(Part 2) Best american history books according to redditors
We found 18,784 Reddit comments discussing the best american history books. We ranked the 6,356 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
This is a well-known story in the region around the Park and those of us who are native to the area are well-acquainted with the usual response to the story, which is "What a fucking idiot, what was he thinking?"
Kirwan survived long enough to be pulled from the water, and was clearly in shock -- but even in that state he obviously regretted the action, saying "That was stupid . . . That was a stupid thing I did." Unsurprisingly he died later in the hospital.
The horror of knowing you have literally cooked yourself to death makes me shudder every time.
Edit: also, for context, the Celestine Pool where this happened does not necessarily "look hot". It's named for the extremely deep blue color of the pool (caused by minerals/bacteria) and while the temperatures are well above lethal to humans and animals, the surface is still and smooth, not rolling/boiling. There was a lot of signage around it in 1981 reminding visitors of the deadly nature of the hot water and there's even more today, but to someone not used to Yellowstone, Celestine Pool might not have initially appeared as deadly as it is.
Edit 2: Since the link apparently does not work for some viewers, you can also read about it at Snopes here and in this Chicago Tribune review of the book I linked. The book is Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park by Lee H. Whittlesey. As other commenters have mentioned it's an excellent book in general, and right up /r/MorbidReality's alley.
For those interested
https://www.amazon.ca/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
An entire book describing the accidental deaths at Yellowstone national park.
Example: One guy was saving his dog which jumped into one of the sulfur ponds to chase.....something. He got his dog out, but was burned to badly and swallowed so much sulfur water that he slowly died after he was pulled out of the pond. He was constantly saying how stupid he was and how much he regretted it
IOW: Its the most entertaining Darwin Awards compilation you'll ever see.
I've recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond and found them to be quite intriguing.
GG&S
Collapse
Sure, and how about the overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh in Iran in 1952? Or how about the countless meddling in Central and South America? Speaking domestically, why is it that they always infiltrate peaceful groups of citizens and then play the role of provocateur?
The U.S. federal government should basically never be trusted and yet it seems each generation falls prey to their lies and propaganda - especially with regard to foreign policy. WMD's anyone? The American citizenry should always view everything the government says with an inherent distrust. That should be the default position of the citizenry. They have lost the privilege of being trusted. They don't work for or serve the interests of average Americans in the least. When the corporate/MIC/establishment elite want to meddle in another countries affairs or start a war, they will do whatever lying or black bag operations they need to in order to achieve their objective. They've done it plenty before and they will continue doing it until we refuse to allow it any more.
The U.S. government has put down so many populist movements and meddled/overthrown so many governments in the name of "making the world safe for capitalism" it's crazy. No other country even comes close. Yes, that's right, not democracy - that is the biggest lie of them all. The U.S. couldn't give two shits about democracy. Not even here at home. They just want to keep us believing that we live in a democracy and keep us participating in their rigged system so that we won't revolt.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/ref=tmm_pap_title_0/191-0374213-3312233
http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/047018549X/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321374076&sr=1-1
I'm a socialist with anarchist/Marxist sympathies, so I'm probably more receptive than most people to the economic/materialist critique you're offering, but just about everything you wrote here is wrong. It's historically uninformed. It romanticizes and idealizes. And it badly misses the point:
> Consumerism was forced upon the populace by profit-creation machines like corporations and advertisement agencies to drive our natural need to consume up beyond sustainable or even logical levels
Human beings have been destroying ecosystems since long before the birth of capitalism. The indigenous people you romanticize are guilty of it as well. It's not the fault of the elite. The elite are exactly what the rest of us would be and do what we'd do if we had their resources and power.
Humans are no different from any other animal, and the rich are no different from the poor; when you let us, we'll devour everything in our path until there's nothing left.
> Humans didn't always seek status and elevation - in fact, most peasantry throughout history was quite content with the wealth given to them by the natural world.
This isn't true. To the extent that it's even a claim that can be tested, it's false in every single instance I can think of. Human beings have always sought power, status and resources. Always.
If all you were saying were that corporations are parasitic, disastrous, amoral and hostile to the flourishing of any and all life that can't be extracted and converted into profit, I'd agree with you. But your historical critique is wrong -- and also dangerous, misguided and irresponsible. It deflects blame. It goes out of its way, very, very incorrectly, to argue that this is all the fault of a single economic system and a small sliver of the population.
All people are the problem, not just the rich or people who live in first-world countries. All social and economic systems have contributed to it, not just capitalism.
The last time a major political party died was the Whigs in the lead up to the Civil War. The Whig Party broke apart on the question of slavery. Northern factions became more anti-slavery, while Southern factions refused to abandon slavery. The Party could not contain these contradictory ideas, so it lost support and quickly found its members deserting the Whig Party for alternatives.
As the former Whigs began to abandon their party, new political parties appeared to take them in. Those parties included: the Free Soil Party, the American Party (sometimes known as the 'know-nothing' party) and the Republican Party. By the election of 1856, the Whigs were gone.
Interestingly enough, the Democratic Party also split on the issue of slavery in 1860, with Northern and Southern factions emerging to nominate their own candidates. However, the Democrats were able to recover after the Civil War and continue to be a major party to this day (of course).
The other major parties that died (The Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, National Republicans kinda) weren't really political parties in the sense that we understand them. They were more alliances of elites competing against each other, as opposed to mass mobilizing voters. The Federalists died largely as a result of the total victory of the Democratic-Republicans and the Democratic-Republicans also died largely as a result of their victory, leading to the somewhat party-less period known as the 'Era of Good Feelings.'
All the other parties you mention were minor parties that were either formed as result of a brief split from the major parties (Southern Democrats) or as a the result of a single influential man creating the party as a platform to run on (the Progressive Party).
In a sense the only true major political party that has died was the Whig Party.
So now comes the real question, why has there not been another party collapse in the 150 or so years after the Civil War? Why have we stuck to the Democrat/Republican divide, even as those parties have changed radically both in supporters and in issues?
The answer is that absent an issue so divisive as that it literally led to civil war, parties are pretty damn durable. Every time a major challenger to the two parties has emerged (such as the Progressive Party in 1912), one or both of the two parties have adjusted themselves and their issues to try to be welcoming to those voters and issues. Thus the Democratic Party moves from being a small government party in the 19th century, to being a progressive party in the early 20th to being the party of the New Deal in the mid-20th century.
In America's two party system, which is reinforced by our first-past-the-post system of elections, parties should be viewed less as solid ideological actors and more as alliances of disparate interests that come together in order to seek political advantage. Thus you have labor and environmentalists largely in the same party, not because those two views are immediately reconcilable, but because it is an advantageous political alliance. When those alliances break down, groups may switch from one party to another (something called 'realignment'). Thus the two parties survive, even as supporters and issues may change.
This is quickly veering into the realm of a political science discussion, so I'll just end here with a few quick answers to your questions.
Sources:
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X
https://www.amazon.com/John-Quincy-Adams-American-Visionary/dp/0061915416/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
https://www.amazon.com/Bully-Pulpit-Theodore-Roosevelt-Journalism-ebook/dp/B00BAWHPX2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1468985270&sr=1-1&keywords=bully+pulpit+doris+kearns+goodwin#nav-subnav
https://www.amazon.com/Presidential-Campaigns-George-Washington-Bush/dp/0195167163
People fall into the Grand Canyon every year because they simply think they because they're on vacation or at some sort of attraction they won't get hurt. There's a book about this mentality written by a twenty year park ranger I have on my shelf. When I get home I'll give you the title. It's a good one.
Edit: Over The Edge: Death in Grand Canyon I was originally drawn to this book because it has accounts of most of the known, fairly recent deaths and how they occurred. I also need to correct myself in saying that people fall in every year. It is less frequent than that but I'm still sticking to the point I made earlier because this book has some seriously good stories in it about exactly what we're discussing.
We're discussing present systemic oppression rooted in past systemic oppression, and also proportionally how much that past systemic oppression has contributed to the present systemic oppression.
Comparing the traffic of the Irish and of British debtors--rated around 300K tops according to the one reputable source published by an academic press--to the 12.5 million slaves of African origins--as demonstrating equivalence is downright laughable mathematically.
While conceding the point that voluntary and involuntary indentures often faced conditions exactly the same as African slaves, they are distinct from slaves in that after their terrible indenture period was ended, their holders legally had to free them and provide them land.
Additionally, the grounds on which white indentures were sent to North America--they were politically undesirable--is substantially different from the grounds on which African slaves werte sent to North America--they were seen as inherently and genetically inferior, rather than merely a political nuisance.
Fast-forward some three hundred years and ask the following questions: (1) Statistically, how do white persons of Irish descent compare to other white persons in their proportional educational attainment, income levels, and political influence? and (2) Statistically, how do black persons compare to white persons proportionally on the same measures?
The results, I venture, will be starkly different--and thus showcases the differentially systemic impact of African slavery and the admittedly terrible conditions of white indentured servitude.
Nerd alert tiem!
Let me open my bookmarks...
ACLU study of arrest rates and self reported usage rates of black/white Marijuana users.
USSC report showing discrepancy in sentencing of black vs white inmates when controlling for other variables
For some background:
EPI paper on de jure segregation in education and it's effect on Black youth.
Book written by Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law, great book on how the government enforced segregation in previously unsegregated communities.
For anyone who wants to hear more stories like this I recommend This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Rice's father is far from the only black southerner who used firearms to keep the Klan away and his family safe.
This is a big TIL for me. I knew that there were different classes of carriers, but never realized they made baby carriers that essentially couldn't keep up with a main battle fleet.
Some basics on their capabilities and how they were used from wikipedia. They were built on commercial hulls, and were too slow to keep up with fleet vessels. Their primary missions were:
Their main advantage was cheapness and construction speed. The post-WWI Washington Naval Treaty, designed to prevent a naval arms race, had limited carrier size and deployment, making the need for carrier construction urgent at the outbreak of hostilities. CVEs filled a dangerous gap while shipyard production raced to catch up.
A secondary advantage was stability, especially in the North Atlantic convoys, where CVEs proved to pitch and yaw less than purpose-built Light Carriers. Probably because of the commercial hulls.
Crews had a sardonic nickname based on the CVE designation: Combustible, Vulnerable and Expendable. Funny. Also completely accurate. Magazine protection was minimal, evasive maneuvering was a joke, armament not so great. HMS Avenger was sunk by a single torpedo. Three escort carriers were destroyed by kamikazes, making them the largest ships lost to that tactic. Their best defense was their aircraft screen, but that was also limited given that at any one time they might be carrying primarily fighters, bombers or ground support aircraft and so be well- or ill-suited to the role of fleet defense.
The CVE's finest hour came probably during the Battle off Samar, one of the key actions in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and a battle military historians have called one of the greatest mismatches and one of the greatest upsets in naval history.
>Adm. William Halsey, Jr. was lured into taking his powerful 3rd Fleet after a decoy fleet, leaving only three escort carrier groups of the 7th Fleet in the area. A Japanese surface force of battleships and cruisers, battered earlier in the larger battle and thought to have been in retreat, instead turned around unobserved and stumbled upon the northernmost of the three groups, Task Unit 77.4.3 ("Taffy 3"), commanded by Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague. Taffy 3's few destroyers and slower destroyer escorts possessed neither the firepower nor armor to effectively oppose the Japanese force, but nevertheless desperately attacked with 5 in (127 mm)/38 cal guns and torpedoes to cover the retreat of their slow "jeep" carriers. Aircraft from the carriers of Taffy 1, 2, and 3, including FM-2 Wildcats, F6F Hellcats and TBM Avengers, strafed, bombed, torpedoed, rocketed, depth-charged, fired at least one .38 caliber handgun and made numerous "dry" runs at the attacking force when they ran out of ammunition.
Heh. Uh heh heh heh. Dry runs. Just reading that phrase gives me the dry runs. I assume it refers to attack missions against a fleet of some of Japan's most powerful battleships, heavy cruisers and destroyers without any bombs or bullets. The guy firing his .38 special out the window at Vice Admiral Karita's fleet? I guess it's a good thing he didn't resort to strong language.
>Sprague's task unit lost two escort carriers, two destroyers, a destroyer escort and dozens of aircraft. Over a thousand Americans died, comparable to the combined losses of men and ships at the better known Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. But in exchange for the heavy losses for such a small force, they sank or disabled three Japanese cruisers and caused enough confusion to persuade the Japanese commander, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita, to regroup and ultimately withdraw, rather than advancing to sink troop and supply ships at Leyte Gulf. In the combined Battle of Leyte Gulf, 10,000 Japanese sailors and 3,000 Americans died. Although the battleship Yamato and the remaining force returned to Japan, the battles marked the final defeat of the Japanese Navy, as the ships remained in port for most of the rest of the war and ceased to be an effective naval force.
The Battle off Samar was given its first full narrative account in the book The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature in 2004 and just went into my Amazon shopping cart.
THIS!
Hey look at that, my evening is booked now.
Speaking of books, has anyone read his followup: Collapse?
It never ended, it just became the prison industry. The Jim Crow laws made sure of that.
i didn't know this until i read The Color of Law, but back in the early 20th century the popularity of personal automobiles skyrocketed to such a size that cities simply weren't able to keep up with the congestion they caused. the number of people who owned cars essentially doubled every year for a while and traffic was a plague. it's one of the reasons why cities embraced the idea of widening roads and eventually building highways so much in the first place, even back then they thought doing so would solve congestion
Good next up:
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/
http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Deadliest-Export-Democracy-Everything/dp/1783601671/
Douglas Blackman wrote a book about this that won a pulitzer. It's actually a really easy read and delves into detail about sharecropping and prison labor. It's absolutely heartbreaking what people did to the freed slaves.
[Slavery by another name] (https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1525272338&sr=8-1&keywords=douglas+blackman)
in fact there is evidence that ethnically diverse areas have less social trust and cohesion.
http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
We have been brainwashed for years into thinking diversity is good, but where is the evidence? In general people often self-segregate into ethnic communities because they like living near people who are like them. That is just the ways humans tend to be.
As for Muslims, is there any country on earth with more than, say, 15 or 20% Muslims that isn't plagued with civil war? Yugoslavia? Lebanon? Perhaps our leaders should have considered this before importing millions of Muslims into the West.
There's a book about deaths in the Grand Canyon, and one of the conclusions made is that children hardly ever are the ones involved in falls or other accidents; they seem to have an innate sense of danger that keeps them from doing really stupid things around cliffs. The highest demographic for deaths in the GC: males in their early 20s.
Hey, no problem: Here's a couple I really enjoyed that helped me learn how to really articulate what I think and understand what others were saying about politics in those sorts of discussions:
If you would like a detailed report of what happens when people do jump or fall into the pools, check out Death in Yellowstone. You can read most of the first chapter using the 'Look Inside', which has the 'boiling to death' stories.
Social networks especially for men have been on steep decline since the 70's. A highly accredited academic wrote about it a while back and he got shit for some reason because he partially blamed multiculturalism. Even if you dismiss the multiculturalism angle which I do his research was very well done and shows a bleak picture of the American social landscape. Charles Murray also wrote about this stuff in Coming Apart.
https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518974854&sr=1-1&keywords=coming+apart
I will add that the reason men have struggled more with this is because men's groups are exclusive rather then inclusive. Or rather the inclusiveness is based on some metric. I.e we all lift, or we all ride bikes together, or we all enjoy climbing. Female social groups are inclusive. You're welcome here no matter what you do as long as you don't do anything to rock the boat.
Surprisingly both groups are still hierarchical. Female social groups rank hierarchy by the most social person that distributes rewards with equal allocations. Male social groups reward the man that gives out the most the equitable shares.
Explained more simply women give each person in the group an entire pie and the most popular is the one that finds the pie shop. Men work together to make a pie and the leader is the one who carves up the pie and gives it out fairly. I.e. the males that contributed the most ingredients or more involved in preparing the pie get bigger pieces. Men that take the pie all for themselves or give up the pie to others are considered too dominant or too weak.
This goes all the way back to male apes going on hunts while female apes stayed back and waited for meat to be brought to them.
Our modern society is shifted to favor the female schema over the male one and men will suffer until more balance is reached.
Fact of the matter is that the NRA does not represent gun owners. The NRA membership accounts for about 7% of gun owners in the United States yet has been positioned as the de facto voice of gun owners.
It isn't.
Unfortunately, there are no non-partisan groups representing gun owners at close to the same scale. There are some smaller groups like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club and Pink Pistols that support, educate, and advocate for gun ownership amongst African Americans and LGBTQ communities (respectively). But the NRA manages to suck all the oxygen out of the room and other groups are rarely acknowledged by the public.
I suspect that some gun control advocates like having the NRA as a foil. By crystallizing the debate across party lines, it allows both sides to ignore complexities like racism -- see the NRA's response to the shooting of Philando Castile, Reagan signing the ban on open carry as governor of California in response to the Black Panthers, or the role of firearms in the Civil Rights Movement (see Deacons for Defense and Justice for one example or a book by Charles E. Cobb Jr., Brown University professor and former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, "This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible").
Gun ownership isn't a White, Christian, Conservative thing. I am a gun owner and none of those things.
Gun owners are also not against gun control. I support increased gun control and even the NRA's Wayne LePierre testified before Congress in favor of universal background checks in 1999.
Gun ownership and regulation is not a simple issue and it cannot be boiled down to pure partisanship without silencing communities that are already routinely deprived of a voice.
The notion of the NRA representing gun owners-at-large needs to be taken out back and shot.
One of the great investigative journalists, writers and speakers of the 20th and 21st centuries. I recommend having a ready of his books of essays, e.g. Arguably.
He spent a massive amount of time actually on the ground in places like Kurdistan, Iraq, Cuba (immediately post-revolution, leading in great part - along with the writing of Orwell and various dissidents - to his disenchantment with communism), and so many other places. He was also tremendously well-read and well-informed, as you'll see when reading his essays.
He was a leftist who despised the Clintons for their conduct (his book: No One Left to Lie To) but unfortunately died before this last election - his writing on Trump would've been gold, as would his struggle over the lesser of two evils. He was not afraid to break with the left on different issues, e.g. Iraq, because he'd spent so much time on the ground in Iraq and Kurdistan and had done so much research into things there, and he was greatly disappointed in the post-war rebuilding efforts that followed the removal of Saddam Hussein, but he was in Iraq at different times to see and celebrate progress where it happened (e.g. elections).
He read every word George Orwell wrote (that's available, even later-found letters and diaries). He was basically against dictators and despots everywhere.
In later times he was famous for speaking out against religion, especially where it was also despotic. This is what most people on the internet seem to know him for (hence the often vociferous attacks against him), but this was a small part of his career over his lifetime.
Really, you do yourself a great service by reading his books of essays, very few of which are about religion but most of which are very, very interesting. My father is a conservative Christian, yet he greatly enjoys reading Hitchens' essays!
From the UK deputy PM at the time of Hitchens' death:
>One unexpected tribute came from deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who worked as an intern for Hitchens years ago. Hitchens was, he said, "everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious".
>"My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I've ever done," said Clegg. "He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing".
Had a friend who worked at Yellowstone for Xanterra (the folks who run concessions and lodges in the park). He had so many stories of the completely insane things people do when they have never been exposed to nature before.
I think my favorite story was a guy getting out of his car and walking up to a bison, trying to put his kid on its back for a ride. Bison are wild herd animals, are fucking huge, and are at LEAST as dangerous as a grizzly (most of the time). The bison flipped out and charged, managing to gore the guy pretty badly (he survived). The kid got away fine, and probably has a little goddamn respect for nature and the wild now.
If you're a bit morbid, and want to marvel at the stupidity of people in a national park, check out Death in Yellowstone. It's a book full of this sort of shit.
> Still wondering why anyone really cares where people choose to live.
Actually, where people live is one of the biggest drivers of life outcomes. If you're born in KCK instead of Leawood - your probable life outcomes is much worse.
At one time, segregation was official city/state/fed policy, which subsidized the development of all-white suburbs (like Prairie Village was one of the first) and movement of people from urban areas to the suburbs - aka 'white flight'. Today, we're still living with white flight. If there were a middle to upper income suburb of Kansas City that were 88% black, do you think many white people would choose to move there? Me neither.
Check out Richard Rothstein's book "The Color of Law", or his lectures on YouTube. Great history and info about the relationship between housing segregation and life outcomes in the US.
As the Vox illustrates, segregation is still going on today (it's actually getting worse) due to policies like zoning laws and drive to prevent low-income housing and apartment complexes from being improved in middle-upper income cities, resulting in low income minorities living in a small number of areas in the metro (as illustrated by the original Vox piece map).
Stories abound that this assessment that you just "picked your family" or "picked your state" aren't correct, just FYI. It was much more complicated than you think.
Same with "citations" for arguments. Read this book as a starting place. It is pretty settled that the only valid reason that the South had for secession was economic anxiety from the removal of the barbaric slave trade. They were to choose between owning people as property (an untenable act) and having less money. They chose owning people. They lost.
We must've had different history classes. :/
But yep. I'm finally going to have to read this book, huh?
You should read up on how Hillary harrassed the alleged victims of Bill's abuse.
> She further alleges that Hillary Clinton, shortly after the alleged rape, verbally intimidated her, implying that Broaddrick better keep her mouth shut -- or else. At a political event two weeks later, Broaddrick claims that Hillary approached her: "She came over to me, took ahold of my hand and said, 'I've heard so much about you and I've been dying to meet you. ... I just want you to know how much that Bill and I appreciate what you do for him.' ...
Just imagine if somebody out there accused Trump of doing such a thing. There would be non-stop MSM coverage.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/30/why_do_bill_and_hillary_clinton_still_get_a_pass_127590.html
Here is a great book by Christopher Hitchens that compiles all of the garbage of Clintons called, No One Left To Life To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton- http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
The Clintons are genuinely terrible people.
This is completely wrong. The consequences were intended. FHA loans were first set up so that African Americans could not buy them. Then mortgage insurers drew maps that labeled AA neighborhoods and neighborhoods close to AA neighborhoods uninsurable. The government adopted those maps in its own regulations and so redlining continued to be an issue through the 70s. We still had segregated public housing through the early 80s. 3 of the 9 supreme court justices ruling on restrictive covenants banning sale to minorities had to recuse themselves because their mortgages had those covenants. The issue was never social engineering's unintended consequences, it was always the intended consequence of discrimination. It's taken decades to make any headway in remediating the problems that our earliest attempts at regulating homeownership have caused. The problem was never that the government guaranteed loans to people who couldn't afford them, there's a system in place to prevent default on FHA loans, the problem was that we withheld homeownership from minorities for decades.
African Americans earn 60 percent of the wages White Americans do, and yet they have less than 10 percent of the total wealth that White Americans do. That's because our system of homeownership has systemically discriminated against them for almost 100 years. Don't believe it? read this book. Too lazy for that? Listen to this interview. Don't have the time for either? Then don't comment on threads about race and housing.
I'm sorry, but yours is a very disingenuous take. Not only do you get the facts wrong about this article and the history which is its context, but you also get the basic premise of government backed mortgages wrong too. Also, the one-two punch of "poor minorities" is either ignorant or bigoted take your pick. The government guarantees loans to plenty of poor people, regardless of their race, and the idea that it sets them up to fail is almost Breitbartesque.
If you read Hitchens' No One Left To Lie To, it's clear that Bill Clinton is a total scum bag.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
I was with you until your last paragraph. While slavery and racism in the U.S. were deeply intertwined, it's important to make the distinction that being anti-slavery does not imply being anti-racism, especially up until the Civil Rights Movement.
Often, abolitionists weren't advocating for the end of slavery out of a love or respect for black enslaved workers. They were arguing from a moral, theoretical standpoint of the concept of owning other people as being reprehensible. Which it is - but then if you go around and treat black people as inferiors - you're still racist, just a racist who doesn't like slavery. For one example of this, check out this essay on Walt Whitman - prime example of a Northern abolitionist who held some decidedly racist views. He was by no means the only example.
My point in saying this is that it does little good to split the nation between north and south when it comes to prevalence of racism. It's going to be difficult to quantify how racist a geographic region is. But even when you take even the most cursory glance at various metrics, you'll find that racism is not isolated to the South.
If you look for racism in the South 100 times, you'll find it 100 times. If you look for the same examples of racism in the North, or out West, or anywhere else in the country, guess what - you'll find it 100 times.
It is disingenuous to say that the South bears the only, or even largest, burden of racism in the history of the U.S. That holds true even "to this damn day". You can definitely remove Democrat and Republican from the equation. But you also must remove South or North or East or West from the equation. No region, no state, no city in this country is free from countless examples of racism. Everywhere is guilty of it.
We need to be realistic and honest about the problems we have. It doesn't matter which region is more racist (if you could ever even determine that). We need to realize that while the South has a history of racism, that history extends to the North and the rest of this country just as much. Overlooking that is a surefire way to make sure all of our racist policies and institutions never change.
> A) what should I call the group of people that split off from other lineages up to 200000 years ago? A subspecies? A clade? Race is the colloquial, and it works well to describe what I mean. There is pretty clear evidence the different 'races' split off at a specific time in the past and evolved to suit different evolutionary pressures.
"Race" is a fine word to describe what you're talking about. But my point is that what we are all talking about is a human invention. There is a lot of genetic variation in humans. We can create groups based on things like skin and hair color. Or we might decide that there are other characteristics around which we would like to group people, like height and hand size.
I understand what you are getting at. Of course it's possible that traits like intelligence are somehow genetically linked to traits for dark skin and woolly hair. But we haven't found such genes. And it strikes me as very unlikely that any association, if it did exist, would be meaningful in size.
> Jews were literally raped, murdered, pillaged, and exiled from various european countries for over a millenia. They are now the most successful group on the planet. Reconcile their history, along with asian's treatment in America and their current condition
The oppression experienced by Jewish and Asian Americans is neither as large nor as recent. Less than a generation ago, government policy explicitly prevented black Americans from buying housing and generating the wealth that white Americans of your parents' and grandparents' generations built in the period after World War II, relegating them to ghettos.
Asian and Jewish Americans of course experienced discrimination, and continue to experience it in specific instances. These groups lived in ethnic enclaves for the first generation or so after immigration (as immigrants tend to do). But they have not experienced the legally enforced segregation that Black Americans have throughout our entire history and into our very recent past.
I haven't read What We Owe to Each Other, but from what I'm familiar with it's an attempt by Scanlon to explain and justify his particular brand of moral contractualism, and not an introductory book on ethics and moral philosophy. I believe Chidi is a contractualist and deontologist so it makes sense why he would like that book (as a philosophy professor), but that's just one area of moral philosophy.
One of the problems with philosophy is that the works are intended for students and educated audiences and not laymen, so most of the books for example that I read when I first started college (and books that you'll find listed in "good for beginners" lists) like Nicomachean Ethics and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals I would never, ever recommend to a general audience. They're full of confusing philosophy terminology and long, multi-stage logical arguments.
Instead I highly recommend what I suspect you're really looking for in Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel. While clearly aimed at an American audience, it's a very good and more importantly very readable general introduction to ethics and the varying schools of thought in the field. It's a really short read for a philosophy text and is peppered with real-life examples and dilemmas.
Another book that I actually read recently and quite enjoyed is A Concise Introduction to Ethics by Russ Shafer-Landau. Unfortunately, this one is intended for a student audience and is more of a textbook (complete with end of chapter quizzes), but it goes really broad and over not just all the big schools of ethics but also the fundamentals of moral reasoning, and metaethics and natural law (two things that don't always show up in ethics books which are usually about normative ethics).
I took my SJ class as an online course around 2010 or so. It was pretty milquetoast in comparison to yours and mostly technical. I think the most interesting stuff to me were the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham vs. John Stuart Mill. We used the book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel
I do not know what the birdcage analogy is and there was no discussion, I recall, about agents, allies, and accomplices.
of course they are, thats where people go when they are lost. they think it will lead them out of the forest. (it doesn't)
-There is a geographical clustering of disappearances
-Bad weather usually occurs just as the search party gets under way
What? This doesn't make any sense. to be able to make a claim like that, you have to analyze thousands of NPS records to find a correlation between weather and searches. Also most searches take place right after someone went missing, which is probably also connected to the weather.
-Swamps and briar patches play a role in the disappearances
Do you know how easy it is to get lost in a swamp?
-Many disappearances occur in the late afternoon
Late afternoon is the time when people are usually expected back from outings, if they left in the morning. They may have disappeared earlier, but are not reported until later.
-If a person is later found, they usually are unable or unwilling to remember what happened to them.
PTSD. Simple as that.
-The missing are often found in places that were previously searched
The people doing the searches are not usually well trained parks staff, but locals and volunteers. Also, most bodies are found years later when someone stumbles on the body accidentally.
-Berries are somehow related to the disappearances.
that is so vague I honestly don't know where to start. "he ate berries." "there were berries on the trail." "they had a blueberry pie yesterday." you claim pretty much anything is related to the disappearances if you try hard enough.
how i feel right now
/rant
for anybody actually interested in National Parks search and rescue, i suggest this book, written by two park rangers who get paid by the government to rescue people
Charles Mann's book 1491 is excellent and exactly on your topic.
Read The Gun by CJ Chivers. Very interesting book on the history and people involved in the creation of the AK.
I hear what you're saying. Memphis is in desperate need of redevelopment, revitalization, an increased tax base, more jobs, greater density, increased walkability/bikeability/livability, less violent crime, etc. All of the good things that come along with gentrification are things we really need. But we have to consider the bad along with the good (warning: wall of text incoming).
I think the big reason why people are so concerned about the negative aspects of gentrification has to do with the fact that the displacement of the black community is, in effect (if not by design although that is debatable), a continuation of the unequal and unjust housing discrimination that has existed in this country for generations.
Ghettos didn't happen by accident. They are a byproduct of explicit racial discrimination at the federal (and, in the case of Memphis, also presumably the local) level.
In the mid-20th century, the federal government actively encouraged and subsidized suburbanization. The FHA, the federal agency tasked with overseeing this policy, required that the developers who received these government subsidies sell the new properties only to white people and institute racially discriminatory restrictive covenants that would prevent them from being sold to any non-whites moving forward. Black veterans following WWII were excluded from applying their GI Bill benefits to buying homes in these areas.
By the time these practices ended, the deed had been done. White suburban subdivisions/municipalities had been created, the values of the homes had increased significantly from the prices they had initially been sold for, and they were by and large prohibitively expensive to black people (who needless to say were also subject to economic discrimination). Not to mention the fact that they weren't exactly the most welcoming places on Earth for the middle-class black families who could have afforded to live there by the time they were legally able to do so.
The end result of these policies had a massive impact on racial disparities in wealth, as the working-class white families who bought government-subsidized homes with government-subsidized mortgages were able to accrue enormous gains in equity while black people (many of whom could have afforded these homes had they not been precluded from buying them at the outset) realized none of those gains, as the areas of town they were forced to live in were effectively abandoned by the rest of society. If you are not familiar with the history of housing discrimination in this country, I recommend listening to this recent episode of Fresh Air and following up with the book the episode is based on.
So, bringing this full circle, if we sit on our hands as the black community is displaced in gentrifying areas around Memphis, then we are complicit in perpetuating unjust racial disparities in housing for the next generation. How would you feel if your family had been forced to live in a shitty part of town by means of discrimination, and then as soon as that area became vibrant and livable again you were forced out by economic forces? You'd be fucking outraged, and rightfully so.
The good news is that displacement is not an inevitable byproduct of redevelopment. The mechanisms by which displacement occur are rising rents and increased property tax liabilities, which are issues that can be remedied by public policy (namely upzoning and property tax abatement for incumbent property owners).
But if redevelopment is going to occur in a just fashion, we're going to have to give real consideration to preventing the negative aspects of gentrification and stop focusing on whether the upper-middle class white people of Lea's Woods might have to, GASP, park their second car around the corner from their house as Binghampton urbanizes (for example).
tl;dr Memphis needs redevelopment but sitting back and allowing the black community to be displaced in gentrifying areas would be to perpetuate a long history of unjust housing discrimination. The good news is that it isn't inevitable.
Also wrote No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family about the Clintons. Brilliant short book, information in that book alone would be enough to keep the crooks from returning to power.
He had an entire book
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853
This is an excellent summary. White Americans got success by making sure the lowest rungs of the economic ladder were full of black people. It was done intentionally with laws and descrimination at all levels of society, city, state and federal.
So, if you knew the position of every atom in the universe, you could write perfect history? So what?
One of the difficult things about history is you have limited evidence. Every written document from Anglo-Saxon England we possess would fit into a small box. The largest amount of surviving text we have from Ancient Rome is monument and gravestone inscriptions.
Our most sophisticated computer models can't predict the weather in 10 days or the stock market opening tomorrow, and we know way more about the current prices of stocks or the current weather data than we do about, say, Ancient Sparta. The data for any model based approach just isn't there. It some ways, environmental determinism in history is like being given a puddle of water and the room temperature and trying to figure out what the ice cube looked like.
There's a reason economic determinism in history has gone out of fashion, and that ecological determinism never really went in: it's a less useful model for understanding why things happen compared with a more nuanced approach.
FWIW, Diamond's follow up book, Collapse contained several sections specifically rebutting the suggestion that he was an "environmental determinist."
We can always dream that politics and short-term interests won't overshadow an existential crisis.
For those interested:
Have you read Collapse? Fascinating book dealing with that exact question. Not everyone agrees with his ideas but it's still a good jumping point.
From the Amazon page:
> Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
If anyone reading this guy's comment finds this sort of stuff interesting, I would highly, highly recommend this book on Morality, Justice, Society, that sort of thing. This comment reminded me of this guy's writing style & I couldn't put this thing down:
Justice by Michael J. Sandel
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422282600&sr=8-1&keywords=white+cargo
I don't know about outright "denial" outside of fringe circles, but it's not uncommon to see folks engage in mental gymnastics to downplay the legacy of imperialism, chattel slavery, etc., or even attempt to turn it into a "good" thing. Think about it:
That non-violence shit will get you killed.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
There's actually a whole book detailing all of the people who have died in the Canyon over the years. The overwhelming majority of deaths can be attributed to being young and male. There's also a maybe not surprisingly large number of guys who died while peeing off the side of the Canyon.
> t’s not surprising to anyone who has lived in or visited a major American metropolitan region that the nation’s cities tend to be organized in their own particular racial pattern. In Chicago, it’s a north/south divide. In Austin, it’s west/east. In some cities, it’s a division based around infrastructure, as with Detroit’s 8 Mile Road. In other cities, nature—such as Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia River—is the barrier. Sometimes these divisions are man-made, sometimes natural, but none are coincidental.
The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental
A housing policy expert explains how federal government policies created the suburbs and the inner city Smithsonian magazine recently ran an article about this. The article is about a recent book that was written by an economist at Berkeley.
The gold standard on this topic is definitely Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
It's only recently that America's forestation rate has increased, and only in the north. South and west are still in decline.
Excellent book if you're interested in learning why cultures would cut down the last tree, even when they know it's the last tree: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
>President Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor attack, knew about it in advance but didn't warn the Hawaiian commanders, because he wanted to sucker Hitler to declare war? -- That would easily find a mention in my list of worst conspiracy theories ever.
Actually this is very likely the case. This guy offers plenty of evidence to back it up: http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-4489636-8060653?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179674151&sr=8-1
It's not a totally crazy conspiracy theory. Throughout history there have always been cases of leaders setting up, provoking or allowing attacks in order to convince the populace into supporting a war. It would be naive to think that that practice would have any reason to have stopped.
Well, what you're discussing here I make a living out of studying (theoretical political science). Just about all technology so far has been good technology, and anything in the not-too-distant future is going to be good technology, and anything in the way-distant future will probably be good technology.
The problem is not with technology, but the dissonance-gap created between the technology we develop, and our behavioral implementation of these technologies into society. Medicine was a good technology, and we've basically implemented it well (some states don't get common medicines, but overall we've been good with Medicine). Radio was a good technology and we've developed it well. Flight is a good technology and we've developed it well. The internet and miniaturized media devices? well, that's a complex one. Obviously it's a defining good of our age, and we could go on all day discussing how good it is for our society in various aspects. But, it's also bad in many -- again, not bad in itself, but in how we as a society have chosen to implement the technology of mobile media and the internet.
This will probably be my dissertation, so suffice it to say these technologies have driven us towards a more democratic political atmosphere (that's little-d democratic as in non-representative, not the party). Referendums, Senate election reform, 24hr. news cycles, daily polls, all serve to pressure elected officials as the democratic citizens pressure them for more instant results. The result is, effectively, an antagonist environment of partisanship, bickering, no-compromise, and misinformation. The evolution of immediacy-technologies (this includes flight, I suppose) has changed the pace of our world beyond what is responsible for most of us. To put it simply, what we have developed in terms of social-accessibility this past century is slightly beyond what we as a people are capable of working with maturely. Infotainment butchers credible news channels, misinformation and bias runs amok, fringe party movements dominate national election, the few qu'ran burning crazies grab headlines. This trend is not a result of human evolution, but a lack of. Our technology has improved and we haven't.
This goes beyond civics though, ironically we can socially flounder because of social media technologies. Just look at all the forever-alones on reddit/the internet, or when you go out with your friends for a drink and they all tap away on their smart phones texting other people instead of enjoying the real moment with eachother. Robert Putnam basically made this his focus of study which can be summed up politically here and more socially analyzed in his book Bowling Alone.
Fortunately, we've grown accordingly with technology where it really matters - international conflict and the nuclear bomb. We haven't had any nuclear winters because we were able to adapt to the new international atmosphere of Mutually Assured Destruction - we were smart enough to put aside our antagonistic nature towards our perceived enemies, and cooled our heads well enough to prevent a nuclear war for 60 years (and still into today!). There have been no major world-wars since we've developed mass-mobilization capabilities, and no crazy biological warfare (of course there are incidents like Hussein and his Kurds, or WW1 gas weapons, but those are regional events or in the case of WW1 an example of us toying with a new technology before truly understanding it)
So, thus far there's no real evidence that we've hit a breaking point where we've gone too far in terms of technological development. But we're getting pretty close. Historically there have been moments of technological development, and moments of social development. During the renaissance we began developing philosophy, human rights, and justice while simultaneously making huge strides in technology (industrial revolution anyone)? Maybe one sparked the other, maybe one allowed for the other, either way we and our technology grew together. I only hope that if we wish to continue our exponential push to singularity, we're able to kick our behavior/cognitive development along with it.
in case you're here for the Tibetan Genocide is fake link... see the 2nd half of this message. I tried replying to the badhistory sub but guess what? your mod removed my post citing a rule violation. He could have simply asked me to edit but instead banned me outright. Scared of sourced facts perhaps?
Excellent work again.
The idea that an entire paper is anti China propaganda is within the realm of reason as historical precedents show...
● https://np.reddit.com/r/CIWO/comments/3qttki/tiananmen_square_massacre/
● https://np.reddit.com/r/CIWO/comments/3qtu2k/falun_gong_persecution_organ_harvesting_aka_falun/
● https://np.reddit.com/r/CIWO/comments/3qyqpg/evil_communist_mao_committed_the_greatest/
● Tibetan genocide is also fake
http://i.imgur.com/EcswTEL.jpg
Colonialism, Genocide, Tibet - Sautman-2006-Colonialism-Genocide-Tibet.pdf:
http://repository.keeptibetfree.net/pdf/Sautman-2006-Colonialism-Genocide-Tibet.pdf
 
Then there is all the subhuman shit they did to other weaker nations detailed at
● http://www.globalresearch.ca/a-timeline-of-cia-atrocities/5348804
● http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-to-start-a-war-the-american-use-of-war-pretext-incidents/28554
● http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/
● http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-C-I-Interventions-II--Updated/dp/1567512526/
 
Even their white gentlemen™ vs the "evil and oppressive Asian man" is totally fake, but how fake? See the stats for yourself
http://i.imgur.com/VCNgVeU.jpg
Pathological lying is the way of the "master race".
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Tibetan Genocide debunked
First of all, there is no genocide.
>A central element of the narrative circulated by the Tibet Movement has been that China has carried out genocide and practised colonialism in Tibet. These notions are, for the most part, uncritically accepted by politicians and the media, especially in the West. This essay challenges such characterizations as inept
>
>A discourse of Tibet and genocide, initially carried out by international cold warriors, began with the self exiling of the Dalai Lama in 1959. Reports on ‘genocide in Tibet’ were directed by Purshattom Trikamdas, head of an anti China Indian political party
committed to ‘the liberation of Tibet’, and published by Trikamdas’ International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) (Shalom, 1984, pp. 66 – 7; ICJ, 1959; 1960). The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which helped spirit the Dalai Lama out of Tibet and conducted a proxy war against China in Tibet, funded the ICJ (Grunfeld, 1987, p. 142; Waldman, 2000; Knaus, 1999, p. 168). Its reports argued that attacks on Tibetan Buddhism were genocide because to be Tibetan is to be Buddhist and Tibetan Buddhism was being eliminated, even in the absence of mass killing. The Genocide Convention (1951), however, requires intent to physically destroy an ethnic or religious group in whole or in part; yet Chinese Buddhism was also attacked during this period.
>
> In the case of Tibet, a political goal also accounts for unsupported charges of genocide. The aim is mobilization, especially in the West, where charges go unchallenged due to confusion over what is genocide, the sacralized popularity of the Dalai Lama, a constructed image of Tibetan victimhood, anti Communism, and anti Chinese racism.
Colonialism, Genocide, Tibet - Sautman-2006-Colonialism-Genocide-Tibet.pdf:
http://repository.keeptibetfree.net/pdf/Sautman-2006-Colonialism-Genocide-Tibet.pdf
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Every legitimate gov? You mean like Britain correct?
http://i.imgur.com/C4ZBbHK.jpg
1903 photos of Tibet revealed: Pics taken show Mount Everest to Westerners for first time | Daily Mail Online:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2383412/1903-photos-Tibet-revealed-Pics-taken-Mount-Everest-Westerners-time.html
what's wrong? your "Christian" leaders never told you?
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http://i.imgur.com/4vhKizo.jpg
Friendly Fuedalism - The Tibet Myth:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
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Finally, for some comedy courtesy "all men are created equal champion of human rights" (who are now committing and funding genocide in the Middle East)
>In America, we proudly call it Manifest Destiny and never trouble ourselves with how we got much of California and Texas from Mexico, never mind the rest of the country and our sordid history with Native Americans.
>
>Our history with the native people of Hawaii has been relatively brief and quite brutal and there exists a tenacious independence movement. Still, there is no talk in the mainstream media and among the Hollywood celebrity activist circuit of Hawaiian independence, not to mention Puerto Rican independence or the American Indian movement.
>
>Government repression of these movements also escapes media scrutiny. Before we lecture China, we may
want to tend to our own backyard.
>
>Under the Dalai Lama, was there religious freedom - Was there any freedom - Actually, no. We would recognize the Dalai Lama's Tibet as a medieval religious theocracy with a small elite class served by a large and oppressed serf population. The Dalai Lama ruled a region with no religious freedom, no political freedom, indeed, no human rights of any kind. The rulers were ruthless. Torture and mutilation were widespread. Poverty and starvation were rampant. It was Shangri La only in the West's imagination.
>
>Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and other Hollywood devotees may be surprised at their idol's current positions. The Dalai Lama condemns abortion and homosexuality while accepting prostitution.
For decades the Dalai Lama secured millions of dollars from the CIA
>
>Despite its shortcomings, Chinese rule has provided the Tibetan region with infrastructure and public schooling and provides Tibetans with widespread opportunities and a degree of personal freedom unheard of under the feudal theocracy of the dalai lamas.
Tibet: The Shangri-La that exists only in the West's imagination - The Salt Lake Tribune:
http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/opinion/ci_10359098
Seems strange that China would "commit genocide against Tibetans" with infrastructure and public schooling...
Great book about Letye Gulf: The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
Here are a couple of excellent books about blacks using firearms to defend themselves against white supremacists.
https://www.amazon.com/Negroes-Guns-Robert-F-Williams/dp/1773230522
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
A People's History of the United States, but only if you are an American
Seconded; for a great history of this, check out Cadillac Desert
Also, one problem I have with this graphic is how the United States is treated as a single entity. While the West is running out of water, the Great Lakes region sits on 1/5 of the world's available fresh water. To this day one of America's strengths is abundant natural resources.
https://smile.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X?sa-no-redirect=1
There's even a book.
Morbid, but interesting read about every death in the Grand Canyon. It's a lot. Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
Edit: ~12 per year (700ish total and counting)
1491 seems pretty alright, though /r/history can probably comment further
I hate that I don't know how to link you to the right spot, but hit "look inside" on this book. You want to read the chapter titled "Hold Fast to Your Children: Death in Hot Water". It gives actual accounts of people who went into the pools. One man dove, most fell accidentally; either way it isn't pretty.
Always love seeing someone else post this battle. Probably by tonnage the most lopsided naval battle in history, and the underdog won.
I highly advise anyone interested in this read The Last Stand Of The Tin Can Sailors.
The Battle off Samar.
It's early morning on 25 October 1944. You are a sailor on an American destroyer, also called a tin can for the lack of armor, protecting a force of slow escort carriers from submarines. Your task force is hunting submarines and assisting ground troops during the Invasion of the Philipines. Yesterday a major Japanese surface fleet turned back after massive air attacks, last night you heard another get wiped out over the radio. This morning the big carriers are far to the north destroying Japan's last significant carrier fleet.
Suddenly, out of the mist you see ships on the horizon. Big ships. Japanese ships. The fleet that turned around yesterday is here. Your fleet has 29x5" guns and 42 torpedoes. The largest Japanese ship has 24x5" guns and weighs more than your entire fleet combined. Thirteen of the smallest ships in the American Navy are about to face off against the largest warship in the world and the most powerful Japanese surface fleet of the war.
So what do the Americans do? Charge. One captain, who will win the Medal of Honor, America's highest military award, says over the ship's PA system "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."
The fighter pilots fire pistols at the largest battleship ever built with the largest naval guns ever put to sea. The bombers drop whatever is in their bomb bays, often depth charges, before buzzing the enemy fleet without ammunition. The destroyers fight off heavy cruisers five times their size. The destroyer escorts, designed solely to hunt submarines, duel for an hour so close to the enemy cruisers that the guns can't depress low enough to hit. The carriers, dodging fire from every direction while desperately trying to reach safety, cripple an enemy cruiser with anti-aircraft shells. The outnumbered and inferior ships fight so heroically that the smallest ship in the fleet goes down in history as "The Destroyer Escort that fought like a Battleship".
In the end the Americans lose more men than at almost any other naval engagement of the war. But the Japanese, convinced this is part of a larger force and led by an admiral unwilling to throw away lives needlessly, turn and run. The last major surface action of the war and one of the most lopsided naval battles in recorded history ends as an unexpected American victory.
Of course in order to protect the reputation of the admiral who did not guard the straits the Japanese came through, this story was not known until a couple decades ago. Older histories claim this was another victory of air power over surface ships and ignore the bravery of the surface fleet. Until the excellent book Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors was released, this heroic tale of bravery against all odds was almost entirely unknown.
Always amuses me the similarities (in general) between Pearl harbor and 9/11 and how they were able to get away with the same thing 60+ years later.
If you're bored, grab Day of Deceit....great book on the PH conspiracy
I've not read that one yet, but I did just finish "The Gun" by CJ Chivers, which covers a lot of the same ground. Also excellent in my estimation.
http://amzn.com/0743271734
it's based on the real life shipwreck that inspired Moby Dick. Other posters point to the Nathaniel Philbrick non-fiction book [In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex] (http://www.amazon.com/In-Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship/dp/0141001828)
lol. the book is totally amazing if you want to learn more.
It's a bit of fact and a bit of propaganda. There are many claims in here, so I'll probably miss some, but let me start with the first big red flag that's demonstrably not true:
>And in the blighting shadow of Slavery letters die and art cannot live. What book has the South ever given to the libraries of the world? What work of art has she ever added to its galleries? What artist has she produced…
There were several big names from the south in literature during the Antebellum period. The best example I can think of, William Gilmore Simms, whom Edgar Allen Poe praised as "the best novelist which this country, on the whole, has produced.". The south even had at least one literary magazine that I know of, The Southern Literary Messenger, also edited by Poe for a short time, coincidentally. It's safe to say the south was not suffering for lack of writers during that period.
As for fine arts, I'm struggling to come up with native southern painters who remained in the south through their lives, though I'm not well-versed in art history. If you expand that to painters born elsewhere who worked in the south, I can come up with some like John Audubon and George Caleb Bingham. There are probably others, but I have to admit that art history is totally out of my realm of knowledge.
As for the greater claim of the entire article:
>Possessed of all the raw materials of manufactures and the arts, its inhabitants look to the North for everything they need from the cradle to the coffin. Essentially agricultural in its constitution, with every blessing Nature can bestow upon it, the gross value of all its productions is less by millions than that of the simple grass of the field gathered into Northern barns. With all the means and materials of wealth, the South is poor.
There's some truth in that. No, the south did not have much industry outside of agriculture, save for a few places in eastern states like Virginia. However, I'd say it's a stretch to say that the South looked to the North for everything they needed. Most of the whites in the south weren't plantation owners, but subsistence farmers who mostly took care of their own needs. The claim that the difference in economy was due to slavery is mostly true. In order to support industry, you need people to sell things to. Slaves don't need that many goods, so producing goods to sell is less enticing in such a market.
>Why are they subjected to a censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them?
There's a small bit of truth to the censorship, but I only know of one very specific case of censorship. There was an outrage among southerners in 1835 over mailed abolitionist pamphlets, Post Master General Amos Kendall allowed them to be banned them from being mailed to the south. During this time, several southern states also passed laws against distributing abolitionist literature.
The bigger issue here might be that of self-censorship. I think this goes beyond people who might have believed in abolition privately, but publicly denounced it (although those certainly existed as well). Newspapers in the south, even those that took a more liberal stance, seemed unable to reconcile that the system of slavery their part of the country relied on was an inherent evil. A great example of this is Brownlow's Whig, a newspaper created by William Brownlow, who would eventually serve as governor and senator of TN, following the Civil War. I choose Brownlow because he's the perfect example of this confusing dichotomy and the shifting view of some southerners on slavery. When the paper begins in the 1830s, he is decidedly pro-slavery. As the war approaches, he continues to support slavery, but he is staunchly opposed to secession. During and after secession, he continues to oppose secession and in the meantime, his views on slavery shift. First, he begins to admit that Union is more important than slavery before finally taking a flat-out abolitionist stance by the end of the war.
From a transcript published in the July 2, 1864 issue of his paper, illustrating the strange position before advocating complete abolition:
>I do now know that I would be willing to go so far as probably he would. But I cordially agree with him in this -- I think, considering what has been done about slavery, taking the thing as it now stands, overlooking altogether, either in the way of condemnation or in the way of approval, any act that has brought us to the point where we are, but believing in my conscience and with all my heart, that what has brought us where we are in the matter of slavery, is the original sin and folly of treason and secession, because you remember that the Chicago Convention itself was understood today and I believe it virtually did explicitly say that they would not touch slavery in the States. ... We are prepared to demand not only that the whole territory of the United States shall not be made slave, but that the General Government, both the war power and the peace power, to put slavery as nearly possible back where it was -- for although that would be a fearful state of society, it is better than anarchy; or else use the whole power of the Government, both of war and peace, and all the practicable power that the people of the United States will give them to exterminate and extinguish slavery.
It's pretty clear that no one told Brownlow not to talk about abolition. His paper was known for being inflammatory and he didn't really care what the authorities had to say. It was shut down and reopened several times over the years as he fled from public backlash, assassination attempts, and eventually the Confederate army. It changed names almost as often as he changed locations including: Tennessee Whig, The Whig, The Jonesborough Whig, The Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, The Knoxville Whig and Independent Journal, and perhaps most colorfully, Brownlow's Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator. My point being, it was pretty clear that he didn't care if he upset people and wasn't the type of man who wouldn't talk about abolition because it might against some regulation. He didn't believe in abolition for other, personal reasons until later on. I think this might be indicative of the more widespread form of "censorship" and not talking about abolition.
As far as the entire article, it seems to fall into the old view of looking reasons why the south was backward rather than seeing the north as revolutionary and the south as being more in step with other countries, like those in Europe and Russia. I agree with James McPherson's assessment in Battle Cry of Freedom that the war was the south's counter revolution to an economic, social, and political revolution that was happening in the north. In short: the article presents a heavily biased, though not completely untrue view of the south and its problems.
edit: added more sources and expanded a bit.
You might be interested in Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It’s a little old but he does an amazing job of laying out the issues with California’s water system.
I believe you're a bit taken in by the neocon propaganda. Muslims don't hate us for our freedoms and they aren't too much different than you or I in their life goals.
The part I believe that you haven't heard ever is how the US has for decades oppressed and exploited other countries. There are numerous examples of US economic manipulation and exploitation that cause serious hardship for the poor of other countries. This leads to a lot of underlying resentment for western style of business practices and what can be spun by the neocons as "liberalism".
If you truly want to educate yourself on the actions of the US around the world, I would suggest reading the book Overthrow.
Please read this so you understand what role firearms play in peaceful protest and societal change. https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X/ref=asc_df_082236123X/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312425492373&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2120017822570763225&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9026941&hvtargid=pla-561430308896&psc=1
Want to know more about Grand Canyon fatalities? I have a book recommendation for you.
Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
Both. Books and articles. Do a quick Google search and you will find plenty. Also, many many interviews on YouTube.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/01/the_case_against_hillary_clinton.html
http://youtu.be/qE8PG2mpo58
Death in Yellowstone is a very interesting book. But I just couldn't finish it. It was too depressing, especially the stories of little children who died horrible or painful deaths.
I highly recommend the book "Death in Yellowstone"
A LOT of people have died from the hot springs.
One of the people mauled by a bear was someone from my hometown and a good friend of my dads at the time.
There is a whole chapter about horrible deaths resulting from people getting too close to the hot springs in the book Death in Yellowstone. It should be required reading before entering the park.
Highly recommended book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Rothstein goes back to the 1920s to trace the various methods government, and mostly federal government, used to create and maintain segregation.
I have to agree. Although many were privately in favor of segregation they required the law to hold it up. Even gentlemen's agreement deed restrictions were subject to block busting.
There's quite a few good books I'd recommend on the subject:
tagging /u/NotGerkonanaken since they said they were interested
edit: obligatory 'thanks for the gold' edit. :)
The paper was primarily focused on Mississippi and Alabama during the period immediately following the Civil War to 1900. Since it isn't published in a journal or theoretically available outside of my school, I'm not particularly comfortable with providing the text.
I would recommend two books, they're very well written, and really do focus very specifically on the topic of Black Codes and the Pig Laws.
http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462423372&sr=8-1&keywords=Slavery+by+Another+Name
and
http://www.amazon.com/Worse-than-Slavery-Parchman-Justice/dp/0684830957?ie=UTF8&psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=od_aui_detailpages00
If you were to pick only one, I would read "Worse Than Slavery."
That sort of toxicity has permeated pretty much all discourse in the US. Everything about politics, race, sex, sexuality and equality. Much of it comes from alienation, much from lack of exposure to other viewpoints. The end result is that people tend to use inflammatory language to denigrate opponents. I could write a long essay about this sort of issue, and folks have written whole books on the subject.
A lot of the issue is lack of empathy for "the other side". If they aren't human, then it doesn't matter how they get treated/killed. This is one of the first things done in warfare - dehumanize the enemy. You can see it when the media has such intense coverage about beheadings in Syria or the riots in Ferguson - the intent of the media is to make the audience feel that those people are rabid animals who have to be put down. No coverage of how they got there, why the folks do what they do, nothing about their families - just horrible coverage to inflame the audience to support overwhelming and crushing violence against them.
> actually addressing the issues and engaging in good-faith discussions
To begin with, not everyone agrees that X is a problem, let alone that it should be "fixed". Or even that it is a bad thing. You can see that in the political debates over global warming.
Some books on having intelligent conversations (in no particular order) include:
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Helps identify BS in conversation/debates.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Explains how different people come to different political philosophies based on their values.
How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable. The author has written a number of books with "gentle art of verbal self defense" in the title. Most are about how to identify verbal attacks and to side-step them.
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. Gives lots of examples of bad rhetoric.
Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren. How to have a discussion with a fundamentalist without losing your mind. In German, I think I should do a translation of the book.
The formal subject of making arguments to convince others used to be called rhetoric. And it has been taught since the days of Plato and Aristotle.
>Should your wages go up three time because of nothing you did? Why?
I'll let Richard Wolff, a Phd economics professor elaborate why, and maybe... just maybe... you'll see the big underlying picture he's trying to convery. So pucker up that sphincter hole my friend:
From 1820 to 1970 the following sentence is true: The average level of wages ─ real wages what you actually got for an hours worth of work rose every decade for 150 years. There's' probably no capitalist country that can boast a record like that. It's absolutely stunning and unusual. even in the great depression, real wages went up because even though peoples money wages went down prices fell even more, so you ended up being able to buy more even though you had more dollars in your pocket, because prices fell.
What did this mean? It meant that Americans began to believe, and you know that how deeply that is in our political language, that we lived in a really blessed place. God, if you believe in that, must really like us, something magical about America: You came here, you worked hard, and amazingly, you got more. You could imagine to live in your own home. You could even dream at one point of sending your children to college. To have a car all your own. To wear nice clothes. It was amazing every family thought that it would live better than the generation before in the next generation better still. Parents got into the habit of offering their children to provide them with the education and the support that would make them have a better life.
And the irony here the United States and the marvel was that it was true... millions of people, the ancestors the most of us in this room if we're Americans came to the United states hoping to cash in on this operation, willing to work hard expecting that their life here would reward them with a higher standard of living then they would have gotten if they'd stayed where they came from, and mostly they were right. And it becomes part of the American culture in the American imagination. This is the place where if you work hard you get more pay. Yea... the work may not be pleasant. The work may be difficult, but the reward is at the mall. You'll earn more money and you'll buy more stuff.
Try to imagine with me what it would mean to a population that for a hundred and fifty years internalizes that image, that hope, that expectation if it were suddenly to stop being true. And I ask you to imagine that because that's what happened.
In the 1970's the rising real wage the United States came to an and, it has never resumed. The real wage of the American worker today, the average amount of goods and services you can buy with an hour of your labor is no greater today than it was in the 1978. You may be working harder. You may be working longer You may be working more efficiently because you work with a computer and all these other things. And indeed you are: You are delivering more goods and service per hour of your work to your employer. He's very happy about, but he doesn't pay you one iota more. This is an astonishing change, a sea change, a dramatic alteration in one's circumstance. It's all the more power in our country because it's unspoken. Because in the 1970's or 80's and 90's or to this day, nobody talks about this. Nobody confronts this. No one asks, "why did this happen?" "What do we do about it?" Instead as good Americans, we pretend that it isn't there. We imagine that if it's going on it's just about me and my job and my circumstance rather than a social process. And we imagine that it's not a social problem just my particular problem then I can solve it.
How did the American working class solve the problem. Two things they did, starting in the 1970's and right up until the crisis, and those two things are part of why this crisis happens which is why I'm gonna tell you about them now. The first thing Americans did is conclude,
>"Okay, I'm not getting anymore wages per hour, I know what, I'll do more hours."
Smart move.
>"And not only me the adult male in the house... but my wife. She's gonna go out, she may have been at home, she may have been a housewife... no more of that. She has to go out because we have to sustain the the family standard of living rising. And the old people have to come out of retirement and take at least a part-time job. And the teenager ought to do something on Saturday's at least, don't you think?
Here's a statistic to think about: the average number of hours worked per year by an American right now average, is 20% more than the average number of hours worked by a Swedish, French, German, or Italian worker. Think about it. For every 6 hours you work, they only work 5 or something like that. Some of you go to Europe and you enjoy lovely dinners with wine in an alfresco setting in an Italian town, and you say to yourself, "These people know how to live." And you imagine it's a matter of their culture they just love grapes. It isn't got much to do with culture:
What they have is... TIME.
They don't work like we do. They have time for long dinners. We are the country that invented fast food, and now you know why. It's a necessity, we don't have time to sit down. We need jobs to run by one of those takeout windows and yell something out at a disconsolate teenager who yells something back and hands you something you shouldn't put in your body in any case. And so Americans went to work most importantly the women. In 1970, 40% of American women worked outside the home for money. Today, double 80%. An absolutely fundamental change: those women had to do that. They merely thought of it as women's liberation and it certainly had those dimensions. They wanted to help the family, the point in fact is if the family was going to continue to consume to give its children what it had promised to live the American dream., since husband wasn't gonna get anymore wages ever again. She had to go out. But when the wife goes out all kinds of things change: Women in America, household women held together the emotional life of our society. They did the emotional work. They provided the solace. When that woman has to go out and do 8 hours of work and get dressed and do the travel and back home, she can't do it anymore. She may face that fact, but she can't.
Starting in the 1970's, the United States became the country with the highest rate of divorce, the relationships couldn't survive. We have 6% of the population in the world and consume over half the psychotropic drugs, the anti-depressants, what's going on? Are we crazy people? I don't think so. I think we are under extraordinary pressure. We work the longest hours on the face of the earth. We do more hours per average worker than the Japanese. That's saying something. And our families are stressed, deeply stressed, as anyone who has studied the situation knows. Our behavior has changed under the pressure of this extra work, and one way to describe it to you is to mention a book some of you may know. A Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, wrote a famous book with a funny title, Bowling Alone, he studies Americans participation in anything other than making their life hang together.
• Bowling leagues used to absorb millions of Americans. No more.
• Trade unions used to be centers of collective life. No more.
• Community organizations used to get lots of people. PTA's did too. No more.
Americans turned inwards in the last 30 years, and it's not some mysterious cultural phenomenon. It has to do with you're working too hard, you're stressed out of your mind. Your relationships are falling apart. Your intimate life is a disaster. But you don't want to see it in terms of wages and the job, and that's what I'm gonna stress.
So the American people ever resourceful did something else which further traumatized them. To keep the consumption going to deliver the American dream to their children, they went on a borrowing binge the likes of which no working class in the history of the world ever undertook before. Starting in the 1970's the Americans savings rate collapsed. We stopped saving money, but much worse than that, we BORROWED money. We invented a new way to give everybody debts. It's called the credit card. Before the 1970's they didn't have that. only the rich people had an American Express card. After that we developed the American Express card for the masses, it's called Master and Visa, and you all have them, you have lots of them. You collect them. You max one out, you get another one. And you keep hoping that this Russian Roulette will not get you. And so in 2007 we came to the end of the line for the working class. They couldn't work anymore hours, they were exhaust, they were stressed beyond words. and now they were overwhelmed by having violated what their parents have told them, "Save money little boy." "Hold something back little girl for a difficult time. For a rainy day. For a special expense. For an illness." Not only did we not save anything, but we're in a hock up to our ears.
Here's some reading for you.
And ignoring the oversimplified and outright false accusation that "so many black men abandon their children", what else is wrong? You learn how to be a father from your father. And if your father didn't have the opportunity to learn from his father because they were property? Well, there's another difficulty, isn't there? And it's a difficulty that's not going to go away in one generation in the best of circumstances.
And why is it so far away from being "the best of circumstances"? Well, you could read Slavery by Another Name and The New Jim Crow to see how slavery actually lasted well past its abolishment and how the for-profit prison complex is preventing black people from simply "working past it". It's really such a complicated, horrible web... It's too much for me to try to discuss in one post.
But put simply: No other enslaved group, not the Irish, not the Japanese, not any other group of people has faced the same level of obstruction while attempting to rise up to equality. And if you think that these issues aren't part of the cause rather than the result of crime and drug use and poverty which results in black fathers being taken from their families... well, you're wrong.
Read James D. Hornfischer's books:
Neptune's Inferno - About Guadalcanal
The Fleet at Flood Tide - The Pacific campaign later in the war. I'm currently reading this.
The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors - About Taffey 3 and battle off Samar
Yes. Read this book.
I won't give any direct answers because this is something you need to know for yourself, not because someone told you.
So if you want to know how to approach this, first you need to know the history. Read for example A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn to see specific instances how was government behaving in last 500 years. Watch documentaries from John Pilger. Watch Assassination of Russia to see how Putin got into power. Read War is a Racket. I could go on and on; there are hundreds and hundreds of great books and documentaries and unclassified documents which you can get today and check for yourself.
Also I need to point out - don't make a (common) mistake thinking of any government as a single entity. It is made of people, each of them having his own agenda. More proper question then would be, could some people in government have so much power and skill and at the same time be so unscrupulous, that they plan, commit, and get away with committing terrorist (false-flag) acts for their own profits?
I can't offer you squat on job hunting, but I used to be a water lawyer here in California and if you want to read an insanely interesting book, that will always up your interest with anyone in any part of the water business in the US (or probably Canada, too), read Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which all about the history of the aquafication of the West. Looks like you are Europe-based from your job applications, but it is a fascinating story well worth your time.
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
Since you didn't specifically mention it: it was a whaleship that was attacked and sunk by a whale. For those who want to read more on this, I enjoyed this book.
That ELI5 is, of course by nature, too simplistic. The Germans didn't "install the Tutsi into power". Instead, Rwanda as it exists today is one of the few countries where the current borders pretty closely approximate with the borders of a complex hierarchical kingdom that existed before the country became a colony.
Colonial powers prefer using existing governing structures as it saves them the time and effort to set up an entire administrative system of their own, and in the case of Rwanda, this was easier than usual. They simply solidified the existing system, so in their eyes, at this point they weren't inducing volatility at all, but strengthening a stable system.
After WWI, the Belgians took over the administrative functions and they not only continued to rely on these governing structures, but, guided by the racist and eugenics movements of the time, came up with a racial explanation for the Tutsi rule: their superiority was demonstrated by their lighter skin, aquiline nose, tall stature, etc. as opposed to the broad-nosed, darker and shorter Hutus. According to this new racial mythology, Hutu were Bantus while the Tutsi were part-Caucasian.
So they didn't intend to induce volatility, but they certainly weren't well-intentioned when they decided how to rule. As to direct economic gain, Rwanda has few resources and covers a small and landlocked territory, but it was well-suited for cash crop production of mainly coffee and some tea.
This is another important cause of the volatility of the country in itself. The post-colonial one-party dictatorship under Hutu rule relied almost entirely on a mix of foreign aid and profits from the coffee trade, and purposely kept the country rural and the population uneducated in order to maximize the exploitability of its only profitable natural resource.
When coffee prices plummeted in the late 1980ies, this caused serious problems for the regime as both the international and domestic communities as well as the exiled Tutsi community in Uganda mounted a serious opposition to the dictatorship. They were eventually forced to agree to political reforms, but hard-liners who were unwilling to relinquish their power seized control after the assassination (probably by the RPF - Tutsi rebels from Uganda) of the President, were able to use the years of anti-Tutsi propaganda, trained submission through dictatorship, and fears about the rebels from Uganda to organize the genocide.
There still is a lot more to it, and it is also interesting, but worrying to see many parallels between the current post-genocide Tutsi government and the pre-genocide Hutu government. I mostly based the above on academic sources, but more accessible reading I could recommend about the country and the region would include Dancing in the Glory of Monsters and anything by Prunier and Mamdani. Jared Diamond's Collapse has a chapter on Rwanda which focuses on the economic dimension; it's a bit controversial, but based on some very interesting research.
For the American Civil War:
Jean Edward Smith's Grant biography goes into some detail regarding logistics, as Grant's experience as a Quartermaster during the Mexican-American War, in particular when Scott's army was cut off from supplies during the Mexico City campaign, influenced actions like Grant's mule train to Chattanooga to relieve Rosecrans, and Sherman's March to the Sea.
However, it's not purely about the logistics of the war, which is covered in some more detail in McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, especially the comparisons of the economics of the Union and Confederate states.
And regarding World War II, the US Army Center of Military History has published two free books:
> What college departments usually offer logistics courses? Business Administration usually?
Or a dedicated logistics department. MIT has its Logistics and Supply Chain Management course available online.
https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
> Because white people didn't go through slavery.
Wrong.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm
http://www.amazon.com/They-Were-White-Slaves-Enslavement/dp/0929903056
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
1491 by Charles Mann is a great place to start if you're interested in pre-Columbian America.
There's a whole book of this stuff. We read stories aloud as we drove to and from the park. "Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park." Many stories of attempts at hot tubbing the pools, falling into the pools, rocks falling on heads, etc.
>hurr durr source is funny
now fuck off
Read the book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible I am only a couple of chapters in but so far it has illustrated to me how firearms ownership in the black community kept a lot of people alive during the civil rights movement.
Try 1491 by Charles Mann.
Read 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's about civilization in the Americas before the influx of Westerners. It's meticulously well-documented, with lots of good notes for further reading / source checking. The writing is well-done -- it's academic information written for a popular audience, basically a history-book version of "A Brief History of Time". It will completely revolutionize your understanding of the incredible cultures and societies that existed before Europeans showed up.
"...considering how old it is"? You don't need to go back all that far to find a time when restrictive covenents were still stipulated and enforced. If you'd like a pretty in-depth treatment of the subject, check out the book, The Color of Law.
It is a very complex issue, and certainly on the poorer end of the spectrum housing policy, especially pernicious starting in the New Deal era from the Federal level which was deliberately racist and codified segregation, still accounts for much of the racial segregation in the country today (see The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein for a very good analysis).
But what is interesting about the wealthier end of the spectrum is that many middle class black families are choosing to live below their means in majority-black suburbs rather than be a minority in the common majority-white suburbs. This is a really interesting paper about the issue. While there are several factors, including discrimination, a major factor is that many black families prefer not being a minority in their own neighborhoods even if it comes at the costs of de facto segregation.
It just is not as simple as people like Klein want it to be. Klein's point is definitely not the slam-dunk he thinks it is. First, his talking point is based on statistics specific to a few large urban areas. It is not representative of the country as a whole and shouldn't be framed that way as Klein did in the podcast. It is much more complicated than simply looking at New York, LA, and Chicago and the average income of neighborhoods to determine the relative quality of social services, schools, etc.
In the Gardens of Beasts, about the US ambassador to Germany during Hitler's rise to power.
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, about an amazing battle at sea in the Pacific.
I second reading The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, I grabbed the audiobook to listen on my commute and found it an enjoyable listen/read.
Yes - all other things being equal. This exact situation has played out countless times in real life with ships lost at sea, and sailors on barren islands. Just look at what happened to the whaleship Essex (the inspiration for Moby Dick, and very well documented in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea) - the fattest sailors lived the longest/survived, while the skinniest ones died first. In the case of the Essex and many other ships of the 17th-19th centuries, the white sailors lived longer than the black sailors because they had more privileged lifestyles and thus weren't as skinny. This is also why, apart from other social and diet factors, Polynesian peoples are bigger on average - when their ancestors where colonizing the Pacific and on the sea for months at a time, the naturally larger individuals didn't die of starvation as often, and were thus selected for.
>can you please clarify your ideological position
Sure.
I'm a paleoconservative deep ecologist. This means I adhere to the oldest values of American conservatism and pair them with an interest in environmentalism through a more wholesome design of society.
I moderate /r/new_right because the new right ideas are closest to paleoconservatism in some ways. I tried to write a description of new_right that encompassed all of the ideas that the movement has tossed around.
Beyond that, I think politics is a matter of strategies and not collectivist moral decisions, am fond of libertarian-style free market strategies, and take interest in many things, hence the wide diversity of stuff that I post.
I've learned that on Reddit it's important to ask for people to clarify definitions before ever addressing any question using those terms. If you want me to answer any specific questions, we need a clear definition first agreed on by all parties.
I recommend the following books for anyone interesting in post-1970s conservatism beyond the neoconservative sphere:
Other than that, I'm pretty much a mainstream Republican. Not all links I post constitute endorsement, such as this fascinating article.
The most-often recommended single volume is Battle Cry of Freedom.
If Gettysburg is an interest, I found Hallowed Ground by the same author to be a good read. More exhaustive is Sears's Gettysburg, which helped me to understand a very dynamic picture.
Finally, we often get inquiries about the roots of the war. The Pulitzer Prize winning
Impending Crisis is first-rate.
To be fair, the textbooks most of us studied in school (in the US anyway) tended to gloss over some of these more uncomfortable truths about our history. I highly recommend reading A People's History of The United States by Howard Zinn. It really put things in perpective for me.
Cadillac Desert, one of the greatest books pn the topic of vanishing water and the American West.
According to the beef industry, it takes somewhere between 450-850 gallons water/pound of beef. Less biased research has put that number as high as 5,000 gallons water/pound of beef. Even at 450 gallons water/pound of beef it is still pretty ridiculous.
The vast majority of this water is consumed by irrigating fields to produce feed for cows. And this is no small portion of total water supplies. In CO, 30% of the total water use in the state goes directly to the livestock industry.
Cadillac Desert put it very succinctly "The West’s water crisis — and many of its environmental problems as well — can be summed up, implausible as this may seem, in a single word: livestock." As a restoration ecologist working in the western US, there is no greater hurdle I face than damage from cattle and cattle related activities.
If we're dropping books with mundane topics count me in
Cadillac Desert is a great book that talks about this Dam and the general messed up water policy in the America West that led to it (and many other misguided projects).
Fascinating read that gives a lot of context to just messed up water policy is in the USA.
here's the book. I myself haven't gotten around to it:
http://www.amazon.com/In-Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship/dp/0141001828/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376622637&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=wahleship+essex
It depends on what you want to get out of it. If you want a clear, intro-level overview of the subject, check out Shafer-Landau's Fundamental's of Ethics. It's a fantastic place to start, and it is the book I recommend if you really want to understand the subject and plan to read outside the context of a class.
If you want primary texts, I suggest that you get the book's companion, The Ethical Life.
If you want a textbook that is a little shorter and more engaging, check out Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy.
If you want an introduction that's informative and fun to read but less informative than the Rachels or the Shafer-Landau, check out Sandel's Justice. You can also watch his Justice lectures online. This book, as opposed to the other two, is written for a popular audience.
> All slaves have died, all of those who owned or directly, socioeconomically benefitted from the slave trade have died, and all ancient American companies have ceased slave labor.
Here is what I meant, and why I think your statement quoted above is not true: Blacks were put into debt slavery up until the second world war. That's only 75 years ago. A fascinating read is Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
> these genuine problems aren't exactly being approached the right way by the Democrats, historically the party of the minority voter.
Absolutely true and for the last fifty years, neither party has done well. Specifically Mr. Clinton made awful policy choices for Blacks in America with his "tough on crime" choices like three-strikes and mandatory sentencing. "Tough on crime" is a popular message that both sides of the aisle espouse.
Read "White Cargo" http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. You won't read about this in High School History textbooks
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/15/white_slaves/
https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
https://www.amazon.com/They-Were-White-Slaves-Enslavement/dp/0929903056
Just because you didn't learn about it in school or see it on TV, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X/
https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/
https://www.amazon.com/Gunfight-Battle-Over-Right-America/dp/0393345831
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Guns-Liberals-Second-Amendment/dp/1610391691/
https://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493660/
https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Second-Amendment-Documentary-Commentaries/dp/0962366439
https://www.amazon.com/Armed-America-Remarkable-Became-American/dp/1595552847
https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Bear-Arms-Origins-Anglo-American/dp/0674893077
https://www.amazon.com/Targeting-Guns-Firearms-Control-Institutions/dp/0202305694
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Amendment-Biography-Michael-Waldman/dp/147674744X
There's actually quite a few good books on this, including "That Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, by Charles Cobb.
NPR did a short interview with the author earlier this year.
"Negros With Guns," by Robert Williams, is another great read.
>Rob Williams was using boycott and pacifists or passive resistance in the '50s.
> But finally, after a couple of court cases when it was just egregious examples of misjustice on behalf of the African American community said enough. If you bring violence to our door, we will not run into our houses, lock up and close the windows and hide.
>"The federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men, and that if it's necessary for us to die, we must be willing to die; if it's necessary for us to kill, we must be willing to kill."
The right to bear arms should be available to all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.
I recommend this book. Without guns, the civil rights movement would have been impossible.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
Counterpoint
Most of the "violence" people have been worried about from Trump protests has been property damage anyway. Don't beat up people in MAGA hats [who aren't otherwise threatening people etc]. Intimidate Trump, or the outright Neo-Nazis, not your dumb neighbors. Beyond that... extraordinary times.
Obligatory link to one of my favorite books.
There's an entire book about people who die in the Grand Canyon: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
I read part of it and I recall that the most common death was 30ish males who died of dehydration because they underestimated their water needs. A lot of them thought it was a quick day trip to the bottom of the canyon and back. Didn't take any water and succumbed to thirst and exhaustion on the trip up.
This reminded me of a book I bought in Arizona... There is a book that documents every death in the Grand Canyon. A large chunk of those deaths is people who died trying to pee into it. http://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1570980217/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_ZPwTAb8JCFRZX
>To your last point, indentured servitude is not slavery. The idea is that you have a debt which you pay off through work directly for a person. Slavery is the absence of wages and freedom but being required to work. An indentured servant is paid a wage and generally has freedom outside of their job.
In real history, that distinction is not as sharp as you seem to think. "Indentured Servitude" has very often been slavery in everything but name. This has been true globally, though the book I linked focuses on the US.
Short answer: the entire Japanese battlegroup had been under murderous attack for the previous two days. Kurita, the IJN commander, had his flagship torpedoed out from under him, then spent an entire day under air attack, losing Musashi and taking damage across the fleet. The center force then had a nighttime strait transit through San Bernardino, at battle stations expecting an attack. Much like the Allied crews that were massacred at the first battle of Savo Island, the IJN crews were exhausted and prone to mistakes, from the commander on down to the lookouts.
Read Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors if you want the details of this fight. Hornfischer for Navy history win.
Obligatory mention of this book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Tin-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482
It's fantastic.
I always loved this line from a destroyer captain at the start of the battle: "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can." It's so laconic and the courage in it is almost banal in its expression.
We weren't taken by surprise at Pearl:
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299
And the French were surprised by Hitler. They were well prepared for war sadly they were prepared for WWI
I have found a lot of good discussion and support for men at /r/MensLib/
I've also heard about the term "social infrastructure" and how we have lost a lot of it which contributes to a lack of spaces for people to connect with one another. The historical "social infrastructure" for men have been bars, bowling alleys, VFWs, etc. but they have fallen out of favor as places for meaningful social interactions.
I haven't read it, but have heard the book 'Bowling Alone' mentioned alongside similar conversations. https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
In a broader sense of community impact, the podcast 99% invisible has a good episode about social infrastructure. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/palaces-for-the-people/
Robert Putnam has done a significant amount of research related to racial and ethnic diversity. He published an article and later a book by the same name, entitled Bowling Alone wherein he discusses the detrimental effects of a multiracial society. The following is a quote from the above linked Wikipedia article:
>In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups.
The more homogeneous the population, the more social capital that population has. Diversity is not a strength but is, in fact, a weakness.
-The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour
-Halsey's Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm, and an Untold Rescue
-Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10
-In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors
People have argued that in fact Roosevelt engineered Pearl Harbor to specifically entice the Japanese into attacking because he knew it would make people demand involvement in the war. It sounds like a conspiracy theory but it's pretty documented.
https://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299
I remembered the term wrong it is third place which is why google didn't bring anything up when you looked into it. Here is the wikipedia article on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Here is how I would describe it.
Third Place is a concept of a place that we spend a lot of time socializing and enjoying ourselves at that is neither work nor home. The Cheers bar, bowling alleys, cafes, coffee shops, book shops, heck even hair salons or anywhere you can socialize with people you get along with. Due to economic changes which means less money to spend and people more likely to work less set hours, the internet, and having less free time in general third places have disintegrated which has caused a lot of harm to socialization.
This is the primary book on the subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
> bit dull to claim that the U.S goal of the Korean war was to overthrow the PRC
It has always been the goal and it still is
USA’s warfare against China 1/2 | http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
USA’s warfare against China 2/2 | http://www.voltairenet.org/article177116.html
 
Here is how America spreads by democracy....through government toppling
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/
Read "Overthrow" by Stephen Kinzer. It's a great book that details all of the 14 governments the US has had a part in overthrowing. He does a great job of establishing the context in each situation, which often highlights how short sighted the people involved in these events really were.
Another comprehensive, really well written book on the same subject.
Its not about preference. That's like saying the difference between slavery, feudalism and capitalism is whichever someone prefers living under. Its mutually exclusive.
Communism is not your "life your life to the fullest" type of philosophy akin to Buddhism. Its not a way of life or a way of thought, its a set of viewpoints and conceptions about the nature of society, and of its respective institutions, with private property being its main focus. Communism is about viewing the contemporary world as a result of its logical, material precedents, known as historical materialism. Its about gaining an understanding into the nature of property relations and essentially of capitalism.
Marx's viewpoint in looking at history essentially centered these principles
>1. The basis of human society is how humans work on nature to produce the means of subsistence.
>2. There is a division of labour into social classes (relations of production) based on property ownership where some people live from the labour of others.
>3. The system of class division is dependent on the mode of production.
>4. The mode of production is based on the level of the productive forces.
>5. Society moves from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class, by overthrowing the "political shell" that enforces the old relations of production no longer corresponding to the new productive forces. This takes place in the superstructure of society, the political arena in the form of revolution, whereby the underclass "liberates" the productive forces with new relations of production, and social relations, corresponding to it.
From this viewpoint he went on to conclude that capitalism inherently was a class system, based on an economic and political hierarchy, which give rise to many phenomenon that is harmful to humanity. Marx for example explained Imperialism as being the result of such a construct. This is a widely documented study and something you can find so easily.
Michael Parenti gives a good talk here which encompasses these ideas. I highly recommend watching it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEzOgpMWnVs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZTrY3TQpzw
If you never heard of the book "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn, I also highly suggest it. Its a great and popular book that tells the history of the US through the perspective the American proletariat, and clearly explains how dominant role economic hierarchy plays in history.
You see, communism is not just an opposition to commercialized lifestyle, and what not, its an explanation as to very contemporary problems within society itself. Problems that are very much deeply rooted within the system. For example, the mass media and its operation as a business. Noam Chomsky, considered US's best intellectual, along with Edward Herman wrote a great book called Manufacturing Consent that
deals with this topic.
You're operating on a huge straw man. You see, communism is more about understanding society from a logical, scientific perspective, rather than creating some utopia. I can point you to a few more sources that you might find of interest. Or at least start with Wikipedia articles. But I do recommend at least watching the Michael Parenti clip. Chomsky has good talks to but I don't like hes style as much. You don't even have to call yourself a "communist" to accept that world view and knowledge.
> that people on the downstream side of the watershed will not have enough water
...or more likely agribusiness, state/local governments, NA tribes, or other highly organized interests. A horrifying but thorough analysis of the Western water crisis can be found in Marc Reisner's 'Cadillac Desert.'
The book Cadillac Desert is an excellent read on water rights in the western US--I quite highly recommend it!
I recommend to everyone on this thread to read Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
"Whiskey is for drinking, Water is for fighting"
Worth mentioning that Greenland was far more green in the days of Erik the Red.
If you want to read more about how the viking settlers of greenland fared, I would recommend this book called Collapse.
Honestly, if I try to present a comprehensive and detailed explanation, I won't be very convincing (plus I'm too lazy).
Shame is, the two books I usually recommend, so people don't have to rely on my imprecise blabber to decide what they think, are from french speaking authors and haven't been translated yet (don't think they will be, come to think of it).
How everything can collapse: A small manual of collapsology for the use of present generations : Why and how our civilization is prone to collapse. Pretty comprehensive analysis of the current situation.
The age of low tech. Towards a technically sustainable civilization : Focused on resources management and technology consumption. How we can prepare our society to technically adapt to this collapse.
You can still read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (that one I haven't read yet) to better understand the similarities between past fallen civilizations and our own.
That would be news to the Confederates. They explicitly stated that their cause was slavery. Here's what the Mississippi declaration of secession had to say on the matter:
>Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Still not convinced? Read the other slave states' declarations of secession. Or read a good review book on the Civil War, like McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.
P.S.: It's actually interesting to note that the slave states didn't support states' rights in their declarations, beyond the right of secession. They actually cite the refusal of certain Northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act as a major cause of secession. Some Northern states had passed laws forbidding state officials from aiding in the capture and return of runaway slaves. South Carolina argued in its declaration of secession that by refusing to enforce federal laws, these Northern states were subverting the Union. They argued that this breach freed South Carolina of its obligations to the Union and justified secession.
John Rawls may be a good place for you to start for a "modern" perspective (look here first: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/ )
Michael Sandel wrote a pretty readable book based off his popular harvard course on the topic. You can find the book here ( https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508 ) or even just check out the course itself here ( http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/ )
​
Hope this helps! This isn't my area of interest but I have come across them along the way.
I really enjoy Justice by Michale Sandel. It's a series of riveting lectures that serve as a great entry into philosophy through ethics and justice.
You can also read his book.
I know I'm late to the party and there are a lot of good answers, and there are a lot of "hur der cause koran" replies...
This isn't so much on the extremism rise in Islam but more to the anti-western sentiment. This is more of a summary and lacking a lot of detail but a lot of it can be traced back to Operation Ajax in 1953 where MI6, with the help of the CIA, decided to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and put "their guy" (the Shah) in charge because Mosaddegh wanted to nationalize Iranian oil, thus making AIOC (now part of BP) pay more taxes if they wanted to drill in Iran.
It is hard to make a TLDR to the situation in Iran between the coup and the revolution in 1979 but essentially. Shah turned out to be a dick as a ruler, people were pissed at the US and GB for helping force the pro west regime change, started gathering in mosques since the Shah banned public gatherings due to riots, anti-west / radical clerics get into the heads of people that are pissed and things start going downhill from there.
Now you have a hard anti-west sentiment growing around the region and the west essentially cock blocking any attempt at people getting back on their feet so you have a lot of poor, uneducated people that have a lot of hate toward the US. They may not be completely sure why but as is the case with most extremely uneducated people they listen to what they consider to be smart people, in this case the clerics who are telling them to hate the US even more. A lot of the terrorists in the field (the meat shields sent out to die) are illiterate and couldn't read the Koran if you put it in front of them so they only know what they are told.
It doesn't help the US when it decides to go in every few years and bomb things back to the stone age. There may be justification to some of the bombing like removing someone who is truly bad but some of the people that live there don't see it that way, obviously. All they see is the US rolling in with their tanks blowing their houses and killing their children. This doesn't justify what the terrorists are doing by any means in my opinion but it may help shed some light on why they are doing it.
The more detailed read you could start with:
1953 Iranian coup d'état - Wiki
Steven Kinzer's - All the Shah's Men and Overthrow are also pretty good.
you might want to give this a quick read. Also, look up how the States treated the Chinese post Civil War, Native Americans at really any point in time, Hispanics post WWII...
Did black people get the worst of it? Yes, although the Natives come very close. Were there black people who weren't slaves? Yes. Were there black slave owners? Yes
Full disclosure: I am part Irish.
I don't know of a single place that has compiled all of the relevant information through history, you have to look on a smaller scale and combine all of it. I guess you could start with these:
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
http://www.amazon.com/They-Were-White-Slaves-Enslavement/dp/0929903056
But you have to go so much further back before you see just how many whites were enslaved, mainly in Europe. You also have to be specific with how you define "white" people. In America, anyone with white skin is white, and if you expand on that it's pretty obvious there have been more white slaves throughout history than blacks, there are simply more white people. But if you get more specific and only include English/British people, then probably not.
You should really read up more on the history of the Civil Rights movement and the vital role the 2nd Amendment played, I'd recommend starting with This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible which details this. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself applied for a concealed handgun license for self-defense purposes (and was denied by the state) for Pete's sake.
Books I’d recommend:
House of Rain by Craig Childs: Part travel journal, part science. It gives the best account of pre-historic and historic southwestern history I’ve ever read. I really recommend this to anyone who knows a little (or a lot) about the Ancestral Puebloan (formerly Anasazi) culture and wants something that puts it all together. If you only visited Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, Wupatki, Chaco, or Walnut Canyon, you might be a little confused by the different narratives. This’ll straighten you out and is just a really great read.
The Outlaw Trail by Charles Kelly: Written in the 1920’s by the first superintendent of Capitol Reef National Park. What makes this different from other books about Butch Cassidy is that Kelly interviewed former members of the Wild Bunch. Many of them were still alive, so it’s a great historical account, as well as being a great western story. If you plan to visit SE Utah at any time, read this and you’ll recognize a lot of the place names as you drive from Arches to Canyonlands and Capitol Reef.
Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Ghiglieri & Myers: Tired of the books filled with heartwarming ranger tales about baby bears? This contains an account or listing of every person who’s ever died in the Grand Canyon. Drowning, suicide, accidents, falls, snake bites, tetnus - it’s all there. Has just as much nitty gritty info as you ever wanted, if kind of morbid, but extremely fascinating - and now part of a series.
Photographing the Southwest by Laurent Martres: Obviously a great book for photography tips, but I use it mostly as a guidebook. He has fantastic directions to all the popular spots as well as some little-known areas. What makes it even better is he’s very clear on if a normal sedan can drive there, or if you’ll need a Jeep. As a Camry owner in the land of Jeep trails, this is invaluable. His information is accurate in the National Parks and he doesn’t direct people into dangerous or illegal situations. It’s an excellent book for areas outside the parks as well. Then, when you get to your cool spot, you’ll know how to get a good photo of it.
You should check out the book 1491, which details the reality of the world the North American civilizations live in. It's a very good book, and shows that it wasn't all eco-paradise and peace-pipes before the Europeans showed up.
>It would be a damn shame (not really) were this Epstein saga to expose people like Clinton, Trump, Pinker and Krauss.
That can of worms goes deeper than you can even imagine. Epstein was so closely tied to the Democratic political machine that Florida state prosecutors wouldn't press charges on him when he was first arrested in 2006.
People are salivating at the prospect of this being tied to Trump, but he may actually come out of this looking better than people think.
I'd actually be more scared for Stephen Pinker. That Clinton was involved with Epstein is no surprise to anyone who knew anything about him, but what the hell was Pinker doing associating with that creep?
Of course, all this assumes that he won't just escape prosecution like he did the last three times he's been accused of exactly the same child molestation charge.
Welp. I was pretty against him for the longest time. I never liked the whole "good politician = good liar" thing. I never understood how democrats would blindly defend Bill Clinton like they do. He was just Republican-lite. The only thing worse than another Clinton to me is another Bush.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996 Good book, by the way.
Unfortunately these stories are nothing new. It's odd to have a lot of stupid people this early, but the whole history of Yellowstone has people dying due to their own stupidity.
One of my favorite books is Death in Yellowstone. Glad to know they're getting plenty of material for Volume 2.
have you ever read Deaths in Yellowstone? I spent a week there years ago and read that book during my stay. it made for some very interesting talking points at various sites.
Probably this.
https://www.amazon.de/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
Edit: Here is a small interview, topic related.
http://www.yellowstonepark.com/unnatural-deaths-yellowstone-national-park-avoid/
> Re the comments on this tweet: Does Bernie get reparations for the fact that his father came to the US without a cent to his name because his relatives were destined to be slaughtered by the Nazis?
Why would the U.S. be responsible for restitution? Or is this yet another demonstration of your willing, abject ignorance and deliberate blindness with respect to the documented facts and nuance associated with this issue?
To this day, Jewish families in Germany that survived the Holocaust are receiving reparations. And it looks like others may not be done collecting yet:
Poles look to charge Germans $850 billion to mark 80 years since Nazi invasion
>A Polish lawmaker said Friday that a committee examining potential German reparations to Poland hoped to complete its report by September 1, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion, and would likely demand up to $850 billion for the damage inflicted during World War II.
It's interesting to see which groups can push for (and have been successful at obtaining) reparations without catching predictable, often nonsensical flak/closed-minded idiocy that obscures discussion on the merits and who cannot.
Some are even offered an extra boost! Like Joe Biden proposing $30 million for Holocaust survivors in 2013. Forget the American citizens whose lives were continually destroyed for centuries and their descendants' futures harmed with the help of the U.S. government, let's try to take on the moral obligations of other countries first!
Slavery, Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration, The War on Drugs, Redlining, race rioting targeting black businesses, VA home loans that shut out Black WW2 vets, etc. are extremely consequential uncompensated crimes. As late as the 1960s, blacks were still separated in public and prisons from most all other races. Just blacks. Not latino, not Jewish, not Irish. Just black! Not even a lifetime ago. If your sense of justice leads you to believe no form of compensation should ever be provided, or even explored, and that a large percentage of black Americans should just shut their faces after absorbing the enormity of the generational injury visited upon them (starkly illustrated by the racial wealth gap, imprisonment statistics, etc.), that's completely on you.
Just don't be surprised when others make inroads with affected populations who know full well just how thoroughly they've been fucked with for hundreds of years (regardless of how effectively this dark history has been suppressed).
>"Tepid solutions are not enough for the times in which we live; we need huge, strategized acts of righteousness, now. Just as Germany has paid $89 Billion in reparations to Jewish organizations since WW2, the United States should pay reparations for slavery." -@marwilliamson
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Cornel West gets it, why don't you:
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/cornel-west-on-bernie-trump-and-racism/
> MH: And that’s to do with the man himself. You’re endorsing him as a person, as your brother. In terms of policies, is there a particular policy that you think is crucial to his campaign that makes him stand out from the rest?
>
>
CW: No, the policies have to do — policies against militarism, policies against poverty, the critiques of Wall Street, the consistency of his call for Democratic accountability of corporate elites and financial elites and basically the greed that we see among so many of those elites. And the same is true about racism. I want to hit this issue head-on because there’s been some talk about reparations and it’s true. I’ve supported reparations. I’ve been struggling for reparations for over 40 years, but I don’t see an endorsement of reparations as the only precondition of fighting against white supremacy. There’s no doubt that his policies will benefit poor and working people and poor and working black people and brown people more than any other candidate. And so, yes, when it comes to just reparations as a whole and larger dialogue certainly, I’m for it, but I hope that a lot of black folk don’t get confused and sit back on this issue of reparations.
>
> MH: You think you can get him to move on reparations? Because he was asked on ABC’s The View about whether he backed it and he said well, you know, we’ve got crises in our communities and there’s other better ways to address that than by “just writing out a check.” A lot of people criticized him for that as you say, do you think he can move on that like he’s moved on other issues? That people like you persuade him to a different position?
>
> CW: No doubt about that, but the core is ensuring that there’s fundamental transformation in the racist system under which we live so that the lives of black and brown and yellow peoples are much better. And so, that’s the real issue. And so, it seems to me I don’t want reparations to be an issue that gets us away from him taking a stand on those issues so much better than any other of the other candidates.
>
> MH: So you say he takes a takes a better position on those issues than other candidates.
>
> CW: Oh, no doubt about it.
>
> MH: A lot of those liberal critics, as you know, have said for a long time, especially in recent days that he’s not good on race issues. They say he has a blind spot when it comes to race both in terms of his rhetoric, in terms of the people he surrounded himself with in the past. What do you say to those liberal critics as someone who has been writing and thinking about race and racism your whole life and yet is a Bernie supporter?
>
> CW: Well, one, it’s a matter of his heart. He’s an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he’s old-school. He’s like me. He doesn’t know the buzzwords. He doesn’t endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it’s true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn’t, he doesn’t say the right thing. He doesn’t use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn’t be blinded by certain kinds of words they’re looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.
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Even Trevor Noah, owned by the PTB and regardless of the motivations, gets it and sums it up concisely:
https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1110293987536093184
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And one of the many great posters here, /u/jlalbrecht, eventually saw the light:
>Note I should have had a h/t regarding my reparations stance to both /u/ikissthisguy
and my wife.
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>cheers. Credit where it is due. You helped me see the issue from outside my personal experience, similar to how Killer Mike changed my opinion about US gun control.
Bolding mine. Try it sometime.
highly recommended book.
edit ok the free market decided
More inconvenient information for the SJW/Marxists: http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963/
Yes. Mainly from Ireland. It's not talked about often, and they're mainly refered to as "indentured servants" when talked about but... Yeah. Basically white slaves. There is a very good book about it called White Cargo.
r/SocialistRA r/RedneckRevolt. Find your local chapter today!
And a friendly reminder:This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed
The book is Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon and it was written by the former head of the clinic at the South Rim and a biologist who leads river trips, in the hope of educating people about the fact that the Canyon is not an amusement park but a dangerous and demanding wild place. The book turned out to be an incredibly entertaining read, but whether it has prevented any deaths is hard to tell. There seems to be an unlimited supply of the sort of people most likely to act like jerks near the rim: 18-29 year old males.
As someone who is still in shock about the genuinely accidental fall and death of another expert hiker earlier this week, I'm having a lot of trouble finding this photo amusing.
I just can't work for the Clintons and this is one reason why...reading this book (link below) and I too agree the DNC needs to wake up to their corruption. and if Hillary gets in we will get EIGHT YEARS OF HER! I am sure no one will challenge her. and I am 65... I can't bear for this to be my final years. all of it is hard medicine. I will say I still go back and forth but reading this book and listening to clips online of Hitch talking about the Clintons ... I go back and forth about how I could ever vote to put this corrupt couple back in power. Could it be possible they could do more harm than an idiot (Trump)? with their ties to corrupt foreign governments through the Clinton Foundation? http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996#reader_1455522996
I think the best book was written by someone on the left. Christopher Hitchens was actually a communist in the 60's, but took on a more socialist tint in his later years. Hitchens on Charlie Rose 4/28/99
His book No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is a hair raising book, and I'd highly recommend it.
Edit: Corrected the link to the part with Blumenthal
>“Terrified by the 1917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that communism could be defeated in the United States by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners—the idea being that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. So in 1918 the Department of Labor promoted an “Own-Your-Own-Home” campaign, handing out “We Own Our Own Home” buttons to schoolchildren and distributing pamphlets saying that it was a ‘patriotic duty’ to cease renting and to build a single-family unit.”
From The Color of Law
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Tin-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482/
Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!!! Read this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Tin-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482
Exactly. Most people still think that FDR had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor for example [1]. Since no one reads anymore (especially history), everyone still thinks FDR had no prior knowledge of the attack and are blissfully unaware that in fact he intentionally provoked the attack.
-----------------
[1] "Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" by Robert Stinnett
C.J. Chiver's novel The Gun is a fantastic read about the AK's conception and how it was designed vs. the M-16, which had parts with tight
tolerancesclearances, causing them to readily jam in harsh (think Vietnam) conditions.edit thanks for /u/csl512 for the correction
If you are really interested, I really recommend The Gun by CJ Chivers
The book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq is a great read and goes into detail on just about every example you could want over the last hundred years. You can buy it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
You aren't going to change his mind, but for your own peace of mind, here is a start off the top of my head:
> He didn't even know about it...
Then tell him he is literally living under a rock. It is listed in 10,000+ plus articles via Google news at the moment. While it is not likely to receive proper treatment in the conventional media, it has reached critical mass, they can no longer ignore it. And for the people who are there, they can verify that it is people from all walks of life, and now in cities all around the country. This just in as an example of senior protesters
> He says all the protesters don't have jobs because they made poor career choices with their lives.
Ask him to prove this (hint: he can't). Don't let him slide on sweeping generalization. There are people protesting across the spectrum including those who have jobs. They aren't protesting unemployment, but rather greed and corruption. While the unemployed might have more time to occupy, its not simply the unemployed who are there.
Edit: In fact, you can meet some of them in this article
Ask him if people in the Tea Party had jobs. Because while they aren't identical people, both movements have some similar populist origins. Also ask him if he smeared the Tea Party in the same way he is OWS. Because before they were corrupted by corporate interests, while I didn't agree with part of their message, at the time I could applaud their original effort. Look up various populist movements through US history and quiz him on them and draw parallels.
Also ask him why people are allowed or even celebrated in making poor choices when they are rich, but are condemned if they actually don't make bad choices (or even if they are human and make some) but get screwed by the system. Ask him if it is right that the class you are born into is a stronger indicator of upward mobility than education. (I can't find the link right now, but here is one and here is another one that can perhaps point you in the right direction.
> He says they're all to lazy to go find jobs.
Really? Then ask him about the number of places that make HAVING A JOB a REQUIREMENT for getting a job.
Ask him if he understands the law of supply and demand and can understand that The main reason U.S. companies are reluctant to step up hiring is scant demand, rather than uncertainty over government policies and then ask him if he knows something that a majority of economists don't know (because that's what they said in the survey referenced).
Edit: Also this self post looked pretty good regarding addressing that question
> He says they're all socialists looking for entitlements
Ask him if he likes weekends off, an 8-hour workday, minimum wage, or even just not dying while at his job then he can thank a socialist.
Check out the condensed version of The "S" Word and the book
Also for good measure, check out A People's History of The United States to find a lot of things neither he, nor probably you (no offense, just sayin'), would have learned in school.
Even though he may not like it, the current quality of life he enjoys was fought for by progressives, socialists, even anarchists and him denying that fact doesn't make it not true.
> He says they do not represent the 99% but the deadbeat 5% who can't do anything with their lives.
Tell him that both they, and he, whether he likes it or not, ARE part of the 99% percent unless he is tucking away millions that he hasn't told you about because this is what inequity looks like in numbers Also via NPR and this explains a lot in 11 graphs. You can also take a peek at 2012
> Talking to him is like talking to O'Reily...
But remember that there are people who can stand their ground with him, like Jon Stewart, or even Marylin Manson.
If Marylin Manson can do it, so can you. Don't sell yourself short, stand your ground! (I know it makes Thanksgiving and Christmas difficult, but if he is not an idiot, it still can be worth it in the long run).
> OH and he said that I'm messed up in the head cause I go on socialist websites...like Reddit
Ask him to define the word socialist. If he gets it wrong, ask him how his education failed him. Ask him if he thinks most of the other industrialized countries in the world are "socialist" too, and if so why are the leading in many quality of life metrics, health care, and general happiness? Ask him why our life expectancy is shorter or why we are working ourselves to death with other countries being able to have several weeks of vacation with people here who may not take any.
> OH OH and then he and my little brother then come in and say, "Is that gonna be your excuse when you can't find a job?" (I'm a college sophmore.)
Tell him that perhaps someone sold you and your brother a bill of goods
that "working hard" is the key to the American Dream while the banksters are offloading it out the backdoor. Ask him if it is called the American dream because you must be asleep to believe it
Ask him why your education costs 1000's and others abroad may not cost anything at all.
Ask him why teachers are treated as scum in recent sentiments when they agree to concessions but want to preserve their right to assemble and bargain as a group yet CEO's get paid for failure based on a peer system and half the country is lead to believe that the richest group of all are the "victims".
Ask him why foreign companies like Toyota can make products in America, but "Made in America" brands like Ford may be made in Mexico.
Ask him if he knows what NAFTA is and why it was bad (and do your homework to learn more, and surprise him by suggesting that Clinton was wrong to support it -- so he can't say you just cheerlead for one party -- but tell him that both he AND a Republican congress are at fault for screwing up our banking sector by repealing Glass-Stegall under Republican pressure, but at least Clinton at least is man enough to open regret the decision)
Ask him why it is right for people to do all these things, to make inequity on par with the 20's before the stock market crash, yet when people stand up to fight that he has nothing but ridicule.
> Edit: As for what to discuss, can anyone put together a clear and irrefutable counterargument? I'm sick of his condescending attitude.
There is not magic bullet. Even this list here is simply a stream of consciousness off the top of my head. But your best friend is true education and enlightenment. It means not accepting the status quo, not relying on only domestic, conventional sources for news and information. It means digging into history with true historians.
In the long run you may not win the battle, but you will be more prepared to try and win the war, even if its not with him. (P.S. I may add more links later if I have the time.)
Good Luck!
Added a new chapter to Five for Iron, set five years before canon. (Here's the ff.net link, for anyone who prefers that site.) Anywho, this chapter is my first from Winter's POV, and I'm hoping I did an OK job with that, while still keeping the premise engaging.
Reading:
I finished Cadillac Desert this week, and I've gotten about 100 pages into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle since then. Both are brilliantly written and wonderfully subversive, but considering my line of work I may be a smidge biased.
I'm surprised these haven't been mentioned yet:
In The Heart Of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick - The true story behind Moby Dick (and much easier to read).
Batavia by Peter Fitzsimons - Insane true story of a shipwreck, then it gets worse...
Also for fans of non-fiction novels try Longitude by Dava Sobel and Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson - both involve the sea. *edit for some obvious typo's
Not all of these have cannibalism, but most:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Poe, The Boat, In The Heart of The Sea (this is a really awesome book, as are the authors other works), Endurance, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls, The Wreck of the Medusa, The Wreck of the Dumaru, Life of Pi
A couple non-fiction (with a legal focus) books about the Mignonette incident and the resulting famous case of Regina v Dudley and Stevens: Is Eating People Wrong?, and The Custom of the Sea
> some people may have looked for someone who had a bit more experience writing or negotiating treaties specifically
Fellow liberal here. To help ease some of these concerns I'd point out that most of what an oil CEO does is negotiate with foreign governments for complicated agreements.
Also the oil industry is actually far ahead of other industries in terms of environmental protection in spite of what you might assume. Two books on the subject I highly recommend are The Quest (which is on Bill Gate's reading list and probably one of the single best books I've ever read) and Collapse.
I recommend the book Collapse by Jared Diamond if you are into lost civilizations and why they did not survive.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a great book by Jared Diamond (follow up to Guns Germs and Steel) dedicated to this subject of collapse, but it is based on older societies.
Part 1 of a video series on it
And here is the author's version
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
I keep hearing good things about this... it'll get you thinking outside the box.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States
I read this book years ago and it talks all about the water shortage in the west. It has always been a problem and we've been slowly depleting underground stores for generation.
Relevant: I recently started reading Cadillac Desert, which is a really interesting treatise on the irrigation of the American West.
Well, one can like getting carrots for $0.99 a bag and still recognize that they're being delivered by a very suboptimal, screwed-up system of production that really needs to change. Problem is, not a lot of people seem to recognize that.
If you find this sort of subject interesting, and you've not read it before, you ought to pick up a copy of Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
It gets a little dry sometimes when he gets into the nuts-and-bolts details, but overall it's a great, incisive look at how utterly FUBAR water policy in the West actually is.
Michael Pollan's [The Omnivore's Dilemma] (http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meals/dp/0143038583/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1324994963&sr=8-4)
[Freakonomics] (http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0060731338/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324995084&sr=1-1)
Nathaniel Philbrick In the Heart of the Sea
Agree with others on Erik Larson, Mary Roach and Bill Bryson.
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick is my all time favorite survival book. Read it before the movie comes out! It's absolutely crazytown.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship/dp/0141001828
If you like non fiction (and lots of detail), In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick about the sinking of the whaleship the Essex and the crew surviving (or not) at sea.
In the heart of the sea is a great book on the true account of a group of sailors this happened to in the 1700's...adrift in the pacific for like 69 days i think...it was the influence for Moby Dick because a whale sunk their ship...never has a nonfiction book read like such an action novel for me
I personally think it's not religion that invoke people to kill Ahmadis or any other minority of the world. Just study any persecution in the world whether it's Rwanda, Sudan or North Korea. The main motive to kill is not religion. It's either economic or political reasons. I would highly recommend Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. We as a nation are either angry at our poverty or social conditions and then we try to blame it on the minorities.
Jared Diamond wrote a terrific book about this subject called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed in which he outlines the various times in history civilizations have completely collapsed and why. Societies such as the Maya, the Anasazi, the Vikings in Greenland and the people of Easter island. He also has some thoughts about the likelihood of a modern societal collapse and what we can do to prevent it. It's a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.
This book is awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
This really depends on what aspects of the Civil War you are looking to learn about. If you're just looking for a general overview of the entire war it's hard to go wrong with James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. If you're looking for a shorter read I would recommend Bruce Catton's single volume history called The Civil War. These are common recommendations, but for good reason.
If you're interested in specific battles or topics, let me know and I may be able to recommend something.
The hard part for majority of people is that Historically events and the motives of individual's actions in those events are never "Black&White". Take the Civil War since that is the crux of this issue. In the book What They Fought For, 1861–1865 by James McPherson reported on his reading of hundreds of letters and diaries written by soldiers on both sides of the war on the question of what they believed they were fighting for. Not all Northerns cared for blacks in fact many were super racist they just didn't like slavery and in every major battle there were slave owning union soldiers fighting for the north, and non slave owning southern soldiers fighting for the south. On the other hand 80% of the Southern soldiers didn't own slaves and many felt that if slavery was to be ended it should like everyone born after 1/1/1861 are set free but given and education before hand.
“I was fighting for my home, and he had no business being there”
-Virginia confederate Solider Frank Potts
“We are fighting for the Union . . . a high and noble sentiment, but after all a sentiment. They are fighting for independence, and are animated by passion and hatred against invaders” - A Illinois officer.
“Believe me no solider on either side gave a **** about slaves, they were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds. Southerns thought they were fighting the second American revolution norther's thought they were fighting to hold the union together [With a few abolitionist and fire eaters on both sides].”
Robert E. Lee is the biggest and the greatest paradox. He was against Virginia leaving the Union but felt his loyalty and duty, like many, was to his home state above the country: “If Virginia stands by the old Union,” Lee told a friend, “so will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will follow my native State with my sword, and, if need be, with my life.” While Lee never publicly came out on one side or the other of Slavery. In a letter to his Wife in 1856 he said “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.” But Lee's wife and daughters taught the slaves to read and write which was against Virginia law and Lee officially freed his inherited slaves, he had no other slaves, on December 29, 1862 five years after his father-in-law Georgie Washington Custis' death as stated in his will. And yes Georgie Washington Custis is a descendant of President Georgie Washington.
Besides once universal conscription was instituted by the Confederacy in 1862, it didn't matter what they fought for, whether they wanted to fight, or even if they supported the Confederacy they fought or become deserters and risk execution. The Union started conscription in 1863. One could argue those who were conscripted didn't care about slavery since if they did they would've volunteered earlier. Many were concerned more about their farms and family. One Confederate officer at the time noted, "The deserters belong almost entirely to the poorest class of non slave-holders whose labor is indispensable to the daily support of their families" and that "When the father, husband or son is forced into the service, the suffering at home with them is inevitable. It is not in the nature of these men to remain quiet in the ranks under such circumstances." Which was used by both sides trying to get them on their side the Union offered pardons and the Confederacy offered jobs or land in some cases.
Now those caught deserted in the Union 147 were executed for desertion out of 200,000 deserters. In the Confederacy 229 were executed out of the 100,000 deserters. But since you can't kill off all the 300,000 men that deserted from both sides many were branded with a "D" on their hip. Many were just purely tortured:
"One punishment much affected in the light artillery was called 'tying on the spare wheel.' Springing upward and rearward from the center rail of every cassion was a fifth axel and on it was a spare wheel. A soldier who had been insubordinate was taken to the spare wheel and made to step upon it. His legs were drawn apart until they spanned three spokes. His arms were stretched until there were three or four spokes between his hands. Then the feet and hands were firmly bound to the felloes of the wheel. If the soldier was to be punished moderately then he was left, bound in an upright position on the wheel for five or six hours. If the punishment was to be severe, the ponderous wheel was given a quarter turn after the soldier had been lashed to it, which changed the position of the man from upright to horizontal. Then the prisoner had to exert all his strength to keep his weight from pulling heavily and cuttingly on the cords that bound his upper arm and leg to the wheel." -- Frank Wilkeson, Army of the Potomac in the Union Army.
In the end it is just easier for people paint with broad strokes the "good people"/The Union as saints and "bad guys"/The Confederacy as sinners. It is the same with all of those leaders/people we have had in History. In reality the Slavery had many shades of blue and grey and should be treated as such. There was good and bad in both the Union and the Confederacy.
Sources and other reading material:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a25915/punishment-and-torture-in-the-civil-war-111413/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170422015315/http://www.americanheritage.com/content/south%E2%80%99s-inner-civil-war-0
http://uncw.edu/csurf/explorations/documents/volume%209%202014/franch.pdf
https://www.nps.gov/arho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/David%20Carr_0.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Know-Much-About-Civil/dp/0380719088/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493924562&sr=8-1&keywords=Don%27t+Know+much+about+the+Civil+War
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493924743&sr=1-1&keywords=Battle+Cry+of+Freedom
https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Volumes-1-3-Box/dp/0394749138/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493924920&sr=1-1&keywords=Shelby+Foote
i would direct you to the fine book, battle cry of freedom.
two important things. one, many in the south realized that the slavery situation was not sustainable, and required expansion to survive. this meant slavery in new states was a necessity. northerners opposed this. two, it can be imagined that this is the time that states' rights and federal authority diverged. this is actually an illusion. the south wanted states' rights for slavery, but also demanded federal assistance to return escaped slaves from free territories. in my mind, the conflict is between an industrial, democratic society and a feudal one.
Well, actually they did. Manifest Destiny. It wasn't always sea to shining sea, it was by some , pole to pole. USA has no peasant population. Some saw Mexico, Central America and South America as a vast labor pool. There was even an incident where American adventures tried to invade Mexico but their ship was sunk by the British. It's mentioned in 'Battle Cry of Freedom'
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X/ref%3Dsr_1_2?tag=offersamzn-20&ascsubtag=bst-13-1578750855127041134
Those adventures btw were Democrats
Read McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.
It's brilliantly written, engaging, authoritative, and generally accepted as "the book" for the Civil War in the minds of most historians.
You note you're a Tennessee boy. You may be interested in the older "New South" school vis-a-vis the War. Wm Dunning led a major push to view the War as one of Northern aggression. The Dunning School was quite influential until (roughly) the early Civil Rights Era.
There are also occasional, but lively debates on H-Net, South about how to view the Civil War.
As a side note, the whole Oxford History of the US series is worth reading. Some of the titles are dated, but they are all very good reads. (well, at least the ones I've read ;-) )
I've heard good things about Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel. There is a video of his Harvard class floating around somewhere.
Haven't read it, though, so I dunno...
>When Justice has been achieved and society is perfect.
Define justice, and define perfect. (Asking this question reminds me of this awesome book http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508 )
Here's one for you
>Progressives are the conservatives of the future.
Must reads:
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385722702/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_B0KwDbBN2MT7W
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_50KwDb9M4ECGM
add this puppy to the pile
> But then again the Irish earned their whiteness.
Exactly. Gotta earn your stars and stripes!
White Cargo
Obvious disingenuous take by /r/Libertarian, but it's not entirely wrong. The Civil Rights movement relationship to self defense and violence is a lot more complicated than most give it credit for.
Recommended reading
This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
It’s a desert, it’s always very dry – and if you’re not from a super dry place, you’ll feel awful if you don’t stay on top of keeping moisture in.
Take/drink plenty of water. Take lotion for your hands and chap stick for your lips.
The Grand Canyon is different from every other hike on Earth, because you start by walking down. So when you get to the bottom, you haven’t really done any of the work yet.
Stay on trails. Please take a map and a compass. Please take twice as much water on hikes as you think you need.
Take plenty of stuff to keep you warm. It gets down to freezing regularly at the Grand Canyon in April.
A pad to get you off the ground, a sleeping bag, and two good blankets. And even then you might be wearing sweats in bed to keep warm.
And if you’ve got $10 to spare, get this book used.
http://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
Recommended reading.
The Grand Canyon is one of my favorite places to hike. Just make sure you have an idea of the weather above and below the rim, and be sure to pick up and read Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon by Michael P. Ghiglieri. Armed with the stories and knowledge shared by the ranger(s) that wrote that book, you should be fully prepared when it's time to head out.
Try the book "1491" -- it's fascinating and goes into detail about a lot of mesoamerican societies. I enjoyed it a lot.
What I can't tell you is whether it's accurate. Like rocket trajectories for Wernher Von Braun in Tom Lehrer's famous song, that's not my department.
If you haven't done so yet, seriously read 1491 by Charles Mann. You will not be disappointed.
I haven't actually read it yet, only excerpts, but I have the book 1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus coming in the mail. It's about America before the Europeans came, and how vastly numerous and sophisticated Native Americans were.
I would love to have him around this election cycle. He would most likely be skewering Obama, and especially Hillary. He hates the Clintons, and was one of the first journalists to dig deep into all of their scandals.
The whole clinton strategy has been say one thing, and do everything the Republicans want: http://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
Voting for her is basically the same as an establishment GOP candidate like Cruz.
If you want some insight into how truly corrupt the Clintons are, pick up No One Left to Lie to by Christopher Hitchens - and thats just the corruption that occurred in the 90s.
https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481000042&sr=8-1&keywords=no+one+left+to+lie+to
> What bothers me the most about this is that the adults seem to either not care, or are clueless to the danger that this group, of mostly kids, is in.
I used to work as a Ranger in the park. This is, unfortunately, not uncommon. For some reason, otherwise normal, reasonably intelligent people just leave their brains behind when they go on vacation. I don't know if they think Yellowstone is like Disneyland, or a zoo, or what, but they just lose all sense of fear when it comes to the dangers around them.
One day, I was gassing up a Suburban in a clearly marked Rangers-only restricted area. A moose walked by. Okay, cool. This is awesome. This is why I'm here. I love nature. Nature is awesome.
But then...
Not ten yards behind the moose comes this group of 20-30 people, just completely ignoring all the signs telling them not to enter this area and completely ignoring any common sense that says you should not be anywhere near that close to a wild animal that could turn and charge them at any moment.
When I stopped them and asked them what they were doing, one guy finally said "We're trying to take pictures of the moose."
Sigh. Sigh. Fucking sigh. Now I have to be the asshole and tell them that they shouldn't be anywhere near that close to a dangerous wild animal in the first place, and second they should not have ignored the multiple signs telling them that they shouldn't be in a restricted area. And, that they need to go back and watch the moose from a safe distance.
Now, repeat this similar encounter nearly every single day. Sure, the specifics are different, but the same thing happens all the time, and I really don't get it. In spite of all the warnings people are given not to approach the wildlife, they still keep doing it.
As a side note, if you want some morbid but fascinating reading, check out Lee Whittlesey's book Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park. It's a fascinating book on all the various grisly ways people have managed to off themselves in the park, often through their own idiocy, and often ignoring many warnings in the process.
I have this book my pa gave me called Death in Yellowstone, which talks about Miss Weeks and others. The part this article does not kindly mention is the fact that all of the skin on her lower half slid off when she was pulled out. It happens to almost everyone who falls in a geyser in Yellowstone.
I felt the true meaning of the word "ambivalence" when visiting Yellowstone. Deadly, beautiful thermal features...
Anyone else ever read the book "Death in Yellowstone" while visiting/camping in Yellowstone? For true "trippyness", do it!
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
That's the one! It has some great stories in there, and yes, a lot of people have been scalded to death in the geysers. You can frequently witness tourists going off the boardwalks, illegally, to get closer to the geysers. Darwin was really on to something.
My mom read these books to me... they scared me a little. The trauma came from camping trips in Yellowstone National Park when she put those books away, then pulled out A Grizzly Death in Yellowstone and Death in Yellowstone so that she could read graphic stories of campers and hikers being mauled to death by bears in the same fucking place we were going to sleep.
I, to date, have a completely totally rational fear of bears.
Bear spray. And read the instructions on it, and wear bells or sing the whole time you're out.
I know, silly - but I just finished reading Death in Yellowstone and damn.
Bear spray, bro.
Also, ensure you're not camping with any food smells - or any other strong smells - in your tent.
If you really want to learn why people disagree with you, I recommend you read this book: The Color of Law. Brown folks (and many white folks too, who weren't 'anglo' enough) were systemically excluded from homeownership during the post-WWII boom.
Some people absolutely left for racist reasons, but others were responding to strong incentives, and even non-racists were right in recognizing that property values were falling in demographically changing neighborhoods.
The other, sometimes overlooked factor that explains a lot of that map are the institutions that encoded segregation into wide areas of the law. The book to read about that is The Color of Law.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1631492853/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=
only $20 if you have prime
edit: oh this is only 15 -- https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Michelle-Alexander-ebook/dp/B0067NCQVU/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510953399&sr=1-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow
> please read a book (like Spirit Level)
please read a book like https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853
Your arguments are ahistorical. I don't know if that's because you're not from the US or not aware of the economic history of 20th century racism here. But at a certain point it's less that you don't know than that you refuse to, and if you're not over that line you're certainly flirting with it.
[This guy is correct folks. Read this book if you don't believe him.] (https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853)
This reminds me of a book that I'm looking forward to reading. It's called Slavery by Another Name and it's by Douglas A. Blackmon.
Here's another great book on that topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is a great book about those seven Destroyers and Destroyer Escorts that charged into the Japanese fleet of Battleships and Heavy Cruisers. Amazing story.
There's a pretty good book about the Battle off Samar called Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.
And for the readers out there: The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (not a ref link)
FDR goaded Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor. Read Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deceit". And it was only b/c of America's imperial policies that Hawaii and the Philippines were ultimately targeted by the Japanese.
If you read the book "Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" and ponder the evidence presented in it, you'll be either more terrified or reassured that our government has done similar crimes before.
The book is definitely recommended. In short, it'll shed new light on both the "good war" and the way the US government practices realpolitik and propaganda.
If you're curious, I strongly recommend the above-mentioned book.
The author is a WWII vet who served on the same aircraft carrier as George Bush, and then went onto become a journalist and author.
He researched Pearl Harbor for decades, getting many first-hand testimonials, and a lot of key US gov't documents via Freedom of Information Act requests.
The most famous document, perhaps, is the so-called McCollum memo. This was written by a mid-level Navy intelligence officer who, the son of an American diplomat, was raised in Japan. McCollum was the Naval liaison officer to the White House and met with FDR once a week or more.
The memo outlined 8 steps that the US would have to do in order to provoke the Japanese to attack the US. The book details those 8 steps and supports them with evidence.
The overall idea of provoking Japan to attack was due to the collapse of France in the spring of 1940. That shocked the world.
The US, being unsuccessful at provoking the Germans into responding to our sinking of German U-boats in the Atlantic, thus opted to provoke Japan into attacking and to use that event to enter the war in a united fashion to keep Europe from falling to the Nazis.
Edit: Typos, added link.
"I wish our wars could all be as clear as WWII was- an almost good vs. evil type conflict"
Two things you should know about WW2 ( my father was in it so I know a few things becuase I have asked him).
2.Until that time it was not clear cut at all about whether or not the new forms of government known as "Fascist" were good or not.
Time magazine made Hitler man of the year
in 1939
see it for yourself:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19390102,00.html
read the actual article here
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html
and the whole world envied the rapid German economic recovery under his lead and many in the US openly wanted the US government to move toward a "streamlined" form of government with a stronger central leader to more quickly replicate the miracle of the German recovery from the economic ruin that gripped the world.
There were many famous US supporters of Fascism.
Charles Lindbergh for example openly said the US should move toward that type of government.
So WW2 was NOT clear cut. It is only told to us that it was clear cut.
You are judging by movies not reality.
Never learn history by reading anything written after history.
Read only the things written during the times to understand history. Today with internet archives of old newspapers it's easy.
By the way I am merely relaying a historical fact and I in NO WAY support fascisms or Hitler etc etc. I just believe it is important for people considering war today to learn from how decisions were made in the past so mistakes are not repeated and successes are repeated. It's important to know it was NEVER CLEAR whether the US should enter WW2.
In fact historical research has now proven conclusively FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen to motivate the country to get behind his decision to enter WW2.
Best book on that which you would probably really be interested in reading is
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743201299?ie=UTF8&tag=reddit0e-20
By the way many suspected FDR allowed Pearl harbor to happen to get us into the war AT THAT TIME. There were articles openly written about it just a week after Pearl Harbor happened.
No. While there may be many things wrong with American society, there is absolutely no valid historical parallel between American society in 1960 and American society in 2011 that would predict the emergence of mass social movements. The causes for the New Left and the sixties were many, and almost none of those causes are shared today:
The current climate is far different.
While I certainly agree that much has to change, you make the fundamental errors of assuming that it will change, that it will change rapidly, and that it will change as the result of people waking up and realizing what is going on.
EDIT: wanted to expand some more on what I said.
You know, I don't have an answer. Most of the selections so far are from before Wallace's prime. (Quick aside: Philip Roth's best books are his latest, but who he was to the world was always the man who wrote Portnoy's Complaint. His worldview never changed. Rather he grew in his craft, and his later characters were various iterations of Portnoy getting old, perhaps with the great exception of American Pastoral.)
Anyway, I don't have an answer because Wallace arrived at a deadlock in American life that we have not yet overcome. He was a prophet of America's decline. What I believe Wallace wanted was certainty and authority in a time where it wasn't granted him.
Politically conservative (he voted for Reagan and admired John McCain), he was desperate for a sense of civic life that was already in decline, and he wanted badly to be led.
Raised by atheist academics, he sought out the comfort of the Church. He wanted unironically to believe in "the sub-surface unity of all things" but couldn't get himself to do so, conceding instead that, "You get to decide what to worship." His message, instead, was existential: life is what you make of it, so pay attention. But he wanted more. He sought "redemption" through literature and contemplation, seeking something of substance to soothe his "inner sap." Perhaps he found it in glimpses, but his long-time depression betrayed dissatisfaction. He searched endlessly in mythology, folklore, and collective subconscious imagery, only to catch his own tail in a Kafkaesque cat-and-mouse chase with himself.
In love, he was a bachelor, who one time contemplated murder over jealous love. He was a womanizer who held his manhood cheap, retreating to books to "feel less alone."
Like Hal in Infinite Jest, he found no authority, neither from his wild, filmmaking father, nor in the life-sucking entertainments of his time. Instead, Wallace found solace among the meek, the addicts, and the defeated (he himself suffered from alcohol abuse). Deep down, it wasn't enough. Deep down, beneath his giant brain, down in the bones of his Anglo-American stock, he knew something was wrong in America. He lamented our cafeteria democracy of boring politicians. He lamented what he called the "death of civics." Look at us now: government in chaos, the waning of religion across the West, an epidemic of addicts, no closer to cultural wisdom or unity, individuals still atomized and community still broken. (As an aside, I believe these premonitions sparked his interest in Quebec's secession movement. There, at least, people were fighting for something.)
In short, Tl;dr: Wallace was perfectionist born in a time that he couldn't perfect. What we have of him is a glorious attempt to surmount the chaos and fragmentation he felt in his heart and in the world around him. The reason I don't have an answer to your question is because I don't think anyone else got as close to articulating that as he did, and I think his fictions and his essays will be read in the future with great pity because I believe that we will rise to the occasion—in politics, in art, and in society—in due time. We always do.
The principle of Fürherprinzip is mostly organic. Humans naturally look towards strong leaders. And while the Third Reich was not completely organic, it was a substantial improvement over the liberal Judeo-Capitalist Weimar Republic. Adolf Hitler's long-term plans for Germany would have fully brought about the National Socialist ideal.
\>Have you had many bad experiences with people outside of your cultural background?
Yes, I went to a high school full of Negroes and mestizos, but that's purely anecdotal evidence, no? I'm intellectually honest, so I'll give you something more substantial. It's a study by Dr. Robert Putnam, entitled Bowling Alone. In it, he initially set out to prove the axiom that "diversity is our greatest strength", but quickly discovered quite the opposite. While studying the great cities of America, he found that ethnic diversity is strongly correlated with loss of social cohesion, diminishment of social capital, and a decrease in overall community engagement, not just between ethnic groups, but within them.
This is the book. I can't find a free PDF anywhere, but I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a torrent of it somewhere.
This last point addressed your other queries, too. The reason society must be organized along racial and ethnic lines, without getting into the spiritual side of things, is that human nature ensures that that's the only kind of organization that WILL work.
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Bowling Alone.
>Strangely, those with an active vibrant spiritual life tend to be people with large amounts of leisure time and excess income (ie, rich people and the elderly).
It's also that if you attend church, you have a large social circle of like-minded individuals, for which humans are hard-wired. This is a lament I tend to hear from my atheist friends that in America there are few networking opportunities as thorough as attending a church. A good book about this is "Bowling Alone" about the decline of American civil society (outside of churches, but church attendance is also declining).
> Assault rifles are precision machines, and they're actually designed to function with as little action (movement) as possible - that's why they're so fast.
I will buy you this book if you send me your address.
Conosco relativamente bene la storia dell'AK47 e dei suoi successori (tra le altre cose avendo letto questo libro).
Il mio punto e' che per lanciarsi in macchina contro dei pedoni o per attaccare dei passanti con un coltello da cucina non e' necessario avere gli "agganci giusti", come dici tu.
Quindi il folle isolato che si e' invasato a forza di vedere video jhiadisti su youtube e seguire gli account twitter dei simpatizzanti dell'ISIS in questi casi e' verosimile.
Procurarsi due Khalasnikov in Francia nel 2015 invece penso sia almeno un tantinello piu' complicato, ci vogliono gli "agganci", e quindi per questo mi sembra che questo attacco sia un atto di un livello un po' diverso.
I found CJ Chiver's book The Gun to be a fascinating investigation of the AK47's design and history. It also covers the development process of the AR10, which of course became XM16A1. The first generation of that gun was... not good. Constant fouling due to dirty rounds, cleaning equipment rarely issued with rifles, the exact wrong physical environment for maintenance, the list goes on.
The later revisions were a big improvement, and today's M16 is a far cry from the ones fielded in Vietnam. But in the first years of the war, the AKs carried by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were far more effective than the M16 supplied to American armed services.
Not to mention the lower recoil and minimized muzzle rise.
If anyone is interested in the history and distinctions between Battle Rifles and Assault Rifles as well as the development of the efficient modern man-killing machine that is the M series rifle, I recommend CJ Chivers' book, "The Gun." It will erase any doubt you may have that the modern assault rifle is a designed-by-committee literal weapon of mass death. Gun nuts like to 'hurr hurr, scary just because it's black,' but as a dude with a lot of guns, I promise you the tech in these things is sophisticated, refined, and tailored for the express person of killing people as efficiently and quickly as possible.
Drunk or not, I hope you keep this up.
It sounds like you really gained a lot from your time in, namely: (1) personal growth and maturity, and (2) a broadened world view from experience. Experience as someone actively taking part in US foreign policy, and also just as a young American going overseas and seeing how the rest of the world lives (and how truly fortunate we are here). Just that you called your 16-year-old self "naive" shows this change in mindset. Also, I think that any introspection is healthy and natural, especially for such a serious topic. It's a tough time, especially watching the current shit-storm in Iraq with those ISIS assholes.
I appreciate and generally agree with Nate Fick's view of the US on the international stage:
http://youtu.be/7mBr1UydKf0?t=18m2s
Sure, the US has done some not-so-great things or maybe done well-intentioned things the wrong way. But I don't think we're the bad guys in the broader scheme of things. Yeah, that's up for debate. Also, I'm gonna guess you're not evil on the individual level.
and more along a similar line, specifically about the Middle East and elsewhere:
http://youtu.be/fQu_7hNjPqY?t=3m27s
a serious issue, but a little [British] humor on a related note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Sorry, gatorbuck, but most corporatism is not what you describe. Nor is it even just corporations; unions and other special interests can and do influence government policy for unfair advantage.
As to corporations using the government, "regulation" is a perfect example. The very first federal regulatory agency -- the Interstate Commerce Commission, set up in 1887 to regulate the railroads -- quickly became "a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests." See Understanding Obamacare by Luke Mitchell, Harper's Magazine for the quote, and much more on the subject.
Most corporatism involves private corporations and other entities that become ever-more entangled with government. Some, like much of the the military-industrial complex, would not exist without government to start with, but that doesn't change anything -- read my definition of corporatism again. I'd also suggest Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq for a very readable history of how corporations have used our military for their own gain.
The main point remains, in any case: without a coercive power center for corporations to influence for their own advantage, corporations are generally benign. People can not do business with Apple if they want; but we can't choose to not do business with (or to provide unfair advantage to at our expence) Halliburton or Monsanto or the megabanks. Government coercion is the difference.
"Destabilize" kind of implies doing things subtly tho.
When was the last time we even practiced that? It's been pretty direct since the Banana Republic days. We've six years to fix it, or else expect another 150 years of revolving door dictators in SA and the ME
A great book on this subject is called Overthrow. It doesn't exclusively deal with Central America, but a good chunk of it does.
We've done it again and again.
You really need to read some history and educate yourself on the realities of militarized policing and the treatment of black Americans.
Here are some suggestions where you can get started:
https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577
https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=37DDCSH6HQ7WTMAV25ZF
Most poor people are white? Back that up, please, because these statistics look like you're pulling it out of your ass.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/ and
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/
What you have to realize is that black people have been MADE into criminals by a racist system in the US for as long as they have been "Free." If you really want to be educated on some things you probably never knew happened, read this: http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
Also, black people are sentenced to around 21 percent longer sentences than white people for the SAME crimes. They are 20% more likely to get a prison sentence than a white person for the same crime. In school, they are much more likely to be arrested than white students for the same crimes. This creates a distrust of a system that they are indeed right to distrust. In doing so, not only does it hurt the next generation by taking away fathers and mothers from their children, but it also succeeds in aiding the glorification of lifestyles such as gangs/selling drugs/etc. After all, if you have no guidance and know that you're likely to be arrested for something you shouldn't, why not live a life where you can actually get some money doing something worth getting arrested for? (source for statistics: http://www.sentencingproject.org/ )
The point of all this is that it's not just cut and black numbers. You need to see the reasons behind where people are. When, historically, laws are made specifically to make good people into criminals, you effectively "breed" crime into a race or society. (Example: After being "freed" from slavery, laws were enacted making it illegal to be a "vagrant." Well, what do you call someone who has no home, no money and no job because they were just released from slavery? Vagrant. Throw them in jail under forced labor, then add to their sentence for any and everything you can and call them a criminal. You think these things stopped back then? Why is crack considered much worse than cocaine on a criminal level? Think about it.)
Just some examples pointing out the ignorance of your statement.
This is absolutely true. Documented fact. There is a new documentary out on this: Slavery by Another Name (trailer).
Full documentary here
The Pulitizer Prize-winning book it was based upon
Capitalism and freedom/democracy are not the same thing. As this evil episode of U.S. history shows, sometimes they are directly at odds with each other.
If you ever needed evidence that those who don't know their own history are destined to repeat it, then this should put such naive, lazy skepticism to sleep, for good.
"From 2000 to 2010, the number of inmates kept in private prisons rose nearly 50%, from 87,000 to 128,000. While this amounts to less than 10% of all prisoners nationwide, it represents a serious trend toward privatization as budget-squeezed states look for ways to cut costs."
source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/06/28/why-private-prisons-will-lock-up-your-returns/
The real problem is when you look at the lobbying money that private prison companies are dumping in Washington and state capitals. For example these corporations are one of the largest advocates of maintaining or increasing in severity current drug laws.
"How much? A bundle. In the past five election cycles, the three biggest companies in the private prison industry have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and $6,092,331 to state politicians. Democrats received 31.8 percent of the money, Republicans got 59.1 percent, and 8.7 percent went to ballot measures, according to the institute.
Lobbying is a big part of the industry’s approach. CCA had 41 lobbyists in just three states—Tennessee, Nevada and Florida—from 2003 to 2010. The institute found it impossible to track all the money spent on lobbying at the state level by these companies as a consequence of widely differing disclosure laws. With the arrival of the Citizens United ruling, that task will not become easier.
The “revolving door” also benefits the private prison industry, with many former government officials joining prison companies the same way ex-colonels and ex-generals join the weapons industry upon retirement, and for the same reason: influence among their former colleagues."
source: http://motleynews.net/2011/06/26/new-stats-out-private-prison-populations-up-120-lobbyists-paying-6-million-to-state-officials/
The real problem is a situation is arising where the corporations profit from incarcerating people, and then use that money to influence politicians to craft laws which incarcerate more and more people. This is eerily familiar to the era of neo-slavery that stretched from the post Civil War era until WWII. During this time many southern states passed laws so you could arrest blacks for almost anything, and then they were "leased" to people. "The lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to commercial interests between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined vagrancy or even changing employers without permission. The initial sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, reserved almost exclusively for black men, was a form of slavery in one of hundreds of forced labor camps operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers."
source: http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
Some statistics on the two largest private prison corporations.
"Corrections Corporation of America
66: number of facilities owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest private prison company based on number of facilities
91,000: number of beds available in CCA facilities across 20 states and the District of Columbia
$1.7 billion: total revenue recorded by CCA in 2011
$17.4 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
$1.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics
$3.7 million: executive compensation for CEO Damon T. Hininger in 2011
132: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at CCA-run Idaho Correctional Center between Sept. 2007 and Sept. 2008
42: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at the state-run Idaho State Correctional Institution in the same time frame (both prisons at the time held about 1,500 inmates)
The Geo Group, Inc., the U.S.’s second largest private detention company
$1.6 billion: total revenue in year 2011, according to its annual report
65: number of domestic correctional facilities owned and operated by Geo Group, Inc.
65,716: number of beds available in Geo Group, Inc.’s domestic correctional facilities
$2.5 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 8 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
$2.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics
$5.7 million: executive compensation for CEO George C. Zoley in 2011
$6.5 million: damages awarded in a wrongful death lawsuit against the company last June for the beating death of an inmate by his cellmate at a GEO Group-run Oklahoma prison. An appeal has been filed and is pending.
$1.1 million: fine levied against the company in November 2011 by the New Mexico Department of Corrections for inadequate staffing at one of its prisons"
source: http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry
But yeah, you're right. I need to stop being melodramatic. Nothing to see here.
This might be closer to your search. The book Slavery By Another Name does a phenomenal job of describing the ways in which the status quo of Southern society and political life were restored closely following Reconstruction. The book places a lot of weight on Plessy v. Ferguson, arguing that Southern whites took the decision to mean that the North had gotten fed up with policing the South. To this day, most Southern states have Constitutions that were re-written in the years following Plessy. Legal codes were revised in a manner that created a practice the author considers to be debt slavery. http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
African American men were required to keep papers on them at all times indicating they were employed. If a black man were caught without his papers, he was arrested for vagrancy and put in jail overnight. The next day, he would receive a guilty verdict and a small fine. The fine was augmented by charges for the sheriff's time, the night in jail, the defense attorney, the prosecuting attorney, and the general court costs. These fines and fees would total hundreds of dollars at a time when even a middle-class person could expect to earn very little.
The man was then informed that he must pay the fees and fines immediately or else be jailed for contempt of court...and have additional fines added on. At this time, a "benevolent" white land owner would always appear and "volunteer" to pay the fine in exchange for a legally-binding agreement to work the debt off on the man's farm.
Upon arriving at the farm, the man was placed in precisely the structures that previously housed slaves and given the same agricultural work, complete with overseers authorized to beat slaves into submission.
A final twist increased the amount of the man's obligation by the cost of his quarters, his meals, his work clothes, and the tools he used. The debt would grow at a rate that was impossible to ever repay, so most black men in the post-Reconstruction era found themselves back in debt slavery for the rest of their lives.
The author notes that this debt slavery was more pernicious than actual slavery because it employed credit. A slave owner prior to the war was required to front considerable capital to buy a slave. Slaves were capital goods, so discipline was restrained by the need to keep the slave able to work. Debt slaves after the war, however, were "purchased" for the amount of their fine (and records are unclear regarding whether the white landowners ever actually paid the fines they assumed on behalf of the black men). Because the upfront investment was much smaller, and because the man could easily be replaced by another small debt purchase, the landowners no longer had any financial motive to treat the debt slaves with even the slightest degree of care. This is illustrated in the book Lay This Body Down, the account of a debt slaver who tossed eleven black men chained to rocks into his mill pond (after church on Sunday) because he learned that Federal inspectors were coming by the next day to ensure debt slavery was not occurring. http://www.amazon.com/Lay-This-Body-Down-Plantation/dp/1556524471/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427315802&sr=1-1&keywords=lay+this+body+down
The author notes the practice continued until WWII, when the manufacturing needs of the US grew so dramatically that black men were needed on assembly lines and the debt slavery practice couldn't profitably continue. The conclusion based on available records suggests that, practically speaking, slavery continued in the southern US until around 1942.
The book that tells this story is excellent. Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James Hornfischer. WWII yielded some incredible stories.
Oh man, you are in for a hell of a ride. Go buy this book. The Gambier Bay was lost in what is considered to be one of the US Navy's most incredible achievments. A few baby carriers, three destroyers, and four destroyer escorts versus four battleships (including the Yamato), six heavy cruisers, 2 light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, in a brave and ultimately successful attempt to keep the Japanese fleet from smashing into the troop and supply ships during the landings at Leyte Gulf.
It reads like a damn movie script, and I wish they'd get around to making a good movie about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Tin-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482
There is a book called "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" that details the battle in very good detail. An amazing story that will change what you believe about naval battles in WWII.
came in here to recommend this book, here's an amazon link
I guess it depends how deep down the proverbial rabbit hole you're willing to go. If you entertain the idea that the entire war was (at least partially) theater in order to justify extravagant military budgets and broad, sweeping societal/industrial changes, then it makes sense that nothing of strategic value was attacked by the Japanese. In a scenario like that, Japan and the US technically aren't "enemies" at all in the traditional sense. Japan would have been told what to bomb and how to bomb it so that nothing truly valuable was lost. The US would be willing to sack a few old battleships if they knew it could/would be used as the justification to enter the war and change the course of the country's and world's history forever (with the US at or near the top of the food chain, of course).
This is one of the only scenarios that makes any sense to me considering that nothing Japan did at Pearl Harbor really made sense from a military strategy perspective. They had every opportunity to do real damage to the US war effort by destroying a substantial amount of the Pacific fleet and infrastructure, and yet all they did was sink a few old battleships and "damage" some others. If you truly look at the alleged damage from Pearl Harbor compared to the amount of equipment, ships, infrastructure, etc. that was typically docked there, the level of Japan's failure is pretty unbelievable (literally).
It all reminds me a bit of how Hitler let the British escape at Dunkirk or how Hitler allegedly canceled all weapons research for a couple years during the war because he thought he could "win with what he had". None of it makes any tactical sense whatsoever, despite how all the mainstream historians try to spin us.
> Do you have any good reads or docs on this?
Most of this is just the overall information I've gleaned from lots of different sources. It's basically my theory of WWII based on everything I've learned with my own speculations peppered in. I just see a lot of details and "facts" surrounding the war that make no sense at all except from the perspective that both sides were ultimately working together.
One more significant detail of that era that I think sheds some light as well: the BIS was crawling with Germans/Nazis all through the late 1930's and '40's - so basically the entire time the war was going on. There was a clause in the BIS charter saying it was immune from seizure, closure, and censure, regardless of what happened and even if its members were at war. Some of the members of the charter were First National of NY, Bank of England, Reichsbank, Bank of Italy, Bank of France, etc. Basically all of the major players and "enemies" of the war. The BIS funneled money to Germany throughout the war with the obvious consent of its member banks. Ultimately, as with everything else, it all comes back to money and power in the end imo.
If you want a book specifically about Pearl Harbor, this one is pretty decent.. The author of the book appears to be a spook and the book itself is likely a limited hangout in my opinion, but it's still a good entry-point and I think a lot of the evidence it compiles actually supports my theory that Pearl Harbor was one act in the Grand Play that is WWII, with Japan "in on it", despite that not being the author's intention.
It's more than that it "never stopped" -- the US callously broke the agreement it made with Gorbachev not to expand NATO to the east.
In the so-called Cold War, the USSR surrendered. It withdrew from eastern Europe and allowed itself to be broken up into over a dozen different countries -- but the US gov't acted treacherously and has never ended US aggression against Russia.
The entire Cold War strategy of provoking Russia and encircling it with military bases continued. The US pushed NATO east, and it tore up the ABM treaty placing an anti-missile base in Poland using the laughable excuse that we did that "because of Iran." Clearly the US wants to negate Russia's nuclear deterrence.
Twice in one decade the US has funded the overthrow of Ukraine's -- the historic birthplace of all of Russia -- government, with this last coup d'etat being a blatant violent and bloody affair.
Is it any wonder Russia is responding? We certainly have tried hard enough to provoke them!
> "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war." -- Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, 1944. The book "Day of Deceit" proves that the US carried out a deliberate, successful policy to provoke Japan into attacking the US so the US could enter WWII.
I haven't read Shirley's book, but it seems obsolete, given the evidence that Robert Stinnett uncovered.
In his book "Day of Deceit" Stinnett documents that the Roosevelt administration definitely knew of the attack before Dec. 7th, but more than that, had a policy to provoke Japan into attacking the US. Prior knowledge of the attack has been a theory for many years, and many people talked about it immediately after Pearl Harbor, but Stinnett unearthed much new evidence from the US gov't itself using Freedom of Information Act requests.
The most startling evidence is a US gov't document written by a Naval officer who proposed provoking Japan into attacking the US. This officer was in contact with FDR and the highest Navy admirals on a daily basis. The memo proposed 8 steps which would provoke Japan to attack the US, and the US gov't then enacted all 8 steps and Stinnett documents these.
Stinnett also offers evidence and testimony that the US gov't had broken the Japanese naval codes (the US gov't only claims to have broken Japanese diplomatic codes) before Pearl Harbor and not afterward like the US gov't and our history books claim.
Stinnett's theory is that with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, the US was shocked and feared that Britain might fall to Germany; the administration then enacted a policy of provoking Japan into attacking the US so that the US could enter the war in Europe in a "backdoor" fashion and have the country united in the war effort as a result of the attack.
Edit: Clarity.
As documented by this author's discovery of the so-called "McCollum memo" (and other research), after the fall of France, the US gov't had an actual policy of provoking Japan so we enter WWII against Germany via the German-Japanese alliance.
Day of Deceit
You should check out Day of Deceit
The review reads, "Historians have long debated whether President Roosevelt had advance knowledge of Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Using documents pried loose through the Freedom of Information Act during 17 years of research, Stinnett provides overwhelming evidence that FDR and his top advisers knew that Japanese warships were heading toward Hawaii. The heart of his argument is even more inflammatory: Stinnett argues that FDR, who desired to sway public opinion in support of U.S. entry into WWII, instigated a policy intended to provoke a Japanese attack. The plan was outlined in a U.S. Naval Intelligence secret strategy memo of October 1940; Roosevelt immediately began implementing its eight steps (which included deploying U.S. warships in Japanese territorial waters and imposing a total embargo intended to strangle Japan's economy), all of which, according to Stinnett, climaxed in the Japanese attack."
The truth about Pearl Harbor was already uncovered by Robert Stinnett, who discovered the McCollum Memo and also wrote an extensive book about it. People tried to defame him, but it's ultimately up to the reader/researcher to decide truth from falsehood.
You have obviously not read Day of Deceit by R. Stinnett because your statement was proven false back in '01. Seriously, look it up then read it.
The argument over this issue has been settled via FIOA requests of US government documents that prove, at the very least, foreknowledge.
> where exactly was the break in society between "i'm going to handle this shit myself like a boss" and "keep the blinds closed, honey, let the police handle it" who then ignore the situation until they have to come out for a third call in which they shoot the man in the chest in front of his kids?
Bowling Alone
I'm not decrying the end of that kind of mob justice, because we also have to remember that these little informal acts of vigilantism also helped keep many a minority down, but we certainly have swung pretty far in the opposite direction.
> Points 1 and 3 in the summary I quoted apply to measures of income regardless of whether you're counting household size or individual income.
Okay. Taken together, the following issues would tend to make me question my men's wage example:
One resolution could be that we are looking at the wrong time frame (30-45 years vs. 8 years). EDIT: Here is an article from five thirty eight, looking at a 15 year time frame. There is some sense in attributing the rise of Trump to things that happened recently as opposed to 45 year trends.
It's also possible that what is "lost" can be not just economic but social or cultural ... e.g. Putnam #1, Putnam #2, Cahn and Carbone. This would still relate to loss aversion, it would just be a loss of a more intangible sort.
That's a great question. I'm not a sociologist, but even many researchers will tell you there isn't a single answer for the definitive rise in social isolation. To make some sweeping, general claims, it largely has to do with:
And right! The study you reference might be the General Social Survey from U Chicago. It's really astounding that it's hard to talk about loneliness publicly, considering the former surgeon general labeled it an epidemic. Hard to believe there can still be a stigma about something affecting so many people.
If you're interested in this, two great books I recommend are The Village Effect and The Lonely American. Both have excellent theories and explanations.
Bowling Alone
The downside of diversity
As for increased crime, hard to find the data since we don't always track it well. But there is some out there, you can find it. Or just look at the Most Wanted criminals in Texas, New Mexico, etc. When you have unrestricted immigration, you're not selecting for the best people. Of course you're going to get lots of criminals.
Depressed wages? Explain how you can import millions of undocumented illegal workers who are willing to work cheap for cash, and this WON'T depress wages for the native low-skilled workers.
Boomers rejected a lot of previous cultural norms. See Bowling Alone for more on how American society has rejected Freemasonry and other kinds of "social capital."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743203046/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505517403&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=bowling+alone&dpPl=1&dpID=51GpVT7tYoL&ref=plSrch
As other uses have pointed out, it didn't change things very much, but was more an adaptation to a battlefield that had already changed thanks to the increased deadliness of supporting arms.
I just wanted to add some supplementary materials you might be interested in.
The Gun is a pretty exhaustive history of the AK-47 and automatic weapons in general
On Infantry is a very dry study of infantry tactics from late 1890s through the 1970s. It is a bit out of date, but covers the period you are asking about.
There is also FM 3-21.8 which covers the US Army Infantry Platoon and squad organization and fighting style. It would be useful to understand exactly how a modern army expects its units to fight and how it organizes them to do so.
No rain, no mud, no sand. You might enjoy reading this: https://www.amazon.ca/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734
The Gun by CJ Chivers is a really excellent and thorough history of the Kalashnikov and its significance. One of my favorite books and authors.
I can't recommend the book THE GUN enough. Amazing story about the AK47:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734
I would like to participate.
Here are three books that might fit the theme.
CJ Chivers "The Gun" - Well written and details the development of the AK-47 which has impacted men's lives for three generations now.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734
Geoff Colvin "Talent Is Overrated" - We are all trying to change ourselves for the better. That takes focus and determination. This book is definitely echoing that view.
http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class-Performers/dp/1591842948
Dean Karnazes, "Ultramarathon Man" - Good biography about a man transforming himself. Lots of fuck yeah moments.
http://www.amazon.com/Ultramarathon-Man-Confessions-All-Night-Runner/dp/1585424803
*All three of these have audiobook versions availible from Audible so that could be a boon for the dyslexic amoungst us who have issues reading.
Of the three I would say Talent Is Overrated would probably prompt more discussion. The Ultramarathon Man might be good for a working out themed choice. The Gun is just a damn good book that combines politics, engineering and war.
I'm a 19-year-old boy from Ottawa, Canada (you may have heard of our little country :P ). While I was not homeschooled per se during my public school years (I went to regular English schools), I definitely learned more quickly, more thoroughly and more widely due to my parents' constant efforts to teach me things that went way above and beyond what I was "learning" at my high school.
My parents are both high school teachers, and have each spent roughly 30 years teaching their respective subjects.
My dad actually just retired last year, but he taught most of the Social Studies curriculum during the course of his career (History, Philosophy, Psychology, World Religions, etc.). He is a bilingual Francophone from Ottawa, so he taught at one of the French Catholic high schools in our area. He also happens to be somewhat skeptical of religion (not an atheist, but damned close). Odd combination, yes, but it has resulted in him introducing me to
military history, everything from the Roman legions to the Knights Templar to the Taliban.
My mother was born in Ottawa, to Greek parents who had left Greece after the Second World War; my grandparents are from a village about 20 minutes away from the modern city of Sparti (Sparta). During the war, the village was at some point occupied by Axis forces (I'm not sure when or to what extent, because my grandparents' English is not great and only my mother speaks Greek).
I decided to include a list (below) of works that I've found particularly interesting (I've never actually written down a list of my favs before, so this may be somewhat... sprawling and will be in no particular order :P ). Depending on the ages of your kids, some of this stuff might be inappropriate for them right now, but they can always check it out when they're older. It's mostly military/wartime history that interests me (it's what I plan on studying in university), but I've learned so many little tidbits about other things as well from having access to these works. Since your kids are all boys, I hope they'll find at least some of this stuff to be interesting :) .
Books
Movies and TV
This is all non-fiction. If you like this list, let me know, and I can expand on it further, and also include my favourite works from other genres, as well as my favourite fiction books as well :) . I left out tons of stuff that I'm too much of a lazy teenager to type in here, lol.
This is a good place to start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_(book)
https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
(maybe some of the section on Guatemala at least is in the preview - I didn't look)
This book is also well worth reading, it expanded his section on Iran in Overthrow. Another long-term foreign policy disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah%27s_Men
I agree with your overall sentiment, but it is strange to be skeptical on this issue, which has overwhelming evidence.
I think there is a danger in receiving everything passively from Reddit, you have to actively seek out ideas and information from a wide range of sources. If you have a broader base of knowledge it is easier to know what seems fishy (on Reddit or anywhere else).
If you want a quick, moderate overview on the topic at hand here is a good book:
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
Amazon link to the book he's referring to.
And might I suggest another book on the topic? This one is written by a former US State Dept. historian: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II.
I have a book called From Sea to Shining Sea I haven't erad it but it looks like something you're after.
I know you said fiction/pleasure, but I read A People's History of the USA. It's certainly not fictional, yet it is gripping.
-The Economist
-Slate
-The Atlantic
-Foreign Policy Magazine
(Just to name a few well rounded publications.)
A People's History of the United States By Howard Zinn is a great primer, but I'm sure some people will say that it leans too far to the left. Either way I thought it was great, regardless of your political view.
EDIT:
Start reading
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Suggested reading [fixed]
My source is largely Who Built America? and A Peoples' History of the United States. What are yours?
I don't have a thorough knowledge of 19th century international property law, but a lot of it has carried by principle from then until now.
If you really don't know any physics I guess I can see how it could be a difficult read. I think you should push through it slowly and try to understand it. That kind of understanding can blow your world up so large it's beyond description. I found it to be leisurely but I've had an interest in physics for at least five years. If you want to learn more about physics after this I recommend Brian Greene.
But if you want to move on to something else that won't make you feel stupid maybe try A Short History of Nearly Everything which tells of the scientists lives as they discovered important things through history. A People's History of the United States, on a different track, gives you American history through the eyes of the common people. Just thought I'd throw that in.
Don't abandon every hard book - we're all guilty of it but pushing your mind through some tough ones is never something you will regret on your deathbed. Know what I mean?
Read http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
Clown, read your history, while you are at it look up the words corporatist and oligarchy. No taxation without representation, live free or die. Liberty was the foundation, not socialist nanny state horse shit. You are very obviously bereft of any historical context.
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fedpapers.html
http://www.reddit.com/domain/tenthamendmentcenter.com
Your inability to understand your mom is a side effect of no education.
The Reluctant Metropolis by William Fulton. Not only does he talk about development and history of Los Angeles, but also how it relates to Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Las Vegas.
If you're interested in water and politics of the American west including Los Angeles, I also recommend Cadillac Desert -- pretty relevant in this multiyear drought
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about water infrastructure in the American West and its politics.
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is fiction but talks about human-nature relations.
That was anything but a free market purchase of water rights. LA used massive amounts of political muscle to get those water rights. Cadillac Desert has a really detailed account of this, but wikipedia has a decent summary
Some pretty shady shit went down to build the LA Aqueduct.
The book list just keeps growing in so many different directions that it's hard to identify which I want to tackle next (I also have a tendency to take meticulous notes while I read and that slows the process down even further!). Some of the topics I intend to read about once I'm done with the books mentioned:
Plus a bunch of books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, and others. There are way too many. And all the fiction books I want to read too! It's not that I didn't read books before, but my faith transition has sparked an intense desire to study and learn far greater than I ever experienced before.
Here are half-a-dozen good ones for you:
I'd suggest taking a look at Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner. It's an excellent read in my opinion, more of an ecology book with it's central focus of water availability in the west. Having said that, the history, economics, and conflicts water policy/availability has created has had a huge impact on planning policy and how the western US developed.
In Cadillac Desert (I believe, I read it a while ago and could be mistaken on my source), there was a suggestion that the American west be divided along watersheds. That seems like a geographical feature that is not used very often, but causes quite a few problems between countries.
non-fiction:
I liked Eddie' Huang's Fresh Off The Boat. Don't let the shitty TV show (which the dude doesn't like) scare you off. It's an interesting book that covers a wide range of shit. Not just cooking or being Asian.
If you know who Eddie Huang is and you aren't a fan/don't want to give it a shot, maybe alternatively try one of Anthony Bourdain's books. I personally haven't ready them though.
The Heart of the Sea: Tragedy of the Whale ship Essex again, ignore the shitty movie. Well, I haven't seen it but I assume so. Very interesting true story about a whaling ship in 1800 something that's destroyed by a sperm whale and the shipwrecked crew tries to survive. Basically a real life Moby Dick - Herman Melville based his story on the Essex.
Fiction:
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is an easy entertaining easy read. I'm now realizing all of recommendations all seem to have movies but that's coincidence. I was also gonna say American Psycho.
Books are cool. I don't read enough anymore.
If you are not a land lubber you might try In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick or Wreck of the Medusa: The Tragic Story of the Death Raft by Alexander McKee.
Until just last night I had never heard of the Essex. I was talking with a guy at my local bar and he recommended I read this book.
Two naval books that are great reads:
http://www.amazon.com/To-Rule-Waves-British-Shaped/dp/0060534257
http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship-Essex/dp/0141001828/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382822400&sr=1-1&keywords=whaleship+essex
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex Link
This is a nice, easy reading book about the story Moby Dick is based on. The Essex was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale and her crew had to navigate home in whaleboats. It definitely falls more on the popular history side of the fence.
Don't know if this helps at all, but for historical context the story of the whalingship Essex was purportedly part of the inspiration for Moby Dick. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is a book written from the perspective of a cabin boy on the Essex. It is one of the most riveting and haunting books I have ever read. This background stuff won't help too much on the literary criticism side of things, but helps put the story into a bit of historical context.
This book is exactly $12.34.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship/dp/0141001828
Jewish stuff aside, I'm currently in the middle of The Alchemy of Air about the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen and In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, about the Essex disaster, which inspired Moby Dick.
Personally, I think the American Empire is declining. Sir John Glubb had a wonderful write up of this, and I have copied his conclusion below. The full PDF can be found here and it is only 27 pages long.
Glubb looked at eleven empires over the course of history. I copied a relevant summary from the end. The pdf is online here.
> As numerous points of interest have arisen in the course of this essay, I close with a brief summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.
> (a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.
> (b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national greatness.
> (c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten generations?
> (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:
> The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
> The Age of Conquests
> The Age of Commerce
> The Age of Affluence
> The Age of Intellect
> The Age of Decadence.
> (e) Decadence is marked by:
> Defensiveness
> Pessimism
> Materialism
> Frivolity
> An influx of foreigners
> The Welfare State
> A weakening of religion.
> (f) Decadence is due to:
> Too long a period of wealth and power
> Selfishness
> Love of money
> The loss of a sense of duty.
> (g) The life histories of great states are amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.
> (h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external causes.
> (i) History should be taught as the history of the human race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the student’s own country.
The real question is how technology will either speed up, slow down. or prevent the same thing from happening to America.
I also recommend the following books:
The Collapse of Complex Societies, By Joseph Tainter
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, By Jared Diamond
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change
Finally, when it comes to survival information, I highly recommend www.survivalblog.com. To me, they are the best of the best.
I also would like to plug Radio Free Redoubt (podcast) as well as AmRRON (American Redoubt Radio Operator's Network).
Did you not notice that I said what the source is? Jared Diamond's Collapse?
You want chapter 15, starting on page 441, but it is a good idea to read the whole book.
http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Succeed-Revised-Edition/dp/0143117009
Battle Cry of Freedom is widely regarded as one of the best SINGLE VOLUME treatments of the US Civil war. There are better multi volume sets, and better treatments of specific events, but as a general knowledge base, this is top shelf material.
The Idea of America Is a great, short read discussing the formative years of the United States.
Older editions of Western Civilizations are quite good and informative. Yes, they're actual college textbooks, but they're easy to follow and surprisingly concise. Pick up a used copy for under $20, ignore the full retail price.
I'd actually take that as advice for just about any book on history. Many university level courses use the sorts of books recommended on this thread, and any used copies Amazon sells through its Marketplace are more likely than not copies read through once for a college course, and sold back for a few extra dollars. I have a substantial collection of used non fiction purchased at a discount for this exact reason, and there's nothing wrong with a few marks in the book, or a crease in the cover. The content is what matters.
So your position is that we should have monuments to monsters in places of high regard like the state house and public parks in order to remind us not to become monsters?
If that's the logic. It sure ain't working.
See the example of the klan standing with the bedford bust in the state house. Or the rally around the Robert E Lee monument in Charlottesville where they marched with torches shouting that the jews "will not replace us" and then murdered a woman.
The monuments aren't a deterrence to monsters, they are an incitement.
Should there be a monument to Osama bin Laden in order to remind us not to commit mass murder in the name of religious insanity? We consigned his corpse to the bottom of the ocean because we knew that was a bad idea.
> It was a different time which required different actions.
No, it wasn't a different time. There have always been people condemning white supremacy. The only difference now is that the white supremacists don't have quite as much power to muffle their critics as they used to.
ETA:
> The common man fought that war and died never knowing what they were really fighting over.
No, they absolutely knew what they were fighting for. They weren't dummies. The average foot soldier was well aware they were fighting for white supremacy. The declarations of secession explicitly spelled out they were fighting for white supremacy and they used that to recruit the cannon fodder - if black people were equal to white people, then poor whites would no longer have anyone below them in the social hierarchy.
Here's a quote from The Battlecry of Freedom: Civil War Era by James McPherson:
> So they undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation. Georgia’s Governor Brown carried this message to his native uplands of north Georgia whose voters idolized him. Slavery “is the poor man’s best Government,” said Brown. “Among us the poor white laborer . . . does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. ... He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men” Thus yeoman farmers “will never consent to submit to abolition rule,” for they “know that in the event of the abolition of slavery, they would be greater sufferers than the rich, who would be able to protect themselves. . . . When it becomes necessary to defend our rights against so foul a domination, I would call upon the mountain boys as well as the people of the lowlands, and they would come down like an avalanche and swarm around the flag of Georgia.
> what I've come to realize is the North also was a beneficiary or at least opportunistically benefitted from the assistance of the Slave states
Yes, any book on Civil War history would address that. I recommend McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom for a good one-volume treatment of the war. No one said the North was pure as the driven snow, enlightened, embraced racial equality, etc. To "realize" that a caricature is false isn't that great of a leap. It's like "realizing" Lincoln wasn't an angel crusading since birth to free the slaves. It's true, but also rebuts only a cartoon version of history that no one really believes in.
>but the CSA was kind of caught holding the historical hot potato here that most western European powers previously benefited from while it was convenient.
Let's not act like they lacked agency. Those European powers had abolished slavery. The South was not in the process of moving away from slavery, rather they more of their wealth was tied up in slaves as we get closer to the Civil War. Their ideology and religion both celebrated slavery as a virtuous and enlightened structure of society.
>(in a southern state that never economically recovered 100%
Never recovered from having the slaves freed, but there are other issues too. The South rejected industrialization, rejected higher rates of education, rejected urbanization, etc. The South made cultural decisions regarding a rural, slow, relaxed existence, and decisions have consequences. The North's choices regarding urbanization, industrialization, automation, education, commerce etc also had consequences. These consequences are still playing out, because one set of choices creates wealth and the other does not, at least not nearly as well.
>This isn't really better than racism in a lot of ways.
This isn't about racism, though. It's about admitting what the Rebel flag actually stands for. We need to have the honesty of admitting that the flag was explicitly created as the national flag of a slave empire. Not a "fight the power" middle finger to "the man," but a confederacy of states dedicated explicitly to white supremacy and slavery, forever.
If I festoon my apartment with Nazi regalia, no one would be stupid enough to think maybe I was using the symbols in a value-neutral way. The swastika existed before Hitler, but the Rebel Flag did not exist before the Confederacy. It is not a value-neutral symbol, no more than this is a value-neutral symbol. We're not kids flipping people off at a Marilyn Manson or Insane Clown Posse concert.
I'm want to suggest folks looking to read Shelby Foote's Civil War series, consider Battle Cry of Freddom instead. McPherson's book is Pulitzer Prize-winning, included in the Oxford history of the United States, highly praised, and is included (along with Foote's series) in the top books recommended by the Library of Congress on the subject.
Battle Cry of Freedom, your civil war bible.
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/dp/019516895X
Cracks knuckles. I, as what Tony Horwitz calls, "A Civil War Bore" (But also one for the American War of Independence) can give you some recommendations. You gotta read Gen. Grant's memoirs. Out of all the memoirs by the major players, Grant is the most readable of them all, it is so well written. Ken Burns' famous Documentary introduced me to the memoirs of two common soldiers. "Company Aytch" follows Sam Watkins as he fights in the Western Theater, from Shiloh to Nashville, and "All for the Union" by Elisha Hunt Rhodes follows one Federal soldier as he survives the entire war in the East, from 1st Bull Run to Appomattox. For a general history, "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson is the absolute best. For more detailed studies on the lives of the individual soldiers, the two classic works "The Life of Johnny Reb" and "The Life of Johnny Yank" are fantastic. Similar works and more modern works include "Fighting Means Killing", a detailed study on Civil War combat, and "The War for the Common Soldier", basically a general summary of the life of the common lad during the war. Now, if you want legacy, there is but one place to go: Tony Horwitz's legendary 1998 Magnum Opus "Confederates in the Attic." Over the course of two years, Tony takes you all across the American South, running into everything as varied as the KKK one county over from where I live in Kentucky (Yeah, I apologize on behalf of South-Central Kentucky in advance, but at least they're in Todd County and not Logan!!!), a Scarlet O' Harra impersonator in Atlanta, and a massive Civil War road trip in Virginia with a reactor buddy. Well written, Mr. Horwitz can make you feel whatever he wants. Tony is was of the best writers out there, and it is a shame we lost him in May. May he rest in peace.
Edit: Amazon Links
The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Company Aytch
All For the Union
Battle Cry of Freedom
The Life of Johnny Reb
The Life of Billy Yank
Fighting Means Killing
The War for the Common Soldier
Confederates in the Attic (If you buy no other book from this list, buy Confederates in the Attic)
For the Revolutionary War
For the Civil War
I have to recommend Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and Killer Angels by Michael Sharra, both fantastic military fiction.
I did some research and this is supposed to be one of the better comprehensive American Civil War books out there.
Democratic theory, which is a study area of political science, comes down to the question, "What is good?"
All our arguments are "normative," we are expressing a value or belief about what is good.
If we define politics as "a relationship of power between two or more individuals," then we can see how fragile all our relationships are, including between a person and their government.
Who do we decide to be? Where were we born? Why did we do something?
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is why I went to law school and why I work in government now.
If you are interested in different political theories, Justice by Michael Sandel and Political Philosophy by Ronald Beiner compare different political theorists or political philosophers, and are great companion pieces to LOGH.
Do you have a specific interest? Otherwise a general introduction like Think, Problems of Philosophy, or Justice are all well regarded. Though, all have their strengths and weaknesses. There are tons of accessible introductions though and depending on your interests it might be better to use one rather than another. All of those are fairly general
Some people take classes to punch a career ticket, but there are plenty of people that take classes just to learn.
I currently am taking a justice course taught at Harvard on moral philosophy. There is even an associated book you can read if you would like that pretty much covers the same material in the same order as the class, but I'm watching the lectures because I learn better that way. Moral philosophy has no chance of increasing my completely unrelated career and honestly I wouldn't even want to take my career in that direction if given the option, because I am just learning as a hobby for fun. I am also going through a game theory course at yale.
Right now I just casually watch lectures in my free time, but there are a few subjects I would like to tackle that will probably involve actually doing homework like differential equations, topology, and algorithms. Just reading a book doesn't cut it because you actually have to participate in subjects like that to fully understand them. And again, I plan on doing those just for fun because I believe learning is a life long experience.
I would recommend reading Michael Sandel’s book Justice and at the same time getting the Justice reader (book of selected readings in political philosophy) put together by Sandel, and watching Sandel’s online lecture series entitled Justice.
Justice book:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374532508/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0374532508
Justice reader:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195335120/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0195335120
Justice online lecture series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30C13C91CFFEFEA6
Hawaii 1880s. A group of sugar plantation owners arranged to usurp control of the islands from the monarchs to lower labor standards and import tariffs to the US. Then came the banana republics, the Nicarauga Canal, America's war of aggression against the Spaniards and John Foster Dulles shitting all over the world because of communists he thought he saw.
Might I recommend All The Shah's Men author Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change
To allow companies access to cheap labor and resources. Low taxes & tariffs, minimal regulation typical neoliberal stuff. Access to financial markets bank loans, investments etc. Also to establish a network of military infrastructure to enable future conquest and prevent competing countries to do the same.
Some recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0312427999/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427577478&sr=1-1&keywords=shock+doctrine
You can find PDFs of both, I just linked the amazon page because they're both good books and quite cheap.
I came here to suggest the same; I'm glad to see someone else recommend it. White Cargo is a pretty good read on the subject.
It's a good read
The Irish most likely.
Edit: There's this book
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
HEre's a good place to start
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/27/1265498/-The-slaves-that-time-forgot Here's another
Some articles for him:
Gun control's racist past and present
The racist origin of gun control laws
Then you could follow up with the role that civilian firearms played in protecting african-americans during the civil rights movement. Here are a few books on the topic:
We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
Not that I think you'll change his mind, but it'd be fun.
Relevant
Relevant.
There is a book about this.
https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X/ref=nodl_
Here's some books you might like:
1491 by Charles C Mann.
The Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.
relevant
Not being patronizing by saying you might not know Hillary well but here are some resources you might enjoy if you haven't seen/read them. After taking them in tell me if you still think Trump is more scary than the Clintons:
There are many more but the Clintons and Hillary must be stopped. They turned politics into pay-to-play cesspool and it isn't acceptable. Also I think the TPP ends the sovereignty of all member countries and will never vote for someone who supports it.
I love Jill Stein and I wish I would have been sending her money instead of Bernie.
If they don't like that one maybe they can read No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton by Christopher Hitchens.
video
I found that one pretty interesting.
Watching this as I type this. Though they had me at Christopher Hitchens. Have you read No one left to lie to?
He also wrote a pretty good book called "No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton" that calls the Clintons out on their flip-flopping and willingness to throw their loyal underlings under the bus.
And finish it up with this oldie but goldie.
Christopher Hitchen's No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is a good short read on the young Arkansas governor's rise to power.
I recommend everyone read No One Left to Lie To by Christopher Hitchens. The Clintons are a real piece of work.
He wrote an entire book on his dislike of the Clintons, yes plural, find it here: https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
>https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
You understand we're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? How does a book by a dead atheist about Bill Clinton, essentially lamenting his triangulation strategy, have anything at all to do with your point?
>LOL The point that other politicians are also dishonest doesn't somehow negate the fact that she is devoid of honesty and integrity.
But that's not my point.
One of two things must be true: either (A) Clinton is especially unqualified as a politician because she is fundamentally dishonest/lacks integrity, or (B) Clinton is as honest as any other politician. If B is true, then either (1) all politicians are unfit for office (i.e., are so dishonest they are unfit), or (2) all politicians have a certain level of dishonesty that society has deemed acceptable.
You are arguing A (or possible B(1), it's unclear since you've provided no real evidence for either claim), and I am arguing that B(2) is true.
Now, you can argue, (and I'd agree) that society as a whole should be reformed such that honesty in rewarded, but your initial assertion that Trump, who has a complete and total disregard for truth at all, is the same as Clinton severely undercuts your claim, as it suggests that any dishonesty is the same as extreme dishonesty, and failing to appreciate large differences is a huge bar to incremental improvement.
You think that Hillary supporters are leftists? Actually, let's be more specific. You think PUMA folks are leftist? There's a huge difference between being a nominal Democrat and actually falling on the left.
EDIT:
Compare PUMA with the average Fox viewer and tell me what you find.
I got this book a while back: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
You'd be surprised how many morons die by falling into hot springs and the like.
I picked up a copy of Death in Yellowstone during a trip there a couple of years ago. Highly recommended.
The chapter on bears had many anecdotes about dog / bear interactions. Also people / bear interactions.
People can be really stupid.
Love Shoshone Geyser Basin. I've been there 3 times! Finally got to see Minute Man go off on the 3rd trip!
Ever read Death in Yellowstone? You'll never look at Shoshone Geyser Basin the same...
I worked a summer in Yellowstone a couple years ago. It's amazing how many people just lost their minds when they got near these large wild animals. The bison harmed FAR more people every year that bears ever do. Not because the bison are that aggressive, these people have never been around wild animals and think they are tame.
I was surprised how many times I was asked if they could swim in the hot springs. "I would not recommend it, since most of the springs are boiling or almost boiling. It would most likely be lethal"
FYI: the vast majority of deaths in Yellowstone are car accidents.
Check out Death in Yellowstone it's a great read
If you like spending money on something that wikipedia rendered obsolete-ish, I recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
Picked it up as a young morbid person in the park. Fantastic.
For America, you definitely need to read "Color of Law". And it should be mandatory reading by Blue City residents and planners because most of the most racist systems like zoning and red-lining started in Blue Cities. Zoning is straight out of San Francisco and intended to limit, displace and steal the real estate of Chinese-Americans! It's a matter of public record! And yet zoning and very similar types of arbitrary and capricious planning is still practiced today.
Having been raised in the SF Bay Area, this doesn't surprise me because "Blue" value people are usually the most racist people I've met. They think they aren't but if you listen to their words and watch their deeds (e.g. the NIMBYism that has caused the current housing crisis in the SF Bay Area), you see it's primarily about racism, sometimes hidden by classicism, which is hidden by "preserving the community norms/feel".
Thank you for your reply.
Sensing that you are level headed and fair minded, I'd like to recommend a book for you to read. Maybe glance at the pages available on Amazon and see if you'd be interested...
The Color of Law..... by Richard Rothstein
Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq"
It's a good read, although it may be a little biased.
there is a really good book called Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq that outlines all of the times that the CIA has pulled this shit. an easy read that i highly recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
your welcome
You could read a book on the subject and maybe stop arguing from ignorance: https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
My bad, I forgot to list the 5% link.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530134-300-ancient-invaders-transformed-britain-but-not-its-dna/
"Anglo-Saxons, whose influx began around AD 450, account for 10 to 40 per cent of the DNA in half of modern-day Britons."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene.html
"Isotope analysis has begun to be employed to help answer the uncertainties regarding Anglo-Saxon migration. However, the number of studies is small. Strontium data in a 5th–7th-century cemetery in West Heslerston implied the presence of two groups: one of "local" and one of "nonlocal" origin. Although the study suggested that they could not define the limits of local variation and identify immigrants with confidence, they could give a useful account of the issues.[98] Oxygen and strontium isotope data in an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Wally Corner, Berinsfield in the Upper Thames Valley, Oxfordshire, found only 5.3% of the sample originating from continental Europe, supporting the hypothesis of acculturation. Furthermore, they found that there was no change in this pattern over time, except amongst some females." - Wiki
Also on white slavery in the US:
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
Anti-Irish sentiment. Irish slavery.
Keeping a culture going by participating in it is a choice. It doesn't matter where that culture came from; it matters whether it persists when there is no actual reason for it to persist. Plenty of people have abandoned that culture and done quite well for themselves. So the obvious conclusion is that if you don't act like a thug, make better choices, and stop acting like a whiny, entitled retard, you'll be just fine.
It's not genetics. I don't believe anyone is inherently more or less capable of success based on their ethnic background. It's bad choices and a lack of personal responsibility. If you can't manage those two things, don't fucking live in America. Because this is not a society that shields people from their decisions. If you fuck up, you're going to feel it.
And before you go into the whole, "rich people don't feel the consequences of their fuckups as hard" line, duh. Wealth is power. It just so happens that the people with the most wealth are the people whose cultures aren't based on being a bunch of criminal-worshiping degenerates. Racial superiority isn't a thing, but you can bet your ass cultural superiority is. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking liar.
You're not absolved of your responsibility to make sound life choices just because you don't have as many do-overs as someone else.
All of the pages I can find that talk about this seem to be using this book as their primary source. I havn't been able to find any detailed reviews of this one, nor much about the authors.
For reliable information, you'll have to go to largely offline sources. Don Jordan and Michael Walsh cover a lot of ground regarding Irish (and other) slavery in their book, White Cargo.
In all, there were some 300,000 to 500,000 Irish and poor British that were sent, or in frequent cases "spirited" (aka kidnapped), to the new colonies and Caribbean islands as slaves and indentured servants. A good part of this was the method by which the English combated Irish rebels -- the Tories. As described in White Cargo:
>One way of dealing with them was to hold four people hostage against the captures of any tory committing a crime. If within twenty-eight days the crime went unsolved and the tory had not given himself up, the four would be shipped off the colonies.
Either way, the English were satisfied.
Regarding the early numbers, they provide:
> Over the next ten years, several English privateers reportedly did arrive in the Chesapeake with Africans for sale, and men and women were brought in from the Dutch territory and from the West Indies, but Virginia continued to rely on the white servant trade. By the mid-seventeenth century, Africans numbered only 300 out of a total settler population of 11,000.
...
>Although there was no abrupt surge of Africans, the racial balance in the tobacco fields was changing. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, white outnumbered black in the Chesapeake by more than twenty to one. By the last quarter of the century, the ratio had narrowed to three to one, with 2,000 black slaves in Virginia and 6,000 white servants.
As they also describe, it was a question of economics. White slaves and indentured servants were frequently cheaper to come by, and had higher survival rates, than African blacks. In time, this changed, and more and more blacks survived both the journey from Africa as well as the labor in the fields. And thus began the shift to African slaves instead of the largely Irish whites.
With regards to the slavery vs. indentured servitude aspect, Publisher's Weekly states:
>High school American history classes present indentured servitude as a benignly paternalistic system whereby colonial immigrants spent a few years working off their passage and went on to better things. Not so, this impassioned history argues: the indentured servitude of whites was comparable in most respects to the slavery endured by blacks.
Though many cases were time-limited (at least at the start), indentured servants were every bit as much treated like those who were bound for life.
oppressed minority is a relative term. A white man in a black ghetto is an oppressed minority. or a white in south africa. Issues such as slavery are rather funny to when you think abotu it. As an Irish American i have just as much of a right to declare myself a member of a formerly oppressed minority.
if you feel like a little light reading.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Irish-Slaves-indenture-Immigrants/dp/145630612X
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335295822&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0814742963
Added so far:
I don't think you're reading my comment charitably. He's one example, but it's not evidence per se. My full view would be closer to Cone's here.
That nonviolent movements work better is ahistorical and anti-intellectual. See This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed or Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, for example.
Nonviolence does not equal the Gospel. Nor does solidarity with the oppressed, per se. If you read above in Cone, the liberation of the oppressed is a sine qua non of the Gospel. And, as I said in the quoted comment, when nonviolent rhetoric works against those ends, it therefore works against the Gospel.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
I think keeping a dialogue open and abiding their decision for the time being is the best option. Try visiting ranges in when you're free, practicing skills, etc. and eventually ask if they'll join you. Exposing them to the history behind the LA riots might be worth while at some point. It's one thing to be an armchair-philosopher and say "I'd rather die than possibly take the life of another person.", but when things go to hell and the cops fall back to protected areas while the city burns, shit starts getting a lot more real.
If they're readers, maybe this would be worth a dabble. It's not just about their individual life and death. There are far worse fates than individual death, like having to watch those worse fates befall your family.
Ugh, I hate these kinds of questions but I'll bite.
I'm sort of picking my way through the book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, about how a lot of the players in the Civil Rights movement armed themselves for self-defense against racists. This article argues that the Black Panthers were the forerunners of the modern pro-gun view of gun rights in the US.
There are several books, and many other articles, on similar topics. I think it would be good to include articles like these because it combats the "guns are for old, angry white men" narrative. A lot of people who talk about gun rights do so in pretty abstract terms, and providing concrete examples of people who were actually oppressed arming themselves and defending themselves successfully is more persuasive IMO.
Oh look typical erasure of Malcolm X's influence of a whitewashed vision of MLK. Civil rights movements have always allowed protecting yourself. Not being ready to do so is a luxury that southern activist didn't have back then and still really don't today. I suggest reading This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed to learn about guns and self defense in the movement. I'm on phone right now so can't properly format but will post the link below.
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/319208570/this-nonviolent-stuffll-get-you-killed-how-guns-made-the-civil-rights-movement-p
https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X
Charles Cobb describes how the people most crucial to the success of the civil rights movement were nonviolent activists who carried firearms, and discusses the role guns played in the Southern freedom movement.
...Why don't we ever learn about that? Wonder why we just hear about the pacifist history? It is possible that the powers that be prefer a pacified population?
You might want to check out https://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/082236123X - its about the broader MLK idea of nonviolent resistance rather than MR's work but it does address how even King's movement etc was in reality backed up by the ability and willingness to meet force with force.
>> Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama, home as "an arsenal."
He mentioned the book https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
Just in case you forgot to check back
If you're into this sort of story I'd recommend Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon
She looks far enough away from the ledge, but you should check out "Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon" http://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
My favorite is the people stepping over the edge backing up with camera in hand trying to get a good shot of the lodges.
Not search&rescue really, but I guiltily enjoyed the book "Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon" way too much. It outlined almost every single death that occurred in the Grand Canyon over a large number of years -- falls, hikes that go wrong, river rapid troubles, and so forth.
I bought after my own trip to the Grand Canyon, where I was boggled at the sight of tourists leaping about on slippery rocks at the edge of the canyon in the rain. Granted, I'm overly paranoid (and very clumsy), but it still didn't seem like the wisest thing. I got to thinking that surely people must just fall in, and searching led me to that book.
I visited the Grand Canyon a couple of years ago and picked up the book Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. In it was a similar story. Someone fell off, and they couldn't find the body. They searched and searched but couldn't find it. Someone had the idea of dropping a bale of hay and watched where it landed. Sure enough, just like in your case, the bale landed right near where the body lay.
Niiiice. This reminds me of a book I have. Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. I'm kinda into the macabre.
All I could find when searching "Death Above the Rim" was a movie about basketball ("Above the Rim"). Is this the book you're referring to: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Death-Grand-Canyon/dp/097009731X
Very intrigued.
Here's a book about deaths in the Grand Canyon. It's an interesting read.
Not true! One of the most common questions asked of park rangers is how many people have died in the Canyon, and this is the best-selling book in the park. When I worked for the local paper, we always covered the deaths whether from falls, exposure, exertion, suicide or drowning in the river.
You know, the last time I was at the grand canyon, I bought a book there: Death in Grand Canyon.
It was interesting in how it detailed all the various ways people died, were murdered, committed suicide, etc.
Fascinating reading.
change the aw/d to product
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/097009731X
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I do remember from history classes in college that the Native Americans would raze down the trees for their agriculture. There's a book on this that I read years ago which goes into much more detail on how they shaped the land. After most of them died (remember, something like 90% of them were killed, many before European colonization was in full swing), the forests starting coming back. It's hard for us now to fathom what New England look like before European settlement, since so much of their history is now lost.
If you're looking for some more in depth reading on the subject, I suggest Guns, Germs and Steel or 1491.
A great read about Cahokia and other relatively recent (and still controversial) findings: 1491
Amazon and local libraries have free ebooks, buddy.
New ones, too. Just read 1491 for free through the Seattle Public Library.
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
I have yet to read it, but the book 1491 was written to explore such questions. Anyone who had read it, please comment on its content.
Popular "argument"???
I meant this book which seems (to my mind anyway) to contain more than simply an "argument"... more like a paradigm shifting change in the way the Pre-Columbian civilizations existed.
To my mind when Europeans jokingly assert that America doesn't really have a "history" -- I believe they are quite frankly, "full of it", because a lot of the "history" of Europe is either large gaping holes (how little we REALLY know of Carthage, or of the Phoenician, Celtic or Germanic histories), or reconstructed "faux" history, with only a superficial "glossy coating" regarding wars and certain ruling family histories.
A very large part of the "American" attitude, psyche, and even "philosophy" of individualism if you will, seems to have been adopted by the immigrants from the native tribes. (Especially if one goes digging into the writings of people like Franklin, Cadwallader Colden, etc.)
And founded an empire which was - for nearly 700 years - the foremost champion of religious tolerance, technological advancement and social diversity. Compare to Christopher Columbus, who wanted to found a theocratic empire based on slavery (and New Spain was far, far worse than anything Mohammed inflicted), so he could use New World gold to feed the endless war against the Muslim world. Also, the man responsible for one of the greatest losses of human life and biodiversity the world has ever seen.
That said, I've really got no truck with Columbus, as he was a product of his immensely barbaric times.
Damn straight. Reference here.
Cool deal. Good to come across someone who read a lot of history. Try reading 1491 by Charles C Mann Here
It is a very good read.
No, I meant 1491 (Good look, though. It has been a while since 2nd grade), and I don't know where you got a judgement from me on how colonialism affected Africa in the long run. The fact that Europeans were able to colonize Africa because of overwhelming 'might' is my point.
edit: also, I knew using the word primitive would make me catch flak, which is why I tried to soften it with focused definition, but I'll use your phrase from now on. It sounds nicer, anyways.
Unfortunately her trustworthiness is so low that no one believes her. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out on his book on Bill Clinton: There is No one left to lie to. The whole world knows a penny is worth more than a promise from a Clinton.
"No One Left to Lie To."
It's actually this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(politics) and of course this https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
He has more than a you tube video about the Clintons. He wrote a book. And more than a grudge. Grudge sounds petty. Hitchens was seldom petty. See "No One Left to Lie to"
From Amazon:
In NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO, a New York Times bestseller, Christopher Hitchens casts an unflinching eye on the Clinton political machine and offers a searing indictment of a president who sought to hold power at any cost.
With blistering wit and meticulous documentation, Hitchens masterfully deconstructs Clinton's abject propensity for pandering to the Left while delivering to the Right, and he argues that the president's personal transgressions were ultimately inseparable from his political corruption.
Hitchens questions the president's refusals to deny accusations of rape by reputable women and lambasts, among numerous impostures, his insistence on playing the race card, the shortsightedness of his welfare bill, his ludicrous war on drugs, and his abandonment of homosexuals in the form of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Opportunistic statecraft, crony capitalism, "divide and rule" identity politics, and populist manipulations-these are perhaps Clinton's greatest and most enduring legacies.
If you are in a campground as big as that one, there is zero chance of bear attack. But, if you want to suitably freak yourself out about the ways Yellowstone is trying to kill you besides bears read this book while there, (in every gift shop) http://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Yellowstone-Accidents-Foolhardiness-National/dp/1570980217
Loved this as a kid
I think I read it in this book actually.
I could be wrong though
Death in Yellowstone changed my opinion on kid-leashes. Of course, taking a toddler to a massive caldera/wildlife preserve is a bit of a risky idea in the first place. But leashing them up could mitigate most of that risk.
Oh - yeah, like BeTee said, tourists (or tourons as the staff called them [moron tourists]) are notorious for their naivete. There is an entire book dedicated to the dumb ways tourons have gotten themselves killed in Yellowstone over the years.
After reading this I know how easily that could have turned into Thai Soup
They have graphic fliers and signs which I am positive they saw. Especially since the lady was joking about the danger. There is a good book called Death in Yellowstone that has many good stories about what dumbasses people can be.
In addition to the comment above, check out the book Color of Law
>Any "segregation" which does exist is entirely self-imposed by people choosing of their own free will to live in certain neighborhoods which are populated by people who match their own ethnicity or socio-economic class
"There’s this idea that people self-segregate, but the reality is that there’s never really been self-segregation in Milwaukee"
Segregation was literally the law of the land for 400 entire goddamn years. Not to mention Milwaukee was littered with sundown towns that helped create the racial landscape. If you think Milwaukee's racial demographics are just some happy accident, then you REALLY need to educate yourself, because there's no excuse for being this ignorant in 2019. If you haven't read The Color of Law or Sundown Towns (which very obviously you haven't) then don't bother responding.
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Description|Jordan Peele's 'Us' - Everything Explained and Deeper Meaning⤶⤶Chapter Times:⤶⤶00:13 Intro⤶01:22 Plot Synopsis and Ending Explained⤶03:18 Reading the Twist and Trauma Theory⤶04:00 Foreshadowing the Twist⤶07:41 Sci-Fi Tropes, Postcolonialism and Post-Colonial Guilt⤶08:56 White Savior Archetype⤶11:04 'Us' as 'Black Cinema'⤶13:07 Is Jason a tethered?⤶15:37 Kitty/Dahlia - Why doesn't she kill Adelaide?⤶16:29 Jeremiah 11:11 What's up with that?⤶18:26 Mirroring and the visual motif of the Scissors explained.⤶19:06 Deeper Meaning - What, or who do the tethered represent?⤶ 19:35 Probably the right answer⤶ 20:14 Bad Answer⤶ 20:41 Good Answer⤶22:20 Further Racial Commentary⤶23:08 Problematising Black Masculinity⤶24:28 Reoccurring Motif's in Jordan Peele's work.⤶25:28 Outro⤶⤶⤶Resources: ⤶⤶Ash, Erin -- ‘Emotional Responses to Savior Films: Concealing Privilege or Appealing to Our Better Selves?’⤶⤶https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/projections/11/2/proj110203.xml⤶⤶Caruth, Cathy - Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. ⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unclaimed-Experience-Trauma-Narrative-History/dp/1421421658/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Unclaimed+Experience%3A+Trauma%2C+Narrative%2C+and+History.&qid=1554213916&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull⤶⤶Froude, J.A. -- The English In The West Indies [Remember this is explicitly an example of Colonial Racism and needs to be understood as such.]⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Indies-James-Anthony-Froude/dp/1546922687/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+english+in+the+west+indies&qid=1554211922&s=books&sr=1-1 ⤶⤶Lazarus, Neil (ed) -- The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies.⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-Companion-Postcolonial-Companions-Literature/dp/0521534186⤶⤶Le Guin, Ursula – The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas⤶⤶https://www.amazon.com/Ones-Who-Walk-Away-Omelas-ebook/dp/B01N0PZ35J⤶⤶Newman, Stephanie -- Too Afraid To Protest⤶https://www.writingonglass.com/content/too-afraid-to-protest ⤶⤶Rankine, Claudia – Citizen⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Citizen-American-Lyric-Claudia-Rankine/dp/1555976905⤶⤶Rothstein, Richard – The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853⤶⤶Sharf, Zack - Lupita Nyong’o Used Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Inspiration for ‘Us’ Doppelgänger Voice⤶⤶https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/lupita-nyongo-us-voice-robert-f-kennedy-jr-1202052716/⤶⤶Tarrant-Reid, Linda – Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century ⤶⤶https://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Black-America-Exploration-Twenty-First/dp/0810970988⤶⤶Touré – Who’s Afraid Of Post-Blackness? : What it Means to be Black Now.⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whos-Afraid-Post-Blackness-Means-Black/dp/1439177562⤶⤶Victims of Crime.org – Black Children Exposed to Violence and Victimization⤶⤶http://victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/other-projects/youth-initiative/interventions-for-black-children's-exposure-to-violence/black-children-exposed-to-violence⤶⤶Vera, Hernan & Gordon, Andrew – Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Screen-Saviors-Hollywood-Fictions-Whiteness/dp/0847699471⤶⤶Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine⤶⤶https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Machine-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141439971/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Wells%2C+H.G.+%E2%80%93+The+Time+Machine&qid=1554213879&s=books&sr=1-1⤶⤶YouGov -- Statistics on Black American’s Fear of Police Violence⤶⤶https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/03/15/black-americans-police⤶⤶⤶Buy our artwork at Displate.com!⤶https://displate.com/displate/942054?art=2291045ae0750b448c3⤶⤶⤶⤶For a tutorial video for our intro effects check out this video:⤶https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7jZ...⤶And follow @bloomandglare on Instagram.⤶⤶Audio mixing by Christopher Hall.⤶Follow @christopher_thomas_hall on Instagram! ⤶(Message me for contact information.)
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1631492853/
sanitized
https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
Thanks, ill be sure to send you a link once I finish the project this summer. The project is my chosen thesis project for graduate school and my professor is thrilled someone is finally making the case that the convict lease system and southern chain gang systems in many ways represented Soviet Gulags, from the death rates and conditions found in prison mines, prison plantations, road and forrest camps, etc to the role such penal projects played in infrastructure development. I've found numerous newspaper articles and convict interviews from the late 1800s and early 1900s and reading them, there are so many overlaps with Soviet Gulag memoirs.
I really dislike how Reagan focused so much on the Soviet Union as being an "evil empire" while he himself built up a massive prison industrial complex. Solzhenitsyn and Reagan were close friends and while they were correct to denounce the abuses that went on under communism, they have done a lot of damage in distorting American history and culture. State capitalism in America has done equally horrific things to what the Soviet Union did just like the Bush's, Clintons, and Trump have done equally bad things to what Putin has done.
Here's some sources you might find interesting. Top one is a documentary slavery by another name and then there's a bunch of books
https://vimeo.com/78437511
https://www.amazon.com/Twice-Work-Free-Labor-Political/dp/1859840868
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Prisoners-Their-World-1865-1900/dp/0813919843/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=black+prisoners+and+their+world&qid=1550435064&s=gateway&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/One-Dies-Get-Another-1866-1928/dp/1570030839/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=one+dies+get+another&qid=1550435037&s=gateway&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2AVK8K7PCQ5GM&keywords=slavery+by+another+name+book&qid=1550435091&s=gateway&sprefix=Slavery+by+anothe&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Chained-Silence-Convict-Justice-Politics-ebook/dp/B00VKMOP94/ref=mp_s_a_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=black+women+georgia+convict+lease&qid=1550435149&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0
> Is there anything "disgusting" or "racist" about the video?
I watched a few minutes, but the only thing I found disgusting was the lack of engagement with any serious issues of race inequality in the US.
> I think that intellectual challenge is a good thing.
Maybe read some about issues of race, then? Here is another one.
> Unfortunately, many leftists seem to find intellectual challenge disgusting/bad/racist.
This is way too vague to be meaningful.
> https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702
I'm putting that on my kindle. Thanks for the recc! I recently read 'Devil in the Grove' and 'Warriors Don't Cry,' too. Both really excellent examinations of integration efforts and the criminal justice system during Jim Crow.
Okay based on that I'm going to suggest a few things you could add to your wish list. I promise I won't be offended if you don't like them, but you might find something you're interested in. :)
Tea things:
First for cute tea things, I highly recommend the flowering tea pot I received it as an Arbitrary Day gift and it's awesome. The teas are delicious and most importantly, to me, the tea pot is sooo cute.
Mana Tea infuser a lot of people have this on their wish lists. I should add it to mine too.
Tea Sampler There are several samplers with different types of tea from this company and a bunch of others. You should look around for sure.
Hello Kitty Stuff:
Add on Hello Kitty alarm clock
This Hello Kitty toy It's adorable.
Mug
Ceramic travel mug
History related:
Hitler Youth This looks like it would be a fascinating read.
The Roads of the Roma: A PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers
Gypsies Under the Swastika
The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Well, if you actually do have an open mind, you should look into these resources:
You write:
> Asians are better scholars, and blacks are better athletes than whites, and yet you blithely say that "nothing in the physical makeup" of these people makes them more or less anything. I guess only the good things count.
No and no. It is you who are asserting false things without evidence on your side. You need to read more, and you need to experience more.
For me, the coin really dropped when I was tutoring a Chinese girl in Calculus when I was finally in a big college in a major city. Every Asian I had known until then in my provincial upbringing had been smart and engaging. I fully believed the stereotype of scholarly asians. Even there in college, my girlfriend at the time was Chinese and wicked smart. So I had "evidence" for my belief, but it was being contradicted by her stubborn inability to understand the math in front of her. It finally just hit me right then that this lady I was tutoring was kind of stupid as far as math went. Nothing wrong with that, but that was the moment that it hit me that the positive stereotype I had had was blinding me to the reality of the situation, and what she could literally understand.
I hope you'll consider what I've written, and read one or more of the books I've suggested. They've all been important to me.
Yes, really.
The truth is there's simply no way to separate American law enforcement from its historical purpose of suppressing minorities and the poor.
Richard Nixon outright said, on tape, that the government needed to come up with a way to single out blacks without appearing racist and that the way was a war on drugs.
Be that as it may. 30 days is ridiculous for this but let's say it isn't. There is a legal doctrine that is available to render the offended parties satisfaction.
The doctrine is called "respondeat superior" or "let the superior answer". This doctrine holds employers responsible for employee misconduct if the employee is acting within the scope of her duties. Basically, the employer is responsible if, while doing her job, the employee offends.
So, let's say this employee, while picking up a dumpster, drops it on someone's car. His employer is liable for the damages.
Let's say this employee, after work, takes the trash truck to an apartment building who's owner is paying him under the table to remove their trash and drops a dumpster on a car. His employer is not liable.
So, in this case, if the employee, with the knowledge of his employer, went out and picked up trash early from the neighborhood, the employer is liable.
If the employee went and got the truck keys on his own without the employer knowing and went to pick up trash early in that neighborhood, the employee is liable.
From the information provided in the video and the fact that I live about ten minutes from that neighborhood, I would say that the prosecutor was outright being an asshole. First, he was being an asshole because he was obviously up against someone who did not even know to bring a lawyer with him.
Second, he is an asshole for not seeking a fine against the company which is clearly the superior party here.
Third, he is an asshole because he could have sought a day in jail which would have been just as effective in sending a message.
Fourth, he is an asshole because he just started or added to a criminal record for the guy who was just busting his ass to make a living.
Fifth, he is an asshole because, as a lawyer, he is carrying on the practice of seeking the most punishment possible for a minor offense. The guy, while in jail on the weekends, will probably have to do some manual labor for the benefit of a local company probably partly owned by the judge or the prosecutor or both.
On the last point: If you find this hard to believe, read a book called "Slavery by Another Name".
Is the prosecutor racist? I believe so. Can I prove it? I can't. Take it for what it's worth.
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors is pretty awesome.
Saboteurs by Michael Dobbs - a very interesting account on the Nazi effort to land saboteurs in the US to cause havoc.
Given Up for Dead by Bill Sloan - a detailed account of the battle of Wake Island and what happened to the defenders after the battle ended. Notable as the only time in history the Marines have surrendered.
Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailor - Probably one of the best books written about the US Navy during WWII, definitely a very good read.
I can recommend a fantastic one regarding Samar:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Stand-Sailors-Extraordinary/dp/0553381482
It's extraordinary and rather reads like a novel.
That's speculative theory, of course. What we know is what happened.
But to project, it depends on whether we deliberately provoked Japan into attacking the US or not.
Some people -- like this author and journalist, and WWII vet who served on the same aircraft carrier as President George H.W. Bush -- claim that after trying to provoke Germany into declaring war on us by sinking German subs in the Atlantic in int'l waters, we enacted a plan to enter WWII via the "back door:" the German-Japanese alliance.
That author uncovered a US document via Freedom of Info Act request which outlined steps for the US to provoke Japan into attacking us, and the book details the fact that we carried out those steps. One -- moving Pacific Fleet HQ from well-equipped San Francisco to the isolated, vulnerable backwater port of Pearl Harbor in our colony/territory of Hawaii, was so controversial that the Pacific Fleet commander resigned in protest over the move.
The logic goes that the US was so shocked (as was the world) at the lightning fast defeat of France, then the world's 2nd largest global empire, that the US felt compelled to enter the war. But FDR wanted to enter the war with the country united (it wasn't during WWI) so he felt he needed to be attacked -- thus the secret policy.
The author also claims, based on first-hand testimony by WWII cryptographers, that we had broken the Japanese naval code before Pearl Harbor (the US gov't claims we only broke it afterwards). That would've given us knowledge of the Japanese attack, and allowed us to move our aircraft carriers and new ships out of Pearl Harbor leaving only old, mostly obsolete ships to be attacked -- exactly what happened.
While this seems nuts to us today, in the 1940s it wasn't (see quote below). In fact, a Hawaiian newspaper ran a front page story the week before Pearl Harbor which said Japan was about to attack Hawaii.
If you subscribe to that theory, we entered WWII unjustly without cause, just like we did WWI.
> "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war." -- Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, 1944. The book "Day of Deceit" documents that the US carried out a deliberate, successful policy to provoke Japan into attacking the US so the US could enter WWII.
http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299
Wise Japanese diplomats and people on Obama's team will remember that the US actively and deliberately manipulated, maneuvered and provoked Japan into attacking the US at Pearl Harbor, as was proven in the book Day of Deceit.
Given the costs of that war to Japan, it is highly likely they've learned some valuable lessons from the US' strategy of starting that war...
> "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war." -- Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, 1944.
This beat it to it
[Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor](http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299 "Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor")
> like how the US started WWI
Well, if you read the US Senate's Nye report done after the war, the US gov't made a conscious decision to wage war against Germany. The Zimmerman telegraph is usually offered up as one reason, though we laughed at Mexico's "power". The Nye report notes how the US loaned much money to Britain and France and how that was a critical factor. The Germans were within their right to sink British ships with submarines, because those ships were carrying war munitions and were legitimate targets under int'l law.
> & WWII
Journalist and author Robbert Stinnett uncovered much new evidence in his book Day of Deceit including the famous McCollum memo which was written by a naval intelligence officer that med with FDR almost daily. That memo -- uncovered with a Freedom of Information Act request -- outlined 8 steps which the US had to undertake to provoke Japan into attacking the US; the US undertook all 8 steps and what do you know, Japan attacked.
Unless you've read and pondered the new, groundbreaking evidence presented in Day of Deceit, you cannot say you have evaluated all of what might have happened at Pearl Harbor.
> or stated the Korean war by invading South Korea.
In 1950 South Korean and North Korean forces battled each other along the 38th parallel and in the air above it. This happened for months and it was only when the South Korean dictator's forces crumbled and fell apart that the North was able to push deep into the South, prompting the US to rescue our puppet dictator.
> The Balkan, that as started by the US too I suppose.
No, actually most accounts have German influence as critical in blowing that up into a war. The US was happy to use Muslim fundamentalist proxy forces to wage war in Bosnia, much like we did in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
> Oh and and in the 90 the US invaded Kuwait.
Have you read transcripts and reports of what the US envoy April Glaspie said to Saddam Hussein in meetings before he attacked Kuwait? Glaspie certainly not give him a red light...
privatejoker: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link
Always amuses me the similarities (in general) between Pearl harbor and 9/11 and how they were able to get away with the same thing 60+ years later.
If you're bored, grab Day of Deceit....great book on the PH conspiracy
Gulf of Tonkin 1967: McNamara knew it was a mistake before LBJ used it as an excuse to escalate. Daniel Ellsberg’s firsthand account from inside the Pentagon: http://www.pbs.org/pov/mostdangerousman/excerpt-ellsberg-memoir/2/
(Gareth Porter says Mac kept the truth from LBJ: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/05/how-lbj-was-deceived-on-gulf-of-tonkin/ )
Cold War’s End 1988-1991: CIA so busy lying about Soviet power under Casey and Gates, they missed the USSR’s fall. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21487-no-tears-for-the-real-robert-gates
Iraq War I: 1990-1991: Lied about Iraqi preparations to invade Saudi, Iraqi forces murdering babies https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.html
Kosovo: 1999: Lied about 100,000 Albanian Muslims slaughtered by Serbs
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/18/balkans3
Afghanistan: 2001: Lied that Taliban wouldn’t give up Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5
Iraq War II 2003: Lied that Iraq was making WMD, including nuclear weapons, was allied with al Qaeda https://medium.com/dan-sanchez-blog/16-articles-that-expose-how-they-lied-us-into-war-in-iraq-bedf2e47c0bc
Somalia 2006: The Islamic Courts Union government was not truly in league with al Qaeda as claimed https://www.thenation.com/article/blowback-somalia/
Libya 2011: Lied that there was an impending genocide in Eastern Libya https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/29/hillary-clinton-libya-war-genocide-narrative-rejec/
Syria 2013: No Slam Dunk on al Qaeda false-flag sarin attack, they finally admit much later
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/10/neocons-red-faced-over-red-line/
Iraq War III 2014: Yazidis on Mt. Sinjar did not need rescuing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/2014/08/13/5fdd3358-2301-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html?utm_term=.b2834d3b716b
Yemen 2015: Not really bad intel, but notably knew war would be “long, bloody and indecisive,” launched it anyway, just to “placate the Saudis.” https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/14/world/middleeast/yemen-saudi-us.html
—Hasn’t led to war yet, but they’ve been lying for years about Iran’s intent and actions to make nuclear weapons, which never existed. https://www.amazon.com/Manufactured-Crisis-Untold-Story-Nuclear/dp/1935982338 https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/16/when-the-ayatollah-said-no-to-nukes/ CIA did finally admit this was so in 2007 https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/20071203_release.pdf —
Older phony casus belli:
1812: Impressment of sailors was the excuse when the Democrats really just wanted to seize Canada. https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/06/19/1812-the-war-partys-first-success/
1846: Mexico: U.S. invaded, called it defense from the Mexicans https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/lincoln-resolutions
1861: Civil War: Keeping Ft. Sumpter open after South Carolina secession was a provocation. (Everyone’s got a different opinion about this one.)
1620-Current: Indian wars: Paid Napolean for the land. God says we can. And they started it anyway. http://users.humboldt.edu/ogayle/hist110/unit3/indians.html
1898: Spain: Remember the Maine was an accidental fire which spread to the magazine. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/usconlaw/pdf/Maine.1898.pdf
1898: Philippines: Must Christianize these Catholics. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/blackboard/mckinley.html
WWI: Lusitania was a deliberate provocation, Zimmerman telegram threat of German-Mexican invasion of U.S. Southwest was a ridiculous joke. https://www.amazon.com/Lusitania-Colin-Simpson/dp/0582127076 https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann
WWII: Pearl Harbor: FDR Knew. https://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299
Korea: Syngman Ree’s forces’ provocations preceded Northern invasion https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/28/who-really-started-the-korean-war/
> You seem to be implying that the US government is behind the attacks on mosques.
No, again, I don't know.
But what I'm saying is that such a course of action would not be beyond the US gov't. It is a blatant fact that the US Pentagon -- at the highest levels of our military! -- proposed to fake attacks in "Operation Northwoods" to start a war on Cuba. Thankfully, JFK's administration shot down such an idea, but the Pentagon still kept working on it.
And journalist Robert Stinnett, a WWII Navy veteran who served on the same aircraft carrier as George H.W. Bush, has uncovered multiple sources of evidence that the US gov't, again at the highest levels, had a deliberate policy of provoking Japan into attacking the US in the Pacific to start WWII. Stinnett wrote a book on this called "Day of Deceit". In it he claims FDR's administration planned this after France fell as a desperate way to enter the war with the support of the American people, as a backdoor way of declaring war on Germany through the tri-partite alliance between Germany, Japan, and Italy.
Since 1941 some have claimed that FDR "let Pearl Harbor happen" but there has been only iffy evidence to support such a claim. But Stinnett not only uses first-hand interviews with WWII vets, but also used FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests to uncover additional material, including an 8-point plan written by a US Navy intelligence officer who saw FDR on a near-daily basis and was born in Japan, a memo that was routed to high military brass and proposed 8 specific points to cause Japan to attack the US. The US then carried out all 8 points.
Whether Japan was deliberately provoked into attacking or not -- that is a question open to your own interpretation of the facts.
There is so much wrong with this article it'd take a book to explain it.
But wait, one journalist/author who served on the same WWII aircraft carrier as former president George Bush, and who has researched Pearl Harbor for decades, did write a book to explain it.
That author not only dug up key evidence from the federal government via Freedom of Information Act requests, but he also personally interviewed WWII cryptographers who said the US did break the Japanese Navy's code (something the US gov't said was not done until after Pearl Harbor).
Needless to say, there's more to this story than this article, which has a NSA historian as its key source.
> "Japan was provoked into attacking America at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty of history to say that America was forced into the war." -- Oliver Lyttleton, British Minister of Production, 1944.
> Everyone knows Germany attacked the USSR without provocation, to preemptively fuck up the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as you said. And preemptive knowledge of Pearl Harbor has never ever been established. You must cite something. It's basically the same old libel otherwise.
Sure, propaganda is a weapon both sides can wield. I'm more knowlegable in the latter field, so I will constrain myself to that one:
About the Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743201299/ (I would also like to include the diary of the US ambassador to Japan between 1932 and '45, Grey, but it has been out of print for a few years). There is tons of incidental proof, however, such as the order to build an 100 carrier two-ocean navy in September 1940, or the fact that to this date not all japanese decrypted messages have been released to the public record because they are considered a threat to "national security".
Disclaimer: I have majored in Japanese cultural studies and political sciences.
> NATO was designed to militarily defeat the USSR. That's gone and many Warsaw Pact countries have joined NATO. I agree NATO doesn't know what NATO's purpose is, but NATO's original purpose is long gone.
NATOs purpose is to stand together if "troops, an aircraft or a ship of one or more of the undersigned nations gets attacked by a third party in the Mediterrean, the Atlantic Ocean north of the tropic of Capricorn or on its own territory." This purpose stands till today. This was not the case in both Bosnia nor Libya.
> I'm not saying Germany isn't still a part of NATO, just it's not still a great part of NATO.
And we are more than proud of not taking part in every military the US wants.
>> If the Libyan people are not strong enough to get rid of their leadership by themselves, what right do we have to interfere?
> I think this is irrelevant to the discussion but NATO is close to arming them and I'm sure it won't be Germany.
It is a sad day when we as a pact were to arm one kind insurgents against a dictatorship (Libya) while other very similar insurgents are ignored (Bahrain) or seen as terrorists (Palestine). It says something about our morality, don't you think?
>> It is likely that Gadhaffi will survive this episode, and we really don't want to be the target of libyan-sponsored state terrorism. Lockerbie anyone?
> this is your weakest argument. If your greatest defense against state-sponsored terrorism is to plea "not me, the other guy!" then I'm at a loss.
My point is you don't troll an aggressive dog. Europe has lived in peace with Gadhaffi for years, that guy even was more than helpful sometimes. No need to get bitten.
>> Excuse me for not honoring the heroes in the Golden Armors the US troops were back then, according to your thesis. The US, however, pledged MAD not for the sake of Germans, but for the sake of Britain, which would have fallen without a continental stronghold. The NATO plans for Germany were to transform it into a nuclear wasteland as soon as the first soviet tank touched our territory. We were to be destroyed by our American friends, not saved.
> Well you're absolutely right, there. No more germans. It's a shame, cause I love Spaten.
Eh, come on, Augustiner is way better. Ever tried their Maximator?
> I understand you're probably german, but you mean affect now. Germany is probably the most vital member of the EU, but now you've got France on your back. They're tired and they want to stop for wine a lot.
Trust me, France is not concerning us. We see other EU members to be a bigger problem, such as - for instance - Portugal. France will do whatever it takes as long as we subsidize their farmers.
It wasn't exactly a false flag. Japan was trying to attack covertly, the U.S. happened to be able to intercept their encoded radio transmissions. There are numerous sources on the USA's knowing provocation but this book has some of the best examples of messages we intercepted that clearly described an attack on Pearl Harbor.
So, if FDR knows its going to happen, and conceals it, because he wants the American people to want revenge. Is that a false flag? I'm going to lump it in with one because it serves the same ends.
Yeah, everyone I've known that had alcoholism or drug issues had a degree of misery before the addiction got bad, and it spiraled from there. Our culture, our politics, and certainly our technology aren't helping anyone get more fulfillment out of life. This book describes the problem pretty well in my eyes:
https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
But I don't know what the solution is, for our society. I grew up a liberal atheist, but I've begun to see the value in spirituality as I've become more conservative (classical liberal really), noticing progressive policies causing more societal disharmony rather than less. I sometimes envy those on the right that enjoy Christianity, but I find most of them aren't spiritually fulfilled by it either. r/taoism is where I get my fill - meditation helps. I started delving into buddhism as my first foray into spiritual fulfillment, but ended up resonating with Taoist philosophies more.
A book you would find interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046
I think that might have been taken from this. It's a good book.
Here is a good book on the subject
I recommend Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/
I haven't read this but I'm betting this draws on the same concept as this renowned work by Harvard Professor, Robert Putnam.
Made me think of this... Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
> What the fuck do you guys have against diversity
Read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. The downsides to diversity vastly outweigh any supposed upside.
Again with the insults. You guys can't have an argument, you just say "nuh uh, [insult]".
What are the benefits of diversity? (without mentioning food)
The best thing would be to knock on doors and not talk about the candidate beyond inviting the person to a [fun event] put on by local Elizabeth Warren Supporters. At the same time hand over a brochure for them to read describing the event with time and date along with some quick bullet points about her. Most people are desperate to meet others as was covered in the book from a few years back called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
> Single black mothers are merely hero victims in US society deserving of redistributed wealth and services when they should be villains... they are essentially dooming their offspring to failure
I agree with the spirit of your remark here, albeit in a different vein. If the Democrats (and I'll use that instead of 'Left' or 'Socialists') really were concerned about disadvantaged children and minorities, etc., then they would actively encourage two-parent, intact families. Discourage premarital sexual behavior. Initiate cultural programs in the black community to drive academic achievement and success. Undermine a black subculture that makes it acceptable to look and behave like the black equivalent of a redneck, etc. And again, all of this was demonstrated in Robert Putnam's work (and he's a liberal academic who conducted the largest study in American history on the state of our civic culture and communities).
> Socialists here literally look at black women like animals who are wholly unresponsible for their situation... They go so far as to say that black people can't even help but procreate because rich whitey doesn't properly train them not to or give them condoms and they're just following an innate urge to fuck that they can't resist.
(You had to say Socialists, didn't you?) I'd ascribe that more to the lunatic SJW fringe than anything else. Though, yes, I'm sure I could find some self-identified socialist asshole that thought this.
Regarding social isolation, check out Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
>It's shocking that a Marxist even has this view about capitalism.
Marxism is a result of looking at capitalism and what it does. It's not like I'm trying to find fault with capitalism because I "just hate" capitalism for no reason.
>society seems to be alive and kicking around here
Which city do you live in? It's just that I keep talking to Americans who observe the same things e.g. Robert Putnam spelled out in Bowling Alone. Atomization of society and destruction of social cohesion and social capital are neither my nor Marxism's invention. These are widely discussed issues. Maybe these things are just absent from your little filter bubble?
It's amusing to see how people like OP are overreacting at recent events when similar shit reared its face during GWB's tenure. Then attitudes rolled back and went the other way during the Obama administration. This isn't new - stop pretending like all this shit has went away when it hasn't: people just bottled it all up.
Go read a book, OP. Here's Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
And a description of political pendulum swings..
Well anyways, here's a NRx reading list I'm slowly making my way through...
​
Introduction
The Dark Enlightenment Defined*
The Dark Enlightenment Explained*
The Path to the Dark Enlightenment*
The Essence of the Dark Enlightenment*
An Introduction to Neoreaction*
Neoreaction for Dummies*
Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell*
The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land*
The Neoreactionary Canon
The Cathedral Explained*
When Wish Replaces Thought Steven Goldberg *
Three Years of Hate – In Mala Fide***
****
The Decline
We are Doomed – John Derbyshire*
America Alone – Mark Steyn*
After America – Mark Steyn*
Death of the West – Pat Buchanan***
The Abolition of Britain – Peter Hitchens
****
Civil Society and Culture
Coming Apart – Charles Murray
Disuniting of America – Arthur Schlesinger
The Quest for Community – Robert Nisbet
Bowling Alone – Robert Putnam
Life at the Bottom – Theodore Dalrymple
Intellectuals and society – Thomas Sowell
****
Western Civilization
Civilization: The West and the Rest – Niall Ferguson
Culture Matters – Samuel Huntington
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization – Ricardo Duchesne
****
Moldbuggery
Mencius Moldbug is one of the more influential neoreactionaries. His blog, Unqualified Reservations, is required reading; if you have not read Moldbug, you do not understand modern politics or modern history. Start here for an overview of major concepts: Moldbuggery Condensed. Introduction to Moldbuggery has the Moldbug reading list. Start with Open Letter series, then simply go from the beginning.*
****
​
For those interested in new reading material, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743203046
Believe it or not, up to about the 1990s it was perfectly acceptable to take a woman bowling on a date. There are simply many better entertainment options now.
There's also this phenomenon - https://amzn.com/0743203046
It won't help much in terms of differentiating all of the variants, but The Gun by CJ Chivers is an absolute must read.
Uh, no. A whole design/manufacturing team produced the AK and Comrade Kalashnikov was given the majority of the credit for propaganda purposes. He was possibly the most important contributor, but one of many.
source: the Gun by C.J. Chivers
I recommend a book called 'The Gun'.
https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734
Surprised I didn't see one comment about "The Gun" by C.J Chivers. Very interesting and comprehensive book about the AK-47 and it's variants and how they have shaped the world. Anyone really interested in the weapon and it's history should check it out.
If you like more modern stuff, The Gun by C J Chivers was an enjoyable read. It focuses heavily on development of the M-16 and AK-47, but I thought the most interesting bits were on how the automatic rifle has changed battle tactics over the last century.
Recommended gunnit books?
May I suggest:
https://www.amazon.com/Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743271734
and
https://www.amazon.com/War-Flea-Classic-Guerrilla-Warfare/dp/1574885553
American Rifle is a good introduction to US military rifles. The Gun is a fantastic introduction to automatic weapons (Chiver's blog is worth a read too). Wolfe Publishing has a deal where you can get PDF copies of their three Magazines for about the price of subscribing to one for physical copies. They are a bit old fashioned but aren't extended ad copy like G&A is. Shooting Times is worth looking at online.
> what do you do with your creations?
Never made a thing.
I was bad at carpentry when I was a kid - the birdhouse and flowerbox I made fell apart quite quickly.
> do you destroy them or sell them?
Nothing to sell, or destroy.
> if you sell them, who do you sell them to?
Cant' sell something that doesn't exist.
> who is aware of what you are doing
Uh, most of my professors have actually taught me what I know. One of them is good friends with CJ Chivers, a renowned, Pulitzer-winning weapons expert - he's written a great book about the AK. My professor's specialization is nuclear weaponry. She's very good at wargames, she went to Cornell, and she's taught at Harvard and Stanford.
> and what is the security level on your workshop?
I have no workshop.
I have the internet, mainly Library of Congress links, or JSTOR documents for uni.
There's so much information on youtube, alone, that you can just use it to learn how to do anything.
If you haven't ever googled/searched on youtube for something you want to learn, then you really should - it's a great learning tool.
Oh, and Forgotten Weapons is an excellent youtube channel, that has a wealth of info about antique weaponry. I highly recommend it.
There was a book written called Overthrow that you might be interested in.
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer would be a great modern history book to look into.
Kinzer is a journalist so he writes in an engaging manner. Parts of the book are even quite funny. Also it really is kind of "forbidden" history that isn't commonly talked about in the US. It'll really open your eyes when it comes to foreign policy.
Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer
(amazon review)
"Regime change" did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is but the latest example of the dangers inherent in these operations.
In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose foreign regimes. He details the three eras of America's regime-change century--the imperial era, which brought Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras under America's sway; the cold war era, which employed covert action against Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile; and the invasion era, which saw American troops toppling governments in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Kinzer explains why the U.S. government has pursued these operations and why so many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences, making Overthrow a cautionary tale that serves as an urgent warning as the United States seeks to define its role in the modern world.
------------
Used hardcover from $2 + $3.99 shipping
New $7.81 + $3.99
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411871430&sr=1-1&keywords=overthrow
Since you seem to like to read books, I recommend you read Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. If you would like a preview, you can watch the video interview. Please let me know whether video news site is blocked by the military firewalls.
Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer?
tl;dr: American exceptionalism gone rogue.
Being proud of things can be fine, once you see yourself/your country/your religion as literally superior to everyone else in the world you're running into issues. I can highly recommend e.g. Stephen Kinzer on this topic.
>(The USA) are the only ones in modern history who are convinced that by bringing their political and economic system to others, they are doing God's work.
https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
There are a few chapters and a larger overview of America's foreign policy over the last couple hundred years. You can also find it swashbuckling.
The US government has never really been 'of the people.' Blue-collar workers don't have the time and money to do serious campaigning. The federal government in particular has always consisted of the upper-middle or upper class. George Washington was the largest private landholder in the US when he was elected president.
It has always been a government by the rich, supported by the middle class, and vaguely aware of the poor. Read A People's History of the United States
Spoiler: politics is 90% about the money.
A good place to start to learn about the war the US Government has waged on its people since its inception:
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
You should take a look at The People's History of the United States. It's very broad and isn't always able to hunker down for a long time on one subject but it gives you a lot of starting points to jump off from and you can use that to dig deep and do your own research. It is very good to be suspicious because society has become too comfortable.
If you look at the history of the U.S there is an amazing amount of political work done by people when they don't vote. They get together and bring cities to standstill, etc. It doesn't have to be violent though sometimes I believe it is necessary. Yet now we have to "legally" protest which is a bunch of bullshit in my opinion. It pretty much defeats the purpose if I have to stand around in a designated protest area while nothing gets done around me.
Yes, that is exactly my point and it isn't a new tactic either. War is often used to gain mass support while glossing over the problems at home. It provides people with something else to fight rather than the system in which they live. I mean look at Afghanistan and Iraq. Every day people are coming under increased surveillance. Even the democratic president, Obama, continues to use his predecessors policies. Why? Because there are only two choices in a two party system. He hardly has to please his own base, just keep them hanging by a hairline because they don't want to go the other way and vote republican.
Edit: I don't advocate not voting. I'm Canadian and do. Though I support anti capitalist movements and if push comes to shove will stand with them.
you may like this book: http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
Ideas and time and mass social conflict. Quick history lesson:
The American Revolution was based upon the idea of Liberty. That the people should have control over their lives and their government. The idea of a "republic" only came back into being because of the return to classicalism (Greeks, Romans, etc.) during the Enlightenment. The enlightenment happened because of an invention called the Printing Press, making the works of classical authors available to the masses.
From the 16th century to the 18th, hundreds of authors were writing about these ideas of republicanism and liberty. You know the names of the big ones. Locke. Rousseau. Hobbes. They weren't all on the same side of the debate for sure (Hobbes was conservative, Locke created liberalism, Rousseau was the radical) but they all talked about ideas like the Social Contract, Mixed Government, and the State of Nature.
The leaders of the American Revolution were not fighters, they were scholars. They read these books, formulated their own ideas about them, and put them into effect. They owned printing presses and wrote articles and disseminated these ideas into the public.
It took hundreds of years for the ideas to take hold, but ideas are not enough. What pressed these scholars from the books to the battlefield was social conflict. The colonists and the british empire had irreconcilable differences that led to war.
There are similarities between this time and then. Ideas about the issues with capitalism and how government is run are circulating everywhere. Printing Press = Internet. We are coming into a second enlightenment. The majority of people are fed up with how our government works. Look at OWS, the Tea Party (which are two sides of the same coin, one just got co-opted by the Koch Bros). People are willing to go out and protest, which leads to more social conflict. The worse things get, the more people will pay attention to whats going on, the more people will act. Remember the masses are a mob, and follow mob mentality. 99.9% of people have no conception of what's actually going on in the world, because its only just beginning to be understood (see my second book link below).
What you can do personally is research. Read. Find out more infomration about what is going on. When you are confident in a topic talk to people about it. Try to inform them. Plant seeds. When enough are sown, there will be fruit. I'd recommend starting here and here.
If you want to make the whole process go faster, vote for romney. The social upheaval that will happen when they cut medicare will be nuts.
I second this, also Economics in One Lesson
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232
Looks like you have something to learn about the working class in America. Read some labor history.
This is a good resource that explains it pretty well. At least the American side of the story. Unions originated mostly in Europe. In the beginning as just a bunch of workers fighting mostly against child labor. Then it evolved into a whole regulatory system. An essential regulatory system that's been forgotten and neglected here in America.
Canadian history. All those battles for independence and civil wars......so god damn fascinating
EDIT: or this
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
What?
Read the book. You can get a used copy for $5 at amazon. Great summer reading, well written, fascinating. You might just learn a few things you never knew.
Since the issue seems to be coming up a lot in the comments, anyone interested in the water politics (and history) of the American West should read this book. It is a long read and can be hard to follow at times, but it's absolutely fascinating.
Cadillac Desert?
http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
It sounds like you have an Intro Geology book.
For a nice overview of historical geology, I was enraptured by "The Earth: An Intimate History" by Richard Fortey. It starts slow but delves into the major developments and ideas of geology as the author visits many significant locales around the world.
Stephen Jay Gould was a very prolific science-writer across paleontology and evolution.
John McPhee has several excellent books related to geology. I would recommend "Rising from the Plains" and "The Control of Nature."
Mark Welland's book "SAND" is excellent, covering topics of sedimentology and geomorphology.
If you are interested in how society manages geologic issues, I would recommend Geo-Logic, The Control of Nature mentioned before, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, and Cadillac Desert.
These are some of the texts I used in university:
Thanks, I'll read the book mentioned in the article. A good starter/companion reader for those interested in water history out here is Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It's older, but it's been revised over the years and is a great place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
http://www.amazon.com/Season-Witch-Enchantment-Terror-Deliverance-ebook/dp/B005C6FDFY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.
http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Gray-City-Love-Francisco-ebook/dp/B00D78R550/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1451757678&sr=1-1&keywords=cool+grey+city+of+love
Not a book, but this American Experiance episode is fantastic.
In 1957, decades before Steve Jobs dreamed up Apple or Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, a group of eight brilliant young men defected from the Shockley Semiconductor Company in order to start their own transistor business. Their leader was 29-year-old Robert Noyce, a physicist with a brilliant mind and the affability of a born salesman who would co-invent the microchip -- an essential component of nearly all modern electronics today, including computers, motor vehicles, cell phones and household appliances.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
Also, not related to San Francisco directly, but focusing on California and the west, if you want to understand why California is the way it is today, this is on the list of essential reading material.
http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-Revised/dp/0140178244
There are plenty of people whose careers (mine included) that revolve entirely around western water law, supply, growth, etc. It is pretty cool stuff.
Cadillac Desert is a good book to start learning about some of these issues.
Much longer than that. Cadillac Desert is 20 years old this year. Chinatown will be 40 years old next year.
If you haven't read the book 'Cadillac Desert' or seen the film, you absolutely should.
Ghost in the Wires - The story of famed hacker Kevin Mitnick
Any Mary Roach Book if you like Science
In the Heart of the Sea - The true story behind Moby Dick
The Omnivore's Dilemma - A great walk through our food landscape
Gang Leader for a Day - Behavioral Economist embeds with a Chicago Gang
Shadow Divers - My first audiobook. It's a thriller about a scuba discovery of a Nazi Submarine on the Eastern US coast.
The Devil In The White City - A story about a serial killer at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex and Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Neither book was within my realm of interests, but they were both fascinating.
I'm from New England and never had a lobster 'til I went to Africa in my 30s :(
I would imagine this is true of lots of salt- and freshwater foods, oysters, scallops, crabs, tuna, salmon...I'm not real sure about the state of the lobster population, but I think high prices for this kind of stuff can be a good thing (depending on how the money is used and the fishing is carried out).
Reminds me of something I read in In the Heart of the Sea, an awesome book about the shipwreck that inspired Moby Dick, but also more generally about the Nantucket Whaling industry. Nantucket was the world's whaling capital in the early 1800s, some days they could practically do their harpooning from the docks. A few decades later, they're sailing from Massachusetts to the Pacific to make their catches.
Then again, I'm sure some of that pricing is just high because it can be. There are weeds in my yard that fetch insane prices at microgreeneries and heirloom farms.
In the Heart of the Sea tells the true story that inspired Moby Dick, and is a great read.
If you like non-fiction, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage and The Perfect Storm are also very good.
In the Heart of the Sea
Based on the Novel:
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
It's the nonfiction story about the Essex, and is a pretty amazing retelling of these men. The things they went through, and how they were forced to overcome. The story about the Essex is what inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. It's really quite incredible and gripping.
In the heart of the sea, the disturbing true story behind Melville's Moby Dick.
I was reading this book on the story of the whaling ship Essex and some of the survivors mention doing this as a rudamentary way of testing the ships speed. I'm curious if this is how it got named or if this is just what they did in a pinch.
The real life story it's based on is a really good read.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Heart-Sea-Tragedy-Whaleship/dp/0141001828
Not sure about the movie that came out recently.
Ever read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex? Not exactly the same kind of adventure, but it fits the disaster bill quite nicely, and I really enjoyed it.
In the last 500 years, conflicts in Europe have been slowly decreasing, until the last 50 years or so when it rapidly became much smaller than in any of the previous centuries. This has corresponded with a slow but sure improvement in living conditions. Some countries in Europe haven't seen a war in over 200 years (Sweden hasn't participated in a war directly in 250 years). These are the most developed nations on Earth.
If you've read Jared Diamon's Collapse, you'll know that many civilizations have vanished from the Earth due to over-consuming what their environments could provide. Japan is an example of a country that managed, centuries ago, to avoid self-destruction though managing the few resources it had. I have, therefore, seen evidence that peace and environment awareness seem to be the hallmark of progress in the very long term, not war as it is erroneously believed, and that failure to remain peaceful or manage the environment well can cause the "collapse" of a civilization, no matter how advanced.
So, yes, it's logical that civilizations that manage to develop for many millenia without killing itself and its environment must have learned how to achieve progress peacefully and taking good care of its environment.
Have you read Collapse by Jared Diamond? If not, pick it up right now!
https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009/
Relevant Jared Diamond reference.
You will notice the absence of A short history of nearly everything, which is a good book, but frankly it didn't speak very much to me. Bryson is almost only interested in geography.
Great conversation starter.
You have peaked my interest. In your ethical point of view, who's money is your money?
As for the people of Haiti, do they work harder to survive? Has the developed world influenced their country more than say the Domicanan?
If you want a good book on this and many other things, check this out.
First, sorry for the incredibly slow reply. I was watching wildlife in Sri Lanka. I never post online before I go away due to the risk of burglary.
> Disasturbation is a fun term I'm not sure I've heard before.
Then I'm glad I shared. Please use it and keep the word alive.
>> Coincidentally, the same age at which I first witnessed worse than death
>
> A friend of mine has HIV and I worry about him at times. He's had at least one recent suicide attempt too. He's still pretty healthy but I think the reality of it all can crash down on him at times.
I'm sure it does all crash down on him quite often. It's a horrible disease even with the numerous treatments that have come out since my friend's death in 1990. I wish your friend many years of reasonable health, and when the time comes, as little pain as possible.
> Anyway...
>
> Not only am I worried about methane release, there's the issue of how air and water currents will change, and when there's no longer enough movement the whole world will be in a dire situation, but we'd probably already be gone by then. I hope. I don't want to see the oceans turned in to a salt crusted casserole.
You may want to read Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward. Don't worry. The oceans will instead turn to an anoxic soup of sulfur producing bacteria. This will start from the bottom up as the lack of the convection current causes the bottom-most waters to become anoxic (no, or little oxygen). The anoxic level will gradually rise since no oxygen is getting below the surface. Of course, without oxygen, there will not be fish, or at least very very few. Once the anoxic layer hits the surface (i.e. becomes the whole ocean), the hydrogen sulfide gas from the bacteria will enter the atmosphere in toxic quantities bringing the mass extinction already in progress to land in a huge way.
This is what caused the Permian/Triassic extinction event, the largest in the history of multicellular life on our planet.
> For me suicide isn't something I seek. I enjoy being alive, it's the only thing I've ever had. If there's no existence elsewhere I'm going to make the most of the existence afforded me. I want to live, it's our collectively self-destructive behavior that might force me to kill myself. Similar to you I've come to terms with the idea of controlling how I die.
Yeah. I think we have a lot in common here.
> I think the sad reality is that humanity's progress has essentially always been straight towards a wall. Over-fishing and over-hunting. Strip-mining and over-grazing. Many of the gifts of our brain which enabled our progress so quickly are probably hurting us now. If nothing else we've been failing to adjust for sustainability over growth for a LONG time.
We have at times reached some degree of harmony. But, it requires zero externalizations and the ability for each person to see the entire habitat available for humanity. I forget the name of the island mentioned in Collapse that managed to find a balance. They did completely engineer the island, leaving only trees beneficial to the humans in some way. But, since they used many trees, this came into balance as a functioning forest that also doubled as their farm. They also managed to limit their population very successfully. I'm not sure if this is ever explained.
Unfortunately, such cases are very rare in human history. Mostly, we eat out our resource base and move on. But, there is nowhere to which we can move on now. The island is earth. And, we're totally fucking trashing the place.
I personally always love hearing people talk about terraforming. Really?
Does anyone seriously believe we can successfully terraform another planet without first learning to keep this one terraformed? It came that way! And, we can't even keep it that way. But, we're supposed to be able to create a viable ecosystem on another planet.
R-i-i-i-ight.
> And that was the Unabomber's point.
My problems with him run deep. First and foremost, he's a fucking terrorist. I can't ever condone terrorism!!
This means that his name is such a red flag to me that my brain shuts down when I hear it. I'm unlikely to actively read anything by him.
Second, he's a Luddite. I don't believe, much as I'd like to, that it's at all realistic to throw away all of our technology and go back to hunting and gathering. And, even if we did, humanity was not sustainable then. The anthropocene is alternately viewed as starting with the Industrial Revolution or with the Agricultural Revolution.
But, it started much earlier.
As soon as we left Africa, our advanced weaponry (stone tools, atlatls, etc.) began causing mass extinctions everywhere we went. That can't be sustainable. So, would you roll back the use of stone tools? Would you also roll back our control of fire? How would you do this? Anyone who didn't agree would continue to use the technologies thrown away to kill off those who eschewed such technologies.
Third, the idea that killing off the brightest minds of our generation to leave the idiotic masses to continue to breed like rabbits can't possibly be the solution to anything.
Sorry. I am not about to read the nonsensical ravings of the lunatic mind.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I respect your view. But, I'm not going to read anything by Kaczynski.
> The man felt he was going to war for the sake of humanity. He possesses an astoundingly brilliant mind and for precisely that reason I think anyone should read what he wrote.
Brilliance does not necessarily produce sanity. He may be extremely intelligent and deluded. The two are not mutually exclusive.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I must point out that there are still people talking about the brilliance of Hitler, usually his military genius rather than technological or scientific genius. But, still, the fact that someone possesses a powerful mind does not mean it is a powerful force for good.
> Here we are as misanthropes/misanthropists talking about inevitable disaster that we caused, maybe lots of murder was truly the hard pill that we needed to swallow. We spit it out though, at least when that murder was set to challenge the power of authority which does the very same thing with reckless abandon. Killing tons of people for one cause or another.
Maybe we're committing mass murder with every gallon of gasoline we burn or every ton of coal.
But, I'd prefer to reduce the human population via attrition. I don't think it will happen. I think we will experience a huge die-off caused by the natural laws to which we believe we're immune. But, I don't think murder at any level is the answer. In the 20th century, we had many of the greatest mass murders in history, the holocaust, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot, Rwanda, etc., etc., etc., and still the population climbs and climbs and climbs.
> But that's why I think we need a Hitlerian leader.
Now you're scaring me. And, not just because I would have been on the wrong side of the concentration camp fence.
>> Are you talking about stacking the living or the dead?
>
> Both work.
>
> I've been trying to think through my misanthropy and how to explain it to people "I hate people, not persons" or something along those lines. It's ultimately not that I can't be around people, I'm not exactly anti-social. I enjoy company and long conversations...
I generally just say exactly what's in my flair, "I Hate Our Species, Not All Individuals".
Though, I do often add that I do hate induhviduals. (Not a typo.)
> Whereas living simply in and among "nature" has always provided me with calm and relative happiness.
I wouldn't know how to live that way, but love traveling to people free (or mostly so) places to view wildlife. I describe this as feeling a oneness with the other sentiences with whom we share the planet, my distant and not-so-distant relatives.
> My creature comforts at this point are my laptop, my sound system and my kindle.
I like my creature comforts. I'm willing to pay more for renewable energy. And, I keep stuff much longer than anyone else I know, for example still using my 2002 20GB Archos which I've never replaced with an iPod. Obviously, music isn't a passion of mine if I can fit my entire collection in 20GB with room to spare.
The (mostly complete) collection of works by Mary Roach. They're pop science, but great reads.
Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Both great books on how different cultures either became more or less powerful than others (how come large civilizations took longer to rise in sub-Saharan Africa than in Europe) and why some societies just failed completely (Easter Island).
Lies My Teacher Told Me. It shows a lot of details that a typical high school American History textbook just glosses over or ignores.
if you are curious what destroys civilizations there's a book on the topic with some research / ideas on the topic https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009
the thesis of that book is resource appetite exceeding supply causes a dramatic collapse.
so you favor a homogenous culture? ideologically or racially?
If you liked that, you will most likely very much enjoy "Collapse", by Jared Diamond.
I'm in between Collapse -Jared Diamond and I've been struggling for weeks to grasp Hegel's Spirit.
The purpose of history is to learn from it. To discover who we were, where we have made missteps, and to correct them. It’s Santaya’s quote “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” in vivo.
 
You said:
>My sense is that for conservatives, history is about monumentalization and triumphal identification, celebrating the achievements of great men (and sometimes women) who can set good moral examples.
I’d like to hear you say more, because my take on your perceptions is that they are reductivist, biased in the extreme (I’ll clarify when I share how you view the left), and not sufficiently broad to cover basic conservative principles like limited government, self-determination, and personal freedom.
 
Let’s take the commanding generals of the Union Army and Confederate States of America, Grant and Lee, as an example. Here’s an image to move along the discussion, based on historical fact: when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he was dressed carefully in his uniform, neatly groomed, and did everything he could to lend honor and dignity to the proceedings. Grant showed up unshaved and slovenly. We can look at this and read into it a lot about the character of each general...but if you do this, you are missing a crucial bit of context: Grant looked unprepared because he didn’t want to keep Lee waiting. His appearance was actually a function of his desire to lend dignity to the general who he could have rightfully punished for being on the losing side. To put a very fine point on what I am trying to say: context matters.
 
Let me say a bit more about both generals before moving on to how you view the left...
 
Lee has been vilified in the recent past, hopelessly linked to the institution of slavery due to his southern heritage. Almost everyone who lives north of the Mason-Dixon Line looks at him, and what he accomplished with a jaundiced eye. People call him a “traitor” and worse. This interpretation follows logically from his place in history, since he fought on the losing side. But...
 
Lee was an amazing general, an outstanding field commander. He was educated at West Point, like almost every general during the Civil War, on both sides. He was a supremely capable leader, one who was able to get his men behind him, inspiring them to fight until they perished. I was looking for a quote from Jay Winik’s fantastic book, April 1865 that goes something like “I’ve heard about God, but I’ve seen General Lee!” to illustrate the fondness the soldiers under his command had for him when I found this quote from the General himself:
>It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it. We must forgive our enemies. I can truly say that not a day has passed since the war began that I have not prayed for them. I cannot consent to place in the control of others one who cannot control himself.
And what I’m hoping you’ll get out of this is that he wasn’t someone who rebelled in armed insurrection against an oppressive government. He was just a damn good general. He was so good, in fact, that scholar James Macphearson has made the intriguing claim in his one volume history of the war that, had it not been for Lee, the war would have been over within six months and slavery would have remained as an institution.
 
Because I said context matters, and because I think it matters in a way that sometimes causes it to be overlooked, let me provide some context for Lee: He was from Virginia, which was a border state during the Civil War. That means it could have ended up with the Union, although it did not. Virginia was home to the Tredegar Iron Works, a massive asset that, by virtue of it’s capacity to churn out munitions, was a boon to the CSA. If Virginia has not succeeded, the war almost certainly would have been over in less than six months. Today, people in the north like to look down on people from the south, assuming that they have both cultural and moral superiority, simply because they have had the good fortune of being born in a part of the country where slavery was not practiced (because it wasn’t feasible, and really for no other reason). We treat Lee like an outlaw redneck, but there was this type called the “southern gentlemen” that Lee personified. Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe” was extremely popular during the era in which Lee lived. The story is a romance (literally featuring a main character who rescues a damsel in distress), and I want you to consider how it finds something noble in combat, while featuring a main character who is an exemplar of gentlemanly behavior.
 
Now for Grant, who was an alcoholic and has also been called an anti-semite. He was also a fantastic general. He was the only military figure on the Union side who was a match for Lee. Lincoln cycled through five generals before finding one who was willing to take massive casualties (the single factor that made Grant successful), telling one of the four who didn’t cut the mustard, “If you aren’t going to use The Army of the Potomac, do you mind if I borrow it?” This is what we would call a “sick burn” in modern parlance.
 
Now for some context on Grant: Asstated earlier, he had a drinking problem. There are reports of him being drunk during battle, even. But he was able to do the one thing that his predecessors wouldn’t: use the North’s manpower advantage and win through attrition. As for his alleged anti-semitism, he did sign Grant issued General Order No. 11, which expelled all Jews from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi. But taking the order at face value and coming to the facile conclusion that he did this just to sock it to an ethic population isn’t fair to the historical circumstances that caused Grant to do this. According to his biographer, Ron Chernow, Grant issued the order after Jewish merchants used the high demand for cotton in the North to engage in profiteering, setting prices artificially high in a way that hurt the war effort. Yes, the order hurt Jewish families who were not merchants and had nothing to do with a small population of people who were being greedy, but calling Grant and anti-Semite and then calling it a day misses a very important nuance. Moreover, without Grant, the war drags on, and the outcome is uncertain. That is hard to fathom from our current perspective.
 
I’ll get to your view of the left in a moment, but first let me test what you said about those on the right against what I believe. And to make it more interesting, let’s take a modern moment and filter it through the perspective you offered: the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was a reaction to the City Council in that town renaming “Lee Park” “Emancipation Park” and ordering the removal of a statue commemorating Lee. You said “For the right, history is about monumentalization and triumphal identification.” I have no problem with Lee being monumantalized and his efforts receiving recognition...but I don’t see this as a celebration of his “triumph.” He lost, after all. Instead, I see it as a pen acknowledgment that he was a central figure in this nation’s history. Removing the statue and renaming a park that had been named in his honor is an effort to whitewash the role he played, even if we today believe he stood for everything we detest, whether we are on the right or the left. It is important for me that we remember difficult times in American history. It is essential, even. If we fail to do this, it’s a form of hubris that allows us to believe that, because the “good guys” won, we have settled the issues that have plagued our nation through its formative years. Moreover, those statues and honorifics are a tribute to the man, not the things we think he stood for. Had I lived in Charlottesville, I would have proudly marched alongside people chanting “Jews will not replace us.” I’m Jewish. They are misguided. This is America...they have the right to be misguided in this country.
 
Now then, you wrote of the left:
>For the left, it's about unmasking and unveiling, interrogating and teasing out the complex social, cultural, and economic causes of injustice.
I have to note that this is an extremely rosy view of your own side. We can take the modern day historical phenomenon that is the 1619 project, and test it against what you wrote. Since I do not agree that one side is more virtuous than the other, I’m going to point out some flaws—obvious to me—with this project. The most glaring of which is that there has been a lot of history since slavery was outlawed in this land that has shaped us far more than the historical blight that is slavery: industrialization, globalization, the boom-and-bust of the information economy, as well as the rise-and-fall of American manufacturing to name as many as I can off the top of my head. My question to you is this: what exactly is being “uncovered” by revisiting the date that slaves arrived on American soil? A key follow-up question is from whence you gained these powers of perception.
 
Having said this, I don’t want you to think that I am dismissing or trying to poke holes in your position. I’m challenging it. I recognize that it is a proper, morally defensible, and self-contained position. It just happens to be one I disagree with. My main criticism of the argument is that it overlooks a lot of context, and basically starts with an answer and works back to an already-arrived-at conclusion. To me, a more valuable question to ask when considering the problems that black Americans face today, which they undeniably do, is “In what ways was slavery not a factor? Provocative, I suppose...but a completely fair question, and one that I feel deserves an answer.
There's always Shelby Foote's epic three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. A huge work that took me months to complete, but definitely worth it. Told mainly from a Southern perspective, but Foote keeps his objectivity throughout.
From the Northern perspective, you can't go wrong with James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Bruce Catton's many works on the war, especially the "Army of the Potomac" trilogy.
Right now I'm reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and I'm digging it. One of the few books I've read that really gets into the social relations of the era.
From an autobiographical perspective, Sam Watkin's Company Aytch is one of the best memoirs of a Confederate soldier serving in the Western theater, even if you have to take some of his stories with a grain of salt. Or if you want to take a darker look at the world of the irregular troops fighting west of the Mississippi, there's the Autobiography of Sam Hildebrand for a confederate perspective or William Monks' A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas for the Union side of things. Monks' book is especially notable because it's the only first person account we have of a Union guerrilla soldier.
If you're looking for fiction, I love The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara about the Battle of Gettysburg. A more recent novel about Sherman's March, The March by E.L. Doctorow is also pretty stellar.
James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. This is the first thing I thought of when I read your request for a good single-volume treatment of an entire war. Good luck to her.
>Read a history book on the civil war.
I just finished reading The Battlecry For Freedom, actually, by James McPherson. Great book, and you should check it out. Sounds like you're the one who's never actually read a book about the civil war.
https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X
Regarding my idiocy, I'm not going to debate my intelligence with a stranger on the internet as I'm sure I've been called worse things by better people but below is a selection of quotes you that rebut your historical revisionism regarding the causes of the South's secession.
"No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
~ Article IV of the Confederate Constitution
"The Confederate States may acquire new territory... In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government..."
~ Article IV Confederate Consitution
"We but imitate the policy of our fathers in dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates, and seeking a confederation with slaveholding States."
~ South Carolina's Dissolution of Union Statement.
"African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing."
~ Jefferson Davis, CSA President
"Our new Government is founded... upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
~ Alexander Stephens, CSA Vice President
And that's just a few.
The Civil War was a struggle over States' Rights inasmuch States had the right to enslave people and treat human beings like property. This whole "It wasn't about slavery," revisionism drives me up the wall. Gee well heck yeah the Federal Government SHOULD impugn upon your sovereignty if your soverignty is predicated upon something as immoral as slavery.
The Confederacy made clear in their very own founding documents that they wanted to enshrine human slavery as part of their society FOREVER. Anyone who wants to posit that the CSA seceded for other reasons, such as Federal tyranny, can get right TFOH with their apologetics for White Supremicism and enslavement of other human beings.
So you're telling me that if I pick up a history of the civil war, say this one: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson, which was written in 1988, 123 years after the events it records, then I can't know anything about the Civil War because a scientist didn't bother to verify anything Mr. McPherson wrote?
It seems to me you don't even know what scientific evidence is. Scientific evidence is that which is testable. How, exactly, do you propose we test the events of 2000 years ago to determine if they happened? Or even 150 years ago?
Edit: Got the date of the book's publication wrong.
James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is immediately the first book that comes to mind. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it is “the book” to read on the Civil War. It is a highly readable account of the build-up to the Civil War, causes, and the war itself. It also won a Pulitzer Prize. For more, I’d also check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s online book club on Battle Cry of Freedom over at The Atlantic.
Other excellent works on the period I would recommend are:
Also, the Civil War produced some of the greatest memoirs in American letters:
And, I always recommend reading poetry and fiction, so I would also encourage you to look at Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, as well as the war poetry of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, particularly Melville’s poem The Martyr, written days after Lincoln’s assassination. More contemporary fiction would be Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, or EL Doctorow’s The March.
Finally, check out David Blight’s Open Yale Lectures on the Civil War. Prof. Blight is a fantastic lecturer. They are free, and the course syllabus is online, and in 26 hours you can take a full Yale course completely on your own.
If you have the patience and the time, and are really interested in learning about the Civil War, I cannot recommend Shelby Foote's The Civil War - A Narrative enough. It is an absolute masterpiece.
Another that is definitely worth reading is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.
If you want to stick with Shaara, read his son's Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure.
The American Civil War is a goldmine for books.
For an interesting read about the impact of the Civil War even to this day read:
[Confederates in the Attic] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederates_in_the_Attic)
if you want something in depth read:
[Battle Cry of Freedom] (http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/dp/019516895X)
I'm not sure where your charge that I'm being bigoted comes from... I have nothing against southerners, as a group, at all. I love southern accents, I love southern food. I respect and admire many southerners. MLK was a southerner. What I have a problem with is people who display the confederate flag, and then act like I'm crazy, because I happen to know it's history.
What we call the "confederate flag" today was flown as the naval jack of the confederate armed forces. The Confederacy as a political body was intrinsically and inseparably racist. That fact is not controversial or revisionist at all, the confederates themselves wrote at length about how the basis of their new government was the superiority of the white man, and how black people's natural position was to be enslaved.
The confederate flag as we know it today is only widely recognized (could you recognize any other confederate flags, off hand?) because the KKK adopted it as a symbol in the early 20th century.
It's a symbol of slavery and racism, period.
I'm sorry that you didn't know any of this. You can say the confederate flag stands for whatever you want, just like I can say the Nazi flag stands for peace and brotherhood... but that doesn't make it true.
It's fine to not know much about civil war history, you're British after all. If you're interested in the Civil War, an excellent one-volume history is Battle Cry of Freedom.
I'm assuming you're American.
The Basics of American Politics together with Politics in Action and some regular political news reading would be a firm introduction to politics.
If you want to dig deep, then buy some books on economics and history. One thing I haven't seen in the answers yet is philosophy. It may not sound important, but it very much is. I would recommend Justice by Michael Sandel. It is a great introduction to different moral theories and ties them together with politics quite well. I left the book finally understanding why conservatives and liberals think the way they do.
Those 3 books should also introduce you to more resources that will take you down as far as you'd like to go.
Aww thanks. I definitely encounter people who have more formal training and I'm just blown away by their vocabulary and some of the concepts they present. I like to try to simplify difficult concepts into things that are more easily digested.
Philosophers are not known for being accessible in their writing. There's a ton of people out there like me who try to make philosophy more accessible.
I've listened to podcasts that delve into singular ideas. I find these particularly enlightening. I listened to Ayn Rand audiobooks (lol). I've bought used college textbooks for next to nothing, because once teachers stop using that edition nobody wants them. I've read 3 different people who analyzed Nietzsche's work because he's so unapproachable in writing style. I really love Nietzsche because he would mirror my own thoughts and sometimes take me to the next level and sometimes I feel I'd be at the next level of his thoughts.
I wish I remembered all the good podcast/audio stuff to recommend for ya. For more accessible books, Bernard Reginster's "The Affirmation of Life" was a really good analysis of Nietzsche. It's good because he would essentially take one concept Nietzsche presented and just really hammer it out in a more logical form before moving onto the next. Moral philosophy is most fascinating to me. I highly recommend Michael Sandel's Justice for a really great overview of positions with great examples and things to think about.
Sorry, it was Colbert, sounds like the same stuff you are interested in:
http://www.justiceharvard.org/2011/07/1456/
http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508/
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? (https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing-Do/dp/0374532508)
It will go over the various viewpoints, where they originate from, and how they compare to others.
"Justice: What's the right thing to do?" by Michael Sandel is a good book for an overview of different approaches to ethics.
"Practical Ethics" by Peter Singer is the one that really first made me think there's good reason to pick a side.
I've read that one, and it's ok. A slightly better, more engaging introduction to Political Philosophy would be Michael Sandel's Justice. It was written for his eponymous Harvard course, which is fantastic and available online here.
No you don't even have a basic idea. Nobody is asking for a 200 framework manifesto, but if it literally took me 2 seconds to think up a problem that you can't solve (and that I contend is logically impossible to solve through your system) then that says much about your "idea."
I really recommend that you read up on a little bit of moral philosophy and ethics (like the following) so you can see why you're running on an almost 4,000 year old OS. What presenting a horse and carriage would be to a technology show today is what your system is to ethics today. Since then, we've developed numerous other systems that have been proven to be objectively better for the well-being of society than retribution (yours). One of them is called utilitarianism, and it has given birth to systems of justice like the Norwegian one in this article that's called restorative justice. In their system punishment is irrelevant but fixing the criminal and making peace with the victims is. For example, if a house robber robs an innocent man's house, they're jailed for however longer until we know that it's a fact they won't ever rob again, be it 2 or 20 years. Then once they are out they have to work for their victim, like do their yard work for years, and then eventually make peace with their victim.
Because of this Norway has dramatically less crime than we do and the whole society's well-being is higher than ours. Norwegians also support this system, including all the victims of criminals. So in essence, if you lived in Norway and wanted to change it to your ancient system you would literally be working to make their society a worse place, just like a criminal. See the moral problem? The only logical escape is to say that you don't care for what's good for society, specifically reduce crime and increase everybody's happiness and well-being.
Great read on this topic. Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
Justice might be a good place to start. Michael Sandel is a professor at Harvard and the class this book is based on is apparently one of the more popular undergraduate classes. I think a lot of his lectures are on Youtube if you want to get a sense of his style before buying.
I haven't read the book, but I did try his edX class during the spring. Very accessible, but thought provoking at the same time.
Try philosophy the Moral Landscape or https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374532508/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
here's a few that would absolutely blow the mind of anyone who thinks the civil war mostly ended our oppression of black americans and afforded them anything remotely resembling equality.
for starters...
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
> Douglas A. Blackmon exposes the horrific aftermath of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, when thousands of black people were unfairly arrested and then illegally “sold” into forced labor as punishment.
> “When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our ‘fault.’ But it is undeniably our inheritance.”
there's tons of awfulness in more modern times as well...
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
or...
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
and if you really don't want to recognize your old self...
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
anyways
i'd be shocked if you're actually interested in reading about this and not just posturing over it but good on you if so.
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/0060528370
I agree with this. A great pair for general American history is A People's History of the United States and A History of the American People - the former will give you a liberal perspective and the latter a more conservative one.
"Smart" people learn to deal with boredom. Being educated takes rigor and a drive to appreciate things for more than just the plot.
This means you will be frequently bored sifting through some painfully tedious prose, but the payoff is that your brain will get some practice at synthesizing information and not just regurgitating surface-level stuff than any rube can pull out of a novel or a popsci book.
That said, I can't recommend the r/askhistorians booklist enough. This list was assembled by people who are experts in their fields and the books are mostly scholarly in nature, so they can be pretty dense, but they are highly informative and well-researched. You can be assured that these are people who follow the sources so the information is
I also recommend reading Moby Dick and following along with NYU's recorded lecture. It's slow and difficult to follow along with at times but it's a seminal work of American literature. Many would argue that it's America's first modern novel.
Plus it's just a manly fucking book. And after you finish reading it, you can follow up with In the Heart of the Sea for historical context. This is one of the few pop history books that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Philbrick is an excellent writer and his sources are accurate.
Final recommendation would be The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (Ginsburg translation).
Both Master and Margarita and Moby Dick are novels with philosophical themes, but I would say that Master and Margarita is more readable on its own, and Moby Dick is better if you follow the lecture that I linked.
I would highly recommend checking out this book, if you can get it from a library or something Collapse
He talks about the collapse of all sorts of different cultures, societies...right now I'm reading about the decline of the Vikings, but there was a chapter before on ancient Polynesian cultures living on the Mangareva, Henderson, and Pitcairn islands. There was also a chapter on the Mayans. He covers things very well in detail, and all the different factors that contributed to their eventual collapse.
There were political economies in the iron ages. Kings didn't starve during famine but peasants did. If there were better social protections (such as good grain storage and distribution) peasants would not starve. The story of Joseph telling the pharaoh to save grain is an example of how famine could be alleviated in earlier times.
The academic literature on the history of disasters is very weak, but a few sources to back up my statements are:
Collapse: https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Revised/dp/0143117009
and Greg Bankoff's work on disaster history: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/history/our_staff/greg_bankoff.aspx
There's one other book on the history of disaster but I'm blanking on it.
Greg's article 'there's no such thing as natural disasters' is much more eloquent than any explanation I can give: http://hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=2694
okay... read Jared Diamond's Collapse
it should keep you busy for a while.
I know, but it's fun to talk about these things. Plus I want to get this saved somewhere so I can use it on my Libertarian friends.
Everything about the war was about slavery. What you had was a pervasive, white-superiority culture (that generally pervaded the nation at the time, but especially slave states) that believed that white men were freed to be wealthy, productive aristocrats who could be thinkers, intellectuals and equals to European courtiers by being given the free time they needed to pursue these things on the backs of black slave labor. By given white men the freedom to not be "wage slaves," as they claimed northern men were by working in factories, they were given the chance to truly pursue their superiority. Even poor whites agreed this was a goal, either through loyalty, racism or just conformity to local culture. Everyone sought to protect this at all costs.
State sovereignty was a defense of the right of slave states to continue to own and exploit slaves. This neo-Confederate belief that it has to do with states rights is a construction to water down the fact that these states' citizens, almost uniformly, extolled the virtues of slavery every chance they got. It became such a contentious issue that every time a new state was admitted into the union, it had to have another state of opposing view on the matter added as well to maintain balance. In the case of Kansas, Missouri (Which had a much lower slave ownership rate than even Texas did - 8 percent to Texas's 28 percent at the time of the war) mobilized men to cross the border and stuff ballots to ensure the state entered the Union pro-slavery. Blood was shed in the process. This inter-state war can be considered the first major fight of the Civil War.
Further, after the start of the war, it was an express objective of Southern leadership to eventually establish a pro-slave empire across the Americas, beginning with Cuba. Cuba had experienced a number of invasions of these American military expeditions before the war. Invaders were called filibusters.
I think the strongest evidence of this is in the way Confederate forces treated black prisoners of war: They were usually enslaved, sometimes executed, on the spot. This treatment spurred outrage from Northerners, even back then.
I'd recommend the Battlecry of Freedom, by James McPhearson. The first half is devoted to the political situation and motivations of the war. It's well documented that the South had slavery and belief in the value of slavery as a primary motivator, and this was true across the board. Few Southerners would have denied this at the time. Any claim they weren't is after-the-fact revisionism. The rest of the book is a narrative of the battles, which is fun to read.
Primary documents in isolation of context that flame the passions of your position is confirmation bias. The position I stated is in agreement with the community of professional historians, including a former professor of mine who is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. If you would like to actually educate yourself on the subject, you can read the book for which he won a Pulitzer Prize on the topic: http://www.amazon.ca/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Civil-War/dp/019516895X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372219567&sr=8-1&keywords=james+mcpherson
But it's historical revisionism because it doesn't sync with your little-boy, pop-culture, history by feeling opinion.
In the history world, there's a trope about the Civil War causes.
People who know nothing about the CW: It was about slavery.
People who know a little : There were many causes.
People who know a lot: It was about slavery.
If you don't believe me get a copy of James McPherson' s Battle Cry of Freedom, basically the go to classic for single volume history of the war. The first 250 pages are all fights over slavery before the first bullet was even fired. I recommend reading the book anyways, cause it's awesome. Plus, it's like 4 bucks on [Amazon] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/ol/019516895X/ref=mw_dp_olp?ie=UTF8&condition=all)
They weren't as "pure" as other whites, and were ridiculed in America for quite some time - some even being used as slaves alongside african slaves. If you played the recent game Bioshock Infinite you may have noticed how the Irish were objectified alongside blacks in the depiction of Columbia.
Also see:
"Irish Americans were not always considered white."
and
http://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
Edit: The marginalization of the Irish really began during the Plantation of Ulster by the English, where King James stole Irish land and gave it to wealthy brits. Also, the Potato Famine wasn't because there wasn't enough food, but because the English stole it all.
An informative read on slavery in general:
https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
You're right. I got nothing! https://medium.com/@bjcampbell/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between-gun-ownership-and-homicide-1108ed400be5
Not https://ssaa.org.au/assets/news-resources/research/2008-08_the-australian-firearms-buyback-and-its-effect-on-gun-deaths.pdf
A https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/08/income-inequality-murder-homicide-rates
Single https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/sunday-review/the-assault-weapon-myth.html?referer=http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/11/10/hand-over-your-weapons/6IxJLanMKGak7RvCLipwbN/story.html
Fuckin https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/
Thing https://www.amazon.com/dp/082236123X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_TGzWAbT97R1RG
In short: get dunked, you gaslit tool.
I want a gun because I have visions and nightmares of being raped. I'm a trans woman and if a man were to try to rape me he'd find that I don't have a vagina and would likely kill me after he finishes. This frightens me and protecting my life is more important to me than the other stuff.
We have many stories of self defense here in America.
Read this book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/082236123X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1502948180&sr=1
As a black trans woman I have the right to defend myself.
Ah, reminds me of all the stupids in Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon.
I decided to read this book about every documented incident of people falling over the edge at the Grand Canyon just before vacationing there myself. Worst decision ever. Did the same as the OP.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/140004006X
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552
I'm fairly well-reasoned, educated, and informed. OTOH I'm not particularly interested in "gaining points" or whatever; it's not of interest to me whether a discussion here "goes in my favor."
What we know -- or think we know -- about pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas is fragmentary and changing fast. By the same token, what Mormon folk-belief has held (e.g., that the BoM civilizations covered the North and South American continents) is also fragmented and changing fast. The BoM people are now thought to have been one (relatively small) group out of many (this isn't a change in doctrine, but something of a clarification of older folk-belief and tradition).
If you haven't read the book 1491, I highly recommend it. It has nothing to do with the BoM or LDS belief at all, but it does give a much different (and well-grounded) view of civilization in the Americas prior to the main presence of Europeans here.
I'll just leave this here...
It's pretty well known that Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick in 1978. Christopher Hitchens was one of the few pundits at the time who was holding his feet to the fire.
Here's some suggested reading for you:
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Can there be just one single day where I don't have to read ignorant white fuckery? Since you obviously don't read books or know how Austin works, I'll tell you.
Nobody let their neighborhood "go to shit". Blacks literally were not allowed to buy housing except for redlined areas. White housing was subsidized via the GI Bill (which Blacks were not eligible for), and low/zero down payment FHA loans. Neither the FHA or VA would back loans for blacks in general or in any redlined area. (Almost the entire Crestview/Rosedale/Allandale neighborhoods were built for returning GI's, which essentially built the white middle class.) Blacks could only buy in areas where private lenders made loans at higher interest rates and bigger down payments which caused defaults and created a renter class, especially since many cities had more black residents than available redline zoned property.
Whites would buy property in the redlined areas and let the properties go to shit. Blacks couldn't bring suit against whites and white attorneys wouldn't represent blacks in court so there was no recourse. Then cities used zoning laws to zone all of the failure in black neighborhoods, e.g. liquor stores, the goddamn east side landfill, etc. This was literally the law and happened in virtually every city in the country.
Flash forward until today. Some blacks were able to own their homes and get decent terms starting in the 70's. Now some of these people have paid off their mortgages but now have to compete with millennials with Mommy and Daddy's money they got from their subsidized housing that has now appreciated. Then they have to deal with racist white attitudes like "don't let your neighborhood go to shit" and entitled whites acting like they are doing everyone a favor by forcing longtime residents out. Sometimes people don't want to cash out, they want to keep the asset to pass to their heirs like whites were able to.
You also fail at basic reading comprehension. I said that you cannot explicitly zone by race. (Zoning did originate, however, based explicitly on race.)
But you can get 90% of the same effect by zoning out poor people by banning housing types that poor people can afford.
Here is basically an entire book on the subject, if you would like to go down the rabbit hole.
​
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853
do you know much about american history between the civil war and world war II? some pretty serious shit went down just eighty or so years ago. I feel sick when I read the word nigger not for a moral outrage reason but because I remember all the shit I read about.
recommend this book
If it wasn't for WWII blacks would still be swept off the street and forced to work in mines .
http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370658624&sr=8-1&keywords=slavery+by+another+name
So I might not be familiar with all the different fields in social sciences. I only have a 203 level understanding of the field to be honest. I like to think that I’m a well read individual and I read a lot of literature on the subject. Here’s another example: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/ref=nodl_
550 pages about the decline of social capital. A fancy way of saying we don’t gather at bowling alleys anymore. You disagree that someone is OVER ANALYZING the topic a bit?
Howard Zinn would say you're wrong. The Gilded Age was full of riots, protests, strikes, and other events that corporate colluding police and national guard broke up. The most famous of which being the Battle of Blair Mtn that brought in the army.
no one has a right to property and in order change that, you're moving away from our most fundamental principles, all men created equal and what not, and moving toward the the imperialistic hierarchies that we fought against. we'd create a california class that would make it even harder for someone to be a part of. when purchasing goods and services, we're all equal. anyone out of state with the money and resources to live here has just as much of a right to do so as you do. i get it, life isn't fair sometimes, but is there a more fair system that doesn't restrict the opportunities and rights of others?
> I have never even had the chance to visit another state so I don't know where I would go.
unless you're native american, the vast majority our ancestors, so most likely yours too, had never been to the U.S. before moving here but they did it without the internet or any of our modern conveniences yet here you are.
> The state has more than enough room to support everyone
room, maybe... but resources? have you looked into our water issues? you might want to check out the book Cadillac Desert. there's indicators that show the potential is maxed out.
I've spent a lot of time dealing with this question and have even written on the subject. I believe a "good" piece of historical writing needs to be able to capture the mind and attention of common people and historians alike. Pure scholarly historical work serves a purpose and has to be inherently accurate, but it does nothing to further the field and bring it to a wider audience. A balance needs to be struck between keeping the information accurate and the story line intriguing. Check out Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson if you haven't already. It is known as one of, if not the best historical books in terms of accuracy and reader interest. http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/019516895X
haha. Actually, i'm African-American. Why does it matter though? I'm not pushing an agenda. I'm not a trumpet here trolling, i didn't even give an opinion about slavery, just commenting that there seems to have been white slaves. It's not just Irish people either. Here's an excerpt from its page on amazon. I thought you'd want to be privy to this information since you're saying it isn't true and there is documentation that disagrees with you.
"White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain’s American colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London’s streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide “breeders” for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock.
Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history.
This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface."
https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
Read books if you're interested in history. Don't buy talking points of proven frauds like Ward Churchill the fake Indian and plagiarist.
Here is a good book that dispels your noble save Dances With Wolves illusions about what happened here before the arrival of Europeans: 1491
Give us a break with your p.c. revisionism. I'm part Native American. Not a big enough part to get hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for nothing--look into how tribes have made out with Indian gaming in places like my state, California. Also, your wrong when you claim there was a massive genocide to make room for the U.S.A. because as it so happens this was a sparsely populate landmass when various groups were arriving. Maybe you think that a few hundred thousand savage and violent illiterates should forever have been allowed to call the whole place their own, but that's not how it works.
> What part do you not believe?
Your accusation. You have no proof to back it up beyond vague associations.
>No it's not. It's not believing someone on his word, when he spent the last 10 years undermining his own credibility.
Is Hillary supposed to be a saint that going after her for her long career full of controversies makes you lack credibility? I'd like to recommend you a certain book: No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. It was written by the great Christopher Hitchens, who had quite a lot to say about the Clintons over the decades. Did he undermine his own credibility too?
It's weird how Hillary has become even more powerful and influential among Dems now than when she was in office. The way they respond to any uncomfortable facts or questions about her you'd think she was the patron goddess of the DNC.
>Soiomon is vice-Director, he has a lot of influence on what gets published, if the story is so well-sourced and believable, why don't you do us a favor and show us the follow up from other publications with high editorial standard?
The Uranium One bust was carried and analyzed by every major media outlet except maybe the Clinton News Network. Where have you been the last couple of weeks?
For those interested in understanding the overthrow of Venezuela in its proper context of the history of US overthrows worldwide, a good introductory book is Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq
The only combat deployment of the Yamato-class battleships was in Operation Ten-Go and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the last significant operation of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Musashi was crippled by waves-upon-waves of massive air strikes from Adm. Halsey's carrier fleet, and the day afterwards Yamato was driven off by a 'blaze of glory' torpedo run from the Destroyers & Destroyer Escorts of Taffy 3. This is a diagram of the torpedo and bomb hits suffered in their first and last battle.
Artist: Sakazaki Freddy
this one
Lol there's entire books about how corrupt the Clintons are.
Ever heard of Christopher Hitchens? https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
The evidence of the tech industry being hostile towards conservatives is well documented. You would have to be willfully ignorant to not acknowledge that.
He ain't lyin... A highly recommended read;
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton is a 1999 book about Bill Clinton by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.
https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
A great history of the US's manipulation of foreign governments
https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409
https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
>There is literally no evidence that Clinton lacked honesty or integrity to any degree more than any other modern politician.
LOL The point that other politicians are also dishonest doesn't somehow negate the fact that she is devoid of honesty and integrity. Wow. If the best you have is "she's just as bad as everyone else" then you're part of the problem for perpetuating acceptance of lies and corruption. Beyond that, you have to be consciously dismissive of all of the blatant lies that Clinton has told throughout her political career to be able to pretend she isn't just another dishonest worm.
Until I read the OP's post I couldn't reconcile the news, having never seen or heard a verfiable instance of an AR that could shoot more than 30 rounds w/o jamming severely and requiring minutes to unjam.
In Vietnam the AR killed a lot of men because it jammed. The AR is one of the reasons we lost the war. It is tough to fight when you're lying on your back trying to clear a jam with a stick down the barrel of your new M-16 (AR-15) and your enemy is blazing away with ultra-reliable AKs. C. J. Chivers' book, The Gun, and his article in Esquire tell the story. The article is titled "The Gun: A Violent History of the AK-47" but it's about the M-16(AR) too, and the difference between how the two guns came to wars. It's a good read and one necessary to really understand what happened in Vietnam and the limits of blind greed and power.
M-16s (ARs) jammed because they were a poor design, one that never did work properly. Even to this day the AR is far less reliable and less powerful than the AK on a battlefield.
In Vietnam it wasn't the ammo and it wasn't the training that failed, although the manufacturers and military brass would like you to think so - it was the gun that failed our fellow men. Read Chivers' book or read the article to find the ugly truth.
Pearl Harbor attacks were a setup. Highly recommend reading this: http://www.amazon.com/Day-Of-Deceit-Truth-Harbor/dp/0743201299. The only reason they actually entered the war was to expand the military complex. As a result (due to the high level of taxation at the time) many social programs were implemented that put people to work and improved the quality of life in America. WWII put America "on top of the world" because of strategic military and economic planning...and since then, their politicians have engaged in endless war because they believe that is the only way to remain "on top of the world."
The SPLC is an anti white hate organization that specializes in promoting non white victimhood. Read this book. https://www.amazon.com/White-Cargo-Forgotten-History-Britains/dp/0814742963
Its not a myth. If you compared the documented numbers of irish slaves brought here to african slaves. There is less than a 30,000 head difference in people brought here against their will.
As for the "land" argument.
Again you are ignoring almost totally that all that land was grabbed up before most of the immigration took place at the turn of the century.
Immigrants came here to new york and developed their own communities. They had no land. No money. but they did have brutal discrimination.
Vietnamese people came here after saigon fell. They had nothing. Many of them literally coming her from a helicopter airlift. That was only about 40 years ago and vietnamese americans now own nearly 93% of nail salons.
They had no "land" to generate wealth when they got here.
The black problem is not racism and a nasty history of slavery. The people alive today never met a slave. and neither have their parents. Its a mix of low iq , high testosterone , and hyperdysgenic welfare dependency.
[There are two I can think of] (https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996)
Off the top of my head:
--Lied about being under sniper fire.
--Was removed from her staffer job by a fellow Dem for being a dishonest person.
--Repeatedly lied about her email issue.
--Lied about Bill's affairs and lied about the women he was involved with.
--Lied about having a strong record regarding gay marriage.
--Lied about record regarding NAFTA.
[Here's some of examples from super biased anti-Clinton Politifact.](
http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/statements/byruling/false/)
The only way you can claim that Clinton isn't an abject liar is if you're politically biased or deeply ignorant. It's an undeniable fact that Clinton is indifferent to the truth. Your response is equivalent to saying to someone that they're wrong about climate change being real because they didn't post proof. Anyone who is cognizant and has their head screwed on is already aware.
I recommend you read Hitchen's book on the Clintons. It's called No One Left To Lie To.
I put you in the same category as people who deny climate change. You're only able to do so out of ignorance and political agenda. Hillary Clinton is demonstrably indifferent to the truth and devoid of integrity. And if/when she loses to a clown like Trump it will be largely because of the fact that she is a habitual liar. And people like you will be partly to blame for excusing her lies.
oh rly?
Report Shows US Invasion, Occupation of Iraq Left One Million Dead
http://www.globalresearch.ca/report-shows-us-invasion-occupation-of-iraq-left-1-million-dead/5442905
 
in case you think this is some "unique" problem..
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-to-start-a-war-the-american-use-of-war-pretext-incidents/28554
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Hope-C-I-Interventions-II--Updated/dp/1567512526/
http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Change/dp/0805082409/
 
lots of blood on them hands of the Leaders of the Free World.
I posted this once before, but it seems that there's a moderator here who sells ARs but not AKs:
The AK-47 is legend for it's reliability.
The AK-47 and the AR15 are likely the reason we lost the Vietnam War: the AK because it worked so well, and the AR because it malfunctioned so quickly and so often that it's user died. Read this article at Esquire magazine. Try to imagine lying in the dirt facing a line of advancing NV troops, your very first shot jams, and the only way to clear the jam is to push a stick down the muzzle:
The Gun: A Violent History of the AK-47
Don't believe what the revisionist AR posers and fanboys say here and elsewhere - the AR was the fully documented jam-o-matic of the Vietnam war, caused the death of countless men in battle and was then, over years, brought to a minimal level of reliability while both DOD and the manufacturers denied that anything was wrong, both to governmental inquiries and to their own men. The story of the AR is one of corruption and denial at high levels of government administration.
You can read about it in C.J. Chivers' book The Gun from which the above article is excerpted.
Just pointing out he's probably a rapist, so that's great.
Yes, white Irish were involved in the slave trade as much so as black Africans.
A good book on the subject is White Cargo - by Don Jordan. Irish slave trade started when James II in 1625 made it so for political prisoners to be traded. The majority of early slaves to the New World actually were white. In part because the Irish were Catholic, which in some eyes tainted them. They were cheaper than African slaves, and Don suggests even the Africans were treated better.
Irish people were actually the first slaves in america, before black people.
The reason why it's racist for an irish person to do that though is because attitudes changed from irish people being the british people's slave to black people being white people's slave. The US was extremely against irish people even as late as the 1920s but attitudes changed! an irish person was president at a time when Obama's father couldn't even sit in the same restaurant as a white person. The fact is there is still very strong racial biases against black people from people and institutions in america