Incidentally, during the '50s and '60s Western governments were against the secular, nationalist, and socialist movements that were laughing off religious ideas and trying to modernize their countries, and sided with the Islamic monarchies.

Arguably the primary reason why monarchies like Saudi Arabia didn't get overthrown by the various labor movements, progressive technocrats, and nationalist military officers that emerged against them during the '50s and '60s was because of the massive amounts of military and economic support given to these backwards, totalitarian monarchies by Western governments (mainly the US and the UK).

-edit-

Here are some good books on the very interesting and complex subject of the Middle East, Islamic fundamenetalism, and US foreign policy

• America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2006)
  
• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (2011)
  
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
  
• The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (2003)

https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal.

I don't need to see it. I was born Kharkov, Ukraine.

In 1940, the NKVD killed about 22,000 Polish officers in cold blood in the Katyn Forest. These were unarmed prisoners.

In 1941, about 15000 Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and brought to Dobrytsky Yar, where they were killed. The parents were shot, the kids were thrown in to the pits to freeze to death among the corpses of their parents to save bullets.

I played in both forests when I was a kid, completely ignorant of the history. What people need to internalize is that neither the Nazis or the Soviet or ISIS now are monsters. They are ordinary men, and ordinary men are capable of doing these things under the right conditions. To dehumanize them is to forget this and forget that any of us could be on either the receiving end or the giving end.

Edit - http://smile.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

For all the people condemning this bookkeeper, I recommend reading a book call Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland

It'll put into perspective that if you were in 1930's Germany, there's a good chance you'd be a Nazi, and if the opportunity to become a bookkeeper came up, you'd jump at the opportunity.

Gathering and analyzing intelligence on other countries is its primary, original role. Most directly for keeping specifically the President informed of just what the heck is developing around the world. It was started after WW2 in order to prevent another Pearl Harbor surprise. And they were not allowed to gather intelligence on US soil, but that has not been strictly observed.

This work involves gathering tasks as mundane as always reading the news in a target country, as political context matters as much as tapped phone conversations when putting together an analysis. But the movie-caliber stuff is important too. They tap phones, recruit sources in governments and industry, build a whole network of resources.

To collect this information, the CIA uses two kinds of employees. “Official cover” officers pose as diplomats in US embassies worldwide. All embassy staff will be under surveillance from the target country’s counter-intelligence organizations — their FBI equivalents — so meeting sources is risky and they might stick to less blatant parts of the job. But on the upside, they have diplomatic immunity and just get sent home if caught spying. Non-official cover officers get jobs in multinational companies or assume some invented identity that gives them a reason to be in country. They can more freely recruit local sources but must rot in prison or die if caught, unacknowledged.

Info goes back to legions of analysis teams working in offices in the US who prepare it into reports.

The CIA also engages in covert and clandestine activities meant to influence other countries. This latter role has grown, diminished, and changed in nature throughout its history depending on political climate. Some bad press from some really ugly leaks in the 70’s (I think) about the extent of these activities put a big damper on them for a while, requiring Presidential sign-offs on killings, iirc. Post 9/11, the CIA is back on the hard stuff but keeps a legion of lawyers to make sure it’s teccchhnically legal.

These cold war activities include funding and organizing Afghan resistance against communist rule, for example. A whole covert war. Also tons of election rigging, assassination, etc. Post cold war they have been involved in anti-terror activities like running the war against the Taliban and assassinating militants and their neighbors with drone missiles.

Fun fact: “covert” operations are meant to hide who is behind an operation, “clandestine” are meant to conceal the entire operation from anyone but us. Compare an assassination to a phone tap.

Edit: in one episode (2 or 3 i think) of Netflix docu series Inside the Mossad explains how Israel’s foreign intelligence uses elaborate sting operations to recruit sources. By the time they realize they’re working for Mossad, they’re in too deep to not go along with it. Intelligence orgs do this a lot when they know the people they need probably hate the org’s country. This is basically all the time for Israel spying on other middle east states. Case officers often use really impressively manipulative strategies for recruiting and controlling their local agents. “The Americans” illustrates some great examples of this, if a little more dramatic.

Edit 2A: There are a bunch of other specialized US foreign intelligence agencies, like the NSA that traditionally intercepts signals and cracks their codes.

Edit 2B: In the UK, MI6 of James Bond fame does foreign intelligence and MI5 does counter-intelligence. These existed during WW2 but back then the lines got blurred, with both organizations running their own double agents against Nazi Germany’s own two competing foreign intelligence orgs. In fact, 0% of any spies Germany sent to Britain were able to work for enough time before being caught to send anything useful over. By 1944, when the UK was more confident that they were controlling all the sources sending info to Germany (the ones that wouldn’t work for the UK as double agents radioing harmless intel back home were either dead or imprisoned), they fed Germany massive misinformation about the location (and timing?) of the D-Day Normandy invasion. Read the excellent book Operation Double Cross to learn about this incredible operation.

BOOK EDIT:

Books on the CIA I found rewarding.

“The Master of Disguise” by Tony Mendez. Ben Affleck played him in Argo. Memoir of this artist’s time in the CIA inventing disguises and forging travel documents, often to exfiltrate an exposed source. Watch or read Argo too if you haven’t, the film at least is incredibly cool because its evacuation of American diplomats from Iran as Canadian filmmakers is largely real.
https://www.amazon.com/Master-Disguise-Secret-Life-CIA/dp/0060957913/

“Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.” Recent declassifications are exposing just how terribly the CIA bungled things in the early cold war, which is what this is about. From massive nuclear arms race miscalculations that threatened the world, to unfounded communism paranoia that led to totally unnecessary coups, they used classification to hide their greatest errors.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389006/

“Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda.” Beyond just the tech, you get insight into the lives of tech team members who would bug homes for their career. Interesting stuff. I think I read a different edition but this is probably fine.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452295475/

“Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001”
Tom Clancy name, but actually an extremely detailed history of the CIA’s 1980’s support for Afghan mujahideen against the USSR and continued involvement in the 90’s. Down to highlighting cultural generational differences within the multiple cohorts of CIA officers in charge of the long-running operation. Also highlights Pakistan’s demand to hand out all the money, both to act as kingmaker for the dominant factions and to skim hella bux off the top. Descriptions of the conflict and how the Afghans relentlessly persevered and how factions had independent deals and truces with USSR. Then much of the civil war aftermath of USSR pullout when the US stopped caring. Taliban become popular for not tolerating warlords raping local boys, an issue that remains to this day among US supported administration (a coalition of “former” warlords who you will recognize if you read the book). Great read, incredible breadth.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143034669/

When I was in school in Belgium in the 1960s, we were taught that the Belgians did nothing but good things in The Congo. My mother confirmed that at the time, all that most Belgians knew about what went on there was on the same level: it was all good, Belgium brought light and civilization to the natives. More recently, of course, people learned the real story: slavery, torture, mutilation, rape and downright genocide, lasting for decades.

It's true that some people in Belgium knew about this, or parts of this, but for the general public the lie was all they ever heard. I remember how shocked my mother was when she read Adam Hochshild's book, King Leoplod's Ghost a few years ago.

Bones breaking isn't necessarily what kills you in rapid deceleration situations. Often times it's your heart detaching from your aorta. Every once in a while someone survives a jump off the golden gate bridge or something, and it's usually because when they hit the water their heart happened to be not full of blood for that split second, and wasn't as heavy, thus staying attached.

edit: this comment got a little more attention than I thought it would. If you're interested in this kind of thing, I would highly recommend Mary Roach's book Stiff.

I have this book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It has a decent reputation among historians AFAIK, and one of the main points of the book is that Native Americans had fairly sprawling and diverse civilizations across North America before European contact. Lots of European accounts of Native Americans describe them as clean, healthy, tall, beautiful actually.

So yeah, Branco can eff right off with his summation of indigenous civilization as human sacrifices, slavery, and early death. I'm not an expert of pre-Columbus American civilizations and cultures. I know these things did happen in the Americas before European contact, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's pretty stupid to suggest Europeans were automatically the harbingers of civilizations and decency.

Christopher Columbus and his men helped decimate the population of Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. They forced native Tainos to collect gold. They severed the hands of men and boys if they didn't meet their gold quotas. They sexually enslaved women and young girls. They met any resistance with indiscriminate cruelty. An opening salvo in centuries of European barbarism towards indigenous people in North and South America.

Christopher Columbus was a monster and deserves to be remembered as such.

There is a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me that has a chapter that talks about how these high school text books are written. It is very leftwardly slanted, but overall a pretty good read.

EDIT would you consider doing an AMA?

That'd be 1491 by Charles Mann.

EDIT: Just to note. This is a controversial book among historians. Much of the info presented can largely be seen as conjecture without a lot of veritable proof behind it. So take it with a grain of salt.

The book is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

The Clean Wehrmacht myth is a blatant lie. The Wehrmacht were repeatedly involved in war crimes, including the extermination of undesirables, and at the very least most, if not all, members were aware that their government was pursuing a campaign of violence against civilians and had purged undesirables (such as cripples and mentally ill) from society back home. The Wehrmacht may have been normal men, but that does not mean they are free of the blame for what occurred during World War 2.

Here are some resources regarding the Clean Wehrmacht Myth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht

https://www.amazon.com/The-Wehrmacht-History-Myth-Reality/dp/0674025776

https://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet/dp/0521712319

https://www.amazon.com/War-Extermination-Military-Studies-Genocide/dp/1571814930

I'd also add Ordinary Men to that list, as it's a very interesting study/discussion of how plain people like you and me can become bloodthirsty exterminators of other people in the right circumstances. https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492122897&sr=1-1&keywords=ordinary+men

Edit: Done replying to comments in this thread, it's exhausting. None of the argumentation is new. To quote the Duke of Wellington, "they came on in the same old way...". The materials are there for you to explore and read. You can form your own judgments based on facts and rigorous research, that's the beauty of a free and open society, the kind of society Nazi Germany was actively trying to prevent. The reason the Clean Wehrmacht myth needs to be refuted is because, as I've said in another comment, it presents an ignorant view of history that allows us to avoid the hard truth, learned largely from World War Two, that ordinary men who would otherwise be considered honorable, decent people can take part in atrocious crimes or, at the very least, hear about them and be permissive or even supportive of them. If we deny that, we can't learn to prevent such things happening again.

Edit 2: Honestly last thing, I just want to add a comment by one of the mods of r/askhistorians specifically relating to this subject. It's honestly the best comment on Reddit I've ever seen regarding this subject and it has a list of plenty of resources for those who want to investigate this issue further: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xc03h/just_how_much_of_the_wehrmacht_was_dirty/cy3cxs0/

This book is similar. Basically, we're happier as hunter-gathers, but you could never go back unless you're OK with 90% of people dying off due to starvation.

The reason tribes were small when Europeans arrived was because European disease arrived first, often with 95% death tolls. Except for the very first explorers (Pizarro, etc.), what European settlers saw was a post-apocalyptic society. Prior to that, Native Americans had as large and complex (and as violent) societies as any that existed on the other side of the Atlantic.

A good book about the modern scholarship on the subject is Mann's 1491, which I highly recommend.

I remember reading a book called Guns Germs and Steel back in the day that seemed to cover all of these developments!

This is stated over and over recently, and it's largely false. Yes, there was some drug use in the Nazi military, but mostly among fighter pilots and tank crews. The book Blitzed by Norman Ohler is a classic example of the overstatement of drug use in Nazi Germany, and this review just tears it to shreds. I'd really recommend reading the whole thing, but a few choice excerpts are:

> The use of methamphetamine was common, he argues, particularly in the form of “Pervitin”. The drug, [Ohler] says, was manufactured in huge quantities: 35m tablets were, for example, ordered for the western campaign in 1940. This seems an impressive figure, until you recall that more than two and a quarter million troops were involved, making an average of around 15 tablets per soldier for the entire operation. Given the concentration on supplying tank crews with the drug, this means that the vast majority of troops didn’t take any at all.

And continued:

> Ohler goes much further than claiming that methamphetamine was central to the German military effort, however. He claims that its use was universal among the civilian population of Germany, too... This sweeping generalisation about a nation of 66 to 70 million people has no basis in fact. No doubt a number of Germans took, or were even prescribed, opium derivatives for medical conditions, or took them to alleviate the growing stress of living in a country that by mid-1944 was being invaded from all sides and buckling under the strain of intense aerial bombardment. But to claim that all Germans, or even a majority of them, could only function on drugs in the Third Reich is wildly implausible.

The author makes his central point, and perfectly illustrates why I hate the overstatement of drug use in Nazi Germany:

> What’s more, it is morally and politically dangerous. Germans, the author hints, were not really responsible for the support they gave to the Nazi regime, still less for their failure to rise up against it. This can only be explained by the fact that they were drugged up to the eyeballs. No wonder this book has been a bestseller in Germany.

To imply that using meth 'stripped the Nazis of empathy' is to imply that not only everyone who was involved in Nazi atrocities was somehow not responsible for their actions and on meth constantly, but to also imply that similar atrocities are impossible unless the perpetrators are on drugs or in an altered mental state. The lesson of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is that normal people committed those acts, just like you and me. A good book which delves deeper into this topic is Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. I wish people would stop propagating this nonsense and do proper research.

I've recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond and found them to be quite intriguing.

GG&S

Collapse

Fun fact, the US government (lead by Nixon and Kissinger) actively resupplied the Pakistani military during their genocidal campaign in Bangladesh in 1971, even though they knew what was happening. They also did the same thing during the Indonesian genocides of the mid-50s, coordinated with Islamist paramilitaries. And during the 1980s, both the US and Saudi Arabia poured billions of dollars into General Zia's dictatorship (whose social base was the same political party that perpetrated the mass killings in Bangladesh), helping him purge leftists and secularists and build thousands of Wahhabi madrassas--which got plenty of recruits from the refugees fleeing the US coalition's insurgency in Afghanistan.

I'd say that much of the rise of paramilitary Islamist politics in the last few decades in South Asia comes down to the legacy of US-Saudi imperialism in the area, and their use of the Pakistani military as an pillar of their regional power. The effects of the 1980s war in Afghanistan can't be underestimated, it totally mutated the socio-political fabric of Pakistan and the wider region. I really like this quote from Steve Coll's Ghost Wars:

>In 1971 there had been only nine hundred madrassas in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about eight thousand official religious schools and an estimated twenty-five thousand unregistered ones, many of them clustered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States...Almost a decade earlier, [ISI] was a small and demoralized unit within the Pakistani military…Now ISI was an army within the army, boasting multiple deep-pocketed patrons, including the supremely deep-pocketed Prince Turki and his Saudi GID. ISI enjoyed an ongoing operational partnership with the CIA as well, with periodic access to the world’s most sophisticated technology and intelligence collection systems….Outside the Pakistan army itself, less than ten years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, ISI had been transformed by CIA and Saudi subsidies into Pakistan’s most powerful institution (Coll 2004: 180).

And of course, the ISI--and their Saudi backers--went on to fund Islamist paramilitary networks across the region, both in Kashmir and Bangladesh.

Here are some excellent books I'd recommend:

• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004)
  
• Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (2013)
  
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (2011)
  
• America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2006)
  
• Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)
  
• The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (2003)

For one thing, it's cold enough in East Asia and Europe (note they're at similar latitudes) for germs to die every winter, so people live longer and technology can advance accordingly. In the case of Australia, humans inhabited the continent and killed off all the big game before they domesticated anything, so they didn't have the advantage of cows and horses. In Africa, in order to avoid diseases carried by mosquitoes, people traditionally lived in small communities far from water sources, meaning they have to put in a lot of effort to carting water. This means that they lacked the benefits of a city like job specializations, etc.

"Guns, Germs and Steel" is a really interesting read to answer this question more fully.

There was a Cracked article that made me think we don't get the whole story about Native Americans. Supposedly they were very advanced, but a plague wiped them out and allowed Europeans to conquer them.

There was infighting between proponents of nuclear safety and proponents of nuclear readiness in SAC and Los Alamos. Some people wanted to have multiple independent safety devices to prevent accidental nuclear detonations or launches, others wanted nothing but a big red button to launch the missiles.

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser does a very good job of telling this story, as well as the story of a nuclear accident in Damascus Arkansas.

If you're still struggling to understand the link between the Taliban and 9/11 then you really need to get some research done.

​

I highly recommend Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. It's an excellent readable-but-academic look at the recent history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion through to 9/11.

I think you are pointing out the stupidity of the American voter. Various people have commented on this. I think the book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" talks a lot about how the right twisted people into voting against their own best interests by exploiting wedge social issues and creating a false image as the heroes of the "little guy". For a long time I was on the bandwagon of blaming institutions like Fox News for deliberately misleading people and manipulating public opinion, but at this point there has been 10+ years of direct, incontrovertible evidence of the sheer corruption and incompetence of the right. If people can't see that at this point they are either being willfully ignorant, or they are just ignorant.

Or get transferred to the front, which was a death sentence. Also it isn't like the SS or Army advertised that there would be no punishment, plus they would force the person declining to publicly step out with the rest of his unit and shame him for it, which in the military culture of honor/masculinity was a huge deterrent. It's not as if they made it psychologically easy, but then capitalized on that acquisence to make people commit crimes and not complain about it or protest because they had bought in by not stepping out. Rather diabolical how they used psychology against their own people to get them to do horrible crimes.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

I heard in "Goodwill Hunting" about the book from Howard Zinn that would knock you on your ass, A People's History of the United States. I did, and it did.

And you are correct, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Most of what you're talking about is Hollywood, not reality. Eric Schlosser wrote an excellent book about the history of nuclear weapon controls, and most of the time most of what you mentioned wasn't in place.

I too enjoyed reading Sapiens.

The book goes in-depth how much of the world is a "fiction" around us - LLCs aren't real, baseball's rules aren't real, capitalism isn't real. But if the reader's takeaway means that "fiction" == "not real and therefore meaningless", they've hugely missed the point.

This is such a broad question. I want to recommend our AskHistorians Master Book List to you as it isn't focused on American history. Maybe you will find an interesting book and subject in there.

My personal recommendation would be reading up on the colonial history of Belgium, starting with King Leopold's Ghost. I couldn't put it better than the book description: In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust.

If that's not what you're looking for, maybe the history of East Germany with a focus on daily life and the Stasi could be interesting as well. But I don't have a good book recommendation for you here. The book Stasiland is very interesting, but maybe too narrow. The movie The Lives of Others could be a good starting point to get you interested.

for those who may not know why this is here:

1. the american irish slave trade is largely a white supremacist myth. it's a weird one because the irish faced a significant amount of persecution in europe.
   
   
2. the post, as well as the entire thread, was made to divert from the system of white supremacy, and instead, blame people of color. "africans enslaved their own people" is so whitewashed and racially coded that it's complete drivel and makes no sense.
   
   it would be akin to saying: "christians persecuted themselves and that's why we have rhode island." it's kidz bop history.
   
   
3. the irish have a documented history of gaining white status by using anti-black racism as documented in how the irish became white. therefore, they weren't consider white nor were they considered negro (the choice word for american enslaved persons, which was racialized), making the op irrelevant.
   
   

Fakta om IQ, eller g (generell intelligensfaktor)

• Hög ärftlighet (r = 0.5-0.8)
  
• Korrelerar med hjärn- och skallstorlek (r = 0.2-0.4 beroende på mätmetod)
  
• Har prediktiv validitet (skolbetyg, lön, utbildning, arbetseffektivitet, succesivt bättre förmåga att lösa kognitiva problem för varje percentil etc.)
  
• Hög reliabilitet (r > 0.9) för återtest av samma individ senare i livet
  
• Validitet och reliabilitet är densamma för samtliga folkslag.
  
• Svarta i USA erhåller i genomsnitt en standardavvikelse (1 σ) lägre resultat än vita européer som i sin tur erhåller ungefär en halv standardavikelse lägre resultat än östasiater.
  
  Detta är konsensus i forskningen. Även forskare som exempelvis Richard Nisbett eller James Flynn, som tror att gruppskillnaderna är helt och hållet miljömässiga instämmer i det som skrivs ovan. Ingen insatt i forskningen tror på det typiska "IQ mäter ingenting", "IQ gynnar västerlänningar", "IQ mäter en minimal del av intelligens". Sådana påståenden visar att man ej läst litteraturen, exempelvis Nisbett, Murray och Herrnstein eller Mackintosh.
  
  Huruvida intelligensskillnaderna mellan grupperna (svarta-vita-asiater) beror på arv, miljö eller en kombination är mer spekulativt och här får man bilda sig en egen uppfattning genom att tillgodogöra sig argumenten från båda sidor. Här (kort och lättläst) är en bra sammanfattning av argument för och emot en ärftlig komponent till gruppskillnaderna skriven av Rushton & Jensen som tror på en 50-50-modell (observera att ingen tror på en 100% ärftlig modell, striden står mellan de som tror på 100% miljö mot de som tror på ungefär 50% miljö/50% arv).
  
  Data att fundera över (diagram):
  
  
• Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study
  
  
• Koreanska och icke-koreanska adoptivbarn mot infödd befolkning i Sverige
  
  
• Amerikanska högskoleprovet SAT, efter inkomst och ras
  
  
• Piffer (2015):
  
  > Published Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), reporting the presence of alleles exhibiting significant and replicable associations with IQ, are reviewed. The average between-population frequency (polygenic score) of nine alleles positively and significantly associated with intelligence is strongly correlated to country-level IQ (r = .91). Factor analysis of allele frequencies furthermore identified a metagene with a similar correlation to country IQ (r = .86). The majority of the alleles (seven out of nine) loaded positively on this metagene. Allele frequencies varied by continent in a way that corresponds with observed population differences in average phenotypic intelligence. Average allele frequencies for intelligence GWAS hits exhibited higher inter-population variability than random SNPs matched to the GWAS hits or GWAS hits for height. This indicates stronger directional polygenic selection for intelligence relative to height. Random sets of SNPs and Fst distances were employed to deal with the issue of autocorrelation due to population structure. GWAS hits were much stronger predictors of IQ than random SNPs. Regressing IQ on Fst distances did not significantly alter the results nonetheless it demonstrated that, whilst population structure due to genetic drift and migrations is indeed related to IQ differences between populations, the GWAS hit frequencies are independent predictors of aggregate IQ differences.

This.

OP, if you're interested in these kinds of questions, you should read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. The book looks a bit intimidating, but it's really easy to read and he goes right to the root of the inequalities in wealth, technological development, social organization, etc. between the old and new worlds. (Spoiler Alert: It ain't about genetic superiority.)

A great read on this subject is Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser. At some points during the cold war Strategic Air Command had nuclear equipped bombers circling around the perimeter of US and NATO airspace non-stop. As with anything we decide to do 24/7, there were some accidents. If you think a B-52 bursting into flames on a runway sounds kinda stressful, imagine how much worse it gets when you know it has shaped explosives ready to jam together some fissile materials inside it. A situation like that occurred once, and lucky, the shaped explosives melted in the heat before they could go off. In another incident a B-52 had something fail and ripped apart in mid-air. This occurred over US airspace, and in some kinda crazy failure of oversight, the bomb on that plane had its physical safety enabled, meaning if the pilot had happened to also have his bomb key turned to the right we would have ejected a live nuke onto Virginia.

To answer your question though: minor taps are unlikely to set off the shaped explosives which start the reaction. Think of the nuke as a football shaped thing with two bits of material in them that, when slammed together with a lot of force, set off a nuclear reaction. If only half the "lens" explodes, that might not be enough force even, so even if you shot the exposed bomb it might only set off some of the shaped explosives, possibly resulting in a 'dirty bomb' or possibly just a loud bang. The detonation charge has to be perfectly timed to all parts of the football in order to make sure the two halves slam together with maximum surface area.

By the way, I can't recommend that book enough, it made me much more aware of how many crazy accidents and near accidents our nuclear weapons program has had, and it really makes you think twice about why the fuck we need thousands of these weapons sitting around, and the huge amount of effort which went into them, both on the design level and on the practical every-day level.

Since no one else has linked it...

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers about all the stuff donated bodies are used for

This was detailed on an episode of Human Planet on Discovery. You can watch it here!

I was secretly bummed they never showed the actual process. I feel most bad for the man who has to do the burial itself. If I remember correctly, he had to drink a considerable amount of whiskey in order to stomach what he was about to do.

(Also, if you're still curious about the ways corpses can and have been used throughout the centuries, have I got the book for you.)

A book written on just that subject

That and even though our govenor is a complete shitbag, he managed to get reelected just by having an R by his name.

1 - Mostly correct. There aren't many details of the crucifixion, and I wouldn't expect there to be (relatively common practice then, most would know what was entailed). Not a big deal either way though.

2 - Wrong.

3 - Almost entirely wrong. Much misrepresentation of the Bible and Xtian theology.

4 - Lots of wrong.

5 - big whoop.

6 - The broad overview is correct in that the Rapture as we think of it today and the emphasis on it is a fairly modern concept. Decent bit wrong otherwise.

7 - Last paragraph is reasonable...our modern conception of Satan is definitely different than the Church Fathers/etc. Lots of wrong in here though.

8 - Largely correct. Popular ideas about these things go far beyond the sparse details in the Bible and even in earlier Christian theology.

9 - The title is debatable (you can interpret Revelation to mean almost anything you want). Most of the rest is entirely bullshit.

10 - The title is correct. The rest of the section rapidly starts to fall down. While I haven't read Ehrman (don't have any of his books, and none @ local libraries), I think his quotes are being made too much of. Yes, there is a huge amount of variance between manuscripts. There is still in the eyes of interpreters and theologians a relatively good consensus as to what the NT is. Sure, we don't have the earliest manuscripts, and there are many problems, but the situation is nowhere near as dire as the blogger states.

Edit to add to 10: Here is a link to Ehrman's book. From the synopsis and reviews, it would appear his quotes are being used in support of a conclusion he would disagree with.

I'm in the middle of an amazing book that goes into great details about the current narrative and academic belief of Pre-Columbus Americas. It counters most common notions and really has some interesting points to back it up. The main one being that North and South America were not pristine wilderness lived in harmoniously with its people; it was actually very much so engineered by the hand of man to accommodate extremely large civilization centers. Some far greater than any European city at it's time.

It's really cool to hear how they piece together some of the political dramas of the Mayan culture based on their findings. From what I remember in the earlier chapters, part of the reason the Maya didn't need iron/bronze weapons was because their method of conquering was through assimilation and trade. They would provide surrounding city-states vast trade networks to gain wealth and knowledge, then redistribute populations around their giant network. Once a city became dependent on the income, the Maya would instate their own leadership into said town and slowly it would become Mayan.

If you're interested. Check it out 1491 by Charles Mann

Jonah Golberg strkes again! This idea that fascism is left-wing is perpetuated by Goldberg's book, Liberal Facism.

>Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

What do RWers consider fascist? Universal healthcare, public education, Social Security, organic food, separation of church and state, gun control, a woman's right to choose, public awareness on the dangers of smoking, etc.

When you argument rests upon equating Nazism with universal healthcare, public education, and Social Security, you really don't have an argument. You simply have BS talking points that make you look like an idiot.

You're not going to get a serious answer from the reddit echo chamber. So far you seem to have gotten:

"Her vagina"
"Nothing"
"the mainstream media is in the tank for Clinton"
"There are no Clinton supporters on the internet."

So here's what I consider the best arguments in her favor, mostly they're culled from my democratic pol/strategist friends, most of whom are serious Clinton supporters by virtue of where I live:

1. Whoever gets elected is going to have to deal with a republican congress at least until 2020, if not further. So incremental change is a given. Exactly how much of Bernie's agenda is going to get adopted by a republican congress? How is he going to get it taken up? So what's going to get passed? How is sanders going to deal with a congress that says "lol no" and sends him a budget increasing military funding and cutting welfare? At the end of the day this boils down to the "experience" argument, but there's a twist. Sanders definitely also has a history of legislative accomplishments, but more than a few presidents, Obama included, have shown us that legislative experience doesn't translate to effective leadership from the White House. I'll be frank, it's pretty damn obvious that the Clintons inspired Frank and Clair Underwood from the house of cards. That is, however you care to look at it, a reality. Personal relationships and a willingness to twist arms is what gets legislation through. Inability to work congress has been Obama's greatest failing as president I think. (I'm not saying congress doesn't share the blame, but politics is the art of the possible, more could possibly been done had the situation been better managed).
   
   
2. Clinton had a point when she said she's been the focus of partisan attacks for 10+ years. There's a SHITLOAD of dirt out there, but for the most part it's already been dug up. Think about the shit that Republicans dug up on John Kerry with the swiftboat nonsense, or on OBama with reviewing every single thing Jeremiah wright said, how exactly did it become a controversy that Obama's pastor said "god damn America?". You already largely know what Republicans are going to bring up with Clinton. Where's Bernie Sanders dirt? His personal life is largely unknown, and he's skated by on a northeastern tolerance for social indiscretions and refusing to discuss it. I guarantee you it's not because dirt doesn't exist, and not because it hasn't been dug up, but because it's being held in reserve for the general. Republicans forever tied to tar Obama with the idea that he was Saul Alinksy's protege, some kind of 60's radical reborn. Sanders actually is that 60's radical, and actually calls himself a socialist to boot. There's quite a bit out there of him associating with genuine revolutionary socialists and communists. There's going to be an army of people looking for every photo of everyone Sanders ever associated with and everything bad they said about America. His personal life wont' be off limits either. Did you know Sanders has an adult son that was born out of wedlock? Sure, millenials won't give a damn, but it will be the basis for tens of millions of negative advertising.
   
   
3. Electability. It's popular here to point to head to head polls suggesting Sanders is better able to beat Trump. But those same polls also showed Clinton beating everyone but Kasich. In a hypothetical match up against Trump, Sanders comes out +13 and Clinton comes out +6. But the presidential campaign map matters a lot as well. Sanders did particularly poor among Latinos and African Americans, and does exceedingly well amongst poor white people in largely white (and largely red) states. Sanders tied Oklahoma, and won Wisconsin, West Virginia, New Hampshire and Vermont. Clinton, Among others has won California, New York, Illinois and Florida. Even taking election shenanigans into account, the former aren't going to matter so much in the general election and the latter will.
   
   
   They are what they are, but the real question is what are you going to do about them? because when you step outside of the echo chamber, it's pretty obvious that Clinton's going to end up the Nominee. Sanders is fighting the good fight and will carry a liberal platform to the convention, which I think is a very good thing for the party in geneal and the Sanders/Warren wing of the party in particular, but his chance of ending up the nominee at this point is virtually nil unless something radical changes like Clinton actually succumbing to a major scandal or getting criminal charges filed. Then question is then, are you going to succumb to the drawback of a two party system and vote for the lesser of two evils or do something that might result in Trump becoming president? It's easy to say now, how do you think Nader supporters felt in 2001 when Bush took office?
   
   I would add to this, your question makes the exact same mistake democrats have made for years as it relates to Republican voters. going back to Thomas Frank's Book what's the matter with Kansas and why Obama's comments about clinging to guns and religion caused such a fury on the right even though they're pretty true.
   
   At its heart, the way people choose political candidate is not 100% logical. People are not robots. The reason political disagreements exists is because people have different priorities. Priorities are not driven solely by logical connections. People choose a candidate based on how they feel about them. Obama won an election (both primary and general) by creating a feeling that he would be different. Trump's winning the republican primary by creating a feeling among disenchanted voters that he's going to come in and make it right, no matter what his background or prior policy preferences were.
   
   Clinton has done a decent job creating an emotional connection with certain demographics.Women over 40, African Americans, Hispanics. She fails at it markedly among millennials and to some extent among men.
   
   Not speaking truth to power, but rather telling the truth to the mob, or at least answering a question deliberately asked about what the defenses of clinton are.

If you wanna read about soil, I'd recommend Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan. If you're looking for a soil science textbook, I'd go with Brady & Weil. If you're looking for just general reading recommendations, I've really been loving King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild.

It should be mandatory that everyone either read or watch the documentary Guns Germs and Steel. Because on the face of it it wouldnt be a unfair question to ask why did Europeans become the most advanced and dominated other cultures. Guns Germs and Steel lays out a rock solid case on and to sum up the answer comes down to Geography and timing not because of superiority of any race. But the answer is even more complicated then that... andv to sit there and argue with these knuckleheads with this long complicated arguments is pointless. It would be better if kids learn young about why these discrepancies exist so we can shut down those questions early on.

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Edit = I've listed some of the best books I've read on the subject below. Just ask if you want to know anything about them:

[The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans] (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904650&sr=8-3&keywords=third+reich+at+war)

[The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans] (http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-Richard-Evans/dp/0143037900/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904650&sr=8-2&keywords=third+reich+at+war)

[The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans] (http://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-at-War/dp/0143116711/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904650&sr=8-1&keywords=third+reich+at+war)

[Maus by Art Speigelman] (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maus-25th-Anniversary/dp/0679406417/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904780&sr=8-2&keywords=maus)

[Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics by Frederich Spotts] (http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Power-Aesthetics-Frederic-Spotts/dp/1585673455/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904821&sr=8-1&keywords=hitler+power+of+aesthetics)

[Art of the Third Reich by Peter Adam] (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Third-Reich-Peter-Adam/dp/0810919125/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=21WGRYFWN5L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR115%2C160_&refRID=1VRZ6QYR6PG5XXXMYTPN)

[Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower] (http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Empire-Nazis-Ruled-Europe/dp/014311610X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904865&sr=8-1&keywords=hitler%27s+empire)

[State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda by Susan Bachrach and Steven Luckert] (http://www.amazon.com/State-Deception-Power-Nazi-Propaganda/dp/0896047148/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904916&sr=8-1&keywords=state+of+deception+nazi)

[Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris by Ian Kershaw] (http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-1889-1936-Hubris-Ian-Kershaw/dp/0393320359/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457904967&sr=8-2&keywords=hitler+kershaw)

[Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis by Ian Kershaw] (http://www.amazon.com/Hitler-1936-1945-Nemesis-Ian-Kershaw/dp/0393322521/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=01WJ9WDS06KZ1AX79B3M)

[The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton] (http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457905061&sr=1-1&keywords=the+nazi+doctors)

[The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg] (http://www.amazon.com/Raul-Hilberg-Destruction-European-third/dp/B008UYLG6K/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457905115&sr=1-4&keywords=destruction+of+the+european+jews)

[Heinrich Himmler by Peter Longerich] (http://www.amazon.com/Heinrich-Himmler-Peter-Longerich/dp/0199651744/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457905176&sr=1-1&keywords=heinrich+himmler)

[Hitler's Hangman - The Life of Heydrich by Robert Gerwartch] (http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Hangman-The-Life-Heydrich/dp/0300187726/ref=pd_sim_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=51FT1ecdFQL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR104%2C160_&refRID=084WSKT05G4GB1FGE1SY)

[Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939 by Saul Friedlander] (http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Germany-Jews-Persecution-1933-1939/dp/0060928786/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457905269&sr=1-3&keywords=nazi+germany+and+the+jews+saul)

[Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedlander] (http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Germany-Jews-1939-1945-Extermination/dp/0060930489/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0DQYMK2GMYNVJK794F03)

[Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning] (http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068)

[KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann] (http://www.amazon.com/KL-History-Nazi-Concentration-Camps/dp/0374118256/ref=pd_sim_14_6?ie=UTF8&dpID=41yRIhssGkL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR106%2C160_&refRID=0BSM1HJ13NDQ46VKENQK)

> single mother

> caring for disabled parents

> Trump voter

Can we update What's the Matter with Kansas for the new level of cognitive BS these people put themselves through?

It's hard to pin down exactly and by what standard you want to judge "Nazi Ideology".

Were most German soldiers patriotic and nationalistic. Most certainly yes. In Hitler's Army, the author makes strong arguments, using everything from rank and file soldiers diaries to communications between high levels of the Wehrmacht, that the average German believed in the rightness of their cause. That being the restoration of German pride, revenge for Versailles, defense against perceived threats to their way of life (Bolshevism), and defense of their homeland. As the war dragged on, defeatism, anti-Nazi sentiment, and war exhaustion did increase exponentially to where it was openly spoken of, at least by German civilians, their disdain for the Nazi's and Adolph Hitler.

In Ordinary Men, the author zeroes in on a particular police unit in Poland that actively participated in the Ethnic Cleansing of Poland of not only Jews, but Slavs, Poles, and other undesirables. While the book paints a largely dismal picture, showing that many went with the "following orders" principle, it was mixed, but definitely was a majority who participated in the Holocaust and Racist actions.

However, there are constant stories being cited, of German regular army, the Wehrmacht not dealing well with being tasked with taking on Holocaust related actions. There were reports of absenteeism, alcoholism, suicides, and even an occasional refusal of a direct order when these actions had to take place. While clearly these units did participate, it was not a mass action, but the large majority did participate. With what thoughts on their mind we can't say for sure across the board, but we do know that Nazi German soldiers overwhelmingly participated in these acts.

So on the whole, if you want to tie Nazism to the larger ideology of German Nationalism, then yes, the average soldier gladly followed the Nazi lead in this. While ascribing to their racist ideology and activities that related to the Holocaust, the numbers were smaller, but still a significant majority.

For anyone looking at a deep dive into the subject of command and control, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety" by Eric Schlosser is well worth the read.

>“As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons."

>"He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled.

>“I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

To say that our current PEOTUS does not know what he is doing is an understatement. Given the history of nuclear power, storage, fallout, errors and use and given the chilling interview KAC gave last night on the Rachel Maddow Show clearly showing no formal knowledge on nuclear controlling powers across the globe, we should all recognize we are in for a long and hazardous ride which might not end well.

The history of nuclear power is ripe with peril and human error. Having someone at the trigger without an understanding of the issues and the technology behind that power should rightfully scare the hell out of everyone on the planet.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788

I remember this from reading Ordinary Men in college. It’s worth checking out.

Checked out her facebook page. Who decided this idiot Julie Williams should be on a school board? Her highest level of academic achievement was attending a 4th tier local community college. Her facebook page still cites junk “studies” linking vaccines to autism. She’s a proud fan of Hannity and a bunch of other extremist right wing talking heads, and she cites mostly Koch sock puppet think tank “articles”.

It would be nice to have school board members who actually have a quality education. As to the history texts - I suggest Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Its been a long time since I’ve been in school and I learned a lot.

I highly recommend "Stiff" by Mary Roach. It's...um...enlightening.

You want some REAL information? Then you need to take the time and read.

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501

Start there. Its written by the 2 most prominent political theorists of our generation. Waltz and Mearsh have added more to political theory together than all of the other political theorists combined IMO.

These two are not 'conspiracy theorists' - they are acclaimed professors of political theory. Renowned in every respect. They wrote about the "Israeli Lobby" and its impact on US foreign relations. Its an unprecedented amount of support. I know it sounds weird to say "Zionism owns America" but to someone who is IGNORant (not a jab at you, its just the reality) it sounds strange. When you start reading about Zionism/Israel/Jews and their political impact on American foreign relations, every action you see witnessed on your TV or articles you read make contextual sense.

If you actually want knowledge, and not just facts you can peddle but not backup, then by all means go Google away. If you want a grounded understanding of how Israel buttfucks Americans so openly, start with the book.

Holy Christ, the top comment there triggered me so hard I'm gonna have to reply to it.

/u/elpresidente1776

>> https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

This book is god awful, it is absolutely riddled with bullshit - if you want to see just how bad it is, here's an actual expert dismantling this guy:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122231

>> Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”).

No, they were not. This is blatant bullshit, as Richard J. Evans in the third Reich trilogy writes:


>> Perhaps to emphasize this anti-capitalist focus, and to align itself with similar groups in Austria and Czechoslovakia, the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party; hostile commentators soon abbreviated this to the word ‘Nazi’, just as the enemies of the Social Democrats had abbreviated the name of that party earlier on to ‘Sozi’. Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism. True, as some have pointed out, its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. Famously, too, antisemitism was once declared to be ‘the socialism of fools’. But from the very beginning, Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: after all, the ‘November traitors’ who had signed the Armistice and later the Treaty of Versailles were not Communists at all, but the Social Democrats and their allies.

>> The ‘National Socialists’ wanted to unite the two political camps of left and right into which, they argued, the Jews had manipulated the German nation. The basis for this was to be the idea of race. This was light years removed from the class-based ideology of socialism. Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process, from its self-image as a movement rather than a party, to its much-vaunted contempt for bourgeois convention and conservative timidity. The idea of a ‘party’ suggested allegiance to parliamentary democracy, working steadily within a settled democratic polity. In speeches and propaganda, however, Hitler and his followers preferred on the whole to talk of the ‘National Socialist movement’, just as the Social Democrats had talked of the ‘workers’ movement’ or, come to that, the feminists of the ‘women’s movement’ and the apostles of prewar teenage rebellion of the ‘youth movement’. The term not only suggested dynamism and unceasing forward motion, it also more than hinted at an ultimate goal, an absolute object to work towards that was grander and more final than the endless compromises of conventional politics. By presenting itself as a ‘movement’, National Socialism, like the labour movement, advertised its opposition to conventional politics and its intention to subvert and ultimately overthrow the system within which it was initially forced to work.

>> By replacing class with race, and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader, Nazism reversed the usual terms of socialist ideology. The synthesis of right and left was neatly symbolized in the Party’s official flag, personally chosen by Hitler in mid-1920: the field was bright red, the colour of socialism, with the swastika, the emblem of racist nationalism, outlined in black in the middle of a white circle at the centre of the flag, so that the whole ensemble made a combination of black, white and red, the colours of the official flag of the Bismarckian Empire. In the wake of the 1918 Revolution these came to symbolize rejection of the Weimar Republic and all it stood for; but by changing the design and adding the swastika, a symbol already used by a variety of far-right racist movements and Free Corps units in the postwar period, the Nazis also announced that what they wanted to replace it with was a new, Pan-German, racial state, not the old Wilhelmine status quo.

>> By the end of 1920, Hitler’s early emphasis on attacking Jewish capitalism had been modified to bring in ‘Marxism’, or in other words Social Democracy, and Bolshevism as well. The cruelties of the civil war and ‘red terror’ in Lenin’s Russia were making an impact, and Hitler could use them to lend emphasis to common far-right views of the supposedly Jewish inspiration behind the revolutionary upheavals of 1918-19 in Munich. Nazism would also have been possible, however, without the Communist threat; Hitler’s anti-Bolshevism was the product of his antisemitism and not the other way round.

Or even more:

>> A more alarmist note was sounded by the French ambassador, André François-Poncet. The perceptive diplomat noted that the conservatives were right to expect Hitler to agree to their programme of ‘the crushing of the left, the purging of the bureaucracy, the assimilation of Prussia and the Reich, the reorganization of the army, the re-establishment of military service’. They had put Hitler into the Chancellery in order to discredit him, he observed; ‘they have believed themselves to be very ingenious, ridding themselves of the wolf by introducing him into the sheepfold.’


Or we can can cite:

>> “As with other fascist ideologies and movements it subscribed to an ideology of national renewal, rebirth, and rejuvenation manifesting itself in extreme populist radical nationalism, militarism, and – in contradistinction to many other forms of fascism, extreme biological racism…the movement understood itself to be, and indeed was, a new form of political movement…the anti-Socialist, anti-liberal, and radical nationalist tenets of Nazi ideology applied particularly to the sentiments of a middle class disorientated by the domestic and international upheavals in the inter-war period.” (Neil Gregor, Nazism, Oxford, 2000 p 4-5.)

And again, from the trilogy:

>> The substantial overlap between the Nazis’ ideology and that of the conservatives, even, to a considerable extent, that of German liberals, was a third major factor in bringing Hitler into the Reich Chancellery on 30 January 1933. The ideas that were current among almost all German political parties right of the Social Democrats in the early 1930s had a great deal in common with those of the Nazis. These ideas certainly bore enough resemblance to the Nazis’ for the bulk of the liberal and conservative parties’ supporters in the Protestant electorate to desert them, at least temporarily, for what looked like a more effective alternative.

>> The Nazis declared that they would scrape away foreign and alien encrustations on the German body politic, ridding the country of Communism, Marxism, ‘Jewish’ liberalism, cultural Bolshevism, feminism, sexual libertinism, cosmopolitanism, the economic and power-political burdens imposed by Britain and France in 1919, ‘Western’ democracy and much else. They would lay bare the true Germany.

You have literally no idea what you're talking about, nazism, indeed, was an extremist form of anti-liberalism/socialism, and their allies in government were not the socialists, or the liberals - but the right wing nationalists and the conservatives.

Their primary enemy was in fact the socialists, and socialists were some of the first people to be thrown in camps.


You are easily one of the least informed people I have ever encountered on the Donald - in the future, avoid discussing topics you have not even a basic understanding of.

Or at the very least avoid reading garbage books written by historically illiterate hacks.

All of that shit you tried to cite, the smoking, the healthcare, the jobs? This was all because Hitler and the nazis were obsessed with a perfect Aryan race.

The nazis also rounded up and tossed the unemployed in camps and called them "workshy."

They believed modernism/liberalism had corrupted german culture - and this is most evident in the "degenerate art/music" events they held all over the place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_Exhibition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_music

Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men sheds light on the Milgram experiments and the psychological factors that contributed to the murderous acts carried out by ordinary men in the Ordnungspolizei.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

I was required to read this for a Germany 1919-1945 course I took in college. It left me with conflicting feelings towards the men who carried out these appalling murders. Barbers, shopkeepers, everyday guys. Uncomfortably questioning myself if I would have succumbed to authority and peer pressure and carried out the orders if in that situation (absent of hindsight).

I would highly recommend [what's the matter with Kansas] (https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493738579&sr=8-1&keywords=what%27s+the+matter+with+kansas) by Thomas Frank. It is an engaging, informative look at the context around why an entire state of low-income voters voted for policies that were drafted to harm them.

I would suggest Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demmick. It deals specifically about the subject you raised.

It is a fascinating read.

jumping on your comment to say how much that book engrossed me and that anyone who has read Escape From Camp 14 might also be interested in reading Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. Out of all of the books I have read about life in North Korea this is the one that made me realise how dire the situation is out there right now due to the many stories from the different walks of life in NK.

The trouble with Germany circa that time is that the Nazis weren't tremendously Out There.

There's a book about this with a very relevant title that I think you should read, or borrow from a library, or something - "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland". The youth of Germany are slightly less responsible for their actions due to years of intense Nazi brainwashing; the elders, not so much. The elders were the 'ordinary men', and even they were happy to line up a few thousand jews and throw the corpses in a ditch.

Wehrmacht soldiers were indisputably Nazis. "Nazi", you see, does not merely cover direct, sworn, card-holding members of The Party: it also describes those fellow-travelers who share the Party's views or further its interests.

Being a member of the German military circa that time involved swearing an oath of personal fealty to Adolph "I don't know which of these untermenschen I hate the most, so just go kill people and I'll tell you when to stop" Hitler, participating in blatant wars of aggression, and witnessing, if not cheerfully indulging in, all sorts of atrocities, with official opinions ranging from tacit approval to outright carte-blanche "slavs aren't people so it's legal to do whatever you want to them".

^^^^^^^^^^.

The Good Book says, in a different context, "ye shall know them by their fruits" - the Nazis had no fruits. Apart from a certain kind, as some of their officials were... peculiar.

Just about everything the Nazis made was garbage. Their vaunted ethics-less science was shit; they falsified reports to fit their politics, did idiot archaeological digs looking for evidence for their falsified aryan history, their concentration camp experiments were nothing but creative torture, and they ignored the whole concept of nuclear physics as "Jewish Physics" and for obvious reasons didn't contribute jack or shit to that field of endeavour.

And as for "but Hitler fixed the economy", wew fucking lad; their economy was a paper tiger based on lies, debt, scams, war booty, and slave labour, 'fixed' by printing money and propping it up with stolen goods, and if he hadn't gone on a war spree and looted Germany's neighbors of gold and goods, he would have been remembered as the architect of the worst catastrophe to hit the German economy since the 30 Years' War.

After The War, no-one who had any real choice in the matter used Nazi equipment; no-one could use all those horses Nazi logistics (which sneers at notions of efficiency) relied upon, because the starving soldiers had eaten them all; the Czechs threw away the Me262 once the Soviets got around to giving them MiGs; the Israelis only used the Bf109 until they could get something better and dumped it at the first opportunity; the Syrians only used the Panzer IV because no-one would give them real tanks; and the French only used the Panther because their own arms industry was munted, on paper it has good stats, and the Nazis left lots of them broken down by the roadside. For a reason, as it turned out. A heavy tank with a medium tank's drivetrain isn't exactly a recipe for success. But hey, it had a badass name and it was pretty good as long as you parked it on a flat surface and didn't try to drive anywhere, so it's been talked up as the best thing since the FT17.

The only thing the Nazis accomplished was to make a huge mess and get a lot of people killed for nothing. Killing people was their plan all along, and the "ordinary men" of Germany were more than happy to go out and shoot some untermenschen. While units like the einsatzgruppen and Dirlewanger Brigade catch a lot of flak for obvious reasons, the Nazi military in general had an atrocious reputation for all sorts of shittery ranging from looting and rape to indiscriminate massacres in 'reprisal' against imagined or real partisan activity- justified partisan activity, given that they were resisting unlawful occupation, when they existed at all, because "oops we just "accidentally" burned down another village, let's say these dead people were partisans" -bombing civilians just about everywhere they went, murdering prisoners, and all manner of things that would be classed in court as "aiding and abetting", including loaning troops and providing logistical support to the SS and einsatzgruppen.

The Wehrmacht only got out of being declared a criminal organisation, after the war, because they were too disorganised to qualify. And when you're talking about Nazi Germany, 'disorganised' is the normal state of affairs: too disorganised to be an organisation was one Hell of an accomplishment.

^^^^^^^^^^.

People like to talk about Mein Opa who bravely defended the Fatherland ^in ^^the ^^^motherland, and who Never Did Anything Wrong; really, it's amazing how many people had nothing to do with the Nazis and were just quietly doing their jobs and never 'employed' a slave labourer or noticed a camp that received a constant stream of jews, gypsies and Soviet POWs, yet somehow never had to build more barracks to hold them.

There is a marked tendency among Nazis, Neo- and otherwise, and sympathisers for such, to try and argue that occasional war-criming on the part of the Allies was as equally immoral as chronic war-criming on the part of the Axis, and that wars are inherently bloody things in which, occasionally, Mistakes Are Made; that it isn't right to pay too much attention to a few thousand dead Frenchmen here or a few thousand dead Poles over there, much less millions of 'missing' Jews and Russians, or to imply that a man in a Stahlhelm might not have been doing the Right Thing by Fighting For His Country.

Both sides did war-crimes. The Nazis treated them as a good day's work.

The usual excuse, once "the Wehrmacht didn't do war crimes" has been blown out of the water like the Bismarck, is that they did war-crime, but only because they'd be shot or sent to the Eastern Front or a concentration camp if they refused.

That wasn't usually a problem; if you didn't have the stomach for it, they'd just move you somewhere else. There was no shortage of young Hitlerites eager to murder some untermenschen, so if you were the one guy in a hundred who thought "Hang on, maybe this is a bit much," they'd get you to help dig the graves, or post you up the road to keep witnesses from getting underfoot, blacklist you from being promoted, or move you to an actual combat unit. After laughing at you and calling you a pussy, of course, because what kind of lily-livered moron gets weepy over a bunch of dead Jews/Gypsies/Russians?

Comparing any army to the Wehrmacht basically means implying that the soldiers in it are a pack of bloodthirsty bandits only held back from a rape-murder-and-pillage spree by fear of being caught.

^^^^^^^^^^.

This shit goes right back to the very end of WW2; The Cold War kicked off right after WW2 finished, and the Allies were willing to overlook quite a bit to try and get the remnants of the Wehrmacht to help out against the Soviets, so a lot of things, especially regarding the Eastern Front, got quietly brushed under the carpet if it'd get some shitbag with an Iron Cross to play ball.

^^^^^^^^^^.

And for a final bonus, "the propaganda" to "demonise the opposing soldiers"? Otto Carius complained about that in his memoir. He wrote of the angry glares of Allied prison camp guards who he felt were disapproving of him purely because of 'atrocity propaganda' and had no justification at all for looking down upon a heroic tank ace who just happened to habitually enjoy the cordial company of SS officers.

He was, after all, just fighting against Judeo-Bolshevism, and never did anything wrong.

The 'atrocity propaganda'. Riight. There's three kinds of propaganda - absolute bullshit, stuff that's mostly true, and truths that the enemy don't want people to hear about. When it came to the behaviour of the Nazi military, there was no need to make things up because everywhere they went, they behaved like the literal nazis they were. Rotterdam, Warsaw, Guernica, Warsaw (again), half-a-hundred other places...

I am planning to pick up a number of books I saw on this list.

Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City is probably the best true crime I’ve read. Some older true crime novels can be really campy and sensationalized.

Also, it’s not true crime, but Mary Roach’s Stiff is a fun read about cadavers and the human body after death.

> Dang, I'm a white guy dating a biracial woman (black/white). People definitely read her as just "black"

It goes back a few hundred years and we've never shaken it. Laws dating from 17th-century colonial America excluded children of at least one black parent from the legal status of being white. Laws defined all people of some African ancestry as black, under the principle of hypodescent. Some 19th-century categorization schemes defined people with one black parent (the other white) as "mulatto," with one black grandparent as "quadroon" and with one black great grandparent as "octoroon." The latter categories remained within an overall black or African-American category.

> I've heard all these comments before (not often but it happens) and things get more complicated when she mentions she's mixed race.

It's so sad too, because race isn't anything scientific, we invented it. And being "white" is an invention of America. In France, "black" people think of themselves as French. When immigrants came to America they weren't white, they were Polish and German and Dutch and so on. Irish immigrants, who were so oppressed in the North that their treatment would be considered the original sin of America if not for slavery in the South, were not considered "white" until the Civil War. And for Italians it came much later:

> When Italians poured into America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were not considered white upon arrival. Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs and other European groups, at the time called “new immigrants,” sought to overcome their subordination by showing, through their behavior, to be deserving of being considered white. In 1911, Henry Pratt Fairchild, an influential American sociologist, said about new immigrants, “If he proves himself a man, and … acquires wealth and cleans himself up — very well, we might receive him [consider him white] in a generation or two. But at present he is far beneath us, and the burden of proof rests with him.” Economist Robert F. Forester wrote in 1924, “in a country where the distinction between white man and black is intended as a distinction of value … it is no compliment to the Italian to deny him his whiteness, but that actually happens with considerable frequency.”

And a little more...

> The construction of the "white race" in the United States was an effort to mentally distance slaveowners from slaves. The process of officially being defined as white by law often came about in court disputes over pursuit of citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790 offered naturalization only to "any alien, being a free white person". In at least 52 cases, people denied the status of white by immigration officials sued in court for status as white people.

Horses, steel weapons, steel armor against obsidian clubs, Inca weakened by disease,

ohhh and gun powder.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Great question. Again, I struggle with being concise but I will try.

Belief is hard. I'm still trying to understand it myself. The short answer is, at the end of the day- I still feel like a believer. Like, I wake up many mornings and feel like nothing has changed for me. I think this suggests that Mormonism is far more than just a belief system. I still feel Mormon. It's still a very natural instinct to pray when I'm stressed.

Logically, I don't believe in God, but I still feel like I do and so I still pray. I think this is the actual definition of Mormon faith- a hope for things. I hope that someone or something hears my prayers, but I know it is very unlikely. But it's a habit and practice I value.

I don't believe in the literal truth claims of most things, only because I have a very different understanding of how to view it thanks to my professional historian friends who have taught me how to think of things from a sort of dispassionate, scientific way.

That shows me, and experience has shown me that things don't have to be literal to have meaning. Have y'all read Sapiens? I love the way Harari talks about constructs and myths. Everything is a myth- everything- equality, human rights, religion, all of it. I sort of take that approach.

So what do I believe? It's hard to pin down. I have a testimony in the messiness of it all. I bear my testimony that humans are super illogical and messy and broken, acting out of hurt and scarcity sometimes, and other times acting out of generosity and kindness. I see this acted out through Mormonism daily. It certainly isn't specific to Mormonism, but I've learned it all through a Mormon lens and I really value that.

So I believe in the Mormon movement. In Mormon people to do good and bad things in a very Mormon way. I love the Mormon communities we have and actually feel spiritually fed in seeing the complexity of it all. To me, divinity is found in collective human experience and I see that in Mormonism.

I know that doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't sufficient. We want temple recommend answers to this sort of thing. Everything else feels like deflection. But the reality is, it's not deflection- I just am not sure how to articulate that my mind and body are very complicated in Mormonism. So the easiest thing to say is that I still feel Mormon and I still feel like a believer. My brain is just more naturally oriented towards belief than skepticism. That's caused me plenty of problems along the way.

I certainly also have a lot of harmful scripts I'm still unpacking but I'm committed in a very Mormon-dilligence sort of way to deconstructing that so i reserve the right to constantly change my mind.

Belief really is complicated and complex. But I certainly no longer believe in a literal, traditional way we usually define belief. But I think that sort of belief requires a very underdeveloped way of looking at the world and most believers I know these days don't subscribe to a sort of blind-faith, immature, take-your-word-for-it belief. There are certainly many that do, but there are also very smart and thoughtful people who let belief be complicated.

I read it in this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912

Very interesting look at people's lives in North Korea from the perspective of people who eventually decided to defect.

Read up on your history before making assumptions

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618001905/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_aB8TBbCQ7Q6M1

This emphasizes different points from those made in Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

Texas is the most populous state to approve textbooks at the state level. That means textbook publishers cater to Texas or their books fail, and schools elsewhere are often stuck with whatever Texas approved.

Texas is a Red state still deeply in denial about slavery and racism. Last I checked, kids in Texas public schools are still taught that the Civil War started for a "variety" of reasons, only one of which was slavery.

Publishers who want a successful textbook must therefore cater to Texas by downplaying the viciousness and significance of slavery. This is a primary reason why teachers have a hard time finding the materials they need.

You know what I hate? The fact that black communities have been isolated in economic ghettos by Federal Government policies like redlining and then have to put up with ignorant people like you who ignore all the crime in white communities so you can hate on people different than you.

You want cultural differences, how about Meth? Or a history of owning slaves? Or maybe you mean the fact that we imprison people who use one type of cocaine for much longer than the kind that is popular with white people?

This is the type of stupidity and ignorance that makes reddit look ugly, why don't you go read some actual history before making up hateful shit about black people?

The book Command and Control gives a good accounting of that story, along with a really interesting look into the history of nuclear weapons. I'd highly recommend the book if you're interested in nuclear stuff.

Buy Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" and loan it to him . It's not a difficult read, well the topic is, but the language is not.
You see that paperbacks are pretty cheap.

I you're interested in this subject, I highly recommend Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. Very interesting read that tries to find out why and how did ordinary middle aged German men commit those attrocities.

There is literally a book (and documentary based on the book) about this. Called What's the Matter With Kansas

Stiff - The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, if you want a light read about dead people. More amusing than it sounds.

There was a really good book I read many years ago called "How the Irish became white" it talked about how over time Irish at least in American western culture came from a group of people considered to be "White Niggers" to being considered parts of the dominant white culture.

In the end the book was all about how "whiteness" is really a social construct, it doesn't truly exist other then to be used as a means to separate us from them. We can be parts of many cultures Anglo-saxon, Germanic, etc. But really the idea of a white race (or really any race) is just a means of separating and controlling others.

You should read Sapiens, the author explains how the agricultural revolution was a horrible thing for mankind.

tl;dr : We stopped eating diverse foods, which were then more prone to parasites, began to live together and spread diseases among us, stopped running like our bodies are supposed to and began working with our backs curved, which gave us hernias and stuff, etc.

The book isn't just about the agricultural revolution, it's about the history of our species from the first homo sapiens to right now. Amazing book, very trippy.

There isn't a universal tech tree in real life. It's kind of hard to say any culture is "more advanced" than another when they're so different. It's especially hard when we just don't know that much about the native societies in the Americas pre-Columbus. There's a really amazing book called '1491' by Charles C. Mann that's a pretty easy read and probably the best summary of our understanding of pre-Columbian America and would answer a lot of your questions.

ITT: Conflating 'Make America Great Again' with Nazis.

Of course.

I think part of the problem is really that people are looking at only granular parts of problems today and don't have enough historical context. Its useless to follow every story about everyone and every little thing. There are lots of ups and downs in politics and there's no reason to be so reactionary to every single new and probably manufactured "scandal".... that's what's exhausting. I like to keep updated on a few big issues, I follow the careers of a few people I find inspiring (and follow a few that do things that worry me), and spend the rest of the time reading up on topics in book form... they have the advantage of being written over time, and with more vigorous standards for accuracy. The news, while still important where immediate info is necessary, is essentially click bait now. You don't need to get caught in the rip tides that pull you everywhere constantly, just understand the general trajectory of the important things.

edit: to those curious about some book recommendations: I'm by no means an expert in anything really, and the books you read should really be about the topics you personally are interested in, so don't take my word as gospel (or any author's). I like American history, ancient history, international relations, and though I think they're more boring I force myself to read about the health care system and the American education system because I feel they're important. I'm also looking to read some books on the military industrial complex and cyber security/ big data because I don't really know anything about them other than the stuff I see in passing on the news or here on Reddit. So if anyone knows a good overview of those issues, feel free to let me know.

• For a good start on human history and the beginnings of modern economics/ intl relations (basically why the West has historically dominated), try Guns, Germs, and Steel I believe there's also a documentary if the book is too dense for your taste (it is pretty dense).
  
  
• Perhaps if you're interested in why people get so damn heated talking politics, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
  
  
• If you wonder why people vote against their own social and economic interest: What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Full disclosure: I liked this book, but I lean left. I'm not sure if it matters, the point of the book is just to track how the Republican party went from being the party of elites, to the party of blue collar workers.
  
  
• If the Supreme Court interests you at all, I liked Jeffrey Toobin's, The Nine
  
  
• The achievement gap? Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria
  
  
• Health care? There's a lot, but this one is an easy read and it compares the systems of Britain, Japan, Germany, and I believe Cuba (which is very good for their GDP!) and the US's. The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T.R. Reid
  
  This is just some stuff I've listed off the top of my head. Another thing that I find helpful to better understanding intl relations are books about the major genocides of the past few decades, which are hard to get through (because of the brutal content) but... What is the What (Sudan), First they killed my father (Cambodian genocide), Girl at War (more of a autobiography, but still chilling) there's a couple of others I've read that I can't remember now.
  
  Anyway, just go to Good Reads and look at Contemporary Politics. Perhaps Great Courses has a political philosophy course too that you can draw from if you wanna go even farther back into the origins of society's structure and political thought.
  
  Also podcasts! I've just discovered these but there's a lot of audio content (FREE!) that you can listen to on your commute and whatnot. I like Abe Lincoln's Top Hat right now.
  
  Edit edit: wow thanks for the gold!!

Queen Jennah and Exemplar Salia are brown. Besides select few NPCs though, it seems Ascalonians have completely pushed out both the Krytan gene pool and architecture. If real world history is any parallel, it's possible that native Krytans were wiped out by diseases they had no immunity to brought by the Ascalonian immigrants, though that doesn't make sense seeing that the two peoples were not isolated from each other before the exodus. More likely that Ascalonian food production technology outcompeted Krytans' such that Ascalonians multiplied so fast that Krytans were left with no resources and a diminishing population. Read Guns, Germs, and Steel.

There are still options like The Body Farm and safety testing (aka, when crash test dummies aren't enough). You might find the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers enlightening.

There's actually a decent amount of Academia dedicated to figuring out how the Irish transitioned from identifiable ethnic minority to other white people. The most famous example is about how the Irish came to become oppressors, which is oF cOuRsE synonymous with white.

But the most profound way in which they became what was... they assimilated.

Disease and climate. We're finding more and more that disease and climate had a huge effect on how cultures managed to dominate the world by the beginning of the 19th century.

Ordinary Men taking part in the extermination of the Slavic people. And ordinary men who participated in rape to such a scale that it caused a demographic shift.

I agree. Despise the perpetrators all you want, I certainly do, but don't fall into the trap of believing they're somehow different. Christopher Browning wrote an excellent book on the Ordinary Men who helped in the attempted genocide of WWII:

>Browning reconstructs how a German reserve police battalion composed of "ordinary men," middle-aged, working class people, killed tens of thousands of Jews during WW II.

The study of "The banality of evil" warns us that blaming extremist actions on some type of "evil other" blinds us to the role we play in supporting those individuals:

>Normalizing the Unthinkable

>Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.

It depends a lot on when exactly we're talking. For a famous and spectacular example you have Albert Battel, who had the "deal with him after the war" added to his file by Heinrich Himmler personally. You have other examples like Erwin Rommel who was insubordinate on a general basis (wouldn't hunt jews, wouldn't tell anyone else to do it, refused to kill captured commandos) and got mightily unpopular for it. At that point they certainly had a hope of winning and losing people wasn't worth and there was still a general idea of "we want to keep this quiet".
At that point they also tried to keep the actual atrocities to volunteers (to prevent people from getting the option of insubordination in the first place).

If I remember correctly it was sometime late '44 that the feltgendarmerie (Military Police) was given the authority to shoot German soldiers on the spot (for desertion, cowardice, or refusing orders). Along with a rise in drummed up military courts wherever they happened to be handily available.
A lot of people were sent to penal battalions much easier then, as it didn't take actually sending someone to a proper judgement and sentencing.

Reading on the subject is difficult (the subject is surprisingly little covered directly, mostly referred to in passing by people covering other subjects. Far as I know there's no book on that one subject).
However, if you have a JSTOR account there is this. (this is the basis of the "nobody ever got punished claim btw).
http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068 talks about how atrocities were committed and how people who might refuse to participate directly rather helped indirectly.
Sadly I don't know any easy way to gain a lot of insight into military insubordination in the German armed forces, not because it was rare (it happened more than you'd think), but because it's been covered surprisingly little and going over the old execution cases is something of a sore subject that's been met with a lot of resistance.

For civilian insubordination it's a bit easier as you can read up on people like Sophie Scholl who was beheaded for resistance, nonviolent resistance in her case as she was participating in the white rose.
People were regularly imprisoned for saying things critical to the regime (or Hitler, which is why Sophie Scholls father was in prison), so it's not a stretch to say that at the very least people believed insubordination would carry severe consequences.

Youknow, I'm more interested in history, and especially WW2 history, than the average person. I've seen videos of executions, pictures and videos from the most horrid camps and battles, I've read testimonies...
I have a strong constitution, I can "disengage" emotionally from most of these things. You have to in order to see it in the first place. As a result my response to things like Holocaust deniers saying it was impossible to burn that many bodies is to literally just do the math.

That picture of Sophie Scholl is one of only two things that I can honestly say makes me physically unwell.

I like thinking about culture. We tell the story of people, real and imaginary, and we should know where they come from.
I believe culture is driven by the head, the heart, and the belly. So if an idea comes into my head for a culture I ask five questions:

• What do they eat?
  
• What do they believe in?
  
• Where do they come from?
  
• Where are they going?
  
• What do they consider family?
  
• How do they court, marry, fu...nction in a relationship?
  
  You'd be amazed how much you can inform yourself there.
  
  That gives me a nice start. Then I start to ask other questions on themes. Ask the 5W1H (Who What When Where Why How) questions about 6 random subjects based on what you now know
  
  For instance, Death:
  
  
• Who handles the body?
  
• What is done with the body?
  
• When is this done?
  
• Where do they put a body?
  
• Why do they do these things?
  
  It's a never fails way of going about things. Now come up with the life of five people living in a society based on this information. Use Proust's questionnaire and Gotham's questionnaire to frame them.
  
  Do all of this with first thoughts. Look it over. Think about it. Look at common travel questions like "What's the best place to eat?" or "what should I not do to piss off the locals"?
  
  You can get the true feel for a society in hours. Then put your characters who are in that culture through those same questionnaires, same random questions. You'll know them from head to heart to belly, and you're golden.
  
  EDIT: I just saw some other information. DO NOT READ GENRE FICTION FOR WORLD IDEAS. Read history, philosophy, anthropology. Pick up a history of food ,Guns, Germs, and Steel, other books that give you overviews on specific topics in history and anthropology.
  
  Tolkien wasn't reading Kingkiller Chronicle, he was learning about hillbillies, ancient languages, and living in WW1 England. Pratchett was a polymoth. Heinlein dug in on so many topics it's unbelievable. Inform with ideas, write from your head and not someone else's.

>Can I just toss in a 'fuck you' to them right there, the ”white race” never existed at all, it was made up as an excuse to support racial discrimination in America against African peoples because America already had just about every ethnicity from Europe so they couldn't claim it was the French/English/German/Russian people who were the ”superior.”

It's almost as if race is a political concept.

This... is a lot of questions. As in, volumes and volumes and volumes written about it.

So I'll just answer the how did it become so crazy? bit.

Korea was targeted for missionary work, and many people were converted to Christianity. Once North Korea was isolated after the Korean War, a guy named Kim Il-Sung came along (Kim Jong-Il's dad, and Jong-Un's grandfather) took advantage of this isolation, and literally had his people paste his face over Jesus's. There's an insane mythology behind him, even stating that his birth was heralded in by a shining star in the north and the appearance of a double rainbow. I read that information from Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demmick, which is a great read if you're interested.

Anyway, if you denied any of this, you disappeared. Eventually, people were too afraid to deny it. Then they were too afraid to tell their children the truth, so you had a new generation being raised with only this information.

A crazy amount of propaganda, isolation from the outside world and several generations later, you have modern North Korea.

Now that South Korea is so advanced and smartphone technology is getting increasingly hard to control (along with a spotty northern border into China where people can sneak out and get new information and products), truth about the outside world is starting to seep in - but people are still too afraid to do anything about it, and the power-hungry regime will do anything to maintain control.

Cliff Notes video version of Sapiens (good book)

A large part of the holocaust were liquidations in Poland and Eastern Europe. Towns as large as 30,000 people were "liquidated" in a day. Police units would march the populace into the woods and take a portion, line them up, shoot them at a proscribed place in the spine. Repeat. There is a horrific book called "Ordinary Men" about the 101 Police Reserve Battalion. Those ~500 men alone were responsible for >80,000 deaths.

Historian here, ACTUAL truth, because of the warm all year climate and abundance of food with small tribal populations divided by geography (for the majority of the time) there was no development to the advanced civilization the rest of the world did, and the ones that did, didnt last long (great Zimbabwe, Nubia, ect). The middle east had vast deserts, Europe and to a lesser extent Asia had winters, so food cultivation and thus tool making never really materialized in vast amounts of sub-Sahara Africa because they didnt have to overcome their environment as far as climate goes. (i am assuming thats what you are talking about as north africa is a different story, they arent poor).

Africa actually has vast amounts of resources, rare earths for example, but their governments corruption keeps any of the wealth out of anyone's hands but the government and military war lords.

The idea that things were just fucking dandy until colonial powers came to the shores is laughable and only a fool with no education would believe such non-sense. The few iron age civilizations that did developed were gone long before the Europeans arrived. And it was the Arabs who arrived first and began slavery and "exploitation" of Africa, not Europe. And for every augment for colonialism raping Africa, there is another Rhodesia to Zimbabwe story to counter it.

tl;dr-Its not always Whitey's fault, despite it always being blamed on him


http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552

^gives you a basic idea in layman's terms

In what I think is my first ever top level post here I'd like to discuss and point out some recently published claims by former officials that likely Israeli spy devices were found near the White House sometime in the last few years. Let me quote the article, bolded parts are mine:

> The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

> But unlike most other occasions when flagrant incidents of foreign spying have been discovered on American soil, the Trump administration did not rebuke the Israeli government, and there were no consequences for Israel’s behavior, one of the former officials said.

> The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as “StingRays,” mimic regular cell towers to fool cellphones into giving them their locations and identity information. Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use.

> The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates — though it’s not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.

Naturally these claims were denied by the Israeli embassy and no part of the U.S. government was willing to officially comment on it. They got another former counter intelligence official from the Obama administration to comment on these claims on the record and he said:

> “The Israelis are aggressive intelligence collectors, but they have sworn off spying on the U.S. at various points and it’s not surprising that such efforts continue,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator of counterterrorism at the Obama State Department and now director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth.

> Benjamin, who emphasized that he was not aware of the FBI's investigation into the cell-phone spoofing, recalled once meeting with a former head of Mossad, the premier Israeli intelligence agency, when he was out of office. The first thing the former Mossad official told Benjamin was that Israel didn’t spy on the U.S.

> “I just told him our conversation was over if he had such a low estimate of my intelligence,” Benjamin said.

Anyway, I imagine none of this is that surprising to informed commentators (the United States has caught and jailed an Israeli spy in the United States before, Jonathan Pollard) -- and the U.S. government probably tries to do the same thing to Israel. But none the less it sparks a little dissonance that one of our closest allies is engaged in such behavior despite our vigorous (and even more vigorous under Trump) support of them. I'm not sure what the standard protocol is to respond to these things but is troubling that the administration made no attempt to rebuke the Israeli government (as the officials claim).

This, in my opinion, undermines his 'America First' attitude. In general, criticisms that one is failing to live up to ones own standards are a lot more potent than the claims that one is failing to meet the standards of others, so we'll see how this comes up in the 2020 election. Some of the Democratic candidates are practically just as pro-Israel as him, though, so it may not come up.

We should always be wary of 'anonymous officials' attempting to further their own agenda but these claims do fit into my previous understanding of how Israel operates and Trump's sympathy to Israel so at the moment I believe them. Let me know if you think there is a good reason to doubt their veracity.

What should the response be? I don't really know, but surely some sort of response or punishment is warranted by blatant espionage. It makes me ever more wary of exactly who is benefiting from our close relations with them, even aside from the consideration of the influence of the Israeli lobby.

lol jesus fucking christ, everyone understands that aipac is shorthand for a constellation of pro-israel lobbying groups and donors. go read the israel lobby if you're seriously this dense

I'm sure /u/Dr_Poz was referencing this insightful book from 2005:
What's the Matter with Kansas?

Here is the deal with N. Korea. Pretty much the ones who live in Pyongyang, aka where the media actually have cameras, are brainwashed. Apparently, those who live in the city are chosen by the leadership to live there as it is an honor. Those on the outskirts of the main drag are more in tune to the reality of the situation their country is in. Yes, they still have the mandatory framed pictures of Kim Jong Il & Un on their walls and yes if interviewed, taped or pressured they will act as they are expected to but in reality they know something isn't right. I suggest anyone who is interested read Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.

If this question interests you, you will very much enjoy Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. His thesis is that the potential for cultural advancement is in many cases restricted by geography and climate.

For example, he looks at the habitat range of various domesticable animals, noting that Europe's horse helped the continent's cultures make huge advancements in civilization, while South America's (IIRC) llama, suitable for different uses, didn't offer the same opportunities in agriculture, transport, and warfare.

Pangaea would surely have mountain ranges and deserts, but on the timeframe we're talking about (tens of My) I don't think those limit the spread of land animals the way that oceans do. If domesticable land animals could spread everywhere, human culture likely would too. At the very least, what we call the colonialism of the last millennium would have played out very differently!

You are correct on the title, "What's the Matter With Kansas", but it goes onto much greater depth than the single issue voting. It really delves into and explains why the social conservatives are being played to go against the fiscal conservative values they once held and who is profiting from them.

At the time it was written, 10 years ago, Thomas Frank made the prediction that this was the direction American "Conservatism" would head, and he has been dead on the money! An excellent read for those completely baffled by the ignorance of the average American voter.

Animal and pet bodies are generally disposed of via a process that essentially liquifies the flesh in lye. I know that there was some amount of push several years ago to expand the service to human remains.

There's a company in Europe that was trying to push the idea of "planting" a person's body by using minimal preservation chemistry and no coffin, and putting a sapling above the body.

I'm not Tibetan, but even I can appreciate the symbology of their Sky Burials, wherein a body is sliced and left exposed to the elements, and is swiftly reclaimed by vultures.

However, there is one outstanding option for OP: Donating his body to science! Organ donors are lauded, as they well should be, but there's a pressing need for bodies for research purposes, particularly bodies of younger folk or children. The research gained through body donation can save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives, for decades after it's donated. Bodies have been used to research car crash impact effects--dummies are fine, but there really is no substitute for strapping a body into a car and launching it into a wall to see how it breaks (or doesn't!)

I'd strongly encourage anyone interested in alternative body disposal methods to read Stiff, by Mary Roach. It is far and away my favorite non-fiction book--hilarious, respectful, inquisitive, and educational!

How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

Interesting timing of this post for me. I was having trouble getting to sleep last night, so I was reading Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. (This was a mistake, but only because the book is very interesting and well written. I got through 86 pages before I gave up and turned the light off. I never got sleepy.)

There are a number of stories in the book that might relate, but this reminded me most of Thomas Holmes (The Father of Modern Embalming.) The Wikipedia entry doesn't really have much trivia about him. More can be found on this page. His info is about half-way down the page. Roach goes into more detail about his story, but the part I thought of here is in that link:

>Holmes retired to Brooklyn, New York where he sold root beer and embalming
supplies. According to Christine Quigley, author of A Corpse: a History and Mary
Roach, author of Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Holmes shared his
Brooklyn home with samples of his Civil War era handiwork. Embalmed bodies were
stored in the closets, and preserved heads sat on tables in the parlor. Not all that
surprisingly, Holmes eventually went insane (Robert Mayer wrote that Holmes became
mentally unhinged after an accident) spending his final years in and out of institutions.
Shortly before he died he is said to have requested not to be embalmed.

By way of a little explanation: I work closely with a medical examiner's office. I was affected a good deal more, at first, than I expected since I don't go there every day and usually work at one remove from the actual place and the work done there. When I asked how people cope with that kind of work, both death investigation and pathology, along with a long and sensitive discussion about the job Mary Roach's book was recommended reading. I borrowed and returned it and eventually bought my own copy, but only last night started reading it. I'm only through 87 pages, but so far, it's a good read. If you want some perspective and maybe a different way to think about your own "final arrangements", or if you're just curious about stuff like what happens to bodies left to science or medicine, you may find it enlightening. She handles the subject with respect, humanity, and humor. It isn't nearly as gruesome as I thought it would be, but I have been exposed to a lot more death and bodies and such in the last three+ years than the average person, so YMMV.

It's just a comparison of how stories play out in American and British media.

There is academic work on this by some of the most reputable IR scholars on the planet...

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501

If you want peer reviewed work I wouldn't look to some guy on youtube attempting to compare and contrast news clips.

They didn't have chickens either, as those evolved from red junglefowl found in Asia. I'm also unaware of there being any large scale domestication of the alpaca and their range is centered in Northern Peru and doesn't extend beyond that. Llamas are bound by the same circumstances, although I believe they had a larger historical range than alpacas. Incas also had access to the guinea pig.

In reality, the only domesticated animals available to central Americans would have been turkeys, which were domesticated roughly 2000 years ago. Dogs were likely kept as a starvation food, and were probably 'unintentionally' domesticated. It's arguable that because of the likelihood that there was a low density of domestic turkey populations, there was a low amount of contact between humans and their domesticated fowl (given that they weren't used for egg production), and that they were domesticated relatively recently, that any diseases carried by turkeys didn't have time or opportunity to find a foothold in New World Human populations.

It should also be noted that the orientation of the New World continents is not beneficial for the transmission of diseases. You must traverse through a variety of different biomes, and thus different species, if you traverse the continents of North and South American from tip to tip. On the other hand, Asia, Europe and the Middle East are oriented in the opposite direction, which causes lateral planes of similar climates (e.g. the climate of France is roughly similar to the Ukraine, which is similar to Kazakhstan). Because of that, similar species can exist along a long lateral corridor and pass diseases between neighboring populations. This effect becomes more pronounced as people use similar domesticated stock in a more widespread fashion.

Most of this can be found in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel in addition to a primer on other reasons why Europeans (and other historical populations) were able to colonize far off places without being fought back into the sea.

If you're interested in a complete list of domesticated animals worldwide, check here.

Cheers.

Edits: Details. Forgot about the tasty, tasty guinea pig.

This book came out by an idiot:

https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

Now millions of conservatives actually believe that national socialism = socialism.

Don’t need future scientists, current scientist already figured out

What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
https://www.amazon.com/dp/080507774X/

When I tried to explain Fascists were historically considered the extreme right-wing, he actually sent me a link to Jonah Goldberg's book as proof that I didn't know what I was talking about.

Thanks Jonah, for making Americans even dumber than they were before you started writing.

>Das Fragwürdige an Israelkritik ist mE die Singularität - die lautesten Kritiker hört man immer nur über Israel schimpfen.

Genau das gleiche Argument kommt bei USA und Trump-Kritik auch andauernd.

Erstens, ist es völlig irrelevant, da Kritik in einer bestimmten Diskussion erst mal für sich steht. Sie ist entweder berechtigt oder nicht aber sich dann, wenn man es nicht schafft die inhaltliche Kritik zu entschärfen, einfach darauf zu berufen, dass es ja auch "nordkoreanische Todeslager" gibt, ist einfach nur unehrlich. Ich muss mich mich nicht in eine Diskussion "einkaufen" in dem ich erst mal eine Liste der Top 10 autoritären Regime abarbeite um mich anschließend für eine Israel-Kritik "reingewaschen" zu haben. Würdest du dich mit dem gleichen Maßstab beurteilen, würdest du wahrscheinlich in kürzester Zeit selbst daran scheitern.

Zweitens, (und hier kommen wir wieder zur USA-Kritik zurück) ist der Grund warum man die USA und nicht den Sudan, warum man Israel und nicht Nordkorea kritisiert der, dass sich sowohl die USA als auch Israel als Teil der westlichen Wertegemeinschaft sehen. Von diesen Ländern darf man nicht nur einen höheren Standard an Menschenrechten erwarten, man kann auch hoffen, dass Kritik an diesen Ländern eine größere Wirkung hat, als der tausendste Artikel über nordkoreanische Straflager, die Kim Jong Un o.ä wohl kaum interessieren werden. Genauso wie es von Ungarn erwartet wird, sich an europäische Werte zu halten und Orban überproportional kritisiert wird, obwohl er keine buchstäblichen Todeslager in seinem Land hat.

>Meine Bitte: Schaut es euch selbst an, geht auch in die Palästinensergebiete, redet mit Leuten. Wer dann noch ernsthaft von einem rassistischen Apartheidsregime sprechen will, bitte.

Und hier redest du einfach Quatsch:

>Eine israelische Regierungskommission stellte beispielsweise 2003 fest, dass Israel sich ihnen gegenüber "gleichgültig und diskriminierend" verhält. In der Tat findet die Ungleichbehandlung israelischer Araber unter israelischen Juden viele Anhänger. Eine Umfrage vom März 2007 kam zu dem Schluss, dass 55 Prozent der israelischen Juden getrennte Freizeitangebote wünschten, während mehr als 75 Prozent sagten, sie wollten nicht im selben Haus leben wie ein israelischer Araber. Mehr als die Hälfte der Befragten meinte, wenn eine jüdische Frau einen Araber heirate, sei das Hochverrat, und 50 Prozent sagten, sie würden an ihrem Arbeitsplatz nicht arbeiten, wenn ein Vorgesetzter ein Araber wäre. Das Israel Democracy Institute berichtete im Mai 2003, dass 53 Prozent der israelischen Juden "gegen die volle Gleichberechtigung der Araber sind" während 77 Prozent der israelischen Juden glaubten, dass "es bei wichtigen politischen Entscheidungen eine jüdische Mehrheit geben sollte". Nur 31 Prozent "sind dafür, dass es arabische politische Parteien in der Regierung gibt". (...)
>
>Quelle (hier gibt's den 60-seitigen Aufsatz als PDF /edit: allerdings ohne den oben genannten Auszug, wie ich gerade gesehen habe)

Not an article, but King Leopold's Ghost is a great book, as is The Congo: From Leopold to Kabila

Or if you have an hour to kill White King, Red Rubber, Black Death is a very well made documentary.

>It is difficult to discredit or ignore the accounts of many Native Americans and indigenous people that ALL have stories of this same creature whilst being so far spread and some not even interacting with one another.

Trade networks in North America reached across the entire continent. Recent evidence suggests trade all the way into South America. Pre-Colombian civilization in the America's was much more complex than you're giving it credit for. The book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" is a good start on this topic.

There's a couple:

In elementary school, I Love Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not was my first introduction to the idea of history with an agenda. It's mostly a collection of interesting facts, but it does spend some time talking about why people (Americans specifically in this case) mythologize our history.

In Middle School I went totally crazy over the US Civil War, largely because of Gettysburg.

In high school came Marx & the concepts of class and progressive history. I'm not a Marxist politically (not anymore at least, but how else does a history nerd rebel in high school?), but I do think these ideas inform my personal historical narrative.

Then came the reason I finally returned to school for history: Lies My Teacher Told Me. I'd already been bothered by American politicians and citizens presentizing the opinions and actions of our founding fathers, as well as the myth of our unified national ideology, but this book illustrated how we pass that flawed narrative along, dooming people to make the same mistakes.

>My continuing complaint with the trump-a-nistas is quite simple... "Why do you continually vote against your own interests?"

Wedge social and cultural issues. People should definitely read What's the Matter With Kansas.

I had family actually move out of Kansas two years ago because of what Brownback did to that state via an infusion of faulty, disproven, horseshit Koch ideology. They have destroyed that state and it will take generations to bring it back from what they did to it with their bullshit economic experiment.

And people WARNED them about this bullshit for YEARS, but it never mattered because they are arrogant cocks who think they are smarter than everyone else.

Thomas Sowell and a number of others have argued African American hip hop culture is basically white redneck behavior, Sowell in "Black Rednecks And White Liberals" which I'm about to begin. Colin Woodward's "American Nation's" touches on this as well, as do other authors who've penned books on the topic, although his book is more about all of the regional cultures that make up our country dating back to the groups that founded those regions and how their beliefs are still resoundingly alive and well and how politicians actively exploit these differences we have between one another. There are other academics I've heard doing research like this but I'm having trouble recall their names, I heard about them in some podcasts. But, there's definitely more reading you can do to explore this idea more.

Amazon links to check out both titles I mentioned:

https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1594031436/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502125308&sr=1-1&keywords=black+rednecks+and+white+liberals

people's history of the united states by howard zinn

Not about nazism, but very relevant if you're an american trying to make sense of this country.

This is wrong on multiple levels, built the most galling one is that somehow you're suggesting that radical Islam is a direct result of Western involvement in Muslim countries.

That's incomplete at best and dangerously ignorant at worst.

First off, some of the biggest state sponsors of terrorism are allies with the US (re Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UAE) and have experienced fuck all in terms of bombing and aggression. There's a lot of money to be made in warfare and chaos.

Also, the main cause of radical Islam is the religion itself above all else. You're insane if you think otherwise. This isn't a bunch of ragtag fighters battling imperialism and defending their innocent families from Western bullies. These are bloodthirsty scumbags who cross borders and slaughter civilians in an effort to spread their monstrous ideology and attain power.

And finally, if the West is so oppressive, corruptive, and murderous why do so many Islamic governments cry out when we threaten to cut off revenue streams and support?

EDIT: Here are some suggestions:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/11/17/10-must-read-books-on-terrorism/

http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669

http://www.amazon.com/Imperial-Life-Emerald-City-Inside/dp/0307278832

http://www.amazon.com/Hatreds-Kingdom-Arabia-Supports-Terrorism/dp/0895260611

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_United_States_diplomatic_cables_leak_(United_Arab_Emirates)

If you want to know more about daily life in North Korea, check out this oral history book entitled Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

It is an amazing read, goes from after the Korean War, through the famine in the 1990s, to current day.

The the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning. It will give you an incredibly detailed account about how normal men became systematic killers.

This is a useful companion piece to Eric Schlosser's recent "World War Three, by Mistake" in The New Yorker. (Hat-tip to /u/puck2 for posting that article to this subreddit.)

For those still not sufficiently alarmed, PBS will premiere the documentary Command and Control, based on Schlosser's book of the same name, in its American Experience series next week (Tuesday, January 10, 2017).

Don't suggest a book you haven't read. If you pick your books you should read them first then give them to your mom. I recommend two books in this order. First, Second.

Well, they're taught that trickery will be involved as well, they they may seem nice but will actually kill you, etc.
It is hard to fathom the level of brainwashing that goes on in NK. Most people are taught, and fully believe, that Dear Leader can actually read their minds. This stops them from even THINKING dissenting thoughts. So as you can imagine, it will take a LOT of deprogramming to deal with this stuff.

Even people who leave North Korea and defect to the South, go through a three-month resettlement school called Hanawon, where they are deprogrammed and taught how to live in modern society. So even the people who have got to the point of dissolution and figured out how to leave, still need a LOT of retraining to actually learn what the real world is like.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanawon

Now consider that there have been roughly 26,000 North Koreans defect to South Korea since the Korean War. Each needing to be screened to make sure they are not a North Korean spy, sent to Hanawon for 3 months, given their resettlement payment and supported to settle in a whole new world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_defectors

Compare that to 25 million people who would need to be dealt with. It's estimated the cost would be in the trillions to handle the crisis. There are summits every year on planning for response to the eventual collapse of the NK regime.

But more to your point, these people are prepared for invasion, they have no trust for the "enemy" coming in, and even if they don't really believe in the regime anymore, they have to continue to pretend to be fighting against these invaders like everyone else. Everyone is an informant to the Workers Party there, which is the ruling party and the whole regime. So if you don't pretend to play along, you will be accused of treason and likely executed publicly or sent to a prison camp. Hard to say what that looks like under actual invasion, so my money is on execution.

This comes around to all of those defectors living in South Korea. Many of them report that, even years later and now that they are part of modern society, they will still find themselves defending Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il and now Kim Jong-Un, when people speak poorly of them. All of that work, deprogramming and life in far better circumstances, and they still automatically find themselves defending the regime that put them through hell. It's unbelievable!

(Hard to find a clear source on some of this stuff as it's a bit of a collage of the books on NK I've read. Probably a lot of it is from Nothing To Envy, as I've read that book about seven times and I can't get enough of it. I truly can't recommend anything more highly! https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912)

If any of you are interested in American history (including South and Central American) , I recommend checking out

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Get that knowledge famo

Highly recommend reading "King Leopold's Ghost" to anyone interested in the history of Belgian colonialist atrocities in Africa. Warning: it makes for grim reading.

https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1G6I5DTX3TBOH&keywords=king+leopold%27s+ghost&qid=1574558091&s=books&sprefix=king+leo%2Cstripbooks%2C143&sr=1-1

You think that you've just made a super intelligent point because you've pointed out the obvious fact that the US has issues with human rights and with over-criminalization. It isn't an intelligent point because you don't know jack shit about North Korea. You don't know dick about how people live there, and I know that because if you did, you would pull your head out of your ass and realize that the issues that the United States has are not even in the same order of magnitude as the issues that North Korea has.

I recommend that you read the following books to give you a better sense of life in North Korea, so that in the future you can be more educated on the subject:

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

Nutrition is just the tip of the iceberg. Try mathematics, history and civics, literature...

You wanted to be part of the intelligentsia, but throughout your philosophical journey, you always based your convictions only on authority and tradition instead of on evidence and arguments. Don't you realize that this is the epitome of anti – intellectualism?

It is correct that the New Atheists aren't the pinnacle of atheistic thought and didn't contribute many new ideas to the academic debate of atheism vs. theism or religion. But this was never their goal, and it is also unnecessary, since the academic debate is already over for many decades. If you want to know why the arguments for theism are all complete nonsense and not taken seriously anymore, why Christianity is wrong just about everything and why apologists like Craig are dishonest charlatans who make a living out of fooling people, your reading list shouldn't be New Atheists, but rather something like this:

Colin Howson – Objecting to God

George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God

Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods

Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God

Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science

J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism

J. L. Schellenberg – The Wisdom to Doubt

Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism

Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God

Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God

Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism

Stewart Elliott Guthrie – Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

Theodore Drange – Nonbelief & Evil



[Avigor Shinan – From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609086)

Bart Ehrman – The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

Bart Ehrman – Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus

Burton L. Mack – Who Wrote the New Testament?

Helmut Koester – Ancient Christian Gospels

John Barton, John Muddiman – The Oxford Bible Commentary

John Dominic Crossan – Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

Karen Armstrong – A History of God

Mark Smith – The Early History of God

Randel McCraw Helms – Who Wrote the Gospels?

Richard Elliott Friedman – Who Wrote the Bible?

Robert Bellah – Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Robert Walter Funk – The Gospel of Jesus

I don't find that funny, I find it hugely disturbing. Learn about how your Bible was created and then see what that does for you.

http://www.amazon.com/History-God-000-Year-Judaism-Christianity/dp/0345384563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397171166&sr=8-1&keywords=a+history+of+god

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1397171269&sr=8-1&keywords=misquoting+jesus+the+story+behind+who+changed+the+bible+and+why

Also please don't just downvote this guy because he's a religious person, that is counter-intuitive to the discourse here.

If you are interested in stuff like this you should check out the book Command And Control.

It really highlights how close to utter devastation we have been during the past 60 years...

One of the top reviews from Amazon:
As a former Titan II Missile Facilities Technician, this was a page-turner for me. The author got it right in his descriptions of the attitudes and culture in the missile career field, the systems in use, even the music we listened to back then. It is rare for a military themed book written by a non-military writer to be so spot-on (IMO). The descriptions of some of the close calls we (we citizens) had with H-bombs are chilling, and the story about the Damascus Arkansas Titan II explosion was weaved in perfectly throughout the book. Time well spent.

Try Legacy of Ashes. Superbly researched and covers everything from OSS beginnings to Iraq.

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006

>AIPAC doesnt spend that much money compared to other lobby groups

They are one of the most powerful lobbying groups in this country and by FAR the most powerful with regards to foreign policy.

Read this book.

A little about the author:

"John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York."

He's a brilliant writer and this book in particular lays a very solid groundwork for understanding just how much Israel has us on puppet strings. Oman may been an actual anti-semite, but the points she's making are not anti-semitic.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

They knew. It is one of the biggest misconceptions about the Holocaust, that the German people had little to no idea what was going on, and that it was just the government. It depresses me to see it plastered all over this thread. I think it just makes people feel better to think that it was only a few evil people who perpetrated this horrendous crime, instead of many "normal" people. I highly recommend that everyone read the books and articles I linked to. They explain it much better than I can. I do doubt, however, that I will be able to change many peoples minds. Most of the time I don't even bother.

I'm not saying the Germans of today are bad, they have done many things trying to set right the crimes of their past generations. But the Germans of the time knew what was going on and many participated in it.

They knew.

I am pretty sure MotoGP will race at Qatar in 2018. Unless there are some major geopolitical changes, Dorna will race there until the Qataris stop paying. The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis, Bahrainis have had squabbles for a long time. The Saudis saying the Qataris sponsor terrorism is the pot calling the kettle black and they know it.

I recommend this article for some context on the Gulf "crisis": http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-can-the-qatar-crisis-be-resolved

Steve Coll is a great journalist, recommend his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

If you would like a very detailed explanation of this, might I recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, but what it boils down to is similar to what person132 said in another comment.

High population density, and larger populations as a whole, combined with city living and poorer diets, means that more Europeans got sick in general. To infect the surviving Europeans, diseases needed to adapt to be stronger, and more resistant to their immune systems. When these diseases came with them to the colonies, they were no match for the Native American's less/differently developed immune systems.

Republicans have been pushing the idea that Nazi’s we’re liberals for over a decade now. https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

The craziest part isn’t even that this book got written. It’s that the right wing in America today shuns the author for not supporting Trump enough. Its crazy how far removed they’ve become from reality, even in just the last decade.

Right (about world leaders' respect for Mussolini - don't know about Churchill arranging for his capture).

My amateur understanding is that prior to Hitler, fascism (like communism) was more acceptable in "respectable circles." Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism expands on the point, but one possibly-illuminating trivia point is that one version of the song "You're the Top" had the line "You're Mussolini" delivered as a compliment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_the_Top

Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Great thesis on why different human societies have developed so differently.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488120868&sr=8-1&keywords=ordinary+men

This is a great book on a related subject. It's about the polish police force during that era. When they were ordered to round up jews and execute them some did it willingly, some did it reluctantly because it was an order, and some just outright refused.

Actually archaeologists are now moving past the Bering land bridge theory, and tracking 5 distinct immigration events into the pre-Columbian Americas.

I wish I had more to back it up, but I just started reading this book this week. I'm hoping I'll have more to say about that when I'm finished.

Read 1491 by Charles Mann - great read, and covers the Amazon (and the rest of the Pre-Columbian Americas) quite a bit.

Well, no that's the Congo. They had great teachers. You remember of course, King Leopold II who cut off people's hands if they failed to meet rubber production quotas.

• Male rubber tappers and porters were mercilessly exploited and driven to death. Leopold's agents held the wives and children of these men hostage until they returned with their rubber quota. Those who refused or failed to supply enough rubber had their villages burned down, children murdered, and hands cut off.
  
• Excellent book on the matter

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It's excellent.

https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

I haven't read too many books about the subject, but one that I really like is 'Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001', by Steve Coll. It's incredibly illuminating and a fascinating read.

Robert Pape's 'Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It' is also one of my favorites.

>have you not seen the persecution that our ancestors suffered under Islam?

I'm not an expert on the history of Islam in India. Some say the Mughal Empire killed 80,000,000 Hindus through the centuries, others say that this is garbage and that the Mughals had a pretty hands-off approach toward governance, others point out that there were Muslim dynasties in India who fought against the Mughals, others talk about how Islamic rulers and their methods ranged from everything from Akhbar to Aurungazeb. So I'm not sold either way.

>This is a clash of civilizations and the Neville Chamberlain routine against Islam has failed.

See, this is the simplistic and superficial "Them and Us" narrative that I cannot stand. Radical Islam is very much a product of so-called "Western civilization".

The CIA and the State Department funded radical mujahadeen in Afghanistan through the '80s, and former directors of the CIA like William Casey were Christian fundamentalists who wanted to see an alliance between Christians and Muslims against the "godless communists" of the USSR, and Saudi Arabia--the premier source of radical Islamic fundamentalism--has been a key regional ally of the West since World War 1 when the British helped the al-Saud family and the fundamentalist Wahabi clerics gain power over the peninsula. Check out Ghost Wars and Carbon Democracy for good pieces of scholarship on all of this.

Then when this came back and bit the US in the ass on 9/11 the government promptly invaded and occupied Afghanistan and then Iraq, eventually extending the war--undeclared and covert--into Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. Hardly a "Neville Chamberlain" routine.

And even after all this, the US government thought it was a good idea to turn around and once again start arming radical Sunni militants, in order to destabilize and counterbalance Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon, and increase the influence of the Gulf States (which themselves are the primary source of funding for terrorist activity).

But hey I guess this is all too complicated for some people so I guess we should just stick with a black-and-white fairy tale about Good and Evil so our heads don't hurt too much, right?

I'll give some historical context.

After WWII all our factories were still at full capacity and switched back to making personal cars, and all these returning vets on the GI bill want to college or back to good factory jobs and started buying homes and settling down.


Now the popular notion at the time was that city life was dying. Why get at best a row house or apartment in New york or philadelphia when you can build or buy a crafstmen house for the same price out in the suburbs. Also as civil rights was coming about it was convenient to cede the inner city to African Americans and poor and use things like loan restrictions to zone and price them out of the nice crime free suburbs.


So given the popular notion that the city and urban life was dying. Most city planning resources when into road construction so everyone could live out in the surburbs and take the new highways to their jobs. Entire cities were built up around this concept. In order to pay for this essentially halted Urban public works like subways and light rail. Why would you want to go on a stuffy subway with negroes when you can commute in your cadillac with radio and select-a-matic transmission?


So the results are profound and easy to verify. Any city that become major and modern after world war II has terrible public transportation: Examples include LA, Houston, Denver, Portland. Any city that was major before WWII tends to have still strong public transportation like Chicago, New york, Boston, D.C.


We basically decided as a nation that surburban life was awesome and gave up on public transportation. We even went steps further in places like LA where they actively bought out trolley lines just to close them down and pave over the tracks. Also the very way we designed our suburbs actively discourage pedestrainism and many live in places that "have no where to walk to". I'm ashamed to say that even my hometown Ann Arbor fell into that spiral and built many planned developments that have no feasible options of walking or biking to get to any retail area.


TLDR: city planners after WWII decided everyone (who was white) should live in suburbs and stopped funding public transportation.

Edit: for those who don't believe me this was covered by sociologists in the way things never were http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-Things-Never-Were/dp/0595348084

and lies my teacher told me http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457056096&sr=1-1&keywords=lies+my+teacher+told+me both fascinating reads

I think if Coleman and Krieger ever read "A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present" by Howard Zinn I think they would have a stroke. Or their heads would explode. One of the two.

Here too. I was raised in Michigan and our history courses were a joke. I also learned we dominated the world in WWII, saved the allies, we're the reason you aren't speaking German, Reaganomics propelled capitalism to Super Saiyan level two, which killed communism, etc. Also, we gave black people rights but they haven't quite managed to get it together.

If you want to learn the things the Republicans don't want you to know, you can either read A People's History of the United States or watch it on Netflix.

> didn't take you to be one who believed in this conspiracy theory

There is conspiracy theory about Jewish lobby and then there is influential Jewish Lobby. Trying to insinuate that there is only the conspiracy theory version is just clever argumentative trick, just like anti-Zionist = anti-Semite assumption.

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer: "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" (PDF). This is the key essay that later became a book that explains how strong of an impact the Israel lobby has had on U.S. foreign policy (by both parties) and why. The essay, at least, is worth a read.

Recommended reading to understand what has been going on in North Korea since the 70s, from the people's perspective: Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick

It illustrates superbly how the people are affected by the insanity of their leaders, all the while trying to keep their belief and faith in their country. From the book you will learn, that it is quite possible that this woman in the video barely escaped death by starvation, that she has probably had to step over dozens of bodies of children that died from hunger in her town, that probably most of her family members have died from lack of food, and that the regime's indoctrination is so infused in her life, that at the point where she is being beaten for trying to survive in China, she probably believes in her heart that she has done something wrong.

Some very inaccessible landmarks were first discovered by airplane. The world's highest waterfall, Angel Falls was first described to the world after being spotted by aviator Jimmie Angel (though it was probably discovered by earlier Europeans explorers and certainly was well known by indigenous inhabitants of the region).

Aerial exploration was extremely important in charting and exploring the Arctic and Antarctic regions as well. The flights of Richard Byrd and others were very important in charting and describing much of Antarctica. A very large section of the continent is today named after Richard Byrd's wife Marie.

Much of the interior of New Guinea was considered to be essentially uninhabited until the first aerial surveys revealed it to be densely populated by indigenous inhabitants. (I believe this was discussed in Guns, Germs and Steel but I can't find my copy of it right now, so I'm more than willing to be corrected on this one).

More recently, satellite images have been used to discover new achaeological sites in the Saudi desert and in Italy.

And I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but scientists first discovered that grazing cows use the earth's magnetic field to orient themselves using Google Earth satellite images.

EDIT: see my comment in reply to asdjk48 below for a more detailed citation of the New Guinea thing.

Well, it was the deciding factor in the birth of human civilization. Without the shift to agriculture from hunter/gatherer societies, we could never have achieved the necessary population to create virtually every human innovation that has ever happened. It is true that agriculture led to most of humanity's woes as well: war, plagues...Glenn Beck, etc... But without that shift we would still have an average lifespan of 30-40 years, and our population would be in the thousands instead of the billions. There are pretty valid arguments for why that's not such a great thing, but it's really a moot point. We're here, we did what we did, so that's that.

On a side note, anyone who hasn't read this book is missing out.

I've never heard of this. Do you have a source? I'm not doubting you, just interesting after having read Ghost Wars.

As described in the excellent journalistic novel Ghost Wars, Saudi Arabian elites and Pakistani's ISI backed the Taliban, who followed a fundamentalist Sunni ideology known as Deobandi. Deobandi is rather similar in nature to Wahhabism, which is dominant in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Iran (and other regional powers like India) supported the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance wasn't Shia, and was mostly defined by being anti-Taliban.

The source of funding for Hamas presents an interesting case; while most of its funding came from Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, this is no longer the case today. Shia regimes like Iran and Syria also have a significant role in funding Hamas.

In general, it is very useful to see the various conflicts between Islamic groups in the Middle East as a result of Saudi Arabia and Iran's geopolitical rivalries, and their proxy militant groups.

It's also interesting to note that the ability of Saudi elites to finance Sunni extremism around the globe is largely facilitated through their access to the world's oil markets, and their historic ability to surge or cutback oil production in order to control oil prices. In my mind, this marks Islamic fundamentalism very much as a facet of the world-capitalist system, rather than part of a "war of civilizations" that Western media so often likes to talk about.

I'd imagine it's more of a generality than anything else. I'd wager that it is partly based on the fact that certain latitudes were more conducive for successful colonization by European powers. Those latitudes closely approximated the seasonal conditions in which their draft animals and crops thrived. This lead to a larger and more stable base in which to built wealth upon.

I recommend reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond as he details reasons why environmental factors are major contributors to why certain societies (ultimately countries) are wealthier than others.

They have to. They need to calibrate the sensors on the crash test dummies.

Read more about it - and many other creative uses for dead bodies - in Mary Roach's book, Stiff.

"no one gave a fuck"

Why did they have to use deception specifically saying that it was temporary and very limited to even pass it in the first place then?

No one wants to become a minority in their own country + important people with lower IQs, higher crime rates, and a higher dependency on the government (not even paying what they take) // baggage.

These should be the top recommendations hands down, both of these books were designed with your specific goal in mind:

A People's History of America - This focuses on history of the US from the perspective of the everyman rather than the 'big man' side of history where every politician is a gentle statesman. It shows just how barbaric and ghoulish those in charge often are.

Lies My Teacher Told Me. - Similar to the last one, this one shows how modern history loves to pretend all sorts of shit did not happen or ignore anything that's even slightly discomforting, like the idea that Henry Ford literally inspired Hitler, both in a model industry and anti-semitism.

These are both relatively easy reads with lots of praise.

Adam Curtis docs are always good, I recommend starting with one called "Black Power" which answers the question "What happens to African countries when they try to play ball with the west?"

People also make the argument that socialists are Nazi's. I think the book was Liberal Fascism.

Edit: Here it is. Don't read the reviews without a gas mask.

If this sort of thing interests you, you may also enjoy this book. It's a bit older (IIRC it came out during the Bush administration) but it looks at the same issue through a bit of a different lens.

I don't disagree with the bulk of this, but two points:

• Are you not perhaps underestimating the efficacy of Soviet intelligence operations against the Axis? Decisive examples might include the use of moles inside of Allied intelligence to verify German plans before Operation Citadel in 1943, as well as the activities of GRU agent Richard Sorge in Tokyo in 1941.
  
  
• Are you not perhaps overestimating the wartime efficacy of the OSS? Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA in particular, seems to paint a fairly damning picture of Donovan & Dulles' covert ops during World War II.

Check out a book called 1491 by Charles C. Mann. It's mind-blowing, will completely change the way you think about early Americans.

You don't have to be young. This book is a historical account of a police unit made of middle-aged men from pre-War Germany through their radicalization from normal men to the kind of people that bayonet pregnant women.

The power of groupthink and ideology is terrifying. The fact of the matter is that it can be confidently said that for any given person, if they were present in Germany during its Nazi transformation, they would almost certainly have become Nazis.

For those who don't want to watch the video:

Big Ideas in Brief by Ian Crofton

Sapiens: a Brief History of Human Kind by Yuval Noah Harari

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by Sandra Blakeslee and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky

The Brain: A Beginner's Guide by Ammar Al-Chalabi, R. Shane Delamont, and Martin R. Turner


Ill go ahead and put in a plug for the book I'm reading right now: The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I'd recommend reading Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong if you're curious about the accuracy of American high school history textbooks.

Not true...this is a common misconception. The Mujahideen (which is actually just a term describing one who engages in jihad, not a name for a single group) were composed of many different groups. Bin Laden was one of the major Arab influences in Afghanistan during the soviet war and after but we never funded or trained him. He had no problem convincing wealthy Saudis to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to his causes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The United States was heavily invested with the Northern Alliance and it's leader Ahmad Shah Massoud who arguably was Afghanistan's best chance at actual peace. Al-Qaeda assassinated him 2 days before 9/11 because they knew if the US had any chance of winning in Afghanistan, they would need Massouds leadership.

>Source : http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414140900&sr=8-1&keywords=ghost+wars

Unfortunately, the most efficient way to become knowledgable about the Middle East is to read. A lot. The Middle East is a far more complex place than most people imagine and understanding the region requires a great deal of knowledge. I have been studying the Middle East for nearly a decade and I still feel like there is so much that I do not know. I would start by reading reputable news sources every day. Places like The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC, Financial Times, are the Los Angeles Times are good English language news sources that you should look at. Additionally, I have written up a suggested reading list for learning about the Middle East, though it is a bit more security-related since that's my area of expertise. I hope it helps. And feel free to ask any questions if you have them.

Books - General History of the Middle East

• Albert Hourani - A History of the Arab Peoples. This is widely considered to be the definitive book on history in the Arab World.
  
• Eugene Rogan - The Arabs: A History. Another essential and critically acclaimed book on Arab history.
  
• Roy Mottahedeh - The Mantle of the Prophet. Role of religion and religious figures in Iran before and during the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
  
• Mark Lynch - The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East. An outline of the causes, reactions, and consequences of the Arab Spring.
  
• Thomas Barfield - Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Afghanistan is usually not considered a part of the Middle East in academic research, so I am including this one. It's probably one of the best overviews of Afghan History.
  
  

  Books - Middle East Military History
  

  
  

• Kenneth Pollack - Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991. Probably the best book on Arab militaries culture and effectiveness and warfare in the Middle East between 1945-1991. Very extensive and informative.
  
• Steven Ward - Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces. A well-written history of Iran's military, from the Safavid Empire to the 21st century.
  
• Ahron Bregman - Israel's Wars: A History since 1947. A terrific book outlining Israel's strategic decision making for its military operations since its founding as a country.
  
• Bruce Hoffman - Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947. A look at the establishment of Israel and the development of the current Arab-Israeli conflict.
  
  

  Books - Middle East Terrorism and Substate Violence
  

  
  

• Daniel Byman - Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know. A terrific primer on al-Qaida, ISIL, and jihadism.
  
• Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Probably the best book for outlining the history of al-Qaida and why 9/11 happened.
  
• Michael Wiess and Hassan Hassan - ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. One of several recent books on ISIL, this one provides an overview on the history and organization of ISIL.
  
• Barry Rubin - Revolution Until Victory?: The Politics and History of the PLO. Although a little old (published in 1996), this books does a great job chronicling the history of the PLO and its role in the Palestinian struggle.
  
• Ahmed Rashid - Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. One of the best books on the rise and fall of the Taliban.
  
  

  Books - U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East
  

  
  

• Bob Woodward - Obama's Wars. Outline of the U.S. foreign policy decision making towards Iraq and Afghanistan in the early years of the Obama administration.
  
• Kenneth Pollack - The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. A good overview of tensions between the United States and Iran.
  
• Michael R. Gordon - The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Follows U.S. strategic and political decision making process during the Iraq War and the U.S. occupation.
  
• Peter R. Mansoor - Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War. An extensive outline of the development and outcome of the Surge during the U.S. Occupation of Iraq.
  
• Steve Coll - Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. A widely popular and acclaimed book on U.S. covert operations from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan until 2001.
  
• Mark Mazzetti - The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth. An overview of the CIA's targeted killing program against terrorist organizations.
  
• Michael Morrell - The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS. Written by the former acting director of the CIA, this book examines U.S. counterterrorism successes and failures of the past two decades.
  
  

  Think Tanks
  

  
  Below is a list of several different think tanks, which frequently publish everything from extension research and analysis to quick and succinct blog posts about the issues in the Middle East. Some of these think tanks specifically focus on the Middle East, while for others it is only one area of their research.
  
  

• Washington Institute for Near East Policy
  
• Center for Strategic and International Studies
  
• Middle East Institute
  
• Atlantic Council
  
• Council on Foreign Relations
  
• Brookings Institute
  
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
  
• Institute for the Study of War
  
• International Institute for Strategic Studies
  
  

  Journals, Blogs, Podcasts, and other Publications
  

  
  

• Foreign Affairs - The premier publication on international politics. Has a paywall, but I recommend it. Also has a podcast.
  
• Foreign Policy - Actually a magazine, its website operates more like a blog. A major publication in the field. Also has a podcast.
  
• War on the Rocks - Reviews international political and security issues, U.S. national security issues, and alcohol. Also has a podcast.
  
• FRONTLINE: Syria At War - Their coverage of the Syrian Civil War. Amazing reporting and film. I highly recommend watching all of it.
  
• Jihadology - A clearing house for primary sources from terrorist organizations. Good place to go if you want to know what the other side is saying. Arabic skills sometimes required. Also has a podcast.
  
• Middle East Week - Looks at issues and topics in the contemporary Middle East that are not frequently talked about.
  
• Syria Comment - Blog run by Joshua Landis, a Syria expert, with frequent quest contributors. Focuses on Syria since before the start of the civil war.
  
• Musings on Iraq - Blog on Iraqi politics and society.
  
• Syria Deeply - A clearing house for news on the Syrian Civil War.
  
• CFR's: The Shia-Sunni Divide - An amazingly detailed and succinct outline of the history and issues behind the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East.
  
• bellingcat - A blog that focuses on open source and social media investigations and analysis on international security issues. A fantastic 21st century approach to international issues.

"his way of life" was built around the social hierarchy that was slavery. "The average Confederate soldier" didn't want slaves to be on the same class level as him. The vast majority volunteered to fight, only 12% of Confederate forces were drafted.

Ignoring that there were (and still are) racial tensions in the south and that a civil war broke out over something ambitious as "states' rights" is pretty ridiculous. Especially when the states still had their rights to establish and enforce the Jim Crow laws.

edit: anyone who disagrees with this post I made needs to read A People's History of the United States

For those interested:

• The Little Prince
  
• Eating Animals
  
• The Hero With A Thousand Faces
  
• The Illustrated World's Religions
  
• Jihad vs. McWorld
  
• Collapse
  
• Just And Unjust Wars
  
• Descent Into Chaos
  
• The Landmark Thucydides
  
• A People's History of the United States

This is something that takes a lot of practice, and many schools don't or can't teach it. Fear not, it's easier than it sounds.

First, some background:

http://www.amazon.com/Global-History-Modern-Historiography/dp/0582096065

This will introduce you to most of the historical method used today. It's quite boring, but if you're going to study history, you'll need to get used to reading some pretty dry material.

For a styleguide, use Diana Hacker's:
http://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Style-Manual-Diana-Hacker/dp/0312542542/

It will teach you everything you need to know about citations.

As far as getting better at source analysis, that's something that comes with time in class and practice with primary and secondary source documents. If you're just going into college, it's something you're going to learn naturally.

However, I do have some tips.
-The main goal of a piece of historiography is to bring you to a thesis and then clearly support that argument. All REAL historiography asks a historical question of some sort. I.E. not when and where, but a more contextual why and how.

-Real historiography is produced 99.9% of the time by a university press, NOT A PRIVATE FIRM. If a celebrity wrote it, it's probably not history.

-Most, if not all real historiography is going to spell out the thesis for you almost immediately.

-A lot of historiography is quite formulaic in terms of its layout and how it's put together on paper:

A. Introduction -- thesis statement and main argument followed by a brief review of past historiography on the subject.

B Section 1 of the argument with an a,b, and c point to make in support.

C just like B

D just like B again, but reinforces A a little more

E Conclusion, ties all sections together and fully reinforces A.

Not all works are like this, but almost every piece you will write in college is or should be.

Some history books that do real history (by proper historians) and are easy to find arguments in, just off the top of my head:

http://www.amazon.com/Wages-Whiteness-American-Working-Haymarket/dp/1844671453

http://www.amazon.com/Economists-Guns-Authoritarian-Development-U-S--Indonesian/dp/0804771820/

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Battalions-Crisis-American-Nationality/dp/0805081380

For the primer on social histories, read Howard Zinn:
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-Present/dp/0060838655/

What you're going to come across MORE often than books is a series of articles that make different (sometimes conflicting) points about a historical issue: (I can't really link the ones I have because of copyright [they won't load without a password], but check out google scholar until you have access to a university library)

Virtually any subject can be researched, you just have to look in the right place and keep an open mind about your thesis. Just because you've found a source that blows away your thesis doesn't mean it's invalid. If you find a wealth of that kind of stuff, you might want to rethink your position, though.


This isn't comprehensive, but I hope it helps. Get into a methods class AS FAST AS POSSIBLE and your degree program will go much, much smoother for you.

It is just for show. Israel isn't going to do anything against Iran militarily, though they have been recruiting terrorists against Iran while pretending to be CIA agents because they want to start a fight between Iran and the US. http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/13/false-flag/

On the other hand, it also shows how the US foreign policy system is so open to manipulation and control by wealthy donors who have their own agendas. How long have we imposed sanctions on Cuba, for no goo reason other than the fact that anti-Castro cubans fund campaigns in states like Fla and NJ?



But in reality, Israel's efforts to make Iran into an issue with the US, has started to make Israel into a BIGGER issue as people are pushing back. People are starting to wonder why we should back Israel at all
Not so long ago you weren't allowed to mention the "Israel lobby" in polite company -- now there are mainstream books written about it, and NY Times editorialists refer to the US COngress as "bought and paid for" by pro-Israeli lobbyists http://mondoweiss.net/2011/12/friedman-line-congress-is-bought-and-paid-for-by-israel-lobby-is-shot-heard-round-the-world

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501/
Even if Israel attacks Iran, nothing will come of it. Iran will simply rebuild its nuclear program and very quickly too. It is already MASSIVELY popular amongst Iranians, and if attacked it is going to be even MORE popular as Iranians are nationalistic.

Guns, Germs and Steel -- Jared Diamond.

• Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan is a great overview of the science of statistics, without being too much like a lecture. After reading it, you'll have a better understanding of what statistics are just silly (like in ads or clickbait news) and what are actually important (like in scientific studies).
  
  
• You on a Diet by Roizen and Oz is touted as a diet book, and it kind of is. I recommend it because it's a great resource for basic understanding the science behind the gastrointestinal system, and how it links to the brain.
  
  
• All of Mary Roach's books are excellent overviews of science currently being done, I've read Stiff (the science of human bodies, post-mortem), Spook ("science tackles the afterlife"), Packing for Mars (the science of humans in space), and Bonk (sex), and they are all very easy to understand, but scientifically appropriate. I'm sure "Gulp" is good too, although I haven't read that one yet.
  
  
• "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" by Mike Brown is a great, accessible overview of exactly why Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, told by the man who started the controversy.
  
  
• "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking is a little denser, material-wise, but still easy to understand (as far as theoretical physics goes, at least!). Hawking explains the history of physics and the universe, as well as the future of the discipline. While there is a bit more jargon than some pop-science books, I think an entry-level scientist can still read and understand this book.
  

I recommend both! For Stiff, I advise getting the audiobook version. It's very well done. The book itself is not any more graphic than it needs to be and is respectful (although I did take issue with the author's apparent negative view of cosmetic surgery in an early chapter.) I found the whole thing fascinating. I was actually most fascinated though when she got to the chapter about the possibility of human head transplants. Here's the page on Amazon.

As for A Dog's Purpose, I messed up and accidentally failed to notice there was an Audible version until literally just now, so I can't attest to the quality of the reading. But the book itself (as stated, I'm only half way through) is really good. Here it is.

Do I have the book for you.

You should read 1491 and America Before. Also there a numerous journal entries that have been published about the true history of Columbus and westward expansion.


Edit: words and formatting

Quebec was an unstable person who needed psychiatric help. People are free to hear new ideas without being labeled fascists. Fascism requires actual force behind the ideas being consumed.

Your false equivalency no more justifies me reading Mein Kampf then blaming it for my heinous acts, after reading it. As purely an academic excercise, I am still well within my right to read or listen from a subjective standpoint so I may dissiminate truth from that medium. I'm required as an adult to operate within the framework of freedom of thought without inciting violence, something that goes over Felarca's head.

My guess is that most people will assume fascism has something to do with 'repressive conservatism,' or resembles more closely 'the right' by American standards.

Historically speaking and by definition, fascists were originally statist authoritarian leftists. The left has always been violent and historically fascist. Again, I know a lot of dictionaries may (improperly) have 'fascist' as being a 'right-wing' principle.


I think the definition of it should probably be researched by an academic, historian, or political scientist and not determined by what Meriem perceives it to be. I previously thought that also and would assume it is right-wing because we assume any system that wants to confine us is done by the right. Again, one would assume the definition is what the one you referenced is until you look at one of the primary fathers of fascism, Mussolini. He was a leftist, by the book.

This seems to be an interesting read. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change

Here's a link that includes a big chunk of the first chapter that includes the thesis of the author, Jonah Goldberg.

What's the matter with Kansas is a great book about that whole issue. Conservatives (Republicans) appeal to dumb people in these types of states on a lot of issues including jobs, giving them false promises and then turning an about-face when the time comes that they're in office.

Republican policies have long benefited the rich, and not the average worker.

> "nation to nation" relationship

Warning - probably sounds pedantic. sorry.

'Nation' is often confused with 'state' - with states being legal, political entities with borders. ['Nations' being cultural, political entities, but no borders.] (https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029)

Add to that and the our constitution recognizes that bands have legal standing equal to the federal government, and nation to nation makes sense.

(Provinces, unlike bands, have essentially delegated authority. Even though areas of authority - health, education, etc are delegated. Municipalities have an even lower level of authority. Only the Federal government has the 'authority' to negotiate with the bands, regardless of issue.)

Being a completely separate 'nation' within a state is pretty much normal for most of North America.

You sound like a guy who has never done any theory-grounded reading before. Let me make a recommendation for you:

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501

This book is written by Waltz and Mearshimer, the latter being a Jew. They are considered, by far, to be the prominent political theorists of our time - diving into state lead conflict to a degree which will expand your mind beyond the typical "Jewish Lobby is BAD to say because I don't know why" thinking.

Their thesis falls under the notion that the Jewish lobby, aka AIPAC, is the most influential lobby in the history of the world. They have unprecedented amounts of leeway amongst our congressmen and executive branch because they rely so heavily on their campaign funding and swing-state Jewish voters. Essentially, entire careers of congressmen are held at the whim of the Jewish lobby, AIPAC. Their decisions are almost always hawkish in the sense that Jewish nationalism is the main driving focus of their policy efforts, hence why the Israeli-Palestinian situation is so fucked.

I am tired of hearing Israeli sympathizers constantly crying about extermination or hatred from others. Israels stance has always been to tolerate certain levels of terrorism to legitimize their policy efforts under the notion of 'not another genocide' and extremist protectionist attitudes. It is backwards and illegitimate at best. The worst part is that Israel is a democracy, so their entire foundation of support can be swayed by the voters. THIS is why there is so much frustration with Israeli and Jewish policy. They can change their government, but choose not to. They have education, but they rather buy into nationalism and the propaganda that their government feeds to them.

Waltz and Meirsheimer go into all of this. Alas, you will probably NOT do the reading and sit here attempting to speak volumes about how using terms such as "Jewish lobby" and "Jewish apologists" precludes to quazi-racism banter. Try again. You're out of your element.

There are a lot of regional cultures in the US. and they are somewhat distinct.

The Virginia Tidewater region that she talked about was very very English. Lots of second sons, lots of Episcopalians and high church english (crypto catholics), cavilers and people who sought to escape England's civil war. My family is this kind of Virginian. They are proud of a history that goes back to 1650 in the area and being related founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Total anglophiles as well. So they hold on to any connection to England and Wales.

There are isolated communities in the tidewater with accents that are supposed to go back to England. There are older people isolated in the backwoods I can not understand. Their accents so crazy we are not mutually intelligible.

Here is Tangier Island. An oddball even in the tidewater area. It's in no way received english like she did but it is some kind of english accent.

https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125

https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006

A couple of books I've read recently about the intelligence side of things. Not sure about how their conventional forces compare to ours.

I don't think so.

I took an online class based on this book and it has a good theory in it. It's been a few years but, IIRC, Harari says that the followers of monotheistic religions are almost required to suppress or eliminate other religions and their deities. If your god is the only true god, all other gods must be false gods or your entire religion is false. Nobody likes their religion being called a false religion, especially when they're deeply emotionally invested in the religion.

Basically, IMO, calling pagan gods "demons" is the result of a smear campaign against those gods and religions tied to them by monotheistic religions. Polytheistic/pagan religions are much older than monotheistic religions, but one of the results of this drive to prove that YHWH is the one "true god" is that some of the other deities became "demons". And the Bible, of course, has to reflect this bias.

Yes, you have some people who believe in monotheistic religions and are more secular. But this smear campaign was run by the church and people who were/are deeply religious and fundamentalist.

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
   
2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
   
3. A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
   
4. Dune by Frank Herbert
   
5. The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

Jonah Goldberg wrote a book just like that, Liberal Fascism. It said that Hitler was vegetarian and an animal rights supporter, and also the NSDAP has 'Sozialistich' in the name of the party, ergo, the Nazis were pinko commie leftists.

There's actually a book on that.

Absolutely. And furthermore, let me say this: if they push me to the point where I feel the need to filibuster, I will take the opportunity to educate them. How? By reading books on the floor of the House like Guns, Germs, and Steel (so they understand better where we came from), The Black Hole War, Bully for Brontosaurus (so they understand a little bit about science), and Subliminal, so they know how the NRA and Fox News is killing their minds.

The Irish weren't always considered white. I haven't read the whole thing, but this book, How the Irish Became White, is pretty interesting.

> New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

I need to get me a hard copy of this puppy.

not exactly. When Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519 Tenochtitlan had a population larger than any city in Europe. His first attempt to sack the city he was routed and barely escaped with his life. He spent the next few years bringing smaller tribes to his side that had been at war with the Aztec empire. During those years the population of Tenochtitlan, and much of the region was ravaged by waves of small pox, hepatitis and other diseases. And then after more than 30% of the population died, widespread famine set in which further weakened the population. It's really the only reason that Cortes was able to conquer the capital city at all.

Some estimates put the population of pre-Columbus Central America at 25 million. It wasn't until the 1960s that the population reached the same levels again. Over 80% of these people were killed through disease and approximately another 15% died in the slave trade.

By 1630, the population that had once numbered 25 Million was down to 700,000.

edit: if you want to read more about the massive and sophisticated indigenous civilizations that were completely wiped out, I highly recommend the book 1491

No worries! Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a really good book if you're into this kind of thing.

Do you even read your "sources"?

CIA AND FBI NOT WORKING TOGETHER. CONSPIRACY!

THE US GOVERNMENT USES THINK TANKS THAT HAVE FORMER POLITICANS AND EX-MILITARY! THE CABAL GOES DEEPER THAN WE THOUGHT!

No, organizations "defending their turf" is one of the biggest management roadblocks inside and outside the government. Even units inside the CIA and FBI often don't work together. It's human nature.

And of course the government is going to use foreign policy think tanks staffed by former goverment and private foreign policy experts. (And non experts, they can certainly be incompetent). I mean duh.

I know I don't have the time to waste on reading this inane BS. All it is is a bunch of (often dubious) correlations that are supposed to advance an agenda. I'll stick with reading actual sources like The Looming Tower or Ghost Wars

> There are other reasons for suspecting that Jesus’s prayer of forgiveness is original to Luke 23. Throughout both Luke and Acts, for example, it is emphasized that even though Jesus was innocent (as were his followers), those who acted against him did so in ignorance. As Peter says in Acts 3: “I know that you acted in ignorance” (v. 17); or as Paul says in Acts 17: “God has overlooked the times of ignorance” (v. 27). And that is precisely the note struck in Jesus’s prayer: “for they don’t know what they are doing.”

> It appears, then, that Luke 23:34 was part of Luke’s original text. Why, though, would a scribe (or a number of scribes) have wanted to delete it? Here is where understanding something about the historical context within which scribes were working becomes crucial. Readers today may wonder for whom Jesus is praying. Is it for the Romans who are executing him in ignorance? Or is it for the Jews who are responsible for turning him over to the Romans in the first place? However we might answer that question in trying to interpret the passage today, it is clear how it was interpreted in the early church. In almost every instance in which the prayer is discussed in the writings of the church fathers, it is clear that they interpreted the prayer as being uttered not on behalf of the Romans but on behalf of the Jews. Jesus was asking God to forgive the Jewish people (or the Jewish leaders) who were responsible for his death.

> Now it becomes clear why some scribes would have wanted to omit the verse. Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of the Jews? How could that be? For early Christians there were, in fact, two problems with the verse, taken in this way. First, they reasoned, why would Jesus pray for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully rejected God himself? That was scarcely conceivable to many Christians. Even more telling, by the second century many Christians were convinced that God had not forgiven the Jews because, as mentioned earlier, they believed that he had allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed as a punishment for the Jews in killing Jesus. As the church father Origen said: “It was right that the city in which Jesus underwent such sufferings should be completely destroyed, and that the Jewish nation be overthrown” (Against Celsus 4, 22).

> The Jews knew full well what they were doing, and God obviously had not forgiven them. From this point of view, it made little sense for Jesus to ask for forgiveness for them, when no forgiveness was forthcoming. What were scribes to do with this text, then, in which Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”? They dealt with the problem simply by excising the text, so that Jesus no longer asked that they be forgiven.

• Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
  
  

The user turned this narrative into a five part series of the first killings, how the ordinary men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 dealt with the aftermath of that killing, how the killings became a routine, and eventually details their largest mass killing - the killing of the 42,000 Jews in the Lublin Ghetto

HighCrimesandHistory's post is based on the fantastic work Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The book details the 500 middle aged family men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, mostly shopkeepers and tradesmen from Hamburg, as they directly killed at least 38,000 Jews in under a year, and sent tens of thousands more to the death camps.

The book itself is incredible and a must read for anybody interested, but /u/highcrimesandhistory turned parts of the book into an incredibly visceral and readable narrative

You are going to get a new asshole torn open for openly disregarding the abundant accounts from outside and within the German armed forces themselves that state German Wehrmacht personnel willingly aided the SS. More importantly they also aided the Ordnungspolizei, the more important of the two, imo, as most people are not even aware of their existence. Most will probably read that name and go "Or dung poli- who?" especially people who think the Wehrmacht were shining beacons of virtue. By the end of the war the OrPo were assimilated into the SS. Who were the Ordnungspolizei and why were they incorporated into the SS? They were, prior to 1936, Germany's police forces. With their collectivization under Nazi control they became Germany's federal police. Many of the people simply retained their jobs during all of this, as it's easier for everyone if the police who worked under an organization of this or that name continue their jobs under a different organization with the same scope, broadly speaking. Give it a few years and the OrPo would be accompanying the German advance into the Eastern Front, where they participated in war crimes as a paramilitary force that herded Jews into ghettos and took part in mass murder. Let that sink in for a second, the once FEDERAL POLICE of Germany was gradually warped to the point where it was carrying out mass murder and finally amalgamated into the SS as there ceased to be a need to distinguish the two.

People all too often cite the SS as being packed to the brim with young and ideologically volatile German men who grew up affected by the rhetoric they were exposed to and bought into it. This is simply not reflective of reality when police officers who were predominantly middle-age and lived their early lives before post-WW1 sentiments began to brew were, in their 30s and 40s, complicit in war crimes and mass murder. As police officers. You really believe the Wehrmacht was guilt-free when what used to be civilian law enforcement took up arms and rampaged across Europe, safely behind the frontlines for the most part, murdering ethnic minorities and other "undesirables"? This is without even mentioning those same policemen become taskmasters in all corners of Europe, overseeing ten times or more their number in local collaborators, often regional police forces the Germans simply left intact and incorporated for their own uses. There's a good book on this called Ordinary Men. If ordinary cops can do that, you can bet your ass a soldier who has no reservations about killing people can do the same if not worse.

I'm sure there were German officers who vehemently opposed the shit they were being fed, but it wasn't significant nor does it stand as evidence disproving the occurrence of other incidents. You don't disprove something which is factually recorded as having happened by putting forward a case where the opposite occurred. Just like how you don't retroactively prove you didn't commit a crime by not committing a crime in a difference situation. That's not how it works.

Manstein was supposedly one of those German officers, rather far up the chain of command, who was not always in agreement with Hitler. Right up until the point he received a large estate in Poland and tax benefits, much like many other officers in the Wehrmacht complaints from him promptly ceased to manifest themselves and he was more than happy to serve. Manstein. The Manstein.

You're arguing with at best isolated anecdotes and excerpts from history which can be cherry picked to present a misleading narrative that is still mostly acceptable- if only to those who don't dig deeper and have little general knowledge of the Second World War and its darker details. At worst you're putting forward overwhelmingly misleading generalizations and just blatantly incorrect information you cannot find anywhere except from those who advocate historical revision. Against the bigger backdrop of documented history- minus cherry-picking, that's just not a fight you're going to win.

That's actually kind of accurate. You should read How the Irish Became White and Low Life Gangs of New York is really curate, even down to the awful accents of the characters.

Maybe take a look at this documentary to get a little perspective on the current situation in the Congo. Canadians are among the top consumers of electronic goods, and it's the materials used to make these good that come from "blood minerals." There are also a few articles on the subject here, here and here. The west plays a large part in the violence in Western African nations. Canadians should at least realize that our lifestyles contribute (whether directly or indirectly) to some degree to political situations in third world countries.

And to say "it's shit because they made it shit" is so ignorant I don't even know where to start. Perhaps take a look through this book to realize how fucked up the Congo was from its earliest days of colonization.

Interesting fact about the term 'Megadeath' that I just learned from a cool book I'm reading, Command and Control by Eric Schlosser: It is a unit that describes 1 million deaths resultant from a nuclear attack, and was coined in some of the initial reports assessing the potential damage from an all out nuclear war (measuring fatalities in megadeaths, e.g. 40 megadeaths = 40 million killed) during the 1950's. I guess fans of the band are probably aware of this etymology, but as someone who doesn't really listen to them, I was not.

If you want to read more with some amazing technical details of the Titan silos, I highly recommend Eric Schlosser's book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". It's a compelling read.

Kind of an aside, but if you like "Bridge of Spies," read Command and Control. It's a great book about the cold war and MAD theory.

This subject has been Jared Diamond's life's work. Guns, Germs, and Steel explains it all much more thoroughly.

As they say, history book are written by the winners.

If you want to see more of the ugly parts of (the US) history that the books left out, I suggest A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

A People's History of the United States discusses the subject of manufactured racial strife extensively.
I recommend this book for this, as well as many other highly useful facts that are typically omitted from the normal discussions of US history.

It's not just the media. There's an entire industry of right-wing authors for example that write books that border on mental illness.

Historically illiterate drivel like: https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

And here's an actual expert responding to this book:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122231

And that book was a best seller, a book absolutely void of facts was a best seller.

I have been reading Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. He does a very decent and attempted unbiased approach at describing the interactions between European colonists and the indigenous cultures.

Christopher Columbus, for example, was a greedy Spanish imperialist seeking riches for himself and the monarchy. He condoned and promoted genocide (against the Haitians), sex trafficking (of young native females), and slave trading on a vast scale. I won't go into the bucket list of his atrocities, but they were the templet used moving forward into the continental genocides (North & South America, Australia, Africa) that followed.

Yet we are told in our schools that he "sailed the ocean blue," and was a swell guy who founded America.

Jonah Goldburg (of Liberal Fascism note) used to ask people that threw around the word 'Fascist' as an all Purpose insult the following question (paraphrasing from memory);

Other than the war, bigotry and genocide, what don't you like about the Nazi party platform?

Not to say that the above 3 are something to ignore in historical analysis, but as important as they are in the retrospective of the Nazi's, my suspicion is relatively few lower middle class voters were casting ballots for a war in the East. At least, as opposed to universal employment, say, or the Nazi whole grain bread initiative.

https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

They've been consistently lied to for a long, long time.

Yup. There's a whole book about the change.

It's actually more heart breaking when you know that basically the entire midwest once once considered the home of radical left politics in the US. As Thomas Frank notes in What's The Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America:

>I do not want to minimize the change that this represents. Certain parts of the Midwest were once so reliably leftist that the historian Walter Prescott Webb, in his classic 1931 history of the region, pointed to its persistent radicalism as one of the “Mysteries of the Great Plains.” Today the mystery is only heightened; it seems inconceivable that the Midwest was ever thought of as a “radical” place, as anything but the land of the bland, the easy snoozing flyover. Readers in the thirties, on the other hand, would have known instantly what Webb was talking about, since so many of the great political upheavals of their part of the twentieth century were launched from the territory west of the Ohio River. The region as they knew it was what gave the country Socialists like Eugene Debs, fiery progressives like Robert La Follette, and practical unionists like Walter Reuther; it spawned the anarchist IWW and the coldly calculating UAW; and it was periodically convulsed in gargantuan and often bloody industrial disputes. They might even have known that there were once Socialist newspapers in Kansas and Socialist voters in Oklahoma and Socialist mayors in Milwaukee, and that there were radical farmers across the region forever enlisting in militant agrarian organizations with names like the Farmers’ Alliance, or the Farmer-Labor Party, or the Non-Partisan League, or the Farm Holiday Association. And they would surely have been aware that Social Security, the basic element of the liberal welfare state, was largely a product of the midwestern mind.

>Almost all of these associations have evaporated today. That the region’s character has been altered so thoroughly—that so much of the Midwest now regards the welfare state as an alien imposition; that we have trouble even believing there was a time when progressives were described with adjectives like fiery, rather than snooty or bossy or wimpy—has to stand as one of the great reversals of American history.

Oh, Gavin. We used to be friends, why did you throw your lot in with Biscotti? :/

Yes, the Irish were discriminated against, heavily. Because they weren't considered white at the time.

How the Irish Became White

https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

Adam Hochschild wrote an excellent book about it

> it coudl be argued much of africa has a better life and opportunity under colonialism

Read King Leopold’s Ghost from cover to cover before you ever make this claim again.

For Korea in general I took a lot of East Asian history courses, including courses on relations with the west, in college. I studied abroad in South Korea for a time where I studied Korean history (ancient and modern) as well as Korean culture and sociology (mostly South Korea). I also had the pleasure of speaking with someone from North Korea.
But if you're interested to know more, these are some sources I can personally recommend...

Books:

• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
  
  
• Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
  
  
• The Cleanest Race
  
  
• Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
  
  
• North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea
  
  
• Korea's Place In The Sun by Bruce Cummings
  
  
• Korea Old and New by Harvard Press and Korea Institute
  
  
  And there's more that I have not read yet. If you only read one book out of these, I'd say Nothing to Envy is a great place to start. It gives the most complete picture, in my opinion.
  
  
  Documentaries:
  
  
• A State of Mind (2004)
  
  
• Seoul Train (2005)
  
  
• National Geographic: Inside North Korea (2007)
  
  
• Inside Undercover in North Korea (2007)
  
  
• The Vice Guide to North Korea (2008)
  
  
• Kimjongilia (2008)
  
  
• The Juche Idea (2008)
  
  
• Seven Days in North Korea (2008)
  
  And there's a whole bunch more that I have not seen yet.
  
  And there's a whole bunch of essays and journals/photo collections floating around the internet as well.

No need. If you go read books like Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea you'll learn that there's already a thriving underground North Korean population in China just outside of Korea. When the food and economic situations in North Korea started getting really bad in the 90's lots of North Koreans risked going to China for jobs. They, and the local Chinese, apparently got pretty good at hiding from the Chinese military & police who would occasionally show up and try to round up North Koreans to ship back home.

Check out Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

According to some, it's about Guns, Germs and Steel.

I'd recommend Ordinary Men. It follows a reserve police battalion responsible for many round-ups and mass shootings. The author pours through dozens of interviews to get individual perspectives and motivations from the men themselves to see how a bunch of middle-aged reservists, most of whom weren't even members of the Nazi party, could kill like this.

trust. Humans are unique animals in this way.

Read Sapiens by Yuval-Noah-Harari

Blows up and articulates how strange human culture is, and how weird that we just accept "the way things are"

https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

> that is, the fact that the Bible has remained unchanged throughout the years

"Fact" - not at all. This isn't true. See Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

There have been errors introduced into the Bible by scribes copying it incorrectly.

Furthermore the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't much better:

>The scrolls are also important because they have enabled scholars to gather an immense amount of information about how the Bible was written and how it was transmitted from generation to generation. In many cases the scrolls show a remarkable similarity to the text of the Hebrew Bible currently in use. In some cases differences between the scrolls and the traditional Hebrew text help explain difficulties in the present Hebrew Bible, and most modern translations of the Bible (such as the NIV) incorporate some of the new information from the scrolls.

The Nag Hammadi find also casts some doubts on the idea of a unified Christian message and theology in the early years after Jesus was crucified. There is a lot scholoraly historical work on the differences betweeen various forms of Christianity from the 1st and 2nd century.

So there were a lot more Gospels, they just didn't make it into the Bible. The Christian Bible you see today was basically established by the early Roman Church. This particular form of Christianity was state sanctioned and thus other forms were driven out, if not outright persecuted.

Why should I believe a random Quora answer instead of a Yale Professor, or an actual textual critic?

Reza Aslan is a fraud posing as a scholar and cannot be trusted. Anyone wanting to read authentic scholarship should read Bart Ehrman.

read all about it -- and the whole CIA corruption of Planet Earth -- https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006 -- still ongoing running our foreign policy for the good of Banksters, Multi-national Corps, and Military Industrial Complex ... under the guise of freedom & democracy until US rules planet earth's people and natural resources

If you are from the US, check how much you give Israel in aid annually. Zero percent interest loans, grants, access to the most modern weapons, military contracts, military aid, diplomatic backing, etc. Their weapons industry is based on US contracts and access to US military technology.

• The US pays for military research
  
  
• Israel gets the technology for free.
  
  
• They use the technology in their own weapons industry.
  
  
• The US BUYS IT FROM ISRAEL
  
  
• Profit (for them)!
  
  If you do not believe me, read this book.

As regards to the Body Farm. The university of tennessee gets many, many donations every year for research, they have a giant freezer full of cadavers awaiting their turn in the Tennessee sunshine. If you donate your body to science, there is no way to be assured where it is going to go. For more reference on this, check out a book called Stiff http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826

> What you say would only makes sense if germs guns and steel would have been unrelated to immigration

My point is that immigrants to the US will not be able to colonize us using superior weaponry, resources, or immunity asymmetry. They will not be able to overpower us with their superior numbers. We are in no danger of going the way of Native Americans or Texas. With or without a more secure border.

>native Americans who were so stupid to think the refugees they helped would be grateful in the long run and treat them with respect and behave as guests?

Well, for one thing, Native Americans were so outmatched that they could not have prevented us from immigrating, as many attempted to do throughout the the Continent. Particularly after we unleashed several deadly plagues.

>By contrast the Africans who did resist immigration/conquest still have their culture and way of life

Your example of African is not nearly the gotcha you think it is. People on the African continent traded with Eurasia for thousands of years and built up an immunity to diseases like small pox, what's more many African regions had their own deadly diseases that Europeans were not immune to. A big part of the reason that Africa put up a better resistance to colonization was that they had the same type of immunity asymmetry that Europeans had in North and South America.

Source

More info


>A lot of them quite prefer living under white rule and emigrate to white areas like South Africa and Europe and most people would say their life would be better off if we accept our way of life (doctors transportation jobs economy all around whiteness) as better, but they have a choice to live like their forefathers or not.

This really has nothing to with your point, but it is still a profoundly ignorant understanding of colonization. For one thing, South Africa is a majority black state. Doctors, transportation, and jobs are not exclusively the white way of life. Just ask China who had such advanced "transportation" that they could have make a trans Atlantic or trans Pacific voyage several hundred years before Europeans.

What's more colonization is the systematic pillage and dominance of another country. African countries did not have to be invaded and stripped of their sovereignty and resources in order to import European innovations such as cars.

There are many people all over the continent of Africa that do choose to follow a more traditional way of life. And, like you said, many African countries have economies that are prosperous and culturally more similar to European and Asian countries. There are also a number of countries and regions that are still struggling with the atrocities of the past five centuries, and do not "chose" to lack jobs, doctors, and "transportation"(cars?, highways?).

Don't worry, I am actually reading Guns, Germs and Steel at the moment and I have read many of these details within the last 7 days.

I am not trying to name names and point fingers here. The point I am trying to make is that all nations have a history with race. Additionally, think about:

• Australia and the Aboriginals
  
• Native Siberians
  
• South East Asians before the Austronesian expansion (this happened many hundred years ago, though)
  
  Apartheid was bad, but it was certainly not the Holocaust, and the world seems to think that we are all a bunch of white-supremists. Just because Americans killed with Germs instead of Guns doesn't not take the deaths away. But that also does not mean you need to feel guilty. White people were indeed slaves at many points in history.
  
  I didn't have anything to do with Apartheid.
  But I'm still prepared to say sorry for any harm my ancestors caused. And I hope that we can learn to love each other, despite our histories.

Since you are looking for some reference books, here are some that I resort to using quite often in my world-building process.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond

Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill

Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armor by Roger Ford

What People Wore When: A Complete Illustrated History of Costume from Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century for Every Level of Society by Melissa Leventon

The History of Money by Jack Weatherford

If you need more, I can list more. I have a reference book for just about anything you could imagine in my ever-growing personal library.

They missed one of the most important ones!!

Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

This is really common - if you donate a body to science it goes where it's needed. The entire body isn't needed for research in one place so the remains can be parted out as needed.

I highly recommend the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - it talks about the options out there for our bodies after we die, and manages to be light-hearted but respectful at the same time. It's really one of my favorite books

Don't be silly. First, there's no way that that tour company does a lot of good humanitarian work in NK because nothing can be done without the explicit approval of the state. Whatever money they think they're giving, and however many meals they think are going to the orphanage, are probably going to help mid-level cadres bribe their kids' way into Kim Il-Sung University. Of course that money is going straight to the NK government. The only reason they let tourists in is because tourists pay lots of money for the privilege of a sanitized tour of the nicest parts of Pyongyang, with bonus appearances by North Korean citizens who definitely, 100% were not placed there by the regime and do not have to report on you afterwards. I recommend you read the book 'Nothing to Envy' by Barbara Demick for a general idea of things.

Religion is basically a virus, like Smallpox. Europe has had much more time to develop an immunity to it. Thousands upon thousands of years. The US is the New World, this is still practically our first exposure to it.

To read more on this perspective, check out "Guns Germs and Steel" which talks a lot about how viral immunity came about in Europe, as well as "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins.

I can think of a few

• Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - WHY and how whole empires fall
  
  
• Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" - How money rules the world - here's how.
  
  
• Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - his thesis might not be entirely correct - but it's a VERY fair look at how our history was influenced by these factors.
  
  
• Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's - "The Predictioneer's Game" - - How quantitative models are SCARILY accurate
  
  
• Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly" - And how sometimes quantitative models are totally wrong.
  
  
• Paul Roberts - "The End of Oil" - Probably the most serious and balanced read on what could be one of the most important economic problems facing our modern civilization in the next 20 years.
  
  
• Frank & Cook's "Winner Take All Society" - and why things are a problem.
  
  
• Richard Florida's "The Great Reset" - Florida is a pretty good author all around - far better than some others in the pitch.
  
  
• James Bamford's amazing "Body of Secrets" - Not all our enemies are external, and sometimes our allies turn out to actually be thuggish & deadly enemies.
  
  
• Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" - Nobody here is exactly as they appear.
  
  
• Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"
  
  
• Robin Marantz Henig's "A Monk in the Garden" - Yeah - the priest that proved Darwin's theory, in 1865.....oh yeah and he invented statistics along the way.
  
  
• Brian Sykes' "The seven Daughters of Eve"
  
  
• Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" - Every page is practically amazing - a collection of amazing old articles from Dr. H's work
  
  
• Kristina Borjesson's edit of "Into the Buzzsaw" - the hard truth about a couple of things in the US media
  
  
• Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" - a great work about such an amazing idea.
  
  
• Kim Sterelny's "Dawkins vs. Gould" - this is a REAL debate about evolution!
  

Yeah, you picked a bad hill to die on, saying I " generically blame "Europeans" " when I clearly pointed out that there were Europeans calling out chattel slavery as evil as it was happening. You really should have caught that before responding.

Somewhat realated, another podcast you can check out is Behind the Bastards, which did a two part episode on Belgium's crimes in the Congo. https://www.behindthebastards.com/podcasts/part-one-king-leopold-ii-the-first-modern-bastard.htm

Did you know Leopold raised capital for his African venture by claiming he was doing humanitarian work fighting the Arabs who were enslaving Africans? And that he then used those funds to create his own slave armies and workforce to extract rubber wealth from the region? I didn't, until I took the time to listen and learn. And that's why I called you out on trying to shift blame to India and it's slave trade, bc that's an old racist tactic to muddy the waters and derail a conversation on slavery.

maybe add King Leopold's Ghost to that list: https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905/ref=sr_1_1?crid=V66OOWR7ZQFJ&keywords=king+leopold%27s+ghost&qid=1573326603&sprefix=king+leo%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-1

edit: also, don't start an apology with feigned innocence on this subject, especially on r/blackfellas. Just own that you response was bad, and trust that we can see the effort to change course.

American History classes are far more focused than World History classes. That and American textbooks are whitewashed in a big way.

Everybody should read this book for a good grasp on what's happening with American History classes indoctrination.

https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

THIS

The editor of the National Review wrote a book call Liberal Fascism. The comparison doesn't get more explicit than that.

I grew up in Kansas. It’s stupid. There’s literally been books written about it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/080507774X/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_c_api_i_lwC1DbXTQKMJP

The book 1491 https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059
should give you a basic answer to your questions. And you are welcome to dig more.

This assumes America is or was one culture. Different historians classify people differently, but in the broadest sense there are at least:

1. Yankee
   
2. Southern (Dixie + Appalachian)
   
3. Midland
   
4. Western/Native/Frontier/Spanish
   
   Embedded in these groups is the idea of a founding culture (going back centuries) that informs attitudes and ideals. To your point regarding skepticism toward education, I think that's a feature primarily of the Appalachian group who were founded by one of the last waves of British immigrants. Glossing over a lot of history: they were poor, desperate, war-torn, and generally uneducated. Late to the party and culturally incompatible with many of the existing colonists, they headed for the hills and subsisted in a romantic but precarious manner. This is where we get the frontiersman and the rugged individualist myth. While tied to "southern" culture (for a number of interesting reasons that we will ignore for simplicity of this comment), they're really pretty distinct. For whatever reasons, this group has asserted itself and suggested their version of "American culture" is the correct one--and we've been living through this friction for a while.
   
   For a layperson, I suggest the following for further reading:
   
   

• https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Our-Patchwork-Nation-Surprising-America/dp/B0045BQT14/
  
  If you're up for a more academic and thorough examination:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Albions-Seed-British-Folkways-cultural/dp/0195069056/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Bound-Away-Virginia-Westward-Movement/dp/0813917743/

Nope, that's not what I was getting at. Feel free to argue with your own preconceived notions at this point.

I will point out one thing. There is a good academic book on lobbies, particularly Israeli. In this case, is this okay for the government to take their money that ultimately alters US policy? Are you outraged by this or these particular players get a free pass but when Russia gives out a loan it's a subversion of democracy? Are you hypocrite or perhaps you can acknowledge that there is a fundamental flaw in the system and Russians are doing nothing wrong but to play this by the "rules" that Western democracies have established for themselves?

I'm no scholar, of course, but it seems like the majority of scholars believe that a man named Jesus existed in the first century C.E. and that he caused some trouble. Some of the New Testament (parts of Mark specifically) may be credible, but much of what we know about Jesus is myth. Pretty much everything written about him was written long after he died. The writings of Paul are some of the earliest Christian writings, and those don't go into much detail about Jesus.

I would recommend reading the book "Misquoting Jesus" if you are interested.

I'd strongly recommend people read Ordinary Men.

"Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101, used to massacre and round up Jews for deportation to the Nazi death camps in German occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of the book, which was much influenced by the experiments of Stanley Milgram, was that the men of Unit 101 were not demons or Nazi fanatics but ordinary middle-aged men of working-class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found unfit for military duty. In some cases, these men were ordered to round up Jews and if there was not enough room for them on the trains, to shoot them. In other, more chilling cases, they were ordered to merely kill a specified number of Jews in a given town or area. The commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of this duty if they found it too unpleasant; the majority chose not to exercise that option, resulting in fewer than 15 men out of a battalion of 500 opting out of their grisly duties."

During my graduate history studies we read this: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

Using journals taken from these reservist policemen, the aurthor displays just how much the common man knew about the final solution and just how traumatizing it was to shoot them face to face.

Yeah a pig is a lot worse for instance. I may also be influenced a bit by having recently read a book that goes a great way to question how we humans inflict pain on other sentient beings without thinking twice as long it is for food production. You get fined for kicking a dog, but we subject farm animals to all sorts of treatments that would qualify as torture if used on humans. Why is it not ok to have human slaves, but fine to enslave animals? In a monotheistic worldview god allows both. In a scientific world view we should have neither.

For those interested this is the book: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

I can strongly recommend it though it may challenge your beliefs about who we humans are in the grand scheme of things.

Sorry that was a bit offtopic. And yes I still eat meat and consume dairy products.

In addition to ignoring the Labor Movement.

Zinn for the win!

How do you know it recorded a ministry of any person, period?

Do you have proof of this alleged characters death, burial, and resurrection? If not, I assert Rand Al'Thor as the avatar of the creator.

A People's History Of The United States by Howard Zinn

Amazon Link

Whew, okay. Pulled out my actual computer to answer this.
So, a lot of what I could recommend isn't short stuff you could read in an afternoon because 1. it's depressing as fuck, and 2. it's likely heavy with the sheer volume of references wherein at least one book attempts to bludgeon you with the facts that "this was depressing as fuck." Frequent breaks or alternating history-related books with fiction/poetry/other topics is rather recommended from my experience. Can't remember if I got onto this topic through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or just some random book found in the library.

The very clean cut, textbook Wikipedia definition of "sundown town", aka "Don't let the sun set (down) on you here.", (Ref: BlackThen.com), is:
> sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

For my intro into the subject however, read Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. This is a very emotionally draining, mentally exhausting book though, frequently with lists of atrocities in paragraph form. I think it's an important read, one which frankly should've been covered my senior year of highschool or so, but it's a difficult one. Also on my reading list is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration which is a surprising and sneakily hopeful title for such a depressing topic, so only guessing the narration may be somewhat more accessible.

Also, 'cause I totally didn't run to my kindle app to list out titles before fully reading your post, here's some below, and relisted one above, by timeline placement, best as can be figured. These might not be the best on each topic, but they're the ones available to my budget at the time and some are still on my reading list.

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

• Timeline 1831
  
  Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
  
• Timeline post-Civil War in 1865 through the 1920's, with thousands of towns still containing obvious racial divides (see "wrong side of the tracks", etc) and sometimes still utilizing laws to push black folks out of neighborhoods today.
  
  The Mis-Education of the Negro
  
• 1933, please see the book later down the list "Brainwashed"
  
  At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
  
• 1944 through the 1970's
  
  Assata
  
• 1960's through 1970's, about Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard)
  
  Revolutionary Suicide
  
• 1940's through late 1980's, about Huey P. Newton, Black Panther co-founder.
  
  Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
  
• 1980's through ?
  
  Sister Outsider
  
• 1980's essays on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class
  
  See also:
  
  Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival
  
  Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
  
• "A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders."
  
  Black Feminist Thought
  
• Supposedly there's a correct and incorrect version of this with severely cut or modified chapters, but not sure which is which.
  
  Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations by Bell Hooks
  
• Contemporary essays
  
  Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
  
• from slavery through today, how black people have been taught they're inferior to the point they help drag themselves and each other down
  
  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  
• Supposed to be really good, haven't read this yet.
  
  
  
  
  

https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

Liberal Fascism

What's the Matter with Kansas. Not sure if that's still a popular book but it still holds up. I's like a textbook for why people vote against their own interests.

Welcome to the mind of a Trump voter. Where Putin and Duterte are heroes.


>Trump is simply the logical response to the Democratic Party going too far left on the political spectrum and ignoring the needs of the working class.

Trump makes all of his products in other countries. No way in hell that guy gives a shit about the middle class. He's just courting the undereducated people who will vote against their own interests. It's a GOP trade secret. Sorry dude. You are getting played again. A billionaire from new york city has no interest in helping your shitty cities. Every city that guy goes to, he dumps on.

I would recommend a book called "Whats the matter with Kansas". https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a good read. Despite being more than a decade old, most of the points put forth in it are relevant today.

It's a good title, and lately I've seen "What's the Matter with Iowa?" and "What's the Matter with Trumpland?"

Ignatiev wrote an outstanding book on "How the Irish became White". It's worth a read for a phenomenon that, I agree, seems hard to believe.

I think this caricature from the end of the 19th century is pretty telling.

The Irish were stereotyped as uncivilized, unskilled and impoverished and were forced to work at the least desired occupations and live in crowded ethnic ghettoes. Many ads for employment were accompanied by the order "NO IRISH NEED APPLY." Does this remind you of anything? They were certainly not black, but also not really white.

That was the big problem American society faced at the end of the 19th century. When immigrants from other parts of the world, not just central Europe came. Are Russians white? But why are they so different from us other whites? Are Italians white? But they are anarchists and they speak a different language. Are the Jews white? But they are not Christians as we all are.

Doesn't make a lot of sense if your society is built on the difference between black and white and grey areas don't fit into the narrative.

> My family and ancestry are all from Ireland.

I stopped reading. I didn't ask for the oppression olympics and, back then, the Irish were not considered "white".

Now, why don't you go look up how you all got welcomed into the "White" race and get back to me?

It's not a pretty fucking story. So no, the Irish were not oppressed for being white. They became White and now fully enjoy White privilege. Sorry but I am good and fucking tired of the Irish card.

I recommend you read this book if you want to understand why your words are earning the Side Eye.

We weren't always. This is a good read, How the Irish Became White.

Los Irlandeses no eran considerados blancos cuando recién llegaron a Estados Unidos, pero eso cambio con el tiempo.

https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095

The book King Leopold's Ghost is all about this genocide. It's a very good read and I highly recommend it.

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild is really good. Its about the Belgian King's rule over the Congo.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevich is an account of the Rwandan Genocide of '94.

That's more recent history, but the fact is little is written about pre-colonial Africa (not dealing with Egypt). I haven't read much, but I'm sure theres some decent readings about the Mali Empire (maybe start with Mansa Musa?).

What about "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textbook Got Wrong" by James W. Loewen? I imagine they'd like the title, then get progressively more horrified as they proceeded.

There is no historical evidence of a written language in the entire sub-saharan region of africa at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

And no the slaves didn't come from the other regions of africa where was some written language called Ge'ez, they mostly came from Senegambia:

http://www.ibtimes.com/where-africa-did-slaves-come-286429

Also confirmed by my school textbook.

So you should really get out of your cucked history books, or maybe talk to actual historians:

[link removed because automod]AskHistorians/comments/1nz7k6/were_there_no_native_written_languages_in/

Also, there was no wheel and no two-story building and no vessel that could even dream of crossing the ocean, you want more ?

I know it's hard to swallow for liberals but humans are different, blacks have a bigger penis, better musculature, more testosterone = more inclined to violence = less inclined to get educated = lower IQ.

Asians have a smaller penis than whites but are also smarter so I don't see why blacks would have a problem acknowledging other differences.

Also, if you want to learn more about the history of humans on this planet: https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552 Great read.

These anecdotes are from Nothing to Envy, I believe.

It seems likely that the original authors were recording the existing mythos of their people, and the myths were used in their society like myths are used in every society: to explain and give meaning to a world they didn't understand, to provide a cohesive narrative for the group, to pass along and reinforce values. I have found learning just a little about the common mythologies of the world extremely interesting and helpful in putting the bible into correct perspective. Like, how many times a flood myth pops up and the different interactions between the diving and humanity in those stories.

You might enjoy Bart Ehrman's writing on the new testament and Jesus as he explores the story of Jesus, who wrote, changed and codified it and why, and how it became a religion.

Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

Most of it came from classes and lectures. I don't have the class book list and sources anymore. I do hope you really, really like reading!

Forged writingss

Misquoting Jesus A well known book.

Introduction to the new testiment

The new testament: a historical intoduction

Revelation and the End of All Things Also a somewhat popular book

You can also do some Wikipedia reading on Gnosticism and other early Christen sects to get an idea of just how many groups their were and how differing their beliefs could be. Also look for things on the Q, M and L source.

Edit

You can likely find a number of online pod-casts (or whatever you call them) and lectures on these things.

I am not a historian so my access to books and memorized sources is very limited, I am a student and have been accused of reading serial boxes at least once when I accidentally quoted the wrong book name, It was too much fun to make the correction as no one had ever said that too me before and I felt special, like I had hit an academic milestone.

Also, Don't feel bad about asking for sources.

> They are first and foremost people and individuals with lives and families,

So is everyone; I don't think anyone seriously doubts it. ISIS members have families and people that love them. So do Klansmen. This is the most facile, boring anti-violence argument one can possibly imagine.

> they dont conciously go out to enforce unjustified hierarchy,

I mean, yes, they do. It's literally their job. Maybe they know it's unjustified, maybe they don't; I find it hard to care. Cops will do anything from mass executions (https://www.amazon.ca/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-solution/dp/0060995068) to bathhouse raids if they're ordered and paid to. If they think hierarchy is unjustified, they either need to quit, or become selective when following orders. Put on the uniform, take the wage, pay the price.

> I cant believe the degeneracy and the actual hypocracy of some people, who would defend muslims as individuals against the type right wing facism and racism which paints all muslims as terrorists ,but find it perfectly acceptable to kill nameless Cops who had nothing to with the actions of their colleagues.

I mean, not all Muslims are involved in oppression. Cops are, definitionally; even if they're nice folks, orders are orders, standard policy is standard policy. This is just hilarious equivocation. And I mean, I don't think many people are outright saying yeah, go abduct and kill some cops - the overwhelming response I've seen has been about how inevitable this response was. And "has nothing to do with their colleagues" is pretty rich - even cops who act with outright violence often aren't hood-wearing neon-lights RACISTS, they're expressing subtle biases that other cops tend to respect and respond to. Cops in a department will draw into the blue wall and actively defend each other - when individual "good cops" start actually doing something about these supposedly unrepresentative "bad apples," I'll start to care about their differentiation.

> Do cops have role in maintaoning hierarchy? Yes. Do cops on a regular basis use violence and bullying to maintain this hierarchy? Yes. Should cops be killed irregardless of their actions or livelihoods? FUCKING NO.

I'd love to see some proof of people actually suggesting a kind of cop genocide unironically, because it's pretty obviously not what most people were saying.

> Why the fuck would you say shit like this, knowing it does not represent the ideolodgy of libertarian socialism, workplace democracy and the absance of hierachy?

You know violence and indeed outright assassination are the products of certain anarchist doctrines, right? Propaganda by the deed wasn't universal, but it's an important part of anarchist history. Admiration/ respect for such actions is not utterly incompatible with anarchism.

tl;dr: Psychopaths and Sociopaths are normal people.

Sociopathy is not a good/ bad thing that turn people into monster.It's just a copying mechanism for survivors of abuse in their childhood.

My advice for every sociopath with antisocial tendencies is: Focus your attention on the kind of person you want to be, rather than what kind of events you want to happen. Imagine how you would act now if you suddenly had impeccable character. Then, make your goal be to act that way, just for the moment.

I think the reason why people are concerned or even frightened by people that show no empathy is because it seems they cannot be reasoned with.
You cannot appeal to them with emotions, or other ways of relating that may have had an effect on a neurotypical.

What do people who lack empathy act like?

They behave all the time like you do most of the time.

Someone who lacks empathy does not vicariously feel the experiences of another. It does not mean they are predatory. It does not mean they are irresponsible. It does not mean they are sadistic. Do not be persuaded into demonizing such people.


Sociopaths and Psychopaths lack an empathy and/or guilt barrier that would prevent them from doing something that is generally perceived to be "wrong" "bad" or "immoral".

They are indifferent beyond measure,without mercy and justice.Try to imagine the indifference itself as a power.The truth is, indifference really is a power, selectively applied, and living in such a way is not only eminently possible, with a conscious adoption of certain attitudes, but facilitates a freer, more expansive, more adventurous mode of living. Joy and grief are still there, along with all the other emotions, but they are tempered – and, in their temperance, they are less tyrannical.Sociopaths are people who grit their teeth and tolerate pain and suffering.They’re serene and confident in the face of anything you can throw at them.

Think of the spartan warriors (IMO the most stoic society that there was). They were trained since kids to get rid of fear, they were encouraged to get in fight and make fun of each other in order to not take emotions seriously. The spartans had several types of drills that they did in order to abandon primal instincts and reflexes. For example, they would hit aspiring warriors in their eyes with vines until the warriors could stop reflex from closing both eyes when they got hit.

The spartans abandoned all primal instincts, including fear, so that they could be their 100% rational and tactical self during battle, and that's part of the reason they were such good warriors.

Some psychopaths may murder, but it’s not because of their psychopathy that they murder. Indeed, psychopathy or any other condition may have played an important role in someone’s decision making—obviously, no one makes decisions in isolation from their neurological condition—but it’s not the psychopathic mind that turns people to kill—and kill in numbers.

Contrary to being immoral, their social blindspot empowers them to avoid many moral pitfalls. Empathy frequently leads to morally bankrupt behavior:

When a control group in an experiment were asked whether a ten year old girl with a serious illness should be allowed to skip a queue to get medical treatment ahead of children who needed it more, they appropriately refused. When the subjects were encouraged to empathize with her by being given her name, face and personal story, subjects overwhelmingly opted to move her to the front of the queue, consigning faceless children to death.

This is a phenomenon that salespeople, politicians, lawyers and every one with an agenda knows to exploit. I'm exploiting it in this very post, and you didn't even realize it! Those who lack empathy have no such lever by which their thinking may be hijacked. They are more apt to make fair and rational judgments.

As with most things, empathy is not simple. It is not binary; it is not something you either have or don't. You will feel empathy for some people sometimes and other times you won't. Even if you are an empathic person, you frequently act with indifference or disproportionately small concern. Thousands recently died in the Philippines in a disaster that exceeded the 9/11 terror attacks; how many Americans fell to their knees and wept? Did you? The difference between you and someone who doesn't feel empathy is that they behave all the time like you do most of the time.

Champions for empathy will protest, "what's to stop someone from being a violent vandal if they don't have empathy?" Lets be clear about something; empathy won't prevent someone from doing horrendous things . Read the account of a Nazi reservist in Police Battalion 101 who, in spite of being viscerally empathic, participated in the point-blank execution of Jews:

> The shooting of the men was so repugnant to me that I
missed the fourth man. It was simply no longer possible
for me to aim accurately. I suddenly felt nauseous and
ran away from the shooting site.

Empathy is not a safeguard against cruelty. Empathy can even be manipulated into "counter-empathy" or sadism .Empathy was never a deterrent, and those who lack empathy have no more incentive than you to engage in foul behavior.

Archaeologists are finding increasing evidence that large portions of the Amazon are, to a certain extent, man-made. 1491 discusses these finds and I highly recommend the book if you like popular history reading.

Edit: People destroy things, the only that changes is the scale of the damage.

Read an interesting book about the different nations/cultures in America. I don't think it's so straightforward that Americans are all the same. People in Alabama, for example, want very different things out of life and see things very differently than people in NYC, for example.

It predates modern politics by quite a bit, at least in my understanding. I've read Albion's Seed and American Nations, and from my understanding Appalachia and the Scots-Irish culture, plus the Deep South, have always supported war. All of them. The South is also saddled with a culture of honor, and, having been raised in Texas, I can say you lose serious face walking away from a fight.

We like to attribute the contemptuousness towards education as an outgrowth of their poverty, but I think the reverse is true. And I think the contempt for education comes from all the admiration going to "men of action," soldiers, fighters, etc. If you have to distinguish yourself with books and fancy words, you probably can't fight. Or worse, you're afraid to.

That was more likely to be in American Nations and not in Albion's Seed, which covers only British immigration and is, as I remember it, more anthropological than political.

From a summary by Woodard:

> NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.

From skimming this wiki page, it appears there were multiple rounds of immigration, and that the Dutch who live in Michigan moved 200 years after those who settled New Amsterdam.

I have a book recommendation for you: Command and Control

It's a superb read regarding a series of briefs on nuclear weapon safety in fire conditions, and how safe modern weapons are in comparison.

Because the current government of Israel is far-right warhawks who need constant conflict so they can always be "defending themselves" and keep political power, and they do not tolerate ANY criticism

American is a thing that can be easily moved - Benjamin Netanyahu, unaware he is being recorded.

9/11 Was good for Israel because it shifted public opinion away from arabs and towards Israel - Netanyahu

See also: Mearsheimer & Walt, The Israel lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Published: 2007 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Available at:
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501
> "Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element."

Id.

Pro-Israel Lobby caught on tape boasting that its money influences Washington (WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT Rep OMAR WAS SAYING)

Netanyahu says THERE IS NO DIPLOMATIC SOLUTION FOR GAZA as he renews calls for military action - Times of Israel, Nov 2018

Netanyahu Beating War Drums is about Politics More Than Security - Haaretz, Nov 2018

Reading my first 'techo thriller' - a non-fiction booked called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.

If I'd have heard of the genre independently of this book I'd likely not find it appealing, but I am really really enjoying it. Absolutely blowing through it for how dense of a book it is. Also, if I could sum up the contents of this book so far I'd say 'shit is fucked'

Hiya, I am a person who lived in Korea in 2012-2013 and for six months up to April this year. I don't have a military perspective on the issue, but I can tell you a little about my experiences in Korea.

Firstly, know that this uptick in worry and hand-wringing about an imminent nuclear attack by North Korea goes in cycles. The US media get annoyed or bored with whatever it is that they are covering, and start to focus on NK again. This happens about once a year, usually in the springtime. In 2012 it was an imminent existential threat. In 2013 it was, too. As it was in 2014, 2015, 2016, and this year. You can almost set your watch by the coverage, and it is almost always as doomsday as the last time. I went on google's search engine and looked for 'north korea' as a search term for the time since 2004 and made images of each individual year here. Admittedly, 2017's graph looks a little different, but you can clearly see the cycles in the previous years. I would be willing to bet that 2017's graph is more due to POTUS tweeting and the generalized anxiety of the Left in the States than a genuine march toward war.

I'll be that you didn't know there was a genuine exchange of fire in Korea in 2010. There were tense moments of actual live fire for that whole of that year, leading to a 23 November bombardment of a South Korean island by North Korean artillery. 70+ South Korean houses were destroyed, and several were killed on both sides. Even with the tensions and the live artillery, the peninsula did not descend into open war.

In addition, you should know that the coverage of NK issues tends to be overblown in US media. I heard this story from even the likes of NPR the other day, and laughed aloud at the ridiculousness of it. It's lines like this that get the people back in the US riled up:

Defense Secretary James Mattis went within feet of the curbstone separating North and South Korea, where grim-faced North Korean troops stared across at him. It's known as one of the scariest spots on the planet.

That whole story is hyperbolic (and irresponsible reporting, imho). I went to the border at that exact place. It's part of a civilian tourist trip that runs almost every day. It wasn't exactly as the reporter made it seem, like he'd been helicoptered into an active conflict zone.

The DMZ is sad, confusing, and very absurd. But it's probably one of the safest places on Earth. You are infinitely more likely to be shot in any major United States city than at the DMZ. I'll concede that landmines are not a normal worry in US cities, but they don't tend to go off in the DMZ, either. The last time one went off was in 2015 (wounding two).

This time, admittedly, Trump is involved. But that doesn't change things too much except for making people feel more nervous. For this, I'm afraid that I have only a long-term remedy. You need to read Eric Schlosser's Command and Control. This book changed my views on nuclear weapons and greatly improved my understanding of the ways that a nuclear war could start. I don't feel comforted necessarily, but hearing about the ways that generals dealt with say, an alcoholic, depressed, borderline suicidal Nixon during the Watergate scandal made me feel a whole lot better about Trump being POTUS.

Finally, China. They are ascendant, gaining power, and working to make the region stable. They will not tolerate NK's bullshit rising to the level that the US might strike them. They'd just invade first. It wouldn't lead to massive, open conflict with the USA or South Korea. China is a player of the long game, and they will withdraw their support from the NK regime if necessary.

Hope that this helps! Please don't worry about this. Worry about more immediate problems in your own community.

I recomend the book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser, also available in audio format. It's a much better history and synopsis of the issues at hand.

Also, Command and Control is a good (non-fiction) read on the topic.

My go to reading list,

Killing Hope, by William Blum

America's Deadliest Export Democracy, by William Blum

Who is William Blum?

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner

Enemies: The History of the FBI, by Tim Wiener

Who is Tim Weiner?

The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth about Economic Hitmen, Jackals, and How to Change the World by John Perkins

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins

Who is John Perkins?

I would like to nominate Roger Goiran, a Bronze Star winning OSS Captain. Roger was head of CIA's Tehran station in the early 1950s and in Belgium in the early 1960s. Goiran had a very promising CIA career but somewhat fell out of favor after he resigned his Tehran post in protest when the plan to depose democratically elected Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh came through. Goiran believed the plan to put the Shah in power compromised US principles and threw its support behind English and French colonialism.

He is mentioned in Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and Meyer and Brysac's Kingmakers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aipac

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpE4DbEx_Mo

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3E7A4DKCUG60V&colid=1J6ELJUM4DT29

Should keep you occupied for a while.

Virtually all of the hyperlinks lead to bogus media outlets and some of the arguments can only be argued by giving remarkably uncharitable interpretations of things other people said. Consider the one against Ellison. In 2010, Ellison said, “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of seven million people. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of seven million. Does that make sense? Is that logic? Right?” The author deems this "paranoid anti-Semitic themes." Maybe, or it could be just true, given how many Middle East scholars have made similar claims.

Because if you have money, you too can buy Senators and Congressmen and Presidential candidates and play King of the World

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/sheldon-adelson-is-ready-to-buy-the-presidency.html


Spend enough money, and terrorists are no longer terrorists

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/21/iran-mek-group-removed-us-terrorism-list

And money buys lobbyists and PR campaigns
https://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=5970


Two bigtime mainstream profs of international affairs will explain it all for ten bucks on Kindle

>The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501/

Here's the shorter version -- they had to have this printed in the London Review of Books because no one in the US would print it https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/06/08/the-storm-over-the-israel-lobby/

Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. I can't explain why in just a few words but it is simply the best book I've ever read.

I read the same thing. 99% sure I read it from the book nothing to envy.

http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324420437&sr=8-1

It's a pretty good book.

I have an English degree, but I didn't read nonfiction until I graduated a few years ago. Here are the best I've read: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, and Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl.

> Yet, how is it any different from those of you who suggest that life is better than death?

What the hell is wrong with you? North Koreans aren't some alien race, they're human beings who also don't want to die. Read memoirs from NK escapees like The Aquariums of Pyongyang or Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I attended a talk by the man written about in Escape from Camp 14, a man born in a NK prison camp who managed to escape.

These are not people longing for death; they're people longing for life.

>Why do you feel that it is fair to use your own experiences in this life to determine the value of life for other people?

We're not. You are:

"We shouldn't let people starve to death."

"But how do we know they don't want to starve to death!?"

You have absolutely no idea at all what you're talking about, your opinion is idiotic, and you're an awful person for having it.

Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you? I hate this false "all positions are equal, teach the controversy!" charade.

You might get "more" by starting to look at more specialized books. Biographies and non-fiction.

• American Prometheus
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
  
• The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time

I've a traced direct paternal lineage to a group who were taken from Mullingar in the 15th century to work in Dublin's docks, 10 generations of those men up to my great grandfather living in absolute poverty in tenement houses. Then there's the horror show of the West of Ireland, people subsisting off a 10x10 plot of potatoes, labouring at gunpoint for landlords with vast estates. Then of course millions died when the potato blight came, not because there wasn't food produced in the country, but because the country was a breadbasket. They went as far as blocking donations of aid to the Irish from other countries. The squalor, indignity and suffering of the Irish under British rule is scarcely worth trying to quantify. Chattel slaves suffered also, obviously, they were subjects to a whole other system of oppression, but ultimately, it seems like they've been unable to shake the oppression complex because they continue to experience or perceive it in many aspects of their life to this day. Irish people, by comparison can blend with British society better now, but even up to the 2000s, because of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Irish people were regarded suspiciously in the UK, had civil rights movements against sectarianism in government services (protestants being privileged over Catholics for many years). Many British people also still tell stupid Irish jokes. The point is, all that is there, and still experienced, but we don't flinch and snarl like a beaten dog every time we encounter it. Here's some further reading around the subject if you're interested.

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095

According to "How the Irish Became White" author Ignatiev , Irish people were basicially treated as an 'other' race in the US initially.

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684824299/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_c2DtDbW5C5ZWA

It's not simply ad hominem; his interpretation of facts has been disputed. The findings and ideas -- not just the man -- are controversial. Here are some good places to start for people who want to learn more. (The links with plus signs are books, not full texts online.)

An overview

Another overview++

A summary & review of three notable books on the subject

The Bell Curve++

The Flynn Effect++

IQ Tests

Race

https://www.amazon.com/Bell-Curve-Intelligence-Structure-Paperbacks/dp/0684824299/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1527199813&sr=8-1&keywords=the+bell+curve

This book compares genders for IQ.
The smartest men are smarter than the smartest women.

The number of lowest IQ men is greater than the number of lowest IQ women.

This would suggest that "the glass ceiling" is just an artifact of which gender is smarter in aggregate.

Women try to redefine the problem and it does not work.

I'm not sure if these necessarily meet the standard for this sub, but two layman-friendly and highly interesting books you might like are Lies My Teacher Told Me and Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.

China is the newest hegemony. The US didn't have a choice in Germany or Japan after WWII, since it was either step in or let Stalin take over. Read this fascinating article:

> Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin ... wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians

The US was founded by slaveowners using the pretext of representation, but it was all about commerce. They put in place a horrific non-democratic system, the Electoral College. The US has intervened repeatedly in democracies and put in place brutal regimes. Read All The Shah's Men, for example.

One reason you might have started with a rosy view is that republicans control how US history is taught to schools across the country; see last two chapters of this book.

As for California, your Congressional representatives are amazing. I'm counting on them to nail that fucking orange traitor.

To counter the criticism above, it was the US that finally shoved the UN aside in Bosnia and stopped the genocide with a few well-placed missiles, albeit three years and 100,000 civilians too late, and it was the US that shoved the UN aside very early when Serbia attacked Kosovo later in that same decade. Fucking Kofi Annan and his inaction in Rwanda... (The hero of that story is Canadian: Romeo Dallaire.)

Dude... It was never great by any stretch of the imagination.

Good primer would be Zinn's "People's History of the United States". In the words of Matt Damon, that book will "blow your hair back".

About the only thing remotely "good" this country ever really accomplished as a whole was assisting the Allied Forces in securing a victory in WW2. And the only real significant part we played in that (as far as the European theater) was materiel. If it wasn't for Operation Barbarossa and the Soviets kicking the ever loving shit out of the German forces we would have been destroyed (or never really got involved in the first place).

Edit: I'd like to add that even the "good" done in WW2 must be tempered by the fact that even General Curtis LeMay commented "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal". We were most certainly guilty of horrific atrocities and violation of international standards of war (i.e. the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings that actively targeted civilian populations) among other thing.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

A Peoples History Of the United States is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in politics, history, or sociology.

I would recommend that everyone read Misquoting Jesus. Very informative.

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252905423&sr=8-1

> What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

Replace the title with any GOP controlled state.

just some of my standard answers.


The Disappearing Spoon- yes, it's chemistry but I found it very interesting.


Abraham Lincoln's DNA- if you have a good background in genetics you might already know many of these stories. Read the table of contents first.


New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers- disease based biology. There is a follow up book if it turns out you like it.


Stiff- more than you wanted to know about dead bodies.


And by the same author but space based... Packing for Mars.

I hope these help... Cheers.

have you ever read stiff by Mary Roach? its quite good.

There is actually a lot of controversy on the lack of regulation for the global cadaver trade.

This is also a great read:

http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826

There are a LOT of uses for cadavers.

Reading this book made me want to donate my body to science.

What we practice in the US now, embalming with airtight caskets (they have “burping coffins” like Tupperware to release gas) began during the Civil War because of the hideous condition the bodies would often arrive home in after so long. If you’re down with learning about all the different things having to with the funeral industry and as well as how industry professionals have either lobbied to make some absurd practices legal requirements or will try to convince you they are when they’re not then these are fascinating to read, Jessica Mitford’s The American Way Of Death and Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers. Some of the most interesting reading you’ll ever do to be sure.

This book, Stiff is partially about the body farm, among other things. It is an awesome read
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393324826/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_-7YHzbP900CXB

Honestly I don't think you need to come up with complex religious justifications - just read 1491. There's a lot of knowledge that's been lost or purposefully destroyed, but all across the Americas there were stunningly complex civilizations that largely didn't use metals at all.

It is probable that Indigenous American civilizations had several of the most advanced agricultural systems in the world, politics, philosophy, writing, mathematics, science and astronomy, etc. Architecture and engineering were somewhat different, but still complex and advanced, and their city planning was completely different than Europe's - Tenochtitlan was literally unbelievable to the Europeans who showed up, it was so clean, organized, and beautiful.

Post contact, or if there was no contact, it's very difficult to say what trajectory they would have gone, or if you can have a 'modern' or industrial society that skips metallurgy altogether - I can't really see how that would happen. Then again what do I know.

I've been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, due to an interest in the history of the human species brought about by an Intro to Biological Anthropology class I'm in. I'm maybe three chapters in so far, but I'm engrossed. Harari theorizes that the reason that Homo Sapiens were able to outlive all the other Homo species is our ability to conceive fiction, our ability to conceptualise things that don't exist, like religions, nations, etc. This isn't really a historic text, but it's well written and seems to be worth reading if you have an interest in the topic. I'd like to read some critical reviews from experts in the field, though.

Sorry, but you are sooooooo very wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Origin

I encourage you to read Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars (Amazon) - it provides an extremely detailed look into the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the entire war itself and the aftermath leading up to 11 September 2001. I'm terribly sorry to disappoint you, but the United States had absolutely no direct hand in the Taliban's creation. Certainly there were fighters that received training and funding via the US and Saudi Arabia, but the true origins of the Taliban were with a group that the US hardly dealt with but received the full support of Pakistan's ISI in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion during the 1990s.

You might like My Khyber Marriage and Valley of the Giant Buddahs. They are autobiographical reports by a Scotswoman who married a Pashtun and moved to Afghanistan in the 1920s. My Life: From Brigand to King--Autobiography of Amir Habibullah may also be of interest. It is an as-told-to autobiography of an Afghan brigand who briefly overthrew the King about ten years after the first two books were written. The Road to Oxiana is a bit clunky but offers a Western perspective on Afghanistan in the 1930s.

The more general Afghanistan of the Afghans, written by the husband of the woman mentioned above, focuses a lot of culture and cultural history, Afghanistan is a more general history and this Afghanistan claims to be more about the military history but I haven't read it myself to judge.

If you want something more contemporary, The Places In Between is a decent travelogue by an adventurer/preservationist/mercenary who walked through parts of the country. It didn't blow me away but it is interesting and most contemporary Afghan books from the West are such trash that this one shines in comparison. The author really did go to areas of Afghanistan about which most people know very little.

Ghost Wars is a popular book that focuses on the US involvement in the area during the Soviet Afghan war. Taliban is another popular book, and focuses on the Taliban in the 1990s and early 2000s. The link is to the second edition which I believe is updated.

Hey OP, the book you want to read about this is Ordinary Men

The book covers the activities of an honest-to-god Einzatsgruppen unit, recruited from policemen around Hamburg. It's one of the most chilling books I've ever read about Nazi atrocities. The perpetrators of these massacres really were just ordinary people, yet as the author discovers, fell quite naturally into their role as executioners.

Browning provides a summary like so. ~10% of the unit committing atrocities became enthusiastic killers. ~80% performed their roles joylessly, but killed reliably and made no refusals. ~10% refused or hesitated at some point, without any real consequences.
A minority (13 of 500), abstained from killing outright.

In reality, if a German officer or soldier wished to abstain from committing atrocities, there was no real consequences for them. This held true even for the Einzatsgruppen, and certainly held true for regular army units.

TLDNR: the average German person never had strong positive or negative feelings about Jews, they just said that they hated Jews when the Nazis were in power and then said that they were okay with Jews when they were removed.

---

If you're not familiar with group psychology and conformity then the idea that you don't need to hate a people to commit genocide upon them might seem like a bold assertion to you, so I'd urge you to pick up one of the best (and cheapest) texts on this exact topic: https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473217160&sr=1-9&keywords=order+police+german

In that particular case it proved possible to get almost every member of a unit full of people who'd never killed anyone before, recruited from an anti-Nazi city (Hamburg), to kill a whole village's worth of innocent people by explaining how it was necessary to safeguard their country's National Security and indirectly making them feel embarassed about backing out in front of their friends and coworkers. They didn't have to threaten them, order them, or indoctrinate them. They just had to tell them that it would protect their loved ones and let them feel pressured not to slack off when they were with their peers.

You were absolutely right about the hardcore believers. They formed groups like the Wehrmacht Veterans Association and the SS Veterans' Association (which campaigned for the Waffen-SS to be decriminalised and its members to receive state pensions). People like Field Marshall Erich von Manstein went to the grave either refusing to say a single negative thing about Hitler or the regime or its policies, or outright saying (usually just to trusted friends) that they had been right.

Of course, even during the war the strong supporters of the regime and direct participants in War Crimes would have found it extremely emotionally damaging to change their views. To believe that what they had done was evil would have destroyed them. So they doubled down and believed as hard as they could that they had done the right thing and therefore were good people. Post-war 'De-Nazification' just strengthened their convictions.

Between the lacklustre response from average Germans, and the counterproductive effect among most hardcore ex-Nazis, even observers of the time called "De-Nazification" an abject failure. Later scholarship has made the depths of this failure even clearer.

--------------

Compare and contrast the relatively mainstream fear of Asian Communists, which endured in the public sphere/polite conversation even after the war - but with progressively softer rhetoric and more emphasis on the "Communist" than the "Asian" part.

----

EDIT: I can see why you'd want to believe that De-Nazification worked, but that doesn't make it true... I've yet to see the words "De-Nazification was a success" in any book or journal covering the process.

Your last point is pretty reminiscent of ordinary men though this is definately easier to pull off when your exporting the jackbooted into communities they dont have ties with

There's a lot you have wrong here. I'm fairly sure your posting in good faith, so I'll try to hit all your points

> Yes I understand that some religion uses it as cover

They do. And it makes them and it makes them intellectually dishonest, at best, and flat out liars, at worst.

> and I also know that almost all atheists believe that life just started as a coincidence and evolved to where it is now

OK, so a couple of things here. The first is that atheism doesn't have anything to say on the matter of abiogenesis, or evolution. Atheist is the response to a claim. The lack of a belief in god(s). That's it. And second, while there are some common beliefs among atheists, no one is saying that life started as a "coincidence". The beginnings of life are largely unknown.

> and that intelligent design is a direct attack to that believe but still why the hate,

What do you mean by hate? I don't see that, and I've been a secular activist for 30 some odd years. ID isn't a direct attack on atheism, it's a concerted effort to rebrand creationism in an attempt to get it into class rooms. The liars at The Discovery Institute have admitted as much. And you not familiar with the Wedge Document?


> I thought they were supposed to be the rational ones

As I said, atheists aren't a monolith. Being an atheist doesn't mean you're rational. People can arrive at an atheist position for bad reasons.

> but every time a scientist releases their evidence for ID no matter how convincing and scientific it is

That has never happened. Ever. There's no such thing as a "creation scientist". Are you aware that organizations like The Discovery Institute create their own publications so they can call their work peer reviewed?

> you will still see it pasted on an atheist forum and shitted on with no real refutes but instead insults about how dumb and stupid the scientist ,

Insults are wrong, but there's typically nothing to refute.

> how intelligent design is just pseudoscience

It's not even pseudoscience. It's a religious claim that can't be supported. At all.


> or just the usual religion argument counters like if God created humans then who created God,

That's not the argument. The argument your referring to properly stated, would be "If everything has a cause, what caused god?". I'm not a huge fan of this response to the Cosmological Arguments, but it's a legitimate one.

> if god is perfect then why is the human body so terribly designed or other arguments like these that depends entirely on god being the Christian one or must be perfect, omnipresent etc.

We can only response, or refute, to the claims we're presented. Most Christians claim that god is perfect, and omnimax. Calling out the contradictions in these statements in, again, legitimate.

> In the end both theories are not 100% proven

OK, again, this is lack of understanding about what science is. A scientific theory isn't a guess, or unsupported conjecture. A theory in science is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be repeatedly tested and verified in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.

Also, science doesn't "prove" things, let alone to 100% certainty. And, when a conclusion can't be reached , that doesn't mean that all assertions are equiprobable. For example; if we have a large jar filled with jellybeans, but we don't know how many there are in the jar, is one billion as likely the correct answer as two hundred? Of course not.


> and both have their faults like an ID believer will also argue that if life randomly started then why has it no happen again

No one is saying that life start randomly. Please stop building this strawman. I bet if you googled this, you'd find many, many scientific responses to this question.


> or if life randomly started because of the different nature of early earth then why do we have only one common ancestor not hundreds.

We did have more than one. I suggest you read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It's brilliant, and it will straighten you out on some of this stuff. If you have a PO BOX, I'll send you a copy.


> So why the bias to ID, why is it that God must be imaginary and that is it?

Because there is zero evidence of ID. Zero. All they have to offer are strawmen, Arguments of Ignorance, and Incredulity. And attempts to poke holes in legitimate science. At best.

The time to accept a proposition is when it's indicated by evidence. Not before.

A bit of pedantry here: you wouldn't have necessarily been a Nazi, since many citizens of Nazi Germany, including members of the army serving in the eastern front, weren't actual members of the Nazi party. However, you probably would have "Sieg Heil'd like a motherfucker" and gone along with the orders to "liquidate" this or that batch of Jews.

> There's a story in Peterson's book about a troop of German Military police who go to Warsaw. Normal guys with families. Their officer tells them that its going to be rough, that nobody has to come who doesn't want to, but he'll be there and their comrades will be there. Almost nobody steps back from it, and they all go to Poland. Six Months later they're Bayoneting women in the street and kicking in doors to shoot people.

I recommend Ordinary Men, as linked above, for further reading. It goes into great depth on the story of how Reserve Police Battalion 101 went from average Joes to war criminals.

Not to tread on the verge of falling prey to slippery slope argumentation, but I do think it is a rather short distance from, "we need to carry guns during worship to protect ourselves from... [insert vague and unlikely threat of your choice]," to, "kill them in the name of God."

One thing a reading of events surrounding the Nazi genocides has shown me is that the greatest amount of evil was perpetrated by normal people who believed they were helping the common good.

That's not so say Christians are Nazis or any such thing like that, only to point that the distance from "us vs them" mindsets to outright violence is not that far, even for otherwise peaceful and non-violent people.

An example of what I am referring to: http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

That really was a pretty rough read. Not a bedtime story. Link

While I do think it's podcast fodder. He brings this up. You must push back before it goes to far, incremental steps soon lead us far from where it was reasonable. An example of this gone wrong, was an ordinary german police force that ended up shooting women after nazi indoctination https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

Have you tried reading this book? It explains the mindset of being a younger male back then. If you know that 3.5 million other Germans have already been sent to death camps for resisting, you'd probably get in line right next to everyone else, because, lets face it, that's what you'd be trained to do.

You clearly didn't read the second link, (also wtf is executing leaders of an opposing ideology, they were murdering prisoners of war) here's a few crimes by the 'ordinary men' of the Wehrmacht

> The 707th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht put this principle into practice during an "anti-partisan" sweep that saw the division shoot 10,431 people out of the 19,940 it had detained during the sweep while suffering only two dead and five wounded in the process.[64]

and


> At Mirgorod, the 62nd Infantry Division executed "the entire Jewish population (168 people) for associating with partisans".[65] At Novomoskovsk, the 444th Security Division reported that they had killed "305 bandits, 6 women with rifles (Flintenweiber), 39 prisoners-of-war and 136 Jews".[65] In revenge for a partisan attack that had killed one German soldier, the Ersatz-Brigade 202 "as an act of retaliation shot 20 Jews from the villages of Bobosjanka and Gornostajewka and burnt down 5 Jew-houses".[66] Even more extreme was the case in Serbia, where the majority of the Jews there were murdered by the Wehrmacht, not the SS.[67] At Šabac, "Central European Jewish refugees, mostly Austrians, were shot by troops of predominantly Austrian origin in retaliation for casualties inflicted by Serbian partisans on the German Army".[65] The orders issued by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in September 1941 called for the German Army to shoot 100 Serbs for every German soldier killed by the Serb guerrillas and did not call for Jews to be singled out.[68] But because of rampant anti-Semitism in the German officer corps, it was more or less automatically assumed that the Serbian Jewish community were behind all of the partisan attacks, hence the targeting of Jews in the mass shootings carried out in retaliation for guerilla attacks.[68] The German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of Wehrmacht war crimes, argued that the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust and it is wrong to ascribe the Shoah as solely the work of the SS while the Wehrmacht were a more or less passive and disapproving bystander.[67]


Edit: Just to add, when you say that part about "normal people not liking that" that just isn't true, the Nazis made regular people key parts of the holocaust all the time. You should read about the 101st reserve police battalion, very regular normal people. They were middle aged, didn't grow up under Nazi propaganda, working class people from Hamburg, drafted but found ineligible for regular military duty. They ended up being a major part of the holocaust in Poland. (The citation for most of this is 'Ordinary Men' by Christopher Browning)

How is this brigading? I can provide more academic sources if needed.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/28/reviews/980628.28fran.html?mcubz=3

The Clean Wehrmacht myth is a well documented fact in history academica. I just generally start off with a wiki article as they are easy to read and the sources for it are found at the bottom of the page if you want to verify it. No one is saying all or even half of the Wehrmacht were members of the Nazi Party. Quite the opposite, the entire point is that just because you weren't a card carrying member, doesn't mean they didn't do just as bad and sometimes worse things in the name of Nazism.

For a few reasons.

1. It would really really hard for it to not break the establishment clause because you know some teachers will take it too far... thus it's a liability.
   
2. There just isn't that much factual about it to teach from a history perspective... most historians think Jesus existed (according to /r/askhistorians) , but they don't go much beyond that. The actual historical lesson on it would take like an hour.
   
3. History classes in general are bland and full of fact memorizing, the whole subject is generally hollow and lifeless in order to cover massive amounts of time and things instead of actually having discussions and focusing on certain events and places. Not to mention the textbook writers try to please every group with an agenda, thus making the book absurdly neutral. A decent write-up about this last point can be read here: http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

That's definitely a failure of your school system, though I'm not going to comment on Georgia's in general since I know nothing about it. I'm a former teacher who's had experience in several school districts, and all of them required a basic world history course that heavily covered Europe. Heck, when I was in school we covered European geography and history in 5th grade, then again in middle school, and again in high school.

Sounds like you got robbed. Luckily, there's lots of great books out there you can use to catch yourself up if you care to, and some of them are free. (I tried to only highlight affordable ones, but libraries are a great resource too!)

This is the entire basis for the worst book ever written.

What's the Matter with Kansas. Good book.

(Relevant, because Kansas used to be at the forefront of progressivism.)

Everytime something shitty happens in Kansas(pretty often these days) I recommend this book

https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

It's an excellent run down on politicians and single issue voters were played over and over again making Kansas what it is today. If you want to know why people routinely can be counted on to vote against their own interests it's a good read

For a comprehensive read on the subject, can't recommend How the Irish Became White enough. The myth that the Irish ascended into the mainstream for meritocratic reasons obviously has wildly racist undertones, but the book does a great job of laying out exactly how it actually occurred: by demonstrating to the existing white power structure that they could readily participate in the brutalization and marginalization of blacks. Eventually the Irish came to dominate police departments in major cities, and spent most of their time on the job rounding up both other Irish people and black folks. They were also welcomed into various industrial occupations as alternatives to black people, and eventually formed a variety of labor unions that also excluded people of color. That's not to say all Irish folks gleefully traded solidarity with another oppressed group for whiteness, the book also goes into detail about Irish abolitionists and later union organizers and agitators who actively fought racism as well.

Any "rags to richest" story about minorities tends to ignore one glaring feature of the American racial ideology: That anyone who wasn't black immediately had a leg up over black people, because blackness by definition denoted the lowest possible status. That's not to say there aren't another 100 nuances and complicating factors in these stories, e.g. wealth and educational status of incoming immigrant waves, but the particular "constants" of the American race equation is a big one.

Yeah I'm pretty sure they weren't considered black but they were considered non-white.

Amazon's summary of How the Irish Became White:

>The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

No. The Irish were never brought to America as slaves. There are a few parts to this:

1. The Irish of the 19th century were not considered 'white' or white in the same way as Anglo-Saxons. I would refer you to the book How The Irish Became White for some of that history https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095
   
   
2. There was some history of prisoners sent to North America for labor but according to John Donoghue, ("Indentured Servitude in the 17th Century English Atlantic: A Brief Survey of the Literature," History Compass (2013)) the numbers were small. The total number of European immigrants to all 13 colonies before 1775 was about 500,000; of these 55,000 were involuntary prisoners. Another 300,000 were African victims of the Atlantic slave trade.
   
   
3. People often point to indenured servitude as a type of slavery. According to Christopher Tomlins ("Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775,") of the 450,000 or so European arrivals who came voluntarily 48% were indentured. However these people had contractz of 3 years on average and had the same rights and protections of other free people. There are examples of indentured servants being kidnapped. But these are rare.
   
   Long and short.... no, there was no systemic or wide slavery of Irish people in the Americas.
   
   

For anyone wanting to read the whole story https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

It's not often you get to say "Fuck Belgium"

> The social, cultural and linguistic differences between Oregon and North Carolina are minuscule, even though they're thousands of miles apart.

Not true whatsoever.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=K526VH57QKR69R5TXQ8F

From my understanding of how the implosion-type device that was Fat Man worked, the explosives that would drive the uranium into the plutonium core (which would cause the reaction) might go off. Since damage would have occurred when it was hit, the timing would be off on these detonations, preventing a full nuclear reaction.

For the record, there was also a concern that lightning strikes would cause the electronics on early nuclear devices to go haywire and detonate. It's a bit of a wonder that there weren't more nuclear accidents between 1940-1970.

(Source: Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser)

I'm currently reading Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, which weaves together a story about a nearly catastrophic accident at a missile site and the broader history of the command and control systems that governed the US nuclear arsenal.

Contrary to the widely held belief that nuclear missiles are highly "fail-safe" and stable in adverse conditions, most of the nuclear arsenal was (and perhaps still is) quite dangerous. Armed, ready-to-detonate bombs have been dropped by accident multiple times... Missiles have caught fire in their silos, threatening to fling a cloud of plutonium across hundreds of miles of American heartland... Warheads have been in the custody of an American force so tiny that they'd have no hope of protecting against a host country's decision to seize a weapon...

The list goes on. It is terrifying. I've long been deeply skeptical of putting too much power in the hands of an unaccountable government, and this book has solidified that fear so much.

The standard by which the US government evaluated choices with regard to nuclear weapon is hideous. Generals and Presidents talked regularly of options which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths, including pre-emptive strikes against the USSR during a period without any hostilities at all.

For supplemental reading, check out Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Nuclear Safety. By Eric Schlosser. A Pulitzer finalist.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788

There is also a documentary on Netflix(?) about the Damascus Accident, where a liquid fueled ICBM exploded inside the silo.

I think it might be time you do some reading. This will do: http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1322136184&sr=8-2

Warning: Will correct your views about the capabilities of the CIA.

Fuck AIPAC.

Suggested reading.

This book is one of the most neutral and honest takes on the subject I have read: http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Are you familiar with it? I think most people in this thread, on both sides, should give it a read.

There's an interesting passage in the book Nothing to Envy about the fertilizer shortages. Since North Korea can't afford to buy or produce fertilizer, they use human shit to fertilize their farms. To obtain this fertilizer, the government instituted a poop quota for each neighborhood block. Basically this meant that after you finished your business, you deposited your poop into specially designated buckets. The government would then collect the buckets and distribute them to the farms. If your block didn't meet the quota, then everyone in the block would get in trouble.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

I'll throw this in here as well because I see it in just about every thread similar to this. Jared Diamond basically tries to explain why some civilizations on our planet have advanced beyond others by leaps and bounds. So if you're looking for a good overview of the past 15,000ish years that attempts to explain how civilizations advance, this is definitely a good one.

We need lots of the basics, MKultra, JFK assassination, Operation Northwoods, Iran-Contra, GLADIO, Project Paperclip, etc.

One thing I feel strongly about is history white washing, so I recommend A People's History of the United States, which is also available from amazon in book format.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is another good book to read once you understand the flows of political power.

Also a shout out to Noam Chomsky, Lots of his books are worth reading and going over, however for those that don't wish to read, I recommend the documentary based on his book Manufacturing Consent, which I hope you were going to include anyway :P

EDIT: Here's a decent source for ebooks - b-ok.org

http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552

http://www.amazon.ca/Guns-Germs-Steel-Jared-Diamond/dp/0393317552

Awesome book!

While I agree that your question is quite subjective, I'd suggest taking a look at Guns, Germs, & Steel, the ubiquitous recommendation when dealing with this question. I'm not sure I agree with all of Diamond's ideas, but it's a thought-provoking book, and he makes some excellent arguments within.

Also, Collapse and Guns, Gems and Steel by Jared Diamond

If you haven't, you should read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393317552). Taking a very scientific, objective approach to civilization and the development thereof, it provides an interesting and, in my opinion, highly plausible reason why African countries have typically fared worse than Western-European countries over the past 500 years (and which has nothing to do with race).

There is NO contemporary evidence (outside the bible) that this Jesus character even existed. Between the apparent "death" of Jesus until Saul of Tarsus' (aka Paul the apostle) Damascus road vision there is no record of Christianity at all. It was Paul that kicked off Christianity. Here is some recommended reading

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330464426&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408070120&sr=1-1&keywords=Nailed

http://www.amazon.com/How-Jesus-Became-God-Exaltation-ebook/dp/B00DB39V2Q/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1403984728

Most of my knowledge comes from Misquoting Jesus, and Lost Christianities and a bit of resultant self study. Unfortunately my copies are out on loan right now so I can't pull out and direct examples. In lieu of that I did find some examples of changes/omissions between different branches of copies.

There's an entire field of study which seeks to discern the original from all of the different copies. It's my understanding that the result of this work has been the elimination of most of the copy errors which occurred after ~300AD or so, but as /u/TheIceCreamPirate states, we don't have any complete copies, and very few fragments, of the gospels prior to then, so any errors which would have been introduced prior to that time are hidden from us.

Maybe you could try showing that the Bible really isn't a reliable document in the first place. I'm currently reading Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus which is opening my eyes to the problems with the accuracy of the text in the New Testament.

For example, the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 is not found in early manuscripts of John and was most likely added at a later date. If your family believes in the inerrancy of the Bible, it makes it hard to explain why something added by a scribe later should be counted as scripture. And if part of it has a dubious textual past, it calls into question the rest of it.

Ovo je isto zanimljiva knjiga: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

> I believe the biggest event that led Bin Laden to set his sights on the US was the fact that during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia welcomed US troops into their border despite Bin Laden petitioning the government to leave the responsibility of defending Saudi Arabia (and Mecca/Medina etc.) to Muslims and the mujahidden.
> When the Saudi government spurned him and allowed the US to "temporarily" establish bases and put US troops on Saudi soil, he began to take serious issue with the Saudi government. And when it became clear that the "temporary" status of US troops in Saudi Arabia was bullshit, he truly began to hate the US.

Yep yep. Steve Coll goes into great detail about this in Ghost Wars.
Great read.

Not the guy making the claim but you can read ghost wars, it talks about what the U.S. knew.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669

I take issue with some of the points raised here:

1. This is not one of them, as it is certainly a reason why we stay. I'd also include the perceived PR failure of being the one to 'admit defeat.'
   
   
2. This logic is exactly what exacerbates these supposed hotbeds of terrorism. It's a product of fully internalizing the narrative of the War on Terror, which, I would argue, has led to things like ISIS. "...we will basically see a global terror state erupt," no we already have that in the form of Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan gives them a rallying cry and a casus belli for their actions. Our continued involvement in the war breeds more militants than a 'terrorist haven' ever could.
   
   
3. It's justifying a war by saying, "Well, we've been doing it for 20 years, why would we stop now?" which isn't exactly a great justification in and of itself. What's it matter that this is now a more conventional war? That just demonstrates that the conflict has gotten completely out of hand. The Taliban currently controls more territory than they have since the invasion. We're using the fact that nothing we're doing is working as a justification for continued involvement? Furthermore, it's not surprising that the Taliban's 2015 rise was the result of a power vacuum, since that's how they rose the first time. And guess what? We share a lot of responsibility for that conflict and vacuum too! It was a US, KSA, and Pakistani support that ratcheted up the conflict in the wake of the Soviet invasion and led to a lot of the destabilization that we've seen in Afghanistan, including the power vacuum left after the main players in the civil war were exhausted that allowed the Taliban to rise. Our actions, including attempting to stem 'terror threats' have directly contributed to a cycle that perpetuates that very terror and destabilization.
   
   >The british and french used to fight in these kinds of colonial hot spots for decades at a time, withdrawing troops and then sending more troops back whenever there was a flareup. Its not entirely different here.
   
   Typically using the logic of literal colonial powers isn't the best look in the year 2018.
   
   >Its important to note that this isn't entirely OUR WAR either. It is a civil war in afghanistan, that we are involved in.
   
   A civil war that only took the form it has because of our actions dating back decades.
   
   >Its important to note that this isn't entirely OUR WAR either. It is a civil war in afghanistan, that we are involved in. This isn't like Vietnam where we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers there, occupying the country. This is more just a war where we are supporting one side of it. We only have a few thousand troops there at the moment, we aren't the main fighting force. However, if we pulled out, the taliban would win and conquer the country.
   
   As you rightly point out, without our support the central government would possibly be overtaken by the Taliban, or, at the very least, forced to negotiate (though, they're now doing that anyway). The point here is that one cannot force a people into taking a government that they don't want without mass suppression and violence. Is that really the end game we want? If so, how exactly are we better than the Taliban? We've brought death and destruction to Afghanistan with very little to show for it, especially if we take things all the way back to 1978.
   
   >We simply can't have that happen, its unthinkable and the consequences would be horrific. So we will stay, for a very, very long time, if need be.
   
   And such a policy of perpetual war is morally abhorrent. I'd say that the War on Terror has skewed our collective moral compass, but, to be fair, it's never been oriented toward justice anyway, so we're really just seeing more of the same.
   
   Regardless, I'd advise we take a minute to think about how we got here, how Afghanistan became a hotbed of terror, why these terrorists do what they do, and the role we play in it all. Are we really working toward a better end for the Afghan people? Or are we just finding nails for the bloody hammer that is our military?
   
   Edit: For those looking for a good history of our involvement in Afghanistan from 1979 to 9/11, I would recommend Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
   
   Edit 2: Changed some language with the clarification that OP was referring to US policy and not offering his own prescriptions.

Jared Diamond - Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel

Both are great. Not at all boring. Both are favorites of mine.

What an absolutely idiotic response.

Whites weren't successful because they were white. They were successful because, their harsh environment and access to resources caused them to look toward innovation to overcome nature. After that mindset was established, they further advanced through structured warfare, and after that, colonization.

If you want to dumb it down and say, "cuz white ppl", then by all means...

Guns, Germs, and Steel can give you an absolutely masterful understanding of why white European peoples came to preeminence.

So, all white people in America have the same culture? A culture that values education and politeness? What about the deep south, where, let's be honest, higher education is not overly stressed? Or how about the differences between a person from New York and a person from Idaho?

"White" is a homogenized term that refers to skin color only. The culture you speak of is "American".

I'll also just point out that Africa is not a uniformly shitty hellhole, and the parts that ARE hellholes are like that largely due to outside influences. I'd also point you toward places like Egypt, with cities like Alexandria that were the once the center of knowledge and learning in antiquity. If you're interested in learning why certain cultures seem to be underdeveloped while others thrive technologically, you should read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. There's also a movie version on Netflix.

Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks. When I see a "black cultural event", I see a group of people with common interests and common troubles who come together to support one another. The fact that they feel the need to do this tells us more about the environment they exist in than it does about their culture. If I were in another country - one that did not support or welcome me as an American - I would probably find other Americans or like-minded people to hang around.

During the time of slavery, the ONLY people that would support black people was other black people. They formed a culture that meshed (mainly southern) American elements with their African heritage. Because they had no real support from the outside, they had to support themselves from within, and that leads to a very strong cultural identity - one that still exists. And a big reason that it still exists is because, by and large, they are still not completely welcomed or accepted.

Now, when I hear a white American complaining about black events, I think of a child who has always gotten his way, who throws a tantrum when someone else gets to do something that he can't. Largely because he, and people like him, created a NEED for those sorts of things in the first place. Black people wouldn't feel the need to form these groups and events if the larger population accepted them the same way they accepted other cultures. And regardless of what you, personally, may feel or believe, there is still a very large group in America that sees blacks as foreign and thuggish. It's a foolish thing to think, and is clearly untrue.

And it's this "why do they get an event, I want an event!" mentality that makes anyone who wants to form a "white culture" event or group seem like a spoiled brat who wants something solely because someone else has it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States

http://www.shmoop.com/early-american-immigration/race.html

http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095

http://professorwhatif.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/what-if-youre-not-quite-white/

Most Catholics were not considered "white" in America, hence Italians having the same oppression issues. I am surprised to see reddit so misinformed on race in America, really. "White" is a constantly evolving, and growing, ethnicity in America.

Which is why it is so peculiar to see current "white" people abused for their privilege. Tell my ancestors about that privilege please. I got invited to that party after the keg was tapped out, the queso was gone and there was nothing but chip crumbs in the bottom of the bag.

In my short time on /r/AskHistorians, it seems that 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is consistently and almost universally recommended.

Everyone should read the book 1491 by Charles Mann! He talks about this a lot. There is actually already a significant amount of evidence that the hypothesis humans came across the Bering Strait and migrated southward during the Ice Age is not correct. There were some people that crossed the Bering Strait but some evidence in the past couple decades has been tending to show that the people that crossed tended to stay up there, and the people that made it farther south got there by other means.

For one, the speed of it is implausible because during the Ice Age most of Canada was covered in massive glaciers that early humans would not have been able to traverse. There was a melting period where it would have been traversable, but this was only for a few hundred years (if I remember the numbers correctly). It takes much longer than that for populations to permanently migrate. Archaeologically speaking, that amounts to a sprint southward, and there is no apparent reason why they would have pushed so far south so fast. There is also a curious dearth of archaeological evidence of human presence to be found along the proposed routes.

For another thing, the language evidence is consistent the Bering Strait crossers staying up north. The language of present day native peoples of the far North seem much more distantly related, or not even part of the same language family as those of more southern native peoples.

And there is also the fact that OPs post is not the first time archaelogoists have found evidence of human presence inconsistent with the Bering Strait hypothesis.

If I remembered more specifics I would say them but my friend has borrowed the book from me. But everyone should read this book!

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

Wow. Okay. Start here, it's an awesome book about Native American civilization before Europeans.

Then go further back and find literally any source talking about the way modern humans spread from Africa around the globe.

while that is on the high end of estimates, it uses new knowledge to revise the much lower estimates you referenced. great read with methodologies, sources, and explanations of how and why the estimate is actually closer to 100 million: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

How about this?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400032059?pc_redir=1408504945&robot_redir=1

I'd recommend 1491 by Charles Mann over Guns, Germs, and Steel. It tries to answer the same questions regarding the apparent gap in technology between new world and old world peoples without resorting to geographical determinism--which, to me at least, felt like a bit of a stretch. 1491 is a good source for learning about science/technologies that fell by the wayside as new world clashed with old world (textile technology, using fire to shape one's environment, etc.).

I'm traditionally more into literary fiction, but I've been exploring non-fiction recently.

Currently Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Recently Finished: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy

Next on the List: Either Guns Germs and Steel or Devil in the White City. Haven't decided yet

In our era carbon capture brings the greatest measurable benefit, and it's young growth that accomplishes that most effectively.

Given the degree to which Native Americans cleared brush before their populations were encumbered by European disease and predation (see: http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059), "more trees than 1900" pretty much means more trees than at any time in human history."

Together: That means a hell of a lot.

Read a book called 1491 opened my eyes to a lot of ideas id never heard.
https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

The book 1491 goes into this at length.

Largely what we would call circumstantial, but convincing, although you'll probably be reluctant to be convinced (as I was) because it's so mind-numbing depressing to think about.

Note: This was just after Columbus.

US imperial ambitions in the Middle East, and in particular the Levant, are themselves motivated to a large extent by Israeli "security interests." From a pure geopolitics standpoint Israel is way more trouble than it's worth. It's not antisemitic to acknowledge that the Israel lobby plays a huge role in directing US foreign policy.

u/photalysis

Yeah I didn't really have a clue about how it was in North Korea until reading this book. As an american who has never gone more than two days without food, it was hard for me to even imagine what they went (and go) through. Thanks for the link

The defector in Escape from Camp 14 recanted parts of his story.

I recommend reading Nothing to Envy instead, which is about daily life in North Korea.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick, is an excellent if disturbing read if you're really interested.

Nothing to Envy

Guns, Germs, and Steel is spectacular.

I strongly recommend reading this book. The super-short TL;DR for it is that Europe sort of hit the jackpot in terms of geography, biodiversity, natural resources available, etc., which gave the people settling there an inherent leg up versus other areas of the world.

Can someone who's knowledgeable about this issue comment on the racialization of the Irish, which the author of this article claims didn't exist? I've heard of this book but I haven't read it, but the title and summary alone would lead me to believe that the Irish were somehow racialized and then integrated into white society as a means to oppress people of color.

No - the Irish became white.

You might benefit from reading How the Irish Became White.

It's absolutely true that Irish, etc. have faced discrimination. And there are still Irish-American, Italian-American, and Jewish clubs and organizations where a vast majority of participants are of that ethnicity. Are those organizations racist? I would argue no. On the other hand, an overtly "white" organization basically serves no purpose other than the reinforcement of structural racism based on skin color.

There is a good book about the Congo and King Leopold, called King Leopold's Ghost.

https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

If anyone wants to learn more about this topic, there is a book called King Leopold's Ghost. It has a very well-researched and heartbreaking view on the crimes committed.

http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905

Check out King Leopold's Ghost for a really interesting non-fiction book about Leopold in the the Belgian Congo and the men who brought the genocide to light- it's an incredibly engaging read.

King Leopold II to be specific.

And he devastated the Congo. This is a book everyone should read.


Also, this book is an essential read on "ordinary men" in a Nazi reserve batallion and how they coped with (or outright enjoyed) the tasks entrusted to them. Some ran away, some drank themselves to oblivion, severe depression, etc.

If you want to learn about our colonial history in the Congo you should read "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild.

Amazon Link.

No, it’s a sub for fans of this book

Similar but not the same.

Racial Differences in Crime Holding IQ Constant

Two studies have looked at what happens to racial crime differences after IQ is held constant. First, Beaver et al. (2013) looked at the degree to which racial differences in crime disappeared after controlling for self-reported life time violence and verbal IQ. Their sample consisted of  3,029 males.

African American men were 43% more likely to be arrested than White men. However, this dropped to a statistically insignificant 13% after controlling for life time violence and IQ. Before applying the controls, Black men were 56% more likely to have been incarcerated. After applying controls, this figure dropped to a statistically insignificant 18%. Finally, once arrested Black men were 50% more likely to end up incarcerated and, after applying these controls, that value dropped to a statistically insignificant 24%.

Secondly, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) analyzed a large nationally representative data set and found that the Black-White incarceration gap decreased by nearly ¾ after simply controlling for age and IQ.

Thus, racial differences in IQ probably explain a good deal of the Black-White crime gap, though not all of it.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

So... that's a yes.

The problem is that scripture is often wrong or inaccurate. It also contradicts itself in numerous places.

If you are willing to have your view on this changed (I suspect you don't) check out Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman has a video talk by the same name here, if you're interested. If you're going to use the bible as the ultimate authority for your knowledge, you should at least hear what scholars have to say about the history of the bible as a collection of documents - who edited them, when, and why.

> But almost all of the Nazi command were fairly ordinary.

Interesting choice of words. A well known book was written about the folks far lower down the chain, the regular troops. Ordinary Men. It goes into where these guys came from, how they got through the gig, etc. Indeed, they were ordinary men, and they did extraordinarily evil things. Very much worth a read, it very methodically goes through the process of how regular folks got broken down to the point of committing terrible crimes.

I'd suggest reading this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068

Your pop understanding of the Holocaust lacks nuance. Soldiers who refused to participate in war crimes were hardly 'Gestapo'd'. They were allowed to stay in the barracks - though they'd usually 'come around' due to peer pressure. People who criticized the Nazis were quietly deplatformed, but only radicals like antifascists and communists were black-bagged. Ghettos and cattle car shipments were public. Slave camps in Germany were adjacent to civilian centers to facilitate transportation.

The extinction of the untermensch was a popular directive in Germany. People knew and believed and acquiesced not under the jackboot'd pressure of tyranny but out of the logical conclusion of fascism.

Many of those responsible for the worst of the Nazi's atrocities, such as mass killings of Jews in Poland and Russia (e.g. rounding up all of the Jews men, women, and children in a particular Polish town ~3000 in all and shooting them), were members of reserve German police and could be considered "normal" citizens not really politically affiliated with the Nazi party. Many (not all) were from humble backgrounds, young, not very educated, not very wealthy and did regular police work until the Nazi party/Himmler reconfigured such reserves into death squad-like battalions carrying out extermination efforts.

The author of this one book I recently read went through hundreds of firsthand accounts from such complicit men to see how everyday Germans could possibly be swept into committing such horrible war crimes. As an Amazon review says, some factors included "cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty." In one particular passage I remember, members of one of these death squad battalions were told that participation in another one of these mass murders was not mandatory, was not forced, and the Germans were allowed to take some rest if they were not up to it this time around. Though like the quote above says, many of those who decided reluctantly to continue did so not because they were particularly geared up to do so out of faithfulness to the Nazi racial ideology or what have you, but because it was their duty within their battalion. Often on nights after having carried out such missions, commanders would allow/encourage draftees into drinking a lot to "forget."

Still, for me too, it's difficult to see from a modern point of view, just how almost an entire society could have sunken into savagery under Hitler. In the end, the implementation of the Final Solution rested on the complicity of the individual in playing their part and its difficult to say exactly why each person went along with it.

> Flirting with fascism

I think you meant flirting with totalitarianism. America is very far away from Fascism, but it flirts with totalitarianism with those acts you mentioned.

But your point was not wrong. Have you ever read "Ordinary Men"? Basically, the guys who shot jews in cold blood were often just normal guys, no weird background, or even crazy views...things just got out of control.

It's not a mental condition, it's normal human psychology that technology has pathologized into a profit motive.

That should really be the most terrifying aspect of this. These are absolutely normal people who can be ushered forward by ideology to commit unspeakable horror.

Some personal favorites:

• The Source by James Michener
  
  
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  
  
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
  
  
• The Junction Boys by Jim Dent. This one isn't very well written, but I enjoyed the story.
  
  
• Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey.
  
  
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. This one can be read in an afternoon. It's perfect for enjoying a pipe and some sweet tea on your back porch. Start after lunch and you'll probably be done by dinner.

Great question and a good answer. It's called the Cognitive Revolution and is described in more detail here

Sapiens is an excellent book about the history of humans and it is a super easy, thought-provoking read. Puts into perspective how short modern humans have been around in the scheme of all humankind

Do you have anything specific you are interested in?

These are just some off the top of my head: http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281/ref=pd_sim_b_1

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Haymarket-Chicago-Movement-Bombing/dp/1400033225/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220339&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/An-American-Betrayal-Cherokee-Patriots/dp/0805089551/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220408&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/Sin-Second-City-Ministers-Playboys/dp/0812975995/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220450&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/The-Hanging-Thomas-Jeremiah-Encounter/dp/0300171323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220494&sr=1-1 (this is my favorite out of all of them)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-American-Democracy-Jefferson/dp/0393329216/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220469&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/What-Hath-God-Wrought-Transformation/dp/0195392434/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220477&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Muckraking-Landmark-Articles-Ellen-Fitzpatrick/dp/0312089449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335220555&sr=8-1

If you read Lies My Teacher Told Me the author touches upon this concept. A certain cultural and societal mindset was required - for the most part (vastly simplified) the Chinese simply lacked the motivation or mindset to do what Europe did.

There are tons of examples out there. American interventionism was following an upward trajectory in the late 19th century. The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Russia, etc, etc were all targets of American intervention. Wilson invaded more nations than any other president in US history.

This book is a pretty good starting point:
http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281

Roosevelt was one of the first major Progressives of his day and his activism brought about the war mindset many progressive liberals have. When in war, there's no room for basic human decency, rationality, etc. Hence the left's irrational "wars" on climate change, capitalism, healthy eating. There's a good book about this subject

https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

I agree with your concerns for the future of the moderate left, especially when I see the likes of Sanders and Corbyn. But, honestly, the party’s are responding to the incentives given to them. The last generation of liberal politicians was the most moderate produced by either political system in a generation. And what did they have to show for it? Torn apart by both sides as out-of-touch elite technocrats, with the attack from the right feeling even more vicious for the party’s moderation.

A couple of decades of that also makes it pretty hard to muster the energy to say, “no, no, we should take the other side’s concerns seriously.”

Take Kevin Williamson. I honestly just don’t have much concern left for defending the author of this. Jonah Goldberg is another good example. I follow him on Twitter and like his dogs, but every time he says something about civility in discourse, this cover flashes through my head.

My grandparents emigrated from the bloodlands of Europe of world war 2. I was raised to be well aware of the horrors of totalitarianism from either side of the spectrum. Telling me that because I think government has a role in the solution to societal problems puts me on the slippery spectrum to Stalin and Hitler is both intellectually lazy and deeply personally infuriating. It’s better articulated and researched, but it strikes the same chord with me as old school John Birch Society crap. It’s exactly why the one point I reacted against in the first place was claiming that no one links liberalism and communism.

So what motivation do I have to come to the defense of thinkers who apparently are willing to lump my political preferences in the same camp as the 20th century’s worst monsters? Again, I understand that nothing I’m saying is particularly fair or constructive, and you could point to plenty of authors on the left guilty of similar rhetoric. But I also don’t see a groundswell of discussion insisting that those authors get a voice on Fox News or the National Review. I’m tired of being in the only camp (moderate liberals) apparently expected to take everyone’s views and preferences into account.

This guy nails it. "A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People."

> A Democrat will blugeon the customer over the head with moral outrage and smug superiority because their "customer" is too much of a "dumb redneck" to see the amazing wonders of the same old product they've been offering.

This could be the cover blurb for "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

> Can you disagree?

Of course, because your position is false, not to mention ridiculous. The claim that the US has "yet to develop much of its own culture" is simple ignorance. I can only assume that you're merely doing what this sub criticizes Americans for doing, talking about something of which you have no direct experience or education.

> My point is that American refusal to just describe themselves as American, without all these ridiculous qualifiers, is part of why America continues to lack a distinct culture.

Your point is invalid in both premise and conclusion. You're taking anecdotes about silly behavior from a circlejerk sub, ignorantly extrapolating that to encompass an entire population of 320 million people consisting of probably hundreds of diverse cultures, to reach a conclusion that's every bit as silly as the silliest things Americans are made fun of for in this sub. Hence my original comment, this is just shityuropoorsay - you're the precise equivalent of what you're mocking.

There are many different cultures in the US, varying significantly by region. The book American Nations identifies 11 regional cultures in North America, and those are just broad regional divisions - there's significant variation within each of those. An example of an area where there's a great deal of local cultural variation is Louisiana, but there are many other similar regions throughout the US. The local culture in particular areas is often a variation of a larger regional culture, for example the Culture of Georgia is a variation of Southern US culture.

The US attitudes about ancestry and ethnicity have perfectly reasonable roots in the fact that many people in the US are in families that immigrated quite recently, often in living memory. For those families, their X-American identity is a real feeling that has to do with where they or their parents or grandparents came from, and the culture they brought with them and passed on, to some extent, to their children. It's not some sort of attempt to make themselves feel special, it's who they are.

Yes, you then also get people who try to turn their distant ancestry which is no longer actually remembered in the above sense into some sort of claim on the culture and identity of countries they've never visited. That's quite rightly made fun of here, because it's silly. But drawing broad conclusions from such behavior, while simultaneously lacking any real knowledge of what you're drawing conclusions about, leads to nonsense.

If you study cultures in the US, you'll find that the history of migration in a given area has a strong influence on the culture - the Louisiana example above is a good one. But the fact that these cultures are strongly influenced from the culture of earlier immigrants doesn't mean there's no unique local culture. Quite the opposite. When people live in a place for centuries, they develop a culture - that's just how human societies work. Your ignorance of those cultures doesn't mean they don't exist.

>Did you even go to college?

Yep. A couple of times, in fact.

>have you ever read a book?

Just finished this one. Excellent read. I highly suggest it.

>I dont expect someone like you to be an expert at philosophy, let alone be threatened by a concept so much that the only people who believe in it MUST be juveniles.

No, I just know enough about the philosophy to see the absurdity of it. I also know enough about human nature to know it's yet another in a long line of mildly interesting intellectual exercises that have no bearing in practicality because of the very nature of humanity.

>If you could entertain a future of private law enforcement, you might be out of a job.

It's more likely that I end up being assigned to a manned mission to Mars that your absurd AnCap ideas actually be tried in any actual civilization.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788

Great book on the topic, that exposes a lot of the madness that led to and surrounded the incident. There's also a film of the same name.

He did not throw...oh, for fuck's sake, just google the background.
Then read.

An read some more.

Or watch a movie.

It sounds like you have two subjects, Sam Harris on Israel and is there anything stopping them. I am no friend to Islam, in fact I am in agreement with Sam that "it's the mother load of bad ideas." However, my feelings towards Islam does not blind me to the plight of the Palestinians. It's painful to watch and the sorrow that Israel heaps upon them only fuels and legitimizes the Arab/Muslim world against the West, specifically the US for funding Israel. What is going on there is nothing short of globally accepted genocide.

I too am a huge fan of Sam Harris. For the most part, I agree with everything he so eloquently states...except for Israel. I listen to his podcast every day and find myself marveling at his use of the English language in expressing such well thought out concepts and ideas. However, I try to avoid his talks on Israel, but it's really not that hard since it doesn't come up much. I just accept him for being soft on the subject.

Regarding "nothing stopping them" I hate to submit to the idea that they are on the path to steamroll all Palestinians and nothing will stop them. As long as the US is their money-guy, they will do whatever they want and nobody can say anything. Why? Because there is a huge Israeli lobby by the name of AIPAC that will destroy any American politician that questions Israel. They are organized towards one goal and fund both right and left leaning politicians and to see that goal come true, which is to ensure Israel takes ownership of the entire country of Israel and push out the Palestinians. Zionism is alive and well and its victim is the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, to say anything about the subject turns the speaker into a bigot and antisemite; there is no room to criticize Israel.

I suggest reading two books on the subject The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Entirely different situation with this woman. Rahm in Chicago is a dual citizen. His loyalty is not to the US. His father was an Irgun terrorist, the group that "taught the Palestinians all they know". Many false flags ( King David Hotel, USS Liberty) and used white phophorous on Palestinians as late as 2014. Please research on actual non Mossad propaganda on the situation. Hard to find, not impossible. Start with www.Mondoweiss.net

US Politicians Who Hold Dual US/Israeli Citizenship (as of 2014... More now)
http://american3rdposition.com/?p=12767

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501

Nope. 100% have a B.A. in history a B.A. in education and a B.S. in health science. Currently in graduate school.

I didn't respond to your "facts" because you didn't list any. You went on some schizophrenic rant about race. You've completely failed to understand how geography influences the success and failures of societies. If I had handed in a paper with your line of reasoning my professor would have handed it back and said "start over, this is trash."


I'd suggest you read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond or the "Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes

You're going to have to go into reading those books with an open mind, because they might not fit your predetermined narrative that societies are only successful because of skin color.

Trust me- if you're a donor, at least one part of you's gonna get used. Now, it might not be in a way you'd expect (your skin might end up in someone's ahem sausage enhancement), but the transplant lists are long as fuck. They're not gonna risk wasting even a tiny piece if they can help it

(Stiff-The Curious Life of Human Cadavers has more information on what happens to you if you're an organ donor postmortem if you're interested)

I cringed so hard when I was reading Stiff recently (which I actually highly recommend) and the author apparently interviewed Dr. Oz and cited him as a credible, medical source because of his work in cardiology.

The book came out in before his Oprah days and before having his own show, but it's just crazy how you can go from respected doctor at the top of your field to huge sell-out. I guess he just must be money hungry and eating up his newfound fame. I can't think of another reason why someone would make that career decision.

Along with Mary Roach’s Stiff, I have often recommended
Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance. The former is science writing about cadavers, albeit lighthearted, and the latter is a collections of essays-wrapped-in-fictional-example (for lack of a better term) about what the body and mind go through when dying in various ways.

I realize this is off topic, but there is a fine scholarly book called How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev. Essentially, a cataloging of how Irish immigrants to the United States altered their social position by acquiring "white privilege" long before the word was even known. I recommend it to those interested in the American immigrant experience.

I haven’t read it yet, but I believe the answer to your questions will be found in the book How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev

It’s been on my list to read for a while, but instead I started playing Skyrim

Yes. You could write a book with this as a premise. in fact there is a book that everyone in this sub would like. It's called "a people's history of the United States" by Howard Zinn. It's a classic book that is a detailed criticism of the US policies over the years. Treatment of native Americans, slavery, women's rights, treatment of immigrants in the early 1900s, Vietnam, all the way to bush and Iraq. All the stuff we didn't go into much in school. We have a very biased version of history taught in our schools. Everything is spun in a way to make America good.

Link to book https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0060838655

You don't?

Because for a very long time in this country. In fact, for most of it's history, this country was violently racist. In fact, so many people of color were left out of opportunities that cost them their children's birthright, all to satisfy a status quo of whites first and everyone else dead.

Capice?

Live Read a little!

I highly recommend the book A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. RIP.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn is good, although it talks more about the history of labor and oppression in the US than about what socialism itself is. Still, it's quite eye-opening, and this was the book that turned me.

Bart D Ehrman Misquoting Jesus and Jesus Interrupted would be a valuable place to start.
There are also some videos on youtube of related lectures or debates.

Edit, I would add Dale Allison's book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus.

> I believe the New Testament is literal

I think you might enjoy Misquoting Jesus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls actually show that early Christians were very un-methodical in translation accuracy. I can pull sources when I get home, but the dead sea scrolls were in fact being produced by scribes in the process of copying and intentionally altering the text. Also they are just one of many hundreds of documents we've discovered. Even if they were somehow 100% like our modern Torah, the other hundreds which contain deliberate and huge negligent modifications show that in most cases they were not concerned with preserving the text's accuracy.

Early Christians commonly altered text on purpose, to support their own agendas. I really recommend you read some literary criticism of the Bible, like that of Ehrman. Certainly the vast majority of changes were of no theological significance--spelling errors, missed lines, etc--even though sometimes those innocent changes caused later scribes to misunderstand the text and then modify it even more in effort to "fix" it.

As just one example off the top of my google, John 8:3-11 is entirely a fabrication added by older scribes.

I'm currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and he spends some time discussing the collective myths we invent (money, countries, religion, etc.). I would highly recommend the book, it's quite interesting.

Billy's Afghan adventures are chronicled in First In by Gary Schroen. First person account of the first team into Afghanistan after 9/11 (CIA prep for SF).

Also read Jawbreaker by Gary Berntsen which picks up where First In leaves off, including the taking of Kabul. Also a first person account.

Then read the prequel that ends on Sep 10: Ghost Wars. 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

These three books are truly a trilogy in every sense.

If you're interested, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, is an incredible book where such ideas and many more are examined.

One of my favorite guests on the Joe Rogan Experience was Johann Hari who gets really deep into how depression and values interact. He pretty much talks about a lot of the same stuff at the beginning of that book Sapiens - for thousands of years we evolved to use whole villages to raise children and now we're at this point, at least in Western society, where (misquoting Hari here) 'most people don't have someone they can turn to in a time of need.'

Essentially, many of us are pushed like round or square pegs into the wrong hole our entire lives and yeah, of course you're going to be depressed. But our society values working hard at the sake of happiness so don't complain or you're a bitch. Annnd, depression should probably be treated with a healthy diet, exercise, free cows, and more - not just popping a pill.

This comment feels meandering and I wasn't sure what to say but this thread had a lot of pain. Seriously, this video helped me through a tough time a few weeks ago and then I quit the job that was making me miserable! Got an offer for an equivalent job today and probably a better one next week. Maybe don't quit your job but that was what I needed to do to make my life enjoyable.

Find something that intrinsically gives you happiness and go for it.

Edit: I cannot link. Also, don't let Bro Jrogan scare you off, he's chill

Give a read to Sapiens, namely the gossip theory (which I'm quoting) and cognitive revolution fundamentals, it might give you another perspective.

If you're ever interested in learning about the lead up to 9/11 in full immaculate detail read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. At around six hundred pages the book is quite long, but it is the most in depth analysis of what was happening on the ground of Afghanistan from the 70s through to 2001. Coll manages to do this in a uniquely non-partisan way, that I have found to be lacking in most books on the wars in the middle east.

Stolen from here: "Al Qaeda is a global terrorist movement with the United States (including the American homeland) as a prominent, if not the primary, target. The Taliban is a Pashtun political movement with a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan's largely Pashtun border".

Basically, the Taliban mainly cares about Afghanistan, Al Qaida cares about the whole of the Islamic world. They're active in lots of countries.

It's not that easy to explain, unfortunately. If you're really interested, I recommend the book "Ghost Wars".

Also in the "conspiracy theory" category:
Ghost Wars, an enthralling piece of investigave journalism done by the Washington Post's Steve Coll about the rise of bin Laden: http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=pd_ts_b_6?ie=UTF8&s=books
Hubris, another excellent investigative book about how the Bush Administration sold the Iraq War:
http://www.amazon.com/Hubris-Inside-Story-Scandal-Selling/dp/030734682X/ref=pd_ts_b_22?ie=UTF8&s=books
Conspiracy of Fools, a book about how Enron collapsed. I guess it's not really a "conspiracy theory" book in that it describes a conspiracy that actually took place and for which people were convicted.

> Racism isn’t rampant. Its factually not.

You and I live in different worlds, with different facts.

> If you really believe racism is thriving, you either don’t interact with real people or you are projecting your own bigotry onto the rest of the world.

LOL. First of all, I'm not a bigot, and if I was, I can't imagine how I would "project" that onto the world and convince myself that racism was both rampant and a serious problem. Bigots do not think that way. Bigots think that the way they think is normal, that everyone agrees with them, and that they are not bigots.


And, I definitely do talk to real people, including real people of color, and I know what they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Look, I get where you're coming from -- I grew up in a part of the country that was heavily segregated, where the public schools taught a lot of lies about equality while papering over every bad thing that ever happened in U.S. history. Our 10th grade U.S. history teacher told us that black slaves in the antebellum South were happy to be slaves, and weren't ready for freedom. I later learned that these lies and more are rampant across the South.


And, if you know your history, it makes perfect sense! The Civil War wasn't even that long ago, and the resentment lingers. People don't want to believe that their ancestors were evil, so they tell themselves that blacks are inferior and subhuman. Hell, we get at least a post a day on this forum telling us that blacks do terrible on IQ tests and that there's a conspiracy to hide this. Racism is everywhere around us. It's woven into our culture, inextricably. I could start pointing to examples but it would never end. If you're not seeing it, that's because your eyes aren't open.

The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad puts a good finger on why exactly people in the US confuse class with race and even predicted the rise of SJWs to some extent years ago. Other material such as Lies my Teacher Told me and A people's history of the United States help put a better perspective from a historical standpoint.

TL;DR the books: The Wealthy (read: Not rich, but wealthy) decided that after the Civil War and after the conclusion of the French Revolution, they would pit the poor against each other and fight for the scraps instead of turning their eyes upward and see who is dropping the scraps. Seems to be working well.

+1, definitely read as much history as you can. I'd highly recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me in addition to Zinn.

We leterally are not hitler. http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189
See? fucking libtards.

But srsly tho. I love killing jews. I am hitler.

You don't even know what that term means.

www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189

This.

>The largely blue collar citizens of Kansas can be counted upon to be a "red" state in any election, voting solidly Republican and possessing a deep animosity toward the left. This, according to author Thomas Frank, is a pretty self-defeating phenomenon, given that the policies of the Republican Party benefit the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the average worker. According to Frank, the conservative establishment has tricked Kansans, playing up the emotional touchstones of conservatism and perpetuating a sense of a vast liberal empire out to crush traditional values while barely ever discussing the Republicans' actual economic policies and what they mean to the working class. Thus the pro-life Kansas factory worker who listens to Rush Limbaugh will repeatedly vote for the party that is less likely to protect his safety, less likely to protect his job, and less likely to benefit him economically.

http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-America/dp/080507774X

If you look at the states with the lowest per capita income, a large chunk of which are the former Confederacy, it's a split. Mississippi has a large black population voting overwhelmingly Democratic, and a white population voting overwhelmingly Republican (now that the parties have finally switched polarities). The split is cultural/racial, despite the fact that the black and white working class in the state have far more things in common than differences.

My dad recommends What's the Matter with Kansas? as a way to show the split between the economic status of conservative voters and those that benefit from conservative policies.

to summarize, it will depend on three points: [1] your race (or the one you pass as) relative to [2] its history in the place you go to, as well as [3] the purpose of your visit.

[warning: a lot of generalization] for example, as a Chinese person in the US would be viewed as a model minority in most spaces (especially employment) and would not face disproportionately higher incarceration rates as your black or latinx peers. To assimilate into the local lifestyle and culture can help you blend in, but it definitely won't completely prevent incidents of name-calling, racial aggression, etc.

On the other hand, if you went to Indonesia for job opportunities, despite still being Chinese, you are probably more likely to be met with hostility and discrimination, because the impressions Indonesians have on their local Chinese populations is different to what Americans have on theirs. HOWEVER if you make it clear that you are there as a tourist (and not a threat to their employment opportunities) the reaction might differ.

Of course, all of these are generalizations to be taken with a grain of salt; they are simply there to illustrate how there can be differences in how you are treated based on the abovementioned factors. I'm here not to help you predict what you, in your context, will face in the country you would be visiting/residing in, instead I am here to introduce to you factors that you have to consider and apply to your particular situation.

Here are more examples to further illustrate how history can further complicate how you can be treated based on race:

• We as Singaporeans view white people as almost homogenous, but there very much is racism within whiteness.
  
  

1. Aryans in Nazi Germany discriminating (and lots of murdering) against Jewish people, despite both being essentially white to us.
   
2. Put an Irish person in White America and there's a history of how they went from being discriminated against to being largely incorporated into whiteness.
   
3. Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins are treated as just Slavs in their diaspora, but put them in the Yugoslavian region and suddenly the identity divides and they discriminate each other based on their national identities despite speaking mutually intelligible Serbo-Croatian languages and sharing overlaps in culture & history.
   
   

• Sikhs in India have a history (of brutal tension) with Muslims, but put them in the US and they will in most instances actually pass off as Muslim and will frequently be the target of Islamophobia.
  
  The answer to such a broad question is truly more complicated than what the analogies in the comments section can give. The solutions to helping cope with or reducing the incidents of racism in such circumstances will also differ, and you might have to look beyond the advice of "just assimilate and you will be fine".
  
  Do your research!

Nobody said "caucasian", they said "white". The fact that you now equate (to some extent) white with caucasian (in the US) is a historic process that you can read more about in this book among other sources.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

The Intelligence Rift:

Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

On Civilization:

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive by Jared Diamond

Gums, Germs & Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared Diamond

The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival by Sir John Bagot Glubb

I highly suggest you read this book. Changed my world, it did.

States rights were a secondary issue to slavery, but they have been pushed as the issue of the civil war in a campaign that began in Woodrow Wilson's day (if I remember correctly from the book) as the country's backslide back to racism gained a lot of steam.

1491 by Charles Mann is a good read, and it gives some great population stats for the Americas.

I would also recommend searching out some peer-reviewed articles using Google Scholar and search terms like "Cahokia prehistoric population" or something. I don't have specific articles off the top of my head.

PRobably the Cahokia Mounds in IL. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check out the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321907090&sr=8-1

For books, /r/askhistorians (which has a strong group of indigenous American studies academics) often recommends 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and downplays Guns Germs and Steel, because Jared Diamond's research process was basically 1. create theory, 2. seek facts to justify theory, and the result is about as flawed as you would expect from that reversal of normal historical analysis. (Mind you, his book blew my mind as much as anyone's when I first read it...)

Or, if you're just asking for rpg books: I don't think White Wolf has anything set in Texas at all. It might be interesting to do 'banes as they lived in Texas before Pentex, and how the arrival of an organizing structure changes them' though. Especially if you take into account the difference in timing between the colonization of the east coast, central america, and texas, there could be repercussions in the spirit world long before your players see human impact. (ex: California didn't have major colonial impact until the 1800s, which is kind of crazy to think about.)

Read 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059

And: https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247

And: https://www.amazon.com/Columbus-Quest-Jerusalem-Religion-Voyages/dp/1439102376

Please, anyone wanting to understand the Native American / colonial period better please read the books "1491" and "1493" by Charles C Mann
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400032059/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hKgrybZMMSVPF
They're the most insightful books on the reality of the European migration west and what really happened to the natives of North and South America. Whenever I hear someone opine about the plight of the Native Americans I tell them to read these books first.
I'm someone who has a big heart for their situation, it's just that there's a lot of history to understand on how we got here and it's not all what libs will spout off about.

I'm a big fan of the books 1491 and 1493 by Charles C. Mann regarding the history of the Americas before and after Colombus and all of the misconceptions about it and the most up to date analysis of the american cultures.

Good question! This relationship has actually come under some academic scrutiny recently. In terms of realpolitik - israel is a US ally where there aren't really a great wealth of state actors who are considered us state allies, so the practical advantages of having a friendly nation state slap bang in the middle of an area that is teeming with anti American sentiment is clear ( arguably due largely to the sheer scale of US intervention in the middle east, which intensified from and after the gulf war in the 1990s, there's a book called "blowback", I forget the author but it could really contextualise the debate). The book I came on here to reccomend to you is by Miershiemer & Walt, called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" - here's a clumsy amazon link (I'm on my phone) http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374531501 - it was fairly influential and has been discussed at policy level. It essentially argues that the costs (favourable arms agreements, housing grants [that can't be spent in the legal minefield of Palestine, but, sort of is]) don't actually outweigh the benefits of having Israel as a dedicated ally. It's definitely worth a look because it will weigh up all the pros and cons for you and show you what America gets for its massive expense, and will set out the debate so you can get an edge on the competition, good luck!

Yeah, parent is entirely untrue. In fact, many of their TVs are Chinese and Japanese, which are then modified by the telecommunications bureau to only receive government stations. As you might expect, hacking them back to full functionality is a time-honored pastime.

This book describes the phenomenon, and is generally excellent. It even describes what happened when an NKer got their hands on a copy of 1984!

https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912


NK has changed a lot. People understand that they are left behind.

Nothing to Envy is good. Disturbing as hell, though, so be prepared.

http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912

obviously the numbers aren't 100% accurate but the comment is reasonable per this book

I encourage, as always, everyone pick up The Aquariums of Pyongyang , Escape from Camp 14 , as well as Nothing To Envy as u/winginit21 mentioned.

Also David Hawk's The Hidden Gulag:Second Edition is a great resource. (PDF File)

For number 3, here are some good books that will go a long way to answering this question:

Nothing to Envy (stories of ordinary citizens who eventually fled)
http://www.amazon.ca/Nothing-Envy-Ordinary-Lives-North/dp/0385523912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383083638&sr=8-1&keywords=nothing+to+envy

Escape from Camp 14 (this one is about a prisoner camp inmate who escaped)

http://www.amazon.ca/Escape-Camp-14-Remarkable-Odyssey/dp/0670023329/ref=pd_sim_b_2


The short answer is that many people are starting to (illegally) cross between the border of North Korea and China to trade, as well as escaping permanently. There are smuggling businesses that you can hire to get you or a loved one out. If you have the money, this will involve a fake passport and even a plane flight all the way to South Korea. If you are poor, the trip is much more harrowing and dangerous.

The amount of people defecting seems to be growing by quite a bit each year.

Oh geez, who invited Stormfront?

If anyone would like a less bigoted examination of history: http://www.amazon.ca/Guns-Germs-Steel-Jared-Diamond/dp/0393317552

(But if you would rather trust a GIF on the internet than a Pulitzer-prize winning book, go ahead. It's a free country. Be as dumb as you want.)

Here is how I would organize it:

Physiological needs of survival.

• Temperature
  
• Water
  
• Food
  
  Techniques for temperature
  
  
• Basic principles of heat transfer, warmth, and cold
  
• Techniques for clothing
  
• Techniques for shelter
  
• Techniques for fire
  
  Techniques for water
  
  
• The importance of water purity
  
• Water purification, sanitation, and filtration
  
  Techniques for food.
  
  
• Foraging
  
• Hunting
  
• Trapping and fishing
  
• Primitive cooking
  
  Miscellaneous techniques
  
  
• Wilderness hygiene
  
• Hiking properly
  
• Land navigation
  
• Things idiots do
  
  Psychology of survival
  
  
• The importance of optimism and never quitting.
  
• The parasympathetic nervous system and you.
  
• Operant extinction and how it makes you crazy, plus how to survive through it.
  
• The Basil Ganglia and automation, the strength of habits, and how to learn and maintain skills effectively.
  
  Each numbered section could be a book of its own, and some of them have already been written. I think this is a good way to organize wilderness survival for the short term. I think once you start thinking about preserving food you are entering a new realm where you'll need a new, more complicated organization. Maybe I'll write the psychology one some day, as I haven't seen a good survival psychology book out there, just a bunch of bullshit.
  
  Now I don't agree that society has failed us. I think you would really like to read Guns, Germs, and Steel. It will put societies into a perspective where they are just groups of people providing themselves with the same physiological needs of survival, in ways most efficient for their environment. But I also think it's best for society that individuals can carry on in the event of a problem. So I hear what you're saying. Anyway, I hope you find this helpful.

If you're interested in reading more about how the Bible changed over time, read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.

It's a little on the dry side, but it's not a rant, and if you're unfamiliar with textual criticism, you may find it interesting on that point alone.

For example, while some stories sound very "Christ-like", the story of the good Samaritan doesn't appear in any of the earliest versions of the New Testament--it was added by monks hundreds of years afterwards.

Fascinating material if you have an open mind.

Maybe to you, but plenty of the guys working in the death camps weren't people who signed up for that, many or most were just regular civil servants who didn't have a choice. It's easy to sit back on reddit and judge them, but the people working those death camps may be more like yourself than you're comfortable admitting. Ordinary Men by Browning is a good monograph on this topic. So you can say that I have the distinction of not willingly participating, but plenty of these participants we now look at as monsters weren't willing either, but they didn't have a choice. I'm not saying they're saints, but the situation isn't as easy as we would like to imagine.

I cannot recommend reading this book enough

​

You should not be shocked that humans are capable of this. Chances are if it were you or me in that position, we would have done the same thing.

What you wrote is only partially accurate. Check out Ordinary Men I recommend this book to everyone interested in the topic of how and why regular Germans participated in the Holocaust.

The reason I mention it here is that the batallion was asked to murder thousands of Jews, many agreed, yet multiple individuals refused and do you know what happened to them? Nothing, nothing at all, the Germans not only didn't punish those who refused, they weren't even looked down on. So it begs the question, how forced were German police units/soldiers? How much of the violence was driven by individuals? What if entire units refused? Some of those questions are unanswerable but the one answer provided in this work is compelling. That German soldiers could say "no" and they would not be punished.

I have been struggling with the same thing, after years of being what some people might think of as a bit of a workaholic, once I got to “Now I can’t work, what do I do” (After I got done struggling with “Now I can’t work, who am I), this is what I came up with:

 


Exercise: Everything I have read thus far, highly encourages persons with MS to get as much exercise as they can get. All of the stories I read about MS that make you think “I would like to experience what that person is experiencing” start out with “I got MS, and I thought my life was over, but then I got very serious about sleep, diet, and exercise”) This gentlemen just posted a very nice one on this very subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MultipleSclerosis/comments/ca5lem/something_uplifting_after_two_and_a_half_years_i/
One of the challenges for me was as someone who used to be fairly athletic years ago, for me exercise was a way to enjoy the wonders the human body was capable of, and going for a short, shuffling walk at the end of which I was exhausted felt… I don’t know, not great. At that point I went to a talk on MS and one of the doctors that was speaking talked about the importance of exercise, and relayed a series of stories about exercise and MS. One of them was about a gentlemen who had lost the use of everything but his left arm. His words were something like “That arm is one of the most important things going on in my practice, it’s the arm he uses to order food, to facetime with his children…”, and then he went on to describe the stretching and exercise he would do to try to preserve as much function as possible.
Some days of course are better than others, on the good ones I try to get in as much exercise as possible. On the bad ones, well I can do less, but I try to do what I can. One thing that has helped for me is thinking of the MS like a foe. It wants to destroy you, take things away, crippled you (I realize this is silly anthropomorphizing, but I feel like it helps me maintain a good state of mind). On the days I feel good, it makes it easier to go out and do what exercise I can, it feels like I am gaining on my foe. On my bad days, I think “Alright, you got me today, but let’s see how I feel tomorrow, perhaps the MS leaves a hole and I can slip through”. Somehow approaching it this way makes me feel slippery and determined, rather than crippled.

 



Reading: When I was younger I read a great deal, but it fell off as my career picked up. I got to a point where I would only read a handful of books a year. Now with more time, I have been spending more time with a book.
I recently finished Sapiens, and very much enjoyed it: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095
I am now working my way through the histories of Herodotus (and am finding them fascinating): https://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Herodotus-Histories-Robert-Strassler/dp/1400031141/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=landmark+histories&qid=1562946514&s=books&sr=1-1

 


Watching: The wife and I watch some TV together, and we have both been on history kick. We have been watching some of the great courses, and really enjoying the experience. Some of our favorites:
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/show/the_rise_of_rome?tn=Also+By+This+Professor_0_3 Everything I have seen by Greg Aldrete is good, he seems to conduct creditable scholarship (For example, he calls out when historians disagree on some topic, shares the views of both camps, and THEN shares his thoughts), and he tells a fantastic story.
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/show/living_history_experiencing_great_events_of_the_ancient_and_medieval_worlds?tn=The+Great+Courses+Plus+Online+History+Courses+_0_70 Robert Garland takes moments out of history and works to make them come alive. I would argue that (at least for me) he succeeds spectacularly in this series.
https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/food-a-cultural-culinary-history The history of food, and history told with an eye to how everything has been shaped by food.
In addition to these, there are countless other good ones. As someone who purchased some great courses in the past (at what were some fairly exorbitant prices even on their sales), I very much like their new subscription model where you pay a fee each month and have access to everything. You can try out a lecture and see if you enjoy the lecturer style.

 


Gaming: Weirdly, being sick has destroyed a lot of the fun of gaming for me. Before I got sick, gaming was a thing I enjoyed “After I did my work”. Now that I don’t have work to be done with, someone how I don’t feel like I have “Earned the right to game”. Not saying this makes sense, necessary, but of course we feel how we feel. I have continued to play EVE Online (which I played before I got sick), albeit at a much lazier pace. I played through much of the latest Zelda with my 6 year old, which was fun, and recently played through FAR: Lone Sails which is a quiet, atmospheric puzzle solving game that involves piloting a vehicle through a post apocalyptic wasteland. Despite that description, I feel like the game is more soothing then it is anything else. It’s beautiful made, it was an enjoyable experience.

 


In addition to this jazz, I have of course been spending time with my wife and children. After my last flare I was spending a lot (almost all) of my time in the house, and more recently I have been making plans to see friends. Because my energy does not last so long, I have been trying to do lunches, perhaps meet a friend on their lunch break at work. The lack of outside the family adult contact once I stopped working has been weighing on me, and having a chat with an old friend has been a real boost.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

Gitmo, the secret prisons in Chicago, and Stop and Frisk, are all rights violations.

I do not support any rights violations by the Fed, State, or Local Governments.

You have a choice - you may stay ignorant.

OR - you can be come educated.

I advise reading the following:

Battle of Athens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

TLDR: WWII Vets remove corrupt Mayor & Sheriff from office, after inaction from the Fed.


This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed:

http://www.amazon.com/This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-Killed/dp/0465033105

TLDR: Visiting Martin Luther King Jr. at the peak of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. “Just for self defense,” King assured him. It was not the only weapon King kept for such a purpose; one of his advisors remembered the reverend’s Montgomery, Alabama home as “an arsenal.”

Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolent” civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to selfprotection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history.


A People's History of the United States

http://www.amazon.com/A-Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0060838655

TLDR: We have a 40 hour work week, weekends, the right to organize and join a Union. All purchased with bloodshed, and via the barrel of a gun.

Banning guns = Tyranny.

All forward social progress will cease if we give in to tyranny.

Ever heard of a history book?

The People's History of the United States.

You should read it.

All history you learn in high school is that kind of bullshit. Unfortunately, a lot of history books will give you the propaganda dissipated at the time as fact, much as I imagine nationalistic history books written in 200 years will quote from CNN and Fox to describe Bush's great war against the terrorists who hate our freedom. People don't like questioning nationalistic mythologies. Especially when they explain that we're all great heroes of idealistic freedom.

Given that you're on /r/Anarchism, you'd probably enjoy A People's History of the United States. Or really anything by Howard Zinn. The Populist Movement by Lawrence Goodwyn is good for talking about the post-Civil War era economic bullshit. Any biographies or autobiographies of the founders (even those written from a nationalistic point of view) will be unable to hide their business dealings and positions of power before, during, and after the revolution.

Any decent US history class you take should have a good list of readings. Better than I can remember off the top of my head.

If you have a Kindle The Autobiography of Ben Franklin is free and goes into great detail about his wealth, his positions in the Pennsylvania colonial government before the revolution, and his terms as President of Pennsylvania after the revolution (before the Constitution was adopted abolishing such positions). It does, of course, completely gloss over the fact that he knocked up a prostitute at 19, or that he was constantly having affairs. But often history is about recognizing what people aren't saying.

OH! Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

No answers yet?

Many of the atheists here agree on Bart Ehrman as a good source. He's a Bible scholar who used to be Christian but whose studies have left him an atheist. He's written a whole series of books about how the Bible was cobbled together and, self-plagiarized, forged and fiddled, and so on. There's a field or method of study called critical analysis that makes the Bible's authenticity problems apparent, and Ehrman writes that stuff into popular books.

Two of his hits have been Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted and Forged. The latter is perhaps his most explicit indictment of the intellectual crimes behind the Bible. Lost Christianities and other books talk about the many gospels and other writings that never made it into or were excised from what's known as the Bible today.

Ehrman also has a bunch of talks on YouTube where he engagingly presents those same ideas.

There are alternatives, of course, and it could be argued whether Ehrman is "the best." But he certainly knows what he's talking about (mostly), is a recognized authority on this kind of stuff, and presents it well. Best of all (from our point of view) he doesn't Lie For Jesus.

> Its kind of like how Jesus' apostles wrote the New Testament.

No they didn't. None of the gospels are eye-witness accounts of Jesus' life, and, they are all written in Greek and not in the native tongues of anyone who met and followed Jesus. Here's a good read..

Yep, I recommend misquoting jesus. It talks in depth about the translation issues in the Bible.

https://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

The book you're looking for is "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why"

I'm about 70% though it and it's been a great read. It's thick reading, but super interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

Free (legal?) ebook links here: https://archive.org/details/Prof.BartEhrman-MisquotingJesus

If she's interested in books, Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman really dismantled my belief in the veracity of the New Testament. I haven't read his other books but I've heard they're good. Also, Mormon Stories has a really interesting series on the New Testament featuring religious academic Jared Anderson.

She might want to check out the New Order Mormon board for a safe place to ask questions. It might feel less threatening than this sub.

Great map, one of the best I've seen.

You may enjoy this book: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029

I'll advocate for one small change to the map, New York City and the Hudson Valley should be its own thing. Call it New Amsterdam or New Netherlands. This would range from Brooklyn (excluding Long Island) and up the east side of the Hudson River to Albany.

My misconception was that were common standards of decency. As in "universal". That isn't the case, and I acknowledge that now.

What Trump does is completely indecent according to myself and most people I've ever interacted with. I also find most of the behavior of Trump's supporters at his rallies, etc, to be indecent. Revolting, even.

Obviously, the communities who voted for Trump find him to be decent, and think its decent to behave as they did during and after the election.

So we clearly disagree on what constitutes decency. There is no common standard of decency. There is no consensus on "American" values. We are (at least) two peoples, and we can either acknowledge that and start coming up with a federal system that respects that, or we can devolve into chaos. I don't think we need to split into two countries, but we need to start separating the culture wars from federal governance, and that likely means decentralizing certain legislative functions.

Great book on the subject, and there's a 2016 follow-up

Also I wouldn't be super confident about that - reading this book shows that the security and safety of nuclear weapons has historically been pretty slap dash.

anybody who is tired of not being worried about accidental nuclear annihilation should check out this book

Read Command and Control it's far from the first time Airmen were getting high while working around nukes.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, if you look at the Politifact tracker. Even so, we're never going to have transparency into the DoD or intelligence operations. There's a book called Legacy of Ashes that points out that the very existence of an intelligence office is counter to an open democracy. That really made it clear to me that we can't actually have everything in the open, and we elect officials to be in those dim rooms seeing what we can't and making decisions in our best interest.

From what I understand, the CIA had been running operations to assassinate Castro without Congress' consent and they thought/think that the Kennedy assassination was retaliation.

See here for a good history of the CIA and this incident in particular -- https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006

Indeed.

The CIA is responsible for some crazy shit.

I don't know if you have ever read Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner but it's a great book that talks about the agency from it's founding up to the 2000's.

http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/0307389006

This is pretty much the thesis of Legacy of Ashes - The History of the CIA about the history of mistakes and failures in the CIA. It's obviously biased against the intelligence community, but it makes some pretty damning claims.

For people who are interested in more information on AIPAC, there was a book published a few years ago by a Harvard and a university of chicago professor:

http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-U-S-Foreign-Policy/dp/0374531501

Here is the wiki on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy

Are you retarded? I'm saying & giving you a source for the fact that Natives were dropping like flies from diseases brought over by the survivors of said diseases, who had biologically developed immunities that prevented them from dying at nearly those high of rates. The natives had a far less varied, lower caloric intake diets than did the Europeans who not only had a wider selection of crops but also of cattle. They had steel weapons and steel armor that the natives did not develop as well as guns, all of these factors growing out of the generally higher level of diffusion of technology on the Eurasian landmass & it's east-west orientation as opposed to the more difficult to traverse, mixed climate north-south orientation of the Americas. It's very similar to how the north-south orientation of sub-Saharan Africa hindered greatly the abilities of it's people to develop relatively advanced societies as opposed to Eurasian societies. Read [Guns, Germs and Steel](Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393317552/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_pbPZBbTNPA260) by Jared Diamond.

Some nonfiction books I enjoyed that came to mind:

• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
  
• The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
  
• Science In The Looking Glass by E. Brian Davies
  
• The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris
  
• Head In The Cloud by William Poundstone
  
• The Future Of An Illusion by Sigmund Frued
  
• The Meaning Of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
  
• The Rape Of Nanking by Iris Chang

I can't see it being a problem. Here's a Goodreads collection of cannibalism books if you need comps. Some appear to be YA.

For research purposes, I would recommend chapters in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (non-fiction). Contrary to popular belief, The Sex Lives of Cannibals doesn't contain cannibalism. It is hilarious South Pacific travel writing though.

If you wouldn't be weirded out by it, I high recommend reading Stiff. It's a really great read about the various ways they use cadavers for scientific research. It's actually quite helpful and important. There's a story in there about medical students at a University (I can't remember which) who would have memorial services for their cadavers at the end of the semester. Really neat stuff.

World History: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. (It is also made as a documentary now)

US History: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

In regards to being sensitive for issues like slavery and the Holocaust, I recommend Teaching Tolerance. They have some good resources.

You might be interested in Jered Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel. He does a pretty thorough discussion of the subject. If boils down to white people coming in quantity from a content that's wider (East-West) than it is tall (North-South). This means temperate bands are longer, providing more opportunities to fight over crops and resources. This builds up the capability to fight, and when the advent of long-distance sailing comes into the picture, these fight-prone groups sail around the work, find less fight-prone people, and vanquish them.

Gotta add Guns, Germs, and Steel to these, though it paints in much broader strokes. Fantastically interesting read.

I'd really recommend Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

It's one of the rare history books that takes on the grand sweep of human history, upending a lot of what you were taught and weaving it all together in a highly-readable and entertaining way.

If I may jump in here, /u/Mycd is making a similar argument to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Though I am not sure about the claim that livestock were a significant source of disease. I know that they were a significant source of vaccination in the 18th century, but disease? Zoonotic diseases aren't usually small pox level variants (except for exotic ones which emerge well after the Columbian exchange).

There is a history of continual exposure to the major, and quite deadly, pathogens in Eurasian history that were the subject of medical inquiry from about 1000 CE onward; Chinese and Indian physicians, for example, experimented with blowing the dust from dried scabs of plague victims into the noses of people who had not gotten sick yet in order to inoculate them. It didn't work as well as modern science would have liked - the Black Death claimed tens of thousands of lives in Cairo alone - but it was better than nothing.

In Diamond's book, he makes the argument that since Eurasian trade routes were roughly east-west, the pathogens had similar enough environs - and continual human hosts - to survive and even mutate. On the other hand, Diamond points out, there was no equivalent to the Silk Road in the Western Hemisphere, thus preventing continual human-to-human transmission necessary for viral or bacterial mutation to the degree in Eurasia. Also, the fact that different latitudes often brought wildly varying environments, hampered potentially deadly plagues from emerging on such a vast scale in the Americas. He doesn't say, though, that Mesoamericans or other major empires didn't have plagues - they did - but compared to Eurasian ones, they were relatively weak or mild.

Other sources: Bernard Lewis Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople

Arthur Silverstein A History of Immunology

Jared Diamond Guns, Germs, and Steel

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - I loved her book Boink about sex which I read a few years ago. Really funny and informative.
  
  
• [Pretty Little Liars](http://www.amazon.com/Pretty-Little-Liars-Box-Set/dp/0061801313/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411518792&sr=1-2&keywords=pretty+little+liars_ =) - I have read 10 of these in the past couple weeks. My little sister got me hooked on them and the show which we binge watched together on Netflix. Yes they are horrible and trashy but my inner 13 year old girl loves them and I must find out who A is!!! Judge away people because I dun curr.

One of my all time favorites is Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, about a climbing season on Mount Everest where a lot of things went wrong.

I also enjoy Mary Roach - she has a great gift of being able to convey information while being really entertaining in the process. Stiff is my favorite of hers, but I also really enjoyed Packing For Mars.

>there are also surgical anatomy electives you can take later that involve surgeons (and aspiring surgeons) doing specific operations on one or more parts of your body.

This is also mentioned in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."

> never smelled a dead body

In fact, I'm reading this right now. Yes, there's a description of the body breakdown and the, uh, aromas generated.

I've been on a non-fiction kick myself.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is good. Very funny, very informative.

Packing for Mars and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers both by Mary Roach were also fun to read.

Books: "Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues", "10 Ways to Recycle a Corpse: and 100 More Dreadfully Distasteful Lists", check for related items on Amazon for both of these books.

Buy something from oddities/taxidermy shops. https://www.facebook.com/Csoddities - I don't know if they sell online, it's a small shop, but you get the general idea.

Take her/him to the museum of death or crime or anatomy. Many cities have them.

Go to together to St. Petersburg, Russia (Russia itself is morbid enough!) to visit this museum: http://www.saint-petersburg.com/museums/kunstkammer-museum-antropology-ethnography/

If you don't have much money, buy a (fake) shrunken and from Amazon, take it out of box and say it's real :)))

This website might be also a good start to find something close to you: http://www.atlasobscura.com/categories/anatomy-museums

Edit: also this book: http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/0393324826

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why? by Laurence Gonzales

Swimming to Antarctica : Tales of Long Distance Swimming by Lynne Cox

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

I was home for a holiday, and found these laying around my mother's book stash. She recommended all of them and I thoroughly enjoy each one. Although, usually I read fiction. All of these books are intriguing, well-written, and educational. If you never read non-fiction a good place to start is reading Mary Roach. Here is her TED talk about orgasms.