308 Comments

Cook may have been a first class captain, but he ended up a second rate third course.

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Columbus never came closer to North America than Cuba. Which makes celebrating it about as relevant as this round of celebrations.... https://uploads.disquscdn.c... ..that can only be due to the Irish discovering North America.

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Columbus started the connection between the Old and New world, as I stated earlier. Any other exploration did not. There was a lot of bad that resulted from that connection, especially for native peoples. There was war, torture and slavery before white folks were here, they were just more efficient at it.

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You're a fucking idiot.

The only "expert" who thinks the Chinese discovered North America is Gavin Menzies. He says it happened in 1421. He also thinks another Chinese fleet sailed to Italy and kicked off the Renaissance in 1434. Then the Chinese Emperor ordered the fleets back home and had all records of the voyages and discoveries destroyed for... reasons. Which is why no one can find any record of the voyages from a culture renowned for it's meticulous record keeping.

He also thinks the word Croatoan was carved into a tree in Roanoke, not a post, and it was really just a misspelling because the colonists in Roanoke really meant Croatian, as in the Eastern Europeans.

Check your sources a little closer next time because you're referencing a crank.

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From what I've pieced together from reading over the years Columbus's map may have been from China, possibly by way of the libraries of Timbuktu. Someone had put labels on the various islands, probably because they couldn't read the Chinese names. Cuba was mislabeled 'Cipango' (Japan) for instance. He found things that earlier travelers had recorded in the southeast Asian archipelago, such as tapa bark cloth, cannibals, cinnamon (although a different type), and the people resembled the descriptions, so he legitimately believed that he had sailed to the Spice Islands. Of course he was wrong, since he was using Ptolemy's incorrect and much smaller estimate of the Earth's circumference.

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New Orleans does damn near everything right.

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New York's famous Little Italy is entirely gone,* because the Italians have fully assimilated, their kids moved to Long Island and became lawyers. No one wanted to keep running the pork store, and the neighborhood is now part of Greater Chinatown. Which is fine.

It's just not an issue anymore.

The Italian-American Anti-Defamation League used to get enraged about references to "the Mafia," which did not exist. This too has stopped being an issue.

The same is largely true for the Irish, Poles (former butt of all the nasty jokes), Puerto Ricans, etc. When I first lived in NYC there was lots of open racism and talk about Puerto Ricans and Dominicans being a "problem." That has mostly evaporated or gone underground where it belongs. Successive waves of Chinese and Latin American immigration have moved the earlier groups into the mainstream. Similarly, I think the relentless hatred by Protestants of northern European extraction toward Catholic southern Europeans is mostly over and done.

The same would be true for the Jews as well, if Christianists didn't constantly revive the hate for political purposes.

--*There are maybe 3 tourist cafés and a couple of very bad restaurants. Last I looked, Umberto's Clam House, of Mafia hit fame, was still there, and is not too awful if you want a real Ameritalian Red Sauce experience.

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Spaghetti in a can! With mystery meatballs.

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The Chinese didn't get to North America before the Europeans.

You got caught out falling for a clear hoax that's long been debunked and passing that hoax off as true knowledge to make yourself seem smart.

I know you have issues using primary sources, but you really should look into them before trying to show off your knowledge.

Try to remember the first rule of holes when you get caught lying.

Run along. We're done.

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Well, if we totally disregard the concepts of "government competence" and "business efficiency", then I'm right there with you.

Still not enough to make me move somewhere else though.

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Also, noncorrupt police with some kind of training, infrastructure maintenance, and that thing called "schools."

OTOH, these are problems otherwhere too, but without the gorgeous streetscapes and the music and the food and the lovely people.

And I speak as someone who once spent a night in Central Lockup. (Yes, I was guilty of the thing, but Katrina seems to have destroyed my rap sheet.)

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Which came to nothing

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Columbus still started it. Facts are still facts. Yes,, he was worse than horrible

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Or maybe a sex show when hubby was away working and the kid was in school. 😳

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I was getting 180Mbps earlier and even though it's down to 120Mbps midday, before I was lucky to get 40Mbps and when it got really bad, it went down to 750kbps, yikes.

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Speaking of Polynesians...

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