5 ms·

Not only resource-poor, but also a cultural backwater burdened with a kind of religious extremism foreign to much of the rest of the world.

mgaunard 4y ago
Did you conveniently ignore Islam?
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  No, that's why I said "much of the rest of the world", rather than "the rest of the world".
jacquesm 4y ago
Cultural backwater right up to that point, and religious extremist right up to that point. Many countries/regions never went through such a phase and that is what allowed Europe to do what it did, it essentially leapfrogged from the dark ages to modernity in an extremely short span of time while elsewhere not much changed. It also enabled a period of expansionism and engendered some of the worst atrocities committed by mankind today, but the scientific and cultural progress can not be denied.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Why do you add the 'today' caveat? I think you again need to add an asterix to 'some of the worst atrocities committed' to instead be commonly recorded or the 'if the tree fell' analogy. What did the sacrifice culture of the Aztecs require to be sustained? Many many peoples of Europe were wiped from the earth (Old Prussians as an easy example). It wasn't about killing non-Europeans as Europeans were just as happy to genocide Europeans. How many many black slaves on whole went to China/East but because they used castration a permanent population was never established. Did this result in more or less suffering than slavery on the eastern seaboard of the Americas? Don't forget for a thousand years before Europeans went international slave hunting Europeans were the hunted (to the point they have mythical an anti-Santa that slave hunts for little European boys and girls). How many struggles like the Sioux almost genociding the Crow happened in the Americas that we don't know about? We have the same principle as being discussed happen in history discussions, only they are used to make European violence look like an outlier that it might not have been.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Because I don't think we've seen the worst yet.

mgaunard 4y ago

Did you conveniently ignore Islam?

NoGravitas 4y ago
No, that's why I said "much of the rest of the world", rather than "the rest of the world".

jacquesm 4y ago

Cultural backwater right up to that point, and religious extremist right up to that point. Many countries/regions never went through such a phase and that is what allowed Europe to do what it did, it essentially leapfrogged from the dark ages to modernity in an extremely short span of time while elsewhere not much changed. It also enabled a period of expansionism and engendered some of the worst atrocities committed by mankind today, but the scientific and cultural progress can not be denied.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Why do you add the 'today' caveat? I think you again need to add an asterix to 'some of the worst atrocities committed' to instead be commonly recorded or the 'if the tree fell' analogy. What did the sacrifice culture of the Aztecs require to be sustained? Many many peoples of Europe were wiped from the earth (Old Prussians as an easy example). It wasn't about killing non-Europeans as Europeans were just as happy to genocide Europeans. How many many black slaves on whole went to China/East but because they used castration a permanent population was never established. Did this result in more or less suffering than slavery on the eastern seaboard of the Americas? Don't forget for a thousand years before Europeans went international slave hunting Europeans were the hunted (to the point they have mythical an anti-Santa that slave hunts for little European boys and girls). How many struggles like the Sioux almost genociding the Crow happened in the Americas that we don't know about? We have the same principle as being discussed happen in history discussions, only they are used to make European violence look like an outlier that it might not have been.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Because I don't think we've seen the worst yet.