TimeGhost History
Published 19 Mar 2025In 1947, Christian Dior stunned the world by introducing his controversial “New Look”. With luxurious dresses and ultra-feminine silhouettes, Dior’s designs ignited fierce debates about gender roles, societal values, and post-war extravagance. While some saw his collection as a welcome return to elegance, others viewed it as an insult during times of austerity. Was Dior celebrating beauty or setting women’s progress back decades?
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March 21, 2025
The Shocking Dress That Sparked Global Outrage! – W2W 13 – 1947 Q3
Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government
Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:
It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.
Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.
This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:
“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?
[…]
Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.
Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.
On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?
Star Trek: Jobs, Money, and Replicators
Feral Historian
Published 14 Jun 2024So the Federation doesn’t use money and magic walls give you anything you ask for. What kind of economy are we really looking at here, and is some approximation of this possible without first having those replicators?
First we have to talk about what money is, what a job is (vs just being employed) and a little historical detour into modern efforts at Universal Basic Income. All of which lead to a very hypothetical look at how we might be able to build a rough approximation of a Star Trek economy in the near-term future.
This is all analysis and thought-experiment. I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these ideas, just bouncing things around for consideration.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Qualitatively Distinct Model
02:27 The Triple Revolution
05:00 Jobs ≠ Employment
06:32 Universal Basic Income
11:35 Federation Credit
13:45 Impacts of Currency
15:16 Can We Really Do This?
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QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”
The Gillian Duffy affair, the start of this People’s Decade, was fascinating on many levels. Fundamentally, it revealed the schism in values and language that separated the elites from ordinary people. To the professional middle classes who by that point — after 13 years of New Labour government — had conquered the Labour Party, people like Mrs Duffy were virtually an alien species, and places like Rochdale were almost another planet. Indeed, one small but striking thing that happened in the Duffy / Brown fallout was a correction published in the Guardian. One of that newspaper’s initial reports on the Duffy affair had said that Rochdale was “a few hundred miles” from London. Readers wrote in to point out that it is only 170 miles from London. To the chattering classes, it was clear that Rochdale was as faraway and as foreign as Italy or Germany. More so, in fact.
The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”
One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.
“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.
The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.
Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.
