Poll of the Day > colombus didn't discover shit

(+) Yeah! (+)

there were already a bunch of people there

what a loser!

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lmao dumbass Americans be like "he founded America" WRONG it was George Washington ya morans read a book

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He liked to have the faces of indigenous people mutilated

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he never even stepped foot in america

motherfucker was in cuba

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he was a nerd

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likehelly posted...

he never even stepped foot in america

motherfucker was in cuba

That is true. Even in his day he feared stepping foot in Florida

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Hurr Durr. . Columbus was a buffoon who didn't actually set foot in America.. . .durr.. .

11110111011 posted...

Hurr Durr. . Columbus was a buffoon who didn't actually set foot in America.. . .durr.. .

yeah we already said that homie

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11110111011 posted...

Hurr Durr. . Columbus was a buffoon who didn't actually set foot in America.. . .durr.. .

he was a sadistic colonialist and shouldnt be celebrated as an individual

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Not a fan of everything this guy does (he's blocked me when trying to discuss Russian involvement in Syria), but this is a great refutation to another video defending Columbus. Tens out thousands of people died while Columbus was governing Hispaniola.

https://youtu.be/OaJDc85h3ME

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Mead posted...

he was a sadistic colonialist and shouldnt be celebrated as an individual

To be fair, there are very few people in history who should be celebrated as individuals. Even the people we tend to to think of as being above reproach.

Gandhi was apparently a bit of a creepy pervert. Mother Teresa was apparently kind of a racist. Most of the Founding Fathers either owned slaves, or were okay with the idea. MLK was apparently an adulterer, viewed by any of his own people in his own time as a bit of a demagogue and a sell-out, and it was mostly only his assassination/martyrdom and the fact that he was seen as the "safe" icon for the black rights movement that led to a lot of his flaws being sterilized.

Name a "great person" from history, and odds are you can come up with plenty of reasons why we shouldn't revere them at all. At best, they were "merely human", at worst, they were kind of monsters who just happened to do something that benefited future generations in some way.

Like it or not, regardless of whether Columbus "discovered" anything or how he treated the people he found, nearly every single facet of the modern world and our lives in it exist solely because of him. His expeditions are what spurred the Spanish exploration of the New World, which in turn spurred European exploration, development, and colonization in general. It's entirely possible to argue that there isn't a single human being who lived during the last 500 years (give or take an extra 30 years) who had as large an impact on the world as we know it as he did.

If you could travel back in time and murder him as a child, there's a very significant chance that everything we know and value in the modern world simply wouldn't exist. Sure, it's possible that someone else would have made an extremely similar expedition at precisely the right time when conditions were perfectly favorable to set the same events in motion, but it's just as likely (if not more so) that Europe would be a backwater science would be stunted, medicine wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced, and most people would still be struggling along in an agriculturally-focused mercantile world without industry, let alone technology.

And there wouldn't be any white people living in North America feeling guilty about any of this shit.

And we've come up with stupid holidays to celebrate far less meaningful things.
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I dunno, MLK was pretty consistent.

I've at least personally known about the detracting factors of Gandhi and Mother Teresa for a long time.

Columbus was far, far worse than many other of his contemporaries, if you read history.

It's hilarious that PO suggests that white people might not have reached the American continent were it not for Columbus. That is complete nonsense. You seriously believe that nobody else would have gone on expeditions to the Americas were it not for Columbus? That is a very strangely finite view of how events could have transpired.

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ReturnOfFa posted...

It's hilarious that PO suggests that white people might not have reached the American continent were it not for Columbus.

Might want to reread what I wrote there, cap'n.

"it's possible that someone else would have made an extremely similar expedition at precisely the right time when conditions were perfectly favorable to set the same events in motion"

It's not just a question of white people reaching the Americas. White people found North America hundreds of years before Columbus did. There's evidence that implies the Portuguese may have found it decades before Columbus did (and he might have had access to their maps/info to help him). White people almost certainly would have found the place afterward if he hadn't sailed.

And literally none of that matters, because none of those events led to even a fraction of what his expedition did.

The key is when an event occurs at precisely the right time, when multiple other variables and factors are aligned in a way to shape events in a specific pattern. Columbus sailing for Spain specifically, in the immediate wake of the Reconquista, at a time when the influence of the Renaissance was spreading out of Italy, while events in Asia made land-based trade routes more expensive than ever and the Portuguese had a strong grip on trade around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, opened the door to aggressive colonization and everything that came with it.

Sail 50 years earlier, and you don't get the same result. Sail 50 years later, and you don't get the same result. If Columbus sails from Italy instead of Spain, you don't get the same result. If he lands a thousand miles farther north you don't get the same result. And there are dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of other factors a better historian than I am could cite.

European dominance of the world is a spectacularly unlikely outcome based on dozens of variables and most human history that preceded it. Without the resources and the push to colonized spurred by the New World at precisely that point, history almost certainly proceeds very differently.

And it's not just a case of "Well, all the same stuff would have happened, just a few decades/centuries later". Miss the specific window where thousands of global variables were in precisely the right mix, and colonization never happens at all. And without colonization and the massively disproportionate gathering of resources, Europe remains a minor global player and industrialization likely never happens.

You may not LIKE the idea, but without Columbus (or someone very much like him) sailing at precisely that point, for Spain, discovering resources, and jump-starting the "European Age", 2000 AD probably doesn't look all that different from 1400 AD. The rapid growth of the last few centuries is very much an anomaly in human history. It's extremely unlikely the same sort of boom would have been triggered elsewhere or elsewhen, once other factors begin to shift (Portugal loses dominance in Asia, the Middle East settles enough to allow more fluid trade, etc). Industry eventually comes much slower, almost certainly somewhere completely different (not in England for sure), and with radically different results.

Especially when you consider the main reason Columbus sailed was because he was wrong. His entire expedition was based on math errors that pretty much everyone else knew were wrong (which is why he had such a hard time getting funding). Without someone that wrong and that stubborn having access to powerful monarchs flush in the moment of their own success and willing to fund insane projects, you likely don't get anyone else making a similar expedition at all, or at least not for a very long time (which then impedes other developments that followed after). The likelihood of someone else making the same mistakes at the same time in the right place to act on them is extremely low.

You can say he was just a flawed man who was mostly a product of his times, or you can say he was an irredeemable monster, but it doesn't really change the fact that nearly every facet of your life exists because of what he did.
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why do people think PO is smart? or even take him seriously in the first place? every facet our lives can be attributed colombus? lmfao get the fuck OUTTA here

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Colombus discovered Boffa.

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Doesn't deserve to be celebrated but I'll take the day off no problem lol

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InfernalFive posted...

Doesn't deserve to be celebrated but I'll take the day off no problem lol

he founded the free world you communist piece of shit

this is a joke

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

why do people think PO is smart?

No clue. Most of his posts are him taking a single sentence of information and stretching it out over several paragraphs.
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It's hilarious how Colombus defenders insist "didn't commit mass rape and genocide" is a really hard bar to hit actually

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No shit. Columbus is one of the worst historical figures.

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Damn, PO both understands this timeline AND alternative timelines better than all of us o_o

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

To be fair

to be fair he literally had the faces cut off of native people to serve as an example to others

so fuck defending him in any way

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