La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for October 09, 2023

I don’t think this man is going to get rich taking gold from these two.

I quit observing Columbus Day years ago. He was just a bad guy in general.

Celebrate Indigenous People Day. I’m sure there are a few left, somewhere.

Assimilation, a story as old as time itself.

The indigenous people of the Americas spent a fair amount of their time slautering each other before Columbus and the other Europeans arrived with their superior technology and showed them how it was done on an industrial scale.

I commend to those who are interested in comparing different historical eras 2 books that make the case — with facts and figures — that things are better now for more people than they’ve ever been. Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined and Hans Rosling’s 2018 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think to learn how our preconceptions about the miseries of the world are largely based on a 19th Century understanding of how things work.

Assimilation by the sword, sperm and disease. El via del conquistador y la religión

OW! A slap heard around the world!

Columbus Day was a school holiday. Now it’s just a date on my calendar.

Thank the Catholic Church and Pope Alexander VI for the Doctrine of Discovery.

It was used to legitimize colonization of non European lands.

Basically, if a land is not inhabited by Christians, (terra nullius) it can be colonized in the name of the Crown and the Church.