Equity or the Hundred Thousand Dollar Egg

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

This administration, like decrepit, idiotic inheritors of the philosophy of the French revolution has declared “Equity” its top goal.

That’s because “equality of results” is both harder to type and because they hope whole word readers will read that as “equality”. They might also think of equity as something they have in their houses, and therefore, something vaguely nice.

In practical fact, it’s the left’s insane idea that it’s the government’s job to make up for not just your personal failures and foibles, but for those of all your ancestors, going back presumably where the descendants of Abel get a big payout from Cain due to their ur-ancestor’s death, in the mists of myth and history.

Only of course, it’s not that way. Because they have no actual way of telling if anyone’s ancestors were discriminated against or hobbled, what they’re trying to do is compensate for PRESUMED discrimination against your ancestors.

Which is there they come up with beauties like San Francisco — a city that never authorized slavery — giving reparations to people who were never slaves paid for by people who never owned slaves.

Actually it’s almost impossible to say none of your ancestors ever owned slaves. And I don’t care what color your skin is. Contrary to the popular historical fiction peddled in our schools that white people enslaved black people because they were that racist and this was the first occurrence of slavery, people have been enslaving each other since… well, since they were people. Some zoologists have identified slavery-like arrangements in chimpanzees, so honestly, it might go further than that.

And if you’re there on the other side of this screen, breathing, have four fingers and a thumb or belong to a species that normally has those, you’re descended from slavers. You’re descended from slavers, murderers, rapists, warlords, pirates, conmen (and women) and you’re descended from their victims. You’re descended from saints, too, and heroes, and kings, and judges, and upright people, and a lot of men and women who were neither, but, in the common run of humanity were decent enough and honest enough and meant no one harm.

So…. what is this equity, and why are there groups that get priority under it to correct “past injustices.” And do note please that one of the groups is recent immigrants because you know, being oppressed in another country gets you rewards here.

Well, the first thing you have to understand is that the left has issues processing the fact individuals exist. Not just that individuals are different, but that they exist at all.

The fact that my elementary school class: all girls, born and raised in the village, and frankly in the way of Portuguese looking much alike, has had radically different outcomes (at least two died young, to my certain knowledge. The vast majority of them are mothers and housewives and two of us work in intellectual professions, very different ones, in different countries and on opposing sides of the culture war) is not in fact something they can process. It doesn’t compute. An homogeneous group must have the same outcomes, right?

If they were forced to confront it, they’d go looking for oppression. (More the fool them. One of the few that were seriously disadvantaged — being barely smart enough to learn to read (no, not me. Giggle) — has had the most successful kids. So, you know…) For “group stuff” that is, to justify the disparity.

The truth is that a lot of people who were once my peers are massive failures compared to me, and others massive successes. It doesn’t even correlate to IQ or anything you can see. If you really dig into that person’s life, you might find it was the ability to buckle down and do something difficult at a time I couldn’t, and that made them very successful. Others had a run of luck (as far as it exists, defined as being in the right place at the right time.) But for that you need to study the individual. And honestly? You can’t equalize that. The fact that I’m ADD AF has cost me tons of opportunities not to mention creating health hazards through irregular eating habits and medicine taking. Otoh being ADD seems to be a characteristic of a certain type of creative and they might be linked. Fix that, and maybe I’m massively successful. Or maybe I’m just not me.

It’s even harder to attribute success of failure to the fact I tan, or that I have an accent in speech, or happen to be female, or any of the other things the left would think gives me protected minority status.

The truth? People are people. And every group has… people. Some successful, some not.

If looking at the fact some groups are more successful than others in the US, it might be better to look at group culture, and what the overculture tells them. When you are convinced, through public school, that the only reason you don’t have As is because your teacher is racist or sexist, you’re not going to do the best you can. Instead, you’re going to recline in victimhood and helplessness. Which is another way to fail.

But anyway, the mondo Marxist brains of the Biden Junta — he might be the brightest of them. I mean have you heard Commie La Whorish? Or the others? — think they can solve everything by discriminating against the people they think are succeeding because they have it easy, and are promoted on characteristics that have nothing to do with ability.

While I’m the first to agree we shouldn’t throw jobs and honors at people who mouth Marxism most fervently, that’s not what the idiots mean.

No, they think white males have it easy and have always had it easy — failing to explain why my sons who are arguably white-ish have it easier than Barrack Obama’s pampered spawn — so they should be discriminated against. And then white women, and then black men, and then– the hierarchy. The most oppression points, based on nothing but what is in the head of the Gramscian-indoctrinated komissar administering these various boondoggles and having no point of contact with reality, the more you’ll be advanced, lauded, and given jobs.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, accounts for the fact that the Biden administration doesn’t have a single competent appointee. Not.A.Single.One. Which should be hard, but is what you get when you hire for any reason other than merit, but particularly when you hire to make people who haven’t been very successful successful.

By this merry path to hell, we’ve corrupted — already — our arts, our sciences, our literature. (No, dear idiots, I don’t want to hear that so and so is a writer of color. I don’t read writers, I read the books. The books are either good or bad. And if they’re long whines about what I can only call aspirational victimhood — the victimhood the author wishes she had experienced, so she’d be fully virtuous — they’re bad books. And that’s all there is to it.)

Now it’s corrupting our government.

The price of eggs has eased a little. A little.

But at their continued rate of hiring to promote supposed past discrimination, the truth is that eggs will get expensive again.

Everything will.

If they continue under the illusion that they can make outcomes equal they will.

When eggs are 100 thousand dollars apiece, we all starve equally.

202 thoughts on “Equity or the Hundred Thousand Dollar Egg”

  1. The Sad Thing about “White Privilege” is that the woman who “thought” it up is of a wealthy family so her family’s money brought her plenty of “Privilege” but then like any other Liberal idiot she decided that Her Privilege Was Not because she was Rich but because she is White.

    Of course, most of the nonsense that they claim Blacks suffer is more about being less wealthy and more about living in High Crime areas.

    And of course, those Idiots imagine that All Blacks Are Poor and ignore the Fact that all too many Blacks live in High Crime Areas.

    Of course, those High Crime Areas are mainly in cities Controlled by Democrats not “Evil Republicans”.

    😡

    1. Well, if your unjust privilege comes from wealth and connections, then there are obvious but very costly ways of renouncing privilege. If privilege comes from “Whiteness,” then you get to keep your wealth and connections, grovel a bit about your unchangeable pallor, and reinforce your power/virtue by dumping on other white people who don’t have your wealth or connections. Thus keeping down any possible competitors.

      It’s a great racket for the white ruling class.

        1. Some rich didn’t pull up the ladders but their children/grandchildren did.

    1. That’ll be a tricky one. As I understand it, the issue is (or is claimed to be) not about online lending per se, but about lending multiple copies simultaneously, effective creating copies of copyrighted works in violation of copyright. Bottom line: instant digital copies of any IP, like Xerox machines but more so, have thrown a monkey wrench into the whole idea of enforceable copyright, and it won’t be resolved quickly. Or maybe not at all.

      Just my 20 mills, and I’m far from an expert on the subject.

      1. Did not read the article.

        But my sisters borrows electronic books from their respective libraries. There is always a list for the more expected popular books. Ex: latest Outlander Gabaldon release, Book 9. The libraries can only loan up to the count of the number of books the libraries have bought at a time, be that 1 or 10. Now is there a perception that libraries are only loaning out a single copy over and over again, or are there libraries doing that against copyright, but most do not? Heck if I know. I too am far from an expert on the subject. I don’t even have a library card for our local library (free if in the city, through property taxes, and I think $150/year if not, and we’re not).

        1. The article (less than a page) explains the issue; an online library service was loaning out multiple copies of books for which they only had a single copy. From the article:

          “The archive expanded its digital lending during the Covid-19 pandemic, temporarily lifting limits on how many people could check out a book at one time. The move helped prompt the publishers’ copyright infringement lawsuit in 2020, which is pending before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan.”

  3. Social Justice is the idea that it’s OK to treat one group of people like crap because they look like people in the past who treated another group of people like crap.

    It’s base racism married to corruption of the blood. It’s doubly unamerican.

      2. ‘Social’ anything isn’t. Social Justice. Social security.

        Maybe an Ice Cream Social, but there the Social comes last . . .

    4. If you mention “corruption of blood” around them, you may need to brace yourself. They do not, of course, look it up to see what it means. . . .

    1. So we’re different colours and we’re different creeds
      And different people have different needs
      It’s obvious you hate me, though I’ve done nothing wrong
      I’ve never even met you, so what could I have done?

      I can’t understand
      What makes a man
      Hate another man
      Help me understand

      People are people, so why should it be
      You and I should get along so awfully?
      People are people, so why should it be
      You and I should get along so awfully?

      Depeche Mode is cancelled!!

      1. Looks a lot like this song. from South Pacific.

        You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
        You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
        It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
        You’ve got to be carefully taught!

        You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
        Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
        And people whose skin is a different shade—
        You’ve got to be carefully taught.

        You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
        Before you are six or seven or eight,
        To hate all the people your relatives hate—
        You’ve got to be carefully taught!
        You’ve got to be carefully taught!

  5. The math for the SF reparations doesn’t even begin to add up, if they give out the payments to all 55,000 blacks in SF, it will cost a quarter Trillion dollars!!!! SF’s budget this year was $14 billion. They only 4 orders of magnitude short!!! And they’re inviting people that moved away to come back and collect. Also the idea of paying 97,000 per year to blacks for 250 years means enshrining that pay in to family offspring, have these idiots heard of EXPONENTIAL GROWTH?!! If they pass this SF will become a smoking crater in mere months.

    1. The Reader notes you are basing your argument in that racist ‘math’ thingee. You are hereby condemned and sentenced to join the rest of the sane people who get to watch the smoking crater.

    2. It’s simple.

      They’ll cut checks to a handful of really poor black families in certain districts, with much fanfare and publicity.

      Then they’ll cut a lot more checks to politically-connected blacks who certainly aren’t poor. There will be zero press coverage of this part.

      Then they’ll run out of money in the budget, and blame the shortfall on unnamed white supremacists. The press will suddenly reappear.

    3. Damn. I’m going to have to paint myself black and move to San Fran. Get mine before it runs out, bank it (provided banks still function) and then move to wherever I want.

      1. No need to paint anything. Just show up, holding a copy of historical family records (please ignore the wet ink) which prove that you had an ancestor, at least as recent as Fauxcahontas’, of the Approved Ethnicity (TM). To fulfill the “identified as such for 10 years” requirement, add a copy (that pesky wet ink again!) of a 10+ year-old form (any sort) on which you “identified” as the same. Easy-peasy!

          1. It might create an issue explaining how centuries-old handwritten records were laser-printed, though… 🙂

            1. The ancient Africans developed laser printers two-thousand years ago. It was only greedy white men who kept this noble and valuable technology from being distributed throughout the world until recently.

                  1. Thanks. I remember the incident, and that it was debunked, but I didn’t remember that it was Rather who pushed the false documents.

                    A bit different from a laser-printed document from 1800, but… 🙂

      2. Don’t bring anything with you that you want to keep. The place has reportedly become a den of thieves, due in large part to elected officials who operate on the theory that law enforcement is racist. sexist, and otherwise doubleplus ungood.
        The prevailing social theory is that poverty causes crime…I’m inclined but not quite fully prepared to argue that it’s the other way around.

    4. Maybe we should just sit back and watch. With popcorn.

      Hopefully, they will manage to finally discredit that idiotic notion of ‘reparations’ — especially when most of the recipients wind up broke again in a few years. We know they will. Between the Crab Bucket Effect and lack of any ability to manage money, or any desire to learn, 90% of them will waste it all within 5 years.
      ———————————
      If a business tries something and it doesn’t work, they either stop doing it or they will go broke. If the government tries something that doesn’t work, they just keep shoveling our money into it forever.

  6. It was tragic the number of Trump appointees that turned and bit the hand that fed them. And so many of the GOP said Trump wasn’t good at picking good people; while failing to understand that he picked people before he was President because he could usually fire them for poor performance; not understanding that government appointees are often much harder to remove than they are to install in the first place.

    And yet for all the poor choices Trump made; JRB has successfully beaten that.

      3. Trump’s nominee pool was also limited by who McConnell and the GOPe were willing to approve. The other major problem is that we think of the Swamp as being the top layer of political appointees, but the muck goes all the way down to the bottom, and Presidents don’t work with that level.
        The Long March through the Institutions took time to salt the mine that deep, and draining the Swamp would first require (1) damming the inputs; (2) nuking the site from orbit.

  7. Equity is a false god. The leftists want the world of Harrison Bergeron, because they have never read the story.

    And, your sons can claim to be hispanic. I suggest they use all the leverage they can.

    1. They have read it, and said “right on!”.

      Never attribute to ignorance what is better explained by the envy and hate of Marxism.

      1. Yep. They read 1984 and considered it a handy “how to” guide, rather than a warning.

      2. But when you have both, you get Joe Biden’s presidency. Make no mistake all the economic blunders are meant to punish us for having the gall not to elect the Hildebeast. They truly do hate us, and the sooner you realize that, the more sense it makes. Socialism in all its forms is based in hate. The leadership of both parties have truly become Nazi’s.

      1. Couple weeks, tops, in the sun and I’m foreign. Mexican? Turkish? Light skinned African? Got asked (well, nearly begged) to put down Native American on a form the oncet.

        While technically true and literally, no. Just no. Ain’t worth it. And it’d be pandering to a policy I despise to my core. And supporting a lie.

        You die a little inside when you repeat the lie. Screw that. Race itself is a lie.

          1. He’s right. Race is, was, and always will be a lie. Humans are diverse in the actual definition of the word (not the fake one that they are trying to push). There is a wide range of variability, from skin color, to height, to hair color, to weight (some of that is genetic), to all sorts of other things that we can’t really tell what is nature (DNA) and nurture (environment).

            Race does not exist. Ancestry? Sure. We all have parents. That’s legit. But the race hustlers can’t grift off of ancestry, and it’s a little harder push to get slavery in there than with race.

            But race, racism, and racial determinism is a lie. Is, was, and always will be, so long as there is one species of homo sapiens on this Earth. When there are aliens, then maybe lets talk. ‘Till then?

            I’ll keep banging the drum. Race is a lie. Always has been. The very idea’s foundation is nonexistent. It’s “logic” is less sturdy than wet spaghetti. It relies on fast talk and appeals to emotion, which is one of the ways it clues you in that it is a con.

            Race is the filter they put over culture to make you think it’s real, but it’s not. Race is a lie. Is, was, and always will be.

          1. Which reminds me…

            There’s apparently some out there claiming that a white character in a very old franchise was originally black. You see, the original black and white (with shading) comic books were released back in the ’80s, and the character in question had a perm, so…

            That ignores the fact that April O’Neal (and yes, that’s who it is) had straight hair in her original appearance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and had a visibly different skin tone than her black boss (who was the villain in that issue). The change in hair-style is even mentioned when she’s first shown with an ’80s appropriate perm. But race hustlers gotta race hustle.

            April was originally a brunette, though, and not the red-head she was in the cartoon. Her job changed, as well, though that’s less important.

            1. The idiot who produced Bridgerton thinks that Queen Charlotte (regency) was black because of ONE bad portrait, and the fact that she was rumored to be descended from the moorish mistress of a Portuguese king.
              Moors were Mediterranean, not back. And by the end of the period, when there were Portuguese kings, mouriscos were likely to be blond or redheaded.
              But she’s an idiot in possession of a race obsession so out of this she’s spun all of a secret black nobility in england, and….

              1. Speaking of Moors and the Iberian Peninsula, I learned today that the longest war in recorded history took place there. The Reconquista is apparently considered a single war that lasted for 781 years.

                It’s the Arabs that always carry on about how they’ll eventually reconquer their land even if it takes centuries. But the Spanish and Portuguese have actually followed through.

    3. Don’t give them so much credit, assuming it’s ignorance. Their driving mortal sin is envy. It is not enough for them to have as much as or more than others. They want to take what we have. They want equity because they want us all dead. They’re sure they’ll be on top of the pile of skulls.

      1. Greed is a very close second. Viz: rioting, aftermaths, and who gets looted and who does the looting. Viz: reparations, same. Viz: bailouts over the past few decades, who and when. Viz: graft, foreign money, selling of influence and assorted similar actions. Viz: big business buying the woke “product” in the form of HR hires, PR hires, Diversity/Race/Sex quota hires.

        There is money to be made in being woke. There is money to be made in being a race baiter. There is money to be made in inflaming the tensions, in division, in convincing the rubes they are isolated, oppressed, and stolen from.

        Forget not the baser drives. Envy and greed go very well together. They’ve also got Lust, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, and Pride well represented, too.

        1. Don’t discount Spite, either. Why else would that New York persecutor err, prosecutor be going after Trump for a misdemeanor 7 years ago that he didn’t commit in the first place?
          ———————————
          Shouldn’t “The prosecutor is full of shit” be an acceptable legal defense?

  8. Fixed pie world has been the hobgoblin of civilization since it began. It is why the Greeks never got outside of Greece until the Romans marches through, and it has never really ceased to bedevil us.

    The problem is it is easy and intuitive to believe. If there are ten apples, and someone has six of them, that means there are only four left to go around.

    It is much harder to explain that if there are five apple trees, and one guy got his to make six apples instead of the one apple everyone else got out of theirs, cutting down his tree does not mean everyone else gets another apple. And it is extremely hard to explain, if we can figure out why that tree put out six apples, and replicate it, next season we could have thirty apples instead of the four we will end up with if allow we cut everyone down to the mean.

    1. Remember that the fixed pie mode of thinking does not allow for the fertilizer that is called “effort.”

      It’s a very good fertilizer, if you don’t keep it from being applied.

      1. Funny thing about “effort” is that Marxism has corrupted that too with the labor theory of value.

        You see it when a student turns in a project that is objectively crap, does not meet the standard of the assignment, and whines that you should give the project an A because the student “worked so hard on it and spent so much time doing it”.

        As if merely spending time and effort doing the thing automatically increased the thing’s quality and value.

        1. This attitude has also been enshrined in various “Quality” initiatives in business. When I was working, various companies I worked for went through things like ISO 9000 or SEI Level 3 certification. This was supposed to guarantee quality products. All they did was ensure that your company had a process defined and followed it. If the process was to produce crap, but you followed it well, then you got the certification. Basically, giving an “A” for effort, regardless of the actual product produced.

            1. I think you’ve successfully described the certification of teachers. And ballots in leftist areas.

          2. At my last computer job, I was the ISO-9000 process interface to the certifying company. We worked out our process and got the execs to sign off on it.

            Engineering had a perceived problem, and the solution was to develop something different. Which was nice, but this happened without my knowledge and with no attention paid to the defined ‘process’.

            When the new whatsis surfaced, I pointed out that (1) we would therefore be lying to our customers about following a process and (2) if the process was wrong, it had mechanisms to change it. I might have had not two, but three heads.

            Internal support for ISO-9000 was about 3 executives wide (not including my boss) and a couple microns deep (part of my salary). They fixed that latter by including me in the first, about 10%, layoff.

            I trust no one will be surprised to learn the company no longer exists, though its demise was more a product of the general 2000-ish tech downturn.

          3. Well, you do have to start with that. If you get random results from random activities, you have nothing to work with

            1. Yes, the certifications don’t block you from creating a quality product. But there’s no attempt to make sure the process produces anything worth while. So the certification is all about process, and not about results. Yet, people and companies treat it as a sure-fire way to get high quality when it’s actually just a formal embodiment of the GIGO factor without checking whether the input is garbage or not.

      2. “Share the fixed pie? Comrade, you eat too much. Pie goes to those who need it. Back to your work.”

      3. The Marxists surprise when they cut open the goose and discover that there is no cache of gold inside, there was some mechanism inside the goose that made the gold, and now it’s dead.

        1. Marxists take advantage of the natural human tendency to attach excessive importance to the Big and to underestimate the importance of the Many. People are thus gullible when it comes to arguments that the wealth of Big Wealth (either individual or business) is much much bigger than it actually is, that “peak other people’s money” is a lie, that and that only a little social and economic fracking is needed to get Big Wealth to disgorge their “fair share” – which will be enough to fund everything asked for, and more besides.

      1. As I recall, their empire did not significantly outlast Alexander, mostly because every one of his generals went full-on backstabbing. And despite all the Alexandrias he left behind, I don’t really get the impression they left much lasting cultural imprint on the world.

          1. Roman -Infantry-. Where they conquered, they most often colonized. They imposed Romanization on the various territories. They imposed their Roman culture, not the cityfolk of Rome proper.

            And amusingly, almost none of them started out as Romans. They were almost exclusively drafted from north of Rome proper. The Centurions romanized them 24×7. They served 16 year enlistments (later 20), by which time they were the most Roman folks on the planet. And they were built around the whole concept of Romanization.

            When so they were mustered out, they gained full citizenship in Rome, usually a fortunevin back pay and muster out bonus, plus shares of all conquests by storm. And most importantly, generous land grants elsewhere from where Enlisted, usually where discharged. They had a residual “reserve” obligation that served to keep them culturized.

            So, thry then did to their neighbors what was done to them. They imposed their Roman civilization upon folks who often saw the benefit of Roman Law, money, engineering, roads, and the peace that allowed most to prosper.

            Yeah, drawbacks, but compared to barbaric semi-eposodic nomadism, very seductive.

            So “Law”, yes, but as second order effect. Absent that engineering masterpiece of culturation, by Infantry with a huge stake in it, Rome would be a footnote.

        2. “…every one of his generals went full-on backstabbing.”

          That’s what happens when you leave your empire “to the strongest” (unless that’s apocryphal, but it sounds like what he’d have, especially when he was almost dead from fever).

            1. IIRC he and Roxana(?) had one, who was still an infant. The problem was in effectively telling his generals, all (or most) of whom were both competent and ambitious, “You all figure out who’s best qualified”. Recipe for disaster.

              1. Whether or not Alexander actually said it is irrelevant. The generals were going to fight over it regardless. There was just too much available to the man who could take it, and none of the generals were going to play second fiddle to someone else. As things stood, even though the empire was split several ways, the resulting kingdoms were still quite a bit bigger than most of the nations that had existed in those places before (with the Persian Empire being the likely notable exception). All of the generals did quite well for themselves.

                1. They did indeed; the Ptolemy dynasty is the prime, and if I’m not mistaken longest-lived, example. But Alexander smoothed the way, and lent a certain legitimacy to each of them.

        3. Is the Septuagint, or the fact that all the Gospels are written in Greek not Aramaic, not much of a “lasting cultural imprint”? How about the Library of Alexandria?

          Also, to the original point, the Greeks very definitely got outside of Greece well before Alexander. Greek cities dropped colonies all over the Mediterranean, from Marseilles/Massalia to the Crimea. Southern Italy and Sicily were especially densely colonized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Graecia

          They didn’t consider themselves any kind of unified Greek “nation”, but that’s hardly unique in history. The Phoenicians didn’t consider themselves “Phoenician” either, but rather Tyrian or Byblian or what have you.

          1. The Byzantine empire was the inheritor of the hellenized Roman Empire, not the Alexander the Great’s empire.

            All Alexander achieved was getting all the apples before he died.

            It’s not just that they did not consider themselves a “nation”. The problem classical Greece had was if you had a good harvest, you had to guard your vines or your neighbors would cut them down in the night.

            When the Romans went through and vacuumed up the cool Greek arts and philosophies, that was one they largely left behind.

            1. How do you think the eastern part of the Roman Empire got Hellenized in the first place?

              I’ll tell you: it’s because the successor states to Alexander’s empire all spoke Greek. And maintained and preserved Greek culture. One of the things the Maccabees were rebelling against was a forcible imposition of Greek customs and institutions on Judean traditions. That was the Seleucids, not the Romans.

              All the kings and queens of Egypt post-Alexander were Hellenic and they all spoke Greek exclusively until Cleopatra VII (the famous one) bothered to learn Egyptian as a second language.

              I’m sorry, you’re just incorrect. Alexander and his successors had an enormous influence on the Near East that lasted, well, until the Muslim conquest (i.e. 900 years) for most of it and until the Turkish conquest for the rest (so another 400+ years on top of that). Hellenism owed nothing, zero, to the Romans; the Romans themselves were late adopters.

        4. The important bit is that Alexander was the reason why Greek culture spread everywhere. There were Greek colonies established all along the path of his conquests, and they outlasted even his generals

  9. They mean to break all that they can of civil society and commerce, kill their opposition as and when they can, and rule over the ruins.
    Their declared policies lead to no other result.
    Resist as you can, survive them, and teach American individual and Constitutional values to the surviving children.
    They are our future.
    John in Indy

      1. Yes, but some of my nightmares are not things that I want to remember.

        Had a recent sequence of some very organized “insurgents” in NYC making it very clear that they were in charge and started by crucifying cops. Then impaling National Guard prisoners. And, when the second VX-nerve gas suicide bomber kid erupts at a Marine unit, “shoot everything” looks bad on CNN.

        1. I get ya. There’s a reason I no longer write horror. I know too much history, read too much psychology, and been present at too many newsworthy events. Things can get… much worse.

          Which is why I write silly little zombie stories now. That a few hundred people want me to finish now…

          Back to the word mines!

      2. Eh, sometimes. I mean, not only is there no gracious way from being in a fort expecting an attack to filling out paperwork that does the opposite of the purpose you fill it out for, or from being processed into a death camp to taking a test about the culture of obscure peoples (imaginary, IIRC), it’s impossible to convey that the second element was truly scary one.

  11. Still praying for that asteroid to strike DC and every other liberal enclave, better yet instead of building a wall at the border let’s build a wall around blue cities and blue states. They can have all the communism they want, only it only applies to them not us. May God have mercy on our souls for not doing what we should be doing. Peace out.

  13. Also, based on what we know of genetics it seems likely that historically very few slaves managed to reproduce. In most places they were worked to an early death if they weren’t simply lined up for a sacrifice to the local god on an auspicious day.

    One of the comparitively rare features of American slavery is that the slaves did manage to have descendants.

    1. Uh? Nooooo. First off, slavery varied greatly in severity in different times and places.

      Secondly, a lot of ancient slave societies not only wanted their slaves to reproduce, but insisted upon it. They’d arrange marriages, and sometimes they’d change them up if the slaves didn’t reproduce. Many, many societies treated human slaves as livestock, and you mostly want to homebreed livestock instead of buying it.

      Thirdly, a lot of slave societies didn’t want slaves to remain slaves, because having free clients who supported themselves in old age was more economical. So they’d free Bob the slave, and maybe sponsor his marriage and kids, because the free family would still be under various obligations to them.

      Fourth, you are totally ignoring the fact that any female slave who looked pretty was often going to become a concubine (legal or unofficial) of one of their male owners. She wouldn’t have as much status as a free woman, but she’d reproduce for sure. There is a ton of law on this subject, and different cultures had different ideas about the status of the kids that resulted.

      Of course, Chinese novels generally have the (slave) maids being fed abortifacient porridge, but in real life that was illegal (and stupid, because it killed a slave that you’d paid money for).

      Romans had a situation where they perpetually had a surplus of slaves from war prisoners, and thus were not as concerned with breeding slaves. At least when it came to their farmworkers, who were not seen as easily.

      The rare situation was gelding male slaves, like the Ottoman Empire did. But they did that in mass quantities because they wanted to kill off their Christian subjects gradually, by removing their best and brightest boys and not letting them reproduce, and by also taking away the girls and making the children of rape into Muslims.

      Most ancient societies that wanted to kill off their enemies’ culture just killed all the men and boys, right away. Gelding was only useful if you had harems.

      2. Plutarch recorded Cato would sell his slaves when they got too old and sick to be useful, even if they’d been with him many years and given good service. It’s pretty clear Plutarch did not approve.

      3. No we know from looking at the genetics of current residents and of past ones that slaves generally failed to reproduce successfully.

        Rome is a great example. ~2000 years ago corpses in Rome and Roman Italy showed wide genetic variation with people from Greece, Africa and all over the Roman empire. from c. 1500 years ago until the present all those foreign genomes disappear. Current Italians look very like their pre-empire ancestors.

        The conclusion to draw from this is that the non-locals, who would usually have been slaves or similar, failed to produce offspring. The same is noted in Arabia which has been importing African slaves for millernnia but where the genome is still heavily Arab. The same is noted in Scandinavia, Viking era graves often have British, Irish, Slavic etc. corpses. Those genes did not make it into the general population because they are not visible in the current residents. What is visible in the current residents are the genes of the remnant hunter gatherers, the early farmers and the Yamnaya Indo-European culture.

        I could probably dig out other examples with more research but I recall that many Amerindian tribes took slaves and killed them when they were no longer useful.

        Now it is of course tricky to extend this to cultures where the slavers are genetically similar to the enslaved (China) or where the slavery was more serfdom (Russia, India for example) but actual slaves from a foreign ethnicity have generally been worked to death without a chance at reproducing if male and if female and not worked to death any children failed to reproduce.

        1. IDK about the European, Asian, African, etc., cultures, on the slaves. But American Indian tribes often adopted their captives, whether European or other local tribes. In fact speculation for the reason that the native tribes in the US will not allow genetics study is that their genetics have been so diluted by European, etc., genetics. Do not know if true or not. But speculation.

            1. adopted you mean killed the men and raped the women, you’re right.
              ………….

              Didn’t say it was voluntary adoption. Point was the current American Indian populations will not allow genetic testing of their population for tribal membership. Yet they can drop anyone based on known linage that does not “meet the tribal criteria”. The “one drop” rule doesn’t apply to most tribal politics.

                1. Reminds me of an old story:

                  William Cornelius Van Horne was an American railroad man who emigrated to Canada to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was New York Dutch, and inordinately proud of having no English blood in him at all.

                  One time while the railway was building (so the story goes), a toffee-nosed Englishman came out to see the work. The Englishman was puzzled to see a number of swarthy fellows among the labourers. ‘Who are those people?’ he asked.

                  ‘Those are Métis,’ Van Horne explained. ‘Half-breeds. There are quite a lot of them here. We have French and Indian half-breeds, Scottish and Indian, Irish and Indian, even Welsh and Indian.’

                  The Englishman duly rose to the bait. ‘What! Don’t you have any English and Indian half-breeds?’

                  ‘Well,’ said Van Horne, ‘the Indians have to draw the line somewhere.’

                  2. As someone who is mostly British Isle (and thus some English in there somewhere) “sounds about right”. Just saying.

          2. The thing about outside blood there is that it came with genes against epidemic diseases. That sort of advantage is hard to avoid spreading.

        2. Doesn’t make much sense and leads me to believe something is wrong with those studies.
          Why? It wasn’t just slaves. The Praetorian guard was mostly GERMANIC.

          1. The Praetorian Guard was quite thoroughly Roman. You may be thinking of the Emperor’s personal guard under the Julio-Claudians, which was German – but was a separate body of troops.

            The Praetorians were citizens. The German guards were not.

    2. Very not likely.
      True in say the Caribbean. Not true in, oh, Portugal or the US.
      And that’s the recent African slavery bout.
      Roman slavery? Yeah, they reproduced, at least in the colonies.
      And the back and forth enslaving of the Moorish occupation in the peninsula?
      The Moors turned blond and redheaded. (Which btw is why the producer of Bridgerton is, in addition to a raving racist, an idiot.)

      1. It’s a pity that the Bridgerton premise is so insane, because the actual dialogue is amazing.

    3. Well, with the importing of slaves to the US banned by the Constitution after 1808, they had to count on reproduction or else their workforce would run out.

      1. The Constitution didn’t ban the importation of slaves; Congress did. The Constitution prohibited banning the import of slaves before 1808 but didn’t mandate banning the import once that year came around. Congress did.

        And when that occurred, the price of slaves trebled and a lot of marginal sugar plantations stopped growing because they needed so much labor and slaves in the Deep South didn’t keep up with the death rate (the Deep South imported further north.) Meanwhile, a lot of cotton plantations in Maryland and Virginia (prior to the cotton gin) lost money on cotton but made it up on breeding slaves.

        1. Quibble: Those were tobacco plantations. Tobacco exhausts the soil pretty quickly, and in the days before chemical fertilizers that was a death sentence for any kind of profitable farming for years thereafter.

          Maryland and Virginia were never substantial producers of cotton. Too far north.

            1. I said they were never substantial producers. Most of the cotton grown in the U.S., both before the Civil War and today, came from the Deep South. At the time of secession, Mississippi was the largest producer by far.

              As for the tobacco planters trading in slaves, here is one of a multitude of citations, chosen more or less at random:

              http://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-economics-of-cotton/

              ‘Former tobacco farmers in the older states of Virginia and Maryland found themselves with “surplus” slaves whom they were obligated to feed, clothe, and shelter. Some slaveholders responded to this situation by freeing slaves; far more decided to sell their excess bondsmen. Virginia and Maryland therefore took the lead in the domestic slave trade, the trading of slaves within the borders of the United States.’

              Paul Johnson, in The Birth of the Modern, goes into the matter in some detail.

              1. And the Great & Glorious Thomas Jefferson, who whine about slavery earlier, began “breeding” his slaves for sale southward.

                Of course, he died broke because he spent more than he had income for.

              2. “During the early decades of the 19th century, large-scale cotton production occurred south of the James River, displacing both tobacco and Indian corn as money-makers. This resurgence of interest in growing commercial cotton peaked in 1826 with the export of 25 million pounds. Today, cotton is grown both south and north of the James River, with a commercial gin in Portsmouth.”
                https://www.slaveryandremembrance.org/Almanack/life/trades/traderural_cotton.cfm

                1. That’s still small-scale production, whether you compare it with the value of other agricultural commodities grown in Virginia or with the cotton output of other states. Your source says Virginia cotton production peaked with the export of 25 million pounds. In 1830, total U.S. cotton production was estimated at more than 350 million pounds, rising to well over a billion by 1860. Virginia was not a major producer.

                  I’m hoping this image embeds properly; it’s a USDA map showing the acreage planted in cotton in the continental U.S. Only a small amount of land in the extreme south of Virginia is planted in cotton; in Maryland, none at all.

                  Source, in case the embed doesn’t work:

                  https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/cotton-and-wool/cotton-sector-at-a-glance/

                  1. I was under the delusion, apparently, that we were talking production from ~150 years ago, not 2017.

                    3. The fact remains that in every source I have read, it was the tobacco planters who switched to breeding slaves, because the land was exhausted and no other cash crop was profitable enough to service their debts. The small amount of cotton grown in southern Virginia did not affect that one way or the other. (And it was a small amount, even at its peak in 1826; after which Virginia production rapidly declined while the actual cotton states boomed.)

                      This is a very strange hill for you to choose to die on.

            2. Actually, as someone who grew up in rural central Virginia, no they weren’t. Not substantial, anyway. Yes you can grow cotton in Virginia but the numbers in the 1800s weren’t much compared to the deeper South. In 1860 Virginia produced 1% of the cotton that Mississippi did but grew more tobacco by weight than any other state, only Kentucky was even close.

              There are some interesting agricultural figures for every state in the Union in 1860 via this URL:

              https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/agriculture/1860b-03.pdf?

              1. As soneone who also grew up in rural central virginia, 1: read the above and 2: were you south of the James?

                  1. As trhe Williamsburg site i posted above says, most of the cotton was done during the early 1800s and south of the james… and it was ‘replacing tobacco as a cash crop’

                    1. And that experiment was a failure, since Virginia cotton could not compete with cotton grown on cheaper land further west, in states with more favourable climates. I have posted figures below: by 1860, Virginia produced something under a quarter of 1 percent of the nation’s cotton crop. It was an insignificant producer then, and is one still, because the soil and climate are not suited to cotton.

              2. Money quote from your link. Figures are for 1860:

                ‘These four States, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, produced 3,672,040 bales of cotton, while all the other States produced only 1,715,012 bales.’

                According to the same document, in 1860, Virginia produced 12,727 bales – much less than one percent of the national production.

                I stand by my original statement.

  15. They don’t believe in equity. They believe in privilege, for themselves. What they’re trying to do is make all things necessary to life their gift while ensuring that none can challenge them. That they’re incompetent means nothing since their incompetence will affect those they despise. Win win.

  16. There’s a video going around of Fauci and the mayor of DC walking around a neighborhood pressuring people to get the jab. A man defies them, and explains clearly why the jab is unnecessary, and calls out their fear mongering.

    The nerve of this peasant, this lowly uneducated creature, defying his “betters.” They are unable to force him to comply and you can see their fury. The end goal of “equity” is to break this. Equity, which is Marxism so thinly veiled that Marx should blush, seeks to destroy this liberty. They will fail. But they’re causing a lot of damage trying.

    1. Marxism as a system is simply unsustainable long term. The problem is that Marxism and pursuit of Marxism cause a lot of damage along the way that takes many years to repair. Even worse will be the effort to undo the industrial revolution as restarting energy production once shut down is very difficult. Of course since the CCP has no intention of doing this themselves, it will facilitate their achieving their goal of global domination and control, simply because their opposition, as inefficient and non-functional the CCP is, will still be ahead of those places that turned back the clock on energy use to the pre-industrial age.

  17. They squawk about equity, but they don’t really mean it. Communists all have this delusion that they’ll be one of the higher ups living high on the hog while everyone else is starving and destitute, despite the fact that most of them are worthless failures who have never achieved anything important in their lives.

    1. You’ll work hard with a gun in your back
      For a bowl of rice a day.
      Slave for soldiers till you starve
      Then your head skewered on a stake.

      Now you can go where the people are one
      Now you can go where they get things done
      What you need my son
      What you need my son

      Is a holiday in Cambodia
      Where the people dress in black
      A holiday in Cambodia
      Where you’ll kiss a— or crack.

    2. Most of today’s Communists, come the Revolution, will not be comfortable commissars, they will be dead Bourgeois at the hands of their former comrades.

      Pining for the Fnords.

  18. Remember that they’ve changed the definition of “equity.”

    From the 1913 Webster’s DIctionary:

    “Equality of rights; natural justice or right; the giving, or desiring to give, to each man his due, according to reason, and the law of God to man; fairness in determination of conflicting claims; impartiality.”

    The current usage of “equity” is the exact opposite of impartial treatment, or equality of rights.

      1. They’re trying really hard to change the language. That annoys me. Greatly.

        I really like the English language. They’re crapping all over it and calling it chocolate sauce.

        I disagree. Explicitly. With much swearing, on occasion.

        1. They have to. The only reason why people pay any attention to them is because they claim to be in support of long-standing ideals. And then they have to claim that the ideal has always meant the nonsense that they’re trying to pedal.

          Classic case in point is the “minorities can’t be racist” nonsense which relies on a bunch of new(ish) -fangled gobbledy-gook (of the non-goblin kind) to “support” the claim.

  19. It seems to me that if they really wanted to actually help people who are disadvantaged they would tell everyone who has “advantage” to go out and help as many disadvantaged people as they can.

    But what they REALLY want is to punish people because they hate them. So they try to cut down the “advantaged” instead of encouraging everyone to help one another.

    That’s why I am a Christian instead of a wokster. I want to help as many people as I can, as my faith directs me to do, and not cut down people who have more than I have.

    1. Helping the disadvantaged is government’s job, not yours and mine, according to their beliefs.

  21. Tangentially…I’m doing our mandatory yearly CBT at work for “workplace respect and harassment prevention.” You’d think it wouldn’t take a one-hour course to communicate “don’t be a richardhead to people” but it does. And of course we’re told all about protected characteristics and similar things and blah blah. What irks me about this course is that it is the only CBT I take all year–and in the financial industry we’ve got to take about ten mandatory hours on various things, each and every year–it is the only one that REQUIRES me to take one full hour on it. Yesterday I finished it in 26 minutes because it’s the same course we’ve taken the last three years and I know all the videos already. Nope. I now have to spend 34 minutes today with my mouse cursor on that window, twitching the mouse every couple of minutes so it won’t time out until I accumulate one hour of time on that window, and only then am I allowed to be done.

    Believe me, I don’t want to see an economic collapse, but if the unemployment rate spiked a few tenths of a percent due to mass firings of the bloated and unnecessary DIE and HR staffs at every company, government, school system, and university in the country, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

    1. You should check and see if there’s a background app that will twitch the mouse for you. I know there are some (Mouse Jiggle, for example) that will keep the computer from auto-screen-locking by generating mouse twitches. I’m not sure whether they do the same for specific programs that are running, though.

  22. A while back, anthropologists discovered that 1000 years ago, 80% of Scandinavians were slaves..Having Norwegian blood, I’ve probably been on both ends of that deal…..the African slave trade was fueled by an excess of slaves being sold by African Kings and chiefs at bargain rates..Before 1700, a majority of slaves in America were white, and that’s not counting all the Indian held slaves, see A Man Called Horse…

    1. Deeetails! You’re going against the Narrative™. Hush. (Pointing out that one reason Charles I of England got in a wee bit of domestic political trouble was that he was asking for more taxes “for the Navy” as Barbary pirates were actively capturing people from the coast un-answered is Frowned Upon by the Establishment.)

      1. Indeed. A useful account of the slavery trade in European slaves, taken by corsairs from North Africa is in Giles Milton’s White Gold.
        The raiders from Sale on Algiers went as far as Ireland and even Iceland – but the coastal villages of Spain, Southern France and Italy were next-to deserted … that, or heavily-fortified. There was a reason that a lot of the old coastal towns in Span were ‘torre-something-or-other.’ They were watch towers, keeping watch for slave traders from Algiers, looking for fresh stock.
        https://celiahayes.com/archives/927

    2. One of the leads in the TV series Vikings was a slave. In this case, he was a monk seized in a raid on his monastery by the protagonist’s crew in the very first episode. Now admittedly, this series is fictional (even if the protagonist and his brother are loosely based off of two historical individuals). But my understanding is that the writers attempted to make the culture match up with what is known about the Vikings. And European thralls is one of the things we know they had.

      1. Quite true. And they sold those thralls to the Arabs in considerable numbers. Varangian Rus came into being as a side-effect of this trade, as the slaves were shipped from Scandinavia to the Caliphate via the Russian rivers. A strong, relatively centralized authority was just what the traders needed to keep those rivers safe for shipping, and there being none indigenous to the area, they supplied one themselves.

  23. True ‘equity’ will only be achieved when there are no eggs. When nobody has anything. That is where they’re headed.
    ———————————
    The Democrats are willing to burn America to the ground, so long as they wind up squatting on top of the ashes.

    1. George Orwell tells a story about his time in Marrakesh. Every day he used to go to the park and feed bread to the gazelles. One gazelle did not like him at all, but desperately wanted the bread. It kept butting him with his horns and then snatching for the bread, too dim to realize that the bread was not going to just keep hanging there in mid-air when the nasty human was gone.

      This is the thought process of the postmodern Left. They expect everything to magically keep working once they have destroyed the people who make it work. They don’t really want to squat on top of the ashes; they just haven’t figured out what fire does to things.

      Another bit of Orwell: ‘So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.’

  24. To the Marxist, all conflict creates Revolutionaries amoungbthe Proletariat, and destroys what prevents Communism from rising and flourishing.

    They really don’t care what flavor of strife, as long as it is intractable and enduring. Race, class, gender, handedness, whatever. “Nihilism” isn’t strong enough a term.

    The Khmer Rouge weren’t ruthless -enough-.

  25. I’m completely blown away by what San Francisco is proposing.
    So as the direct descendant of Holocaust survivors, can I get reparations from German-Americans?
    It makes just as much sense as San Francisco’s new plan…

    1. The San Francisco “Reparations” plan is so fundamentally insane that it boggles the mind. There are times reparations make sense. One of the classic ones I know of is the Atomic veterans and folks downwind of the Nevada test site (because father in law was an atomic vet, although did not qualify). Here you had to show evidence that you (or person for whom you were heir) had been harmed, a variety of unique illnesses were/are considered direct evidence, also for the vets if you had certain measured dosages you were considered harmed. There was then a process to provide evidence of expense/losses and there was an upper limit ($75K) to what could be claimed (set by Congress). Clearly the U.S. Government was at fault (No private parties in the US had tested nuclear weapons). This is classic clear cut reparations.

      In this case we have San Francisco paying out insane sums ($5 million+ 97K for life plus other bennies). The conditions to claim are vague, in particular because San Francisco (and California) was a free state so had no slaves. There is no showing direct attributable damage or loss which is the classic requirement for reparations rather you have to be in a couple special groups. What this is is either bribery or Dane Geld. Aside from a lot of whining the “Danes” don’t seemed to have threatened anything (although stores in San Francisco probably would disagree due to the extreme “shrinkage” they experience), and at his point burning SF down might qualify as urban renewal. This just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And once the Dane Geld is granted, you will never be free of the Dane… I don’t understand why anyone would offer this, and I further don’t understand why anyone (except perhaps the “Danes”) would support politicians that want to do this.

      1. If anybody had a claim for ‘reparations’ from San Francisco it would be descendants of the Coolies. That was the closest California got to slavery.
        ———————————
        Does the Left drive those idiots barking mad, or were they drawn to the Left because they were already batshit crazy?

        1. And even then I think the Claim would be against the rail company (Union Pacific ? or its ancestors? ) The City of San Francisco did NOT commit the tort, nor were they in any obvious way responsible for it. Maybe the state of California or the USA? I think ultimately the USA did compensate the Nisei that were thrown in camps during WWII.

          As you ask I have NO idea how these commissioners get there, are they initially insane or did something turn them into moonbats? Usually you can see a goal or cause, e.g. they’re buying votes, there’s some kind of kickback in the process etc. The only thing I see here is virtue signalling / assuaging “white mans” guilt. Its as if some bizarre form of Toxoplasma Gondii (yes I know that its relation to human Scizophrenia has of late been removed) has gotten to them. This seems to be yet another case of bad plotting/ Clown world gone berserk

          1. Star Wars universe got Midichlorians and The Force.

            We got litterbox microcritters and resultant Crazy Cat People.

      2. I don’t think it’s the danelaw or bribes, that gives them too much credit for rationality. This is just mad virtue signaling and prayers to their psychopathic earth goddess or to whatever nonsense they worship. Priests have broken more societies than any general ever did,

        1. Comment on Twitter that Russia is now planning to sell most (if not all) its oil and natural gas to China in return for support for its adventures in Ukraine. The tweeter fels this is essentially making Russia China’s junior partner.

          1. That’s the probable result, yes. Of course, as pointed out here before, the really big Russian oil & gas fields literally do not connect to the pipelines running to China. Some years ago, Russia announced a >10-year project to connect the west pipeline network to the east pipeline network, but of course that was before all the Western oilfield service companies and construction companies bailed from Russia, and when Russia was flush with convertible cash. Good luck getting it done with chinesium.

            1. Russia and China have a history of squabbles with each other. They might get along -briefly- to screw over the West. But both will be looking for opportunities to screw the other over in the mean time.

              1. In particular, Vladivostok used to be part of China. It was part of a largely unsettled region at the time, which was why the dynasty at the time (Qing, IIRC) was willing to sign it away to Russia for assistance in dealing with the foreigners who were starting to make demands of the Chinese. According to what I’ve read on the subject, the Russians took the territory but didn’t live up to their end of the agreement.

                The result was the Chinese giving Kissinger grief over a century later when Kissinger stopped briefly in Vladivostok for a quick meeting with the Soviets before heading on to China for a meeting with Mao. The Chinese haven’t forgotten, even if they don’t make noise about it. And there’s not a chance that the Russians will voluntarily give up their primary access to the Pacific.

      3. Pure virtue signal. The fact they were not slaveholders of African -Americans yet are willing to offer up a sacrifice/be a good example simply proves their utter virtue and rectitude.

      4. The fact that California was a “free” state and joined the Union as such – that is a warping of history that angers me the most. California did not have black slaves, slave markets, slaves imported and kept in slavery, never had Jim Crow practices imposed by law, and any segregation in the 20th century was pretty much self-imposed by all parties. As Tregonsee says, – it makes no sense at all, other than the usual Bay Area libs grandstanding for the special interest groups.

        1. California is now a Slave state. They just haven’t figured out how to put on the chains.

          Yet.

  26. Descendants of survivors of communism should be allowed to send equity communists on a half flight trip over the ocean.

    Change my mind.

    2. The Sepoy Mutiny resolution would be easier and cheaper (and black powder is All Natural!), and I’m sure we could find or produce a sufficient number of bombards…

          1. Alas, no. The expensive part of the flight is takeoff. And then there are all these silly regulations about dumping toxic waste in the ocean…

  28. “The Army has carried the American … ideal to its logical conclusion. Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed and color, but also on ability.”
    — Tom Lehrer

  29. On the other hand, if somebody would just go lopping off the heads of Marxists like they were lopping off heads during the French Revolution, the world would be a better place.

  33. In other news, I was somewhat surprised at myself earlier today.

    I was shocked when a young Portuguese lady was called ‘Hispanic”.

    Didn’t it require “The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)”, signed by Pope Julius II, to divide the Americas between the territories of Spain and those of Portugal?

    Seems almost offensive to go back on it now…

      1. Thanks! I wasn’t going to step up as the white guy and mansplain anything anyway; but it’s good to know more context.

  34. Looking up the Aesop tale of the Goose that Laid Golden Eggs and found this note in Wikipedia, which tickled my fancy:
    Portuguese missionaries arriving in Japan at the end of the 16th century introduced Japan to the fables when a Latin edition was translated into romanized Japanese. The title was Esopo no Fabulas and dates to 1593. It was soon followed by a fuller translation into a three-volume kanazōshi entitled Isopo Monogatari (伊曾保 物語).[38] This was the sole Western work to survive in later publication after the expulsion of Westerners from Japan, since by that time the figure of Aesop had been acculturated and presented as if he were Japanese.39] Coloured woodblock editions of individual fables were made by Kawanabe Kyosai in the 19th century.[40]

  35. Benjamin Franklin doesn’t use the word “equity” but this is more like the classical definition than the Woke version:
    “Ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation to the prejudice and oppression of another is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy…An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.”

    https://fee.org/articles/17-benjamin-franklin-quotes-on-tyranny-liberty-and-rights/

  36. And not surprisingly, Thomas Sowell had something to say on the topic.
    “Equity: The Thief of Human Potential” – Thomas Sowell

    1. From all the way back in 1999. Equity wasn’t a term people used in my humanities grad program back at the turn of the millenium, but the thinking was the same. It’s been…interesting…to see all that garbage escape the incestuous confines of academia to be monetized and popularized over the past several years.

  37. You’re descended from slavers, murderers, rapists, warlords, pirates, conmen (and women) and you’re descended from their victims. You’re descended from saints, too, and heroes, and kings, and judges, and upright people, and a lot of men and women who were neither, but, in the common run of humanity were decent enough and honest enough and meant no one harm.

    Or as Aslan puts it in one of the Narnia stories (Prince Caspian, I think– the following is from memory):

    “You are descended from the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is honor enough to lift the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to bow the knee of the proudest king.”
    ~ C. S. Lewis

  38. You’re descended from slavers, murderers, rapists, warlords, pirates, conmen (and women) and you’re descended from their victims. You’re descended from saints, too, and heroes, and kings, and judges, and upright people, and a lot of men and women who were neither, but, in the common run of humanity were decent enough and honest enough and meant no one harm.

    Or as Aslan puts it in one of the Narnia stories (Prince Caspian, I think– the following is from memory):

    “You are descended from the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is honor enough to lift the head of the lowest beggar and shame enough to bow the knee of the proudest king.”
    ~ C. S. Lewis

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