#the principle of charity is explicitly in abeyance

[tanadrin]

Unpopular politically incorrect opinion: genocide of Native Americans was justified after all. Natives were stuck at barbaric civilisation level and would have been most likely wiped out anyways next time Yellowstone supervolcano erupts (and it would erupt any millenia now). But now, thanks to the Europeans building an industrial civilisation on the American continent, we can at least plan to create the technology to mitigate Yellowstone's treat.

This is pure nonsense. Do you get all your history from 90s videogames? Have you studied American history since you stared at the pictures in your grade-school textbook while zoning out?

I could talk about the complex arc of urbanization in both North and South America, including regions far outside the direct influence of the most famous urban civilizations like the Aztecs and Inca; I could talk about how the history of European invasion and conquest wasn't a clear technological rock-paper-scissors like some game of Civilization, but had many major turning points and reversals, and could have gone very differently very many times; I could talk about the changes to native culture and politics engendered by contact that included, often, wholesale adoption of European technology and political models; or how the pop culture portrayal of Natives is not only based on noble-savage type myths that have little basis in reality, but also fails to account for the ways in which the diseases that preceded major European waves of settlement radically altered regions like the Eastern Woodlands, and mean that the "wilderness" Europeans encountered was nothing of the sort--it was intensively shaped countryside well adapted for the use of its inhabitants that had simply been recently depopulated by smallpox--or I could talk about the ways in which Europe was an economic and technological backwater very nearly until the Industrial Revolution started, and how colonization was motivated in part by the fact Europe had nothing in goods it could trade with neighboring regions, because what could be gotten from other parts of Eurasia and Africa was simply better; I could talk about how technology is a response to material conditions, and is driven largely by those conditions, and how you can't actually rank societies in terms of technological development, how the Yellowstone supervolcano "problem" is a myth ginned up by internet clickbait, and how even if it exploded fifty years from now and we knew exactly the date, and had all that time to prepare, humanity would certainly be no better off now than in 1491--

--but I won't waste any more breath on that. Because that's not why someone states an opinion like this. Someone advanced as opinion like this because they fancy it makes them seem like a Very Serious Person; they fancy a willingness to trade lives for the greater good, even in the abstract, marks them out as someone who is not prone to sentimentality (which we have been told by Very Serious People must necessarily be unserious, for it is womanly), that callousness toward people we do not know and whose lives we need not understand somehow makes us Strong (as though the problem is that the world abounds too much in compassion, and violence and cruelty do not come naturally enough to humans!), and that by advancing such an opinion publicly, in defiance of others' weak sensibilities, makes them Brave, as though enough tracts on the desirability or even necessity of exterminating "savages" had not already been written to carpet America from one ocean to the other!

The little child who shits in the toilet and calls eagerly for his mother and father to come see has at least demonstrated, to people who care, that he is progressing in the natural stages of development toward maturity, and those close to him may take a certain satisfaction in that; he takes pride in pleasing his parents, not in the smell of his feces. You, however, have come forth bearing this enormous turd of a thought in your hands, proud precisely because of its stench, expecting others to ooh and ah over it, though you have not the sense even to wear gloves; and having shoved it in my face, you want my opinion. Very well. I will give it to you, and, since you apparently disdain such things, I will not obscure it with any tact or charity:

You are an idiot. You are at best an edgelord, and at worst a bigot; you lack compassion, learning, and wisdom; you lack even the emotional intelligence to understand your own limitations in these regards; and you are an asshole. Whomever was responsible for raising you failed terribly to do the task well; and for that I am sorry. But now you are old enough to interact with the world on your own recognizance, you must do better; your miserable attitudes from here on out are nobody's responsibility but your own.