On 12/28/2015 5:30 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 6:39 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/28/2015 2:53 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/27/2015 3:56 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 7:04 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 12/23/2015 1:12 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 6:31 PM, John Clark
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 Telmo Menezes
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>wrote:
>
>>
and their land is not your land.
>>
I do not have the same faith in the divine
right of inherited wealth as you do.
>
Nice dodge. Yes, let's put all in the same bag,
Wall Street trust fund kids and remote tribes
wanting to keep living their way in *the place
they were born in*.
I'm not a big fan of
Wall Street trust fund kids
either, and if one of them owned one of the 3
places on the planet where a thirty meter telescope
could be built and refused to let it be used for
that purpose I would be in favor of using the law
of eminent domain to force the brat to sell it. And
by the way, no native Hawaiian or anybody else was
ever born atop Mauna Kea, there is nothing living
up there except for a few astronomers, and if
native Hawaiians
get there way soon there won't even be that, they
want to remove all telescopes from the mountain
including the world class ones that have been there
for decades. Why do you defend these people?
I don't defend them. I think they should not interfere
with the construction of the telescope. All I am saying
is that ramming things down people's throats isn't
working out so well. I am suggesting that something
like the "prime directive" is probably a good idea. It
would be nice to put a telescope in a certain mountain,
but it's not our mountain, so tough shit.
?? Why isn't it our mountain? The Hawaiians didn't
create it. The ownership of land is a concept invented
and enforced by the U.S. and Hawaiian state government.
There's no ownership of land apart from the society that
enforces it. In this case the state of Hawaii owns the
land and they approved the use of the land for astronomy.
This is the usual confusion between lawful and ethical.
The desire and need to have some control over one's
environment already existed in biological species much more
ancient than the Homo Sapeins.
But among social animals it was joint ownership...which is
exactly the kind of ownership the government exercises
over. The Hawaiians are like a small fraction of the tribe
who wants to have exclusive control of a part of the joint
territory because they have supernatural myths they tell
about it.
Suppose that centuries from now we are capable of traveling to
inhabited planets in other star systems. We come across a planet
populated by humanoids who are roughly in the middle ages. They
are terribly afraid of us and regard us as the demons of some
ancient prophecy of their religion. Do we see them as part of our
tribe, take over the planet and impose our values and technology
for the greater good? Or do we try to remain benevolently distant
until they are ready? And if we chose the first, isn't it true
that they were right to consider us demons to being with?
The ethical choice is number one. And the answer is no.
So you agree with our subjugation if a more advanced civilization
discovers their way to Earth?
I agree with our advancement, yes. Nobody said anything about
"subjugation"...you're trying to move the goal posts. Educating the
American indians wasn't subjugation. The only subjugation they suffer
is being kept in traditional roles on reservations by their "leaders".
This is not so different from the situation native Hawaiians
found themselves in when the Europeans arrived.
Or when the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. Do you suggest that the
Spaniards should have just waited until the Aztecs "were ready" to
stop sacrificing slaves everyday to make the sun rise? Do you
think they should have waited until the tribes subjugated by the
Aztecs "were ready" to stop providing sacrifices?
There is a lot of contradictory information on the history of that
time, and I'm no expert. I believe that, since the time Spain was a
fascist dictatorship under Franco, even Spain agrees that the
conquistadores committed horrible acts against the Aztec empire.
Wikipedia, for what it's worth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_in_the_Great_Temple
and
http://lasvegassun.com/news/2015/oct/09/mexican-site-yields-new-details-of-sacrifice-of-sp/
I do know that the Spaniards were not exactly goody-two-shoes. They
were ok with genocide for conquest, with destroying religious temples
to extract gold and with slavery. They were also the fine folks who
gave us the Spanish Inquisition.
Some descriptions of what the Spaniards did to the Aztecs are
gut-wrenhing.
How do they compare to what the Aztecs did to captives from the the
tribes they ruled over? If ever there was nation ruled by a death cult,
it was the Aztecs:
/The top three Gods that they believe in were Huitzilopochtili (or
“hummingbird wizard), Tezcatlipoca (“smoking mirror”) and Quetzalcoatl
(“sovereign plumed serpent”). Aztec sacrifices were an important part of
the Aztec Religion. They have a strong faith that the Gods needed to be
nourished and replenished by human beings. This happened through human
blood. Being as it was a part of their religion, therefore they had to
participate in bloodletting, which means you purposely harm and drawing
blood from the body. Those who were higher in status within the Aztec
religion were expected to give the most blood during these Aztec rituals.
////The Aztec gods and goddesses also required the living hearts of
humans for nourishment. All hearts were acceptable but the bravest
captives were considered to be particularly nourishing to the Aztec
gods. As this kept going on widespread warring took place as the Aztec
people sought to bring the captives back to the Aztec temples for
sacrifice.//
//
//Sometimes they only sacrificed one person other times hundreds or even
thousands of people being held captive were sacrificed at a time. Each
Aztec sacrifice followed the same rules and steps.. The captive or
captives were taken to a pyramid or temple and placed on an altar. The
Aztec priest then made an incision in the ribcage of the captive and
removed the living heart. The heart was then burned and the corpse was
pushed down the steps of the Aztec pyramid or temple. If the captive was
particularly noble or brave, however, he was carried down instead.//
//
//In the case of an Aztec human sacrifice being performed for the god
Huehueteotl, the ritual was slightly changed. Huehueteotl was the Aztec
god of warmth, death, and cold. He was responsible for light in the
darkness and for food during times of famine. As a part of the Aztec
religion, special sacrifices were held for Huehueteotl. The victim was
first thrown into a fire, and then pulled back out with hooks before
being dying. The living heart was then removed and thrown back to the
fire. Aztec human sacrifices and bloodletting were important aspects of
the Aztec religion, as they believed it brought balance and peace to the
world around them./
/Tlaloc was the god of rain. The Aztecs believed that if sacrifices
weren't supplied for Tlaloc, rain wouldn't come and their crops wouldn't
flourish. Leprosy and rheumatism, diseases caused by Tlaloc, would
infest the village. Tlaloc required the tears of the young as part of
the sacrifice. The priests made the children cry during their way to
immolation: a good omen that Tlaloc would wet the earth in the raining
season.
Xipe Totec, God of the east and water, he wore human skin and was a
patron for craftsmen. He was a god of maize and was associated with rain.
The table below shows the festivals of the 18-month year of the Aztec
calendar and the deities with which the festivals were associated. In
History of the Things of New Spain Sahagún confesses he was aghast at
the fact that, during the first month of the year, the child sacrifices
were approved by their own parents, who also ate their children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Some post-conquest sources report that at the re-consecration of Great
Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed about 80,400
prisoners over the course of four days. This number is considered an
exaggeration. According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare,
"between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.[39]
The higher estimate would average 14 sacrifices per minute during the
four-day consecration. Four tables were arranged at the top so that the
victims could be jettisoned down the sides of the temple.[40]
Nonetheless, according to Codex Telleriano-Remensis, old Aztecs who
talked with the missionaries told about a much lower figure for the
reconsecration of the temple, approximately 4,000 victims in total.
Michael Harner, in his 1977 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice,
estimates the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th
century as high as 250,000 per year. Fernando de Alva Cortés
Ixtlilxochitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of Codex
Ixtlilxochitl, estimated that one in five children of the Mexica
subjects was killed annually.
/
I am not an Historian, so I do not know how to evaluate the
credibility of such sources. But I am very, very skeptical that they
were the champions of human rights that you paint them to be.
Now your straw-manning. I never said they were champions of human
rights. Just that they were better than the Aztecs, both
technologically and ethically.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
