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> If you have read it is it any good? Looks pretty interesting.

Yes, I read it a few years ago. I had to look on my bookshelf to find the right title. It's pretty good, although a little dated. The authors go through a big old list of scares and how they took off and what measures were taken to try to prevent the scare as well as who the "pushers" of the scare were.

If you like that kind of thing I can also heartily recommend "Fear: A cultural history" by Joanna Bourke. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fear-Cultural-Professor-Joanna-Bourke/dp/1844081567

It's like saying evolution is the key to the human species, and someone else saying, "It's not the only reason, people who want to really know what else went into it should read this"

It's so absurd, I think I'm taking crazy pills sometimes. But, I guess because you had the gif, you're taken as the expert. So, again, good for you, man. I'm glad you could show me that no matter where I go on reddit, the facts don't matter, it's how snarky you are.

Here you go! http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Idiots-Guide-U-S-Constitution/dp/1592576273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377187253&sr=8-1&keywords=dummy%27s+guide+to+constitution

Perfect for all the redditors!

K.

To everyone else, the rise of Nazi Germany is the result of a complex set of factors. I would recommend: Nazi Germany (Short Oxford History of Germany), though unfortunately it is a little costlier than when I bought it.

http://www.amazon.com/Ecoscience-Population-Environment-Paul-Ehrlich/dp/0716700298

Read the madness of crowds. Author really goes into depth on incidents in history. The section on inside jokes is funny as hell, amazing to see how long memes have been around for.

This book is also good: Demon Haunted world

>Income inequality isn't a problem by itself, I just said that.

Unfortunately you're completely, totally wrong on this point and provide no source for it. Decades of research have shown that income inequality leads to a host of undesirable consequences for countries, as documented in the book The Spirit Level.

> "In their new book, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett extend this
>idea" (of the harm caused by status differences) "with a far-reaching analysis of
>the social consequences of income inequality. Using statistics from reputable
>independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23
>of the world's richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking
>conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the
>narrowest income differentials—such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the
>US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal—the United States as a whole, the
>United Kingdom and Portugal—do worst." (Michael Sargent, Nature)

From the book's blurb:

>One common factor links the healthiest and happiest societies: the degree of
>equality among their members. Further, more unequal societies are bad for
>everyone within them-the rich and middle class as well as the poor.
>The remarkable data assembled in The Spirit Level exposes stark differences, not
>only among the nations of the first world but even within America's fifty states.
>Almost every modern social problem-poor health, violence, lack of community life,
>teen pregnancy, mental illness-is more likely to occur in a less-equal society.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirit-Level-Equality-Societies/dp/1608193411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413150108&sr=8-1&keywords=the+spirit+level

So please don't assert the idea that income inequality isn't a problem. That seems more exaggerated rhetoric than DrGobKynes' factual statement.

First of all, consider the source of the list

I won't even deign to call the guy who made that list an academic - he only has one published work that I can find and it is fiction (http://www.amazon.com/June-2004-Laurence-W-Britt/dp/1884962203/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426277319&sr=1-1) and I don't see anything else to support his "political science" credentials.

I also have no evidence to suggest that the guy is actually a doctor. But hey, feel free to direct me to his academic institution.

Now, let me indulge you and actually engage with the list as though it is something serious (a ridiculous premise, but what the hell).

The list itself is nothing more than astrology and fortune-telling - you could take those "factors" and apply them to any country on earth, including countries that I doubt you would regard as fascist.

Nationalism? Where are you not going to find that?

Corruption? Name one country on earth without it.

Controlled mass media? That one is just flat out wrong - access to free and unrestricted forms of media is probably at an all time high.

Fraudulent elections? The evidence of that is absurdly thin.

Disdain for intellectuals? Absolutely ridiculous... our percentage of college graduates and post graduate degrees is also at an all time high.

Rampant sexism? That is absolutely absurd - again, women's equality in the US is stronger than at any time in history. How on earth can you claim "rampant sexism" with a straight face? Women have complete equality in legal rights, full access to education (in fact, they dominate our universities and institutes of higher education) and full access to the job market as well. And yet... the sexism is SO rampant to your eyes that you would characterize it as FASCIST.

You would compare any of these factors in the US to the prototypical examples of fascist countries (WWII era Japan, Germany, and Korea)? Seriously? Do you know how paranoid that makes you sound?

But guess it doesn't take much to convince a bunch of conspiratards that the sky is falling.

I don't understand why you're trying to parse this issue other than to be perversely intellectually dishonest.

It is wholly incorrect to believe "Red Scares" were exclusively aimed at Communism and Communism alone, as if to say that most Americans and businesses were totally cool with Socialism, but hey if you're a commie then you gotta go!

That's nonsense.

Red Scares were inextricably linked to the rampant, well-organized and funded anti-leftism that had been going on for decades in the United States especially during / toward the end of World War I where union membership had been on the rise, and fighting unionist expansion was of particular interest to organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).

"Red scare tactics were frequently employed in attempts to halt the surge of unionization," according to Michael Heale, Reader in History at Lancaster Universtiy, in his book "American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within." NAM even issued pamphlets titled "Join the CIO and Help Build a Soviet America" in the 1930s.

The way you speak of Red Scares, you make it sound like they were isolated incidents aimed explicitly at Soviet-style International Communism and/or the radicalism associated with that ideology. But that is clearly not the case. They were very much part and parcel of a broader, political movement that included anti-leftism of every stripe, and the people behind these organized movements didn't care for the academic differences between socialism and communism; they were all cut from the same, troublesome cloth.

Who's downvoting this? These people are clueless about the history of Islamic fundamentalism. (apparently the adviceanimals people are downvoting because of "antibrigade bot" hehe)

Terrorism didn't come from fucking blowback. People need to stop repeating what they hear from pundits because even the most well-renowned historians such as Bernard Lewis, who speaks fluent Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew has written many books such as this one "Crisis Islam Holy War & Unholy Terror" on the tiny differences between all the Islamic fundamentalist ideologies, including the ones that embrace terrorism.

You know how there are like 2-3 different LDS Mormon churches some more extreme than others?

Similarly, in Islamic fundamentalism, there are many different ideologies within it that are much harder to detect because they don't name their mosques differently like Christians do with their churches and sects. All of them claim to be "True Islam".

The history of Islamic terrorism didn't just "start after 9/11" and it didn't start "right before 9/11" either. Suicide terror started in the 1980s but Islamic terrorism (not suicide-based) has its roots all the way back to the 1920s. Here's a lecture by a psychiatrist named Dr. Andy Thomson who goes through the history of suicide terrorism. He's famous for papers involving evolutionary psychology, racism, NPD, bipolar, et al.