Yeah, the ordinary American has too much much vacation. Juicy, you might be happier in China or some place with a six day or even 7 day week, not just for the lower class, but for you, too. You always seem to be upset about the average American getting over by having too high of a minimum wage, too easy access to health care, living the high life eating on food stamps etc.
I'm on the fence. The version of Columbus taught in most American schools isn't close to the monster he was. However, as Ottomaton pointed out, being a monster was normal back then. Rather than celebrate him or not, I want schools doing a better job at discussing who Columbus, and then hopefully voters will decide accordingly. Yes I'm an idealist.
Hahahahahaha no. The Americas never could have competed with Eurasia/Africa, they were too isolated from one another ( no Genghis Khan/steppe nomads to spur them to advance and to also suffer as a cross-continent communicator)and suffered from geographical weaknesses which were always going to hold them back.
China don't have more holidays than the US. When they have those week long holidays, it's usually a result of 3 actual days of holidays with the other days just shifted around (eg, work on Saturday & Sunday and get Monday & Tuesday off instead). Europeans usually have the highest # of holidays.
Sure that was part of it, but the technological advantage of the foreigners was why the native population was so incredibly easy to conquer. In Columbus' own words Fighting with cane sticks against crossbows, pikes, steel swords, and potentially even early muskets isn't exactly something that ends well.
Bobbythegreat, I agree with your general premise, but the implication that Native Americans not having artillery and machine guns indicates laziness or some other moral failing is a little bizarre.
BTW, the reason Cortez was able to defeat such a large Aztec opponent with so few men is goofy. The Aztec had such an industry in human sacrifice, that they couldn't keep up with demand. They couldn't afford to waste any potential human sacrifices. They repeatedly captured, but refused to kill, Cortez ' s men, because they wanted to rip out their hearts. The Spaniards would escape, return to fighting, and get captured again, only for the cycle to start again.
So we'll add Native Americans deserved to be murdered, deceived, and conquered because they were wasting their time on Earth by not developing more effective weapons for war to the previously noted one million civilians can be nuked and the elderly and poor don't deserve to vote to your impressive list of insights bobby. You are proving yourself to be quite the evolved humanitarian.
How about letting people choose their days off? That is 2 extra weeks of vacation days. I'm self-employed. I don't really get days off.
I didn't mean to indicate that it was laziness per se, IMO the main reason they never did all that much by way of military innovation was because they never felt a reason to. Compared to those in the rest of the world, those in the Americas had it pretty well....they never felt like they had to develop that technology like they did in other parts of the world. Sure there were small scale skirmishes between tribes or whatever, but they never had anything the scale of what was going on in the parts of the world that were developing more rapidly. Every time a conquer would rise, it raised the bar for warfare and it caused everyone to step up their game, that never really happened in the Americas.
He brought together two worlds. Big risk, big reward. But I would love seeing some good alternate histories in both hemispheres if it never happened.
Celebrate a person that was quite evil, didn't even discover America first by a long shot, and is full of delusional stories to our elementary kids in the States. But i absolutely think it's fine. I think by us officially celebrating such a day is in itself something worth for kids to later learn and understand in their later year as part of US history.
Funny thing is that the Church needed a couple of thousand of pages to explain the consumption of the body of Christ and a little more than two sentences to give the entire world away on the Columbus voyage. Pretty funny. All that said, I think that in general the people of that era were no different than today. I suspect 98% of humans were decent people when it came to the idigenous and respecting their inalienable rights. It was an has been the policies of the governments and the church that seem to war and seek conquest. And to that end, little has changed in 500 years. So I think the people of the time weren't so much as dicks, as it was the policies that governed them. And I would like to think that the majority of activities and interactions were generally humane and good.
Big if, but if you consider North Africa's fairly seminal contributions to Western Civ during antiquity and imagine continuous European trade with Sub-Saharan Africa without the displacement of trans-Atlantic slavery or full-fledged colonialism and mineral appropriation, then one can see how they might have advanced beyond indigenous America. But they'd still have to learn how to write, use a wheel, smelt ore, and develop political and linguistic networks bigger than a square mile.
