• knfrmity
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    3 years ago

    I learned about the near extinction of north American bison in school but we were always lead to think it was accidental. That Europeans saw so many bison and figured they couldn’t make a dent in that if they tried. Realizing that a lot of it was on purpose is so sickening.

    To put this near extinction in a bit more context, I seem to remember reading a paper which suggests the biomass of hoofed animals like bison, deer, cattle, etc., was roughly the same pre-invasion of the Americas compared to today with mass scale animal agriculture.

    • xenautika
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      3 years ago

      native hooved animals (ungulates) of so-called North America are estimated to produce 80% of methane emissions compared to livestock today. amazing considering the weight of a mule deer is ~1/6 of a cow and that “eat less meat” campaigns ask for far less livestock than pre-colonial native ungulates

    • AgreeableLandscape☭OP
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      3 years ago

      At least in Canada, in the 2010s, they actually acknowledged many of the atrocities done to the natives in my high school social studies class.

      Granted, that’s just talk. Now if only we can actually do things about it.

  • Della
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    3 years ago

    the supposed “bastion of freedom and liberty”.

    • AgreeableLandscape☭OP
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      3 years ago

      “Hey, we didn’t force you to beg us for help! We simply eliminated all possible ways for you to be self sufficient in the ways your tribe has been doing for generations!”

  • immoral_hedge
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    3 years ago

    But dont you know their language was foreign, skin was darker and spiritual beliefs beyond their comprehension. It was like mercy killings.

  • Rafael_Luisi
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    3 years ago

    The US entire existance was an absolute disaster, it still is the worst thing that the bri’ish empire has given to the world

    • AgreeableLandscape☭OP
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      3 years ago

      There’s a Chinese saying for this, “Weasel giving birth to rats.” When describing things that get progressively worse with each iteration.

        • RocketLauncher
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          3 years ago

          I honestly want to read some more if anyone can honestly make some compilation or literature

          • AgreeableLandscape☭OP
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            3 years ago

            I image the issue with that is that traditional Chinese idioms and poetry are infamously hard to translate to Western languages. Most Chinese-English bilinguals, like me, know Chinese literature and English literature, but it is very hard for us to bridge the two due to the nature of the two languages.

            At best you’d explode a simple sentence in Chinese to a paragraph in English, once you account for all the implied cultural context and how some things can just be omitted in Chinese while not changing the meaning of the sentence.