They never developed those exams, they were all under the Sino sphere, but political correctness at this point of moment will be to describe it as East Asian Cultural Sphere.

I am also not sure if there is even a Korean superiority . There never was. They only became who they are at the moment in the past 25 or 30 years.
They have been vassal state of countless of Chinese / Mongol and Manchurian dynasties and occupied and conquered by the Japanese.

This post was edited by Hamsterbaby on Oct 30 2024 11:45am

How can we even know the life expectancy of these pre-civilizational societies that didn't keep written records? It's just a crap shoot of guessing

by examining bones, the same way we judge it even among cultures who did record history through writing.

we dont have birth and death dates for common peasants in europe, just the elites. and even those are shaky in accuracy past a certain point.

Precolumbian statistics tend to be very extrapolated guesswork drawn from general depopulation rates, or literally scrying the bones in the case of skeletal analysis.
In the 19th century, those humanitarian debates in congress were premised on the need to save Indians from disappearing entirely because their life expectancy was at the point of total extirpation. Its why Thomas Jefferson had a delegation of Indians be vaccinated from smallpox and tried to roll out vaccines to tribes, its why congress in 1832 passed a bill allocating funding for Indian healthcare at the federal level on a purely humanitarian basis. A joint committee in 1865 was called just to investigate the issue of Indians facing extinction, the turning point when American efforts focused on civilizing and assimilating Indians to save them and the basis of the later allotment and Dawes Act. And yet basically none of it was impacting Indians west of the Mississippi.


America wasn't dealing with mesoamerican cultures building mighty ziggurats and performing mathematical calculations of celestial phenomenon. We were dealing with fragmented hunter gatherer tribes barely subsisting in squalor, dying off en masse before we even arrived and then cranking their demise into high gear with the introduction of disease and destabilizing european technology and encroachment letting the survivors kill each other even faster. Any morality of our response had to be premised only in the circumstances we encountered, not whatever came before

so is it your position that these vast and well debated humanitarian efforts were entirely devoid of any feelings of apology for our role, premediated or simply happenstance, in the downfall of these people? that seems pretty illogical if so. and if not, why is it OK for an 1860s politician to feel apologetic towards indians who were already in decline 400 years prior and killed out mostly by incidental contact diseases, but not OK for Joe Biden to feel the same way and express it 150 years later?

because that's the real context of this topic, it not being OK for joe biden to say sorry on behalf of the US govt for the role it played in the downfall of the native population of america. for the many sham treaties which are legitimate to apologize for all the way down to diseases out of anyone's control which is just polite even if there is no fault.

Personally i think it's stupid to care what happened hundreds years ago when we all live in the present and can change the future starting today. Atm, it's bleak because corporations control the whole world and we're one step away from Authoritarian regimes.

Digital ID is currently being vetted in Canada which people called a conspiracy theories for years. Then it'll be social scores and so on.

Joe Biden wasn't apologizing for our role in their downfall, he was apologizing for our role in humanitarian efforts designed to help them. Its kind of specious to compare the two. Those 1860s politicians were looking for practical means to address a real crisis, one which had been in progress since before settlers even arrived to these shores, one which even sped up by our presence, was largely done without our intent. One thing we can say for the 1860s, they weren't apologetic. Joe Biden in 2024 is saying sorry for the efforts we undertook to uplift the native population, at a time of no acute crisis and with no actions of his own to offer up.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Oct 30 2024 04:13pm

That just brings us back to "if you have good intentions you never need to apologize regardless of the outcome". a system which has the inherent goal of destruction of cultural practices is a bad outcome, an apology is hardly a big issue. as you say a lack of action offered up is good, what can he do now?