So, here’s a crazy story: A Tampa-based judge is about to release a 21-year-old radical Islamic terrorist (RIT) to the custody of his mom and grandma. The RIT came to the attention of authorities when one of his roommates murdered his other two roommates and led cops to the scene of the crime.
In the ensuing search, the cops found bomb-making materials, a photograph of Osama bin Laden and the collected works of Anwar al-Awlaki in the apartment, along with internet activity suggesting that the surviving RIT, who is slated for bail as early as today, thought it would be a good idea to “kill civilians and target locations like power lines, nuclear reactors, and synagogues,” according to the feds.
After the murders but before he was arrested due to the items found in the search, the RIT fled to South Florida, where he hooked up with a pal he’d met on a radical Islamic terrorist fan site. The online pal quit his McJob, liquidated his $3K life savings and visited a Bass Pro Shops outlet in South Florida, where he and his friend bought two guns and 100 rounds of ammo.
The cops caught up with them at a Burger King in Key Largo. What were they going to do with those guns and rounds? No one knows. The pal who quit his McJob isn’t under arrest, but he declined to elucidate on the pair’s aims when contacted by a reporter.
So, this judge is about to release a radical Islamic terrorist in my community today, unless prosecutors can get him to change his mind at a hearing this afternoon. Why isn’t Donald Trump screeching about this on Twitter instead of demanding media apologies for FAKE NEWS? Why aren’t people like Pam Geller freaking out about this reckless endangerment of the community?
Because — haha, just kidding! — the menace who is set to make bail in Tampa this afternoon is in fact a neo-Nazi, not a radical Islamic terrorist. All other details relayed above are correct — just swap out “neo-Nazi” for “RIT,” “Timothy McVeigh” for “Osama bin Laden” and “The Turner Diaries” for the “works of Anwar al-Awlaki.”
America is so weird sometimes. The end.
Trentrunner
So M. Night Shyamalan is now a BJ front-pager…
Which fits, because I’m sure the end of the Trump Era is
WE WERE DEAD THE WHOLE TIME.
Jerzy Russian
If anyone needs me, I will be curled up in a fetal position the corner over there.
chopper
“avoid terrorism charges with this one weird trick”
Scotian
Sometmes?!?!?!
Try being stuck having you as our only neighbour, trust me, sometimes, seems a bit understated…*wry chuckle*
Another Scott
But of course. It’s Florida in 2017 USA. :-/
In other news:
(via Julia Ioffe’s twitter feed)
Cheers,
Scott.
burnspbesq
And if some intrpid Senator were to ask ol’ Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III about this … smh.
Ian G.
Oh man, I thought the twist at the end was going to be “because the RIT has a 2nd amendment right to stockpile military-style weapons and besides, good guys with guns will stop him”, said the Bush-appointee judge.
Imagine if some lunatic imam appeared on a YouTube show brandishing AK-47s and saying that the 2nd amendment will guarantee his right to carry out Allah’s will. The GOP would be moving to repeal the 2nd amendment faster than they would move to repeal ACA, and with the NRA’s blessing. Only white people are supposed to threaten civilization with their 2nd amendment rights.
Stan
I admit this is a little tangential but – there’s a huge streak of pro-Nazi thinking/feeling in this country, even though – I swear this is true – we fought a fucking war against those guys.
Check out, say, collectors of old militaria. Nazi stuff dominates. Re-enactor hobbyists are disproportionately WW2 Germans (and US Confederates too, which seems close). Military history sections of bookstores are full of this stuff, much more so than, say, WW2 Japanese, or Vietnamese, or anyone else we ever fought.
What exactly is going on here? Why do we think nazis aren’t bad guys?
Punchy
But the question remains….did he in fact get busy in that Burger King bathroom?
mapaghimagsik
@Stan: Part of it is that people have always had a fascination with the criminal or “bad guys”. But reading about serial killers and wanting to try your own is a huge leap.
I don’t get the Nazi fascination.
Gravenstone
Didn’t the one cracker kill his buddies because they were in fact neo-Nazis who were attacking his over his recent conversion to Islam? Talk about your plot twists.
Chyron HR
@Stan:
Um, excuse me, but if you’d attended the People’s Progressive Congress of Progressive Peoplehood this weekend you’d know that they’re not “Nazis”, they’re the noble members of the white working class and we need to start letting them have a voice in the Democratic primaries.
trollhattan
@Stan:
If “24” had been made in the ’60s it would have been themed as either a contemporary fight against Soviet spies or a WWII-era fight against Nazis. But today we know who the real enemy is, don’t we?
Spanky
@burnspbesq:
He’s preoccupied with other things:
Quinerly
OT: Meanwhile in Missouri, the Repug terrorists are murdering chickens on FB feeds, ripping out their hearts…all in the name of St. Louis being an “abortion sanctuary city.” I’m kinda shocked this isn’t getting move coverage: http://m.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2017/06/13/missouri-legislator-decapitates-live-chicken-on-facebook-because-abortion
Punchy
This is where the story became the obvious fake. There’s no way a Bass Pro is selling guns and ammo to 2 brown-skinned customers, esp. if they’re together. Just like how 2 brown-skinned males cannot talk to each other on an airplane. Or get up to use the restroom at the same time. Or be seen together shopping for fertilizer.
SatanicPanic
@Another Scott:
I’m sure Donald J Trump will get right on this. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck
NotMax
From the sidebar at the newspaper site:
BBA
Why would they agree to this? Sure he’s family etc., but you know what he’s been up to, and now you’re putting your home at risk to keep him out of jail for a few months before trial?
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Stan: Well, we got into War 2 because Pearl Harbor was bombed by “those dirty Nips”, not because of the Nazis. We only got involved in Europe because Hitler was kind enough to declare war on the US on 11 December. Prior to that, Roosevelt was stymied by public opinion and the Republican party from direct involvement in Europe. There was a significant amount of pro-Nazi sentiment in the US before the war, and it never quite went away.
sc
Well, the two economically anxious guard-killing prison-breakers in GA are competing for his / their lack of alarm. The sheer amount of things requiring their non-attention is staggering!
PaulWartenberg
this is insane. the man is caught threatening to attack NUCLEAR REACTORS, so that ought to automatically fall under the Patriot Act or other severe federal charges that should make him invalid for bail. Christ. White Privilege at its worst.
scav
for some reason, my machine keeps insisting my name is “sc” when I’m from nowhere near that state. Sorry, but can my misfires be released?
Elmo
@Stan:
I’ll take, “What color were the Nazis?” for $1,000, Alex.
Cheryl Rofer
Julia Ioffe, mentioned by @Another Scott above, has an excellent article on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and his meetings with Sergey Kislyak.
It’s the kind of thing I’ve been collecting information for, and she’s written it so I don’t have to.
It seems to me that knowing why Sessions, who has little-to-no foreign policy chops, was meeting repeatedly with the Russian ambassador, would go a long way toward understanding the unprecedented Russian interactions with the Trump campaign.
Big Ole Hound
FLORIDA HAS IT’S OWN SET OF RULES FOR ALL IDIOTS CALLED JUDGES. YES I’M SHOUTING
hovercraft
The GOP That Failed
The party didn’t decide. And now Republicans are stuck with Trump.
By Jeff Greenfield
June 10, 2017
So now that even the most willfully blind villagers are being forced to admit that Twitler is a disaster and the GOP chose to go with him anyway, the excuses must begin? They didn’t just go along, they built bullshit mountain, there’s a reason that everything Twitler is suddenly claiming to be doing, was already proposed or done by the black man, he never was the radical socialist that they claimed he was, he was a left of center pragmatist which in this day and age where the Overton window had moved so far to the right, that fucking Nixon would be a liberal today.
LAO
Far be it from me to argue in favor of bail BUT prosecutors have to demonstrate (by clear and convincing evidence) that the defendant is (1) either a threat that no reasonable conditions of bond can ameliorate OR (2) is a risk of flight. The release order here places the defendant on house arrest — (ankle bracelet).
It’s not easy to get bond in a federal case when the government opposes release — the evidentiary bar is set fairly low, and they obviously failed to meet that standard. May be they will provide the Court with more evidence of his actual dangerous rather than rely on innuendo and assumptions.
Quinerly
OT: Disturbing new restrictions on the press: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/capitol-reporters-new-restrictions-senate-interviews
LAO
@PaulWartenberg:
That is not what he is charged with and Prosecutors certainly did not present any evidence of a likely or imminent plan to do so.
Mnemosyne
@Stan:
Speaking as someone who’s read a LOT about the Nazis, I absolutely don’t think that they’re not bad guys. It’s pretty clear from, say, The Nazis: A Warning from History that they were horrible people.
I think the eternal fascination people have with the Nazis is that they were “civilized” people who decided to kill their own citizens in the name of “science.” People can’t make excuses that the Nazis were somehow “forced” to kill Europeans because they were savages who deserved it, which is the unspoken part of the massacres of the native people in places like India or Africa. And they can’t be dismissed as savages themselves, like we can dismiss the Japanese or Khmer Rouge.
The Nazis were people very similar to Americans (to the point that the Nuremberg Laws bear more than a passing resemblance to Jim Crow laws) who killed people who are also very similar to Americans. And that’s the fascination for normal people: why did they do it, and how can we prevent it from happening again?
For abnormal people, IMO the appeal is finally being able to revenge yourself on all of those Others who look down on you and laugh at you. And a subset of those people will try to take matters into their own hands like this asshole tried to do.
different-church-lady
[pushes button on speaker phone]: “Johnson? Make this go viral!”
MoxieM
@Stan: I blame Hugo Boss.
No, really, at one point when the insane Curt Schilling was being insane, the contents of his Nazi stuff collection was viewable–Facebook maybe even? He owns prisoner garb from Dachau with sweat and possibly blood stains on it, which I find so repugnant that word fail. I think it’s even way more gross, disgusting, reprehensible, …did I say words fail? …than the obsessive collecting of Nazi soldier garb, equipment etc. I can’t even. And does our beloved press ever mention this? Does this ever prevent him from holding a public speaking position? I think he should be hounded from pillar to post to tumbrel for such a thing. But then I have moral standards.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Ian G.:
Wasn’t that what happened when the Black Panthers started carrying guns? Suddently we couldn’t have enough gun control.
ruemara
@Stan: Because White Nationalism. They focused on elevating whiteness as a virtue. It’s great to have virtue just by being born.
The upcoming near future already has a movie title. “There Will Be Blood”. I just don’t know if there’s any real will to oppose them. Lots of virtue signaling, not much will.
Mnemosyne
@MoxieM:
Wait, what?
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
MoxieM
@Mnemosyne: I wish I were. and I wish I had saved a screen shot, but I didn’t want to save such a thing.
Matt McIrvin
The Nazis also had an appealing sense of visual style (snappy outfits and badass emblems, bold swastika flags, striking searchlight rallies and streamlined Moderne architecture), which was part of the way they came to power in the first place–some people are attracted to this kind of thing like a moth to a flame. I think part of the interest is just similar to the people who like to dress up as Star Wars villains–the bad guys just look cool (and Star Wars of course got a lot of its aesthetic directly from the Nazis, even for the good-guy characters in some cases).
The Moar You Know
@Stan: We never really did. Oh, afterwards, once Russia and Britain had won and the vast numbers of Americans who thought Hitler was a stand-up guy were too ashamed to tell their kids they’d thought he was the greatest, then there was finally a consensus, for a while, that Nazism was bad. But we as a nation sure as shit didn’t think so before WWII, and FDR had to fight like hell just to get us to send Britain some second-rate military equipment. And it wasn’t free – we charged Britain full price. Incidentally, that debt was not repaid until sometime around 2005. Yeah. We made them pay us back.
Had Pearl Harbor not happened all Europe would be Reich Europe today. That’s a certainty. The Republicans of the time (oh my, isn’t that an odd coincidence) fought like hell to keep us out, and would have succeeded.
As to why now? The last folks alive during WWII will be gone in a couple of years. The few that are left no longer constitute any sort of effective voting block and no longer need to be catered to, so we as a society can become “Nazi-curious” again. And a lot of Americans like what they see when they take a look. What that says about the fundamental nature of Americans, well, you decide. I’ve already figured it out and am just really sad that I’m pretty much too old and not-rich enough to emigrate anywhere. This is not a nation I want to stay in any longer.
hovercraft
@Quinerly:
Yesterday I saw somewhere that Yertle and Twitler are upset because apparently they had it on good authority that Kennedy was going to retire this Spring giving them the fifth vote to overturn Roe once and for all. Not to mention the justice would have been a pure true conservative in the mold of Alito and Goresuck, who would fulfill all their fantasies.
NotMax
Hmmmm.
LAO
Wow — the balls on these Republicans.
Mnemosyne
@MoxieM:
Holy shit. I think the odds of me ever meeting Schilling are zero, but if I did, I would be hard-pressed not to punch him in the mouth. And I’m not even Jewish.
ETA: I can understand why a museum would want to preserve that, or a family still having something like that passed down from a relative, but to buy it for your personal collection? That’s like buying the outfit that one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims was murdered in.
Joe Falco
I’m sure Trump did Nazi that one coming!
Major Major Major Major
@Stan:
I’m more surprised the Nazis didn’t seem to know they were bad guys.
“I’ve just noticed something… have you looked at our caps recently? Because they’ve got skulls on them. Have you noticed?”
EBT
Still ok with using existing laws to round up the nazis and white supremacists and put them in jail.
LAO
@Major Major Major Major: I’ve been waiting for someone to post that. LOL.
hovercraft
@MoxieM:
I don’t even know what to say to that……………
What a disgusting human being.
grandpa john
@Stan: because they suffer from a skin disorder, it’s white
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@MoxieM: “He owns prisoner garb from Dachau with sweat and possibly blood stains on it, which I find so repugnant that word fail. I think it’s even way more gross, disgusting, reprehensible, …did I say words fail? …that the obsessive collecting of Nazi soldier garb equipment etc. I can’t even”
I run into twats like this all the time in on line role playing. Also some 20 something under employed white dude bro who never served a day in the military but likes to see see himself as an SS officer(never the enlisted man, always the officer). I tell them “well, I am running this role play were it’s a Soviet Gulag in Siberia in 1946 and we are looking for people to play SS officers…”, and that pretty much ends the conversation. Funny how these White Warrior dude bros never want to think about what happened to Germany after WWII.
NotMax
EU schism over refugees widening.
MattF
@hovercraft: Well, specifically about Republican cowardice, see Ms. Rubin.
Major Major Major Major
@LAO: happy to help.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: To me, the Nazis are fascinating because the rank and file citizenry then were fundamentally no different than those in Germany now, yet somehow they allowed themselves to behave in a fundamentally different way. That suggests to me that any population is similarly vulnerable to this including the US. Understanding why that happened is particularly important to guard against it repeating.
That said, while I find it fascinating, my distaste of it only grows the more I learn.
Kay
This is horrible to say but is part of the difference in treatment by the general public (not wingnuts or racists- just people who only pay scant attention) because the general public thinks neoNazis are kind of dumb? Like, international terrorists are sophisticated plotters who might pull it off but these guys will have trouble putting together gas money to get to the nuclear power plant, let alone blow it up?
Major Major Major Major
@LAO: reminds me too of a satirical letter to the history channel about their unrealistic programming I saw once. “The bad guys play soccer with the heads of children and the good guys are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair, and the war is ended by an unstoppable super weapon developed in secret in the desert? Really?”
Stan
@Elmo: But the Russians were pasty white too, and we hated them for a few decades……
MoxieM
@Mnemosyne: He’s taken down the prisoner garb, but still has an armband from the SS camp guards at Dachau up in a frame with other unit arm bands. It’s beyond appalling. (And, illegal in Germany. for good reason.)
I need to go take a shower now.
LAO
@? Martin: I think you can look at the Stanford Prison Experiment from the early 1970s and understand, that what happened in Germany could happen here.
ruemara
@Major Major Major Major: But evil always sees itself as good. They can’t perceive that what they do is wrong to other folks. That’s just how deeply they delude themselves.
MoxieM
@? Martin: Um, they are pretty different now, than they were in the 20’s and 30’s. The efforts of the ’68 generation to call the country to account for its crimes against humanity have been generally quite effective. Not perfect, but compared to, say Japan, or Holland (see: Indonesia), pretty damned effective. Talk to a modern German about what they’ve learned in school and internalized about the Holocaust and WWII, autocratic rulers, and the necessity for democratic process and you’ll be surprised.
The Moar You Know
@NotMax: Gonna get worse. Europe is having some legitimate problems with them (mostly in paying for it, the costs are staggering, and while Germany can afford it, nobody else really can). These converge with their non-legitimate prejudices. It’s gonna be a fucking mess for years.
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
And the reason the Allies harshly punished the Germans — up to and including forcing German citizens to take tours of the death and labor camps before they were cleaned up — was to teach them never to do that shit again.
Unfortunately, white Americans have never been forced to undergo a similar deprogramming for white supremacism, so it still lingers in our body politic like a malignant cancer.
MoxieM
@Mnemosyne: I know right. It’s like collecting the blood stained garments of child rape victims or something. (Gah, people probably do that.). Beyond this one crazy man, who is crazy, and has the money to indulge in his insanity (all the while “support our troops” …fucking hell, what did he think they were doing 70 years ago! moron.).
It’s the idea that there is a commercial trade in what should be sacred items of reverence b/c survival against all odds. I can’t even.
Mnemosyne
@LAO:
There’s been some interesting stuff written about the Stanford Prison Experiment lately. It was much more staged and planned out than the experimenter ever admitted publicly.
The “guards” did not spontaneously decide to mistreat the “prisoners.” They were directed to do it by an authority figure, which is much more to the actual point, but not something that authority figure was comfortable admitting he’d done.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 6/12/17
Sessions’ Russian meetings still a mystery
Rachel Maddow explains what is still unknown about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and Sessions’ violation of his own recusal from matters dealing with Russia or the 2016 campaign.
? Martin
@MoxieM: The people aren’t different, rather the institutions and the culture is. And that’s my point. The US has this enduring optimism that we are individually well equipped to regulate our own behavior, and Nazi Germany shows that no, we aren’t – at all. We need the cultural and institutional safeguards. What’s more, conservatives believe in the need for those safeguards when applied to non-Americans, non-whites, non-Christians, and non-males, but not to white Christian men, which Betty’s post illustrates extremely clearly.
Major Major Major Major
@MoxieM:
And talk to a rural German and they’ll wonder what all the fuss is about.
The Moar You Know
@? Martin: If circumstances were the same, it would play out the same way today.
True. See Rwanda, etc.
It just did in November 2016. I do not say that lightly. It’s not “repeating”, the process has wholly repeated. What comes next is at the whim of the guy in charge.
I was introduced to Nazism through comic books as a kid, like most people in America of a certain age, and that would have been the end of it save that while in college I fell down the rabbit hole of what is called “social psychology” – the Milgram experiments and that sort of thing. After I got out with my degree in said subject, I started buying up a lot of history books. I don’t say it lightly when I say the buildup to today’s de facto fascist government and voter base couldn’t have been stopped after Bush got placed into office in 2000. At that point, we just kissed our last firewall against fascism – the strict observation of the rule of law – goodbye. Replaced by partisan politics as the ultimate arbiter of right versus wrong. It’s not a system of government I want to live under, but here we are.
MoxieM
@Major Major Major Major: Some of ’em yeah. More east, more south, for sure. Best not to generalize. :/ My point stands though. The effort has been made, it’s in the curriculum, and the laws. And, to Martin’s point about culture, well, as a card-carrying sociologist, I’d have to say you can’t really separate that from the people in any meaningful way. For certain, it’s a mixed bag. But if you look at what’s happened to AfD, it’s an illustrative case. It certainly all makes for interesting dinner-table conversations, though (there, I mean.)
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Could be, but the feds have shut down some pretty dim bulbs on the strength of some pretty sketchy and unrealistic plans to blow shit up for al Qaeda. I just want would-be mass murderers held to a common standard! :)
TenguPhule
@Stan:
Rooting for the Empire.
They know the Nazis were evil, that’s why they’re so drawn to them.
Matt McIrvin
@ruemara: Not entirely true. If you talk to, say, Dick Cheney or Steve Bannon, they’ll willingly embrace at least the machinery and terminology of evil–if only fictional evil. “Darkness”, “the Dark Side”, and they always emphasize that it’s power that the Dark Side gives them. They see themselves as mustache-twirling villains and are proud of it. Now, they’ll say that it’s all for the greater good in some wider sense. But there’s no mistaking what really interests them.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
My favorites are still the guys who were totally going to blow up the Sears Tower using the money they’d earn running a head shop, only they could never agree on who was actually going to run the head shop if they managed to get around to buying one. Which they never did.
Poor bastards are probably still in jail and will be for another 20 years.
Major Major Major Major
@MoxieM: AfD certainly demonstrates that it’s hard to get a party off the ground with nothing but all trolling, all the time. The alt-right kiddies here demonstrate how it’s much simpler to just take over parts of an established party instead.
@MoxieM: Yes, it was a generalization, just saying that it hasn’t stuck to the degree indicated in what I was responding to.
NorthLeft12
@BBA: @BBA:
So this judge, besides being a Nazi lover, appears to have a grudge against women. Surprise, surprise, surprise!
What judge and/or prosecutor would propose or agree to this kind of arrangement is beyond me. Where is his father and grandfather or brothers and what are they giving up to secure this yahoo’s release?
NorthLeft12
@ruemara:
I’ll disagree with you on the “always” part. I think the truly deluded that you are referring to are a very small minority. I think the great majority of those people are aware what they are doing is wrong and evil on a number of levels, but they rationalize that what they are doing is necessary for the good of the society, or the rewards they receive are worth it. Why do you think all those SS and concentration camp guards took off their uniforms and hid out? Regular German army personnel did not do that.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know:
This this this. When even torture was not punished by Bush and Cheney’s heads on platters, we were always going to end up here eventually.
Kathleen
@Chyron HR: You referring to CouldaWouldaStock?
Citizen Alan
@LAO:
The Milgram experiment is perhaps more on topic. It was actually designed to figure out what it was about Germans that made them more susceptible to authoritarianism. And then I quickly found out that Americans were every bit as susceptible as Germans were
LAO
@Citizen Alan: Agreed. It’s been a long time since I took a psychology course. I confused my social psychology experiments.
LAO
@NorthLeft12:
So an Assistant U.S. Attorney fails to meet the burden of proof re: the defendant dangerousness for pre-trial detention and this is where you go? SMH
sheila in nc
@Stan:
At that point, the Russians were also irreligious, or at least their state was. They were also a threat to capitalism, or so the capitalists thought.
Boatboy_srq
Just a reminder that prior to 9/11 a bunch of the 19 were, despite decent visibility on the FBI radar, flying small aircraft in and out of several airports in that area – where their instructors said they were obsessed with takeoffs and with flying, but landings notsomuch. FL isn’t exactly known for its ability to suss out potential risks. One more reason SRQ isn’t my local airport anymore.
That said, there’s apparently no crime/sin/transgression that a white male can’t get away with there, or that FL won’t overlook or respond to with useless gestures. Remember the incident a couple decades ago where some Panhandle idjit took his shootin’ irons out to get him some o’them furriners what were taking over his country – and wound up shooting some nice British couple on holiday while they were stopped at a rest area? FL’s solution was – you guessed it – moar gunz, this time in the form of 24/7 FHP presence at every rest area. Which presence is now, thanks to austerity, some septuagenarian with a Wackenhut badge and a revolver – IOW a perfect target for anyone looking for a person they could overpower to get their hands on firearms.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Stan: Ask yourself this– just how different were the Nazis from the Confederates?
Take away the technological and linguistic differences, and about the only real difference was that the Nazis were killing “undesirables” off wholesale in the midst of enslaving them.
Confederates wouldn’t waste the enslaved labor by simply gassing them– better to WORK them to death; and maybe get them to produce MORE workers.
There are statues and memorials to the Confederates all over this country.
WVm
@sheila in nc:
Some Russians are pasty white, and others have more than a touch of Mongol / Hun / Tartar invaders in them. Especially when you get away from Moscow and the urbanized area in the western fraction of Russia, which as a whole covers something like 10 time zones.
Genetic testing like Ancestor.com and 23-and-me in Russia would be very interesting and different. Wonder if there’s money to be made there?
Lurking Canadian
@Major Major Major Major: I have heard of, though never found, an SF short based on the same premise. It is (allegedly) written by a far future historian arguing that this “World War Two” was clearly a legendary event that should not be taken literally.
In addition to the issues you raise, we’re supposed to believe that the victorious general was called “The One Hammer” and the leader of the “Soviet Union” was called “The Man of Steel”.
Clearly made up. The whole thing.
Man I wish I had the Google fu to find that story.
Scamp Dog
@Lurking Canadian: I remember that story too, but I read it so long ago I’m unable to provide any hints to you, never mind coming up with the author’s name.
opiejeanne
@Lurking Canadian: more like iron hewer.
JAFD
@Lurking Canadian:
Good morning !
Methinks you’re looking for
http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html
(Unpaid endorsement of ClipMate, from Thornsoft.com, clipboard extender and info manager. Knew I’d seen that commentary on Livejournal and clipped the URL, so just searched clip database for ‘livejournal’, went thru the results. Now must move that clip to the ‘Relevant’ sub-clipboard.) (Oneovdevzedaze hope to get my Linux maven friends to code a Clipmate equivalent for Linux…)