It must have been difficult for him to be so insane.

Partly, but also because they’re chauvinistic about their religion and think Catholics aren’t Christian. Even at their best they practice sola scriptura and disagree with Catholics on interpretation, therefore they assume Catholics don’t actually understand the bible. Meanwhile Catholics look at them confused as to how anyone can read that thing, reject all context snd traditional interpretation, and come away believing every word is literally true and that they have an unerring understanding of it, much less without the graduate degree in the topic priests need.

That is impressive and I’ll admit I forgot about Japan and Vietnam in my “weirdly vertical countries” list. But still yeah it’s not even close in any count.

I want to add that the Iriquoian people are probably one of the best examples of all these things. They only have one surviving culture, the Haudenosaunee Nation, but when white people arrived in North America they were a significant cultural group in the areas settled by the early French and English colonists. When we arrived they had long been using a combination of farming, hunting, and managed gathering for sustainence, in a way that was compared to nobility. They had a complex society and political system which they frequently debated. Their political debates with Europeans heavily impacted modern European values, and their political system was extremely influential on the structure early American Republic.

The book The Dawn of Everything goes more into this and other cultures and peoples often seen as primitive for their lithic tools and other traits we typically see as of an earlier stage of advancement.

Aren’t they one of only two empires that was formed into a narrow line north to south? I’m not saying they aren’t impressive, just that they were only competing with Egypt there.

Tenochtitlan was one of the most populated cities in the world when the Spanish arrived

Oh they were all sorts of things before white folks showed up, even more since. The Yupik still hunt and gather. The Aztec had major cities when the Spanish arrived, with Tenochtitlan having an estimated 200,000 people more than twice the estimates for Madrid at the time. Cahokia was an empire that farmed sunflowers and later maize in what’s now Illinois before being abandoned in the Eastern hemisphere’s middle ages. The people of the pacific northwest were mostly fishers because if you’ve got a fuckload of salmon it’s not a bad call. In what’s now Mexico you had a lot of sylviculture.

Maize was domesticated from teosinte in mesoamerica. Beans, tomatoes, squash, and peppers were all grown by many cultures. The inca grew so many potatoes.

Most people were doing a little bit of everything though. Or whatever made sense to them. Many wanted to hunt and gather and chose to not prioritize agriculture over the hunt.

But also, hunter gatherers can do all these things. They can engage in complex politics, build great monuments, develop an interesting material culture, and plenty else. We have evidence of this in both hemispheres.

Yeah, it was wild to see how much of what I had been taught was European ideals and ideas were just Iriqouian critiques that Europeans were convinced of. Then later when he gets to talking about how some of these ideas seem to come from the rejection of Cahokia blew my mind again.

There’s a 4th: absolution. If you see their societies as having equal right to exist then what was done was a horrific atrocity that specific people are guilty of, often including one’s ancestors. It’s the same with a lot of anti black racism.

Yeah turns out metallurgy isn’t a prerequisite for complex society, just certain forms of complex industrial machinery

I feel like they’d understand that one

Only two elements are liquid at standard temperature and pressure: mercury and bromine

And awful for phones

Yeah American evangelicals don’t think any Catholics understand the Bible.

I wonder what would have happened if someone had attempted to explain sinusoids to that man. Like, they’d probably be called a dumb evil bastard and some racial and homo/transphobic slurs followed by the sort of logic that only schizophrenics can follow. But still, a chunk of this really is just a man mapping squares on circles

Yeah he was clearly psychologically unwell with psychosomatic symptoms

The idea that the police must be held above suspicion and assumed heroic is one of the worst things that can happen to good law enforcement. Good law enforcement requires the public to always be scrutinizing the cops.

And this is especially the case for such an iconic police department. The Miami PD is up there with the NYPD, the Chicago PD, and the LAPD as default “we want to do a police story” departments. There are other major cities where maybe you could claim they aren’t as public of figures, the Cleveland PD or Portland PD would leave the audience asking why them unless there’s something to it, and even more so for smaller cities like Eugene, OR or Akron, OH. But “I want to do a story about crooked cops” leaves Miami as one of the cliche settings.

Yep, I’m still gay, just checked

Y’all’s churches were weird. Growing up catholic in a German part of America we just did fish fries with beer battering and pig roasts, both with copious beer, though the kids had to stick to a single sip of wine. My wife’s catholic upbringing was more Italian American and her church did meatballs in tomato sauce.