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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   22438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population? Or something metaphysical, that during the independence war God let the Holy Spirit descend on the Americans and their descendants in a way which he did not bother with for the Latin American nations?

Yes.

Less flippantly, do I need an explanation for gravity to prove it's effects? Are 250 years of history not enough?

If you're claiming only this specific idea of gravity could do x, probably yes. The US was a huge mostly empty resource heavy new frontier. It's why we called it the New World. I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.

You know, this is the same argument I saw in a random youtube video ages ago, about why North America is an OP starting position for a civilization. They made all the usual arguments about natural resources, fertility of the soil, and a few I'd never heard before about how especially navigable America's waterways and coasts are.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

So excuse me if I don't entirely buy the argument that anybody living in America would have been as great as The United States. History shows there were, and they weren't.

Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.

I think reality is actually more complicated than that. There's reason to believe that the North America that the European explorers saw was essentially a postapocalyptic wasteland. There's good archeological evidence there were very sophisticated societies in North America (as there were in South America when Cortez arrived) that had collapsed – Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Now, I tend to agree with you that these nations likely would not have been as great as the United States if they had not collapsed or been overrun, but this is for moral reasons as much as any other: the Cahokians, like the Aztecs, appear to have practiced human sacrifice. As simple as it is to say that being "too stupid to have invented guns," is slightly more important than whether or not you practice human sacrifice, I tend to think that European success (including in the sciences) was due in no small part to their religious outlook, which was upstream of their culture, which in turn produced the scientific method.

TLDR; American Lore is even cooler and more hardcore than you were taught in school (and if you ever get a chance to go to a North American mound, I highly recommend it).

Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.

Fascinating reading.

Political, economic, or cultural problems may also have contributed to the community's decline.[61] Thomas Emerson and Kristin Hedman argue that Cahokia's large immigrant population was a factor in the city's ultimate fragmentation, as differing languages, customs, and religions obstructed the creation of a cohesive Cahokian cultural identity. Analyses of Cahokian burial sites and the associated remains have also shown that many Cahokians were not native to the city or its immediate surrounding region. These immigrants were sometimes buried separately from native residents, a possible indicator of weak integration along ethnic lines.[32] It is likely that social and environmental factors combined to produce the conditions that led people to leave Cahokia.[62][56]

It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?

Eurasian diseases absolutely wrecked the Americas and the Australias. Making up a huge amount of the initial suffering/damage/deaths inflicted.

Like it's always struck me as kind of stupid when people try to whataboutism Australian history since unless they somehow had an impermeable bubble until the invention of vaccines there was no way that that exchange wasn't going to lead to 90% of Australian Indigenous dying horribly of smallpox et al.

I mean, asian diseases ravaged Europe for centuries, we dont hold China morally culpable for the black death.

Second, without the benefit of hindsight there was little way of knowing who's diseases would be worse for who on first contact.

That said, smallpox is gone, and syphilis is still going strong, so maybe notch one for new world diseases.

At least two -- tobacco has killed many multiples of plausible smallpox totals!

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