Donald Trump’s Nightmare

I was inspired to write this by two things.

Stalin’s Nightmare (Bertrand Russell, Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, 1954) World War III ends with the Soviet dictator being captured and some pacifist activists getting to work on him. They try to convince him that it is better to be loved than feared, and that there is a such a thing as spontaneous benevolence.

No, Oprah is not going to be a viable Democratic candidate (PZ Myers, Pharyngula, 2018 January 11):

In some ways, they’re perfectly good representatives of the yin and yang of our two political parties. Donald Trump: xenophobic, angry, crude, white male. Oprah Winfrey: kind, sympathetic, open, black female. They’re almost caricatures of the right and left. All they need to do is open their mouths in a public forum and stand there like the apotheosis of their representative parties, and people start clamoring to make them our real political leaders.

So President Oprah Winfrey would be a good nightmare for Donald Trump. But I have thought of a more detailed scenario.

Joseph Stalin’s Nightmare

In 1954, philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote the book Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories, available in the Internet Archive as Nightmares Of Eminent Persons And Other Stories : Russell, Bertrand : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive This book is about what various sorts of people might dread the most. Another one, The Theologian’s Nightmare is in a later book by him, Fact and Fiction (1961). That nightmare is to discover that the Earth is very cosmically insignificant.

One of my favorites of these nightmares is Stalin’s Nightmare. It is in the original collection, and subtitled “Amor Vincit Omnia” (“Love Conquers All” in Latin). More on it below the fold.

Liveblogging the Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party was the destruction of some tea shipments in the British North American colonies before they became the United States. It was done as a protest of some British-Government tax policies, essentially crony capitalism by tax break. “No taxation without representation!” they objected.

It was done long before present-day social media, but I will imagine what a liveblog of it might look like. I didn’t try to imitate 18th-cy. English, especially literary English, so some of it may look anachronistic. It’s under the fold.

Look Who Would Be Aborted: Feminists and Female Politicians

Back in Look Who Would Be Aborted! | NexusZine I made a list of possible abortions that did not happen, and in Look Who Would Be Aborted: Who’s Who | NexusZine I listed who might have been aborted as a result of those hypothetical abortions. I will here make a list of hypothetical abortions for some noted feminists and female politicians.

• Lucy Read in 1819 — Susan B. Anthony
• Margaret Livingston in 1815 — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Anne Purcell in 1879 — Margaret Sanger
• Olive Pickering in 1879 — Jeannette Rankin
• Anna Rebecca Hall in 1884 — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Miriam Horwitz in 1920 — Betty Friedan
• Ruby Seale in 1924 — Shirley Chisholm
• Ruth Nuneviller in 1933 — Gloria Steinem
• Velma Lee Moore in 1938 — Maxine Waters
• Nancy Lombardi in 1939 — Nancy Pelosi
• Filia Ravitz in 1941 — Elizabeth Holtzman
• Dorothy Emma Howell in 1947 — Hillary Clinton
• Pauline Reed in 1948 — Elizabeth Warren
• Vernita Lee in 1953 — Oprah Winfrey
• Shyamala Gopalan in 1964 — Kamala Harris
• Sandra Echols in 1973 — Ayanna Pressley
• Fadhuma Abukar Haji Hussein in 1982 — Ilhan Omar
• Bianca Cortez in 1989 — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Europeans Are Mixed

Or in more informal terms, honkies are mutts.

• Genetic testing reveals that Europe is a melting pot, made of immigrants – “Genetic tests of ancient settlers’ remains show that Europe is a melting pot of bloodlines from Africa, the Middle East, and today’s Russia.” – National Geographic
• Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe – professional-journal paper

The three migrations that populated Europe were:

• Paleolithic: likely from the Middle East.
• Neolithic: from Anatolia (Turkey) in the Middle East, by farmers.
• Steppe: from the South European Russian part of the steppe (grassland) zone, by users of domestic horses and wheeled vehicles. These migrants took the Indo-European languages with them, spreading them over Europe and southern Asia.