@Pluto's Republic

the concept of ‘staying put’ in one place for a great length of time. I can appreciate the advantage of a timeless familiarity with one’s environment and the intimacy it achieves. I can also imagine that going in search of the new and undiscovered, armed with curiosity rather than guns, would have been to our greater advantage. Unfortunately, that endeavour was largely motivated by avarice. How do we now compensate for that?

I know this one too well:

...when you have so many fucking chores to do you don't know what to do first so you crack a beer, sit at your computer, and read deep political opinion essays.

[Edited addition]

As for the rest:

I often find myself contemplating the fact that the New World (North and South America) was really new. Humans didn't arrive until about 50-75,000 years ago and then the door melted shut. The people became the native Americans. The Old World (The Eastern Hemisphere) was really old. In different populated corners of it, the people stayed put and physically evolved into indigenous races.

Until one day, very, very recently — less than 500 years ago — the indigenous white people of Europe invented the gun. That changed everything. They got on boats with their guns in search of riches. It was then that the international murder-sprees began, and they have never let up. The brown people of the world were doomed. All of their nations were invaded by white people who were roaming the planet, bristling with guns.

A long time ago it came to me that there are some big things (lessons, concepts, systems, ways of being) that cannot be taught. Those things can only be learned. And the learning dawns like an enlightenment or sudden profound recognition. And one sees that it was always sitting there in plain site.

@Pluto's Republic

"Guns, Germs and Steel"

It's about that theory, how exactly and particularly were the Europeans able to dominate and subjugate brown indigenous cultures all over the world. Fascinating.

From his website about the book, "GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES"

Guns, Germs, and Steel seek to answer the biggest question of post-Ice-Age human history: why Eurasian peoples, rather than peoples of other continents, became the ones to develop the ingredients of power (guns, germs, and steel) and to expand around the world. An extraterrestrial being visiting the Earth 14,000 years ago could have been forgiven for failing to predict this outcome, because the human populations of other continents apparently also possessed advantages....

My own interest in this question became rekindled by my experiences in New Guinea over the last 50 years. When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me almost immediately that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans....Eventually, a New Guinean named Yali, in the course of a long conversation with me about birds and volcanoes and my work and other things, asked me the question directly: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Despite the obviousness of Yali’s question, I didn’t know how to answer him. It took me 25 years until I was ready to offer an answer, in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

The answer depends on a synthesis of four bodies of information, in the fields of social science, botany, zoology, and microbiology, applied to findings of archaeology, linguistics, and human genetics. Many social scientists have studied the development of complex societies around the world, and the emergence of technology, writing, centralized government, economic specialization, and social stratification. The conclusion of social scientists is that all of these developments required sedentary populous societies producing storable food surpluses capable of feeding not only the food producers themselves, but also capable of feeding full-time political leaders, merchants, scribes, and technology specialists. Until 11,000 years ago, all people everywhere on Earth were hunter/gatherers, living at modest population densities because the hunter/gatherer lifestyle yields only modest food quantities and little or no storable food surpluses. (Some hunter/gatherers in especially productive environments became semi-sedentary and developed chiefs, but no hunter/gatherers went as far as developing kings, metal tools, or writing). Beginning 11,000 years ago, it was the rise of food production (agriculture and herding), yielding 100 to 1,000 times more food per acre than the hunter/gatherer lifestyle, that fueled the rise of sedentary populous societies with storable food surpluses and all of their consequences. That’s the first step in answering Yali’s question.

I know this one too well:

...when you have so many fucking chores to do you don't know what to do first so you crack a beer, sit at your computer, and read deep political opinion essays.

[Edited addition]

As for the rest:

I often find myself contemplating the fact that the New World (North and South America) was really new. Humans didn't arrive until about 50-75,000 years ago and then the door melted shut. The people became the native Americans. The Old World (The Eastern Hemisphere) was really old. In different populated corners of it, the people stayed put and physically evolved into indigenous races.

Until one day, very, very recently — less than 500 years ago — the indigenous white people of Europe invented the gun. That changed everything. They got on boats with their guns in search of riches. It was then that the international murder-sprees began, and they have never let up. The brown people of the world were doomed. All of their nations were invaded by white people who were roaming the planet, bristling with guns.

A long time ago it came to me that there are some big things (lessons, concepts, systems, ways of being) that cannot be taught. Those things can only be learned. And the learning dawns like an enlightenment or sudden profound recognition. And one sees that it was always sitting there in plain site.

@mimi
are you saying you are not a genocidal maniac? That can't be. Let's have a vodka with that. Putin gets so angry, I need to get drunk.

Проста!

a genocial maniac, when your father's generation sacrificed so many lives to stop another genocidal maniacally infected people from killing those non-maniacally inclined? Don't betray your father's sacrifices they were forced to make by maniacally challenged political idiots.

HI, I am the maniacal pardoner of genocidal manicas. "My folks' needed those a lot. So, I know what I am talking about.

Let's have a beer with that, ok? From one maniac to the other. Tab is on me, the "Kneipe" is your choice.

@gulfgal98 about the fact that I do nothing to stop the war machine.

How in the world do we get rid of the psychos who run it?

maniac. I am very serious.

I know you have a snark tag attached to your essay, but it is the reality in which we now live. So many of us feel powerless to stop it, so we ignore it. Our history and our present can no longer be ignored.

There are sins of commission and sins of omission. While few of us have been on the front lines of the war machine that is the United States, far too many of us are content to sit back and ignore the death and devastation that has come to far too many people in our own land and overseas. Every American citizen must accept responsibility for what the government is doing in our names.

Once we all begin to realize that we all carry the burden of the killing that our government continues to do, the sooner we can dismantle this immoral war machine.