We needed tough lessons as children. An occasional playground fight was expected as the norm, and if we complained to our mother that we were being teased, we were treated to this glorious aphorism: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” My mom used to say that all the time, one of the seemingly endless adages she had at her disposal to deal with any of life’s problems. To this day I think long and hard about the practical application that dogma had on my life.
The idea that you could actually choose whether or not to be hurt by words: that was huge for me. Even though it has been repeated ad nauseam for generations, “sticks and stones” really is a powerful bit of philosophy to a kid. That’s one of the great things about being a parent: you can spout nothing but clichés, and yet, to your child, you come off as one of the great thinkers in Western culture.
–from MEAN DADS FOR A BETTER AMERICA, by Tom Shillue
Yesterday’s video failed to upload. We’ll see how this one does.it was called “by the fire…with no fire”
Thank you for reminding me. I wanted to talk about our post-show hangout in Memphis and here it is:
“Conversations with GROK”
Question: “Which modern political ideology is responsible for the most human death and suffering?”;
Answer: Communism (in its 20th-century implementations as Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, and related variants), by a very large margin.
This assessment rests on the scale of democide—government killing of civilians outside of conventional combat, including executions, engineered famines, forced labor camps, purges, and mass deportations—documented by historians and political scientists. The 20th century’s record of ideological mass killing is dominated by communist regimes.
Scale of the numbers
R.J. Rummel’s extensive democide research (University of Hawaii) remains the most systematic quantitative effort. His estimates for 1900–1987 put communist regimes at roughly 110–148 million victims (later upward revisions for China’s Great Leap Forward famine pushed totals higher in some presentations). A Reason summary of the same data framework lists ...
