Saturday, August 3, 2019

Debunking "Adam Ruins Everything"





Debunking "Adam Ruins Everything:"

Click here to watch the video on YouTube and then read our response below: Adam Ruins Everything - Christopher Columbus Was a Murderous Moron | truTV


Here is our response:

1. America includes the Caribbean, and Columbus did reach (South) America during his third voyage.
2. Columbus wasn't trying to prove the Earth, was round, but he made his voyages BECAUSE the Earth is round. 
3. Columbus believed the Earth was smaller, not because he was bad at math, but because some respected SCHOLARS believed so. That includes people like Ptolemy, Pliny, Aristotle, even a contemporary of Columbus named Toscanelli. 
4. People in the Old World didn't know there was another continent between Europe and Asia. That is (partially) what we mean when we say, "Columbus discovered America."
5. The shape of the Earth was not a settled argument, which is why Columbus, years later, during his third voyage (and not on his first, as the video incorrectly implied) believed the Earth was round, but as a pear, or as a woman's breast. Other people believed the Earth was round, but in the shape of an egg, a pineapple, like a disk, or like a winnowing basket that it’s hollow in the middle.
6. Columbus reached the New World in a few days (36 days) as he said he would, and not in many years, as the "professionals" told him it would take.
7. The reason why it took years for Columbus to get a "yes," from the king and queen, was not because it took him that long to convince them, but because Spain was in constant war with the Moors, and they didn't have the time or the money for another thing.
8. The USA is not America, but part of it. Columbus did not reach the USA, but the USA was reached because of him: Florida was discovered by Juan Ponce de Leon, who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Hernando de Soto was inspired after Leon and he explored many places in the USA. England sent their own explorers after they learned Columbus proved it was saved to cross the Atlantic. Amerigo Vespucci (whom America is named after) neither reached the USA. 
9. Columbus was not the only one who believed he was in the Indies. Everyone in the Old World did. 
10. There was gold.
11. Columbus did not come with 17 ships to enslaved the Tainos. They were his allies and not his enemies.
12. Columbus did not "bounce the Caribbean slaughtering" Tainos. That is fiction.
13. Columbus did not have a regime in 1542. He was out of office in 1499 and he died in 1506. On the other hand, the natives were killing one another through cannibalism and human sacrifices long before 1492. That part of the story is not mentioned in the video.
14. Washinton Irving did not create a myth of Columbus either. The myth is not that Columbus was a hero (he was), but that he was the villain. 

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