Maya civilization collapsed upon learning kings weren't gods

Agencia EFE ^ | 26 August 2006 | Staff

[ThanhPhero]

Well, he cut taxes pretty seriosly, but I guess that wouldn't iompress a leftist a whole lot.

[ThanhPhero]

Actually, his accomplishments are irrelevant to liberals. He was a mystical King who ruled by Heavenly Right. The left, at least in the US are mostly closet and some not so closet Royalists. That is why Kennedys get elected in Massachussetts just because they run. An authentic Kennedy with Tourette's Syndrome and an 80 IQ would win election in Mass. to any office that does not have an incumbent Kennedy. Do yall old folks remember "Camelot?" The left saw Kennedy's accession as the Return of the King. His looks fed the fantasy and his royally behaved wife and his Hallmark children, too. Believe it. The left has that fantasy still and looks for a new King who will rule forever. It is one of the things that happen when you lose religion.

[KillTime]

Yup, the Mayans where the Jaffa of their time. ;)

[FreedomPoster]

>>An authentic Kennedy with Tourette's Syndrome and an 80 IQ would win election in Mass. to any office that does not have an incumbent Kennedy.

I was drinking coffee when I read that.

You owe me a keyboard and monitor cleansing.

LMBO! So true.

[RightWhale]

Yeah. Maybe not the Marilyn Monroe thing. But he didn't actually start the Apollo moon program. That began in Congress. He announced it, and he was good with speeches, no two ways about that.

[kenavi]

The Judges were largely nothing to write home about.

[redgolum]

Of course, Diamond drew the completely wrong conclusion from this: That the battle was won by the Spaniards' steel cutlasses and harquebusiers. Wrong. The battle was won by the Spaniards because the Incas regarded their emperor as godlike, and the Spaniards destroyed that belief.

That, and the Spaniard's had the guts to go after the "sacred cow" so to speak. Unlike the current administration.

[redgolum]

Actually, moral relativists are saying that human sacrifice is a needed feature for population control. Just ask any eugenics/planned parenthood groupie.

[Irish_Thatcherite]

That, along with mass immigration and cultural entropy, I presume. It was the same thing with Romans...

[Bellows]

Diamond drew the completely wrong conclusion from this: That the battle was won by the Spaniards' steel cutlasses and harquebusiers. Wrong. The battle was won by the Spaniards because the Incas regarded their emperor as godlike, and the Spaniards destroyed that belief.

True, but the Spaniards did it with steel cutlasses and harquebusiers. :-)

Diamond's book is interesting and worth reading as something that provokes thought, but I don't particularly like his writing, which in striving to sound scholarly is more difficult to read than it needs to be. And he overlooks (or ignores) some very obvious points in order make his own. In the chapter about early domestication of plants for food, for example, he observes that some plants and trees, like oaks, have never been domesticated although they constituted a valuable source of food (acorns). Explaining why, he posits that oaks grow too slowly to be of interest as a domesticated food source, and that competition from squirrels and other wildlife makes harvesting difficult and unpredictable. But he never mentions the most obvious reasons for why oaks have never been domesticated, which is that acorns just don't taste good compared to other more easily grown nuts, and are not a particularly useful source for anything else (oil, food for domestic animals). In other words, Jared, we haven't domesticated oaks because nobody wants acorns! Duh!