Like Chairman Mao, the MRA blogger Alcuin is a massive douchebag with intellectual pretensions far outstripping his limited brainpower. Also like Mao, Alcuin is perhaps best appreciated in tiny doses. Most of his posts are rambling, pretentious messes; yet many of them contain wonderful little nuggets of anti-wisdom that I feel compelled to share with you all.
Mao had his Little Red Book. Here’s part one of Alcuin’s Little Red-Faced Book. Click on the titles for the full posts.
[A] woman only thinks of her next meal, and which man can provide the best one for her. … Allow them to run organizations and society, and they will destroy everything. … Women are too emotional and self-centered to build civilization.
All Feminists are Doctor’s Daughters:
Feminism, the domain of doctor’s daughters, is for snobs. Men with dirty fingernails are haughtily ignored and dismissed. … Ironic, ain’t it, that feminists can be both perpetual victims and upper-class snobs at the same time, with the same remark and arrogant flick of the hair, as she puts her nose in the air and walks past. … Uppity cunts.
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Backlash:
Because feminism has attacked humans so viciously, injecting its hate-filled venom so deeply into both men and women, the “reaction” will not be a mere rainstorm. Deep, psychotic imbalance such as the type wrought by feminism and by liberals in general will necessitate a fucking shitstorm the likes of which we’ve hardly seen.
Constant rape accusations are ridiculous, given the sexless marriage epidemic. How many bored, asexual women stuck in a sexless marriage would love to be taken?
Modern miseduated western women fear their femininity, fear their natural beauty, and run away from it. … The hags we currently see in western countries resemble a clear-cut, eroded mountain. A contemporary western woman reminds one of the landscape created by the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, ugly and unnatural, a place of evil and sadness.
More to come; Alcuin’s idiocy is a renewable resource.
Well, and yes. The tribes were recognized fairly early on as sovereign nations — but sovereign nations within our own nation, whose rights in the land had been displaced by European discovery and conquest, and I’d say that makes them substantively different from other sovereigns. Not that this was ever really put into action, but I do think the US had a duty to deal fairly with the tribes, and not, say, force them into internment camps, separated from families, and finally forced to march across the country under extremely harsh circumstances that left thousands dead from hunger and exposure and illness.
And yet, all you can muster is that Jackson was a bad president with some policies that weren’t acceptable?
Also, for what it’s worth, Mr. Al, Ottoman Empire or no Ottoman Empire, I’m pretty sure that the Young Turk government that directed the Armenian genocide would make pretty much the same argument you gave about Jackson’s policies to show why killing Armenians wasn’t really that bad, when you think about it.
I’m not saying the Trail of Tears “wasn’t really that bad”. I’m just demonstrating how Jackson is fundamentally different from Stalin or Hitler, the worst motherfuckers pretty much, well, ever. Jackson is comparable to any historical conqueror, take your pick. There have been hundreds. We don’t compare Napoleon to Hitler either.
It’s why I take issue with people like DSC jacking off over various American figures being “as bad” and pointing to a “double standard”. No. It’s seen as different because it is.
Butler declared that Jews and queer folk and Roma weren’t real Germans, and that was why they had to be killed. So by your logic that genocide is not so bad if it’s done in the name of one’s OWN people against an OTHER/outsider, Hitler’s genocide was also not so bad. They people he killed weren’t HIS people and they were killed to preserve HIS aryan nation.
Right, Hitler utilized a segment of his own people as a scapegoat. Jewish Germans were citizens up until the Holocaust, until Hitler arbitrarily revoked their citizenship. Native Americans were never citizens of the US, nor did either party (that is, the US or the indians) ever wish for such a relationship. The tribes were essentially sovereign nations, which Jackson conquered and exploited for the benefit of his people. Which sucks. But again, if you can’t see the difference, you’re an idiot.
And Hitler did not lead an “Aryan Nation”, much as he might have wanted to. He led Germany and was elected to lead Germany and its people. He failed rather spectacularly, because he killed a segment of the German people as established when he was elected.
And yet, all you can muster is that Jackson was a bad president with some policies that weren’t acceptable?
I mean, what do you want me to say? He committed genocide? No, he didn’t. Genocide is the *intentional* eradication of a group of people. The Trail of Tears and the resultant deaths were a side-effect of his indian removal acts. So Jackson was an extremely callous man regarding the Native Americans, he was a terrible President, and he is guilty of general crimes against the indigenous people. That’s really as far as I’m willing to go.
That should say “Hitler” not Butler. Wow, autocorrect.
Oh man, now I’m envisioning an anime comedy series called Adolf Butler.
MRAL: Andrew Jackson was not a great President, but again, your attempts to equate him with Stalin are fucking hilarious.
Not so far off the mark. He figured the laws didn’t really apply to him, vided treaties because it was expedient to his personal ends, and committed the Cherokee to the Trail of Tears; knowing that thousands of them would die, and not really caring if all of them were killed in the process.
Sort of like Stalin with the kulaks.
When you discuss the death tolls, are you norming for total populations, or just going with raw numbers?
As to the “citizens of his own country”: newsflash, most of the victims of the Holocaust weren’t citizens of Germany. From a technical standpoint (since you want to get all nuanced) almost none of the Jews were, because even the ones who were German by birth (and language; a lot of the justification for WW2 was the “reunification of the German speaking peoples) had been declared to be non-germans, and so not-citzens of the Third Reich.
Now, let’s test your theory: What defines, “one’s people”? Stalin, and Mao, and Hitler, would argue they were defending, “their people”. So would Pol Pot. The people they killed, imprisoned, starved, were being culled from the Real People. So, when using that “nuance” you say absolves Jackson, all of them are no worse than he was. They were pursuing a higher goal, for the greater good.
Which is, when you think about it, the justification of every racist, everywhere, and everywhen.
Nice company you want to keep.
Wow. Andrew Jackson isn’t so bad because he didn’t kill white people instead of Indians. I’m actually shocked that this is a thing anyone would seriously argue, even MRAL.
News flash, people: Attempting to genocide is worse than committing rights abuses against your people. Only one of these is an attempt to actually exterminate, where the deaths are the goal.
Now, this doesn’t really absolve Stalin in even the least tiny way in comparison to Jackson. Although his goal wasn’t genocide, IIRC the way he carried out his purges was *in effect* a racist genocide in a number of instances (When they weren’t purely political like the officer purge). But seriously, Jackson doesn’t need or deserve protection from criticism against his extermination, and it wasn’t really ‘better’ than anyone else’s genocide.
Right, Stalin’s came later, when the population was higher globally. not to mention the Native Americans had already suffered a mass death event already, not very long before Jackson’s.
Wait.
What?
GRAY? For *JACKSON’S KILLINGS*? What, pray tell, is supposed to be the redeeming factor here?
This isn’t actually true. He is comparable to some historical conquerors, but actual destruction of the populace hasn’t really been the goal for most of history, and isn’t actually that common. What you usually see with conquest is, and this may shock you, that the people who lived there, stay there, but toil for a different overlord. Take, for instance, the conquest of a huge swath of the Indian peninsula by what would become the Delhi Sultanate; despite having a religious mandate to exterminate the Indians, the conquerors bent over backwards to find a loophole, because actually killing everyone on that land wasn’t nearly as effective a ruling strategy as letting them live and continue to work.
Americans never played this game, and were much more racist in their dealings with the people who were there first. I wouldn’t expect *Good* treatment of second class citizens, but intentional attempts to genocide more or less every time is actually above and beyond the norm (Which we got closest to with the attempts at forced assimilation). It’s not unique, by any means, but it is not actually the norm. Jackson’s more like Genghis Khan, who was more or less exactly as evil as Hitler. Hitler isn’t uncontested, at all, for the title of ‘The Worst person to Have Walked onto the World Stage ever.” But he is one of the most recent entrants, and because of this has left a lot of scars on a lot of people.
I am sorry to have derailed this thread, although the ensuing discussion is very interesting. It wasn’t my intention to compare the worst Soviet administrations with the worst American ones. In fact, one of the things swirling in my head as I was typing the tangential comment is that it would be rich indeed to say that the people who perished on the Trail of Tears died of “natural causes” and that therefore the most the government is guilty of is mismanaging the hardship that it deliberately created in the first place.
I think we are also getting bogged down in definitions. The term “genocide” implies an intent to wipe out or decimate an ethnic group. There is no conclusive evidence that this was Stalin’s intent behind Holodomor, although the famine did much to dampen the efforts at Ukrainian independence. I don’t think Stalin was anti-Ukrainian to the same extent that he was anti-Semitic, but what I was trying to explain is that in this particular set of circumstances, it is a distinction without a difference.
For all the attraction of the social aims of communism — which I will happily concede — Lenin and Stalin openly embraced terror as a means for bringing their large and ethnically diverse country to heel. Stalin, I believe, understood the mechanics of terror better than anyone, even though he was not above miscalculation (such as on the eve of World War II). He reduced most people in the Soviet Union to barest survival, to living each and every day in fear that their very lives were hanging by a thread — that is long-term terror. He imposed it by, from time to time, killing or causing the deaths of huge masses of people. His purges were like tzunami waves; and just like victims of a natural disaster, survivors of those purges were left deeply scarred, which is exactly what he appears to have wanted.
Now, if you are Stalin, and you want to kill lots and lots of people at random in order to subjugate the rest, how do you do it? Sending death squads seems like an obvious answer, and he did that — but if you want to kill millions, that’s too expensive and labor-intensive. Kicking people off their farms, destroying crops and letting farm animals die — that’s a far more efficient way.
My family lived through that horror. I don’t believe it was through inadvertence that urban revolutionaries who didn’t know diddly-squat about farm work and only cared about ideology were invariably placed in charge of collectivization in localities. Holodomor was a hardship that Stalin intentionally created. Whether he did it because he didn’t like Ukrainians or because he just wanted to keep what was left of the old Russian Empire intact — ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that under Stalin’s regime, a human life had no value and human rights did not exist at all, for anyone.
Rutee: I wonder what the policies of the Europeans would have been like were the locals more resistant to disease, and so not reeling from massive disruption of lifestyles, culture, worldview as a result of the population being in recovery from as much as a 90 percent die-off, and subsequent repopulation.
If the conservative estimates of the newer research is correct, there were almost 200 million people in N. America in 1491, perhaps as many as 300 million. That would have been a ery different problem in terms of trying to impose their will on them.
Not sure. British policy was originally about war, but they eventually reformed to more diplomatic measures later despite being in a much better position to kill later than they were before.. The French and Dutch would probably not be more likely to shoot the Indians if they were in strength, given that, to the best of my knowledge, they were mostly content to trade with them even as they were. The Spanish might have been forced to stop killing natives with the loss of local support (At least in the case of the former Aztec conquests), but they were perfectly happy to shoot and kill even with the Aztecs not suffering a mass death event yet, at least.
I’m pretty sure the British were constrained at least somewhat by foreign military and economical constraints, so they didn’t want a costly war, but I’m not actually all that clear on why they switched from a killing stance to a diplomatic one (Even holding back the substantially more bloodthirsty colonists).
But in terms of overall effect? I’m not really sure. A lot of Native American cultures didn’t have a strong emphasis on the same kind of war, and the Spanish didn’t need a mass-death event to conquer one of the ones that *did*… but Spain got a lot of help from natives in that. The Dutch and French probably wouldn’t have been very different at all, but the English and Spanish would probably have been greatly constrained in their expansion. England could probably still have crushed them, if it really tried, but it would have taxed a lot of resources better spent elsewhere, and trying to do so might have cost it big elsewhere. I really don’t think I know enough to make very definite statements at all. Heck, it could have changed a lot of things; maybe the indigenous population might have fought for New Amsterdam, maybe the Indians would have actually modernized in the face of a serious military incursion of North America. Maybe the Europeans would have banded together to christianize and the ultimate situation of the Native Americans would have been even worse. I just don’t know.
Lotta genocide apologists itt.
It bothers me that MRA-hood overlaps with apologia for genocide but you know what? It doesn’t really surprise me. .
Rutee: The Spaniards weren’t dealing with a “war for conquest” mindset, but a, “war for captives” one: and they weren’t seen as targets for that until it was too late (with the Aztecs; with the Inca they were looking at a much different situation, and they were lucky enough to show up in the middle of a power struggle, and both sides thought they could be used to consolidate their position).
With the Aztecs the nature of the politics was enough to give them a base which was willing to help them, and the religion gave them a foot in the door.
Smallpox followed soon thereafter.
The British also had some help in that regard; the denuding of Massachussets, in particular, is what made it possible for them to establish themselves. Squanto was playing power politics (he was a “captive” of sorts, and he was hoping to use them to regain his independence, and political advantage).
The war ethos of the Iroquois was pretty severe, and I don’t think the Europeans would have been able to withstand them, without a lot more numbers than they were likely to have; because the Crown(s) didn’t see them as all that profitable. The were on their own until they were large enough that there was an actual interest extant in England/France.
So the situation would have been something like India, but lacking in the exploitable resoruces (calico, spices, metals; since there was no metalworking anywhere; with the possible exception of the Mound Culture in the Lower Mississipi, who may have been starting to play with copper).
So the need for land wasn’t there, and the resources to justify an armed presence didn’t really exist.
It’s an open question, but I think the level of, “no one is using this, God meant it for us” which suffused a lot of the interaction wouldn’t have been present.
Well, I don’t think that without smallpox, the Aztecan or Incan Empires would stay conquered. I don’t know what would happen in the aftermath entirely, but it’s not what happened in history, that’s for sure. I was under the impression that the british colonies were established in search of resources originally, but they certainly didn’t bring militaries with them. I don’t necessarily think that they could have overcome an unweakened Iroquis either. But people are complicated, and I don’t really feel comfortable making any serious proclamations on what would have happened in such a massively different series of events. The only one I can really say with any confidence is yeah, that the Aztecan and Incan Empires would have put up a much more extended fight and probably booted the Spanish out pdq (Whether they’d stay booted, I really don’t know). It seems a safe bet that the American Continents would not be dominated by white people in the centuries to come, but I just don’t know.
Because there’s also no bad time for Eddie Izzard!
Eddie Izzard is perfect for every situation!
Clarification: Demographically dominated by white people. Even the worthless parts of Africa fell under European dominion eventually. The Spanish would still probably have tried to make settlements in modern day Argentina or Chile, but it wouldn’t be set on expanding from there, I’m betting. It’s a good place to make a route even further west.
Other two notes: It is within the realm of reason that the British would shift to a much less conquering note sooner. They weren’t nearly as horrid as the Spanish in this regard, and there *were* people who wanted to farm there.
It’s also worth noting that without a permanent conquest of the Aztecan empire, we wouldn’t have the mass crash in Europe that came when the Spanish overinflated the price of gold. Again, I have *NFC* what would be different, but it’s a short term difference that may precipitate long term ones.
Okay, didn’t actually cut and past what I wanted, but Hail Eris anyway! the video should be in response to Pecunium saying:
Rutee: The English were a mixed bag. They let people go, in search of whatever they were looking for, and then supported them when it was politically useful. The British East India Company was a free-standing entity until Victoria.
But the Crown lent them regiments, under Company officers. In the Americas there were two sorts, the Jamestown, “make a killing on cash crops” groups (which were murder on the locals, and murder on the laborers they brought with them), and the more northern sorts who were looking to reform themselves, and the world.
The US is still paying for this, in lots of ways; because both of those groups shaped the overall culture, and they were very different in how they saw the relationship between the government and the governed. I really need to read, “Albion’s Seed”, which goes into it more detail.
I think (looking at the politics of the age), that had the Aztecs not had 1: a God-King, and two, not been wiped out by smallpox/the flu/measles, etc., the competition for “client states” (a la the various satrapies of India) would have led to France/Spain/Britain/Holland trying to carve out the central american area into spheres of influence.
There is a difference between Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas, which is the tse-tse fly, so that it wasn’t until the Europeans arrived, with both breechloaders, and a way to keep a steady supply of beasts of burden that even they could impose a will. Horses got way into into the Americas in short order, and I don’t see the ways in which that changed a lot of the native people’s lifestyles being less affective, and the competition for clients could have led to firearms getting into various people’s hands in large enough numbers; before breechloaders, to make it a lot harder to just overwhelm people.
But the confounding variables (and lack of real knowledge about the people inside the edge of pre-disease contact too small) is enough to make all such speculation impossible, past the sense that it would be a very different world.
Snowy: Even when the rest of the post makes no fucking sense. Fell the POWER of Eddie Izzard! He can save any situation!
MRAL, before you call someone a dumbass you should actually have a clue what the fuck you’re talking about.
Article VI of the US Constitution
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Is there anything you’re not ignorant of?