It was a great movie. Thomas Crown, though, was the role he was born to play.

It's pretty unlikely to get two more terms of a democratic presidency. Biden wasn't VP when he won. The last VP to be elected was Bush 1. Before him, LBJ, special circumstances. Truman, also special circumstances. That takes us back nearly 100 years.

Maybe if Kamala were to step aside we could get a governor as the nominee, but that seems unlikely even though governors have better records in presidential elections. Biden didn't run when he was VP, but I don't remember another VP that stepped away from the ticket voluntarily.

I know. I was just adding extra info.

She's not legendary, the way Achilles is. She was a real person.

Fact is, it's an important work for historical reasons. If you want to understand how Nazism works, and how it differs from Italian fascism, and be able to draw the lines that connect Nazis to historical German (and other nationalities) anti-Semitism, you need to read it.

If I had a copy, I wouldn't put it on display, but it is the kind of thing I can totally see being assigned in a college course on WW2 or some similar topic.

NB: I've only read a few excerpts for a class similar to the one I described above.

Also, I am against book burning in any circumstance. A book is never worth more as kindling, unless you're actually freezing and then it would be a hard choice.

I've seen some real ones in Ireland. It's literally a door, with something like an elevator shaft behind it. That's all. Pretty terrifying idea for a 16 year old.

Dan Savage pointed out in his podcast yesterday that in interwar Berlin, lgbtq-whatever-else-we-add-now people were more free than any time since probably ancient Rome before the Christian period.

It took about 3 years of Hitler in power to start shipping those people off to the camps. They still haven't really recovered.

"Them"? The cows? Kenya knows we eat them, right?

No, the Revolution got rid of the monarchy and neutered the clergy and nobility, but it was an urban revolution of the Parisian middle class, or bourgeoisie. The situation of the peasants changed little through the revolution, and it was persistent efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose Parisian culture on the countryside. It took until WW1 to construct a coherent French nation. Weber (not that Weber) showed that in Peasants into Frenchmen in the 70s.

And Napoleon had family connections in the Italian nobility. His uncle was a cardinal. His father was a lawyer and inherited a fair chunk of change. Napoleon was hardly any sort of peasant.

It was the bourgeois that win in France, not the peasants.

That's surely not true for a number of reasons. The UK wasn't a thing, and modern English wasn't a thing. Beowulf has a fair bit of jokes in it, and that's some 200 years earlier, in Old English, than this thing.

Hell, I'm pretty sure Plato's Symposium starts out with a three word pun. That's Greek and not English of course, but the idea of picking out an earliest joke is just ridiculous.

No one commented or voted on my comments for a few days. So I logged out and ran a search for my username, and got told I didn't exist.