Happy to have provided a little amusement while I did! o7

Your reliance on hostility, bad-faith caricatures, and aggressive profanity to “win” a performance is why I blocked you in the first place. By setting up a false binary where any attempt to discuss specific historical structures is automatically labeled a “noble savage” trope, you created a framework that leaves no room for actual historical specificity or nuance. There was never room for a genuine conversation.

“By setting up a false binary”

Excuse me, but you were the one who fucking opened up with

What ever intertribal conflicts happened, they never reached the level of disease spread, displacement, and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure

Which is utterly and completely wrong on its face, and doubled down on it by vaguely asserting ‘culture’ as a reason why it didn’t happen, despite the ample evidence of intertribal displacement and systematic violence aimed at cultural erasure.

I’m sorry that you’re still clinging to notions of a ‘noble savage’ that dehumanize Native Americans in the hopes of providing a neat and comfortable foil to colonialist atrocities. I’m also sorry that you don’t know a single goddamn thing about Native American cultures beyond this noble savage caricature.

You never attempted to discuss specific historical structures, you dismissed a vast amount of historical evidence that any student of the Americas beyond the high school level would be aware of. And, on top of that, you blithely regarded the position as fundamentally not culturally chauvinist to insist that a particular culture engendered pure and noble virtue, unlike those other, evil, colonialist cultures.

Thinkers who argue that culture is not merely a passive byproduct of an economic base, but an active, creative force that shapes human behavior and historical outcomes on its own terms.

Which does not actually address the issue that your assertions had, nor my objections. Since my objection wasn’t “Culture doesn’t affect anything” but rather “These are all things that quite verifiably happened, and the core reason for them not happening on a larger scale is material, not moral or cultural,” especially as your incredibly unserious assertion was on a vague ‘Native American’ culture, as if there was such a monolith, even just within the continental US, wherein the only real commonality was a chalcolithic or pre-chalcolithic level of material technology. India and fucking pre-Iron Age Germania had more in common than that.

I have a lot of rage, tbf, but it’s not why I wound down participation. I wasn’t tired of arguing or overwhelmed by shitheads on the Fediverse - I’d mostly kept to places that shitheads didn’t congregate at by the time I left Piefed.

It was basically just a policy disagreement with Rimu over admin/coding stuff that affected my experience as a user. That’s all.

When my user experience got more irritating on a technical level and promised to stay that way, I decided that I didn’t want to deal with it and couldn’t move all my communities again. It was just exhaustion.

On the Old Place I was never more than a lurker and occasional commenter. I only ran the comms I did because the Threadiverse lacked alternatives, and I didn’t want the only topics I cared to comment on to wither for lack of activity.

I’m sorry that you took so much offense to being called out for an argument that blatantly contradicted its own premise?

Ok, but this is good actually, there’s a lot more accounts voting a dozen times a minute for hours than people actually reading a thousand comments a day and responding accordingly.

By Rimu’s own data, there were about five users who were above the ‘cap’ of 240 a day. None of which he suspected of being bots.

Sorry that you can’t do basic math, or understand that an upvote is precisely so one doesn’t have to type a response.

I’m sure he’s screaming at us from his tower, feeling smug about how he’s always right.

How utterly bizarre.

Like, the only question of correctness in this entire argument is regarding my supposed transphobia, which you’ve had zero evidence of.

It’s the queers and brown people who are wrong to the cishet white man who doesn’t go outside.

Uh. Sorry for not matching the stereotype you made up in your head?

Also sorry for being disabled, I know ableism is one of your favorite pastimes. On top of the racism, of course.

It’s very impressive how he can be so sure of himself yet not let facts contractict himself.

It’s funny because at no point have you presented anything even vaguely resembling facts, just accusations that you can’t back up.

He’s not a transphobe, the trans people are wrong!

… by all means, quote my supposed transphobia.

Ah, wait, of course - you can’t, because this is all bullshit predicated on the standard notion that lies spread by repetition.

Bruh, who do you think I’m not talking to directly, exactly?

What is the direct address that I’m supposedly avoiding look like, in this scenario?

And Pug is still stalking this thread and replying exclusively to you and me so Ada and other Admins can’t see him.

what

Ada has me blocked, as I mentioned and you literally acknowledged. And, quite literally, I responded to several other people in this thread.

Real MAGA shit here, just a total disregard for what was said a single sentence ago.

My most pathetic fanboy here is really something else.

And still can’t,

Go ahead, sweetheart, find a comment where I refuse to use someone’s preferred pronouns. You should be able to back up what you say with evidence, after all, like I did - at least if this isn’t some bizarrely delusional obsession with me. :)

If your head wasn’t cramped with genocide apologia, it’d be a nice rent-free alternative to my current place.

and still insists Ada is evil for blocking him. Very pathetic behavior.

From “I can’t believe he won’t even correct the record where Ada can see!” to “Wow I sure am glad Ada made sure she can’t see him correct the record!”

Fascists like you do enjoy playing with words, after all. :)

Admiral Patrick and PugJeuss are the smae person effectively. Both hate actions being called out.

Sorry for providing evidence of your bullshit, lmao. I know you hate evidence.

By the way, SmugJesus replied to St Elesewere and said Ada is lying about him. He knows you and Ada can’t rebuke him, so he replies only to people who can’t read his messages to prove him wrong.

I have literally spoken directly to Ada several times on the issue, and her response was to block me. Sorry that not everyone is a coward like you. :)

Hey Pug, I thought you were leaving this place? Can’t quite let someone you hate get away with being correct?

Sorry for coming back to check on a ping, I know my constant posting is unchanged from my previous usage.

I’m also sorry that you’re assmad over being called out, with evidence, on your utter bullshit. :)

And shit, you talk about me constantly. I’m your number one obsession. If I insisted on responding every time you said stupid bullshit about me, I’d have twice the comment count I actually do, lmao.

Sorry that your obsession isn’t mutual, sweetheart.

Sorry I call out your actions, are you sure you’re not the teseract dev? You hate when people document your actions and crash out when people do.

It’s particularly amusing since I actually backed up my claim with evidence, while your claim of “stalking” amounts to a handful of downvotes over the course of a single day.

Pug couldn’t handle this basic request for decency. *shrugs

Again, I never failed to use Drag’s pronouns, nor did I object to the neopronouns used. In fact, Drag never gave me any guff about acknowledging dragons, and likewise, I never bothered Drag about it. It was always unrelated people insisting that I had to acknowledge the reality of dragons existing, or else be transphobic.

I check when I get a ping notification.

Unfortunately, Ada still to this day spreads slander that I do not respect neopronouns, despite that explicitly not being the issue and being corrected on that.

Because I, while on a non-Blahaj instance and having not used any Blahaj comms in months, opined that while I would use anyone’s neopronouns, including Drag’s, and had no interest in getting into an argument with anyone about their gender, I didn’t think dragons were real.

To Ada, that was ban-worthy.

Downvoting a handful of comments is stalking, while this is just normal non-obsessive behavior, eh?

A very simple theory of innovation/development is cultural, specifically whether your empire will make you rich for developing military applications, and control more heretical heatens.

… simple to the point of absurdity.

Motivation for the Wright brothers would simply have been great empire/government rewards for success.

Fucking what.

Eastern cultures were less expansionist driven.

I really hate the re-emergence of orientalism.

Sky lanterns require an open and continuous flame, which is considerably more troublesome to combine with cargo of any sort. Early manned hot-air balloons were filled by gas generated on the ground, which requires an understanding that it is the gas which generates lift through buoyancy.

Concept behind hot air balloon understood.

I’m not well-read on the history of Chinese scientific thought, but it could very easily fit into what I said in the comment: "If you lack the concepts behind the invention, the only way to discover it is by accident" That’s how most things were discovered before early modernity.

Knowing how to make something, especially something discovered by accident or passed on by practice rather than taught as an application of theory, is different than knowing why it works, and understanding why something works opens up a much broader range of applications and elaborations.

I wouldn’t even go that far. Having iron weaponry when your opponents have bronze is an advantage, yes … but I really doubt that it’s a decisive advantage. It’s not like a bronze-wielding army is suddenly going to become helpless against a foe with iron weapons. If the bronze-age army has better numbers, better tactics/strategy, and/or better motivation, they may very well defeat an iron-age enemy in battle.

A few times, sure, but on a historical scale, it’s a ticking time bomb. One of the advantages of iron, other than being significantly superior for usage in edged weapons (armor is a mixed case), is that it is much more plentiful and cheap, and doesn’t require distant supply lines to be maintained in war time in most cases.

“Their swords are better than our swords” is bad, but not necessarily spelling doom. “Their swords are better than our swords and they can make 5x as many for the same time and cost, and they aren’t reliant on their trade ships not being pirated or sunk by storms to continue making them” is a bit dire.