LWDT VI: Kropotkin's Bread Dead Redemption.

[Kowani]

the lwdt needs more center-left socdems

Well, I'm here. It's kind of lonely being the only SocDem.

You know I’m a SocDem, right? My reasoning is probably very different from yours, but I’m here.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

Well, I'm here. It's kind of lonely being the only SocDem.

Shame there's apparently only one of you.

What would NSG be without extremism?

A better place with more civil discourse.

Bruh, I’m a SocDem as well.

An AuthSocDem, but one nonetheless.

[The Xenopolis Confederation]

Why?

Drifting too far away from the traditional AnCom theology of this thread.

I don't think that's it. I'd like to hear it from his words.

[Liriena]

Welp, there goes pre-capitalist "Western civilization", on account of all the ritualistic, religiously-motivated torture and murder of heretics, witches, Jewish people and native Americans.

These things usually did not happen on the scale they did in the Americas and you know that.

Umm yeah, they did? In the scale of the tens of thousands at the very least.

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Answer: None. The authoritarian-left kisses the ass of Stalin and the like, while the libertarian-left supports people like Maduro and violent mobs. Under leftist unity they're pretty much united anyway, so the difference between the two are pretty blurred.

Maduro is not a left-libertarian, so why would I support him?

[The National Salvation Front for Russia]

Umm yeah, they did? In the scale of the tens of thousands at the very least.

As I've shown before, they're dwarfed by the Aztecs. The Spanish occupation that followed was tragic, in its spreading of disease and slavery. But the act of breaking Aztec power was good (even if the motives were marred by greed).

[Democratic Communist Federation]

Can I be an atheistic polytheist?

Slavoj Žižek calls himself a Christian atheist.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

Umm yeah, they did? In the scale of the tens of thousands at the very least.

As I've shown before, they're dwarfed by the Aztecs. The Spanish occupation that followed was tragic, in its spreading of disease and slavery. But the act of breaking Aztec power was good (even if the motives were marred by greed).

I personally cannot comprehend why people include deaths from diseases they were not immunized against on the tally board of "Native Americans killed by Europeans".

While there are proven cases of biological warfare by the Europeans (I’m looking at you Amherst...you douche), the near-entirety of it was completely accidental.

[Yusseria]

These things usually did not happen on the scale they did in the Americas and you know that.

Umm yeah, they did? In the scale of the tens of thousands at the very least.

Uh-huh. These dudes explained it way more succinctly than I'll can:

Aztecs would literally sacrifice hundreds, if not thousands of people on a regular basis, with specific gods requiring particularly cruel twists to said sacrifices (such as Tlaloc requiring the tears of children, which innately implies suffering).

One event had them sacrifice between 10,000 and 80,000 people for one lengthy ceremony, but it might be an exaggeration.

To add on this, historians estimate the number of witches that were executed in Europe to be between 40,000 to 100,000, based on 12,000 known convictions that ended in executions. Aztecs killed an estimated 20,000 to 250,000 a year, meaning that by comparing lowest estimates, the Aztecs killed more people in two years than European witch hunters in several centuries.

That's a misleading comparison. It's taking a small subset of executions in one place and saying it's smaller than all executions in another place. A better comparison would be to compare the total per-capita executions of both medieval Europe and the Aztec Empire.

The Aztecs would still win by an obscene margin even if they had their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs.

Their entire society revolved around human sacrifice, to the point of keeping entire nations as hostages for human farming in their Flower Wars, and being considered excessive EVEN BY MESOAMERICAN STANDARDS.

[Mushet]

Witch-hunting only gathered up steam in the 17th century because of the chaos and bloodshed of the Thirty Years War. People were lashing out at a time of utter shit. It's horrible and a tragedy, but to compare it to institutionalised mass murder done on a daily basis to sustain mere normalcy (such as it was in Mesoamerica) is disingenuous.

Aztecs would literally sacrifice hundreds, if not thousands of people on a regular basis, with specific gods requiring particularly cruel twists to said sacrifices (such as Tlaloc requiring the tears of children, which innately implies suffering).

One event had them sacrifice between 10,000 and 80,000 people for one lengthy ceremony, but it might be an exaggeration.

>Might be

So much sensationalism about Aztec sacrifice, it's almost all people talk about in regards to them. It is not even close to the scale presented and when it did happen it was often enough willingly. The cruelty and scale is exaggerated in order to feed into some erroneous narrative.

[Catochristoferson]

Umm yeah, they did? In the scale of the tens of thousands at the very least.

As I've shown before, they're dwarfed by the Aztecs. The Spanish occupation that followed was tragic, in its spreading of disease and slavery. But the act of breaking Aztec power was good (even if the motives were marred by greed).

I still don't think it's justified to kill a bunch of civilians just because they live under a shitty regime.

[Mushet]

Tenochtitlan was a metropolitan area with a canal system comparable to Venice's but with a population Paris.

And was somehow conquered by a few hundred Spaniards tens of thousands of miles away from their homeland. Clearly they were lacking in many areas.

Everybody loves to talk about the small number of Spaniards while glossing over the fact that they were accompanied by thousands of Indian allies that did most of the fighting. Also that they were ran out of Tenochtitlan the first time and only prevailed the second time when the city was destabilized and diseased.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

As I've shown before, they're dwarfed by the Aztecs. The Spanish occupation that followed was tragic, in its spreading of disease and slavery. But the act of breaking Aztec power was good (even if the motives were marred by greed).

I still don't think it's justified to kill a bunch of civilians just because they live under a shitty regime.

Most civilian deaths were from disease, not warfare.

And again, the diseases were almost entirely unintentional.

[Fahran]

Though I will somewhat side against Torrocca here and say I'm not sold on the idea of quipu a writing system. A few people push the idea yeah, but an equal or greater number are against it and the only place in the Americas we can definitely say developed writing was Mesoamerica.

I would call it as much a writing system as the early accounting records we've recovered from Sumeria in so far as it conveys information and had a standardized, easily comprehensible format for the initiated. Early Egyptian hieroglyphics and primitive Chinese writing are about as debatable given that they served limited religious or commercial functions and would not have been widely understood or replicated except among court scribes and maybe the clergy. That said, I wouldn't have called quipu a remarkable system of writing or record keeping. Really, the Phoenicians probably came up with one of the better early systems and, by that time, the Egyptians, Akkadians, Sumerians, and Chinese had developed their systems more as well.

One event had them sacrifice between 10,000 and 80,000 people for one lengthy ceremony, but it might be an exaggeration.

I suspect that's a Spanish exaggeration given how unsustainable it would have been. The death toll of human sacrifice, especially for the Aztecs, was astoundingly high though. Several thousand a year would have made a lot of sense between demanded tributes, enemy nobles captured in the flower wars, temple dedications, and everything else - and this number could have been sustained given that Meso-American warfare didn't really exist to inflict large-scale casualties but rather to extract tribute and capture victims for sacrifice. Several thousand at an especially long ceremony, like the dedication of an important temple, might have made sense. The 20,000 number cited else-where certainly seems plausible, though 250,000 is still a bit excessive.

[West Leas Oros 2]

As I've shown before, they're dwarfed by the Aztecs. The Spanish occupation that followed was tragic, in its spreading of disease and slavery. But the act of breaking Aztec power was good (even if the motives were marred by greed).

I still don't think it's justified to kill a bunch of civilians just because they live under a shitty regime.

Sort of defeats the purpose.

[Aellex]

Also, what we think of as "western writing" is basically a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, which is from what is now Lebanon.

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

[Aellex]

That's a misleading comparison. It's taking a small subset of executions in one place and saying it's smaller than all executions in another place. A better comparison would be to compare the total per-capita executions of both medieval Europe and the Aztec Empire.

No, that's an accurate comparison, your would be the misleading ones as most executions were punishment for crimes in Europe rather than ritual sacrifice in the Aztec empire.

[Fahran]

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

The Greek alphabet was probably developed by someone or a group of someones who had intimate experience with the Phoenician alphabet, with the Greek alphabet then influencing the Etruscan and Phrygian alphabets. The Romans largely got their alphabet from the Etruscan alphabet.

[Western Vale Confederacy]

I still don't think it's justified to kill a bunch of civilians just because they live under a shitty regime.

Sort of defeats the purpose.

Dying from a sneeze or dying from getting your heart literally ripped out of your chest cavity while still alive.

You choose.

[Kubra]

Also, what we think of as "western writing" is basically a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, which is from what is now Lebanon.

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

>kanji
>stolen

hardly. The whole point of chinese characters is so that between multiple different languages and dialects at least the written system will be more or less the same. A japanese person might not speak chinese, or vice versa, but they can look at the characters and surmise the meaning of a written statement.

[Torrocca]

Also, what we think of as "western writing" is basically a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, which is from what is now Lebanon.

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

>TFW Kanjis are "stealing" but practically every European alphabet is some original shit and totally not stolen from Latin

[Hanafuridake]

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

>TFW Kanjis are "stealing" but practically every European alphabet is some original shit and totally not stolen from Latin

The idea that kanji or other writing systems are “stolen” is naive and implies that civilizations totally didn't want other countries being influenced by them and adopting their literary culture (whoever heard of soft power).

[Torrocca]

>TFW Kanjis are "stealing" but practically every European alphabet is some original shit and totally not stolen from Latin

The idea that kanji or other writing systems are “stolen” is naive and implies that civilizations totally didn't want other countries being influenced by them and adopting their literary culture (whoever heard of soft power).

Obvious fake news. What kinda nerds would wanna influence other peoples' cultures or religions? /s

[Aellex]

But you're wrong tho, while Latin Alphabet was influenced by Greek and Etruscan ones (and not by the Phoenician one), it still very much is an alphabet of its own unlike Kanjis by exemple which are just the Japanese stealing the Chinese writing system.

>TFW Kanjis are "stealing" but practically every European alphabet is some original shit and totally not stolen from Latin

What are you even bitching about fam? It's just sad and rather confusing to witness, there is no other (western) European alphabet, we're still all using the Latin alphabet, lmao.

[Aellex]

>TFW Kanjis are "stealing" but practically every European alphabet is some original shit and totally not stolen from Latin

The idea that kanji or other writing systems are “stolen” is naive and implies that civilizations totally didn't want other countries being influenced by them and adopting their literary culture (whoever heard of soft power).

...
I really don't see where all the butt hurt over that single word is coming from; it's not even a judgment of valor, merely an observation.
Whatever the reason or goal, whether for the better or worse, Kanji really do just are at their core a copy-pasted Chinese alphabet.