No Grokking Republicans book Diary today on the Columbus Day holiday. But on that point, there is this.
John Oliver, Last Week Tonight: Why is this still a thing?
(I tried to embed this video without success. Any help would be appreciated.)
Christopher Columbus is a Right Wing racist imperialist hero, and a con man and all-around villain to many on the Left. The Catholic Church once thought of canonizing him as a saint for creating the opportunity to convert so many Native Americans to Christianity, and at the same time to enslave them, rape them, kill them with European diseases, and steal everything in the Americas, from gold and jewels to every bit of land the Europeans could reach.
As I see it, if it had not been Columbus, it would have been another bringing conquistadors and the Spanish Inquisition to the Americas, and all of the other imperial powers that followed: Portugal, France, the Netherlands, the British, and eventually Germany and Russia. As we learned from Philip Zimbardo last week, it is often the situation and the System, not the character traits of the individuals caught up in the System, that creates the greatest evils in the world.
We resume on the 20th with Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control, by Christopher Peterson, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman. We will apply the experimental results on unlearning helplessness to ongoing GOTV to flip the House and create Democratic majorities in all former Confederate states. Yes, even Alabama.
Then we will finish this series with The Varieties of Religious Experience, to examine the Religious Right, and to emphasize that Evangelical Christians and Muslim extremists do not own the debate, and must not be allowed to frame it for everybody else.
Update: No, it will be religion on the 20th, and helplessness on the 27th. I can't find my copy of Learned Helplessness, and it will take a while to get one on interlibrary loan.
Disclosure: I live in Columbus, Indiana.
I'm at the doctor. I will join in the discussion when I get back.