When I started the second year of my anniversary posts, I had promised myself that I was going to make some of them really short. I don’t need to write 500 or 600 words about everything. But it goes totally against my whole conception of having a blog. I hate it when people produce blog posts that are 90% quotes. I understand: readers seem to like this. But to me, it’s just a new form of plagiarism. Just the same, one sentence posts that link somewhere else strike me as lazy. So I find myself forever at least writing a couple hundred words.

When I noticed that on this day back in 1513, Juan Ponce de León first made sight of Florida, I wanted to make a complete post out of one sentence, “On this day in 1513, the slave trade started in Florida.” But I went back and checked what I wrote last year. It was, Anniversary Post: Western Discovery of Florida. But it went along with that great image on the left that I did in Photoshop.

Anyway, here’s some of what I wrote last year, which I think is pretty good:

There really is something wrong with human beings.

Given my state of mind and all the time I wasted on the Worst Publisher in the World, I’m just going to reprint last year’s anniversary post about Yaoya Oshichi’s murder. It seems to go along with what I’m going through. I’m dealing with a selfish person who only cares about her own sense of entitlement. She really thinks she is doing me a favor, when it is just the opposite. And she’s making my life a living hell. So why not reprint an article about powerful people who lack empathy and dehumanize others? Sounds perfect!

On this day back in 1683, Yaoya Oshichi was burned at the stake. She was 16 years old. Apparently, she had fallen in love with a temple page during a fire. So the following year (1682), she set a fire, hoping that she would get a chance to see him again. But she was caught. Apparently, the magistrate at her trial tried to save her life by claiming that she was 15 years old. (You had to be 16 to get the death penalty. This is accepted everywhere — except in Texas.) But the clueless girl corrected him and ended up burning. The story is a very famous one in Japan and has been broadly romanticized in literature.

This took place toward the beginning of the Edo period. At that time, the government applied the death penalty in cases of murder and, as with Oshichi, arson. And the ways they killed people were varied. The less terrible ones are decapitation, waist-cutting (just what it sounds like), are crucifixion. The more terrible ones are sawing (mostly what you are thinking), burning, and boiling. I really don’t understand these torture deaths. I can understand the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the death penalty — even if I don’t accept it. But these torture deaths can only be the result of psychopathic minds.

So 334 years ago, a girl was burned death. I can’t say that we humans have gotten any better. And I am definitely not just talking about the recent activity of the Islamic State. Sometimes I think the one thing that binds together all of the “great men” of the world now and forever is a lack of empathy.

Happy anniversary of the sadistic murder of Yaoya Oshichi!

It is the seventh anniversary of the Jamrud mosque bombing. It was a suicide bombing and at least 48 people were killed and roughly a hundred injured. According to witnesses, a boy of 15 or 16 climbed into a window, went to the main hall that was filled for Friday prayers, and he blew himself up. It was a complete horror as you can see in the photo on the left. But there are two issues that this raises in my mind.

The first is the use of children as suicide bombers. I once heard an interview with a teenage girl who was supposed to be a suicide bomber but backed out at the last minute. And her story was really tragic. Her boyfriend had been killed by the Israelis and so she was upset and mentioned that she would like to get revenge, and the people who lead these kind of things jumped on her and pushed her into becoming a suicide bomber. It is so horrible. Like military leaders everywhere, she was just a resource to be used however they thought best in their war with the Israelis. All I can say is that warriors should fight their own wars and leave kids out of it. I realize this is not the way things work, and there is nothing any different between that and killing children. Still, I have a hard time not seeing this teenage boy as a victim as well.

The second issue is the bombing of a mosque. I’m just not clear where all our resentment of Muslims comes from. The Muslims who are politically radicalized are mostly in the business of killing other Muslims. So I just don’t see what the whole issue is with their religion. I keep coming back to Sam Harris’ line that “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas.” Really?! It’s such a bigoted and ignorant claim. His depth of thinking on Islam is about as deep as Phil Robertson’s thinking on atheism. The main thing that occurs to me is that this kind of thinking (that many atheists are very open about) is very much blaming the victim.

With deep sadness and hope that the world becomes a better place, we mark this seventh anniversary of the Jamrud mosque bombing.

On this day in 1807, the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Slave Trade Act — pushed most notably by William Wilberforce. It outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire. But it was just part of the process of ending slavery. Slavery itself wouldn’t be outlawed until 1833. But slavery in England itself had been illegal since 1772 with the decision in Somerset v Stewart.

Now the timing of that last one is quite interesting. This had an impact on the American Revolutionary War. It is discussed in Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution by Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. Somerset v Stewart was extremely well reported on here in the colonies. And slave owners could see the writing on the wall. We can’t say how big a factor there was with regard to this, but it was certainly a force pushing for the war.

In the musical 1776, the biggest part of the drama circles around the southern states walking out because of an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence. But we don’t actually know what was said because the secretary of the Second Continental Congress thought it unimportant to write it down. In the movie, the discussion is all about how the south would not accept independence if it meant losing their slaves. But I have a hard time believing that people were not making rather the opposite argument, “We are in favor of independence because of the threat to our peculiar institution; why would we sign a document that threatens it?!”

Political progress is always made slowly — step by tiny step. There are broader features of it, however. Slavery was going to end. America bought itself 30 years of slavery with the Revolutionary War. And I can’t say it bought much more. Democracy was in the air. It’s hard to say that progress has been made more quickly in the United States. In fact, it seems rather the opposite. And here we are in America fighting over economic issues that were considered settled in the 1950s.

But we continue on. And this was an important day for humanity in 1807.

On this day in 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled about a half million barrels of oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska. I remember at the time that I bought a shirt that said, “We don’t care. We don’t have to care. At Exxon, we’re part of the problem.” This was based, I think, on Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator character, Ernestine. It amused me for a while.

But even at the time, I understood that the problem was not Exxon or even the oil companies. The problem was and is the system itself. If you have a population that is dependent upon something as toxic as fossil fuels, you are going to have accidents. There will be consequences.

I don’t talk about it much because it seems elitist of me with my relatively stable life. But I wonder about capitalism and our push for ever more growth. I do see that if regular working people are going to see improvements in their lives, we need economic growth. But that’s only because we’ve decided that capitalism is the only system we can possibly have. And that seems less and less tenable.

I find that I get hung up on how you would replace capitalism. But the truth is, that’s silly. In our society, capitalism is like water to a fish: it is such a given that it doesn’t really even exist. I would say that for the vast majority of people in the “advanced” economies, belief in capitalism is far more real than belief in God. At least with God, people know there are other people who don’t believe in their particular choice.

So we are stuck in a situation where we are just trying to make the given state of awesome capitalism more humane. Think about Bernie Sanders for a moment. He calls himself a socialist, but that’s really a joke. He’s just an old style liberal. We’ve lost so much ground over the last five decades — especially here in the United States.

Obviously, we will eventually get over our addiction to oil and things like the Exxon Valdez oil spill will be a thing of the past. But capitalism will create new ways to destroy us. Rest assured.

[This is a reprint of last year’s Anniversary Post, Fascism. It’s interesting that a year later, we are looking at Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination for president. A lot of people don’t like it when Trump is called a fascist. They claim that he’s more along the lines of a right-wing populist as we see in Europe. But I think these people are being pedantic. They want to confine the word to a very narrow definition. I think it is that after the Nazis, no one wants to use the word fascist to describe anything that is popular in the United States. But what are you going to do? Donald Trump is a fascist. Maybe he’s not exactly Mussolini, but then Hitler wasn’t either. -FM]

On this day in 1919, fascism was born. It seems like only yesterday! Maybe that is because the United States has so many fascist elements to it — and I’m not just talking about the Republican Party. When the head of Whole Foods said that Obamacare was basically a fascist law, he wasn’t wrong. Neoconservatism is entirely in keeping with fascism in terms of nationalism and foreign policy. But neoliberalism has many similarities to fascist economic policies. I don’t know where we ever got the idea that the best way to improve the lives of Americans was for the government to “partner” with the private sector. I think neoliberalism has had a much greater negative impact on Americans than neoconservatism. Of course, the fact that most neoconservatives are also neoliberals (or worse) when it comes to the economy does tilt the argument quite distinctly away from them.

The reason that today is the birthday of fascism is because today is the day that Benito Mussolini started his political movement. Of course, fascism dates back much further than that. In fact, it is hard not to see fascism as fundamentally a movement trying to bring back the Roman Empire. I don’t think we should hold it against the Romans, given that they ruled roughly 2,000 years ago, but they had many of the same kinds of beliefs and policies that we know and despise in modern fascism. I think there will always be fascists, the only question is how much power we will allow them to get.

The American right wing has a lot of fascist elements. The biggest way is in their nationalism. That is probably the single most important aspect of fascism. But there are other aspects: authoritarianism, imperialism, traditionalism, racism, and anti-intellectualism — all of which are alive and well in American conservatism. There is one way that the American right is not like fascism. In its early days, fascism believed in workers being combined as an important part of the power structure of the nation. So basically, you had labor, business, and government all working together. American conservatives are not on board with that kind of thing. In that regard, they are more believers in feudalism. So you can say that American conservatism is very much like fascism, but worse.

Liberals, of course, are not like that. But the New Democrats (who continue to control the Democratic Party) have a number of similarities. But it’s like everything about the politics of America: the New Democrats generally suck, but they are so much better than the Republicans (who have been completely taken over by the conservative movement). A better argument could be made that Democrats are communists, but that doesn’t make much sense either. I think that most people on the American left wing see themselves ultimately as being in favor of a kind of Swedish socialism. And the worst you can say about them is that their markets are not as efficient as they ought to be. I don’t agree with that criticism, but I’ll take it if the conservatives will accept that there really isn’t much they have to disagree with Mussolini.

Happy birthday fascism!

[And welcome to America! -FM]

On this day in 1413, Henry V of England became king. He was king for less than ten years, due to his early death. And his reputation really is just due to the British victory at the Battle of Agincourt. Now that’s one of those great battles that sum up the stupidity of war. Reading Shakespeare, you would think that the British simply fought more bravely than the French. But if anything, they fought more cowardly. It was all due to the use of the long bow that allowed the victory. The vast majority of the British troops were archers. Bravery and resolve in such matters are fairy tales designed to convince men to get themselves killed for no good reason.

It is, then, perhaps appropriate that the great warrior king should die at the age of 36 of dysentery. You gotta love that!

Anyway, Shakespeare’s play Henry V is not bad. It’s interesting how different people at different times have performed it. It’s clear that Shakespeare meant it to be the jingoistic travesty that becomes clear if you sit down and read the whole thing. But normally when it is performed today, people finesse it into something anti-war, or at least nuanced. Which it isn’t. As I’ve argued for years: Shakespeare has benefited greatly by having 400 years of the best editors, directors, and actors finding meaning he never intended and probably would have found horrifying.

Still, we should mark this day of King Henry V by listening to Kenneth Branagh’s do the Saint Crispin’s Day speech. It’s great. It’s beautiful. His performance is wonderful. Yet what he says is vile. Pretty language should never be used to hide ugly ideas.