What If
Carroll includes a fascinating section hypothesizing what would happen if different people had become president. Any of these scenarios would make for a fascinating alternate history novel.
For example, Jackson was nearly killed in the Creek War, but a Cherokee warrior named Junaluska saved his life. Had this not happened, John Quincy Adams would have been president instead and the Trail of Tears would not have happened.
Continue readingFranklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt did not allow Jewish refugees to the US, condemning many to death in the Holocaust. He also could have lessened the atrocity by attacking Germany sooner than he did. (Incidentally, Henry Ford owned the best selling newspaper in the country and used it to spread anti-Semitism. Ford Auto company was also a haven for Nazis and he promoted their views on company grounds. Ford even received a special award from Hitler.)
Continue readingBill Clinton
Clinton not only didn’t try to stop the Rwandan genocide, he pushed for the UN to withdraw and denied a genocide was happening. Clinton could have saved 300,000 to 600,000 lives if he’d sent just 5,000 US troops to intervene.
Right-wing terrorists murdered at least 288 people from 1995 to 2012 and attempted to assassinate Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Clinton’s mishandling of the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, and the Republic of Texas militia led to more recruitment for right-wing terrorists.
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When presidents of the United States are ranked from best to worse, they’re generally judged on subjective things like leadership, charisma, etc. and the lists end up merely being a popularity contest, often based on the politics of the person doing the ranking. George Washington is often listed as one of the best presidents, not because he did anything particularly noteworthy while president, but simply because he was the first.
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Maus takes the form of two parallel stories. In the present, Art Spiegelman is trying to learn about his father Vladek’s experience during the Holocaust. In the past, we see his father’s story come alive. The artwork depicts Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Americans as dogs, and other nationalities as other animals.
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When Joseph Smith first started writing the Book of Mormon, he began with the Book of Lehi. However, the Book of Lehi was stolen and has never been recovered. Fortunately, Lehi’s son, Nephi, gives an abridgement of the Book of Lehi (in The First Book of Nephi), so we pretty much know what was in it.
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“White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.”
The 1619 Project is a collection of essays, flash fiction, and poetry from a variety of writers concerning the experience of Black Americans. Black history is not well taught in US schools. Unbelievably, in 2017, only 8 percent of high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War!
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There are three different texts titled The Word of the Lord used by different Mormon splinter groups. One was written by Otto Fetting between 1927-1933. Another was written by William Draves starting in 1933. However, I could find next to nothing online about about the text written by Harry Edgar Baker between 1916 to 1918. Wikipedia mentions the other two books sharing this title, but not this earlier one.
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When it comes to errors in human judgment, we tend to focus on bias, but noise is also a cause of error. Bias is the average of errors committed by a group. You need to know the right answer to know what the bias is. Bias is systemic and predictable. Noise, on the other hand, is variable amongst a group of judgements. You can tell there’s noise even if you don’t know the right answer. It’s unpredictable and not easily explained.
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The world is better today because of the Enlightenment, yet people attack reason, science, humanism, and progress when these things should be celebrated.
One of the bits of wisdom from the Scientific Revolution is that misfortune is no one’s fault. Bad things sometimes happen for no reason other than the universe is indifferent to human suffering. There’s no point looking around for someone to blame when an earthquake happens. Entropy ensures there’s more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right.
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