In short Republicans are going to screw over 23 million poor Americans because they don’t want Democrats getting political credit for helping them during an election season. And because our press is generally broken and afraid of calling a duck a duck, this is going to get dressed up as a genuine concern about wasteful spending by a party that’s long been a huge fan of no shortage of wasteful spending.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    How the fuck hasn’t an admin banned that username yet?

    Edit:

    I’ve explained this to that account at least three times now, so I’m just blocking them and leaving the same evidence as the other times for everyone else.

    Yet, the most infamous records of intentionally spreading smallpox to Native Americans occurred in 1763 at Fort Pitt (present day downtown Pittsburgh). On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a fur trader commissioned at Fort Pitt, wrote in his journal after a failed negotiation between the British and the Delaware tribe. He stated that they had given the emissaries food, and as Trent wrote, “Out of our regard to them we gave them 2 Blankets and an (sic) Handkerchief out of the Small pox (sic) Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”

    Later that year, the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo Tribes laid siege to Fort Pitt. The fort’s commander wrote to his superior officer, Colonel Bouquet, that he feared the disease would overwhelm the fort’s inhabitants. After hearing of the outbreak, Bouquet’s superior officer, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, sent a suggestion from New York: “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox (sic) among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.”

    Bouquet responded, “I will try to inoculate [them] with some blankets that may fall in their hands and take care not to get the disease myself.” It is important to understand that before Jenner’s safer practice of vaccination, the term inoculation specifically meant deliberate infection. While this method was the main way of producing mass immunity, it was also known to be just as likely to start an epidemic as to end one. The timing of an outbreak of the virus that struck the Ohio Valley later that year and lasted well into 1764 coincides very closely with the distribution of infected articles from Fort Pitt.

    https://asm.org/Articles/2023/November/Investigating-the-Smallpox-Blanket-Controversy

    And as that article states, the main reason for lack of evidence is Native populations had no written language and were stripped of their own languages later.

    So the only evidence we have, is when the people doing it flat out wrote down that they were doing it.

    And we’ve got plenty of examples of that.