zzzpaz

> You keep comparing the colosseum killings to events that transpired over large geographical areas, for different purposes than entertainment.

I see, so enslaving, torturing, raping Africans and native American was not entertainment right? Was really required to kill 98% of the indigenous population. I understand, that makes sense indeed given your point of view.

> You cannot measure how primitive a culture is by the amount of people they kill.

Oh no? Then what's the metric let's see. You define what's primitive?

> To me (and, I would argue, most people), the monument symbolizes specifically those often pointless killings and nothing else

What do you think and your opinion is useless for the history. The monument was not symbolizing these killings give that was build before the killings happened and was not build for the sole purpose of killing people.

> prove my lack of knowledge of historical events

You proved that yourself I didn't need to do anything.

> Meanwhile, you have not told me anything I did not already know.

Meanwhile, your opinion is wrong even tho you've the right amount of information to understand that these games was normal.

It's like box, extreme sport or anything else like that. The difference is that the violence and the killings were well received by the population as these were normal back then.

Gladiators were not forced to participate to the games, they decided to do out of their own will. Which is totally different from other events where people were not given the choice. If you didn't want to participate to the games, was ok. No freedom for you. If you wished to do so, you had a chance to live free and a chance to die in the arena.

It's an example to dispute the false claim that 10 years is little time for a technology to mature. If 10 years are enough for hardware let alone software.

Another example are social media, from 2004 to 2014, they were widely used by almost everybody that has an internet connection (Facebook had more than 1 billions active users back then)

Agreed, but unfortunately is the sad reality. And social media didn't help either my friend

You tend to realize this after you've done this experiences. If you don't, you'd miss out something and somehow you will get it back later.

I know of people who got married before 20 yo, been together for a decade, got kids an all and after that one of the partner walked away because "I'm missing something out, I want find myself".

Traveling is a way to learn new culture and see things with a different lens so I'd definitely not remove that from the experience of person on their 20s

Indeed. The tech is not scalable and in 10 years very little has been done to make the decentralized dream come true

None of this is widely used. The only widely used purpose of blockchain is trading.

> But 10 years is a short time span. Internet took more time than that to mature.

10 years in tech is definitely enough. Most of the biggest trend mature and get widely used in 10 years.

Smartphone from 2007 (iphone) / 2008 (android) to 2017/2018 has been having a massive adoption everywhere in the world.

Windows from 1995 to 2005 (with XP already around since 2001) has proven the same.

Cloud technology, from 2006 to 2016, definitely has still room to go but already widely used.

> Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life.”

What this has to do with politics? A person's personal choice doesn't necessarily need to be related to the political situation.

Majorly people are moving from farms to city life, so it's not even accurately describing the trend.

The Colosseum was active for 400 years, you consider that a relatively short period of time? In total they estimated that 400.000 people died in there, in 400 years! That's 1.000 people a year. Even if you double or triple that number is nothing compared to the deaths of the slaves trade in the Americas (estimated to 5 millions and more, in the same timespan of 400 years - 1500 to 1900 - just before being capture or during the transit to America) or the number of native Americans that have died during colonization (which is estimated to be to the order of 100 millions with a decline in population of 98%)

If that's not even enough to give you another metric the Iraqi war killed 460.000 civilians in less than 20 years and it's pretty recent.

> It serves to remind us of a more primitive past and of how far we've come.

This is what you fail to understand as well, they were not primitive by any means. Despite this games the society in Rome during the Roman empire was liberal (go read a book about it), we've killed and we continue to kill much more after the Roman empire and nowadays. The examples above should be enough for you to understand

> We are also specifically dealing with a historic artefact that symbolizes these killings.

It does not symbolize these killings only and was not solely built to host gladiator games. The Colosseum had multiple purposes. There were kind of games with wild animals (lions or African animals) vs man (similar to what nowadays people do in Spain during the Bullfighting) and was also used to stage battles, drama, composition, natural environment simulation and so on.

If your historical sources are Hollywood movies and TV series, of course you are missing something out.

It was a place or entertainment, similar to what today is a Cinema or a theater (indeed it's real name is Flavian Amphitheater)

Reminds me of The Late Mattia Pascal romance

It's just a useless observation. Same as being an alien approaching our planet and saying "oh.... Look at this planet. Over the years billions of people must have died".

Well, while is true that many people died in the colosseum (so in the entire history of our planet) what's the point? If was not to analyze or judge their behavior?

If you look at the OP reply on one of my comments you'd see that his intention indeed was to judge their behavior with our lens. Which is wrong. That's it.

I just said it multiple times just go and look at my replies.

Is not required to have an opinion on past events based on nowadays standards. Historian do that all the time, they look at the history with objectiveness especially when is far away to avoid to get trigger by random deaths that happen all the time (even nowadays).

So if you want understand the history the worst thing to do is to cry because someone died. You need to understand events and why these things happened and then maybe you can learn something.

I don't think is complicated to understand, but apparently seems to be the case.

If nobody is offended then why are we here discussing about how many people have died in the colosseum? Just enjoy the fact that now you can see more as compared as what we were able to see before.

Maybe you never been there, so just pay a visit and see the magnificence of it. After all, is still around after 2000 years and pretty well conserved.

This comment is so weak. Human life cannot be counted in percentage as every life matter.

I'm surprised that doesn't even have down votes.