But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

A lot of this country’s problems boil down to straight white men who see themselves as some sort of default “normal” but any variation on that as “an identity” that is “political”

If you were too young in 2003 here is what Bush told the American people:

1) The Iraq War won’t cost a lot of money
3) We won’t need a lot of troops
4) We’ll bring peace and freedom to Iraq
5) We’ll find WMDs
6) We’ll be welcomed as liberators
7) It will be easy
8) It won’t take long

All lies.

I’m a Free-Thinking Centrist with Only Right-Wing Ideas You’ve probably wondered about me, the independent thinker in your social network. I’m one part libertarian, one part populist, and one part common...

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-...

Systems are crumbling - but daily life continues. The dissonance is real If everything feels broken but strangely normal, the Soviet-era concept of hypernormalization can help

This is an absolutely critical read. Please take a few minutes and do so.

www.theguardian.com/wellness/ng-...

Happy Dave Brubeck Day to those that celebrate

why are they allowed to keep doing this? conflict of interest is supposed to mean something

I’m old enough to remember when I took out a full-page ad in the New York Times last fall to publish a letter signed by 225 mental-health professionals saying that Trump’s severe personality disorders made him destructive and dangerous.

Narrator: "It did not make them rich."

Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements

A blue Tesla Model 3 has been crushed by an Olmec statue. A man with long black braids leans against the hood of the car with his arms crossed, staring down the camera.

Tesla Model 3 crushed by an Olmec statue
By Mexican sculptor @chavismarmol.bsky.social

Ernest Hemingway wrote this in 1935…

It would be helpful if more people understood renewable energy is actually an extremely disruptive technology and the reason monied interests are trying to make folks hate it is that they are the ones which will be disrupted.

Socialism is what they called public power. 

Socialism is what they called social security. 
 
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
 
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

—Harry Truman, 1952

Once again: The animating purpose of representative democracy is to protect the rest of us from the whims of insane rich people, be they kings or oligarchs. Everything else is wainscoting.

It’s like there is this straight line from Citizens United to “richest man in the world buys himself unfettered access to the Treasury”

hey quick question does Goliath win in that story

do you have any idea just how badly you have to fuck up to get Canada mad at you

It occurs to me, for no reason in particular, that I should put this starter pack back in circulation

go.bsky.app/3h6n3YC

The Halfway Post & @HalfwayPost “BREAKING: ICE just announced it is pausing the hotline where people can call to report undocumented immigrants because 90% of the calls are from people reporting Elon Musk.” 12:30 PM • 1/28/25 • 6.2M Views