This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
Serious request. Can anyone suggest an alternate adjective for "iconic" that would eg. fit into the phrase....
Air-raid sirens were a(n) ______ part of the blitz?
I don't suppose I need to rehearse here how Carter lost heavily in the 'bombed schoolgirls' metric.
Though that's at least partly because Brzezinski prefered farming that sorta stuff out to US client states and factions.
Thanks for that name - some interesting wiki reading. I happen to have just finished reading 'The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative' by Leopold Tyrmand. It helps to get inside the head of a Polish asylum seeker in the US in the 70s - I am slightly surprised to see him (Brzezinski) described (alongside the less surprising "...hawkish or a "foreign policy hardliner" on some issues, such as Poland–Russia relations...") as "progressive".
I think a few factors conspired to give ZB a dovish reputation in some contexts.
In spring 1977, Carter gave a speech proclaiming that America no longer had "an ordinate fear of Communism". Obviously, right-wingers gloated over this phrase after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, linking it with supposed naivete on Brzezinski's part(*), and along with his general association with the Carter admin, that would contribute to an image of him as on the left. But yeah, stuff like Gwangju May 18 and cheerleading the Khmer Rouge present a somewhat more checkered record.
(For some pretty entertaining television, check YouTube for "Joe Scarborough vs. Zbigniew Brzezinski 2008", in which Joe tries to impress his girlfriend and future-wife Mika by mouthing off to her father with pro-Israeli talking-points recycled from the popular media. It does not go well for Joe.)
(*) Brzezinski went on the conservative show Firing Line in 1983, and was asked about his connection to that line, and replied something like "Not only did I approve it, I made sure it got into the final draft", and then said he stood by it still, because what he meant was that, while the USSR still presented a military challenge to the west, it no longer had any ideological appeal, because no other nations were any longer interested in adopting their system. I'm actually not sure if that interpretation is backed up by Carter's actual words.
I happen to have just finished reading 'The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptives Cooperative' by Leopold Tyrmand. It helps to get inside the head of a Polish asylum seeker in the US in the 70s - I am slightly surprised to see him (Brzezinski) described (alongside the less surprising "...hawkish or a "foreign policy hardliner" on some issues, such as Poland–Russia relations...") as "progressive".
That book was written in 1972, when Brzezinski was already a rising star but four years before he became a semi-household name. Does it mention him directly?
Reading Tyrmand's wiki page, it seems he's considered a "paleoconservative", in British terms, maybe similar to Malcolm Muggeridge. So, yes, most of the political spectrum would probably appear left-wing to him.
Originally posted byKarlLB: Praying for someone's death and loving them are rarely compatible.
Some years ago we had a lady in our congregation, in her early 90s, who was sharp as a tack and lived independently. She needed surgery for something - gallbladder, I think - and was very worried about the impact of a general anaesthetic. She said that she hoped for either a complete cure, or death, not a cure which left her debilitated, or confused. She was quite clear that she had had a great life and was ready to go. We prayed for a complete cure. She died.
The following Sunday, our minister mused "For Mrs X, death was a form of healing."
Now, none of us had prayed for her death, of course, but she herself might have been!
(After the "death is a form of healing" remark, requests for prayers for healing noticeably dropped off!)
Also wrt praying for someone's death - I think that praying for the death of an enemy is fully in keeping with the Psalms.
It is, but it's harder to square with Jesus' words on the matter. Treating the OT as primary without filtering it through Jesus is the sort of thing I associate with, ironically, people who I would probably identify as my enemies.
Originally posted byKarlLB: Praying for someone's death and loving them are rarely compatible.
Some years ago we had a lady in our congregation, in her early 90s, who was sharp as a tack and lived independently. She needed surgery for something - gallbladder, I think - and was very worried about the impact of a general anaesthetic. She said that she hoped for either a complete cure, or death, not a cure which left her debilitated, or confused. She was quite clear that she had had a great life and was ready to go. We prayed for a complete cure. She died.
The following Sunday, our minister mused "For Mrs X, death was a form of healing."
Now, none of us had prayed for her death, of course, but she herself might have been!
(After the "death is a form of healing" remark, requests for prayers for healing noticeably dropped off!)
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
Serious request. Can anyone suggest an alternate adjective for "iconic" that would eg. fit into the phrase....
Air-raid sirens were a(n) ______ part of the blitz?
I think "staple" or "common" fits better here. Air raid sirens weren't symbolic in the way something "iconic" is, they just happened a lot. Iconic in modern parlance also has a more solidly positive connotation.
C.S.Lewis (in Studies in Words) noticed and deplored the tendency throughout history for words that denote thick qualities that can be approved or disapproved of to thin into vague expressions of approval or disapproval.
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
Serious request. Can anyone suggest an alternate adjective for "iconic" that would eg. fit into the phrase....
Air-raid sirens were a(n) ______ part of the blitz?
I think "staple" or "common" fits better here. Air raid sirens weren't symbolic in the way something "iconic" is, they just happened a lot. Iconic in modern parlance also has a more solidly positive connotation.
I think the usual icon of the Blitz is that photo of St Paul's dome surrounded by smoke. I'm not even sure you can describe a sound as 'iconic' - although as language is often illogical, I daresay people do.
People who lived through the Blitz said the sound of the sirens prompted feelings of fear, even years after the end of the war.
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
Serious request. Can anyone suggest an alternate adjective for "iconic" that would eg. fit into the phrase....
Air-raid sirens were a(n) ______ part of the blitz?
That's a symptom of PTSD. As a veteran of the NICU, alarms going bing also raise my heart rate immediately.
My mother often told stories of working in Whitehall during the blitz, making it sound quite exciting. But years later when a new motorway was being built about half a mile from our house she was badly shaken when we could hear and feel the explosions of the gelignite used to uproot the trees. It was fun for the children, but quite different for her.
That's a symptom of PTSD. As a veteran of the NICU, alarms going bing also raise my heart rate immediately.
My mother often told stories of working in Whitehall during the blitz, making it sound quite exciting. But years later when a new motorway was being built about half a mile from our house she was badly shaken when we could hear and feel the explosions of the gelignite used to uproot the trees. It was fun for the children, but quite different for her.
I can imagine that very clearly. My Mum was about 9 during the raids on Bath in 1942. She used to tell me about sheltering in the cellar, hoping not to be buried alive. If there were siren sounds on the telly, or (we lived near the Thames) flood warning sirens went off - she got pretty jittery.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to demoting "iconic" from my pantheon of favoured adjectives.
That said...
How about "emblematic"?
I like this from @Hedgehog, though mostly for my own reasons, ie. it's a less hackneyed form of "iconic", and I remain of the opinion that "iconic" is suitable for describing certain things remembered about the blitz.
[TRIGGER WARNING]
By the standards of peacetime democracies, the blitz has been canonized and appropriated to an extent that it can arguably be called part of an informal national mythology, albeit with likely waning fervour among more recent generations.
Two examples from the aftermath of the 7/7 attack of 2005...
1. From a British newspaper, a cartoon of an old couple walking down the street, and one of them asks the other "Do you think the terrorists will win?" They then both look away from the viewer to a ghostly background of burning buildings, firehoses etc, and say, respectively, "Nope" and "Not a chance."
2. A special editorial on local news in Canada, by a producer(IIRC) who was a native of London. He opened jauntily by looking into the camera and ostensibly addressing the terrorists with "Do you have any idea who you are up against?", and it went from there.
I'll concede that air-raid sirens might be too ubiquitous a sensation to be considered especially emblematic of the blitz(though I rarely heard them in Korea, FWIW), and maybe it's just the blitz itself, or more probably the entire England Stood Alone narrative, that has attained folkloric status.
(The only scene I can really remember from John Boorman's Hope and Glory is the mother coming home to firemen dousing her house, and musing with faintly discernible pride "I guess it's our turn", only to be told that it was just a regular housefire. It nicely captured the psychological phenom of wanting to feel oneself part of the hardship during a collective crisis.)
The local paper mill near here supplies the Kirkland brand of TP, so we're good. (There was one month during the pandemic things got a little short--but we survived).
My sister has sent me a revised map of North America, where Canada has renamed its southern neighbour Dumbfuckistan...
Something of an insult to those in the US who do not support Trump, but I guess Canada is tired of being polite.
I don't really have a problem with collectively-directed insults in the context of a declared war(or in this case, a trade war), but who do you mean by "Canada" in the above post?
I'm not sure - I assume that the map was originally posted (on Facebook, I think) by a Canadian who is getting fed up with Trump and his vapourings...
Yes, obviously. But saying "Canada has renamed..." could leave someone with the impression that eg. the Canadian government made that map.
Personally, I'd actually be cool with the Canadian government doing something like that, IF I thought it would convey the message to Trump that we're seriously in this fight. I'd probably like it to be a bit more clever than just "Dumbfuckistan", though(*).
(*) I also don't really think it's great to use "-stan" as the fallback suffix to indicate that a country is inferior and not to be taken seriously, but I can accept the maker of the poster wasn't consciously doing that, just resorting to the commonplace practice for that sorta joke.
Yes. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the '-stan' bit myself.
Yeah, especially given that the more thoughtful in the Canadian camp have been criticizing Trump for abolishing an indigenous name.
But I've been predicting for a while now that the rhetorical front in this battle is gonna end up being mostly a lotta white-boy sports-style nationalism. Whatever works, I guess.
Did you see the video where the Trump eagle repeatedly tries to pub up a Lake America sign only to have the sign taken down by a beaver, a moose and a bear with a bazooka. Eagle takes on a Canadian goose. Guess who loses.
I've not seen it, but YouTube is currently awash with anti-US satire...
Trump certainly knows how to piss people off. I understand that Mark Carney is not, however, one to be taking any nonsense from his neighbour, and it'll be interesting to see how the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, deals with Trump when he eventually meets him face-to-face.
And would that be in the interests of the nation that the monarchs and the PM in question were sworn to serve?
If he does show up then I repeat my suggestion that the people should line the streets and turn their backs to the parade in silence. Placards may be carried.
And would that be in the interests of the nation that the monarchs and the PM in question were sworn to serve?
If he does show up then I repeat my suggestion that the people should line the streets and turn their backs to the parade in silence. Placards may be carried.
Trump would just dismiss them all as euroweenies who can't handle being in the presence of his greatness, while Farage draws attention to the number of brown faces in the crowd.
What I was thinking of was...
On his recent trip to the United States Of Dumbfuckburg, His Majesty was reported as having swung the cancellation of a whiskey tariff from Donald J. Trump. In an alt-scenario where Charles DOESN'T make that trip, is he getting more, fewer, or the same number of concessions on the trade front?
In more everyday situations, duckduckgo "Freedom Fuel vs. Mansfield". The anti-hurt feeling laws of Albion prevent me from saying much more, except that in addition to the current dispute, FF was also involved in an earlier one a few months back.
And would that be in the interests of the nation that the monarchs and the PM in question were sworn to serve?
If he does show up then I repeat my suggestion that the people should line the streets and turn their backs to the parade in silence. Placards may be carried.
I would encourage them to drop their pants in a mass mooning.
Yes. I wasn't entirely comfortable with the '-stan' bit myself.
Yeah, especially given that the more thoughtful in the Canadian camp have been criticizing Trump for abolishing an indigenous name.
But I've been predicting for a while now that the rhetorical front in this battle is gonna end up being mostly a lotta white-boy sports-style nationalism. Whatever works, I guess.
The re-naming is just more deflection from the disastrous war and the Epstein files and half a hundred other things.
The version of the re-drawn map that I saw divided the USA in two - Southern Canada and Northern Mexico.
Comments
This might have potential. Toilet-paper shortages were an iconic part of the COVID lockdown, so the phenomenon might maintain some hold on the popular psychology.
Toilet paper as an icon is too much for my imagination.
Serious request. Can anyone suggest an alternate adjective for "iconic" that would eg. fit into the phrase....
I think a few factors conspired to give ZB a dovish reputation in some contexts.
In spring 1977, Carter gave a speech proclaiming that America no longer had "an ordinate fear of Communism". Obviously, right-wingers gloated over this phrase after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, linking it with supposed naivete on Brzezinski's part(*), and along with his general association with the Carter admin, that would contribute to an image of him as on the left. But yeah, stuff like Gwangju May 18 and cheerleading the Khmer Rouge present a somewhat more checkered record.
(For some pretty entertaining television, check YouTube for "Joe Scarborough vs. Zbigniew Brzezinski 2008", in which Joe tries to impress his girlfriend and future-wife Mika by mouthing off to her father with pro-Israeli talking-points recycled from the popular media. It does not go well for Joe.)
(*) Brzezinski went on the conservative show Firing Line in 1983, and was asked about his connection to that line, and replied something like "Not only did I approve it, I made sure it got into the final draft", and then said he stood by it still, because what he meant was that, while the USSR still presented a military challenge to the west, it no longer had any ideological appeal, because no other nations were any longer interested in adopting their system. I'm actually not sure if that interpretation is backed up by Carter's actual words.
That book was written in 1972, when Brzezinski was already a rising star but four years before he became a semi-household name. Does it mention him directly?
Reading Tyrmand's wiki page, it seems he's considered a "paleoconservative", in British terms, maybe similar to Malcolm Muggeridge. So, yes, most of the political spectrum would probably appear left-wing to him.
Praying for someone's death and loving them are rarely compatible.
Some years ago we had a lady in our congregation, in her early 90s, who was sharp as a tack and lived independently. She needed surgery for something - gallbladder, I think - and was very worried about the impact of a general anaesthetic. She said that she hoped for either a complete cure, or death, not a cure which left her debilitated, or confused. She was quite clear that she had had a great life and was ready to go. We prayed for a complete cure. She died.
The following Sunday, our minister mused "For Mrs X, death was a form of healing."
Now, none of us had prayed for her death, of course, but she herself might have been!
(After the "death is a form of healing" remark, requests for prayers for healing noticeably dropped off!)
Isnt it prsying for the inevitable?
Hence "rarely"
I think "staple" or "common" fits better here. Air raid sirens weren't symbolic in the way something "iconic" is, they just happened a lot. Iconic in modern parlance also has a more solidly positive connotation.
C.S.Lewis (in Studies in Words) noticed and deplored the tendency throughout history for words that denote thick qualities that can be approved or disapproved of to thin into vague expressions of approval or disapproval.
How about "emblematic"?
People who lived through the Blitz said the sound of the sirens prompted feelings of fear, even years after the end of the war.
Ah, but manly alpha males don't wipe or wash their arses because that would be gay. Problem solved!
"well-known"
"everyday"
"notorious"
"typical"
My mother often told stories of working in Whitehall during the blitz, making it sound quite exciting. But years later when a new motorway was being built about half a mile from our house she was badly shaken when we could hear and feel the explosions of the gelignite used to uproot the trees. It was fun for the children, but quite different for her.
I can imagine that very clearly. My Mum was about 9 during the raids on Bath in 1942. She used to tell me about sheltering in the cellar, hoping not to be buried alive. If there were siren sounds on the telly, or (we lived near the Thames) flood warning sirens went off - she got pretty jittery.
The fire siren in the valley where I grew up apparently was the same or very similar to sirens used in the blitz.
Every time it sounded mum used to drop what she was doing and run next door to comfort the elderly Cockney woman who had survived the Blitz.
That said...
I like this from @Hedgehog, though mostly for my own reasons, ie. it's a less hackneyed form of "iconic", and I remain of the opinion that "iconic" is suitable for describing certain things remembered about the blitz.
[TRIGGER WARNING]
By the standards of peacetime democracies, the blitz has been canonized and appropriated to an extent that it can arguably be called part of an informal national mythology, albeit with likely waning fervour among more recent generations.
Two examples from the aftermath of the 7/7 attack of 2005...
1. From a British newspaper, a cartoon of an old couple walking down the street, and one of them asks the other "Do you think the terrorists will win?" They then both look away from the viewer to a ghostly background of burning buildings, firehoses etc, and say, respectively, "Nope" and "Not a chance."
2. A special editorial on local news in Canada, by a producer(IIRC) who was a native of London. He opened jauntily by looking into the camera and ostensibly addressing the terrorists with "Do you have any idea who you are up against?", and it went from there.
I'll concede that air-raid sirens might be too ubiquitous a sensation to be considered especially emblematic of the blitz(though I rarely heard them in Korea, FWIW), and maybe it's just the blitz itself, or more probably the entire England Stood Alone narrative, that has attained folkloric status.
(The only scene I can really remember from John Boorman's Hope and Glory is the mother coming home to firemen dousing her house, and musing with faintly discernible pride "I guess it's our turn", only to be told that it was just a regular housefire. It nicely captured the psychological phenom of wanting to feel oneself part of the hardship during a collective crisis.)
The local paper mill near here supplies the Kirkland brand of TP, so we're good. (There was one month during the pandemic things got a little short--but we survived).
Something of an insult to those in the US who do not support Trump, but I guess Canada is tired of being polite.
I don't really have a problem with collectively-directed insults in the context of a declared war(or in this case, a trade war), but who do you mean by "Canada" in the above post?
I doubt if it was from officialdom!
Yes, obviously. But saying "Canada has renamed..." could leave someone with the impression that eg. the Canadian government made that map.
Personally, I'd actually be cool with the Canadian government doing something like that, IF I thought it would convey the message to Trump that we're seriously in this fight. I'd probably like it to be a bit more clever than just "Dumbfuckistan", though(*).
(*) I also don't really think it's great to use "-stan" as the fallback suffix to indicate that a country is inferior and not to be taken seriously, but I can accept the maker of the poster wasn't consciously doing that, just resorting to the commonplace practice for that sorta joke.
Yeah, especially given that the more thoughtful in the Canadian camp have been criticizing Trump for abolishing an indigenous name.
But I've been predicting for a while now that the rhetorical front in this battle is gonna end up being mostly a lotta white-boy sports-style nationalism. Whatever works, I guess.
Trump certainly knows how to piss people off. I understand that Mark Carney is not, however, one to be taking any nonsense from his neighbour, and it'll be interesting to see how the new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, deals with Trump when he eventually meets him face-to-face.
We shall see. Mr B has said some harsh (but truthful) things about Mr T in the past.
That is true, but in the hot seat, face to face, has Burnham the bottle to do what Starmer would not?
What is it that people wanted Elizabeth, Charles, and Starmer to do against Trump?
And would that be in the interests of the nation that the monarchs and the PM in question were sworn to serve?
If he does show up then I repeat my suggestion that the people should line the streets and turn their backs to the parade in silence. Placards may be carried.
Trump would just dismiss them all as euroweenies who can't handle being in the presence of his greatness, while Farage draws attention to the number of brown faces in the crowd.
What I was thinking of was...
On his recent trip to the United States Of Dumbfuckburg, His Majesty was reported as having swung the cancellation of a whiskey tariff from Donald J. Trump. In an alt-scenario where Charles DOESN'T make that trip, is he getting more, fewer, or the same number of concessions on the trade front?
I would encourage them to drop their pants in a mass mooning.
The re-naming is just more deflection from the disastrous war and the Epstein files and half a hundred other things.
The version of the re-drawn map that I saw divided the USA in two - Southern Canada and Northern Mexico.