History As Propaganda

This stimulated me to actually make a new post! I have been neglecting my blog so terribly because I spend so much time publishing on Facebook. And for personal reasons it has been challenging. It’s good to make another post.

A response to the YouTube presentation, Untold History: White Slaves in America

In reality there is nothing to do with political correctness when we do not refer to indentured white servants as slaves. It has to do with historical fact. Indentured servitude was exactly that. It was a form of bondage, but at that time apprentices were often treated very poorly as well. 

Still, both groups retained their basic human rights. They were not property. Their testimony in court was accepted.  Their children were not born into bondage. Their children could not be sold away from their parents. They could not be brutally beaten. They could not be raped. They could not be tortured.  They could not be murdered.

At least not legally.

All of those things could be legally done to black slaves who were considered to be chattel, that is, property. Or, as the Dred Scott decision pointed out, not human.

Now, I would agree that there was a form of white slavery in America.  These men (and it only applied to men) were treated very much as chattel property, although legally they were not. Again, technically they had rights. Said rights were almost never respected.  They could be beaten and brutalized, and if they were murdered it was unlikely to ever have been accurately reported.  That is, those whites who were swept up in the Jim Crow chain gang down South. Technically, they were convicted prisoners, but they were treated as slaves. 

Of course, they would be released after they served their sentences, which was not true of actual slaves.  Neither could they be sold to a new owner, although they were sometimes “rented“ or “loaned“ to local businessman to complete specific tasks before being returned to their cells at night.

So, for both the indentured sevants and the men in the chain gang, at the end of the term of servitude, they were released and were full, free human beings. This was never true of a black chattel slave.

On a rare occasion, such a slave might be allowed to buy his freedom from his master, and perhaps even be allowed to buy his family’s freedom, but it was very hard for a slave to earn any amount of money much less the cost of such high-quality “property”.  Finally, once free, a slave was always subject to being seized and resold.

Our history is very ugly. We humans are known for our cruelty and greed, but chattel slavery was the worst of the worst.

I must note that there were actual white slaves at the time of the founding of America, but not in America. The Barbary pirates and other Muslim groups had for centuries been perfectly content to enslave whites. It was one of the causes of the Barbary Wars (a series of two wars).  They are recalled in the Marines’ hymn as “the shores of Tripoli”.

Furthermore, the speaker does have a correct point in that slavery has existed for all of human history as far as we can tell. The Romans enslaved everybody, but actually their slaves were able to become freedman and, once free, were respected Roman citizens, something impossible to America’s black slaves. Some slaves, once freed, actually became wealthy in Rome.

The Greeks also enslaved anyone they could, except fellow Helenes.  Well, some Greek cities toward the end of the Greek era did enslave their fellow Greeks, and the rest of the Helenes were horrified at the practice.

It is worthy to note that many of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes became slaveowners.  Numerous slaves died on the Trail of Tears along with their Native American masters.

If the  author’s case is that we humans are really stinking and pretty rotten as a species,  I won’t argue with him.  But black slavery was a different thing in America from other forms of slavery at other times in history, except when it was much the same (it all depends on what nation and what era we are   referring to), but white slavery never existed in America. Forms of bondage, yes. But not slavery. And certainly not chattel slavery.

These facts are bitterly denied by many conservative websites, but they are conflating the very harsh and sometimes brutal treatment of indentured servants with chattel slavery. The conditions, as harsh as they were, were much better for the indentured servant, although they were still horrific by today’s standards.

It’s all a matter of historical fact.

If you’re interested in a fact check on the subject click on the following link:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-irish-slaves-idUSKBN23O2BS

Additional notes:

It is interesting note that the author also wants to see the American public school system destroyed and to return to the appalling situation of 200 years ago with apprenticeships replacing education.  No more free education. You have to pay for it, and suffer for it, and be abused for it.  

Remember, he himself identified apprenticeship as often brutal and sometimes even a form of slavery. Yet he wants to return to it for our children. It’s better than a public education, isn’t it?

Throughout the presentation, horrific pictures are posted as if they are signs of the evils of white slavery. In fact most of these are pictures of atrocities committed against criminals, rebels, and other “ne'er-do-wells” which have nothing to do with the slavery. I’m pretty certain that some of those pictures were Russian serfs being abused. What does that have to do with slavery in America? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Amazingly, the author compares illegal acts such as kidnapping and shanghaiing individuals to serve on ships as proof that slavery was an accepted practice. Such actions were illegal. While it was very difficult to get the captain convicted for such a crime, he was a criminal. Peddling in human flesh in America, as long as the flesh was black, was totally legal and even actively encouraged by our laws.

Better yet, we suddenly see a picture, for no discernible reason, promoting Michael Hoffmann‘s hate filled screed, Judaism Discovered. Hoffman is a notorious holocaust denier and antisemite.  At first it’s shocking to see this suddenly appear in the middle of the interview, but on second thought, of course this website is also promoting vile bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred. Are you really surprised? I am not.

In fairness to the interviewee, I do not know if he was aware that this book was being pushed during his presentation. Nevertheless, the fact that it was promoted tells you what kind of website promotes his book.

And now, I will confess. Halfway through the video I simply couldn’t stand any more of this nonsense. I did not watch the second half of the video. My patience was exhausted.  To put it another way, “When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Revelation 21:8

Live And Let Die

https://apple.news/ALCkx-noxRk659K6MujCwHA

The price for our freedom to have guns has become the degradation

 of every other freedom we have.

>While Highland Park captured the most media attention, all in all, 220 Americans were shot and killed over the holiday weekend. That doesn’t include five people who survived being shot during the fireworks after an Oakland A’s game—hit by stray, apparently celebratory bullets from a high-powered rifle fired outside the ballpark. Or two police officers shot—again perhaps by accident—at the Fourth of July fireworks display in Philadelphia.

...  You’d be hard-pressed to find an institution in this country that isn’t buckling under the weight of a gun fetish that has seen domestic firearms production triple since 2000 and a steady rise in mass shootings, as right-wing courts and state legislatures repeal rules and politicians and gunmakers stoke fears of tyranny and civil war. America now has more guns than people, according to one estimate.

...It’s an argument you hear from open-carry activists too: “My Rights … Don’t End Where Your Fear Begins.”<

The last statement, unsurprisingly, totally misses the point. The freedom of these gun cultist ends where my life and the lives of my children and the lives of my grandchildren and the lives of my great-grandchildren end!

>...the law professors Joseph Blocher and Reva B. Siegel note that armed riders were banned from market and fairs back in 14th-century England. Most U.S. states adopted laws against “brandishing” in the 19th century, and in 1874, the Georgia Supreme Court, in a typical piece of reasoning about the limited scope of the Second Amendment, wrote, “The practice of carrying arms at courts, elections and places of worship, etc., is a thing so improper in itself, so shocking to all sense of propriety” that the Framers could never have intended it.

...On the one hand, plenty of Republicans are scared shitless: “Both parties have extremists,” a GOP lawmaker told Politico after the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. “There’s a difference in our crazy people and their crazy people. Our crazy people have an excessive amount of arms. They have gun safes. They have grenades. They believe in the Second Amendment. They come here and Trump’s made them think this is the Alamo.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly warned members of Congress not to verbally attack one another over their upcoming impeachment votes for fear of endangering their lives (presumably at the hands of armed Trump supporters).<

Please note that even Republicans are afraid of extremist gun cultist Republicans. They know these people are a danger to civilized society but feel they must  be allowed to play their little war games like I did when I was eight (of course, I did it with toy guns and with other little boys who willingly joined in the game).  These children occupying grown-up disguises actually leave dead bodies in their wake.

And, in a completely non-shocking state of affairs; this absolute, total, undeniable, God given right of every decent free human being to carry guns and threaten innocent people by their mere  presence only applies to white men. However, we should know that no conservative Republican is ever, ever racist. Calling them that is offensive.   After all, is it racist to say that every armed black man should automatically be killed on sight?

>...Or at least—it works for them. For others, it’s not even an option. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins said the quiet part loud, posting a photo of armed Black men on his Facebook page and writing, “If this shows up, we’ll consider the armed presence a real threat. … I wouldn’t even spill my beer. I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand.”

 

...In Oklahoma last month, a man in a tactical vest carrying a semi-automatic rifle scared everyone he saw: Government employees locked the doors to their building. Target shoppers called 911 from the parking lot, and AT&T employees fled the store when he entered. What got the man in trouble with the police, finally, was his brass knuckles—those are illegal in Oklahoma. Whether out of fear or sympathy, police seem incapable of restraining armed, right-wing demonstrators.<

So you see carrying a weapon designed for assaulting enemy units while dressed for war is terrifying, but it’s perfectly OK. However, you better not have any brass knuckles in your pocket! 

America has gone totally completely, utterly, and certifiably insane.

Der Ding an Sich

 

The bubble that is I 

Flies through time 

Drifting 

Swirling 

Updraft and down

Fragile bubble

Little thing

All that is

All that will be

All that can be

Itself within itself

The  bubble that is I

A Rising Tide Of Asininity

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/03/05/americas-school-accountability-system-is-broken-here-are-the-issues-that-must-be-addressed-to-fix-it/?sh=575473e57f96

Surprise surprise! I got it right again! (OK, I’m not always right — just almost all the time.🧐). When I took my test and measurements course for my masters degree in school administration, one of the critical points made to us (critical now but at the time just one more data point) was that standardized testing is absolutely useless at evaluating the progress of an individual student, an individual teacher, or an individual school. All it is good for is making a bell shaped curve giving a generalized placement of performance according to a very narrow limited standardized test format and placed in a very broad setting. This is very useful in special education testing but useless for general evaluation of educational quality or performance.

Then President Reagan began screwing things up, as he had to find someone to blame for his policy failures. So he blamed teachers.

A propaganda report was issued worrying about a “rising tide of mediocrity “. A nonsense phrase meeting nothing. The report was pure propaganda, almost entirely data free. Nevertheless, based on that we desperately sought out an accountability system which would be based on the virtually useless data of standardized testing. This was designed to stimulate competition among schools and individual teachers. It’s actual primary effect was destroying teachers’ willingness to cooperate with each other. A teacher who found a clever way to get high scores on the test would never share that with another teacher because she had to compete. Collegiality and the mutual self-help system which has always been the hallmark of education was instantly corroded.

As always with standardized tests, it is mandated that, by the very nature of the test, a bell shaped curve results from the data. Failure to accomplish such a curve results in a test result skewed negatively or positively. The test will then be considered invalid and a new test created which will form the proper and only acceptable result: a bell shaped curve. When students began understanding how to find averages (because teachers were teaching it) the test manufacturers changed the test. They stopped calling them averages and began identifying them as “the mean“.

In other words, the test was no longer testing the students ability to understand the concept or perform it. It was deliberately making it hard for the children to understand so as to force a bell shaped curve because too many students were learning the concept too effectively and that’s not allowed in a bell shaped curve or any kind of standardized testing.  It is absolutely mandated that no matter how well a group performs or how badly it performs, 50% of those taking the test must be at or above the second quartile (the peak of the bell’s shaped curve) and 50% must be below it. 25% must fall at the first quartile or below and 25% must place at the third quartile or above. Please note that this is regardless of the actual level of knowledge or performance.

 This means that if the competition system really worked and all second grade students in a given year were now displaying at or above college level reading skills, the test would be adjusted until it showed that these incredibly brilliant children in fact were divided into 25% failures, 50% successes, and 25% high-performing extreme successes. The same would be true if the entire system failed so badly that not a single second grade student in the entire nation knew their alphabet. The same bell shaped curve would result.

Standardized testing does not test the quality of performance.  Criterion based testing does.

Now here we are 40 years later and guess what? Accountability and competition have proven to be a disaster for our public education system. Who would’ve guessed? Answer: anyone willing to look at the facts. 

Educational “experts” who never actually worked in the classroom but had extensive degrees, endlessly praised the system and supported and encouraged it to spread. I have stated on the record and will now repeat;  they are the equivalent of a medical doctor who says to his patient, “Thee hast an imbalance of thine humors. Tis necessary for to bleed thee that thee might becometh more balanced.“

At this point I can only say that stupid is as stupid does.

> The foundation of every recent accountability system, from the dawn of No Child Left Behind to the dusk of Common Core, has been the Big Standardized Test. And that foundation has cracked and crumbled. It has produced no results in the evaluation of teachers. It has produced no progress in student scores. Frederick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) has recently detailed how the bipartisan coalition that supported testing has disintegrated, in part because parents have lost faith.

…High stakes testing has had a hugely corrosive effect on education, pushing to schools to see their goal not as the full education of the whole child, but as preparing students to score well on the big test. It has shifted school resources away from any topics not on the test. <

Stoners Rule

 https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/05/terence-mckennas-stoned-ape-theory.html

OK,so what to say about this? First, silly fantasies with zero evidence are not theories. They are silly fantasies.

Second, let’s imagine it happening.

Grunke: Hey, man. You know what, man?

Irk:  No. Like what?

Grunke:  Like, like you know we’re wasting our time man.  Like we could be like really super cool, you know.

Irk:  Oh wow, man! That would be like, great, man.

Grunke: All we got to do is like… You know, make stuff. 

Irk: Oh yeah. We could do that.  Like we got these hands. I mean look at these fingers!  They’re really weird and wild!  Bet we could do amazing stuff with them, specially with these thumbs.

Grunke:  That’s right you got it. Like we could make, you know, like art and...and...and sports and like, media and stuff.

Work:  Yeah, yeah let’s do that.  We can do that. But know what?Let’s, let’s go do some hunting and gathering first, cause, I got, like, you know, the munchies.

Thus civilization was born.

In summation, let me note if that I class this “theory” in the same category as the aquatic ape, ancient aliens, or Atlanteans gifting us civilization.  I wonder if the “theorist” was stoned when he came up with this idea.

That Damned Fire Bell Again

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/12/black-flag-understanding-the-trumpists-latest-threatening-symbol/

 Yes, I have said it before but I think this may be the time I mean it the most. Please read this entire article.

The Republican party has turned into an active terrorist organization.  They have declared war on America. They have declared war on our democracy.  They have declared war on the rest of us.

Way back when George Bush was pushing for his insane war, I was standing with my grandson at the DMV and said I was more afraid of Bush and company than I was of the terrorists because they could only kill me while Bush and company could turn me into a slave. I got an awful lot of dirty looks because at that time the vast majority of the American population were eager to go to war. Yes, that same war that we now so bitterly regret having ever gotten into.

Although Junior didn’t make me into a slave because he actually still had a shred of respect for democracy and left office peacefully, Trump has picked up the torch and used it to set fire to our nation.

I can only go back to my history books and agree with Thomas Jefferson. The issue is a different one, but the results I fear will be the same.

> Discussing the question of Missouri's admission to the Union, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Holmes, "... but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence."

- Jefferson to Holmes, April 22, 18201< Quote from monticello.org.

>Trump’s rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

... In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people, "socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." 

... Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

... And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. 

... Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

... I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury as, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. 

...As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Label Mania

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/01/us/bruces-beach-los-angeles-property-return/index.html

Facebook just told me I didn’t read this article, which I did. I don’t know why it thinks I didn’t. I guess they’re trying to do things right; but they are trying to do  it in a very wrong way.  To put it in other words, computers are stupid and we are forcing them to rule our lives.

Back to the point. 

> "This is what reparations look like," said Bradford, insisting that the county is not giving anything to the Bruce family, yet simply returning their stolen property.<

  This is why I am so offended by the concept of reparations. Everybody means something different by the word. I’m against reparations in the sense of paying reparations as were paid to the victims of internment during World War II.  They deserved reparations because they were the ones who actually suffered. I strongly support the current return of property which had been stolen from these individuals. It was actually taken away from owners improperly and has now been returned to the heirs and assigns thereof.

I don’t call that reparations. I call  call that justice. I call that human rights.

Thankfully, when I read articles which actually specify what individuals mean by the term “reparations”, they almost always end up being basic human rights. So I support most of what people are asking for as “reparations” I’m just not foolish enough to call them reparations.

Most of what has been declared to be white privilege has also been mislabeled. Most of them are not privileges which can be granted or taken away. Most of them are human rights. Those rights have been denied to non-whites but that doesn’t make them a white privilege. It makes them human rights that have been denied.

This is one of the greatest flaws of the left’s positions. Mislabeling concepts makes it easier to criticize them. Label ideas correctly and they are less offensive and more accurate. Both are advantages which should not be thrown away with silly, even stupid misuse of language in order to make some sort of emotional points or gain some sort of emotional advantage in the minds of the language abusers.

What’s more important? Making a stand and flying the flag of your superiority, or winning the battle?