InevitableSwing

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

If you’re not American you’re probably thinking “What the ever-loving fuck?” I’m American and I’m thinking the same thing. But American fundies are whack. Many of them actually hope for an apocalypse so they can be raptured up to heaven.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

/s

Thank you for the gold kind stranger.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

I’d respect him if he were using this power for good, but he isn’t and never has.

When he won in 2008 I was a big lib and even though I wasn’t 100% on the Obama train because he did a bit of a slick pol patina - I was very hopeful. Hope is just a four letter word but I only learned that in retrospect. One day I was talking to my landlady about him and what I felt about him and she mentioned a bumper sticker with the key phrase “You’ll be disappointed.” That wasn’t what I expected at all. And because I was still a big lib - I wondered if she was fucking with me a little. I don’t remember what she said exactly but it was basically that he was slick and an egomaniac. I knew she was sincere and not fucking with me at all.

As weeks turned to months turned to years - I didn’t grow disappointed but very disappointed in him. I should have left liberalism around early 2011 when I had read enough about him to know that when he said “Change has come to America,” - he was basking in his own success and he was never going to do anything good because he simply didn’t care. And he was and is the most lib/neolib American pol ever.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

I hope the day Haley starts to lead DeSantis in the pols - somebody snarkily tells him and he tries and 100% fails to laugh it off. He looks utterly dejected. His mask slips and he rages like a wounded predator because he knows his serious injury means certain death.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

how much more time

~4 months?

and money

I’m truly terrible at mental arithmetic but I’ll guess a few hundred million.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

The Hammond’s flycatcher, for example, is named for William Alexander Hammond, a former US surgeon general. Hammond held racist views toward both Black and Indigenous people, writing that Black people specifically were of “little elevated in mental or physical faculties above the monkey of an organ grinder.”

I wondered what was on his Wikipedia page. The page seems to be a disgrace. I hate reading pages with stuff missing so I only ctrl-f’ed through it but there didn’t seem to be any mention of his racism. I did find this very strange comment in the “selected works” section…

• (1863) Treatise on hygiene, with special reference to the military service (Surgeon General Hammond found no satisfying manual on hygiene. He wrote one. For some reason Hammond toned down a clearly racist passage in a last-minute note, adding it was premature to reserve military valor to the whites. Freemon 2001 p. 163 at Google Books)

I googled to find articles at sites like newspapers but I got nowhere. All the good results were bird-related.

Hammond’s Flycatcher, by Teresa Dendy | Bird Names For Birds

Hammond also encouraged troops to go pick fights so that the resulting dead natives could be sent back to him. The soldiers planned to send back bodies preserved in whisky.

Other than gruesome human specimen collecting, Hammond had other dishonorable beliefs and deeds. Hammond was on the Union Side of the Civil War, but he was not an abolitionist by any means. As tensions in Kansas rose leading up to the war, Hammond decried that white men should not kill each other over the lives of black people who he claimed had no better physical or mental attributes than monkeys. He also owned slaves.

Hammond was not just a racist. His sexist views were detestable as well. He believed that women had smaller, differently configured brains from men and were thus incapable of doing “men’s work”. His medical writings were respected and thus quoted to argue against women’s suffrage. Medicine today, especially concerning mental health, still struggles with sexism and racism in part because early practitioners like Hammond laid the groundwork for their fields with sexist and racist beliefs.

InevitableSwing, 6 months ago

I’m confused. The lesson learned from the Holocaust is that Gazans are basically Nazis and Israel should be proud of its military might?