Fuck Amazon, they’re a bad company concerned only with slashing costs and making profit. They don’t want to improve the world, just like most large companies, and I wish there was an alternative when you buy stuff. Well, Walmart and Ebay died so maybe someday a better option will replace Amazon.
I personally am thinking of buying more products locally even if it costs more, which would help keep retail alive. As I see it, if you don’t support retail then it will be replaced with…offices and luxury condos probably. If we were to replace retail with parks I wouldn’t mind that, but this laissez-faire capitalist world hates communitarianism, and still isn’t ready for that. Props to New Yorkers for protesting another selfish company. Though I’ve disliked your dirty rundown subways, perhaps you’re victims too and maybe you’re waking up to the problems I’ve always called out in your city.
Pause to remember the Renaissance which means “rebirth” in French. Christians couldn’t draw, everything was flat 2D because they were focused on their inner spiritual world rather than the external world, and if Christianity were instrumental for progress then we would have advanced sooner within those 1000 years without needing to dig up ancient knowledge from the Greeks (and Romans.) We rediscovered old art and that is when we learned the techniques of foreshadowing and 2 point perspective which had been lost for a thousand years, and then only after reading ancient Greek philosophy were we ready for a scientific method, because Christian thought was always an obstacle. The moment science expanded from neutral topics and started to contradict the Catholic church and its dogma, the church fought back and then you had Galileo’s arrest and other heresy trials.
Ancient Greece was always a more advanced civilization than the most Christian countries that have ever existed during the Dark/Middle Ages because they had a freer spirit of inquiry. It’s a terrible thing when Christianity fights our values, and then when it loses it tries to claim credit for them. DarkMatter2525 made a video about that, titled “The theft of our values.”
A response to when Catholics defend the Galileo and the backwardness of the Middle Ages
You can’t say there was stagnation in the Middle Ages, because Christianity invented the crossbow
Funny how the first examples that you thought of were advancements in weapon technology. Yes, it’s natural for you to think of those because the Middle Ages were a barbaric time full of strife, sectarian violence and holy wars, as during the time when we were the closest to following God’s holy word. That was when we thought about the God and Jesus the most, and followed the bible the more strictly than at any other time in history. The result for Europe was close to hell on Earth, with disease, widespread illiteracy, superstition run amok, systems that perpetuated injustice, anti-Antisemitism, serfdom, disenfranchised women, and the Inquisition.
Now we would expect there to be some technological advances in a thousand years anywhere, but the question is why there wasn’t much more of it during that very Christian time period, and then why did it suddenly change? I don’t think it’s coincidental that when we found ancient knowledge during the Renaissance it triggered a Scientific Revolution. There is something about Greek thought and even its religion with all of the lazy gods which allows for freer thought than Christian monotheism.
Monarchs and elites helped by pushing back against the church; had they not done that then the new printing presses would have printed bibles and theological treatises which were what the handful of literate people (monks) had cared about for centuries. A division of power between church and state helped literate geniuses to communicate and spread revolutionary discoveries when they were separated by hundreds of miles, (and also allowed aristocrats to shield dissidents like Martin Luther who could further weaken the Catholic hegemony.)
Fundamentalist Christianity looked just like Fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East today, but how often do you hear about new scientific discoveries coming out of the Middle East? Their greatest technological advancements today involve breeding camels. If we hadn’t pushed back against the church, then we still would be where the Islamic world is right now, stuck in the 7th century during the 21st century.
It’s no coincidence that the period when we most strictly adhered to Christianity was a time when we fell backward so far that we forgot how to make concrete for one thousand years. Yes, the Romans knew how to do it, and they built the Roman Pantheon with it in 125 AD, and then shortly after most of the population embraced Christianity we lost the technology and literally forgot how to make cement for one thousand years. In fact, I was told when I took Art History at college that we never found the same exact recipe and to this day we still can’t make the same strong concrete in the way that the Romans did at the Pantheon.
I wish to ask you only out of amazed curiosity–whether you feel any embarrassment at arguing in the defense of groups of people who owe you no loyalty and who would absolutely kill you at the drop of a hat if they were still around? Do you really think the Inquisition, or the guys running the Salem witch trials in early Colonial America could be trusted to not back-stab you and be your allies? If not then why on Earth do you think you’re in the right when you try to revise history to defend the actions of such detestable people?
Take the pope, you say he met Galileo. Wonderful, let’s imagine how that might have happened in context.
Galileo wanted to publish a book that contradicted the church’s teachings about an Earth-centered universe. The Pope agrees to meets him, hears his idea and is impressed and says, “Well that sounds like a great idea. I will mandate it and make it the only belief you’re allowed to have.” Galileo then says, “Well that sounds very nice of you, but no thank you, that kind of misses the point.”
Don’t you value the free speech that allows you to write what you’re writing on the internet? It seems clear to me that you keep two sets of books, and whenever you walk into a room to argue about religion you leave the book with critical thinking at the door. Religion comes to us with a smiley face and an ingratiating form, but you have no right to forget how it was when it was strong before it lost its claws.
I am cracking up at the idea of him leaving his unwanted useless present behind in a cave, “Just in case it might be useful in the future.” While I don’t share the hate many socialists and liberals have for him (because it’s almost as though they want him to fail), I do think he is a technocrat who often jumps into areas where he knows nothing. Areas where the problem isn’t an engineering one. In effect he’s a clown.
And his eye-catching tunnel project appears worse and worse the more I put aside my novelty seeking emotional desire for a new fast mode of transport and realize that what most of LA needs is just plain old metros rather than new underground taxis for the rich.
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