🚀 go-pugleaf

"Everett Hickey" <lithium@ev1.net> wrote in message
news:3bbc6bd5$1_2@newsa.ev1.net...
| "Mapanari" <Mapi@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
| news:xINu7.18248$Kp2.10696034@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
| >
| > | Ummm... none of those things are specific to the west.  Cleanliness is
| > | something that most of the west gets low scores on, compared to many
| eastern
| > | cultures where cleanliness is held in much higher regard.
| >
| > Cleanliness is the hallmark of civiliazation, which is why the European,
| > Japanese
| > and other cultures that ascribe to those values are superiour in just
| about
| > every
| > way to others that don't.
| > Camel jockey's are not very clean.  Just ask one to eat with both hands.
|
| You don't know much about their culture, do you?  On average, when they have
| access to it, they bathe more than once a day - being clean is part of their
| religion, instead of just a 20th century fad like in the west.  It took a
| major marketing campaign by plumbing manufacturers just to get us to bathe
| once a day.  Sounds a lot like people who called native americans "filthy",
| because they lived outside - even though they took more care of themselves
| than the people who called them that.

You yourself are displaying your ignorance for other religions and other
cultures.  Arabs traditionally only wash their feet, hands and face before
praying.
In many countries this is the only bathing they do for weeks.

And native americans were so dirty and filthy that immigrants could smell them
in the night and from miles away.
There are immigrant reports of the stench of villages included rotting flesh,
dead
animal parts, feces and more permeating the area where immigrants would have to
vear aside to avoid the smells.
Most plains indians would foul the water, chop down all the trees, kill all the
animals
and then have to move on to do the same.  This is typical of most nomadic
primitive
peoples.
I know you've seen a lot of Hollywood movies and it's really politically correct
to love
your native american injuns and ascribe to them all sorts of wonderful cultural
and lovely
sayings ( If I hear "the great spirit" and "The trickster" one more time I'm
going to scream!)
and to actually believe the re-writing of factual and anthropological history,
but saying
it was so doesn't mean it was so.
Take the plain's indians hunting practices...which many scientists believe is
the reason why
many game species in America became extinct like the Wooly Mammoth; they'd
encircle a
whole herd of whatever and then drive them off the cliff killing the whole herd.
Then down into the valley to take tongues and other choice parts and leaving the
rotting carcasses
by the 10's of thousands to stink up the sky.
The buffalo hunters on the plains were never as bad as the indian themselves.
Shear numbers of
white, black and indian buffalo hunters almost made the buffalo extinct.  And by
the way, it
was through the good graces of a few white men that you even have any buffalo
left to see; not
one indian was involved in saving the last buffalo.

I could go on, but you'd just put your hands over your eyes and start chanting
" I'm not listening!
Blah blah blah blah blah!"

You want me to tell you the quaint indian custom of how to soften seeds to be
eaten?  Or the many tribes that practised canniblism?  Or ritual murder and
sacrifice?
There was a reason why the average settler in 1800's wanted nothing better than
to exterminate them.  Like the Denver Militia yelled as they hacked up the women
and children at Sand Creek " Nits make lice!".
We're a little bit more advanced now, but, re-writing history is something your
liberal social teachers love to do to fit their own PC agenda.


snip
|
| The Greeks brought much of it in (though cataloging of data came to Athens
| through Persia, as did many other organizational skills).  However, the
| Greeks and Romans couldn't hold onto it when their civilizations collapsed -
| it was arabs who not only maintained everything they could (the loss of The
| Library was a harsh strike against that), but continued on - pushing further
| into mathematics and the sciences (Euclid brought us geometry, but most
| arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, and some of the earliest stirrings of
| what would lead to calculus, came from the middle east during the Pax
| Islamica).

The libraries in Damascas and in Spain and Morocco survived throughout the
years.
It's really something that not even 1/2 of all the ancient texts and stuff
written pre
1300's has been translated.
Civilizations ebb and flow, knowledge goes here and there.  The dirty Xtian
crusaders destroyed the second biggest resorviour of knowledge in the whole
world, and I still maintain that it was bigger than Alexandria, the collected
works
of the whole world in Constantinople when they sacked that city and killed over
100,000 people ( about 90% of it's population) on their way to a great glory of
fighting the infidel for God.  Later on the "infidel", Tyrians, and others,
learned the
mercy of the Christian god when by lying the Crusaders were let into Tyre and
then
proceeded to take every inhabitant up on the walls, behead them in front of El
Saladin's
army and push their corpses of the walls, all women, children and old men, the
whole
city.
See, the arabs remember stuff like this when they're taught history, their
history.
|
| That region fell on hard times later, and all that changed - but history is
| irrelevant.  My point is the things you originally mentioned as an attack
| are not very well grounded.  The fact that the only part of that you really
| responded to was historical doesn't prove your point much.  The closest you
| came was treatment of women (they're way way behind in that area), and
| education (they go futher into it than we do in some areas, but they dont'
| exactly have any major universities with a global draw).

I'm a cultural anthropologist and that's the way I see things.  Some cultures
are
just superiour to others.
We can debate all day long, but in the end, we're on the moon, eating Big Macs
and our women have birth control and can wear thongs on the beach, except in
Florida.

|
| > It's nice to read parts of history, and whatever pc professor taught you
| last,
| > usually to denigrate "Dead white men history", but it doesn't make it so.
|
| I've torn through a pretty good number of history books, particularly ones
| that try not to hold any viewpoint at all.  I also like access to direct
| archaeological data instead of other's interpretations of it.  I have no
| intention of denigrating western culture - but I get a strong feeling that
| you're either very highly biased towards it, are bigoted against particular
| groups, or simply have a number of gaps in your history.  You aparently know
| a lot, but you also sound like you're missing a lot - especially recent
| history in that region.
|
Recent to ancient, whatever.  I study all of it.
There are gaps just like everyone; I can't nor can anyone read everything there
is
to be read.  I concentrated on the middle ages when I got my history degree and
with side trips to Russian, Polish, Chinese and Persian/middle eastern history
to
see the broad picture.
I was more interested in the money  and trade routes, commerce and politics
angle
of the times.
But, I had to learn about how weapons were made, the history of sailing ships,
defensive
fort building, military tactics, weather data and tons more stuff to get a
fairly clear
picture of the times.  Sure there are gaps, but not many.  I think I skipped the
development
of musical instruments, most of the pottery except as pertains to middle eastern
language and communications devices, hierogyphics, reed binding, and epic poems
and
literature.  Not enough hours in a lifetime.

mapi