[Asurai]

Originally Posted by pitseleh

Go on, say it - "Genocide, schmenocide... they were all gonna die anyway. Those pox-infested blankets only sped up the inevitable! Nowadays we don't worry about that kinda stuff, we have medicine now. I'm so glad I'm not a poor person. I barely even notice my pesky humanity anymore! Hooray!" That's pretty fucking cold, man.

What? Besides having no clue what you just said, I have no idea how you got it from that quotation.

Basically, the point is: it's better to be healthy and safe than sick and afraid. If you disagree, then by all means say so.

Originally Posted by Solumina

If everything were in black and white we would be incapable of truly deep thoughts, there would be no philosophy, no wisdom, only cold hard facts and logic.

Philosophy is hard facts and logic.

It ain't no paradise by a long shot. Maybe it looks like that from the office in the Ayn Rand institute, but people are still being crushed under the wheels of "progress" every day.

Who is still crushed under the wheels of progress every day?

The only people that I can imagine you to say, would be the poor (I don't use the term insultingly; I was and still am dirt-poor) who are laid off by industry. But they're people getting screwed by regression, not progress.

(Just to note: Ayn Rand's a bit to extreme for even my tastes; the entire "anything done for yourself is good; for others, evil" thing never appealed to me. But she did know a lot.)

I would be interested to hear, though, how the culture of the Aztecs was "philosophically and morally" superior to that of the British. The one cut out the beating hearts of captives to please the Sun; the other invented the theory of individual rights and Social Contract.

Neither I nor Bowden support genocide. In the book, he strongly condemns, say, the actions of the Spaniards, as I do now.

Yeah, but what's cooler? The latter, of course.

Of course. The latter is totally ubergothic. 8)

Originally Posted by Wolfmoon

Asurai, that quote fills me with disgust and revulsion on so many levels........

You've always been nothing but kind to me, so I regret any offense done to you. If you can refute any of the statements, I would be glad to retract them.

Xnguela:

Don't worry about it. I'll talk to you once you get it working again -- if you still wish to speak with a cynical, Randian capitalist, of course.

I'll be back shortly, again, then I'll get to the longer quote. Goody goody gumdrops and rainbows.

Tstone:

The Aztecs knew of the wheel and used it for children's toys. There is absolutely no archaeological evidence that they knew of any other use for it, to the best of my knowledge. Saying that "they must have had the wheel, because they built stone temples" is a non sequitur; we know very little about the methods used to build those temples.

The image is a round stone without any way to connect it to something else. A wheel, to be functional technologically, must be able to be connected to an axis of some sort. A round stone does not equal a wheel; it could be any number of other things. Perhaps they used it to offer still-beating human hearts to their gods. </ad hominem>

Still, even if they did, it doesn't particularly matter much. To say that even the most advanced American Indian culture was "grandiose" in terms of science and technology, compared to even the least advanced Western European civilization, is an absurd comparison.