Yes. Examples: Euclid, from The Elements fame, arguably the most influential mathematician of all time,
likely never even existed.
You believe a nationalist curry revisionist "historian"? You really have no idea who is trustworthy, do you?
For a more recent example, take the Holocaust. In addition to being mathematically impossible, the only supposedly extant gas chamber is a post-war "reconstruction". And those two are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Holocaust.
Like I said before, WWII is the best attested episode of human history. So you are disposed to believe a nationalist curry "historian" but you disbelieve the thousands of Western historians and archivists who, after the war, built the mountain of documentary evidence that we have about what the Nazis did. It is not your reason that is leading you in that direction, it is your masturbation.
Then, pray tell, how the Egyptians as we think we know them could've ever constructed those gargantuan pyramids with the remarkable accuracy they exhibit?
A pyramid is the easiest stone building you can think of because there are zero tricky stress buildups anywhere in one. A Roman aqueduct or a medieval cathedral is far harder. The only major thing that needs to be taken care of is to check that the top of each layer of stone is level. There are many simple techniques to do that which were well within their capacity (plumb bobs, water-levelling, etc) . Other than that, building a pyramid is just a matter of brute force (or rather labor force), which is not particularly difficult if you have the kind of agricultural surplus that the Nile valley makes possible. I really don't see what is so mysterious here.
Even if they didn't want the technology per se, the fact they wanted to push frontiers means they were striving for something.
They were just pursuing their real interest. How can my business be safer? How can I make a little more money to be more secure? How can I satisfy more customers? Innovation will follow naturally when everyone is looking after their REAL interest.
Even if their goal was expanding the breadth of our collective knowledge, I'm sure they saw that as a (net) positive -- i.e., as a betterment.
They did not think of it that way. Their masturbational urges were satisfy by religion. Beyond that, they were just trying to better their own lot a little bit. No one had a global vision of "progress" during the industrial revolution. This concept was invented after the fact when it had become clear that progress had indeed occurred in hindsight.
This sounds cute in theory, but I don't buy it in practice. You really think the common man was devout enough to relinquish all worldly desires?
Yes. You are just a prisoner of your own time and of the vapours of your own masturbation. This is why you cannot imagine people living in a healthier manner.
You sure (((they))) weren't worshipping cash? If factories were truly built in the name of God, then why were workers' conditions so abysmal?
The worker's conditions were NOT abysmal. Again, in saying they were, your masturbational interest is making you choose to believe those who flatter your rebelliousness (and hence your claim to superiority). Why do you believe those who tell you that working conditions were abysmal and not those who tell you what happened during WWII? Why are you reacting differently to these 2 claims?
Is that why the Soviets beat the Americans to every conceivable milestone in the space race? Again, your take seems too unnuanced to me.
The Soviets beat the Americans in the early Space Race because:
- they copied both German and American technology (the latter through spying). The R-7, the rocket they used from Sputnik to the space-walking firsts, was a direct evolutionary descendent of the V-2. In the Soviet nomenclature, the R-1 was a near-exact copy of the V-2 that Sergei Korolev developed, with German help, in 1945-46. After that, they evolved it into the R-2, the R-3, ... and eventually the R-7. The R-7 still used vernier thrusters for guidance instead of gimbaled engines, which is one of the reasons it had to be so big.
- More importantly, they "beat" the Americans because they decided to spend huge amounts of resource on stunts for propaganda purposes that the Americans saw no need for. The US was still a democracy at the time and the government still felt that it owed the public not to waste their money. In the late 50s, the American missile program was in fact more advanced than the soviet one. The R-7 was too big and unwieldy to be a realistic ICBM. By contrast, the American Atlas was far more advanced. As a result, by the early 60s, the US had a credible ICBM deterrent, and the USSR did not.
Finally, with their space stunts, the Soviets handed a huge gift to the US Military-Industrial complex (and to leftie science-masturbators). At the end of his second term, in 1960, Eisenhower warned about the dangers it represented, which means that, throughout his presidency, he had tried to restrict its growth. THAT is why the Americans were not able to answer the Soviet space stunts immediately: they were under tight budgets.
In other words, the early Soviet successes in the "Space Race" were a propaganda victory, i.e. a lie. It hid the fact that the Soviets were actually behind the Americans by using whatever technology they did have not for the purpose of building a useful deterrent but to monopolize the limelight.
You are still a sucker for this lie today. And you are, once again, because it masturbates you and you can't resist it.
Humanity is as doomed now as it ever was. That's probably why prophecies of our demise have been around since time immemorial.
And we are still here.
Everything (100%) of what you said above was masturbationally motivated. Do you realize that?