand followers at some point in the last week; the art displays immense technical mastery of figure drawing, but absolutely no grasp of panel layout, and the writing's gender politics are weirdly reactionary for something whose official synopsis manages to use the word "queer" three times in the space of two paragraphs.

Long-form narrative which hasn't received regular updates in several years due to the author's incredibly demanding real-life obligations, but instead of cancelling the comic or going on hiatus, they continue to publish one page roughly every four months with the kind of grim determination normally associated with historical anecdotes about the Battle of Stalingrad.

Fantasy adventure comic which you strongly suspect, but cannot prove, is a direct adaptation of somebody's high school GURPS campaign. The story is so elaborately and discursively plotted that you need to keep the fandom wiki open in a separate tab simply to remember who the fuck any of these people are.

Chicken-scratch parody comic about, like, Rainbow Brite fighting the Care Bears or some shit that somehow has better writing than anything on Netflix.

Semi-autobiographical slice of life comic, except with robots.

[northshorewave]

Occasionally I see a post from one of the more committed atheist-materialist types in my circle say they want a world not just without religion, but without spirituality, and I gotta say guys I really don't think that looks like whatever beautiful global moment of fellowship and enlightenment you're imagining. I think it looks a lot like what we've got now, e.g. a whole generation determining, based on the evidence, that cooperation and community are sucker's bets, the whole world is a casino, and all that matters is how much of the spoils you personally can soak up. Political leadership would be about the same too: Trump is lots of things but he isn't fucking spiritual.

[northshorewave]

Railing against smart kids/school-enjoyers/kids-who-asked-about-homework on the Website for People who are Trapped in Grad School like a fantasy princess in a tower seems like a uniquely stupid and boring form of self-loathing.

The internet was indeed once a place where nerds, 'well-actually' guys, and grammar nazis cowed everyone into submission and were usually given the moral high ground. That era is DEAD. Stone dead. The super-descriptivists, the people who use 'WeLl AcKsHuLLy' and 'former gifted kid' as expressions of pure contempt, the people whose entire psycho-political universe is subconsciously defined by fear of looking old...you guys won. You won so hard. Look around. No one has standards. No one cares about facts. Correcting people is seen as an act of hostility. And you're so desperate to still look like the cool rebel flipping off the old schoolmarm that some random tumblr smartass running a 'reading comprehension' gimmick blog is enough to piss you off? Fuck you actually. Have some fucking dignity, if the concept even exists in your mental world.

If there's any path at all out of the anti-intellectual hell we find ourselves in it involves unlearning some of this bullshit. It's not 2013 and the stakes are higher than which bitchy blogger can get the Gawker job by writing the most blistering rant about 'entitled nerds'.

[forthegothicheroine]

Give me good public domain books to get off project gutenberg

[entries-in-marginalia]

I apologize, my previous reblog was from the wrong account!

TITLES:

The Prisoner In the Opal, by A.E.W. Mason

Argonauts of the Western Pacific, by Bronislaw Malinowski

The Golden Bough, by James Frazer (utilize the 12-volume option!)

From Ritual to Romance, by Jessie Weston

The Golden Treasury, selected by Francis Palgrave

Thais, by Anatole France

AUTHORS:

Aubrey Beardsley

George Eliot

Thomas Hardy

Robert Smythe Hichens

William Hope Hodgeson

Joris-Karl Hyusmans

M.R. James

Charles Kingsley

Edward Bulwer Lytton

Arthur Machen

Johanni Spyri

Mary Webb

[prokopetz]

"But if this other world has always operated according to video game logic, why is the isekai protagonist literally the first person to figure out all these basic mechanical exploints" well, largely because litRPG isekai is merely the latest flavour of I've Been Transported To Another World Where Everyone Is Stupid Except For Me, a venerable genre that's been a going concern at least since Mark Twain.

When I was a kid, it was American sci-fi authors writing stories about shitass engineering majors getting portal-fantasied to alien planets and single-handedly saving civilisation on the strength of being the only person in the world who knows what a flowchart is, and very little has changed – right down to the weirdly inverted character arcs where the loser protagonist discovers that they don't actually need to engage in any self-reflection at all because the very traits that rendered them odious in their native society are what make them God here.

[prokopetz]

I apologise if you've already answered this, but I tried searching your blog and I'm unsure if you haven't or if it's another example of Tumblr's amazing search system.

I was talking with a friend recently about how much of a culture clash the Monk Class is compared to the rest of Dungeons & Dragons and was wondering if there is a coherent reason for their original inclusion. I'm aware that they're largely influenced by Shaolin monks as depicted in Hong Kong cinema in the 70's/80's as compared to the Sword and Sorcery stuff most of the rest of D&D takes influence from.

Basically, my question ultimately boils down to, "Is the Monk Class there purely because of an original player wanting to rule of cool their way into playing something wildly out of genre, or is there a stronger link between Sword and Sorcery and Hong Kong cinema that could have organically resulted in the Monk Class joining the rest of the classes?"

A lot of the link between the two was simply a matter of time and place. The kung fu craze hit North America at just about exactly the same time as the sword and sorcery revival that gave us films like Clash of the Titans and Beastmaster and The Sword and the Sorcerer and Dragonslayer and Krull – not to mention the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan adaptation, which revived popular interest in first-wave sword and sorcery literature – so there was a lot of it going around. Analysis of early Dungeons & Dragons as a product of its media influences often overlooks that it was largely drawing on what was trendy in American popular media in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Even the tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings references weren't a deep cut; while the books were originally published in the 1950s, they'd experienced a strong resurgence in the 1970s, putting them firmly in the popular consciousness at the time that D&D was being developed. All this being the case, it's not surprising that early D&D was also substantially influenced by Hong Kong action cinema.

That said, the reason the monk character class in particular (i.e., as opposed to kung fu media influences more generally) is there is allegedly because one specific guy in one of the game's early playtest groups really, really wanted to play as Remo Williams from Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's The Destroyer; several of the class's signature abilities are direct references to powers Williams exhibits in the course of the novels. Remarks from folks who worked at TSR at the time have pointed the finger at Brian Blume as the Remo Williams fan in question, though accounts are conflicted whether Blume was actually an uncredited contributor to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor (1975), in which the class makes its first proper appearance, or whether Blume's interest merely prompted its inclusion.

This is the case for the character archetypes in a lot tabletop RPGs of that era; instead of trying to work out what classes "ought" be be present, authors would simply start with the types of characters their playtesters actually wanted to play, often based on specific popular media characters, then work backwards to derive an IC rationale for why those were the setting's standard adventuring professions. Other examples from D&D in particular most obviously include the Ranger (based on Tolkien's Aragon, naturally), but also the Paladin (principally inspired by Holger Carlsen from Poul Anderson's 1961 isekai novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, also the source of D&D's goofy regenerating trolls), the Assassin, back when it was still a separate character class (probably mainly based on the Assassin Caste from John Norman's Gor), and even the Wizard to a large extent (less Gandalf than you'd think: a large portion of D&D's iconic wizard spell list is lifted directly from the 1963 Vincent Price film The Raven).

(I often think that modern indie RPGs could benefit from reviving this approach. Like, fuck textual consistency – just pick half a dozen of your favourite popular media characters without regard for the compatibility of the source material and work backwards to explain why these six random assholes are your game's playable archetypes!)

[antidiluvianobservatory]

Oh, that's very interesting, thanks for answering!

We definitely discussed the hypothetical conversation that must have happened at Dave Arneson's table when a player suggested playing a Shaolin Monk in an otherwise mostly Euro-centric mediaeval fantasy setting and came to the conclusion it was a, "...fine." response. So from the sounds of things, while it was likely a player's interests that prompted it, it possibly would have ended up in the game naturally anyway due to the cultural interests of America in general at the time.

I'll have to check out The Destroyer, that's not one I was personally aware of.

[prokopetz]

Oh, it definitely would have come along a bit later – witness AD&D 2nd Edition, which excluded the monk from the Player's Handbook, ostensibly because it was culturally anachronistic, then turned around and produced an entire sourcebook dedicated to playing as ninjas. Of course, by that time, American popular culture had moved on from badly dubbed Shaw Brothers films and embraced ninja schlock, so the transition wasn't unexpected. The 5E iteration of the monk has basically absorbed the 2E ninja as a subclass, bringing us full circle.

(Amusingly, the 2E ninja handbook hangs a lampshade on the cultural anachronism by suggesting that the ninja classes and subclasses it presents could be re-skinned as operatives of MI6-style superspy organisations for "non-Oriental" campaigns. Never mind that having James Bond swanning around in the German Renaissance would have clanged even louder than shoehorning in a random ninja clan!)

[prokopetz]

Basic writing issues aside, what’s most striking to me about The Rise of Skywalker is that Rey is really only the protagonist in terms of screen time. If you look at the film’s narrative structure without reference to screen time – insofar as it has a discernible narrative structure, anyway – you could be forgiven for thinking Kylo Ren is meant to the hero of the story. Certainly, we get more of his perspective and motivations than we do from any single other character, and he’s the only one who has a clearly defined character arc. The film’s ostensible main plot spends two and a half hours flailing aimlessly, while in the background there’s basically this whole other film about Ben Solo: Tragic Antihero going on that we get only occasional glimpses of – and it’s the only coherently written piece of the whole affair.

[prokopetz]

(To be 100% clear for the Adam Driver fans in the notes, this is 100% a criticism. How the film’s writers managed to look at the patricidal space Nazi with the essential personality of a fence-post that somebody painted a frowny face on and decided that this is the only character whose interiority we’re interested in exploring, I’ll never fully grasp!)

[mariacallous]

[mariacallous]

NY Jewish Week Daily Digest - 6/22/2026

[pagecommando]

So uh. This is LITERALLY the stuff that resulted in "Motorist guides" and sit-ins. This is from 2018, before 10/7 and before Politico really shat the bed.

America’s Forgotten Pogroms

In the 1940s, a right-wing group terrorized Jewish communities in Boston and New York while authorities looked the other way. Could it happe

Here's how it ends. We could all see it then. All of us. Very few people with political or social power wanted to do anything about it when it was quieter.

The intervening years have hardly been free of anti-Semitism, even of a violent kind. But incidents have been sporadic, rarely tied to organized movements. Figures like Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran certainly maintained followings on the right (and Buchanan sustained his ubiquitous television presence), although in time they too were marginalized. To the extent that anti-Semitism has crept into mainstream discourse, it has tended to come from the left—commingling with animus toward the state of Israel. The attacks of 9/11 in particular prompted essays, like those written this week, prophesying that a dark strain of anti-Semitism had resurfaced. Some left anti-Semitism mirrors that of the right—with conspiratorial thinking, claims of Jewish disloyalty or un-Americanness, and fantasies that Jews will take a peace-loving America to war—just as the far left’s blend of isolationism, protectionism and anti-immigration sentiment finds a reflection in Trump’s international agenda. Anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise, but it would be premature to say anti-Semitism has returned to what it was in the 1940s.One big difference between then and now is that public officials have unanimously condemned the violence in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. But, we might be moving in the wrong direction.As many have pointed out, Trump’s response has still been grossly inadequate, as he continues to demonize George Soros with tropes out of “The International Jew,” and other Republicans have persisted in running campaign ads and tweeting messages with anti-Semitic overtones. How long the official consensus against anti-Semitism will endure remains uncertain. Recently, historians of the U.S. have been asking whether core features of the postwar order that seemed solid or even permanent—a mixed-economy welfare state, American leadership in the world, objectivity as the lodestar of journalism—are looking more like products of a passing era, what one scholar called a “long exception.” It’s now an open question whether the taboo against anti-Semitism was a product of that long exception as well.