Posts

Ancestry and Identity

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My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. My maiden name is Irish in origin and he always said he was part Cherokee.  I once read part of a family history or genealogy for my father's family and the only thing I remember is that he was also part French, something he never told me. Around the same time, my husband and I also got a copy of his family genealogy. I learned that Traylor is Anglicized French and was originally something like treilleur and meant something like soldier. His French ancestors were Huguenots  who fled France for England because they were persecuted and anglicized it to try to fit in better. Hundreds of years later I continue to be routinely aggravated at trying to explain the name because people who see it routinely call me Taylor and people who hear it routinely spell it Trailer. Most surnames are real words, often derived from a place or profession. Taylor is such a surname. Traylor is gibberish to anyone adequately familiar with th...
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Never Again

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Wikipedia: Never Again  Yeah, wow, that's not remotely what I learned. Which isn't to say ANY of that is wrong but I knew of it as a statement by politicians and I understood it to be the motive behind setting up things like the World Bank. Americans like to imagine I'm a pro Nazi Hitler apologist while Europeans apparently get taught what I eventually parsed out: The seeds of World War II were sewn by the War Reparations Germany was saddled with at the end of World War I (originally called The Great War) and so they decided two things: 1. In the tradition of what worked in the US to prevent our only Civil War from becoming the start of a cycle of civil wars (the USUAL outcome), they did not saddle the losing side with war reparations as had been the human tradition since time immemorial. Instead, the US went into Germany and Japan and helped them rebuild, just like The North went into The South and helped them rebuild per Grant's unprecedented policy set at the Surrend...
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Living History

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Sorry I can't watch this shit in full. The guy being interviewed is claiming there's no fraud  in the 2024 presidential election and not backing that up. You cannot confidently assert that as something we are certain about based on nebulous bullshit like "we are still counting votes". Your desire to assert that there absolutely is no fraud is suspicious.  You can say "Well, it's complicated and the process of counting votes isn't over, so those numbers are bound to change which makes it a moving target and muddies the waters " But things being unclear for valid reasons is absolutely not proof positive that there was NO fraud. My belief is that Biden won and both Clinton and Harris lost because Trump did MORE election tampering when running against women than when running against a man because he was counting on "sexism" providing plausible deniability and making people disinclined to examine it too closely. You have no actual proof that fr...
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Personal History

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I saw a TV show once. I have no idea what show it was, but there was some neurotic woman that this guy hooked up with and she had amazingly tattered panties on and he was like "WHY????"  So she explained to him that she HAD to wear them because they were her "lucky panties" and every time she stopped wearing them, some major political or social drama happened and she was convinced there was a cause and effect relationship. She HAD to wear them because if she didn't, it was HER fault when shit happened in the world. I don't think I'm quite that crazy BUT I'm aware this post may look like that to other people. This post addresses the question of "Why write at all if I have no traction and make pathetic amounts of money?" It gives you MY subjective point of view which I cannot prove is factually accurate. If my inferences are actually correct, OTHER people theoretically COULD verify parts of my story but I have zero reason to believe they will...
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Minimum Wage

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I once read a well documented history of the minimum wage law. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the name of the book was because apparently this book tells a very different story than the general public impression of the law and the reason it was created. To my shock, people on Metafilter told me that minimum wage is essentially a racist policy of oppression which is the exact opposite of what I had read. In a nutshell, the book I read indicated that following the American Civil War, freed Blacks had it worse than slaves thanks to rampant racism and Jim Crow laws. One reason: Blacks were paid half what Whites got paid. So the federal minimum wage law was proposed to try to force the South to pay Blacks the same as Whites. And it initially failed spectacularly because racist southerners were flat out unwilling to "pay a Black man a White man's wage" and often simply fired Black employees. Along with segregation and a shortage of Black high schools in the South such that ...
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I hate politics

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I have only managed to vote a few times in my life. This is largely because I'm medically handicapped which has proven to be a substantial barrier to making my life work. It's also because I lived a very private life for many years and I don't really understand politics, which is part of public life. I've never managed to keep up with political issues and I have a substantial interest in human psychology and social phenomena and I believe those things drive stuff other people see as "politics" in ways that most people don't talk about and which are often invisible and unprovable. My mother is German and grew up in Germany during WW2 and its aftermath, so I've had some interest in WW2 and the events leading up to it. I'm fond of the poem  First they came  and its suggestion that you should speak up while you still can. This blog is an attempt to do that, though it's probably already too late to remedy the mess we are. As a student of psychology,...
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