This must be one of the most obscure busted-myths of Americana that I've ever known. Edison has been a folk hero of science since my birth. His name was synonymous with "genius" like St. Mother Teresa's name was synonymous with "charity". Nobody questioned Edison or his legacy.
It's not surprising that Edison was a mixture of genius plus 20th-century hype machine mastery, and I suppose that most inventor-scientists have strong, eccentric personalities.
I think Edison also had a bit of Warhol going on, in that he could command a cadre of workers to do his bidding and git 'er done. I was going to cite his quote about inspiration and perspiration, but that belongs to Kate Sanborn! Another Edison myth, busted!
The current Edison mythbusting is actually very similar to the Mother Teresa mythbusting, in that it's a vast overcorrection to the veneration, and relies on a lot of myths itself. Like you said, somebody can be a brilliant inventor and a shameless self-promoter. Edison was both engineer and executive. The Warhol comparison is pretty great.
What did Christopher Hitchens get wrong about Mother Teresa?
Sounds like her veneration was a vast overcorrection of a terribly harsh reality, that people who are faith and fairytale based instead of fact and evidence based simply refuse to accept.
Not even the highly but undeservedly venerated Elon Musk is known to have been involved in wrongly defending child sexual abusers, like Mother Teresa absolutely did (although he's certainly well know for accusing innocent people of being child molesters).
And if you're actually against abortion, then it's pretty idiotic and counterproductive to also be against contraception and empowering women, don't you think? That just causes even more abortions and poverty and suffering, which is the height of hypocrisy. Unless causing poverty and suffering is actually your goal, which is exactly Hitchens' spot-on criticism of Mother Teresa.
Hell's Angel (Mother Teresa) - Christopher Hitchens
>Christopher Hitchens investigates whether Mother Teresa of Calcutta deserves her saintly image. He probes her campaigns against contraception and abortion and her questionable relationships with right-wing political leaders.
Is there anything factually incorrect or "vastly overcorrected" in the wikipedia article about her? If you have better facts with supporting evidence, then you should edit the wikipedia pages so they're correct, instead of just posting about it here.
>According to a paper by Canadian academics Serge Larivée, Geneviève Chénard and Carole Sénéchal, Mother Teresa's clinics received millions of dollars in donations but lacked medical care, systematic diagnosis, necessary nutrition and sufficient analgesics for those in pain;[120] in the opinion of the three academics, "Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross".[121] It was said that the additional money might have transformed the health of the city's poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities.[122][123]
>One of Mother Teresa's most outspoken critics was English journalist and antitheist Christopher Hitchens, host of the documentary Hell's Angel (1994) and author of the essay The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) who wrote in a 2003 article: "This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."[124] He accused her of hypocrisy for choosing advanced treatment for her heart condition.[125][126] Hitchens said that "her intention was not to help people", and that she lied to donors about how their contributions were used. "It was by talking to her that I discovered, and she assured me, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty", he said, "She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, 'I'm not a social worker. I don't do it for this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church'".[127] Although Hitchens thought he was the only witness called by the Holy See, Aroup Chatterjee (author of Mother Teresa: The Untold Story) was also called to present evidence opposing Mother Teresa's beatification and canonisation.[128]
>In 1994, Mother Teresa argued that the sexual abuse allegations against Jesuit priest Donald McGuire were untrue. When he was convicted of sexually molesting multiple children in 2006, Mother Teresa's defense of him was criticised.[129][130]
>Abortion-rights groups have also criticised Mother Teresa's stance against abortion and contraception.[131][132][133]
> And if you're actually against abortion, then it's pretty idiotic and counterproductive to also be against contraception and empowering women, don't you think
No it is not the case. Because people against abortion are frequently primary against what abortion allows women to have - fear free sex and empowered life. And even when it is not primary concern, these are pretty big concerns still.
If anti abortion people were about saving life, they would be promoting easier to access health care, help to babies and mothers and so on. It never happens.
But contraception and abortion really empower men to disrespect women, to treat them as objects, to use them up and toss them out like garbage. A man who doesn't need to worry about raising a child is a man who will easily rape or abuse. A man who isn't obligated by financial support of a wife or children is a man who will cheat and move on when something hotter comes along. A man who will accompany his woman to the abortion mill is now a knight in shining armor for an empowered, liberated woman? Not sure about that.
It would be a joke if it weren't so serious. I mean, men basically convinced women of all this feminist empowerment. Contraception and abortion come from the medical industry, and well, in those heady decades before the Sexual Revolution, guess who ran the medical and pharmaceutical establishments? It was men who designed the condom, men who gave us the Pill, men who've performed all those countless abortions on strong, empowered, liberated women whose contraception failed or just was ignored after awhile. All they needed was a few useful idiots to be their face and voice, like Margaret Sanger, John Money, Kinsey.
That is very observable phenomenon. You don't need "narrative" to see what kind of believes the same person have.
> But contraception and abortion really empower men to disrespect women, to treat them as objects, to use them up and toss them out like garbage. A man who doesn't need to worry about raising a child is a man who will easily rape or abuse.
This one is however completely made up. Rapists do not mind raped women having kids. Some of them rape so that there IS the kid and others simply assume they won't be caught.
Rapists use pregnancy to force women into marriage or lifelong coparenting, especially in conservative environments.
> A man who isn't obligated by financial support of a wife or children is a man who will cheat and move on when something hotter comes along
Men with children cheat all the time. In fact, kids make it harder for partner to leave when cheating is found.
> A man who will accompany his woman to the abortion mill is now a knight in shining armor for an empowered, liberated woman?
He is a man providing support to a woman that did not wanted to bear a kid yet. This may mean her being able to go to school, get a job, her previous kids having available parent.
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You see clearly against abortion and while you pretend abortion is for men, your comment shown literally zero interest in women. You literally did not put in a single sentence about what being pregnant, with baby or having aborted coats woman. Literally only person you cared and thought about is a man.
That Reddit discussion reads like a long-form strawman.
I mean, you do not refute the statement that "Teresa ran hospitals like prisons, particularly cruel and unhygienic prisons at that" by answering "oh they were not hospitals, just homes where the dying and destitute were housed without care".
You also do not refute the accusation that "mother Teresa withheld painkillers from the dying with the intent of making them suffer" by claiming that they didn't died on the street and those who did not died could eat a good meal and leave, or claiming that other hospitals on India were also not clean.
I stopped reading that nonsense. It is a wall of text where none of Hitchen's observations were refuted or addressed.
That's a marvelous article and 60 citations to boot.
I mean, it just goes to show you how condescending the British are, in particular, about India and Indians. Hitchens didn't even bother getting to know the culture or the situation on the ground there before comparing St. Teresa's empire to the richest Western hospitals (and then turned around and vilified St. Teresa's own medical care and transportation lifestyle...)
I never really knew many deep facts about St. Teresa's network of homes and facilities. I just knew she was a woman of great charity. And she had to have earned that success in some supernatural way. If she was truly as cruel to the poor as her detractors say (and most of them merely parrot Hitchens without an original thought) then she would not have angered the priests of Kali, she would not have won the hearts and minds of the poor, and she would not have gained such singular worldwide acclaim and a prompt canonization.
Honestly, she was the type of person who not only worked within the Church and furthered the Church's mission, she furthered the humanity of those who are vulnerable and powerless. She spoke up for the unborn in a steadfast, loving way. She championed these people who couldn't even get into hospitals, who would otherwise die in a gutter. She inspired countless other women to act in the same way and join her mission. In fact I always, always see blue-and-white saris around town, because the Missionaries of Charity are active and engaged here in my hometown, and it's fantastic; it's literally like little St. Teresas running around and carrying on her work.
>And she had to have earned that success in some supernatural way.
Well that shows how un-serious your arguments are. We were discussing facts and evidence, not fairy tales and woo-woo and talking magic ghosts. If you're not a fact based person living in reality, you will believe whatever you want no matter the evidence, so your arguments are pointless.
If Mother Teresa had supernatural abilities, then why didn't she use them to make Donald McGuire stop raping children, instead of denying the truth and participating in the cover-up?
> Well that shows how un-serious your arguments are. We were discussing facts and evidence, not fairy tales and woo-woo and talking magic ghosts. If you're not a fact based person living in reality, you will believe whatever you want no matter the evidence, so your arguments are pointless.
I am sorry my good man, but I likewise believe that if you have nothing but reason and no faith, then you are an empty banging gong, who stands for nothing and cares for no one, with nothing useful to say to someone like me. Good day.
On the 100th anniversary of the first flight, the NYT published a great article explaining how narrow the success of the Wright brothers happened to be. There were others who flew first in so many slightly less amazing ways.
It's worth reading because it's another good example of how history has elided so many other contributions.
Not as narrow as many want to believe. The Wright brothers were the only ones doing actual engineering on the subject. They were 5 years ahead of everybody else and remember that being second is much much easier than being first, for one somebody else is the one making all the mistakes.
Firstly, this is an opinion piece not an article. Secondly, I've never encountered such an inadequate summation of such a notable accomplishment.
If the author holds such admiration for earlier forms of flight, I'd be interested to know how many times he's traveled in a hot air balloon relative to airplane flights.
I find your statement about the Edison quote disingenuous. I did some reading about the origin of the quote and it isn’t as cut and dry as you seem to claim.
Also, the quote is meaningful because Edison said it, not because the quote has merit in and of itself.
It’s inspiring because someone of Edison’s acclaim attributed his success to hard work. Anyone else could have said it and it wouldn’t have been a meaningful quote because they weren’t as successful as him.
Note that my statement doesn’t presuppose that he was successful solely due to his own efforts or that he isn’t a fraud etc. But rather that the significance of the quote relies on his perception as being successful in the public eye.
Edison and his company are a complex topic.
Many have pointed in the past that they have been discredited for the participation and Thomas name appeared are sole inventor.
Although they were employees of his company, and the patent would belong to Edison he (seemingly) made sure to disappear with any registries of their participation.
Of course, this could be words of the envious, but it is notable that more recent events such the system that led the creation of IBM Watson had their creator/inventor kicked out of IBM and his name erased from company registries. They only admitted their participation many years afterwards.
Edison sabotaged Tela's efforts by doing public safety demonstration, only to steal his ideas later down the line.
It is hard for me to trust a man who burnt an elephant
You may be relieved to know that Edison never killed an elephant. The elephant's owners killed it and held a barbaric public event. Employees of the Edison Film Company filmed the event, as a sort of early newsreel (one among many around that time), which is how Edison's name got associated with it. But Edison himself was completely uninvolved, and his company did nothing to bring the event about. The notion that this was some sort of public demonstration against DC current is a complete myth. For one thing, it took place a decade after the war of the currents.
Not to undermine your clarifying the truth, it's worth pointing out some of the confusion about that episode probably stems from some of what transpired during the war of the currents. The reason people falsely remembered it as a demonstration against AC is probably in part because it resembled things done in demonstration against AC:
It's not surprising that Edison was a mixture of genius plus 20th-century hype machine mastery, and I suppose that most inventor-scientists have strong, eccentric personalities.
I think Edison also had a bit of Warhol going on, in that he could command a cadre of workers to do his bidding and git 'er done. I was going to cite his quote about inspiration and perspiration, but that belongs to Kate Sanborn! Another Edison myth, busted!