Tag 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. 

A Victory for Truth in Media

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Read this story:

https://apnews.com/article/onion-buys-infowars-alex-jones-6496f198d141c991087dcd937b3588e9

Satire publication The Onion buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at auction with Sandy Hook families’ backing

By  DAVE COLLINS
Updated 2:33 PM CST, November 14, 2024
 

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax.

The purchase turns over Jones’ company, which for decades has peddled in conspiracy and misinformation, to a humor website that plans to relaunch the Infowars platform in January as a parody. Within hours of the sale’s announcement Thursday, Infowars’ website was down and Jones was broadcasting from what he said was a new studio location.

“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers.

The Onion acquired the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive for an undisclosed sales price.

The satirical outlet — which carries the banner of “America’s Finest News Source” on its masthead — was founded in the 1980s and for decades has skewered politics and pop culture, including making Jones a frequent target of mocking articles. Mass shootings in the U.S., such as the Sandy Hook attack, are often followed by The Onion publishing slightly updated versions of one of its most well-known recurring pieces: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

“No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds,” The Onion said in a satirical post about the sale. “And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.”

On his live broadcast, Jones was angry and defiant, vowing to challenge the sale in court and calling it “a total attack on free speech.” He later announced his show was being shut down. Jones, who had told listeners for days that he had a new studio set up nearby, then resumed his broadcast from the new location, carrying them live on his accounts on X.

He claimed the takeover by The Onion was premature because the bankruptcy judge had not yet signed off on the winning bid.

A Jones-affiliated company named by the bankruptcy trustee as the backup bid requested an immediate status conference, citing “the apparent defects in the sale process, including changing the procedures, lack of transparency, and inaccurate disclosures to interested bidders.” A hearing was scheduled for Thursday afternoon in Houston.

The Onion, based in Chicago, consulted on the bidding with some of the Sandy Hook families that sued Jones for defamation and emotional distress in lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas, lawyers for the families said.

“Our clients knew that true accountability meant an end to Infowars and an end to Jones’ ability to spread lies, pain and fear at scale,” said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the families.

Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, told The Associated Press in a video interview that it will relaunch the Infowars website in January with satire aimed at conspiracy theorists and right-wing personalities, as well as educational information about gun violence prevention from the group Everytown for Gun Safety. Collins would not disclose the sale price.

“We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the better jokes we’ve ever told,” Collins said. “The (Sandy Hook) families decided they would effectively join our bid, back our bid, to try to get us over the finish line. Because by the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, who could either continue this website unabated, basically unpunished, for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb, stupid website, and we decided to do the second thing.”

John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said the organization will be the exclusive advertiser on the new Infowars website.

“When you think about the unmitigated harm that Alex Jones and Infowars brought to Sandy Hook families, it’s just poetic justice that now Everytown and The Onion together will open a new chapter on Infowars and a chapter that is devoted to the issue of gun safety,” he told the AP.

Jones did not lose his personal X account, which has more than 3 million followers, in the auction. But the bankruptcy judge is deciding whether his personal accounts can be sold off at the trustee’s request.

Sandy Hook families sued Jones and his company for repeatedly saying on his show that the shooting that killed 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax staged by crisis actors to spur more gun control. Parents and children of many of the victims testified that they were traumatized by Jones’ conspiracies and threats by his followers. Jones has since acknowledged the shooting was “100% real.”

The Onion bills itself as “the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events” and says it has 4.3 trillion daily readers. Recent headlines have included, “Trump Boys Have Slap Fight Over Who Gets To Run Foreign Policy Meetings,” “Oklahoma Law Requires Ten Commandments To Be Displayed In Every Womb” and “Man Forgetting Difference Between Meteoroid, Meteorite Struggles To Describe What Just Killed His Dog.”

Sealed bids for the private auction were opened Wednesday. The bankruptcy trustee named First United American Companies, which is affiliated with one of Jones’ product-selling sites, as the backup bid should the sale to The Onion fall through.

____________________

You can oppose gun control without lying about one of the issues related to gun control. The simple fact that Alex Jones lied outright about such a sensitive issue is proof enough to me that the cause of opposing gun control is worthless.

Alex Jones really should be in prison, but the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and the press means that it is perfectly LEGAL to tell lies for the sake of political propaganda. Which is why he and others like him have to be sued instead. Slander and libel are civil rather than criminal issues.

There should be NO legal or civil penalty for telling and printing the TRUTH, but lies about anything or anyone should never be tolerated anymore. The First Amendment in its current form is worthless and it should be replaced. I would recommend it say:


“Neither the federal government nor any state in the United States shall have an established religious body of any kind, and while truthful speech and postings in the media must always be protected, slanderous and libelous statements of any kind are prohibited and will be subject to prosecution”

 

What’s wrong with Robin DiAngelo’s approach to racism?

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Read this:

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

Robin Jeanne DiAngelo (née Taylor; born September 8, 1956)[1] is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies.[2][3] She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to “white fragility“, an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

DiAngelo was born Robin Jeanne Taylor into a working-class family in San Jose, California, the youngest of three daughters born to Robert Z. Taylor and Maryanne Jeanne DiAngelo.[3][4]

She lived with her mother in poverty until her death from cancer, after which she and her siblings lived with her father. She became a single mother with one child in her mid-20s, and worked as a waitress before beginning college at the age of 30.[5]

In her youth, she saw that her poverty led to class oppression, though it was only later in life that she identified personally benefiting from white privilege, even while being “poor and white”.[6] In 2018, DiAngelo stated that her “experience of poverty would have been different had [she] not been white”.[6]

_______________________

What drew her to this conclusion? Did she have an experience with police similar to mine many years ago?

Police misconduct is not just about killing black people.

But then again…..skin color alone must NEVER be the issue. O J Simpson literally got away with murder by playing the race card…..with a legal dream team he could afford as a rich celebrity. A poor person, whether black or white, facing the same charges O J did would almost certainly have been sent to prison for those murders. The case of Bill Cosby, serial rapist, is another example.

Also, white people, Americans, and liberals are not the enemy. White supremacy, corruption in capitalism, and misrepresenting liberalism are the enemy. You are not promoting truth or justice when you paint ALL members of any group with the same brush. Like, I condemn Israel and the Zionists that run it, but I don’t hate all Jews. I abhor Islamic states, but I don’t hate all Muslims We should always be judged as individuals, period. It’s what you DO that defines your character, not what GROUP of any kind you are said to belong to.

I am a white person, but I am also one that came from a working class family. I have also worked alongside black people for most of my life, so the idea that ALL white people are better off in this society than ALL black people strikes me as the most absurd form of nonsense. A black person who works the same job as me is my equal, no less. And a black manager or executive of the company I work for is my superior.

Here is the listing for DiAngelo’s most famous book in Beacon Press.

https://www.beacon.org/White-Fragility-P1631.aspx

Another book she has written is:

https://www.beacon.org/Nice-Racism-P1678.aspx

The description of it reads as follows:

In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. DiAngelo also made a provocative claim: white progressives cause the most daily harm to people of color. In Nice Racism, her follow-up work, she explains how they do so. Drawing on her background as a sociologist and over 25 years working as an anti-racist educator, she picks up where White Fragility left off and moves the conversation forward.

Writing directly to white people as a white person, DiAngelo identifies many common white racial patterns and breaks down how well-intentioned white people unknowingly perpetuate racial harm. These patterns include:

  • rushing to prove that we are “not racist”

  • downplaying white advantage

  • romanticizing Black, Indigenous and other peoples of color (BIPOC)

  • pretending white segregation “just happens”

  • expecting BIPOC people to teach us about racism

  • carefulness

  • and feeling immobilized by shame.

DiAngelo explains how spiritual white progressives seeking community by co-opting Indigenous and other groups’ rituals create separation, not connection. She challenges the ideology of individualism and explains why it is OK to generalize about white people, and she demonstrates how white people who experience other oppressions still benefit from systemic racism. Writing candidly about her own missteps and struggles, she models a path forward, encouraging white readers to continually face their complicity and embrace courage, lifelong commitment, and accountability.

To put it bluntly, this does not help the cause of anti-racism one iota. It actually promotes racism against white people by indicating that any effort by white people to oppose racism by seeking unity with people of color is useless. No wonder so many whites refuse to support black politicians like Barack Obama. With allies like Robin DiAngelo talking down to them, anti-racist whites don’t need enemies. They might even turn against the cause altogether and become racist because of dogmatic assertions like those of DiAngelo!

And I remember how disgusted I was by that radical feminist website many years ago.

The Bigotries of “Everyday Feminism”

As a white male person, I refuse to hate myself in order to fight racism or sexism, and if Robin DiAngelo thinks I should, that’s her problem. It won’t be mine!

Especially considering that Wahid Azal is a fan of that sort of hateful approach. And I know what a monster he is!

Religion, imperialism, and oil

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Christianity is the most popular religion in the world, with about 2 billion followers all over the world. Islam is the second most popular religion, with over a billion followers. Part of the reason Christianity is larger is because it is older, since it is about 2000 years old, as compared with Islam being only 1400 years old.

Another reason Christianity is more popular is because of its association with imperialism. First, it took over the Roman Empire. After the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, the religion continued as the dominant ideology of the Byzantine Empire, which was a direct offshoot of the Roman one. Later, the Arabs built a vast empire using Islam as their unifying force, challenging the Byzantines. Finally, the Turks, another Islamic power, destroyed the Byzantine Empire.

Then the European powers spread their empires all over the world, taking Christianity with them. Islam remained relatively weak until two things happened to make it more powerful: European imperialism fell apart and oil was discovered in most parts of the Middle East. Suddenly,  the Arabs became  extremely rich due to their oil revenues, and with that wealth came the ability to spread Islam around the world. But in Europe, Christianity declined as the people became increasingly secular. The tragic events of World War II probably did more to destroy Europeans’ faith than anything else. Today, the USA is the most powerful Christian dominated nation in the world, but it is still secular in its government. And even here, religious influence is slowly declining.

I suspect that within another generation, Islam will surpass Christianity as the most popular world religion, but its power cannot last long, because oil is a nonrenewable resource. And when that oil runs out, the economies of the Middle Eastern  states that depend on oil will break down, and so will Islam.

What can freethinkers, atheists,  and secular humanists do to overcome this situation? They must do everything possible to end the dependence on oil, and indeed all other fossil fuels, and establish societies based on renewable and sustainable sources of energy such as wind, water, the sun and geothermal sources. Once at least some parts of the world are free from needing resources that are doomed to run out, we will have even less need for religions like Christianity and Islam.

The stupidity of “Life After People”

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The History Channel is showing a series titled “Life After People”. It is the sequel to a two hour special that was broadcast on the same channel last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People:_The_Series

The assumption in all versions of this show is that humans disappear SUDDENLY, by some completely unknown and unexplained process, leaving all man-made structures to slowly decay and become overrun by wildlife and plants. Some Protestants claim a simular event will occur, called the Rapture, but it will only involve them, not humanity as a whole. Quite simply, this idea is completely unscientific and irrational.

Here’s another version of the same concept:

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Let’s face it: While it may be fun to speculate what might happen to man-made structures after we are gone, it is pointless to do so while avoiding the real issue of what might cause humans to go extinct. Why are we so afraid to actually discuss this? It is a process that will take at least 100 years, involve massive death and suffering, and may be preventable. The History Channel is being profoundly irresponsible and cowardly NOT to discuss this in detail.

Besides, its not even history, is it?