People are donating out of the goodness of their hearts, of course. Clearly, relieving a teeny tiny drop in the massive ocean of public debt is a more worthy charitable cause than giving directly to organizations that provide clean water, education, or disaster relief.

Looks like something I would do

Why do you have two Kansases?

Kansas is named for the Kansa Nation that already lived in the area when early American explorers arrived.

Arkansas is pronounced like Arkansaw, silent s at the end. It is apparently the French spelling of an Algonquian word for the Quapaw people, completely unrelated to Kansas.

Why is everything a square???

Because by the time the colonizers made it west of the Mississippi, they were so tired of figuring out logical boundaries such as “geographical features” and “which people already live in which regions” so they decided to take the lazy way out and slice up half of the continent like a sheet cake.

H

Definitely not enough sleep

Except for Lola

Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola

2

I have the weekend off work and I’m going to a very chill wedding that I have no responsibility to organize, so it’s nice. Also the storm last night took the edge off of the heat

Clearly I have more reading to do, thank you for calling my knowledge and assumptions into question. If he was as outspoken against the Armenian genocide as you say then that already does a great deal to shift my perspective.

By benefiting from the genocide, I meant that his government benefited from the availability of valuable land that had been depopulated, and that it was easier to enforce cultural erasure and ethnic assimilation after the dirty work of mass slaughter had already been done. The “Citizen, speak Turkish” campaign in the 30’s certainly had the effect of strongly discouraging (and in some places punishing) ethnic minorities from speaking their native languages in public.

You also raise a good point that we shouldn’t conflate every act of the government with the views and policies of one man. Just like the President of the United States isn’t my entire government. I ought to examine this period of history much more critically.

Atatürk, “Father of Turks.”

He led his people to so many great achievements - national independence, secularization, democratic elections, promotion of science and education, women’s suffrage, and the preservation/de-Arabacization of Turkish language and traditions.

He also denied the existence of, and actively benefited from, the genocides perpetrated against Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other ethnic minorities under the Ottoman empire. His forces perpetrated bloody massacres against tens of thousands of Greek civilians during the war (though there was far too much of that happening on both sides). His government forcibly assimilated those who remained, requiring minorities to adopt Turkish surnames and banning their languages from being spoken.

I totally get the satire in your comment but I just wanna say, the forced Christianization of indigenous Americans was definitely carried out by Protestants.

edit: I guess Protestants didn’t have widespread, overt “accept baptism or we’ll execute you on the spot” policies like some Catholic missions in the Americas, but the result of forced relocation and family separation was much the same. When they force people onto a reservation on an inhospitable plot of land half a continent away from their homes, and then withhold aid unless they accept Christ as their savior, they might as well be saying “convert or die.” Same goes for using the natives’ “heathenry” as part of the justification for wars and war crimes.

Maybe in 4800 years people will share jokes about ancient 21st century doomsaying to poke fun of doomsayers in the 69th century, and someone will respond,

"back when the fastest a human could travel was on a combustion-propelled rocket in space.

back when the long distance strategic weapon was a nuclear ICBM."

If your flight attendant starts acting up, then you take her friend

I don’t get it. Is this post just a joke that handwritten letters are old-fashioned compared to typed letters and emails, or simply poking fun at the writer’s “old-fashioned” religious beliefs? I don’t see anything historical.

If you are the addressee of the letter then I offer my sympathy, it hurts when family find reasons not to be there for the most important days of your life. If you are the addressee then I wish you a happy wedding!

tbf I think cows, chickens, pigs, and fish are cute too

Thank you so much for sharing, that is beautiful. It is a humbling experience to listen to this relic of the ancient world. Music is truly a language that transcends all boundaries.

You bring up good points, but to be clear, I didn’t say violence is never a solution; just that the Pottawatomie Massacre was misdirected. I thought I was clear from the beginning that I believe the raid on Harper’s Ferry was a much more well-conceived attack, both in terms of moral justification and strategic value. Surely you can see that attacking a military target with the intent to arm and free slaves is a completely different matter than slaughtering people for being merely associated with criminals just because you’re so consumed by righteous anger in the moment.

Migration is not the same as casting a vote in an election when you are not a resident.

The victims of the Pottawatomie Massacre lived on homesteads in Kansas. Again, is guilt-by-association enough to condemn someone to a bloody extrajudicial killing?

They were led out into the woods, literally none of the five men killed were killed in front of their wives or any children who were not themselves adults and being killed as well.

I apologize that I had that detail muddied. I was recalling what I had heard from the historian at the Adair Cabin historical site but it’s been a while. The Doyle men and Sherman were certainly led away before being killed; are we as sure about Wilkinson? Either way, abducting three men in view of their family and then murdering them within earshot (as attested by Doyle’s widow) is only marginally better than murdering them on the front lawn.

They were only civilians in the same sense that John Brown himself was a civilian.

Is there any evidence that the victims themselves were murderers or had participated in armed violence against their government and countrymen? If the victims were, say, known members of Samuel Jones’ posse or Quantrill’s raiders then I wouldn’t have even raised the issue.

when you’re a member of a fraudulent legislative attempt to cement that political view over a region.

How so? To my understanding, Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers both migrated to Kansas in droves for the express purpose of voting on the issue of slavery. What was the fraudulent part?

There are plenty of people in my community today who have frankly abhorrent political views and are willing to excuse atrocities at home and abroad for any number of reasons - ignorance, self-interest, tribalism, whatever you want to call it. They’re not all criminals. I don’t think dragging them out of their homes in the dead of night and slaughtering them should ever be a solution that crosses anyone’s mind. In the case of the Pottawatomie Massacre, all it achieved was steeling the bushwhackers’ resolve and a fresh spate of retributive violence. In the two years leading up to the massacre there were 8 killings in Kansas over this issue; in the three months following and including the massacre there were more than 30. It was a reckless spark in a powder keg

Ah, thanks. I had to look it up. I think my folks just call them hand towels

I’m just saying, Harper’s Ferry was heroic, Pottawatomie Creek not so much. Brutally murdering your civilian neighbors for their political views in front of their spouses and children, just because you’re pissed off and lack the means to strike at the real enemy, is abhorrent.