I just perused the comment thread. That is quite possibly the creepiest thing I’ve read since the Wikipedia article on The Turner Diaries.

Seriously, every other post in that thread is “All the Democrats!”. Liberals are posting historically-minded questions about injustices in America’s past, and also discussing which would be the worst serial killer. Conservatives are just posting their political adversaries and calling them traitors.

Disgusting.

Rest of the list:
2. Dick Cheney (Lex Luthor without the charm, or the good side),
3. N.B. Forrest (obviously),
4. Joe McCarthy (Ironically did a very decent impression of the Stalin-era Politburos during his inexplicable rise to fame)
5. Lyndon B. Johnson
6. Ann Coulter (I bet she eats live puppies for breakfast every morning, just before beating up her kids)
7. Fred Phelps
8. George W. Bush
9. Benedict Arnold
10. The Rosenbergs

They were also at least people to came here to settle, to stay and develop a life. The person named in entry #1 was hired help. He never came over here to stay. He was a British subject who was born in Great Britian, died in Great Britian, was a member of the British Aristocracy (as a Baron), and neither he nor his contemporaries would have considered him an American. He acted in the name of the British Crown, not the colonial authorities. He also commited his acts 13 years prior to the existence of America. The fact that someone committed an act in territory that later became America doesn’t make them an American. He was a foreigner.

Maybe it is for the same reason that the pilgrims and the Virginia Colony are usually covered in American History classes?

Oh, and in response to this bit of idiotic assholery:

I’ll bet you are one of the folks bemoaning 2100 casualties in Iraq over 3 years too. Sorry that you don’t like it that people are held accountable for their government.

Only it’s not 2,100. It’s more like 38,000 if not more.

That includes those evil infants and toddlers that need to be held accountable for their government.

Sorry Barry, but he/she deserved it.

He protests homosexuality, but is unable to see his own sin (by his standard to be sure).

For the past week, there’s been a lot of hubbub over All Things Beautiful’s Ten Worst Americans challenge. For a lot of reasons, I don’t…

General Sherman also authored the Navajo treaty …

I think that having personally commanded several genocidal wars is enough to get you on the “worst Americans” list even if you also worked out a good treaty along the way.

RonF:

Don’t take this as a defense of Sherman’s march to Atlanta. I just want to know what was new about it.

All kinds of atrocities and raids have been practiced in warfare since recorded history, but Sherman’s march inaugurated a couple of new tendencies for the modern age. It was one of the first times in recorded history that scorched-earth warfare was (1) systematically used (2) as a weapon of offense (3) on such a large scale. There are a few examples of scorched-earth tactics being used for defensive purposes (e.g. in Spain and Russia during the Napoleonic wars), plenty of examples of arbitrary pillage, raiding, and destruction in the countryside, and some examples of the destruction of entire cities (such as the Romans’ destruction of Carthage, or the Mongols sack of Baghdad). But Sherman pioneered the systematic use of deliberate devastation as a strategic weapon to break the enemy (through both concrete damage and terror), and he practiced it on a regional scale uncontemplated even in Timurlane’s darkest dreams.

Now, I’m no expert in military history; there may very well be examples of this kind of devastation elsewhere prior to Sherman, and maybe even on a comparable scale. But my understanding is that it’s Sherman whose legacy our contemporary historians and generals study as the origin of modern total warfare. (And if I’m mistaken, of course, he’s still an asshole, for other reasons.)

Well Seasoned:

Emperor remains emperor is ok? Have you studied what was done to US captives by the Japanese? Have you looked at the statistics on how many Americans were still dying during the latter phase of the war? Do you not remember how the war with Japan began? … Sorry that you don’t like it that people are held accountable for their government …

Deliberately killing civilians in retaliation for the crimes of their governments, in order to achieve some political end, is terrorism. In this case, terrorism that resulted in the deaths of over half a million civilians.

Question 1: In what respect is this morally better than the massacre of 2,000 or so innocent civilians in retaliation for the crimes of their government on September 11?

Question 2: Given whatever justification provides your answer to Question 1, is there any moral limit on the number of civilians killed in the terror-bombing of Japan as far as you’re concerned? How many innocent lives would you have considered acceptable losses for an unconditional surrender?

I”m curious as to what this guy invented that didn’t exist prior to him. Hell, the Romans slaughtered all the Carthaginians, burned the city down, and sowed salt on the ground to sterilize it. How did he “improve” on that?

Don’t take this as a defense of Sherman’s march to Atlanta. I just want to know what was new about it.

I’d like to see documentation that the intent behind the assembly line was to produce a particular effect on the workers, as opposed to producing a particular effect on the product.

Profits don’t just appear by fairy hands. The money always comes out of someone’s pocket - and in the case of the rise of mechanized, assembly-line labor, the pockets picked belonged to many, many skilled laborers and craftspeople and small business owners.

Profits are not necessarily a zero-sum game. They do not have to be the result of picking someone’s pocket. They can be earned by producing an existing product more efficiently. They can be produced by improving a product so that it works better or faster. They can be earned by creating a new product that enables others to do a job they couldn’t do before. There are entire new industries that make our lives better; think of all the medical-related industries that didn’t exist 100 years ago. Shit, think of all the ones that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Productivity can be increased without reducing someone or something else.

I’m not saying I think the answer is to return to the “dark ages,” but why should that be the only alternative? I’d be glad to lose my freedom to purchase unlimited widgets in exchange for greater independence for workers, more opportunities for small business owners and jobs that require skill and engage people’s faculties - the kind of jobs that provide experience and make the individual worker more and more valuable with age, rather than just a worn-out cog to be pitched in the trash.

There’s lots of jobs like that. But they’re not in manufacturing, and aren’t going to be. Assembly line jobs are actually decreasing; robots are taking over more and more of them. Information technology and medicine are two areas. But there’s lots of dismal jobs out there, just like there were before the assembly line was created. The problem is that if you want the kind of job you describe, you need to get a good educational or technical training base and maintain it as you get older.

Whatever benefits it may have conferred, the assembly line turned workers into manipulable serfs,

For the most part, they already were. And they were unable to afford what they made, to boot.

and that was its purpose.

That I’d like to see documented.

The labor movement fought for controls on the process that made things better for workers for a while, but those are now being steadily dismantled in the US and in foreign “cheap labor” pools, do not exist at all (and, oh yeah…greedy first world capitalists are largely responsible for the conditions prevailing in today’s third world countries. Ford and his ilk, and their European predecessors are responsible for that).

Yeah, we’ve pretty much exported our worst shit manufacturing jobs to the third world. I’m not a big fan of having essentially exported our manufacturing base. But if you want to blame greedy first world capitalists for that, put yourself on the list if you personally use any of those products. Do you wear custom-made shoes, or Nikes? Multiply that against all the other products you wear or listen to or watch. The greedy first world capitalists can’t sell what people don’t buy. How much freedom to buy widgets - and clothing, and appliances, and personal electronics, etc - would you care to lose? If we had to pay American middle-class wages to everyone that made all the material goods we use, I think you’ll find that most people would be able to buy far fewer material goods.

As Rose said above, the main point was to weaken the position of the labor force by making workers interchangeable and, ultimately, disposable, so that they would no longer be in a position to make inconvenient demands on their employers in the interest of improving their personal ‘profitability.’

I hate to say it, as I agree that the abstraction of labor (that is, the simplification of labor tasks until anyone can perform them) was a strategy undertaken explicitly to cheapen labor costs and destroy the bargaining position of the worker, but Henry Ford didn’t invent it.

The factory system predates Henry Ford by almost a hundred years and was first developed in England in the pottery industry, long before the assembly line, explicitly for the nefarious purposes just ascribed to it. I don’t remember off-hand who invented it, though.

Yes, he fine tuned mass-production and he was a racist. However, he retracted his anti-semitic comments later in life. Granted, you can’t unsay what has been said, but at least he acknowledged he was worng. Also, unlike Walmart, he didn’t just produce cheap goods, he PAID his workers well, even before unionization. My grandfather worked on the assembly line from it’s very beginning until the mid-seventies, and his job at Ford was what brought his family out of poverty.

Excuse me? Emperor remains emperor is ok?

Apparently so, because the Emperor did remain Emperor.

If it is true (and I’m not saying that it is) that this was the only sticking point preventing a surrender prior to the A-bombs, then their justification evaporates.