Intuitively you would think that the tide is being formed because the Moon is "lifting up" the water at the point closest to the Moon. But this contribution is actually very miniscule to the tidal effect. Instead the bulk of the tides are produced about 45 degrees away where the tidal force is parallel to the Earth's surface. This has the effect of dragging the water closer to the tidal bulge.
Thank you--the diagram you link is a better explanation of whey the tide "bulges up on the sides of the Earth closest to and farthest from the Moon"--the article left this entirely unclear.
In particular, I could understand how two satellites connected by a cable would result in the cable being stretched. But I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that we get a high tide where the Earth's gravity and the Moon's add (the far side of the Earth from the Moon), but we also get a high tide on the opposite side, where the Moon's gravitational pull is subtracted from the Earth's. The centrifugal force is (I think) a much better explanation. (I realize physicists don't consider that a force, but...)
So yes, tides really are weirder than I think.
(The other facts in the article were actually familiar, e.g. the fact that the tides in Hawaii are quite small, because it's not far from an amphidromic point.)
Tides aren't caused by centrifugal force but by differing gravity. You would be ripped apart by tides falling straight into black hole.
The near part of Earth experiences more gravity from the Moon, the far part less. The Earth moves in the center so the water bulges on the ends. Important part is that the Earth pulls things out their natural orbits.
With circular orbits, gravity and centrifugal force are balanced so could be considered difference on centrifugal force. But that isn't true for all orbits.
but to develop better intuition, think of the sun's gravity as a field in space and nothing is being dragged anywhere, it's just that wherever you are feels appropriate to where you are and where you are going is the path of least resistance, and the places around you feel the same way, and where you all are in relation to each other (in this field) changes its relative position to everything else.
the water of an incoming tide doesn't feel "i'm being dragged uphill", it feels "hey, the earth is moving underneath me". it's all in freefall all the time.
you don't feel like you are rotating at 1000 mph (1600 kph) but you do feel your weight against the surface of the earth. same with the water, except it feels itself being squeezed by everything around it like you only feel that in the entrance to a crowded venue.
so, the water on the side toward the moon and the water on the side away from the moon would mostly perceive the earth as dropping away or coming closer (if they could perceive anything at all) where they are is always their point of reference
It's kind of interesting to compare this to Ptolemy's eras. In the Tetrabiblios, Ptolemy argued that man went through seven ages in his life, each associated with a different celestial object.
1. Infancy --- The Moon. Since the Moon waxes and wanes more rapidly than any other celestial object, this period is characterized by the fastest development.
2. Childhood --- Mercury. As Mercury is the fastest of the planets, at this age children have the short attention spans and flit from one thing to the next.
3. Youth --- Venus. Starting around puberty, a man's mind starts to become focused on love.
4. Young Adulthood --- The Sun. A man comes of age, he starts to think about his work and people begin to take him seriously.
5. Middle Adulthood --- Mars. In his mid 30s a man's demeanor becomes more severe. He realizes he has certain goals he would like to accomplish and there is not much time left to achieve them.
6. Maturity --- Jupiter. By his mid 50s, having achieved what he can in his life, he has arrived at a position of authority in the community. He has gravitas and respect.
7. Old Age --- Saturn. By his late 60s, he starts to decline physically and mentally.
It is worth noting that this exact sequence (the Chaldean sequence) of the seven classical celestial objects follows the same paths as the Serpent of Wisdom coiled about the Tree of Life in the Hermetic Qabalah. This is the western analogue to the Hindu notion of Kundalini, which shares the same serpentine symbolism; both of which represent the process of the psychological maturation of man.
See Liber 777 Col. VII [0], Key Scales 3 through 9 inclusive. Also note that Key Scales 4 through 9 in Col. XCVII, excluding Saturn in old age, correspond to the "Ruach," "soul," "mind," or (one could say) "post-bicameral ego" of man.
I sat down and divided my own life into thematic epochs not long ago. Mine are split differently and more specifically to my own lived experience but I, too, arrived at the fact that I'm entering #5 in my mid-30s. Interesting coincidence!
I suppose that constantly changing and revising the language we use to refer to everything at least has the upside of allowing us to use the latest frontend frameworks every year.
I think you meant to reply to a different comment. I talked about dividing one's life up into periods based on experience and themes, not about linguistic revisionism or Javascript frameworks.
Later on it looks like he classifies him as a "vanity angel" rather than a "strategic angel." It sounds like it can be useful to have someone with name recognition as an investor when you're talking to people who aren't very familiar with the space.
if you are trying to convince people to invest on name recognition vs. knowledge of your space, or ability to move the company forward it doesn't seem like a great guide for getting angels: "be lucky and get someone famous with lots of money".
Noether's theorem tells us when we would expect conservation laws to hold and when we would expect them to fail. In the case of global energy conservation, there would have to be a global time invariance associated with the spacetime. But this is manifestly not the case in an expanding universe. It is generally not even possible to have a well defined notion of global energy in a dynamic spacetime.
Noether's theorem tells us when symmetry guarantees conservation, but it says nothing about conservation in the absence of that symmetry - it's not a biconditional statement. Talking about endless expansion is like observing 1 second of a pendulum's swing and concluding there's no time symmetry because it's only moving in one direction. The symmetry exists at the full cycle scale, not the snapshot scale.
It's true that it leaves open the possibility of a conserved quantity that is not associated with a symmetry. But the kinds of conservation laws we are thinking about, like conservation of energy, do originate from a symmetry. So if the symmetry is broken it is very reasonable to assume that the conservation law would be broken as well.
Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics is similar. They emphasize the importance of frame invariant representations. (I highly recommend the first edition over the second edition, the second edition was a massive downgrade.)
Kip Thorne was also heavily influenced by this geometric approach. Modern Classical Physics by Thorne & Blandford uses a frame invariant, geometric approach throughout, which (imo) makes for much simpler and more intuitive representations. It allows you to separate out the internal physics from the effect of choosing a particular coordinate system.
It's hard to prove rigorously which is why people usually refer to it as the "manifold hypothesis." But it is reasonable to suppose that (most) data does live on a manifold in the strict sense of the term. If you imagine the pixels associated with a handwritten "6", you can smoothly deform the 6 into a variety of appearances where all the intermediate stages are recognizable as a 6.
However the embedding space of a typical neural network that is representing the data is not a manifold. If you use ReLU activations the kinks that the ReLU function creates break the smoothness. (Though if you exclusively used a smooth activation function like the swish function you could maintain a manifold structure.)
People also apply the notion of data manifold to language data (which is fundamentally discrete), and even for images the smoothness is hard to come buy (e.g., "images of cars" is not smooth because of shape and colour discontinuities). I guess the best we can do is to hope that there is an underlying virtual "data manifold" from which our datapoints have been "sampled", and knowing its structure may be useful.
Those are less problematic than you might imagine.
- For language, individual words might be discrete, but concepts being communicated have more nuance and fill in the gaps.
- For language, even to the extent that discreteness applies, you can treat the data as being sampled from a coarser manifold and still extract a lot of meaningful structure.
- Images of cars are more continuous than you might imagine because of hue differences induced by time of day, camera lens, shadows, etc.
- Images of cars are potentially smooth even when considering shape and color discontinuities. Manifolds don't have to be globally connected. Local differentiability is usually the thing people are looking for in practical applications.
There was pushback against a lot of the evils of colonialism - most of them unsuccessful, like this one. Maybe we can learn lessons for fighting against the institutional evils of our time.
Glad you asked. Check out the Nobel Prize winning work by Acemoglu in his book Why Nations Fail. He makes a compelling case that the encomienda system put in place by the conquistadors impoverished South America at the time and continued to impoverish its victims in the future as well.
So yes, extremely evil even by the standards of settler colonialism.
The Meso-American civilizations routinely engaged in human sacrifice. Tens of thousands of people per year were murdered. These weren't peaceful monks quietly engaging in scholarly pursuits. Even if you don't personally drag victims to the top of the pyramid and cut their heads off or hearts out, if you stand around and watch, you're part of the problem. I'd be interested in how you compare the details of what pre and post colonization looks like and why you weigh post colonization as evil.
Yes, that's probably the excuse that got the guy off the hook for burning the entire written history of those civilizations.
But it was not actually a good excuse. Burning those books was still wrong. Even people around him understood how wrong it was. We do not have to view colonialism from the stratosphere, we can judge the actions individually down at the ground.
We know why he wanted to focus on other things than the things he was actually personally responsible for, but what's your motive? Got a project of your own to defend?
Witch hunts were capital punishment inflicted on pagan worshipers, not human sacrifices, and they were several tens of thousands in the span of three centuries.
Executions in Spain, Portugal, and Italy combined are estimated to have been 1000 in total. [1]
Really crazy how we are taught from an early age the horrors of the holocaust and other genocides, and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then... "Never again. If this this happened today we know better to stop it"... And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because... a priests burned books (something that I absolutely do not condone of course)?
Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too? Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
> We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
Yes, that was mistake and the lesson that should be learned.
> The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs.
This is complete revisionism, Spain laid war on the Aztecs supported even by other indians, it wasn't a voluntary biological warfare. The Aztecs killed tens of thousands of people per year.
> Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
The allies. Are Allied bombings considered a contentious subject now?
> Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc?
Spaniards did not "wipe out" indian people, the Aztec civilization went the way of every conquered civilization. Did Arabs wipe out Egyptian language, culture, history, etc or did it dwindle in importance over the centuries as a new civilization took over the other?
> and aboutour moral superiority compared to those that didn't intervene back then..
Didn't intervene? You act like it was an act of charity. We didn't "intervene" until the germans declare war on us.
> And then look at tens of thousand of people being mass murdered by a genocidal civilization and complain that Spain intervened because...
Spain "intervened"? The genocidal civilization was Spain, not the aztecs. The aztecs didn't wipe themselves out. The spanish did.
> Were we wrong to destroy half of Europe to stop Germany too?
Who is we? Who destroyed half of europe to stop germany?
> Really trilled to know future generation will talk about us as the bad guys because we destroyed German art and books as we stopped a literal mass genocide.
Did we wipe out the germans? Did we wipe out the german language, culture, history, etc? Are you really equating what we did to germany to what the spaniards did to the aztecs?
Before anyone wastes their time, this is the same start of the other bad faith argument that the enslavement of Africans was for their own good and they were better off being slaves than being in Africa.
> Aren't the people who survived Spanish colonization better off than they would have been?
"The ends justify the means" is certainly a valid metric by which to judge things, but an honest application of it leads one to conclusions such as "Mao Zedong was the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived" (as seen here: https://i.imgur.com/3QUXVi3.jpeg).
Mao is bad because he delayed the growth that China was capable of achieving and did achieve after Deng Xiaoping. 40 years after the communist revolution in 1990, China was still as poor as India per capita. In the 35 years since then, China became five times richer per capita than India. If the Chinese republicans had maintained power continuously since 1912, there's a good chance that China would be as developed as South Korea or Japan today.
It's valid to ask a similar question about the Americas. What would life be like for people today? It's probable that the Aztecs or their descendants would have taken over the Americans, since they were by far the most technologically superior. Would they have evolved into a prosperous industrialized society today?
I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it. Europe (and the US) had opportunities (partly due to colonialism) to become industrialized and prosperous, and it has taken those opportunities. So it is with China. Africa has opportunities, but colonialism has made progress difficult. In the long term, I think cultural/societal differences are not the deciding factor, so much as the geopolitical environment shapes society. The formation of mountains doesn't much care about the contemporary scale of human construction projects, either.
You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
> I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it
So your theory is that civilizations are the way they are because of exogenous rather than endogenous factors? That seems difficult to reconcile with the historical record. Your viewpoint just begs the question. For example, why was Europe in a position to colonize the Americas in the first place? Why weren’t the Spanish greeted by Aztecs with swords and guns?
In the long term, I think civilizations grow along the lines of natural selection. They are neither optimal nor pessimal, but are likely to display a high degree of fitness. Environmental shocks in the short term will challenge fitness. Competition among civilizations also challenges fitness.
Why indeed was Europe technologically advanced? Why were the Americas not so much? Resources are one factor, which is why obtaining resources from other lands is valuable. But the main impetus for advancement surely isn't based on one's "skill in advancing". Most people could be trained to fix cars, if desired. Also, Rome fell, but people now live where Rome was with far greater technology. I posit that, if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were given the desire to advance to the level of Europeans, the resources to do so, and time, similar advancement would arise.
Probably not, but this counterfactual depends on the circumstances, and depends on your values. For example: people might argue about the relative harms of various kinds of slavery vs. cultural genocide vs. land dispossession and forced displacement ....
After contact there were waves of mass die-off of people throughout the Americas due to disease brought from Eurasia: are we positing that those deaths still occurred? Because they were extraordinarily destabilizing. For example, if we hypothetically imagine that the balance of disease severity was the other way around and 90% of the population of Eurasia was wiped out over a century in several waves of horrific pandemics, then history would look quite different indeed, and it's all but impossible to predict precisely how.
European states other than Spain also did horrific atrocities in their conquests and colonial projects. Are we positing that we just replace Spanish kingdom(s) with some alternative European monarchies? Or are we imagining a situation in which peoples of the Americas retained some autonomy?
Now imagine that happening once per generation for 3 or 4 generations in a row, followed by / contemporary with getting invaded by an alien army with significantly superior weapons and ships whose goal was total domination and enslavement / elimination.
So the general theory is that if you kill half of the population the descendants will be better off? What's the mechanism, and what happens if you follow that to its conclusion?
That's only about the black death, and some specific reasons for why that helped, kind of, _some_ parts of Europe. First, it definitely didn't help everyone - Norway, for example, lost all economic power and went into the 400 year night, as it's called (it was under Denmark). And secondly, it's a single case. You can't create a general rule from that. It's vastly different to compare that case to when e.g. 95% of the population died out in certain places during the Spanish conquest.
And, again, take that "rule" to its logical conclusion: How many people will inhabit the Earth after a while, and under what conditions will they live?
This is an alt history story idea I've had rattling around in my head for years. It starts off in 1492 with a dejected Columbus complaining about Isabella and Ferdinand not seeing his vision.
Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.
The colonization of the new world was largely an immunological accident.
When meeting Europeans, 90% of the Americans would catch some European disease and die. This was widely seen as the will of god(s) by both sides. Often the disease spread faster than the Europeans, so when they got to an area most people were already dead.
The following conquest is seen as barbaric and unjust by us modern people. But for the people of the time, it was just how the world worked. The Aztecs would have been overjoyed to conquer Spain the same way.
Possibly, although I think the Aztecs specifically was likely doomed from the start because they were a very young society and a brutal military conqueror and everybody they dealt with hated them, but you never can know. However the Aztecs were far from the only significant America Native society or civilization. There were many others, especially to the South, that we know were far more stable societies and governments producing more advanced goods and had high levels of trade amongst each other. South America was essentially in their own bronze age at the time and their gold and precious metal work was beyond what anybody in Europe was able to replicate at the time.
If Europeans hadn't made it to North America, it's likely that nobody would have invented vaccines or the internet by now. European history would have been unrecognizably different.
Because it might not have been the “Spanish”, but certain people who ruined history. So it’s not fair to blame a whole country for the actions of a few.
It's pretty fair to blame the entire social and political system of 16th century Spain, which at that time was centered on religious persecution, mass murder, large-scale theft and exploitation, and quasi-slavery, leading to centuries of profoundly racist tyranny in the Americas. The book-burning cultural genocide was just the cherry on top.
(As is common for feudal occupiers of foreign lands, and by no means unique to Spain) the worst kinds of psychopaths were continually elevated to positions of authority and then granted almost complete impunity to do what they wanted, with an ideology that treated the recipients of their exploitation as sub-human.
The initial conquests and the immediate atrocities that followed them (arguably the worst period) were mainly quasi private enterprises. The state even tried to reign them in to some extent due to significant social/religious pressure at home. Of course that was largely superficial and hardly enforced after boatloads of silver and gold started arriving.
The priests and missionaries that followed them were likely the group that was most sympathetic to the natives (of course only in relative terms compared to the "conquistadors" which is a very low standard).
You're literally applying birth sin for it to make sense, because none of the Spanish people alive today had anything to do with it
Even worse, what hnidiots3 was trying to convey: 99% of the population that were alive during the time period you'd have described as "Spaniards" were entirely uninvolved in these actions, and wouldn't have supported them either, likely.
While the Mayan culture was literally doing human sacrifices - the average person living in Spain wasn't inherently evil and wanting to cause suffering to other people. Despite their culture being kinda shit.
They just wanted to live their live, which was mostly being a farmer and working.
Are you saying that the average person in Spain did not support colonialism (let's suppose after the benefits of colonialism became apparent)? Would they be horrified that Spaniards had killed "barbarians" and "savages" (as they were described) and gained great riches? Other people have brought up religion; how many Christians condemned the Crusades?
How specifically do you think the average Spaniard benefited by the crown building a colony?
Do you think the crown then went and splurged on their farmers, reducing their taxes or something? Because no, that didn't happen.
The benefits for this was entirely with the aristocracy and wealthy, not with the average Spaniards.
Going by some of the statements in this thread, if Spain-after-colonialism becomes richer and more developed, such that the average citizen's standard of living increases, then colonialism benefitted the average citizen. Benefit to the colonized peoples aside, surely many other people benefitted, even if they weren't immensely enriched.
The wrongs of religion throughout history are typically exaggerated in modern times and the Spanish Inquisition is one of the best examples of this. It lasted more than 350 years and during this 350 years a very high-end estimate of executions is 5000. So the death toll from it ranges probably from one person every ~3 months to one person every month. [1]
So for some comparison, 2-5x more people die in the US of lightning strikes each year than died during the Spanish Inquisition per year. Obviously any death is undesirable, but describing it as a horrific mass-murder is hyperbolic. It was rather more a mass public shaming campaign like the Chinese Struggle Sessions, but many orders of magnitude smaller in scale.
For that matter even the Mayans were likely sacrificing people on a far larger scale. We lack exact numbers but know that they did group sacrifice, often of children, and that this was regularly done when building new structures, or for hopes of a good crop season and the like. And I think the thing that makes human sacrifice particularly primitive in its nature is that obviously doesn't work. Whether you killed a dozen kids or not has no bearings on how your crops grow. And so they would have to, over centuries, continue to reject the evidence before their eyes.
The Inquisition was mostly about mopping up the last few practicing Jews and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula, terrorizing them into conversion and conformity.
Millions of people (on all sides) were killed in the Reconquista, over a few centuries, with many others enslaved, imprisoned, driven out of the peninsula, or forcibly converted. Those who converted to Catholicism were rewarded with centuries of further discrimination and persecution. (Disclaimer: I am not expert enough to know detailed figures here; feel free to search for expert sources if you want something precise.)
Scattered lightning strikes are not meaningfully comparable to large-scale genocidal war.
The Reconquista was a large scale genocidal war with millions dead?
Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not.
The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well.
How many do you think were killed then, over those centuries of conflict? Several hundred thousand? What if we include deaths due to famine? How many were forced to migrate? Also several hundred thousand?
As I said, I'm not an expert; and you are right, it's not easy to find good sources for numbers about this. As far as I can tell were quite a few individual events with tens of thousands of people killed at a time. There were hundreds of recorded major battles.
The Reconquista lasted more than 700 years and the number of people killed in any given conflict is unknown, with estimates varying by orders of magnitude. Both sides tended to exaggerate casualties, including their own. It was a defacto holy war, and so large casualties on your side could be seen as a sign of great martyrdom and piety, while inflicting heavily casualties on the enemy was also framed as having God's favor - heads I win, tails you lose.
The only thing that's entirely clear is that it was very small scale for the overwhelming majority of the conflict, punctuated by a very small handful of "large" battles that would generally be considered moderate to small scale in modern times. There were certainly not hundreds of major battles. So I don't think anybody knows exactly how many were killed other than 'not that many.' Put another way - over some 700 years it's certain that far fewer people died than e.g. one large modern battle like the Battle of Stalingrad.
The greatest legacy of the era was defining, or at least solidifying, the character of Spain/Portugal and the more militant nature of Catholicism at the time. So for some context, Columbus would set sail for the New World just months after Grenada finally fell!
> had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain,
Well it varied, but such behaviour was not strictly unique to Spain in those days. Being a Catholic in England wasn't terribly exciting either.
Then you have the witch hunts across must of Europe which resulted in probably well over 10x times more people being murdered in Germany alone compared to the inquisition and they weren't really a thing in Spain.
In a way the Spanish Inquisition was quite similar to the NKVD or the Gestapo/etc. since the persecutions were usually intended to impose ideological/social conformity (or inherently racist in how it targeted even perfectly honest Jewish or Muslims converts) rather than "ritualistic".
Of course Christian Spain is interesting in the sense that it turned from one of the most of tolerant societies in Europe to the one of the most intolerant ones in a couple of centuries.
e.g. during the Almohad invasions you had Christians, Jewish and even moderate Muslims fleeing to the Christian kingdoms which generally were much more tolerant at the time.
> Can you see how this absurd double standard may come across as racist?
That's not particularly new in Europe though. e.g. the Greeks and Romans found Carthaginian mass child sacrifices extremely abhorrent yet at the same time didn't see much of an issue with "exposing" unwanted infants. Treating violence due to economic/utilitarian/political reasons differently that doing it for ritual/religious reasons was is still pretty ingrained into western culture.
Why do people always ignore what happened before a few hundred years before? The Moors invaded Spain and were advancing into Europe and moved into what is modern day France. It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves in what is now modern day Spain.
Well... I was talking about about what was happening a few centuries ago.
Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
> It also ignores that Muslims and Christians would in-fight between themselves
> Regardless why is it strictly relevant what happened 250-800 years before the Iberian kingdoms expelled or exterminated their Muslim and Jewish population?
The Reconquista partially led to the Inquisition. The Reconquista started 711 and ended in 1492. How could it not be relevant?
I feel that you are being deliberately obtuse. It is pretty obvious how they are intertwined.
I actually spoke to a friend of mine who basically knows a huge amount of history (he is at University doing some sort Masters in a related subject), because some of the replies on this subject in sibling threads are so ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Instead repeating the same thing in multiple messages you might at some point consider saying HOW do you think they are related. Because yes its obvious that they are, on its own that is saying very little.
> ignorant they actually gaslite me.
Because its very hard to understand what specific points are you trying to make?
> The Spanish state (crown, army, church) had just gone through several centuries of horrific mass-murder of non-Christians in Spain, where the most brutal and sadistic thugs were politically elevated.
That is one hell of a gloss over of the the previous 500-600 years before the Inquisition and massively over-simplifies what happened. There wasn't really a Spanish state either, certainly not as we would understand it today.
I understand it's a joke and it is partially true but also there are still direct descendants of Central and South America original peoples, and also many Spanish families that exploited the conquered lands came back to the "mother land" and kept their families there.
The Spanish crown also repeatedly sent new waves of political allies to take over political control in the Americas, to counter the consolidation of power of the descendants of previous generations of Spanish rulers. There was a fair amount of conflict and intrigue between the two groups.
Let’s not forget the slaves sent to the fields after Spanish conquest. Irish, African, Portuguese, Indian, all found their ways to the sugar canes.
That era was literally groups of humans exploiting every other group of humans they could find.
The first wave owners children found themselves going to war with the crown or being a member of the crowns second wave to further entrench the royal riches. It became extremely political.
I wasn't calling the descendants of the Mayans out for anything.
I was specifically talking about the culture. Which is synonymous with the people in the upper class, which did ritual sacrifices of peasants.
the term Spaniards however targets the average people. Which are precisely farmers.
I do not see any double standard whatsoever, and frankly: you're brainwashed if you do.
Just to be explicit, you are now calling Jewish people "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" who have "perpetrated that endless abuse [of denouncing the Holocaust and Naziism] upon the German [..] people"?
Where do you get "jewish people" from? It's an odd but also very interesting conclusion of yours. Do you feel that the jewish people are implicated when someone says "the most unhinged and narcissistic people" and "perpetrated that endless abuse upon the German people"?
What else would you call what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people from the perpetual "blood libel" abuse that has been perpetrated against them and their children from the earliest memory on throughout all their life? Is that healthy, to forever fixate and obsess and bring up and accuse people of things that happened several generations before they were born, and perpetrated by very specific and limited people who were punished for it? Do you think the German people are uniquely due for the most utterly evil and vile practices of collective guilt?
Since you seem to assume the "jewish people" qualify as being referenced with "the most unhinged and narcissistic people", why would you think that people are collectively guilty, not even to mention across generations?
What we witnessed in Gaza is an evil that is far worse than what was perpetrated 85 years ago, will you also collectively shame and abuse and berate all jewish people of the world with constant references of how they deliberately played games of shooting starving children in different body parts for points?
You really should reexamine your messed up perspective if you want to believe yourself a good person. No people deserve collective guilt, unless they are collectively engaged in something. What humanity should make of the polling in Israel and the USA among Jewish communities about their views of whether a genocide was happening, whether it should happen, and whether there are any innocent people in Gaza, is something that may need to be reexamined. At least the Nazis lied to their populations about what was going on, because it was a totalitarian dictatorship (as you were told all your life too). What is to be made of the fact that Israel is a democracy and a very civilly engaged and politically aware democracy?
Maybe think about some of those things instead of just reading with Automatica response tricks you have been trained to perform.
I'm lost. Can you be more explicit about which "unhinged and narcissistic people" you mean? If not the Jews, was that supposed to refer to the German ruling party? German business elites? Other Europeans? NATO? Foreign immigrants to Germany? I really have no idea what you are getting at.
> "what has been done to the German people for 80 years now and seemingly for the foreseeable future as they are very psychologically and emotionally broken people"
Germany is a highly developed and successful economy which is a center of power and wealth in Europe. Its population is well educated, healthy, with a high standard of living, and generally content. From my position in the United States (so: not an expert), I don't see much evidence that modern Germans are held responsible for the events of 80–90 years go. Maybe you can include more detail for those of us who lack the context to guess what you are talking about. Who is it who has done this supposed damage to the German people, and what precisely do you think they did?
Can you elaborate about what you think makes Germans "psychologically and emotionally broken"? Do you mean because they have been economically dominating less-developed nations of Europe, and you think they should instead aim for more continent-wide integration and development? Or like, you were hoping for a German military invasion of Austria or France?
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You seem to have mistaken me for a supporter of the Israeli government. You may want to redirect your misplaced lecture someplace else.
Yes, I understand you don't see it. That is precisely part of the effect from being psychologically and emotionally broken. But just mull this over, why did the "German" government just last week plunder "modern Germans" to pay another €1 billion to the supposed 200,000 remaining holocaust survivors, when they've already pay €90 billion since 1945 for things none of them did? Or did you do the holocaust and therefore you should pay?
Another point, I you are not psychologically broken, why would you otherwise tolerate a foreign government maintain 40 colonies within your boundaries with ~200,000 of their colonists? It's the level of rationalization and excuse making that is common among abuse victims, like battered wives. But like I said, I understand why you don't understand it, even though every movie and every video game you have ever watched has some kind of reference of or to nazis and often some belittlement of germans. Why is no other war ever used to belittle and degrade any other people? The US committed war crimes from 2001 to 2021. Far longer than the Nazi regime even existed in total, not to mention Vietnam, which is celebrated in many ways and people who participated in it are looked up to, and those are far more recent conflicts... yet only Germans have been abused as they have been for 80 years. I just heard a German/Nazi reference from a boomer the other day. Of course he is an idiot, but that's someone that was not even alive when the war was going on at all, yet here he is just parroting the things he was trained to do.
I would say because it highlights that even back then there was the same kind of tension as today between those who believe they are doing right, those who also believe they are doing right, and right never ending up being done in the end. It’s like ideological, metaphysical, and psychological border disputes and skirmishes, i.e., human nature.
Also, failing upwards of those who serve the dominant system is clearly not just a modern phenomenon.
Because a previous commenter wrongly said, "the Spanish made a point of seeking out all the Maya books". It wasn't "The Spanish" it were some individual actors clearly acting against "The Spanish" crown wishes.
I'm guessing that his 1st person description of the human sacrifices carried out by the Mayan and establishing a connection between those and the need to erase the culture that enabled them and that he - wrongly or not, we can't know anymore - saw as enabled by those books had some weight there...
The Spanish crown didn't have in mind to destroy other people books, but then again, they also didn't have in mind that they casually, recurrently and nonchalantly offered human sacrifices to their "gods".
Probably the order of priorities for the Spanish crown was books < human sacrifices.
The origins of the 260 day ritual year are not known for certain, but there are a couple of hypotheses:
1. Pregnancy. 260 days is roughly the gestation period of a baby, so this may have been the inspiration for tracking this duration. (For what it is worth, modern Maya timekeepers cite this as being the reason for the length of the 260 day ritual calendar.)
2. In the tropics there are two days of the year when the Sun passes through the zenith and objects cast no shadows. In the latitude where the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations emerged, the length of time between these two days of the year is about 260 days.
3. Numerology. 260 is the product of 20 and 13. 20 was significant in Mesoamerican culture because it was the base of their numbering system and was associated with the human body (given that we have 20 fingers and toes). And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos. So the number 260 represented a kind of interlocking between the human and the cosmic.
It's also worth noting that the Maya also tracked a 365 solar cycle, so they did have a concept of a more standard kind of "year." The 365 cycle was used for civil purposes. The 260 day ritual cycle was used more for divination.
(Shameless plug, but if you want to learn more about Mesoamerican astronomy I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and I talked about it on the last episode: https://songofurania.com/episode/047)
This reminds me a bit of how the Islamic calendar year is 355 days and doesn't have intercalation for religious reasons (many calendars insert extra months now and then to realign with the year, but the Islamic calendar does not). This is why Ramadan always seems to be at different times of year when you hear about it.
> And the number 13 was associated with the cosmos.
Any reason number 13, of all numbers, has been so significant in different parts of the world, sometimes associated with completely opposite meanings (e.g., between Jews and Persians/Europeans)?
generally, 7 and 13 get a lot of attention because a)they are prime b)1/7 and 1/13 have long period when written as decimal fraction - so you keep stumbling in your calculations every time you encounter them
1/7 in base 20 takes surprisingly short form of 0.(1h) (h is 17), unlike 1/9 or 1/11 - so I wonder if there's Mayan prejudice on those instead
Orbital mechanics can be counterintuitive. There was a fairly basic orbital mechanics problem that caused some debate among physicists back in the 1970s. The problem went like this:
You are in a spacecraft orbiting the Earth. You distribute a bushel of apples throughout spacecraft so that they are at rest with respect to the spacecraft. After a long time, where do the apples end up?
Hannes Alfvén (more famous for Alfvén waves) argued that they would bunch up together in the middle of the spacecraft. But Michel Hénon (correctly) proved that half would end up in the bottom front corner, and the other half in the top back corner.
Intuitively you would think that the tide is being formed because the Moon is "lifting up" the water at the point closest to the Moon. But this contribution is actually very miniscule to the tidal effect. Instead the bulk of the tides are produced about 45 degrees away where the tidal force is parallel to the Earth's surface. This has the effect of dragging the water closer to the tidal bulge.
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