vineri, 14 februarie 2014

great people, great characters!


Despite the fact that Bobby Fischer quickly became a media darling following his victory in 1972, and many thousands of Americans cheered his name, Fischer’s stance on America was anything but kind. Claiming that he hated the country he once called home, Fischer was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I applaud the act” and within the same breath, “Fuck the US. I want to see the US wiped out.”
   He was also a raging anti-Semite, to the point even his most die-hard supporters found him repugnant. Unless that person was a woman.

Aristotle’s views on the fairer sex are so expansive that they get their own Wikipedia page. He basically asserted that women should be subservient to men, to the point where they shouldn’t even be allowed to eat as much food. He also claimed that women were basically incomplete men, and thus, inferior.
( Opiniile lui Aristotel cu privire la sexul frumos sunt atât de expansive că primesc propria lor pagină pe Wikipedia. El, practic, a afirmat femeile ar trebui să fie aservite bărbaţilor, până la punctul în care acestea nu ar trebui să le fie nici măcar permis să mănânce la fel de multă mâncare. De asemenea, el susţinea că femeile erau de fapt bărbaţi incompleţi, și, prin urmare, inferioare.)

John Lennon was the Chris Brown of his day. That’s not us making a cheap joke; that’s a direct comparison that has been made about him. Lennon openly admitted that he used to beat the living crap out of women, in an interview with Playboy Magazine, a magazine literally dedicated to appreciating the awesomeness of womankind, albeit the naked variety. Woman beater or not, you have to admire his sense of irony.
   The kicker of this is that very few people know this about Lennon. Whereas Chris Brown has become a walking joke, and has his domestic violence charges listed very clearly on his Wikipedia page, not a single mention is made of John Lennon’s similar abuse, despite him being massively more famous and influential than Chris Brown will ever be. And when it is mentioned, his fans are so quick to defend his actions that they almost break through time and land on the receiving end of one of his punches personally.

Nikola Tesla is hugely famous online, and within pop culture. Though in his lifetime his contributions to science and technology were largely overlooked, today he’s widely regarded as one of the best minds science has ever known.
   Eugenics, for those of you too lazy to open up a new tab on Wikipedia, is the art of selective breeding on a mass scale. It’s the act of actively denying people with undesirable traits (such as infirmity or stupidity) the right to reproduce, which supposedly betters the human race. You’ll notice that this is a terrible, horrible idea, if only because if it happened, we never would’ve gotten reality TV.
   And Tesla loved that idea. In his writings, Tesla extended the notion that “The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established,” referring to it as important for “weeding out undesirable strains.” Of course, none of this alters that fact that he was a fantastically gifted mind, but it’s more than a little disconcerting to realize that this guy fully supported the thought of certain people getting denied the chance to mate. Especially once you realize he never took a wife or had a kid.