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Lee Doyle's avatar

Not sure I’m up for the book. (500 pages!) Your point about shame is compelling. Thank you for the thoughtful review. I may read Falludi.

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John Jay Stancliff's avatar

Iraq was an experiment done to test the hypothesis that America, sans the old bipolar order it shared with the Soviet Union, could decide foreign policy questions unilaterally with its military, and its test subject was a nation hated by (and indebted to) the House of Saud and Israel. Capital had some to do with it, but leftists hate to admit Halliburton Company cannibalized the US government, taxpayers, and soldiers more than it did Iraqis. Al Qaeda and Halliburton both benefitted as the situation became irreparably worse after 2004. Reverse negative self-hating delusional imperialism of a completely historically unique kind.

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Joel's avatar

Al Gore 2000 ran on banning talk radio, video games, anime, k-12 student fashion--everything the ACLU (Israel) had protected. If he opposed the ACLU that means he wanted to make us Islam, which means he must have been funded by the King of the Muslims--Saddam.

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Randy K's avatar

SO troubling.

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Soutre's avatar

After Sept 2001, the supreme court had to release Virginia v. Black (2003), Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004), and Brown v. EMA (2011) to assure us america's soul (least restrictive means) was still intact

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Jonah's avatar
2dEdited

I just read this book in the last couple weeks and I think you might be mixing up Antonio Gramsci with Giovanni Arrighi as the main influence on the third part here. I don't remember Gramsci being a major influence on the work from what I read and he isn't mentioned in the index, and the idea of the industry-production/credit-financialization cycle comes from Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century", which is referenced multiple times.

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Warren's avatar

After Klebold and Harris 1999, people talked about censoring violent video games, erotic anime, gangsta rap, children's fashion (school uniforms), talk radio (fairness doctrine). Our culture of strict-scrutiny was surrounded.

We all thought Sept 2001 was an attempt to scare the government into legislating this censorship, thereby turning us to a de facto muslim-majority nation.

If Saddam was funding this anti-ACLU crusade, then the Iraq War was inevitable.

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Amy Axler's avatar

Well edited piece just in time for Memorial Day.

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