Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 363 posts

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#231

Post by lazide »

dumbo-octopus wrote: post #221
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> depending on who you ask > Generally not an arduous process. Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.

Oh and accepting Him as your Lord, not savior. Lord is the predicate, Savior is the consequence.

Do you have his number? Everyone I call tries to tell me I’m crazy in Spanish.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#232

Post by mikhailfranco »

ywvcbk wrote: post #156
nroets wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that around the same time other European expeditions were making similar discoveries: 2 years before Columbus, Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope and a decade later Da Gama braved 10,000 km of open ocean and discovered a sea route to India. Discover of the West Indies was imminent. Columbus only won because he took an irrational gamble.

The Portuguese were doing the rational thing and taking the much rational and safer option. Was anyone really going west before Columbus? Of course I assume the Portuguese might have discovered Brazil eventually anyway because of the ocean currents

The Portuguese obviously discovered Brazil before Columbus (or worst case, contemporaneous), because of the dividing line drawn up in the Treaty of Tordesillas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas

It's not known how they did so (windblown fisherman, or expeditions that kept knowledge secret, probably both). The truth is that the passage from Europe to Cape of Good Hope - and back - is much more natural following trade winds via Brazil.

I am always skeptical of these people who row from Spain/Azores to the Caribbean or mainland S. America, because if you push a boat out from the Azores at the right time of year, that's exactly where you will go. If I look at the speed of the 'rowers', compared to the sea drift of a small boat, I find they reduced their time by 50-60%.

If someone puts up a small unattended sail, or even had a bigger wind cross-section of a larger boat (with unused oars :), they would beat the rower every time. There are several records of unmanned boats abandoned in storms, or torn lose from their anchors, which float the crossing in similar times. The rower only wins in calm seas. The exertion of the rower may be admirable, but the time and the crossing are not.

Coming back is similar, but more demanding. First, you have to go north to find the westerly trades and the Gulf Stream, but once you do, your passage will be swift. However, the seas of N. Atlantic are stormier and colder, so if anything goes wrong, you are in a lot more trouble.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#233

Post by netdevnet »

mightyham wrote: post #219
netdevnet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brought humanity together again This is such a culturally insensitive thing to say. And very ironic considering all the Americans that died during that "bringing humanity together" period and all the segregation imposed by the invaders that has been in place until not that many decades ago

GP quite literally acknowledged the injustices that happened in the sentence before the one you quoted. Saying the Columbus' expedition brought humanity together is a descriptive statement because it did in fact permanently connect groups of humans who had lived separately for thousands of years. Also if you think it's culturally insensitive to describe the effects of European colonization (positive and negative), th…

You don't acknowledge continent-scale cultural and human destruction by calling it "injustice" or "inevitable awful consequence". Do you imagine someone saying that about the current situation in Crimea? Millions of people died. It is not just an "injustice". An injustice is a state official forging evidence for nefarious purposes not destroying a country and unaliving its people let alone a whole continent. It really downplays the role of the invaders even more than it already is.

Who exactly was brought together? The natives were virtually or/and culturally wiped out (in case you didn't notice) and the consequences can still be seen today. When you look at the US today, do you see two groups together? How so, when the actual natives have virtually no land have been systemically attacked since their world was destroyed.

Thinking about it in positive terms is no different than doing the same with the situation in Crimea or with any of the world wars.

It is fine to discuss stuff but the idea of bringing two groups together when one of them has been virtually wiped out speaks of severe cognitive dissonance.

There is no whataboutism here because no other continent has experienced what the American continent has. There is no equivalent in written history for the scale of suffering and destruction unleashed upon it.

And you having a problem with me criticising the vast destruction (rather than a generic injustice) of a continent by saying that cruelty exists together (tell me what other continent in the last 2 thousand years got culturally destroyed and had millions of deaths as a result of foreign invaders) says a lot about your opinion about the deaths of tens millions of people (at the very least) the descendants of which still suffer all sorts of challenges. Including the continuous dismissal of the scale of their suffering by people like you ever since the invasions began.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#234

Post by latexr »

pirate787 wrote: post #202
latexr wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but he was great Why was he great? How does that follow as a conclusion? By your own account of the events, his “accomplishment” is the very definition of dumb luck.

He was an explorer who set out to circumnavigate the globe and connect East and West, it wasn't "dumb luck" that in doing so he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated. Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived -- he made the trip to the Americas four times, without loss of life in transit.

> he discovered the planet was bigger than he had estimated

Finding out you were wrong when everyone doubted you in the first place isn’t particularly impressive. Especially when we already knew the right answer over 1500 years before (Eratosthenes).

I like the Moon analogy someone else shared on the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41835857

One doesn’t stop being an idiot because they struck gold under wrong assumptions. They just become a lucky idiot.

> Columbus was also perhaps the greatest navigator who ever lived

Highly debatable. We don’t even need to leave the peninsula to find another country (Portugal) with numerous examples of people who could fit that title.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#235

Post by shsbdksn »

juunpp wrote: post #97
shsbdksn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very strange way to present Spanish history. Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity). We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of…

Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or…

Spain was always a confederacy of tribes! Even today!

The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).

That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!

EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#237

Post by shsbdksn »

chipdart wrote: post #138
felipeerias wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocese_of_Hispania

> formed the Diocese of Hispania That was an administrative region that existed only for slightly over a century. The caliphate of Cordoba existed for longer than that.

And Christian Spain hass run longer than the Caliphate.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#238

Post by throwpoaster »

istultus wrote: post #230

Makes sense. Now that the Graun's chief enemy is Israel and Colonialism, why not combine two favored targets into one hateful guy? I'm also pretty sure he was cis-gendered.

What's "Graun" -- wikipedia says a composer. What's the connection?

I like the sound of the word.

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#239

Post by eo3x0 »

throwpoaster wrote: post #238
istultus wrote: post #230

Makes sense. Now that the Graun's chief enemy is Israel and Colonialism, why not combine two favored targets into one hateful guy? I'm also pretty sure he was cis-gendered.

What's "Graun" -- wikipedia says a composer. What's the connection? I like the sound of the word.

It’s a nickname of the Guardian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graun

Re: Christopher Columbus may have been Spanish and Jewish, documentary says

#240

Post by netdevnet »

dumah wrote: post #227
netdevnet wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians? I noticed that a lot in anglo-saxon spheres. It seems to function as an othering technique. I wonder if you are aware of you doing it. Other groups don't seem to get that kind of categorisation (just look at this thread)

Some Protestants hold that Catholicism is not a sect of Christianity due to a number of beliefs, such as the different requirements for salvation. I don’t know how common this belief is in the US but I personally have encountered a number of people that believe this.

Interesting, I have never heard of that. Which is funny because Catholicism is far older than Protestantism
Post reply on HN