"Christians" in Texas rewrite history.

Didn't you know? Moses was a founding father and the origins of democracy are the old testiment. Oh, and god created America to be exceptional and not bound by the laws of other nations (so torture is ok). At least that is what public school textbooks say in Texas; and due to the purchasing power of Texas this hog wash will now find its way into many other red states public schools.

The American right wing is a fascist cancer which is seeking to destroy this country.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progre...oves-textbooks-with-moses-as-founding-father/

Um, the Fascists were an innovation incorporating socialism, communism, futurism, and anarcho-syndicalism - and were stridently anti-racist. They despised capitalism, especially Anglo-American capitalism.

Die in a fire gturd.

Well, it's like denouncing Elizabeth Warren as a papist Jacobite. It doesn't connect to reality on any level. It doesn't even make sense.

What do you have against fire?

Didn't we have a thread on this six months ago?

From the link in the original post:

So, yeah, probably we did have a thread six months ago.

IIRC, the textbook authors refused to make the requested changes and Texas was stuck with accepting books that didn't have Moses as a Founding Father.

Once I told my students, facetiously, that the US was started 10,000 years ago by Jesus himself.

It's nice to know that Texas is sprouting this shit in a non-ironic way. :-/


Sent from my iPhone while driving

Dayton agrees!

Me, I'd like to see some of these textbooks...

So the company publishing the Texas school books will ensure that the lies don't get into blue states? Will they be secretly "flagged" like when George Costanza took the book into the bathroom? And if the right wing is a cancer, the left wing is Ebola so it's a wash I guess. BTW the US is "exceptional" though I wouldn't give god credit for it myself.

The US is 'exceptional' in two ways.

One, when the colonists arrived they found mile after mile of cleared farmland. Turns out the US was god's gift to providence - if you call providence a complete lack of immunity to European germs and the destruction of up to 90% of the indigineous population. The first voyagers there reported mile after mile of fires on the coast. A hundred years later, the plagues left empty villages.

If the population of the native Americans weren't wiped out by disease, then we would be talking of a situation like India or China - where western technology allowed conquest, but didn't include mass colonization.

Two, we are exceptional in our geographical insulation, as the destruction that reeked havoc throughout the industrial world in the world wars left the US completely untouched. That's the rise of the American century, not our political uniqueness, God given enodowments, or the current lie, the exceptionalism of the free market system.

My, that went downhill fast right after "um".

I need a decent and relatively unbiased source.

Because you own source doesn't claim that they wanted to list "Moses as a founding father".

Yeah, but you know what I love about this?
They're as much admitting their religion is a pile of bullshit when they have to lie to save it.

I mean, they may in fact be so mentally far gone into fundie territory, that to defend the Bible, reality itself has to be wrong, so they think they aren't lying, but fuck it, the results are all the same.

The damage they're doing to education and the country has to be stopped of course, but the damage they're doing to their fairy tales, and corrupt fairy tale based institutions, bring it on.

It's not just the insulation of our geography that makes us exceptional.

You need a couple things to build a great civilization. You have to be able to produce enough food to not only sustain your population but to allow specialization. You've got to be able to trade in order to generate wealth. Good roads work, but water is far cheaper. Rail while new is in between. And lastly, you've got to be able to defend yourself so others don't take your food and wealth.

Security: You've already covered it. Oceans to our east and west, desert to the south, frozen tundra to the north. Defensively the best location IN THE WORLD.

Food: We have the largest area of arable land IN THE WORLD.

Trade: We have the largest navigable river system IN THE WORLD. As well as deep water ports on the two great trade oceans (with a rail system connecting our ports, and access to a canal between the two oceans).

We got it good.

The Nazis were very much a religious group. Mein Kampf has Hitler declaring he is doing god's work over and over, that eliminating the Jews was what god wanted, the oath to Hitler was religious in nature invoking god, and even the belt buckle worn by all German soldiers declared god was on their side.

So shut up and stop lying.

The Nazis were German. The Fascists were Italian. Why not rant about the Republicans or Democrats who are running Great Britain?

They did a ton of last minute revisions refused to allow actual historians to debate it and basically made it much worse. They just voted in whole texts from some right wing religious wacko nonsense fiction without even reading it before they voted on it.

All of that is true.

Yet you are missing the obvious - we'd have had a fraction of that if we hadn't also had a native civilization wiped out by plague. Because otherwise, just like the Vikings, we wouldn't have been able to conquer the entire land when we had what is now thought to be more numerous poplation than Europe in active opposition to the colonization effort.

Just like the Europeans didn't eliminate and colonize Asia and Africa.

The one other place that was successful was Australia - also a place where isolation caused a lack of resistance, and was far less populated in the first place.

There's no actual evidence that a European plague wiped out the Indians, though they did suffer from some European diseases. Most of what seemed to kill Indians was other Indians. They were in a state of nearly constant tribal warfare, which produces staggeringly high casualty rates.

As usual, that's the opposite of the truth. Warfare for American Indians was about raiding livestock and taking occasional captives. The "total" war practiced by Europeans, where the aim was the physical elimination of the enemy was unknown to them, that being one of the main reasons why they were so easily defeated.

Are you fucking serious?

Stop. Lying.

In numerous archaeological studies, a very high percentage of North American Indian skeletons show the cause of death was definitely trauma with edged weapons or blunt instruments. How high? About 60 percent in South Dakota, 50 percent among the Blackfoot tribe, over 30 percent in British Columbia, 15 percent in Illinois, but only about 5 percent in Central California. That's orders of magnitude higher than you find in any civilized population.

Putting it in terms of murder rates, where the US is upset at having a rate of about 5 per 100,000, Indian murder rates were often a hundred times higher. Among the Chippewa in Minnesota it was 750 per 100,000 (per year) and among the Piegan plains Indians it was 1000 per 100,000. Germany, including both world wars, would only clock in at 160 per 100,000.

Even if that's accurate, that wouldn't decimate a population. @gliar fails again.

So basically, for him, shut up forever.

So a disease with a 10 or 20 percent death rate can decimate a population, but not wars with a 50 percent death rate just from wounds?

Many of the abandoned fields and villages the Pilgrims found in New England were the result of Mohawk war parties. They knew this because the villages that had made pacts with the Mohawks were still there to tell them about it. Of course the Indians also used to tend to only use a field for about five years before abandoning it, unlike Western farming practices. It was all slash and burn (flint axes aren't that great for clearing forests).

The pattern of contact was repeated throughout the Midwest, with the first explorers in Wisconsin constantly encountering starving tribes who'd been driven from their lands to the west. The local tribes didn't have enough extra food to feed the refugees and would tell them to keep moving after a day or so. Other written accounts relate that decimated tribes blamed both disease and inter-tribal war for their misfortunes. That kept population numbers in check and pressured against long-term permanent settlements (cities). From the archaeological record, it had been going on for thousands of years and often involved dismemberment for war trophies.

War Before Civilization is a 1997 book I read long ago.

Its central focus is that after WW-II, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians reacted in horror and completely reversed their earlier thinking that savages were, well, savages, and that the real horror was civilization and its technological way of making war. This was accepted hook line and sinker, to the point were archaeologists thought German chiefs were buried with their big axes because their social hierarchy was based on skill at chopping wood, and that the mass graves in front of a pre-Roman village's front gate, each showing wounds and dismemberment, must have been the result of ritualistic burial - as opposed to brutally stopping a frontal assault. Rechecking some historical observations that primitive warfare didn't produce high casualties, the author simply added up the numbers they recorded. During the fighting season, it came to about a 1 percent fatality rate per week. In that instance, the tribes would fight ever couple of days, hurling spears at each other until someone was killed, then going home for the night. But they kept at, and every male fought. As a percentage of population, it was worse than the Somme.

Did you ever wonder why every male Indian was a warrior? It's what they did.

Not exactly. They had a few major dust ups...otherwise the Lakota would never have ended up in the Great Plains. They were up around Minnesota until the Cree chased them out.

I know it's Red Room and all, but we're going to do some math.

5 x 100 = 500
500÷100,000 = 0.5 %

That's a death rate that won't impact a population's sustainability. Not surprisingly, @gliar fails. Again. As always. 100%, completely full of fail.

He lovingly suckles the prolapsed Anus of Epic Fail™. Always has. Always will.