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America - The Official Thread
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Dotini
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I'm still confused. Perhaps leveling an historical structure or wiping out a family or even an entire civilization can never be properly described as erasing history. Perhaps there is no example whatever of erasing history. Maybe the only example of erasing history is when you take the rubber end of your #2 pencil and erase the iconography of the original Book of Kells, the words of the Magna Carta or original Declaration of Independence.
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DesertPenguin
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There's always gonna be a "Sarah Palin" in the mix 
UKMikey
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Dotini
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Can anyone provide a valid example of history being erased? I'm not doing terribly well, other than the example of colonial erasure of mounds and pyramids.
Edit: I've dug up an example of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who was erased from history.
https://artsandculture.google.com/e...atliche-museen-zu-berlin/9QISgLrWPLdZIg?hl=en
And I suppose lost history is related to erased history. For instance, I'd like to know who designed the Antikythera mechanism.
Edit: I've dug up an example of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who was erased from history.
https://artsandculture.google.com/e...atliche-museen-zu-berlin/9QISgLrWPLdZIg?hl=en
And I suppose lost history is related to erased history. For instance, I'd like to know who designed the Antikythera mechanism.
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- TexRex72
I snorted.
Such an ironic sentiment from the Trumpkin who posted an OANN clip of the ousted corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor as a means to deflect from the illegal conduct that got his bronzer daddy impeached.
Trumpism, man.
Nobody said you did. Odd that you'd reject a nonexistent accusation out of the blue.
Thoroughly unsurprising that you'd offer up a tweet from a puppet of the right wing spin machine Turning Point USA in support of a new nothing argument when your previous nothing argument got busted.
Here's a more recent tweet from Benny:
Now I don't actually approve of flag desecration myself, but I support the Constitutional right of others to desecrate the flag. That's how you know I'm not a Republican. You know who prohibits flag desecration? Communist China.
There's also a relevant tie-in to the topic at hand, rather than simply highlighting more stupid **** from a guy who says stupid ****, and that is that burning the flag is legal in this country provided you don't violate any local, state or federal laws to do so. Similarly, celebrating America in any manner you see fit is entirely permissible provided you don't violate any laws to do so.
Trumpism, man.
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@TexRex, So let me get this straight. I post a tweet from some guy named Benny showing Angelenos defying their government and shooting off illegal fireworks to celebrate Independence Day, and in response, you post a tweet from that same Benny showing how Democrats celebrate Independence Day by doing something even you don't approve of, burning an American flag.
I'm ok with that.
I'm ok with that.
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- TexRex72
You posted a tweet in which said Benny was suggesting that "celebrating America" by using fireworks that California has deemed illegal, likely for reasons of safety, is equivalent to celebrations of America being illegal.
How dim can a person be? Oh, wait...
And yes, I don't approve of flag desecration and I won't engage in it myself, but I'm capable of setting my own feelings toward it aside and acknowledging the Constitutional right of others to engage in it so long as other laws are not violated in the process, because those violations diminish the power of the protest in very much the same way that vandalism, looting and physical violence do.
Those who seek to prohibit the specific act of flag desecration fail to grasp that the flag they purport to so respect itself represents the Constitutional right of people to desecrate it without fear of criminal prosecution. These people who seek to prohibit it present themselves as patriotic Americans but they're really just caricatures of patriotic Americans, and the act of flag desecration is much more patriotic than advocating for prohibition of it.
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He started his post with the words "COMMUNIST CALIFORNIA:". Is California communist? No. That should have been a clue to you that what he was saying was tongue in cheek. It must be sad to have no sense of humor.
Oh, and it was nice to see the Democrats having fun on Independence day too. I mean, burning the American flag seem to me, to be an odd way to celebrate America's founding, but the're Democrats, so...
Dotini
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If Hitler had wiped out all the Jews together with their all synagogues, I guess that would have counted. Perhaps the time the Jews lived in Egypt and supposedly rebelled - if that was what happened - the story may have been erased by the Pharaohs since it made them look weak.
After the 3rd Punic War, in which the walled city state of Carthage was completely destroyed by Rome and the fields salted, I don't think that civilization ever lived again. There are probably a few nameless civilizations that went extinct with all their works now being mounds in the deserts or jungles. Possibly the Mongols, Huns or Conquistadores did a bit of this nasty work. The world is covered with puzzling ruins.
But, thanking you for your bold try, I think the official GTP verdict is there is no such phenomenon as erasure of history. It simply cannot and does not happen, at least not anymore. End of story.
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Burning a flag is the correct method of flag destruction, at least according to the Boy Scouts of America. You might want to retire an old flag, let's say. The BSA burns more US flags than any other organisation or group in the world.
UKMikey
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It's funny that a kid's cartoon with flying magic buses is somehow totally invalidated because it gets one specific date-related fact wrong but some tweet trying to pass off California as communist because it bans fireworks gatherings for safety reasons is obviously joking and shouldn't be taken seriously. Would that I had a sense of humour so I could appreciate the irony of the vastly different standards to which they're being held.
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It's true. At least the former is, but I absolutely believe the latter is as well.
Flag desecration is the issue, though, and it's also a bit of a misnomer. The free exercise of that which the flag represents is to respect it, even if that isn't the intent of those who choose to protest in that manner.
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Can't imagine Ye would be any worse than Trump, and the lulz would be lullier.
ROAD_DOGG33J
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We might even get a sneaker out of it.
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Well, Columbus did a pretty job on the Tainos of Hispaniola, reducing a population of somewhere between 60,000 & 3 million to a couple of hundred survivors within about 30 years. I think it's fair to call this genocide. Is it reasonable to celebrate this historical figure with statues & holidays?
Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, when he was 18. For decades, he participated in the mistreatment of the Taíno and the introduction of enslaved Africans, before renouncing it all, becoming a Dominican friar and confessing what he had witnessed in “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.”
“They [Spanish explorers] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.’
When las Casas wrote this in 1542, there were only 200 Taíno left on Hispaniola. Across the Caribbean, he claimed the Spanish were responsible for the deaths of 12 to 15 million indigenous people.
Historians usually attribute most of the deaths to the spread of diseases for which native people had no immunity, but recently historian Andrés Reséndez has pushed back against this, arguing that populations were lower than previous estimated, and “a nexus of slavery, overwork and famine killed more Indians in the Caribbean than smallpox, influenza and malaria.”
Soon after Columbus’s death in 1506, Spanish explorers moved on to other islands, like Puerto Rico and Jamaica, and according to las Casas, “perpetrated the same outrages and committed the same crimes as before.”
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To briefly go back on the subject of reverence of Columbus, it's not that Columbus wasn't revered at all but it didn't gather any significant momentum until a lot, lot later and it actually has links to the American revolution. Columbus was regarded as one of the key figures in the age of navigation but in the scramble for the Americas, the English-speaking world promoted John Cabot more because he did his navigating on behalf of the English crown whereas Columbus was doing it for Spain, a big naval rival. Notwithstanding the fact that Cabot actually did reach the North American mainland.
By the time the American revolution was kicking off, the English-sponsored Cabot was seen as a less than desirable "hero" because the revolution was against the English. Columbus really took off as a "very famous person" around the turn of the 19th century but before then, he just wasn't as well known as he is now. It happens sometimes; Charles Babbage designed a perfectly working computer in the 1820s and died in poverty as a laughing stock, not gaining recognition until long after his death. The same is true of Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Kafka and even William Shakespeare. They just weren't 'always famous' as we now know them, if you know what I mean.
And in the interest of balance, the main distinction Columbus did have over Cabot and Erikson is that unlike them, Columbus stayed. He was Governor of Hispaniola and lived in and around the Americas for about 8 years although the legacy of that is the source of his reevaluation.
A fair assessment.
By the time the American revolution was kicking off, the English-sponsored Cabot was seen as a less than desirable "hero" because the revolution was against the English. Columbus really took off as a "very famous person" around the turn of the 19th century but before then, he just wasn't as well known as he is now. It happens sometimes; Charles Babbage designed a perfectly working computer in the 1820s and died in poverty as a laughing stock, not gaining recognition until long after his death. The same is true of Vincent Van Gogh, Franz Kafka and even William Shakespeare. They just weren't 'always famous' as we now know them, if you know what I mean.
And in the interest of balance, the main distinction Columbus did have over Cabot and Erikson is that unlike them, Columbus stayed. He was Governor of Hispaniola and lived in and around the Americas for about 8 years although the legacy of that is the source of his reevaluation.
And on a complete and total tangent, one thing that fascinates me with Columbus is that he's probably the most recent very famous historical figure where we don't know what he looks like because no portraits were done during his lifetime.
A fair assessment.
Joey D
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Salt Lake City allows them and it's stupid. No place in the western US should allow fireworks because all it does is lead to fires. Since last Sunday we've had five wildfires all caused by fireworks and two of them were major.
People who defy fireworks laws are terrible people. Thankfully, in Utah, if you're caught setting a wildfire, even if it's accidental, you're going to be paying out your ass for the rest of your life because of it. The criminal penalties are low if it's set accidentally, but the state will sue you for the cost of fighting the fire and it's rarely settled for less than 70% of the entire cost.
UKMikey
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DesertPenguin
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