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

Heard online a couple years ago: “I don’t care what woke thing they call it! I’m celebrating it as COLUMBUS DAY!” And someone said “How do celebrate Columbus Day? Go to the grocery store and get lost looking for the spice aisle?”

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.