u/iwannaintopolitics

I'm not saying that in the literal sense he was the first human to discover the Americas, because of course there were already indigenous people here and we also have leif erikson.

The point is that Columbus did discover the Americas relative to the viewpoint of the entire rest of the world. That was always the point of the phrase 'Columbus discovered America'. And that's completely fair from an historical point of view to say.

Firstly, the native americans were here first. Fine, that's true. But not only Europe but the entire rest of the old world (so asia, middle east, india, africa) were not aware of them at all. And its all these people who would later colonise America and make it, yknow America. In that sense, Americans are mostly these old world people, America is considered a part of 'western' civilisation. So from the point of view of the native americans sure, they knew about it before Columbus. But even from their point of view, Columbus discovered them relative to the entire rest of the world. Why diminish that? In other words, it feels incredibly cheap and pedantic to say 'well actually the native americans discovered america first'.

If we discovered an alien planet, we would say we discovered an alien planet, because relative to us nobody on this planet knew about it beforehand. Its the same.

Now for leif erikson. Strictly speaking, if you want to be very lawyerly about the word 'discovered', leif was indeed before columbus. But lets be honest, 'discovered' implies he viewed the americas as a new continent nobody else in the (old) world knew about, but in the vinland sagas this very small part of the new world he landed on is treated just as an extension of the greenland the vikings did already know about. His 'discovery' impacted nothing in viking history let alone the rest of the world, unlike Columbus' voyage, and historically is more a testament to how impressive and advanced viking maritime technology was rather than a true historical discovery which was treated as such by contemporaries at the time.

Bottom line here, strictly speaking leif erikson was indeed before columbus, not that he even knew he'd discovered something. If a tree falls?

Honestly, my bottom line would be that its sort of ridiculous to say that trying to argue the people who already lived there 'discovered' it is ridiculous and is intentionally missing the point that its 'discovered' relative to the rest of the world, and I go back to my analogy on how if we discovered an alien planet we would indeed use the word 'discovered'.

But with leif erikson, I think it is a lot fairer to say yes, he also discovered it. But since that discovery for all intents and purposes was then 'lost', it is therefore fair to say columbus 'also discovered' the Americas. Because for the entire rest of the world (not just the few scholars of norse manuscripts left at the time) this was indeed a 'new discovery'.

You see, after finally watching the final episode, which I was certain will be bad, but I did anyway to get it over with, I am still a little shocked.

I could now write a lenghty essay about everything that went wrong with this episode, this season, this show, but I just wanted to ask you all:

What is the message?

Let's focus on Butcher and the ending. Butcher, despite hints to the contrary, didn't really do anything worse than you would expect from the man in like season one. As his reward for leading the boys to victory, he gets:

- Told by his sort-of-son that he is very evil

- Dead dog

- Shot by his best friend

All that for, according to the shows own stakes, saving the world *and* wanting to ensure nothing like Homelander happens again.

So what exactly is the message? To be cold blooded? If Butcher had a gun and shot Hughie, he would have won. He didn't, and so he died, is that the message? Is this supposed to be a bad ending?

Maybe the message is that you should return to the status quo that created the evil you fought? That's basically how Harry Potter ended, but I'm not sure if The Boys aimed to be like Harry Potter?

Because I seriously do not understand the show's message. Like, fucking Stan Edgar is back to lead Vought? After all this, we are back to season 1, essentially, with him running Vought. How did that end? Time and time again, the show did it's best to communicate to us that:

- Vought is an evil company

- Superheroes are some of the worst people on the planet

Even the comparably tame Soldier Boy was an absolute violent asshole who was nearly indestructible, but we are supposed that 3rd time's the charm and Vought will now built a proper goodie Superman?

I don't understand what happened. Like, I get that they wrote themselves into a corner with accidentally making it so a "genoicide" (I don't know if the term even applies) would be the objectively correct choice, but they seemingly didn't even try to do anything else? In the end, our so called heroes managed to return Stan Edgar to his position as the superhero company boss. What was the point, what exactly is this supposed to mean? What is the shows message?????

I invite everyone to please, share your thoughts and maybe try and explain what exactly are we supposed to feel after this.

The government obviously floods the zone with massive file drops and the drip-feeding of leaks on the internet, all full of extremely disturbing info. But the information is so overwhealming that its impossible to distinguish the real from the fake. AI has been released at a very convenient time to complicate all this, as now we no longer live in the era of photographic evidence: literally any schmuck can generate a grainy image.

It's wrong to believe that something would be so disturbing that the government would "never have allowed this to get out!" they bank on this very response, they flood the zone with FAKE info but sprinkle in the REAL info so nobody, not even the conspiracy theorists, can tell them apart.

I'm willing to bet the most disturbing conspiracies to come out of the epstein case, or these UFO files, are the real deal. The plan is to sow so much distrust in information that there's no need for them to even bother censoring anything, covering up anything.

Authoritarians will always find a way to adapt how they control the people regardless of what technology comes along.