hodj
Vox Populi Jihadi
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Look, here is what I feel like has happened here: You've taking a simple statement, and blown it up into way more than it was ever intended to be. It was a generalization, a quick turn of phrase, it wasn't meant to be some sort of mandate of absolute fact in every situation handed down on high by the gods of history.
And you continue the trend of reading more into what was stated when you start trying to overanalyze statements like "laying the foundation for colonialism". That terminology does not necessarily imply conscious intent, in the first place. One can intentionally or unintentionally lay the foundations for future actions and events through actions in the current moment, and that's what Europeans were doing. If I go out drinking heavily one night, and choose to drive myself home without a taxi or a chaperone, I may be unintentionally laying the foundation for an accident, or possibly I may be laying the foundation for my own demise, or the accidental killing of another. This does not imply that I went out drinking that night with the intention of killing myself or someone else when I went to leave for home. You want to take a scalpel to what I've said, but at the same time, it feels like you're really just massacring it with a sledgehammer.
Whether events occur by willful malice aforethought, or unintentional ignorance, is really irrelevant to the discussion. Intentions are like assholes, everyone has one, rarely do we wish to see others'. What matters is what happened. What happened was Europeans were looking for new territories to exploit for new resources, in part because they had come to what amounted to political and military stalemates in Europe, where large tracts of land were not (generally) changing hands any more, and demand for resources was burgeoning as populations were growing. They didn't go out there going "We want to conquer the world and plunder it" but that was what occurred.
Look, I do recognize what you're saying and the thing you have to realize is I don't disagree with you. But what I think you're doing is taking a very casual statement, and overanalyzing it to death, and then using it as a springboard for what you want to say. That's fine, but try not to read so much into what I said because I made that post
1. Very early in the morning my time, like think 7 am or so
2. I was just speaking very generally and in broad strokes
We can have a discussion of the finite details, and I'm fine with that, I love discussing this type of topic. I just feel like you've way over analyzed what was said. I wasn't giving a thesis presentation, I was making a quick comment, a broad generalization, on a complex topic, of course its going to be possible to nitpick the comment to death with details. It doesn't make the broad generalization wrong, it just means that if someone wants to have a deep grasp of the complexity of the issue, they need to do their own time and research into the topic.
