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Nov 27, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
“One can understand that at this time preoccupations are elsewhere,” begins a pamphlet circulated around Paris in late February, 1848. This brochure, in the works for months, was published just as France was in the throes of yet another revolution.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
Greetings from Washington, D.C.We’re just a few hours away from seeing the first results in (all together now) the most consequential election in American history. I’m just back from a piss-up near the White House, full of cautiously optimistic Republicans who think early results are looking good for Donald Trump to eke out a second election victory.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote, is a car crash. Futurism is “danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,” it is “courage, audacity, and revolt,” it is “aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”1It means driving your car into a ditch, then hopping right back in the driver’s seat to screech down the highway.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling |David Pugliese
Winston Burdett, a theatre critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, joined the Communist Party USA in 1937. It wasn’t terribly shocking that a union newspaper man would become a card-carrying member of the Reds. When Burdett’s paper went on strike, protesting for more pay, he led the picket line. When merchants and subscribers needed to be encouraged to cancel the Eagle during the strike, Burdett joined the posse of irate newsmen to do some door-knocking.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling |Parker Molloy
When the mob arrived at the gates of the Jewish quarter in Barcelona on a tempestuous Saturday night, they came to accuse their neighbors of biological warfare. “They have brought the deadly poison into the world,” the mob called, beating at the door to the enclave. “From them came this great evil upon us.”It was 1348, and the Black Death has just arrived in Spain. The region had been hobbled by famine and economic instability for more than a decade prior.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
“What made those people burn houses and slay their fellow men?” Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1863. “What force made men act so?”These were no new question, Tolstoy admitted. “These are the instinctive, plain, and most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the monuments and tradition of [the past].”His predecessors, Hegel and Nietzsche, were convinced that great men and world spirits moved history. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace as a rejection of these grandiose theories.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
When the alarm went up, the people of Uxbridge were already primed for panic. “Rise, arm! Arm! The Irish are cutting throats!”Years prior, an army of Irish dragoons had been pressed into service for King James II. They had fought, and died, for the British, but amid widespread anti-Irish sentiment, they were due to be shipped off as conscripts for the Holy Roman Empire. In the dead of a December night, 1688, word began to spread: The garrisoned Irish had decided to rise up.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
“I don't pretend,” Uri Avnery wrote, “to be objective about Israel.”Avnery was, like his assessment of the Hebrew language, “not given to understatement.”At 15, Avnery was a member of Irgun, the paramilitary group deadset on creating an independent Jewish state. This was 1939, and Irgun was using terror to advance its cause: It had no qualms about murdering British administrators of Palestine, Arab civilians, even Jews thought to be collaborators.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
When Tucker Carlson introduced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his Twitter-hosted talk show last summer, he advertised it would be an exceptional interview. It would be the only conversation with the activist-turned-presidential candidate, Carlson proclaimed, that would not mention vaccines. It was a hollow promise. Vaccines come up about halfway through the hour-and-a-half-long conversation, when Kennedy insist that COVID-19 was developed as a bioweapon.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
bugeyedandshameless.com | Justin Ling
In late July, Russian channels started to pick on something weird: Ukrainian drones were attacking gas stations near the Russian town of Sudzha. It was curious, because Sudzha is nowhere near most of the fighting in the region — that was mostly happening along a totally different stretch of the border, north of Kharkiv, some 150km to the south-east. Then the attacks expanded. Ukraine was hitting farm equipment, greenhouses, oil depots.