Content tagged with "politics"

Bebe Rebozo
Explanation
October 16, 2022
178

Bebe Rebozo was a close friend, confidante, and adviser of Richard Nixon. “Bebe” was a nickname – it’s Spanish for “baby” as he was the youngest of 12 in a Cuban family. Rebozo was often suspected of criminal activity, but nothing was ever proven, other than a minor tax penalty. Rebozo was also…

British Control of India
Explanation
156

The British had been involved India since the 1600s, when the East India Company set up trading operations there to import silk, cotton, and spices. The company slowly took control of large parts of the country through economic means, until they exerted de facto control of India in the mid-1700s. In…

Bund
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
April 6, 2024
229

A poster for the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, arguably the height of its popularity. This is both a common and a proper noun. Commonly, it’s literally German for “bunch,” but also extends to be “union” or “group.” As a proper noun, it’s refer to several different historical groups, both for…

Dag Hammarskjöld
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
January 28, 2022
130

He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, and is considered one of the greatest diplomats in world history. He served from 1953 to his death in 1961. He was killed in a plane crash in Congo. There are conflicting reports of the cause, and it was still being investigated into the…

Daimyo
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
April 6, 2024
159

The literally definition is “large land,” referring to the fact that these Lords were landowners Not surprisingly, the term was used a lot in Shogun. I could have figured it out just from context, but I also remember the term being used in The Book of Boba Fett, the Disney+ sequel to The…

Démarche
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
October 28, 2021
414

This is a vague word that generally means a request or statement of position from one government to another. When a government makes a request or a demand of another government, it is in the form of a démarche. From Protocol for the Modern Diplomat , a historical document published by the U.S….

Filibuster
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
December 21, 2021
432

In politics, a filibuster is when a legislator makes a long speech or takes some other action meant to delay and therefore prevent the adoption of legislation. It’s basically a rules loophole, that lets one person prevent a measure from passing. Here’s a general definition: the use of irregular or…

Neoliberalism
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
November 15, 2023
450

This term has a long historical context, first being used in France in the 1800s. It seems to have switched sides many times, and been flexed and twisted to mean a lot of different things. In contemporary Western politics, it mainly refers to the resurgence of conservative politics in the late 20th…

Suzerainty
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
October 28, 2021
196

From Wikipedia: […] a relationship in which one state or other polity controls the foreign policy and relations of a tributary state, while allowing the tributary state to have internal autonomy. The dominant state is called the “suzerain”. This seems to be a fairly historical term. There doesn’t…

Tammany Hall
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
March 22, 2022
344

This refers to a democratic “political machine” in New York from the late 1700s all the way through the 1960s. It began as something like a fraternal order, and took the name “Tammany” from an Indian chief. The members started to exert political influence shortly thereafter, picking candidates and…

TARP
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
September 13, 2022
1548

TARP – the Troubled Asset Relief Program – was the famous “$700 billion bailout” that the U.S. government undertook in 2008 to try and stave off the mortgage crisis. The crisis that led to this program was the basis for the book Too Big To Fail. Did the government lose $700 billion? Was it repaid?…