Reflections of a stormy petrel

C'est pas très sérieux! It's the sort of thing you should tut-tut airily while enjoying a nice glass of red Chimay.

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J'aimerais bien le croire. Mais j'ai temoigne' une irrationalite' croissante entre les rangs conservatifs, des de la victoire d'Obama. Dans quelque peu de mois, le creationisme et le Ron-Paulisme sont passes de la peripherie semi-folle au centre operatif du mouvement, et Glenn Beck et ses pareilles sont devenus leur portes-parole. C'est comme un ensorcellement collectif; meme les gold-bugs et la John Birch Society sont reapparus. J'ai peur que cette absurdite' anti-historique ne soit que trop symptomatique de la condition de la mentalite' conservatrice aux Es-Us.

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Pas tout le monde. Par exemple pas l'adorable Bill Kristol. (Well, he's my editor, and a perfectly civilised and sceptical individual, happily.) I'm also glad the crowd at National Review wrote a couple of months back that the Right were shooting themselves in the foot with the whole birth certificate nonsense.

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P.S.: pardonnez tous mes outrages contre la langue de Moliere et Voltaire, SVP.

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Pas beaucoup! It's just that your keyboard needs accents. (There's a way to do them by using the Brazilian Portugese keyboard. I used to know all about it on my old laptop.)

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PPS: that was fun!

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Did you just call a website "narrow minded" then say they should not publish a line of thought you disagree with? Nice.

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Only if you ignore the fact that these people as much as told Nick Cohen that because he stood for human rights and equality he could not be a left-winger! If that does not meet your definition of narrow-mindedness, it meets mine. But then, the only point you make is that you are offended that I disagree with you.

PS: honest people sign their messages.

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elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com

This is interesting, as I just finished reading the book 1421 last week, and I found it interesting and pretty believable. From the description of the book in the OP, it sounds like they're just picking and choosing circumstances instead of doing thorough research. (To me anyway, and I'm just an amateur LOL)

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Exactly. There was nothing miraculous or even surprising about Columbus sailing to the Caribbean; had he not done so, America would have been discovered by the Portuguese captain Cabral ten years later, when he drifted off his route to the Cape and India, and discovered Brazil. Besides, there is good reason to believe that illiterate British and Breton fishermen had already discovered the banks of Newfoundland and had kept the discovery secret to their own advantage. The point is that as soon as the route to America was found, there were hundreds of ships ready to exploit it. Within twenty years, even before Cortez invaded the mainland, Spain had established an empire in the island, with cities like Havana already in place. And that is just one of the points.

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And then there are all those celtic ruins all over New England.

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elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com

there is good reason to believe that illiterate British and Breton fishermen had already discovered the banks of Newfoundland and had kept the discovery secret to their own advantage.
I have a book called Cod(and I'm damned if I can remember the author right now) which devotes a chapter to making this case--the quantity of fish that Breton and Portuguese ships were coming back with pretty much had to have come from the Grand Banks/Georges Bank (which is coincidentally also where The Perfect Storm takes place).

Edited Date: 2010-01-06 09:12 pm (UTC)

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I know the book, though I've never read it.

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redcoast.livejournal.com

I could write a response entitled "Seven Plagues that Proves God Hates America" but nobody would buy it, right?

Let's see - Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 attacks, smallpox, Spanish Flu ... I can think of more.

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MANY PEOPLE WOULD BUY IT. But you wouldn't let yourself be tempted by filthy lucre, would you?

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God scourges those he loves.

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Smallpox and Spanish flu did not devastate America alone. You might have tried yellow fever.

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affablestranger.livejournal.com

Wow.

And the laughs just keep on coming, brought on by those who say they really want to be taken seriously.

Eesh.

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I would have found this tolerable, were it not for the shoddy workmanship and especially because it cited that psuedo-historical garbage, 1421.

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Well, no, the whole thesis is inacceptable from beginning to end. There was nothing miraculous about Columbus managing to get to the Caribbean, as the story of Cabral makes clear. Every war and every army have stories like that of Washington's "miraculous fog"; it only means one piece of luck in seven years of an activity - war - that depends on luck all the time. (And if we are looking for miracles, what about the unusual wind pattern that kept the British fleet away from Yorktown and trapped Cornwallis between the artillery of Washington and Rochambeau and the ships of Le Grasse?) There was nothing miraculous about the election of Lincoln, just a very smart campaign by a talented lawyer (Lincoln had become the leading lawyer in his state, and a rich man, before he ever entered national politics) and experienced campaigner (remember the Lincoln-Douglas debates) who had a brilliant ability to get noticed and make the right speech at the right time - in fact, the way all successful politicians rise. And frankly, I think that to place the election of Ronald Reagan in the same class is mere party political delusion. You may disagree, but I think that Reagan's part in the collapse of the Soviet empire has been grossly overestimated, and that the Soviet Union would have collapsed whoever was at the American helm. Everyone knew, at the time, that it was an incredibly inefficient and corrupt society, and I think the reasons for its collapse were wholly internal.

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mindstalk.livejournal.com

Those people, who tell us socialism or communism cannot work, nonetheless often display a touching faith in the viability of the USSR left to its own devices.

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