(All dialogue guaranteed etc etc)
HUGE FRIGGIN IDIOT: Man (Western culture) overthrew Mother nature ,the closest thing to "God" we'll ever know, 10-12 Thousand years ago and has been "in charge" of the Earth ever since. How's it working out for you ?
ME: Western culture has not existed for anywhere close to 10,000 years and has never been as close to "in charge" of the entire planet as many Westerners have liked to think. The two cultures which have come closest to ruling the entire planet both came from Mongolia.
HFI: Take "our" culture back to it's roots in what is now Iraq The "agriculturist" (10,000 yrs ago) that started in the Golden Crescent with their new ability to gain more from the soil than the hunter gatherers built cities and armies that have slowly but surely expanded, defeated ,destroyed or enslaved every "primitive" culture of hunter/gathers they have contacted since. Their/our curse that goes with the agri-culture is overpopulation and need for constant expansion. We, the agriculturist , rule the world. At least we will until we destroy the planet's ability to sustain us. Not a problem though, Mother has many children and lot's of time.
ME: More than a few Iraqi's are annoyed by Westerners claiming ancient Mesopotamian culture as their own. (And who can blame them?) While farms and cities were being organized in Mesopotamia, the people of Europe were still living in caves.
And besides Mesopotamia not being Western civ, it was not the only origin point of large-scale agriculture and cities, which also were to be found 10,000 years ago in present-day Mexico and on the north-west coast of South America. Your conception of Western civilization and its supposed dominance is wrong, just spectacularly wrong.
(And after I posted that I was thinking: where does he get all this? And then it hit me: Rousseau. White man: civilized, rest of world: savage, civilization: bad, savagery: noble. I figured HFI would ignore what he was ostensibly answering and just triple down, and sure enough -- )
HFI: You mean we're not an agriculturaly based war machine that conquers every thing that get's in it's way including Mother Nature like all our predecessors ? Mesopotamia>Greece>Rome>Northern Europe> England >America/Western Culture. No?
Resistance is futile , the primitives will all be assimilated.
(A hermetically-sealed mind, not responding to, by all appearances not even noticing the points I'm making. At this point nothing remains for me but to repeat myself that, as the saying goes, insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Whether the saying was formulated by Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Rita Mae Brown or someone else appears to be controversial.)
(Beware, beware of the evil agricultural Borg!)
(Who is not insulted by this Bizarro-World of HFI's? Middle Easterners, the descendants of prehistoric city-dwellers, are denied their birthright when it is insisted that those city-dwellers, somehow, were white men. And white men, it is insisted, are evil, and all-powerful, relentlessly crushing all in their path -- why? Because they invented farming. [Actually because Jean-Jacques Rousseau had huge unresolved Daddy issues, obviously.] Nevermind that they didn't, and that Mesopotamians weren't the only ones who invented it, and nevermind that the two largest empires in human history were those of Mongolian hunters, nevermind the thousands of years of civilization, of cities and farms [aarrghh! helphelp, cities and farms!] in East Asia and in Africa and in the Western Hemisphere, sorry, none of that jibes with this Bizarro-World and so none of it exists, and nevermind that it's kind of a stretch to include even Greece in Western civilization, let alone Mesopotamia -- why? Because, as has been pointed out by some people, some of whom, very strangely, insist that Western civilization is the only one there is, it began to take its contours when the residents of the former Western half of the Roman Empire began to lose their knowledge of Greek. The people who are so proud of this civilization don't put it that way, they say Western civilization began when Christianity took over Western Europe, but it all happened at once: collapse of the Western Empire, takeover of Christianity, losing touch with Greek culture. Greek culture stayed alive, of course. But only among Greeks and Muslims and a teeny-tiny handful of Westerners, until Greeks and Muslims taught Greek to Westerners who, in obscene, absurd arrogance, called it the Renaissance. Sometimes things get so stupid it makes me want to spit. Ptui!)
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