Return Of The Son Of Arguing With Idiots

(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!)

The American Revolution

So, the Roanoke colony failed in the late 1580's, and then Jamestown was founded in 1607 and the Plymouth colony in 1620, and gradually the English began to establish themselves in the Western Hemisphere. By the 1630's there was a college, Harvard, in Massachusets, by the 1670's the English power had supplanted the Dutch at New Amsterdam, and so it went, and the English colonies grew by leaps and bounds, crowding against the French settlement to to the north and West and against the Spanish to the south and West long before the American Revolution.

Was English rule in the colonies always, inevitably going to become intolerable to the colonists -- there was Bacon's Rebellion in the late 17th century -- or would the colonists wished to have remained British subjects in the absence of the specific mismanagement of things insyigated by the mad king George III and his ministers?

You asking me? I don't know. It seems to be the current fashion among historians to regard the colonists as Englishmen, who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the rights which Englishmen in England took for granted. But this view contests, has always contested against the opinion that the colonists were intrinsically different from Englishmen, which opinion prevailed from time to time in the past, and may or may not be the prevailing opinion in the History departments again in another few decades. (I'm not going to make a prediction here; a careful examination of predictions of the past has led me to the point where the only prediction I feel inclined to make is that in the future many people will continue to predict many things and that they will usually be wrong.) It seems to me that perceptions and historical depictions of the American Revolution are particularly fraught with preconceptions and political argument That very often the Revolution is described as being what the individual historian wants it to be: the precursor in spirit as well as in time to the French Revolution, or utterly distinct from it, associated with it only through ignorance. Truly a victory for freedom for ALL people; or the business dealings of a small clique of WASP's, plus a few of their cronies of Dutch descent; or something somewhere in between. I suppose that to a large extent it is legitimate to argue the Revolution is also what it became, whether the Founding Fathers had it in mind or not. On the other hand, does it make sense to see a fulfillment of the promise of 1776 in 1863, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire long before 1863?

I tend to see a lot of the rhetoric about American freedom, specifically American freedom, as somewhere between dubious and downright ridiculous. It seems to me that it amounts to a large extent to the Smithian freedom for a small group of capitalists to squeeze the rest of us, and for the rest of us to either play ball, or starve, or rot in prison. Nice freedom, Ben, George! Thomas may have been a little more progressive than that, or maybe I'm still looking at Thomas through rose-colored glasses. Thomas didn't free his slaves, after all, stirring though his writing often was.

Accurately or not, a lot of Enlightenment philosophy and highfalutin' rhetoric was associated with the American Revolution since well before 1776, and with the Dutch, English, Mexican, Russian, Chinese and Nicaraguan revolutions as well. The problem is, a lot of that Enlightenment philosophy doesn't make any sense, doesn't have much relation to reality. Man is not born free, he is born covered in slime and blood and usually screaming in horror, and in need of constant care and supervision. I subscribe to the Hobbesian, not the Lockeian and Rousseauian view of nature. Freedom is something which we ATTAIN to some degree if we are fortunate, and consists in no small degree of OVERCOMING nature.

Except that it's nowhere that simple either. For instance, I see no reason for this arbitrary distinction between "natural" and "man-made." As if we were somehow apart from other animals. Singled out by God for a special destiny or some such nonsense. I don't think that the arbitrary nature of the distinction between "man-made" and "natural" has occurred to most people yet.

So anyway, the blather of Locke and Rousseau about the supposedly noble nature of man in "nature," corrupted by awful, awful civilization, was in the air a lot during the American Revolution, and perhaps even more so in Europe in the observation and misunderstanding from afar of the American Revolution. The French Revolutionaries, many of them anyway, may have believed that they were doing exactly the same things that the American Revolutionaries had done.

I could go on. Happy holiday.