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Joshie

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Posts posted by Joshie

  19. Posted

    More genetically diverse doesn't mean they had more disease; that comes from having a high population density.

     

    Not true, it mostly comes from the varieties of livestock and domesticated animals you have around, along with some things that come from the wild. Tenochtitlan in the years before the white man got to it was a very connected, prospering city of 250,000-350,000 people and as dense as anything in Europe without having a ton of disease or resistances like the ones people across the Atlantic had.

     

    As for African populations being resistant to and able to carry things that other populations can't, well, it's just a fact, you can't really argue... so many awful things come out of those jungles, even in our time, Ebola, etc. over time the people that live in those environs have to adapt protections like:

    dXiXfaf.png

     

    Also 450 feet is not "one of the tallest buildings in the world" by a long shot. We know how the Egyptians built the pyramids and it wasn't by getting aliens to do it for them.

    No one said "one of the tallest buildings in the world" so you shouldn't put it in quote marks. Obviously it isn't one of the tallest, and was exceeded a thousand years ago by certain cathedrals. It is, however, one of the largest structures ever built.

    • Like 1

  20. Posted

    Andrew is on point with this. Alot of these alien whackadoos obsess about monuments in South America and Africa because there has been little academic research to contradict their stupid ideas. So in this environment their crazy beliefs actually can gain some foothold. Now, the reason there is so little academic research into pre-Columbian South American or pre-colonized Africa (barring Egypt) is because of the prevailing sense in academia that brown and black people are stupid. I mean, the Olmecs built statues with African faces on them, and there is no research into whether there were African traders visiting Central and South America before Columbus. Like, the question is not even entertained, much less given money to study.

     

    1. White people are part of the alien crazies conspiracies as well, viking runestones, stonehenge, etc. It's not limited to just questioning the achievements of darker people.

    2. We don't have to investigate fringe theories like African -> Gulf of Mexico transit because we have genetic evidence now that wasn't present when the theories were developed. There is not significant African haplotypes in the native population of the Americas. We can also tell because they weren't wiped out... Africans are even more genetically diverse and disease resistant than European explorers (witness what happened to the people getting colonized in the Americas vs. the people getting colonized in Africa) so if there was regular trading contact the indigenous Americans would have wiped out by plagues before Columbus even got there.

    3. I don't know about that "academia is against folks of color" either. Lots of historians are def. racist, but in my anthro classes 10 years ago we learned about Mansa Musa and Timbuktu and the Arabic contact with Zanzibar and East African trading with India/China (i.e., things we have evidence for instead of fringe wishful thinking) There is a large part of academia (even in the red-state public university I attended) that is open to exploring the achievements of African people and teaching them to students and it's disingenuous to portray it like it's still 1935, intellectually.

     

    And the ancient alien nutjobs are disallowing for any human ingenuity to come from the populations of South American and Africa, etc when they posit that only aliens could have built the lasting testaments of these people's civilizations. None of them say that Issac Newton got the laws of thermodynamics from a being from another planet. Or that the Panethon was directed by Martians.

    4. If anyone says Isaac Newton got the laws of thermodynamics, it would have to be from another planet, because he was dead at least 50 years prior to people getting started on those. The earliest shit done to disprove caloric/phlogiston as far as I remember was Count Rumford in 1795 or 1797 and Newton was dead in 1727.

    5. No one says the Pantheon (I assume that's what you mean by "Panethon") was directed by Martians because, quite frankly, it's not that impressive. It's 150 feet tall, and built in the middle of a very organized urban center, of hundreds of thousands of people, who we know had architecture to build aqueducts and mathematics, etc. The Great Pyramid is still one of the largest structures ever built, over 450 feet tall, and very difficult to imagine anyone building that far back, and would still be an incredible achievement today.

  21. Posted

     

    My first thought as well, although I thought it was too mainstream (as far as SF goes) to be that cryptic a reference.

     

    Also, how was this username still available?

    I'd like to answer your question, but I'm not sure I understood it... can you please restate it as some combination of you gesturing to something technological and saying your own name, please?

    • Like 3

  25. Posted

    I've always wondered why gun rights people never say shit about their constitutionally protected right to bear nuclear arms...

    as a gun rights person, because of the externalities. it is not possible to use nuclear arms without affecting an otherwise uninvolved party who did not choose to incur that cost (seismic effects, fallout, radiation, etc.) you can't have a weapon to protect your rights that violates someone else's unavoidably and intrinsically. it creates an imbalance that violates bentham/mill's harm principle.

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