I am thankful to people who share their insightful viewpoints which in many cases have been significantly different than mine and led to me changing my opinion on issues.
I recommend you to read history. There was no genocide in Cuba. Some people people die from sickness brought by Europeans and right after the discovery the Queen of Spain at the time ruled that the native couldn't be enslaved. So the ones who didn't die were simply blend into society.
> I recommend you to read history. There was no genocide in Cuba
Perhaps your history is written by Spaniards. I notice you didn't give any specific books to read. I'll do you a favour. Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/Brevisima-relacion-destruicion-Humani... The cover is "A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant Theodor de Bry for Las Casas's Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Cuba"
While some atrocities did happen there was no genocide at all. That's why the old Spanish Empire in America is full of indigenous and mixed people. In coutrines like Bolivia the indigenous population is like 80%. How's that possible with?
500 years ago the Spanish crown forbid by slavery and declared that all indigenous people had the same rights as anyone. They also encouraged mixed marriages, something that wasn't allowed in the US until the 60's if I'm not mistaken.
I could tell you also how the some Mexican tribes allied with around 600 Spaniards to overthrow the Aztec Empire because they were the slaughters. Or how Blas de Lezo defended Cartagena de Indias from the British and saved thousand of indigenous which would've died in hands of the attackers.
That's why you can find 500 year old Spanish cities and universities in America.
I won't judge actions made 500 ago by today's standards but I won't throw unfunded accusations either.
Las Casas's reaction to the atrocities, which the depiction shows, lead him to advocate for abolition of slavery.
That is, dm3730's comment concerns events which took place before slavery was prohibited, while your response concerns a later period of time, making it a rather inapplicable comment.
And I'll note that Spain had African slaves (not abolished in Cuba until 1886), and allowed slavery of indigenous people who rebelled against Spanish rule.
> Raphael Lemkin (coiner of the term genocide) considers Spain's abuses of the native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide including the abuses of the Encomienda system.
Do note also the "Skepticism toward alleged demographic declines and accusations of genocide" section on the same page.
The encomienda system allowed for forced labor, with severe punishment for not complying. But no, it wasn't, technically, slavery.
You ask "How's that possible [that the indigenous population of Bolivia is like 80%."
Where's the incompatibility? Tell me, what's the indigenous population of Cuba?
The US genocide of the indigenous Californians killed something like 90% of the indigenous population. But there's no similar genocide of the indigenous Hawaiians or Alaskans. Does the lack of a US genocide in one place mean that there was no genocide anywhere? Clearly no. So your example doesn't prove anything.
You write "all indigenous people had the same rights as anyone".
That's like saying that the US founders believed that "all men are created equal."
First off, did conversos have the same rights as non-conversos?
"Yet, there were very real spiritual and social consequences tied to this system in which Indians and Africans were deemed to be of lesser spiritual ability, received a watered-down version of the faith, and were relegated to an inferior spiritual status within the religious fold. ... That culture of inferiority and suspicion around the purity of their religious belief and practice was reinforced socially and spatially throughout colonial society. Because they were perceived as constantly in need of correction, colonial controls on their bodies and souls were all the more heightened. In addition to limited access to the sacraments,Indians and Africans experienced heavy regulation of their spiritual and social activities. Indians were regularly restricted to reducciones as a means of taming their natural inclinations to better prepare them for proper Christian practice. Africans were subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to regulate any unorthodox or immoral behavior. Confraternities and religious brotherhoods, arguably the most active aspect of popular religious life in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas, were often segregated by casta category or ethnic origin, with whites holding positions of power to monitor their ritual practice."
Dude the history of humans is brutal. The only way societies consolidated and culture formed is through the battles and conquers of the past. We're now at a point where we have the prescience to not repeat the past. But just respect that that is how you yourself are alive on this planet. Your ancestors killed and conquered the resources of others, and that's how they propagated to get to you. It's foolish to believe otherwise.
Where do they believe otherwise? They're merely mentioning that the city was populated prior to the genocide. You're defending atrocities against a specter of your own imagination.
In their 2nd comment below you can see that they are trying to call out the colonization, etc. And also I'm not "defending against my imagination"... there's so many commenters that think history is so reprehensible and modern day people should be directly guilty for things that happened 500 years ago.
I'm not. I feel the need to show being realistic about the past instead of having an emotional response. "Omg people conquered other people, that is bad!" Very infantile view of a complex world/history, where every single group in every single nook and cranny of every continent has done this in the past.
Putting aside questions of what it means to "buy" the Louisiana Territory and then use military force against the indigenous peoples, one obvious one is the Spanish-American War, where we got Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippine Islands.
We then had to fight the Philippine Republic for control of the country, in the Philippine-American war.
> I feel the need to show being realistic about the past instead of having an emotional response.
What's wrong with an emotional response to an atrocity? Is it irrational to cry over the Holocaust because, hey, the Tsars didn't some pretty bad pogroms, too? No, emotional responses are perfectly fine and are a normal mode of thinking. Your fetishization of reason is dangerous and echoes the same rhetoric that enabled these atrocities: oh, they're not people, they're savages because X, so cut off their hands if they don't bring enough silver. The correct response here is to denounce colonialism, not to say, "oh, hey, it's not that bad because other people have done bad things."
Haha you're putting words in my mouth. Of course I have an emotional response to events of the past, usually negative like most people. I'm just separating that from the historical and factual response, and understanding the difference between the two.
The point is that it wasn't just Europeans that have done bad things in the past. It was every type of person. And now we can collectively move past with the lessons.
> This article seems to be extremely one-sided. They don't bring up views from the "white scientists" they blame for racism and who helped during the discovery.
Which article did you read? Because the article linked in above explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism. People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point. It is nice to see that Peter was able to get past his prejudice, better late than never.
"
When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses.
"I think that's a fair comment," he says. "But my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience."
"
Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.
> People with bias or prejudice often have difficulty seeing data that contradicts their desired view point.
> [The article] explicitly provides the views from Peter Piot who admits he wrote out the African researcher and by the way, admits to racism.
Uhhhh.... lol.
A strict reading of the article would reveal that Piot never admits to racism (on his part) and admits to no attempt to "write out Muyembe".
Piot accuses others of being racist (those same others he admitted to harboring resentment for) but without evidence his claims are as valid as Muyembe.
I mean really... how are you going to accuse TWO PEOPLE of racism when you lack the ability to read four sentences.
> my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola
Calling an accusation "fair" is not the same as admitting the accusation is correct.
It may be fair for the police to suspect you of a crime if you were in the area and match the description. But if you didn't commit the crime then the accusation is not correct.
> What does that say about the other 99% of projects that aren’t even worth mentioning?
At least one other major project, the OLPC from media lab and the infamous Negroponte gang was a total failure. Negroponte was back in the news recently due to the whole Joi Ito-Jeffrey Epstein pedo funding debacle.
It would be difference between Eliud running and average male walking.
I would not dare event to try running a marathon, but I've done 100km walks 3 times already, and numerous shorter distances. Never walked extactly the marathon distance, but it should take me ~6:00 hours. However, I am definitely among the faster walkers (at the last 100km event they told me I was the first to finish, but it was not a competition, so who knows).
Well a brisk walk (from memory) is about 15 minutes a mile.
So people under the age of 10 and over 60 probably start having a non-negligible numbers of people who can't complete a mile in 15 mins.
And then you have an obesity + overweight rating of 57.6% in the USA according to Wikipedia (and this may not cover people who are not overweight but physically fit) and you can start seeing how maybe not everyone can do even a 15 minute mile walk.
For the record I know BMI is a bit of a weak metric for covering obesity given that anyone "swole" will have a very high BMI...
”Race Walking is a progression of steps so taken that the walker makes contact with the ground, so that no visible (to the human eye) loss of contact occurs. The advancing leg must be straightened (i.e. not bent at the knee) from the moment of first contact with the ground until the vertical upright position.”
and also states:
”All the Judges shall act in an individual capacity and their judgements shall be based on observations made by the human eye.”
Of note here is the “to the human eye” phrase. If one were to introduce electronic aids similar to those used in fencing to detect whether there always is a foot on the ground, speeds would decrease significantly.
I think running 5mph for 5 hours is a very ... achievable goal for the median person, but I don't think I would put money on the median person, or at least, American, completing that time without additional training from their current condition.
If you took a random sample of people -- or at least a random sample of people 18-50 with no outstanding health issues -- and put them on a "couch to marathon" 6 month training program, yeah, I think you could plausibly get a median finish of 5 hours (for comparison, the Boston marathon has a median finish time of a little under 4 hours).
I honestly wouldn't bet on the median person with no training getting off the couch and moving 26.2 miles in less than ~10 hours.
I don't really have much of an idea of what the median would be for time required to walk/run 26 miles. I doubt that there's any good data. The original comment just specified "men", which is presumably global and would include the elderly. I've read that about 45% of people are non-urban, which may be expected to increase fitness, perhaps.
> In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions.
Who is "our" in this? If you mean USA, then are you sure about your claim? Eg: "Guy chooses to kneel on the field because kids were getting shot, guy gets canned.". How is that significantly different than what is happening in this case?
I suspect that few people who dislike Blizzard's response like the NFL's response. They are similar cases, but the first one was punishing an American, only seen by Americans to applease an American audience. The HK issue is punishing someone, seen globally, to appease a foreign audience.
Honestly, you've changed my mind right here about the NFL issue by putting it into this perspective.
I always thought Kaepernick had the right to kneel, but that the NFL had the right to bench the player as well.
I thought the President, being a US citizen, also had the right to be raucous about the issue as many politicians were, as long as it didn't extend into actual executive action.
The reason people in the US might find this action offensive (the reason I do) is because it supports a communist government and I'm sick of US-based MNCs cow-tailing to China instead of taking a principled stand for Western values, but that should include the NFL supporting Kaepernick's right to free expression as well.
Perhaps the same reasoning can extend to so-called "cancel culture" of people getting fired for expressing their private opinions online.
I think it’s a bit different. In this case you’re economically punishing the responsible party - not trying to raise awareness (make a scene).
I can silently stop playing Hearthstone and the effect would be felt. I’m not wasting other people’s time or breaking a contract.
In regards to the kneeling specifically, my impression was it was free publicity to the players. Honestly, looked like they were taking advantage of the situation, a way to get free press for themselves. I know I wasn’t the only person who felt this. That’s likely part of the reason they were canned.
Ah yes, how dare those black players lift their heads up and 'make a scene'. What grifters they are, taking advantage of their blackness to promote themselves.
> That's really the only way to get to the root of this, but it can't be financial penalties to Apple. That would create perverse incentives and moral hazard.
I don't follow. What perverse incentives and moral hazard?
Not OP, but I too have been to the lake. It is India's most famous trek and quite a lot of people head up there every year. I don't have my images uploaded anywhere but you may find the information here[1] useful.
> a post mortem fracture can be distinguished from one that happened just prior to death
My understanding is that ante mortem and post mortem fractures can be distinguished by bone marrow oedema. Presumably, if the post is an extremely long period and there's no bone marrow present, then there would be other substantially different fracture patterns.
