Columbus Day
Article
Columbus Day is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 07, 2022 and October 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Happy Columbus Day!”; “I could be convinced to part with Columbus Day”; “making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day”. It most often appears alongside Adraste, America, American Jews.
Metadata
- Category: Events
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: October 07, 2022
- Last seen: October 10, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Adraste (2 shared issues)
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- America (2 shared issues)
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- American Jews (2 shared issues)
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- Beroe (2 shared issues)
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- Christmas (2 shared issues)
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- Columbus (2 shared issues)
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- Easter (2 shared issues)
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- Eostre (2 shared issues)
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- Hanukkah (2 shared issues)
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- Jesus (2 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- Anatolia (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Beroe: Happy Columbus Day!
Beroe: Does “Columbus Day was originally intended as a woke holiday celebrating marginalized groups; President Benjamin Harrison established it in 1892 after an anti-Italian pogrom in order to highlight the positive role of Italians in American history” count as one of the usual beats by this point?
Beroe: There’s a saying “the sovereign is he who sets the null hypothesis”. But I would add that “the sovereign is he who decides which arguments are too galaxy-brained and annoying to take seriously”. A hundred years ago, when everyone wanted to honor the Italians, it would have been galaxy-brained and annoying to object to Columbus Day. People would have accused you of just wanting an excuse for your anti-Italian bigotry. It’s not like it’s going to normalize the youth taking over the West Indies and enslaving the local population!
Of course, there’s the broader issue - whatever Columbus did or didn’t do himself, he opened the way for Cortes and Pizarro and the eradication of native tribes in America and the series of epidemics and slave plantation systems that killed most of the natives alive in 1492. I’m reluctant to attribute this to Columbus (who didn’t do most of it, couldn’t have predicted most of it, and died before most of it happened), because then you would also have to credit Columbus for all the good things he caused in the far future that he couldn’t have predicted - like America inventing vaccines or helping win World War II. On the other hand, if we don’t credit him at all for things he couldn’t have predicted, we can’t credit him for discovering the New World at all (all he predicted was that he might reach Asia faster than usual) and he becomes an inconsequential figure. If we’re celebrating Columbus Day at all, then it has to be because we’re attributing downstream effects to him, in which case he had many downstream effects but these were (hopefully) overwhelmed by the good effects of the US and all other modern New World countries.
4: LHN on whether anyone actually cares about Columbus Day:
Inline links: LHN
The size of Chicago’s Columbus Day parade and the continuing efforts to have the Columbus statue (removed in 2020) returned to its place of honor point to “Yes” on the sentiment question, at least for an influential community here.