IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Ketil Z Malde ketil at ii.uib.no
Tue Sep 22 15:39:53 EST 1998


smwei at umich.edu (Silke-Maria Weineck) writes:

> Maynard Handley (handleym at ricochet.net) wrote:

> : Jesus

Jesus would of course qualify as Man of the Previous Millenium

> : I said that the big things that changed everyone's lives over the last one
> : thousand years were for the most part caused by white European (and in the
> : last 1/4 of those thousand years North American) males. 

> your parenthesis, however, strikes me as the funniest things I've read
> in this thread. 

I think he means that in the last 250 years, North American males have
also been very influential, in addition to the European ones, not that
only North Americans have been.

However, a millenium is a mighty long time, and I'd like to point out
that the Chinese invented stuff like paper, printing, compasses,
firearms, and of course a bunch of philosophies...unfortunately, they
don't seem to have retained the names of inventors (with the exception
of the philosophies), and a lot of that may have been in previous
millennia.  No match for Jesus. :-)

And keep in mind that, even if for us white males it looks like most
important stuff were done by white European males, some people might
think that Lao-Tze were more important than Shakespeare, or that Haile
Selassie were greater leader than Napoleon.  If it gets down to voting,
the fraction of white European votes isn't all that large, either.

Oh, well, the whole thing is a bit silly, I suppose.  And off topic.

~kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants



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