Newsgroups: sci.geo.geology,alt.sci.planetary,alt.sci.physics.new-theories,
	sci.physics
From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
Subject: Re: Mars Life Scam Rigged By NASA, NSF
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 05:47:04 GMT

In article <4ugfk0$gsa@crl11.crl.com> viejo@crl.com (James G. Weston) writes:
>From the standpoint of the Europeans, the "age of discovery" was a 
>bonanza.  From the standpoints of the indigenous peoples who were 
>murdered, enslaved, impoverished, and otherwise abused...

Quite a few of whom were already busy murdering, enslaving, impoverishing,
and otherwise abusing each other...  These practices were not European
innovations; the Europeans just did them more efficiently and on a larger
scale, often with plenty of enthusiastic local help.  (For example, the
Europeans were the customers and instigators of the African slave trade...
but it was the Africans themselves who rounded up the victims and sold
them to the traders.)

>I suspect it 
>would have been a lot better if all those people had stayed home.

Remember that slavery (for example) was a very old practice that was
practically universal... until those evil Europeans abolished it and
pressured everyone else -- sometimes at gunpoint -- to do likewise.

>Keep in mind that those great "discoverers" should more correctly be 
>called hustlers and thieves.  They didn't have any purpose in making 
>their voyages nobler than getting rich...

You're saying that there *is* a nobler purpose than making people rich?
No, I'm not kidding.  Civilized amenities like emancipation proclamations
and child-labor laws are luxuries for the rich; the poor have to be
ruthless toward the weak.  The first step in becoming nice people is to
be able to afford it.

>And for all the riches they 
>brought to the Europeans, they destroyed many civilizations and committed 
>crimes that even the Holocaust can't match.

In which they were far from alone.  Remember Tenochtitlan, with its decor
based on human skulls.  (The *lowest* estimate for the number of skulls on
the *main* skull rack in Tenochtitlan's main square is 60,000.  The most
straightforward estimate, based on Cortez's observations of it, puts the
count at over 100,000.  And it was not the only skull rack in that square,
nor were all the skulls on racks.  Not nice people, the Aztecs.)
-- 
 ...the truly fundamental discoveries seldom       |       Henry Spencer
occur where we have decided to look.  --B. Forman  |   henry@zoo.toronto.edu