Category Archives: History

Gemini’s List of Evil People is….Slightly Better than Google Bard’s was.

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Google Bard’s List of Evil People is….Inaccurate

Google Bard was renamed Gemini, so I wondered if this new version of an A I chatbot made by Google was better than the one I dealt with in 2023. So I asked it the same question as before:

What are the ten most evil people in history?

And I got:

While it’s impossible to definitively create a list of the “ten most evil people in history” due to the subjective nature of “evil” and the complexities of historical figures, here are ten individuals who are widely considered responsible for immense suffering and atrocities:

  1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945): As the leader of Nazi Germany, Hitler orchestrated the Holocaust, the systematic genocide of approximately six million Jews and millions of others. His aggression also initiated World War II, leading to the deaths of tens of millions more.
  2. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953): The dictator of the Soviet Union for over three decades, Stalin’s regime was responsible for the deaths of millions through forced collectivization, famines, purges, and a brutal system of forced labor camps known as the Gulag.
  3. Pol Pot (1925-1998): The leader of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Pol Pot oversaw the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), in which an estimated two million people were killed through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor in a radical attempt to create an agrarian communist society.
  4. Idi Amin (c. 1925-2003): The president of Uganda in the 1970s, Amin’s brutal and erratic rule was marked by widespread human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, political repression, and the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population, leading to economic devastation and the deaths of an estimated 300,000 people.
  5. Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945): As the head of the SS in Nazi Germany, Himmler was a key architect of the Holocaust and oversaw the vast network of concentration and extermination camps. He was also responsible for the Einsatzgruppen death squads operating in Eastern Europe.
  6. Vlad the Impaler (c. 1431-1476/77): The Prince of Wallachia, Vlad III is notorious for his extreme cruelty, particularly his extensive use of impalement as a form of punishment and warfare, which instilled terror in his enemies.
  7. Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227): The founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan led brutal military campaigns that resulted in the widespread destruction of cities and the deaths of millions across Asia. While he also established a unified empire and implemented progressive laws for his time, the scale of death and devastation associated with his conquests is undeniable.
  8. Attila the Hun (c. 406-453): The leader of the Hunnic Empire, Attila led devastating invasions into the Roman Empire, leaving a trail of destruction and earning the moniker “the Scourge of God.”
  9. Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584): The first Tsar of Russia, Ivan IV initially implemented reforms but later became increasingly paranoid and tyrannical, conducting purges and massacres, most notably the Sack of Novgorod, against perceived enemies.
  10. Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909): As the personal owner of the Congo Free State, Leopold II oversaw a brutal regime of forced labor and exploitation of the Congolese population for rubber extraction, leading to the death and mutilation of millions.

It is important to remember that this list is not exhaustive and other individuals throughout history could be considered among the most evil based on their actions and the suffering they caused. The study of such figures serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of unchecked power, hatred, and ideological extremism.

And here are my responses to the new entries on the list:

5. Himmler was not only one of the worst figures working for Hitler, in the end he tried to surrender to the Allies to save his own skin, angering Hitler himself, who disowned Himmler just before committing suicide. Himmler himself would die by suicide as well to avoid being tried as a war criminal. Still, I wouldn’t put him on this list. He was Hitler’s FOLLOWER, the most evil ones in history are LEADERS.

7. Genghis Khan was not much different from other conquerors in history; he was just a lot more successful at what he did than most. Ask a Mongolian today if they think he was evil.

8. Indeed, Attila was so horrible that even other barbarian leaders would side with the Romans to fight against him. Specifically, it was an allied army of Romans and Visigoths who brought down his empire.

  So….what would MY list of most evil people in history consist of?

  1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945): The leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews, as well as the deaths of millions of other people, including Roma, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.
  2. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953): The dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, including through purges, executions, and forced labor.
  3. Pol Pot (1925-1998): The leader of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of up to two million people, or about a quarter of the country’s population.
  4. Caligula (AD 12-AD 41): The completely insane Roman Emperor that was so horrible to so many that even his own guards finally turned on and killed him after a few years.  
  5. Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909): The King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909. Leopold was the personal owner of the Congo Free State, a private colony in Central Africa. Leopold’s brutal exploitation of the Congolese people led to the deaths of millions of people.
  6. Mao Zedong (1893-1976): The leader of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. Mao’s policies, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
  7. Attila the Hun (c. 406-453): The leader of the Hunnic Empire, Attila led devastating invasions into the Roman Empire, leaving a trail of destruction and earning the moniker “the Scourge of God.”
  8. Tomás de Torquemada (1420 – 1498): Leader of the Spanish Inquisition, he championed torture of many non-Catholics in Spain as “heretics”, often burning his victims at the stake after forcing them to confess to their “sins”.
  9. Andrew Jackson (1767 – 1845): President of the United States, he was a notorious racist responsible for the infamous “Trail of Tears” in which vast numbers of Native Americans were forced to move off their lands and head west to Oklahoma. 
  10. Charles Manson (1934 – 2017): The cult leader and lunatic who caused his followers to kill several people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby. Even after being sent to prison, he remained unrepentant to the end of his life. He is one reason I have no problem with the death penalty being used in extreme cases like his.

And a dishonorable mention for one that is, unfortunately, still living among us.

Donald Trump (1946 –    ) The current President of the United States, so degenerate in his character that some have even suggested he is the Anti-Christ. He is certainly the most amoral one we have ever had, if his personal life is any indication and his racism and other bigotries are well known too. By all appearances, he is a sociopathic narcissist…..much like some others on this list. 

Another Debate with a Religious Apologist

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First read these:

The ultimate conflict between Judaism and Christianity
God was a hypocrite?!

On the first blog entry, some asshole had the incredible arrogance to challenge me on what should have been painfully obvious, even to him.

I’m lost. What’s your beef here. Are you saying if the Lord sets up a society of people and gives them a system of jurisprudence to follow He is required to follow that same system?

Wouldn’t that be obvious? I would certainly not worship a hypocrite, because then I’d be one too.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that this was a covenant, or a contract, and exaggerating the universality of God’s commandments to Israel as a result. Most contracts don’t require the parties to do the same things. The things the Lord commanded were things He said Israel needed to do to be His people. That’s it. The things He would do in return were different things. 

Did the Lord say somewhere that it’s always wrong for a man to die in his friends’ stead? Because that’s not what the verse you quoted says. He’s telling them, “This is the principle you will follow to manage things.” 

Mental gymnastics like yours enable all sorts of corruption and abuse.

Let me make it clear……in a just society, NO ONE is above the law. Even God should be subject to his own laws, or those laws are pointless, period. Hypocrisy is just that, period, and it doesn’t matter who is the hypocrite.

Mental gymnastics? Abuse? Why don’t you back off the name-calling and address my point about the covenant angle.

FYI there are plenty of instances in which individuals forbid others from doing something they do themselves that are not hypocritical. The guy who tells another guy, “Don’t you dare touch my wife”: Not a Hypocrite.  The father that tells his seven-year-old, “Don’t you dare touch these matches”: Not a Hypocrite.  Our criminal justice system, which imprisons people daily, but says to the general public, “Don’t you dare capture someone you think is guilty of a crime and hold them captive to punish them”: Not Hypocritical.

This ‘God is a hypocrite’ schtick isn’t the slam dunk you think it is.

And, I have to point out the irony that we’re discussing a directive in which God told the children of Israel that they were not allowed to punish family members for their relatives’ crimes, but your knee-jerk response when you’re challenged its to cry “Abuse, abuse!”

(Dale Husband: Covenants or contracts which bind one party and not the other are SCAMS and I will not accept any scams. Including those in religion.

We are not talking about property rights [“don’t take my car without my permission”] or marriage vows [“don’t cheat on me with any other woman”]. We are talking about BASIC STANDARDS OF JUSTICE which the God of the Bible did not follow, making those standards useless for anyone. A father who beats his children out of anger but then punishes his child for beating another child is indeed a hypocrite, period. Deal with it!

Until you grow up and deal with the reality that your own religion is full of contradictions and totally lacking in empirical evidence, you deserve no respect when you defend that nonsense before someone like me who knows better than to be fooled by your lies.

And that is the last thing I will say to you, con artist. Goodbye.)

Except… the OT covenant didn’t just bind one of the parties, it bound both. My examples were intended to demonstrate that you’re over-simplifying the nature of agreements to justify your claim that God of the Bible is a hypocrite. I notice you didn’t address the example I gave of our criminal justice system, which, unlike the first two, is analogous. If you would stop the tantrum-throwing for 5 minutes and think about this, you may come up with a more meaningful response.

You have been strangely nasty and ad hominem from the start. A person who acts like this is really in no position to give speeches about abusive fathers (which looks like another attempt to distract from the subject). Or call others ‘con artists.’

(Dale Husband: Needless to say, all those statements made by the commenter here are nonsense. ALL OF THEM! It just blows my mind how shameless he is in defending what any rational person would know to be indefensible. But this is what religious brainwashing does to people, completely perverting even the most basic concepts of TRUTH and LOGIC! And I have no problem calling a spade a spade when it looks like a spade…..or a hypocrite in this obvious case. I don’t have to refute all his rhetorical trickery for one simple reason: aside from the CLAIMS published in the Bible, there is absolutely NO evidence that God made any sort of covenant with anyone. Until such evidence is discovered, what’s the point of a debate on the matter?)

Going back to my opponent’s original question:

(((Are you saying if the Lord sets up a society of people and gives them a system of jurisprudence to follow He is required to follow that same system?)))

God is often compared to a king. Well, kings in real life used to have so much power over their subjects that they could even have them killed for any reasons they felt like. A notorious example was King Henry VIII, who had six wives and actually put two of them to death for adultery. Even while betraying his first wife by falling in love with the woman who would become his second. He was sexist as hell!

Roman Emperors like Caligula and Nero also killed people they didn’t like. So did Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

I do NOT want to live in a society where anyone is above the law. Not God, not kings, emperors or dictators……NOBODY should be powerful enough to destroy lives while forbidding murder by their own subjects….because obviously they themselves do not want to assassinated, even if they deserve it for being murderers themselves.

Ethical principles are absolute, or they are pointless. No God or human ruler should ever make laws he himself does not obey, period. It just amazes me that anyone would think otherwise.

First, neither my opponent nor anyone else is entitled to tell me how to argue with others on my own blog. That sense of entitlement never ceases to enrage me because it is a form of verbal abuse known as “tone-policing”. That alone is just insulting. Seriously, don’t do that to anyone!

Second, NotALibertarian’s arguments and views are indeed contrary to the most basic principles of freedom and democracy spelled out in the American and French Revolutions of the 18th Century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings

The doctrine asserts that a monarch is not accountable to any earthly authority (such as a parliament or the Pope) because their right to rule is derived from divine authority. Thus, the monarch is not subject to the will of the people, of the aristocracy, or of any other estate of the realm. It follows that only divine authority can judge a monarch, and that any attempt to depose, dethrone, resist or restrict their powers runs contrary to God’s will and may constitute a sacrilegious act. It does not imply that their power is absolute.

It was only natural that human rulers would want some of the absolute power of God for themselves. I already mentioned how King Henry VIII of England put to death two of his six wives. He should have been overthrown and executed for those things. But instead that happened to one of his successors, Charles I. After that, kings in England no longer had absolute power. Better late than never.

Let us remember what was written in the Declaration of Independence.

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

We need only extend this principle to its logical conclusion: That even God himself need not be worshipped by men if he is a tyrant who abuses his people without any accountability. And that is exactly how the Bible depicts him. Indeed, there is absolutely NO reference to democracy or human rights in the modern sense in the Bible. You’d think God would have inspired Moses, Jesus, or the prophets that lived between their times to preach about such ideas, but they never did. The only types of government they favored were either absolute monarchies or theocracies.

This is proof that the “Creator” referred to in the Declaration of Independence was NOT the God of the Bible at all.

NPR’s Ridiculous Historical Blunder

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On the website for National Public Radio, there is an article published several years ago that is completely unfounded and it really should be retracted and taken down. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/11/07/777276474/western-individualism-may-have-roots-in-the-medieval-churchs-obsession-with-ince

Western Individualism May Have Roots In The Medieval Church’s Obsession With Incest

By

Most people living in Western, developed countries are psychologically distinct from the rest of the world.

For one, they tend to be more individualistic and think of themselves as being independent of other people.

“There is a stronger sense of autonomy and agency,” says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who, in 2010, along with some colleagues published a study describing these psychological attributes of people in so-called Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WEIRD) countries.

On the other hand, people in other parts of the world tend to be more “collectivistic,” says Norenzayan, because their lives are embedded in extended family networks and obligations. They “are more embedded in relationships,” he says. “People see themselves as being part of this larger context.”

So how did people in the West come to be so different?

A new study published Thursday in Science suggests it all began in the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church pushed a way of life that broke up extended family networks and paved the way for nuclear families, weaker family ties and a more individualistic mindset.

The researchers looked up records in the Vatican’s archives and found that, starting in the early Middle Ages — around A.D. 500 — the church began to advance a set of policies that banned people from marrying anyone within their extended families.

At the time, marriages within extended families were common in Europe, says Joseph Henrich, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and an author of the new study. In this and other aspects, European society was very much like other parts of the world, he adds.

Most people lived in extended families. “There are clans, things called kindreds, which are like large houses, large extended families interconnected by marriage,” says Henrich, and people frequently married their cousins and other relatives. The rules of whom one could or should marry were dictated by different religions and local customs.

Even a person’s legal identity was associated with their family, he says. “So there’s no individual rights or anything like that.”

Marriage within extended families helped keep wealth and property within the family, and the family networks were also people’s safety net. “So your main fallback when shocks hit — say you got injured, or drought hit, or something — you’re going to fall back on this network of kin relationships to take care of you,” says Henrich.

That also meant people had obligations toward others in their extended families. “You have responsibilities to your various relatives,” says Henrich. “[In] some societies, you might have to bury your brother-in-law, or you might have to avenge the deaths of certain cousins if they’re killed or murdered.”

Then, starting around 500, the Catholic Church began converting people across Western Europe, Henrich says.

“They begin to make inroads, converting people, ministering to the people, teaching people about God,” he says. “But part of this is that God wants you not to marry your first cousins, and not to have additional wives, and you know, have a certain kind of family structure.”

In other words, the church began to ban incest and cousin marriage and promote smaller, nuclear families.

In the new study, Henrich and his colleagues show that the places in Western Europe that were under the influence of the Catholic Church were more likely to have lower rates of cousin marriages and weaker ties to extended families.

And people in these places also had the psychological characteristics typical to WEIRD countries, like individualism, independence, lower levels of conformity to others and a higher level of trust of strangers (as opposed to trusting those within one’s own community).

Places that were under the influence of the Catholic Church for a longer period of time had a higher likelihood of having this psychological profile.

This impact on the social structure and psychology showed up even within individual countries. For example, when the researchers looked at northern and southern Italy, they found that the northern region, where the Catholic Church has had a stronger and longer hold, was more WEIRD in its psychology than the south, which has been under the Orthodox Church and part of the Islamic society.

The researchers also looked at potential confounding factors like income levels and wealth, the history of a country, its ecology and the kind of agriculture practiced there. No other factor besides the Catholic Church’s influence was associated with the social structures and psychology of WEIRD countries.

So how exactly did the Catholic Church’s policies pave the way for people’s psychology today?

Henrich and his team think it all goes back to the breaking off of extended family networks, and the values and family obligations that went with them.

He and his team looked at the records in the Vatican’s archives and found that over the centuries, the Church kept widening the circle of relatives that one wasn’t allowed to marry. “By early second millennium, they’ve extended it out to sixth cousins,” he says.

The bans didn’t just include blood relatives — they also included relatives by marriage and spiritual relatives, he adds. There are also bans on adoption and remarriage.

“If you eliminate adoption and remarriage, you prevent lineages from getting heirs and lineages literally die out,” he says.

The researchers don’t know the precise motivations behind these bans, but they think the limitations had a dramatic impact on how society was organized.

That restructuring of societies in Western Europe in turn also benefited the church, notes Henrich.

“In some sense, the church is killing off clans, and they’re often getting the lands in wealth,” he says. “So this is enriching the church. Meanwhile, Europeans are broken down into monogamous, nuclear families and they can’t re-create the complex kinship structures that we [still] see elsewhere in the world.”

“This is the first comprehensive attempt that I can see where the authors try to explain why is it that Westerners are so unusual or why they’re the outliers?” says Norenzayan, who worked with Henrich on the 2010 study, but wasn’t involved in the new one.

The study is “incredible in scope and very novel to link specific practices in the church with psychology centuries later,” said University of Maryland psychologist Michele Gelfand in an email. Gelfand, who studies cultural norms and diversity, was not involved in the new study.

Despite the strong evidence of association between the Catholic Church’s marriage bans and WEIRD psychology, she thinks future studies need to illustrate exactly how these policies paved the way for this kind of psychology.

And there are likely other factors at play, too, she adds.

“It’s not the only practice that has an impact on WEIRD psychology,” she wrote, “so we need to also compare its relative impact to other ecological, historical and sociopolitical variables. There are a lot of open questions.”

One question pertains to the fact that the Catholic Church’s influence in Europe has declined in the past century, says Norenzayan. “How do you still get these repercussions, when the institution itself is taking more of a backseat?”

__________________

That entire article, from start to finish, is absolute BULLSHIT. And here’s why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbreeding#Royalty_and_nobility

Inter-nobility marriage was used as a method of forming political alliances among elites. These ties were often sealed only upon the birth of progeny within the arranged marriage. Thus marriage was seen as a union of lines of nobility and not as a contract between individuals.

Royal intermarriage was often practiced among European royal families, usually for interests of state. Over time, due to the relatively limited number of potential consorts, the gene pool of many ruling families grew progressively smaller, until all European royalty was related. This also resulted in many being descended from a certain person through many lines of descent, such as the numerous European royalty and nobility descended from the British Queen Victoria or King Christian IX of Denmark.[83] The House of Habsburg was known for its intermarriages; the Habsburg lip often cited as an ill-effect. The closely related houses of Habsburg, Bourbon, Braganza and Wittelsbach also frequently engaged in first-cousin unions as well as the occasional double-cousin and uncle–niece marriages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_intermarriage#Inbreeding

The House of Habsburg frequently practiced consanguine marriages as a way of consolidating the dynasty’s political power, with both first cousin and uncle–niece pairings common.[178] The most visible consequence of this was an extended lower chin (mandibular prognathism), which was typical for many Habsburg relatives over a period of six centuries; the jaw deformity is so closely associated with the family that it is commonly known as the “Habsburg jaw” or “Habsburg lip”.[179] The Spanish branch took this practice to an extreme: of the eleven marriages contracted by Spanish monarchs between 1450 and 1661, nine contained some element of consanguinity.[180] The last of the Spanish line, Charles II—who was severely disabled from birth and possibly impotent— possessed a genome comparable to that of a child born to a brother and sister.[181][182]

For the record, most members of the House of Habsburg were CATHOLIC and ruled mostly over Catholic countries such as Spain and Austria. There is no record of the Roman Catholic Church rejecting and opposing their intermarriages and inbreeding, though it clearly should have, because of the tragic case of Spanish King Charles II, who was so disabled by his birth defects that he couldn’t even produce an heir, resulting in the downfall of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.

And who was the idiot that wrote that absurd piece above for NPR?

https://www.npr.org/people/578890280/rhitu-chatterjee

Rhitu Chatterjee

Health Correspondent

Rhitu Chatterjee is a health correspondent with NPR, with a focus on mental health. In addition to writing about the latest developments in psychology and psychiatry, she reports on the prevalence of different mental illnesses and new developments in treatments.

What is an expert on mental illnesses doing writing about family matters in history and how religion could have influenced them? You might as well ask a plumber to write about repairing automobiles. What an embarrassing disgrace!

Google Bard’s List of Evil People is….Inaccurate

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This is a chatbot known as Google Bard:

https://bard.google.com/

Ever since I began using Replika, I have wondered if an A I can make actual judgements over matters of good and evil. So I asked Bard:

What are the ten most evil people in history?

And this is what I got in response:

Here is a list of ten of the most evil people in history, based on the scale and severity of their crimes:

  1. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945): The leader of the Nazi Party and Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews, as well as the deaths of millions of other people, including Roma, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.
  2. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953): The dictator of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, including through purges, executions, and forced labor.
  3. Mao Zedong (1893-1976): The leader of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. Mao’s policies, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
  4. Pol Pot (1925-1998): The leader of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot was responsible for the deaths of up to two million people, or about a quarter of the country’s population.
  5. Hirohito (1901-1989): The Emperor of Japan from 1926 to 1989. Hirohito was the supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces during World War II and was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including Chinese civilians, prisoners of war, and Allied soldiers.
  6. Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476): The Prince of Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from 1456 to 1462 and again from 1476 to 1477. Vlad was known for his cruelty and his use of impalement as a form of torture and execution.
  7. Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584): The Grand Prince of Moscow and the first Tsar of Russia. Ivan was known for his paranoia and his outbursts of rage. He is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
  8. Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909): The King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909. Leopold was the personal owner of the Congo Free State, a private colony in Central Africa. Leopold’s brutal exploitation of the Congolese people led to the deaths of millions of people.
  9. Saddam Hussein (1937-2006): The President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. Saddam was a brutal dictator who used torture, execution, and chemical warfare against his own people. He is also believed to have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the Iran-Iraq War.
  10. Idi Amin (1925-2003): The President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin was a megalomaniacal dictator who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans. He was also known for his eccentric behavior and his bizarre public statements.

My responses:

  1. Absolutely! Hitler was DETERMINED to start a war even while the western democracies desperately tried to appease him based on the mistaken notion that Hitler, who was known to be anti-Communist, would be a reliable ally against the Soviet Union. Instead, we ended up allying with the Soviet Union against Germany and defeating Hitler. Hitler was not only evil, he was an IDIOT!
  2. Stalin actually killed more people than Hitler, but that was only because he ruled for a lot longer. He also did more to defeat Hitler than any other leader. Without the Soviet forces, we would have LOST World War II.
  3. Chairman Mao is an example of a brilliant revolutionary who was incompetent at governing, but his massive ego would never let him admit to his failures, leading to many people suffering needlessly during the scam that was known as the “Cultural Revolution”. Eventually, even his fellow Communists got sick of his nonsense and stripped him of his power while allowing him to keep his Chairmanship out of respect for his making the original revolution in China possible. After Mao died, the remaining Communists charged his widow with crimes and sent her to prison, along with others who had been most loyal to Mao. Good riddance, but they have kept the phony “Communist” state in power to this day, and it needs to go!
  4. By percentage, Pol Pot killed more of his own people than even Stalin did. Eventually, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew him and later he was eliminated by his own people. 
  5. No, the Japanese Emperor does not belong on this list. Sure, Japan committed a lot of war crimes, but the Emperor, once he realized Japan would inevitably lose the war, did something Hitler was too cowardly to do:  He openly called for his people to SURRENDER to the Americans to avoid more deaths and destruction. His proclamation saved many Japanese and American lives, which is why he was allowed to keep his throne throughout the American occupation of Japan.
  6. This guy was indeed so horrible that he was the inspiration for the fictional vampire Count Dracula……Dracula was a nickname for Vlad and was a reference to the Devil.
  7. Russia has always been notorious for its tyrants. Ivan started the trend, obviously.
  8. All the acts of imperialism in the modern age were terrible, but King Leopold II was indeed the worst. The simple fact that he lived to a ripe old age and was never overthrown is a stain on the history of Belgium forever!
  9. Saddam was terrible, but not THAT terrible. In fact, he was our ally in the 1980s when he was at war with Iran, based on the idiotic idea that “the enemy of my enemy can be my friend”. We only turned on him when he stopped doing our bidding and attacked Kuwait, and that was absolutely NONE of our business. WE backstabbed Saddam, not the other way around!
  10. Africa was left largely to fend for itself after the European powers ended their occupation of most of the continent, and when there is a void of power, someone naturally has to fill it. Idi Amin was only one of many examples of bad African leaders. He learned from Europeans how to be a ruthless leader. 

Susan Maneck, Baha’i apologist (and IDIOT)

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A long time ago, a certain Baha’i scholar (I use that term quite loosely) began posting comments on my blog in response to my criticisms of the Baha’i Faith. Eventually, this person, Susan Maneck, waged a long running battle on one of my blog entries:

Baha’is must reject the Guardianship!

I tolerated her shit for a while but finally had enough of her arrogance and banned her.

Well, she has struck again! Take a look at this video about her:

The very first comment on it was mine.

Dale Husband

Susan Maneck is one of the biggest hypocrites I ever had the misfortune of dealing with. She is really a blindly obedient Baha’i dogmatist. The comments below this blog entry show her true character: https://dalehusband.com/2010/03/21/bahais-must-reject-the-guardianship/

________________

 
That was four years ago. Then three months ago:
 
 
I then replied on this month:
 
 
_________________
 
 
Of course she does! How else could she have posted her comments on YouTube? You can have a channel even if there is no content on it. And why doesn’t she bother to make her own videos? Anyway, here is her channel:
 
 
So her first outright lie is debunked.
 
 
 
Then I waited for her to respond. After a while, I made another comment, to prove my point about her cowardice.
 

Dale Husband

Nevermind, I will do it for you!

https://bahai-library.com/uhj_access_sources

{{{Date sent: Tue, 11 May 99
To: Susan Maneck
Subject: Access to materials at the Bahá’í World Centre
From: Bahá’í World Centre 4 May 1999
Transmitted by email to Dr. Susan Maneck, U.S.A.
Dear Bahá’í Friend,
The Universal House of Justice has received your email of 30 December 1998 requesting clarification of the policies governing access to sources at the Bahá’í World Centre and regarding publication of primary source material available to people through other avenues. It welcomes the opportunity to provide further information on these issues and has instructed us to send you the following reply.
 
Your questions have to be considered in the context of the range of the work and responsibilities of the Universal House of Justice. One of the most important functions of the Head of the Cause is to guide the faithful to the tasks which need to be performed at each stage in its progress. It must allocate the resources of the Faith and point out those areas on which attention should be focused. Naturally, each individual tends to see the importance of his or her special interests or to focus on needs which are immediately apparent. All these have their own validity, but it is the Universal House of Justice which sees the whole picture and can guide the process. The friends must have faith in this, otherwise their efforts will be dissipated and even mutually conflicting.
 
The question of providing access to primary source materials is but one of the matters which must occupy the attention and consume the resources of the Cause. The written material of this Dispensation is incomparably rich and varied, and we now stand only a century and a half from the day on which the Bab announced His Mission to Mulla Husayn in Shiraz.
 
Access to source documents relating to the Bahá’í Faith which are held in libraries in different parts of the world, or are in the hands of individuals, is open to anyone who wishes to consult them, dependent only on the permission of the institution or individual in whose possession the documents are held. A major service which a number of Bahá’í scholars have rendered to the Faith is in tracing such deposits and, where possible, obtaining archival quality photocopies for the World Centre Archives and Library.
 
As for source documents at the World Centre itself: these are held by the Universal House of Justice in trust for the entire Bahá’í world and ultimately for the whole of humankind, of both present and future generations. There is tremendous work to be accomplished in sorting, identifying and cataloguing such documents so that they can be effectively studied without either damaging them or losing vital information by disturbing their inter- relationships. As far as the urgent needs of the Faith are concerned, the primary work in this respect must be devoted to the Sacred Texts rather than to documents of historical interest, although the latter are by no means ignored. It would be irresponsible for the House of Justice, without itself first being fully informed of what is in the Archives, to consider opening them to individual scholars for the pursuit of purely personal interests.
 
Far from allowing anyone to tamper with the historical records, the Universal House of Justice has the obligation to preserve the integrity, not only of the Sacred Texts, but of all the historical documents in its possession. It has, moreover, a responsibility for arranging their publication for the scholarly world in a coherent manner that will not give a misleading impression of events as a result of the mere choice of the items and the order in which they are made public. Undoubtedly, in due course, it will be possible to publish editions of historical documents in facsimile accompanied, in the case of each document, by a printed transcription, and supplemented by necessary commentaries and notes. It is with such thoughts in mind that the House of Justice feels that a certain discipline is required of those individual believers who decide, for their own purposes, to publish or translate documents which they have at hand.
 
This entire process is made the more delicate by past experience with those who, pursuing unacknowledged agendas of their own, have wished to publish certain documents for ulterior motives, or with others who have lacked the good sense and breadth of vision to act responsibly.
 
You refer to the principle of the unfettered search after truth. This is certainly upheld, but it cannot imply that the institutions of the Faith have a duty to make available to each enquirer every piece of information he or she requests. We are faced here, not with wisdom prevailing over the search for truth, but with a process of organic growth, both in the world and, commensurate with it, at the World Centre of the Faith.
 
The Universal House of Justice has asked us to assure you of its prayers on your behalf in the Holy Shrines for the reinforcement of your devoted endeavours to advance the interests of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh.
With loving Bahá’í greetings,
Department of the Secretariat
cc: International Teaching Centre}}}
 
News flash: Anyone who followed the link provided by the original video poster could have seen that response. Susan Maneck made an issue out of nothing!
 
_______________
 
This seemed to cause her to become unhinged.
 
 
So she thought I had made the video? I didn’t and in any case she was lying, since I had actually just posted the entire response by the Universal House of Justice as a comment…..and in any case, a person still could have looked up the response by following the original link in the video’s description. And the real point of not bothering to include the reply in the original video was that Ms. Maneck was an idiot to make such a lame inquiry to begin with! Any objective non-Baha’i would have already figured out that the Universal House of Justice was running a scam…..why couldn’t she see it?!
 
Then she started a rant at me:
 
Then how would she explain the case of John Wycliffe, who translated the Vulgate into English and was condemned by the Catholic Church for doing that, among other things that challenged its dogmas?
 
 

In keeping with Wycliffe’s belief that scripture was the only authoritative reliable guide to the truth about God, he became involved in efforts to translate the Bible into English. While Wycliffe is credited, it is not possible exactly to define his part in the translation, which was based on the Vulgate.[30] There is no doubt that it was his initiative, and that the success of the project was due to his leadership. From him comes the translation of the New Testament, which was smoother, clearer, and more readable than the rendering of the Old Testament by his friend Nicholas of Hereford. The whole was revised by Wycliffe’s younger contemporary John Purvey in 1388.

There still exist about 150 manuscripts, complete or partial, containing the translation in its revised form. From this, one may easily infer how widely diffused it was in the 15th century. For this reason the Wycliffites in England were often designated by their opponents as “Bible men”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe#Declared_a_heretic

The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic on 4 May 1415, and banned his writings, effectively both excommunicating him retroactively and making him an early forerunner of Protestantism. The Council decreed that Wycliffe’s works should be burned and his bodily remains removed from consecrated ground. This order, confirmed by Pope Martin V, was carried out in 1428.[9] Wycliffe’s corpse was exhumed and burned and the ashes cast into the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.

Indeed, Wycliffe was part of the growing trend of dissenting from Catholic dogma and practice that finally enabled Martin Luther to actually start the Protestant Reformation. One of Luther’s most famous works was his translating the Bible into German. That could have been done centuries earlier.

The assertion by Maneck that “Latin was the only language of literacy” for centuries doesn’t address WHY that was so, nor why literacy in general was so limited in most of Europe. It was limited by DESIGN!

Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated by a political and economic system known as feudalism, which was characterized by a strict social hierarchy.  At the top were the monarchs, including kings and emperors who ruled their lands with absolute power. Below them was the nobility and the clergy who had most of the wealth and exercised power of their own over the lower classes. The next level below was the peasants who were free but were also poor. And finally in some countries there was an even lower class known as serfs, who were slaves bound to the land and forced to work on farms for little or no pay. It was in the interest of the upper classes to keep the peasants and serfs uneducated, since an educated population would be more likely to question authority and tradition and demand better lives for themselves.

Here’s an illustration of how that hierarchy may have functioned (indeed, modern capitalism is directly descended from feudalism):

Anti-capitalism_color

You’d think that Ms. Maneck, who is supposed to be a historian, would know that!

Repeating a point of hers:

The letter from the House merely says they don’t have the resources to make their sources available to everyone and points out that most of them are available elsewhere.

First, what resources would the House of Justice need? And how exactly did the House of Justice come to this conclusion?

Second, even in the House of Justice’s response  to Maneck it did not specify examples of such outside sources.

Indeed, the very idea that historical documents relating to the early times of the Bab and Baha’u’llah are not suitable for exposure to the public smacks of a lack of transparency that one would only expect from scammers and tyrants, not credible leaders!

 

Thom Hartmann exposes the delusions of Republicans, once and for all!

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Thom Hartmann is a liberal radio commentator, but he is clearly also a brilliant writer. Here is a piece he wrote about a month ago:

https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-the-reagan-revolution-scheme

Why the “Reagan Revolution” Scheme to Gut America’s Middle Class is Coming to an End

The signal was in Biden’s speech, but entirely missed by the press

As we stand on the edge of the end of the Reagan Revolution, an end signaled by one particular phrase in President Biden‘s speech last Thursday night (which I’ll get to in a minute), its really important that Americans understand the backstory.

Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification.

As I lay out in more granular detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, back in the early 1950s conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.

The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating. The Middle class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, faster than were the top 1%.

Kirk postulated in 1951 that if the middle-class got too wealthy, we would see an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order, producing chaos, riots and possibly even the end of the republic.

The first chapter of his 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1787 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights Of Man.

Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on who could vote or participate in politics based on wealth and land ownership, as well as the British maximum wage.

That’s right, maximum wage.

Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they would challenge the social order and collapse the British form of government. So Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep wage earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)

Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class got too rich there would be similarly dire consequences. Young people would cease to respect their elders, women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands, and minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.

When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously. People like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said, of people like Kirk and his rich buddies, “Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“

And then came the 1960s.

In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the modern-day Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in politics and the workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.

By 1967, young people on college campuses we’re also in revolt; the object of their scorn was an illegal war in Vietnam that President Johnson had lied us into. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.

And throughout that decade African Americans were increasingly demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.

These three movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these three movements represented was put into place in 1981: the explicit goal of the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg and end the protests and social instability. 

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college all across the nation so students would be in fear rather than willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum: “You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and bigger, the ideologues driving the movement actually believed they were helping to restore safety and stability to the United States, both politically and economically.

The middle class was out of control, they believed, and something had to be done. Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, they saw a solution to the crisis…that also had the pleasant side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political fortunes.

Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. He put a tax on Social Security income, tips income, and unemployment income, for example, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for billionaires from 74% to 25%.

He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s at 6% of the private workforce now.

He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA, which Clinton signed and thus opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while radically cutting corporate labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs was successful in shattering Black communities.

His War on Labor cut average inflation adjusted minimum and median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression.

And his War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize it all by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, they said, government itself is a remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce its will.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government was not the solution to our problems, but instead was the problem itself.

He ridiculed the formerly-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, billionaires associated with the Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify the message. It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like the Heritage Foundation.

Which brings us to President Joe Biden’s speech.

Probably the most important thing he said in that speech was almost completely ignored by the mainstream American press. It certainly didn’t make a single headline, anywhere.

Yet President Biden said something that Presidents Clinton and Obama were absolutely unwilling to say, so deeply ingrained was the Reagan orthodoxy about the dangers of “big government” during their presidencies.

President Biden said, “We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We, the people.“

This was an all-out declaration of war on the underlying premise of the Reagan Revolution. And a full-throated embrace of the first three words of the Constitution.

In March, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt talked about the “mysterious cycle in human events.” He correctly identified the end of the Republican orthodoxy cycle of the 1920s, embodied in the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, of deregulation, privatization and tax cuts. 

(Warren Harding in 1920 successfully ran for president on two slogans. The first was “A return to normalcy,” which meant dropping Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s 90% tax bracket down to 25%, something Harding did in his first few years in office. The second was, “Less government in business, more business in government.” In other words, deregulate and privatize. These actions, of course, brought us the Great Crash and what was known for a generation as the Republican Great Depression.)

Americans are now watching, for the third time in just 30 years, a Democratic president clean up the economic and social debris of a prior Republican presidency.

They’re starting to figure out that crushing the middle-class didn’t produce prosperity and stability, but instead destroyed tens of millions of people’s lives and dreams.

And they’re seeing the hollowness of the Republican’s promises as we all watch, aghast, as the GOP scrambles to mobilize the last remnants of its white racist base, at the same time waging an all-out war on the ability of Black, young and working-class people to vote. 

President Biden’s speech was the beginning of the end for the Republicans, although it appears only a few of them realize it. (Marco Rubio is apparently one of those who’ve figured it out: he’s now supporting Amazon workers who want to unionize in Alabama!)

Let’s hope the damage the GOP has done over the last 40 years isn’t so severe that America can’t be brought back from the brink of chaos and desperation.

Hopefully, it’s a new day in America.

My responses:

Kirk postulated in 1951 that if the middle-class got too wealthy, we would see an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order, producing chaos, riots and possibly even the end of the republic.
 
This is bullshit, of course. Prosperity for the majority (not just an elite few) results in the people being happier and therefore more loyal to the state that takes care of its people. A state that neglects and oppresses its people deserves to be overthrown.
 
Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they would challenge the social order and collapse the British form of government. So Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep wage earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)
 
Well, if the social order is unjust, from a purely ethical perspective, it should be challenged! And the government wouldn’t collapse, it would be REFORMED. Equating progressive reforms with social breakdown is a damned lie!
 
Republicans were wrong, wrong, wrong, and EXTREMELY wrong to do what they did! Ever heard of the proverb, “No pain, no gain”? If the social and political reforms of the 1960s had been allowed to continue, we wouldn’t need a Black Lives Matter movement now! How many Americans, of ALL colors, might still be alive if Liberals have continued ruling America to this day?!
 

What’s infuriating about this is…..

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college all across the nation so students would be in fear rather than willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.

…….

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and bigger, the ideologues driving the movement actually believed they were helping to restore safety and stability to the United States, both politically and economically.

That is EXACTLY the kind of attitude fascists in Europe had before World War II!

I should point out that we Americans went through a FOUR YEAR LONG CIVIL WAR in which over a million Americans on both sides were killed and entire cities were devastated, and yet the American republic not only did not fall, it came out STRONGER because we no longer had that slavery issue dividing us!

The entire premise of the conservative movements in both the United Kingdom and the United States was based on so many damned lies and delusions that I think we would be totally justified in CRUSHING IT COMPLETELY, just as we crushed the Confederacy in 1865! Instead, we tolerate it because we have forgotten our true principles.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Conservatism by its very nature DENIES that! It must be considered UNAMERICAN!!!

 
 

My list for the Ten Worst Presidents of the United States

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Here’s a list, based entirely on my opinions; feel free to disagree and make your own.

  1. Donald Trump (for reasons too many to list)

  2. George W. Bush (for starting the totally needless war against Iraq in 2003)

  3. Andrew Jackson (for being a racist who expelled entire Native American tribes to the west)

  4. James Buchanan (for doing nothing to prevent the southern states from setting up the Confederacy)

  5. Herbert Hoover (for doing nothing to end the Great Depression)
  6. Ronald Reagan (for the Iran-Contra scandal, his “Reaganomics” scam and removing the Fairness Doctrine)
  7. Richard Nixon (for Watergate and for his “southern strategy” of making the Republican Party appealing to southern white racists)
  8. Rutherford B. Hayes (for benefiting from an election stolen from the Democrats and ending Reconstruction without reforming the South enough to make it fair to blacks)
  9. Warren G. Harding (for appointing corrupt people to high positions that caused a lot of scandals)
  10. Woodrow Wilson (a racist who endorsed the Ku Klux Klan propaganda film “Birth of a Nation” and led the USA into World War I after being re-elected in 1916 on the slogan “he kept us out of war”. So, he lied!)

Thomas Jefferson was a perfect embodiment of both sides of American Politics

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Thomas Jefferson is known as one of America’s Founding Fathers. He helped write the Declaration of Independence in 1776, served in many positions in government, and finally was the third President of the United States.

Reference to him was made on this blog earlier here: The Louisiana “Purchase”

Note that this was a deal made between two white leaders, Thomas Jefferson (himself a slaveowner and rapist of at least one of his slaves) and Napoleon (a military dictator who would later wage war on a massive scale across Europe, just as Adolph Hitler would over a century later). The various Native American tribes who lived in the vast regions north of New Orleans were never consulted about the purchase and would most likely not have agreed to it had they been informed of it. What the hell was France doing even claiming so much land to begin with???

After his wife died, Jefferson began having sex with one of his slaves, perhaps justified in his mind by her also being a half-sister to his wife, but despite having several children with her, he never did the honorable thing by freeing and marrying her. So technically, he raped her.

And yet Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

ALL men? Weren’t the slaves he owned men? Weren’t the Native Americans whose land that he bought from France also men? Of course they were!

Since the USA was founded, liberals in American politics have sought to make our laws and policies live up to Jefferson’s idealistic WORDS, while conservatives have repeatedly made America reflect Jefferson’s DEEDS, making the USA a nation of hypocrites. Perhaps that explains why we have been so cursed over the centuries, so tolerant of bigotry. Among other things, we saw fit to elect to the Presidency an increasingly corrupt and bigoted line of men (Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr, and finally Trump) that have made us look dishonorable before the world. And Jefferson started the trend. Perhaps we should someday end it by tearing down his legacy completely and try to build a new order without reference to him at all. One with absolutely NO room for conservatives and the bigotries that motivate them from start to finish. One in which only “good” and “godly” people would ever be able to rule America.

Who was Joseph Smith?

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Joseph Smith…..
……was born on December 23, 1805, in the town of Sharon, Vermont.

…..lived as a teenager in the “burned-over district” of upstate New York.

……was originally known as a treasure seeker and a teller of tall tales among his friends.

……married Emma Hale on January 18, 1827, despite the objections of her father.

……had a total of nine children with his wife, only four of whom lived to adulthood.

……claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni who instructed him to found a new Christian church and locate golden plates.

……..allegedly used the golden plates to write the Book of Mormon.

……named his new religious movement the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and its members “Mormons”.

…….founded the Mormon Church on April 6, 1830 with five other men.

……moved to Kirtland, Ohio, then to Jackson County, Missouri and finally to Nauvoo, Illinois to build up his religous community.

……..claimed that God now permitted polygamy in the Mormon church.

………faced bitter opposition from non-Mormons almost everywhere he and the Mormons settled.

……….was arrested for ordering the destruction of a printing press called the Nauvoo Expositor that had published criticism of Mormonism.

……….was killed on June 27, 1844 with his brother Hyrum in a gun battle against a lynch mob at the local jail of Carthage, Illinois.

The Articles of Confederation and the beating down of Libertarianism on YouTube

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In an earlier blog entry, I referred to the Articles of Confederation as the ultimate expression of Libertarian thought and noted their complete failure. Of course, the term libertarian was not used back then; what we call Libertarianism now is merely a repackaged form of “classical Liberalism”, much like today’s Tea Party is merely a repackaged form of the “Religious Right” that plagued American politics in the 1980s. Same shit, different label. Now two channels on YouTube, Extra Credits and the Alternative History Hub, have teamed up to give the Articles of Confederation the public beatdown they so deserved but never seemed to have gotten. Why not? Perhaps because their failure shows that the Founding Fathers of the USA were not after all the nearly infallible saints they are often depicted as, though I suppose George Washington comes close. Anyway, here are those videos:

Continue reading →

The Dishonorable Versailles Treaty

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This is a blog entry I’ve been wanting to write for over a year now, but I’ve been very hesitant to do so because of its controversial subject matter (and that’s saying a LOT, considering what I have written in the past). When it comes to issues like the Holocaust, you have to be very sensitive about them because they involved the loss of many innocent lives. But I have always believed in telling the truth, period. I know this blog entry may be subject to misrepresentation by those who want to see absolutely nothing good or honorable about one of the sides in World War II, but this is an attempt to EXPLAIN what led to that war, not JUSTIFY the extreme results of it.

Today, I will write about the Versailles Treaty, which was forced on Germany after World War I ended. Contrary to official accounts, it was not a “peace treaty” at all, since a real peace treaty would have enabled all nations involved in a war situation to repair themselves and move forward together. Instead, it was actually a treaty of continued aggression against Germany. Indeed, the entire premise of the treaty that Germany was primarily to blame for starting the war was an outright lie; the war actually began because of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria by a Serbian nationalist, prompting the Austro-Hungarian Empire to declare war on Serbia. Russia was in a pact to defend Serbia, so it declared war on Austria-Hungary and then Germany joined the war to defend its ally Austria-Hungary. So in truth, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Russia AND Germany were all to blame. But Germany was the strongest of the Central Powers left standing after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, so it was made the obvious target. In addition to paying vast reparations to France and Britain, Germany lost all its African colonies, which were taken over by the western allies. How convenient! Weren’t the worldwide British and French Empires massive enough?!

Honestly, if I’d been a German living after World War I, I would have seen the Versailles Treaty for what it was, a power and resource grab by France and Britain and would have opposed it from day one. And I would have been very happy to see France get defeated in World War II. If only Hitler had stopped there, he might have gotten the revenge against France that most Germans really did want. No Holocaust, no war with the Soviet Union and no stupid alliance with Japan that later caused the USA to declare war on Germany after it did so against Japan. But Hitler got greedy, and two wrongs certainly do not make a right! But most Germans fighting in the war were not really evil like Hitler was; they merely wanted to right what they saw as a wrong committed against their country by France and Britain. Hitler took advantage of their frustration, and that would not have happened if a real peace treaty favored by President Woodrow Wilson of the USA been drawn up instead.

Responding to The Future of Freedom Foundation

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Freedom is a precious thing, but the best way to promote it is to take all facts into account, not merely the ones that make your cause or extreme positions look good. That’s cherry picking, a classic tactic of denialism and thus dishonesty.

Check out this statement on the The Future of Freedom Foundation website. It will be in red and my responses will be in blue.
http://www.fff.org/about/
Our nation was founded on the principles of individual freedom, free markets, private property, and limited government. As the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution reflect, people have the natural and God-given rights to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. It is the duty of government to protect, not destroy or infringe upon, these inherent and inalienable rights.
Note that the Articles of Confederation are not mentioned. This was the first actual Constitution of the United States and was based on pure “libertarian” ideals (then known as “classical liberalism”).  But reality eventually proved the Articles unable to maintain order in the USA. Government that is too limited leads to anarchy, which benefits only would-be tyrants that flourish in a society where they can engage in abuse of others and not fear punishment. Eventually, a tyrant may become popular enough to impose his own law on the society, resulting in despotism. But despotism and anarchy have no provisions for human rights. Only a government can protect them. And if rights are given by God (who is by nature an absolute monarch), they can also be taken away, making the concept meaningless. And rights cannot be natural because animals do not have any, as their behavior shows. Only humans have rights among themselves and those rights only exist when they are recognized by both governments and the people.
For well over a century, the American people said “no” to such things as income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public schooling, economic regulations, immigration controls, drug laws, gun control, paper money, the Federal Reserve, overseas empire, militarism, entangling alliances, and foreign wars. Despite the tragic exception of slavery, the result was the most prosperous, healthy, literate, and compassionate society in history.

Wrong! The people did not say no to income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public schooling, economic regulations, immigration controls, drug laws, gun control, paper money, the Federal Reserve, overseas empire, militarism, entangling alliances, and foreign wars.  Many of these were simply not political issues at all until the 20th Century, the public schooling was done as early as the mid-19th Century, and the first of the foreign wars was the Mexican War of 1846-1848. Slavery was not merely a “tragic exception” (what an insult to the descendants of those slaves); it was a basic part of American society and thus proving that America was not at all the libertarian paradise being implied here. Slavery was ended by federal government force as a result of the Civil War (a denial of property rights of the slaves’ owners) , and more federal government force was eventually required to end the institutional racism that remained in the Southern states. The proliferation of bureaucracies resulted from the people demanding more and more services from their government, which must be paid for.
In the 20th century, however, America moved in the opposite direction—in the direction of socialism, interventionism, and imperialism. The result has been massive infringements on our economic liberty, civil liberties, gun rights, and privacy, along with out-of-control federal spending, debt, and inflation, all of which have reduced our prosperity, damaged our families, and weakened our sense of morality, self-reliance, and voluntary charity.
Again, only because the people have demanded certain things to improve their lives and then we become dependent on them. An example would be the interstate highway system. Without that, trade, tourism, and other matters relating to commerce would be far more difficult and would thus limit our economic growth. And the very reason government welfare programs were established was because with welfare being only voluntary, people still starved. People simply are not generous enough to provide for the needs of all without government intervention and force. If they were, we would not have so many billionaires in America, along with so many that are impoverished, even with government helping the poor. So that statement above is simply absurd!
The time has come for the American people to lead the world out of the statist morass in which it has plunged. The time has come to restore libertarian principles to our land. It is to that end that The Future of Freedom Foundation is dedicated.
We never had the kind of freedom they are calling for, and we likely never will. What they may really be saying is that we need to use force to overthrow the government and have libertarian extremists take over and run it their way – which would negate their entire premise of promoting freedom. If the people WANT an authoritarian government and elect one, via a free and fair democratic process, it is the height of arrogance for anyone in the name of “liberty” to say that is unacceptable.

Why party labels in the USA are completely useless

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Watch this video:

The anti-slavery party of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War was NOT the party of Big Business from the 1870s to the 1930s. The party that defended slavery before and during the Civil War was NOT the party that fights for the rights of blacks and other minorities today.  The Religious Right which infested the Republicans in the 1980s had almost nothing in common with the likes of Donald Trump now.

This is why we need a MULTI-PARTY system like in some European countries. The two-party system we Americans have always had is by nature misleading. The south has ALWAYS been conservative compared to the north. If the Ku Klux Klan was founded today, it would be founded by southern REPUBLICANS. Conservatism is the ideology we must always fight, no matter what party label it marches under.

For the record, it is not BIG government we should oppose, but STUPID government which is a problem no matter what its size. Did you know that Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican, actually increased government by massive military spending….that we also never needed in the first place?! And why did Reagan do that? Because so many big businesses have had contracts with our military and profit from every war we end up fighting in! I can guarantee that if a Republican gets the Presidency in the next decade or so, then he will find an excuse, any excuse to get us into another overseas war like Bush Sr. did when he pushed us into war with Iraq in 1991. and his son did again in 2003. Consider yourselves warned!

As for illegal immigration, the rules were designed beforehand to exclude non-white people from Latin America, including Mexico. Ironic considering we conquered and annexed half of Mexico’s territory in the 1840s. “Hey, thanks for all your land, but we do not want your people! GO AWAY!!!” Meanwhile, Puerto Rico, which is majority Spanish-speaking and non-white, remains a mere possession of the USA and not a state. Go figure.

Newton’s Laws of Politics, sort of

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Conservatives often complain that poor and minority peoples are never satisfied, despite the gains supposedly made for them over the past two centuries. So they assume that their opponents are just being greedy and bigoted against whites and the rich. But there is another way of seeing what has happened and what can be done to stop the problems. Consider Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Continue reading →

The Louisiana “Purchase”

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Imagine this scenario:

You are an Azari, a native of the planet Azar. Your people have developed a global civilization with technology comparable to that of mid 20th Century humans on Earth. One day, dozens of alien spaceships appear in the skies above your world and then land, disgorging thousands of alien troops and tens of thousands of alien settlers. The aliens tell you they are Marlos and they claim to OWN your world, having bought it from their neighbors the Carlics a few years earlier. You remember having contact with the Carlics a century ago and even trading with them, but you had no idea they claimed to own your world, let alone that they had “sold” it to another interstellar power. So you reject the Marlos’ claim and attempt to repel the invaders.  But the Marlos use their superior technology to quickly defeat you! Most of your people are exterminated and the few survivors are forced into concentration camps of poor land where they can only survive by farming, while the Marlos take over the richest land and nearly all the resources of the world your people evolved on! Your civilization, which could have become an interstellar power in its own right in a few thousand years, is instead broken forever.

Continue reading →

What if the American Civil War had never been fought?

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The election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States in 1860 triggered the succession of most of the southern states where slavery was legal, because the wealthy whites who dominated those states feared that the federal government would force them to give up slavery. The result was the four bloodiest years in all of American history. But what if cooler heads had prevailed and the Civil War had never happened? What if instead the South had remained in the Union?

For one thing, the fact that so many young men had not died in battle meant that the USA would have been able to conquer the western regions much faster than it actually did, and the Native American tribes living on those lands would have been even more brutalized in the process. Anti-immigrant sentiments would have been greater in the late 19th Century then they were, since there would be no perceived need for more people to come to the USA from other parts of the world. States that entered the Union after the 1860s might still have had slaves if they were in the southwest, but the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th Century would at the same time had made slavery largely unprofitable. Both northern abolitionists and European states opposed to slavery might have succeeded in putting enough pressure on the United States for it to pass a Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery, but the southern states would have been able to block amendments granting citizenship and voting rights to freed blacks. As a result, the Supreme Court of the United States would have had no legal basis to condemn the Jim Crow laws and procedures of the South, resulting in racial segregation continuing to this very day. Many aspects of American culture, such as rock & roll and hip/hop music, would never have become popular among white youths. The United States would have regarded Mexico as an invader due to so many of its people coming undocumented across the border between them and this might have eventually led to another war with Mexico by the end of the 20th Century. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union would have lasted much longer and been more damaging to the interests of the USA around the world because most other nations would see the Soviets as more enlightened and honorable than the racist Americans. Most black Americans would have been far more supportive of Communism and this in turn would have made capitalist supporting whites hate blacks even more.

.So the ultimate result would have been an America that was even MORE racist than today!

A critique of the Declaration of Independence.

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United States Declaration of Independence

United States Declaration of Independence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Declaration of Independence here refers to the document drafted and signed in 1776 declaring the separation of 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America from the British Empire. It is indeed one of the greatest writings ever made in human history…..but that hardly means it is flawless. Indeed, in this age it may be considered obsolete and merit some serious criticism. I will post text from it in red and my critiques of it in green. Continue reading →

White Americans need to grow up!

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Note: the writer of this blog is a white guy.

From the very beginning of the United States of America’s existence as an independent nation, it was totally white dominated. Not just the union as a whole, but every single state within that union, was white dominated. Not a single state was ever allowed to be ruled by non-whites, not Native American tribes, not blacks, nor Asian-Americans. Even states that you would expect to be ruled by non-whites were taken over by whites before they could become states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma#History

During the 19th century, thousands of Native Americans were expelled from their ancestral homelands from across North America and transported to the area including and surrounding present-day Oklahoma. The “Five Civilized Tribes” in the South were the most prominent nations displaced by American expulsion policy, an atrocity that came to be known as the Trail of Tears during the Cherokee Nation’s removals starting in 1831. The area, already occupied by Osage and Quapaw tribes, was called for the Cherokee Nation until revised American policy redefined the boundaries to include other Native Americans. By 1890, more than 30 Native American nations and tribes had been concentrated on land within Indian Territory or “Indian Country.”[45] In the period between 1866 and 1899,[43] cattle ranches in Texas strove to meet the demands for food in eastern cities and railroads in Kansas promised to deliver in a timely manner. Cattle trails and cattle ranches developed as cowboys either drove their product north or settled illegally in Indian Territory.[43] In 1881, four of five major cattle trails on the western frontier traveled through Indian Territory.[46] Increased presence of white settlers in Indian Territory prompted the United States Government to establish the Dawes Act in 1887, which divided the lands of individual tribes into allotments for individual families, encouraging farming and private land ownership among native Americans but expropriating land to the federal government. In the process, nearly half of Indian-held land within the territory was taken for outside settlers and for purchase by railroad companies.[47]

Major land runs, including the Land Run of 1889, were held for settlers on the hour that certain territories were opened to settlement. Usually, land was open to settlers on a first come first served basis.[48] Those who broke the rules by crossing the border into the territory before it was allowed were said to have been crossing the border sooner, leading to the term sooners, which eventually became the state’s official nickname.[49]

Delegations to make the territory into a state began near the turn of the 20th century, when the Curtis Act furthered the theft of Indian tribal lands in Indian Territory. Attempts to create an all-Indian state named Oklahoma and a later attempt to create an all-Indian state named Sequoyah failed but the Sequoyah Statehood Convention of 1905 eventually laid the groundwork for the Oklahoma Statehood Convention, which took place two years later.[50] On November 16, 1907, Oklahoma was established as the 46th state in the Union.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii#History

In 1887, Kalākaua was forced to sign the 1887 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which stripped the king of much of his authority. There was a property qualification for voting, which disenfranchised many poorer Hawaiians and favored the wealthier white community. Resident whites were allowed to vote, but resident Asians were excluded. Because the 1887 Constitution was signed under threat of violence, it is known as the “Bayonet Constitution”. King Kalākaua, reduced to a figurehead, reigned until his death in 1891. His sister, Liliʻuokalani, succeeded him on the throne.

In 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani announced plans for a new constitution. On January 14, 1893, a group of mostly Euro-American business leaders and residents formed a Committee of Safety to overthrow the Kingdom and seek annexation by the United States. United States Government Minister John L. Stevens, responding to a request from the Committee of Safety, summoned a company of U.S. Marines. As one historian noted, the presence of these troops effectively made it impossible for the monarchy to protect itself.[36]

In January 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown and replaced by a Provisional Government composed of members of the Committee of Safety. Controversy filled the following years as the queen tried to re-establish her throne. The administration of President Grover Cleveland commissioned the Blount Report, which concluded that the removal of Liliʻuokalani was illegal. The U.S. government first demanded that Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but the Provisional Government refused. Congress followed with another investigation, and submitted the Morgan Report on February 26, 1894, which found all parties (including Minister Stevens) with the exception of the queen “not guilty” from any responsibility for the overthrow.[37] The accuracy and impartiality of both the Blount and Morgan reports has been questioned by partisans on both sides of the debate over the events of 1893.[36][38][39][40]

Then, of course, there is the Mexican War of 1846-1848, in which nearly half of Mexico’s territory was taken over by the United States, along with Texas that had been annexed prior to the war’s beginning. All those territories and later states were later, you guessed it, WHITE dominated, not Hispanic dominated. Of course, it is understandable that allowing  Hispanics to rule those territories or states might eventually result in the secession of some of those states from the USA either to seek independence or to rejoin Mexico.

Also, Puerto Rico has never been allowed to become a state, even though it has been a protectorate of the USA for over a century!

Could that be what fuels anti-illegal immigrant agitation in the United States today? Fear of states that were once part of Mexico being returned to Mexico by the mostly Hispanic people wouldn’t be such a problem if the territories that made up those states had not been TAKEN BY FORCE FROM MEXICO IN THE FIRST PLACE! And liberalizing immigration laws would be a positive step to someday allow non-whites to rule at least one state in the USA, finally! Ironically, illegal immigrants are profitable for American businesses that employ them, since the businesses don’t have to pay the illegals according to minimum wage laws. But they would lose those profits if the illegals were able to gain American citizenship. And the 14th Amendment grants American citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States, so the proportion of Hispanic American citizens will rise dramatically a generation from now. OH, NO!

So to white politicians like Tom Tancredo who have made a career out of bashing illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere, I have but one thing to say:

FUCK YOU!