(Speaking of words whose meaning has been broadening.)

But it's going to be a rough ride getting there!

The development of Anarchism feeds into the more general rise of organised labour, which is something that terrified the powerful of the USA. There are strong echoes of the Palmer Raids in what is happening now.

Britain had a Labour Prime Minister by 1923, the illegitimate child of a Scots household servant.

Clement Atlee, the next man to be a Labour Prime Minister, wrote: Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.

British politics is different.

The words change, but the tune remains the same.

I rather think the breaking point will come when the Powers That Be find that the War on Badguyism has so riled the proles that it is more trouble than it is worth. You may take this as either sign of my touching faith in the power of collective action, or sign of my cynical conviction that the War on Badguyism will ever substantially inconvenience anyone who really matters.

[Your URL reads "http://Http://...." which is going to get gnomeed every time. -- JDM]

Of course, the Soviets thought they were doing the same thing in 1979, right?

(Summary for those out of the range of streaming: Afghanistan is the video game level that no one has yet beaten. You might not get anything out of going to war there, but you could get on the high score board.)

I'd come up with a variant of the joke at the end: anyone who's worried about Chinese dominance should be trying to convince the Chinese that Afghanistan is really western Tibet.

I agree. However, this is nothing new. This has been going on since the most ancient records of politics and war that we have.

Divisive hateful propaganda is SOP for motivating support for an unpopular regime, policy, or war, and false accusations of "ism" are one of the simplest and most effective means.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-secondary-boogeyman-cartel-invasion.html

You know, because Communist doesn't work any more and Terrorist is losing its punch.

I think that if this is the case for categories with 'real' referents, it is so but worse for categories at base referring to mental constructs---such categorisations are at least resistant, and sometimes seemingly impervious, to falsification via observation.

And I think it likely that contention over the mental map is both an expression of deeper territorial imperatives and feeds back into them---eventually enough people with enough power decide that the Angolan guerrillas were 'terrorists damaging Chevron's property' rather than 'anti-Marxist freedom-fighters', and the question of who will own actual territory in Angola gets an answer different to what it might otherwise had been.

*I am inherently sceptical of trans-humanism...but then I look at humanity, including within, and tend toward thinking that it were worth a shot faute de mieux...but there's a bootstrapping issue there of the sort that Calvinism gets around by invoking 'grace'.

The final game, yet to be scheduled, will pit Vietnam against Afghanistan for the world championship; U.S. and Russia will eventually have to compete for 3rd place.

Fair point, though perhaps my touching faith is in the ability of riled proles to clearly articulate their displeasure.

Me included, alas. Unless, of course, I am undercover.

Jane

Reality seems to be always two steps ahead of satire these days

"Education Secretary Rod Paige said Monday that the National Education Association, one of the nation's largest labor unions, was like ''a terrorist organization'' because of the way it was resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress by President Bush in 2001."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/us/education-chief-calls-union-terrorist-then-recants.html