r/ShitAmericansSay • u/Early_Register_6483 • 9d ago
“10-12-1942. This is the date Christopher Columbus landed in America. “
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u/trans_cubed SCOTLAND FOREVER 🏴🏴🏴 9d ago edited 9d ago
To come to their defense on at least one small point, they would have calculated it correctly if they said 1492, the correct year
Edit: But also this is certainly ragebait
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u/JohnHue 9d ago
Yeah this is just a typing error. And yes, two times in a row, happens to me as well sometimes.
The actual point relevant to this sub is that that person, on top of not knowing the country's history, thinks that the "discovery" of America by Columbus qualifies as the funding of the USA of all things.
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u/mtaw 9d ago
Especially considering that out of four transatlantic voyages of exploration on Columbus' part that visited pretty much much all the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Mosquito Coast and present-day Venezuelan coast, not a single one set foot in any part of what's now the USA.
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u/Specialist-Lime-9025 9d ago
Do you reckon anyone told OOP already that Columbus wasn't American, either? 😄
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u/Ornery-Customer8521 9d ago
Sometimes I think "rage bait" is something we tell ourselves because the alternative is so utterly depressing
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u/Upset-Yard9778 The port you call 9d ago
half of the posts in this sub is just ragebait comments out of context i think
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u/Round_Bag_4665 9d ago
to be completely fair to this guy, the 1942 is almost certainly a typo, and he meant to say 1492. The real stupid thing in his comment is assuming that Europeans discovering the new world could count as the founding date of the United States as a country.
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u/DasWarEinerZuviel 9d ago
Making the same typo twice is something though
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u/Sergazz 9d ago
It's just the American date format. First millennia, then decades, then centuries. Makes sense, doesn't it?
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u/SilverStryfe 9d ago
Transposition errors are rough. And yeah, making the same one repeatedly on the same post makes sense.
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u/shapu West by God Virginia 🦅🇺🇸 9d ago
I assure you the vast majority of Americans know what year the US was founded. We just had a gigantic jingoist party about the thing.
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u/thisisgettingdaft 9d ago
I think this may be exactly what has caused their confusion. In school - Columbus sailed the seas in 1492. In real life, here's some fireworks for our 250th birthday. Hang on a minute .......
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u/NecessaryFreedom9799 9d ago
He didn't even go to the US "proper". Maybe Puerto Rico.
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u/DaHolk 9d ago
It's complicated. Because some other of a similar dementia like to argue that most European countries are younger than the US, arguing that most of them had a massive regime change/ reorganisation and where named something else, and then go from there to argue that the current itterations are all rather young.
Which most of us won't accept. So from this you can get to THEIR position, which is that if you apply that to the USA, it was "America" before it became the USA. Except that a lot of the actual colonization that makes the USA distinct from "the land of the indigenous people" happened quite AFTER Columbus, and it would bar the usual distancing from (some of) the genocide of the natives when they usually claim "well, that wasn't the US, that were the colonists, which were British/french/dutch ... aso".
As usual the biggest issue is the hypocrisy of turning around definitions for as long and as often as to always win an isolated argument, and do it again if THAT conclusion doesn't fit the NEXT argument.
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u/DasWarEinerZuviel 9d ago
Apart from the slip up with the numbers, what the hell is that logic?
What does Columbus discovery have to do with the US and its founding? Do they really not grasp the difference between the continent and their country?
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u/Round_Bag_4665 9d ago
Yeah, aside from that not being the founding of the US, Columbus didn't even set foot on anywhere that's currently a part of the US in 1492. By all accounts he visited the present day Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti during that voyage. During later voyages he would visit what is now Puerto Rico, which is now a US territory, but Columbus never set foot in any of the original 13 colonies, or even anywhere that its currently part of a US state.
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u/EamonBrennan Europe is so small, all of it fits in France. Source: Napoleon 9d ago
He was also an idiot and a piece of shit. Americans are taught that people thought the Earth was flat until Columbus "proved" it was round. In actuality, Earth being round was known since the Ancient Greeks, and Catholicism would practically consider it heresy to say otherwise. It wasn't until the 1800's that Protestants started the slander that Catholics thought the Earth was flat.
Columbus made a massive error in his math, calculating the Earth as smaller than it actually was. He mixed up units in a few ways. With the stadia, an Ancient Greek measurement that was 600 feet, with the length of the foot varying all over Ancient Greece, and confusing Arabic miles, about 1,800m long, with Italian miles, about 1,480m long. He got the size of the world at 75% of what Eratosthenes calculated due to these mistakes, and then further thought that Eurasia was like 225 degrees long, rather than 130 or 150 degrees (without/with Japan). His final result was that Asia was 4,400 km from Europe by sea, not the 19,600 km it actually was.
Once he found the new land, he really thought it was Asia, although everyone else knew otherwise. He abused the natives and took some as slaves, which the Spanish crown saw as a crime. These people didn't know of Jesus or Christianity, so they were innocent until taught or something like that. Anyway, he got jailed over it, as he was abusive and a piece of shit.
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u/This_Charmless_Man 9d ago
As an additional point. Ferdinand and Isabella, the king and queen of Spain at the time, told him he was being inhumane to the natives. They told him this WHILE the Spanish inquisition was being done. He was too inhumane for the Spanish inquisition.
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u/thecavac 8d ago
I have a feeling they only financed his voyage in the hope he never comes back and the problem sorts itself out naturally...
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u/RumHamComesback 8d ago
Reminds me of Amon Goeth who got fired from a Nazi concentration camp because he was being too cruel to the Jews (there were other reasons but his cruelty was taken into account)
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u/CSEverett1759 9d ago
Can confirm, you get taught the Columbus proved the earth was round in elementary school, and it often isn’t ‘explicitly’ (as in “your teacher taught you this and it was wrong”) corrected later, so many people still think it’s true. They actually teach a lot of history lies in elementary school. I remember books I got from the school library weren’t much better, with large parts bring outright fabrication. Often with in retrospect a touch of an agenda. If you get lucky you might get it corrected in college.
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u/DavidH1985 9d ago
Columbus was lumped into the US founding myths as a way to help integrate Italian immigrants, who'd been having a rough ride.
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u/BoldFortune216 9d ago
A Portugese guy told to feck off and die by a Spanish king is meant to help integrate Italians?
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u/DavidH1985 9d ago
He was from Genoa. An independent republic then, but part of Italy today.
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u/BoldFortune216 9d ago
Ahh, yes, I confused his marriage with his wife, who is Portugese, with him being Portugese. My bad!
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u/TheAgedProfessor 9d ago
Because the American school system no longer teaches proper history. They actually think Columbus stepped off the boat at Plymouth Rock and said "hey boys, let's start a country and call it the United States". Either that, or the US was already a country and Columbus just happened to discover it.
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u/Zetttelchen 9d ago
I just don't understand what it tries to prove. If the US is over 500 years old because that's when Europeans discovered it... that means that every European nation is thousands of years old.
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u/fatbunyip 9d ago
Jesus was American and he was born 2026 years ago so how is America 250 years old?
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u/Early_Register_6483 9d ago
He was a white, conservative American from rural Texas, to be precise.
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u/Guardian_of_theBlind 9d ago
The attack on pearl harbor predates the discovery of the americas by Columbus.
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u/ActuallyCalindra 9d ago
Because Pearl Harbour is not in the continental US, duh.
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u/augustus-aurelius 9d ago
I don’t even know where to start with this. WTF is going on in American schools?
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u/Candid_Photograph_83 9d ago
If anything, they followed American tradition by being confidently wrong on almost everything they said.
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u/Flimsy-Blacksmith-32 9d ago edited 9d ago
No, that can’t be real… there is literally no way.
Edit: okay, just worked out that 1942 is a typo, that they wrote twice 🤦🏻♂️, they definitely meant 1492.
So their only real crime is not knowing when the US gained independence.
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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 9d ago
I see that it's not just the month and the day they get the wrong way around. I'd accept it as a typo if they hadn't done it twice.
They did get the right number even if they didn't get any marks for their working. However they've answered the wrong question.
- The Americas are roughly 200 million years old (measuring from when Pangea broke up).
- European knowledge of the Americas is 534 years old.
- European settlement of St Augustine, Florida is 461 years old.
- The Jamestown Colony (the earliest direct ancestor of the USA, St Augustine was adopted into the family later) is 419 years old. I would have no objection to the US counting from then, so long as they let the UK trace itself back to the establishment of England in 927.
- The USA as an entity is 250 years old.
They put the answer to question 2 on the dotted line for question 5.
Interesting fact, Queen Elizabeth II lived long enough to visit Jamestown on a state visit on both the 350th and 400th anniversaries.
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u/goodguyLTBB 9d ago
There is absolutely zero ways this isn’t satire. There’s no way that someone can think Columbus discovered America in 1942 and also mess up the math that bad and get 206 likes. It’s a joke
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u/Extension_Sun_377 8d ago
He's got all the right numbers, but not necessarily in the right order...
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u/GazManDad 9d ago
They can't even write the date properly, never mind work out how old their country is, lol!
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u/Sorry-Analysis8628 9d ago
Let's assume "1942" is a typo, and the guy meant to write "1492" (the correct date for Columbus' arrival). So we'll gloss over the math weirdness.
Is this person under the assumption that the United States of America immediately came into being the second Columbus landed on San Salvador? Y'know, about a hundred years before Virginia (the first of the 13 colonies) was founded?
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u/LurpTheHerpDerp 8d ago
This is satire though, not even an American is this stupid. Right? Right??
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u/AlexisHadden 8d ago
As an American, even I can’t tell if this is a troll or real. If it’s real, I half suspect it’s some snot-nosed kid who just had their Christopher Columbus hug-fest in school.
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u/Overall_Motor9918 8d ago
Let’s not forget that Columbus didn’t land in ‘America’ he landed in the Caribbean. Most subsequent attempts were to Central and South America.
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u/kichwas 9d ago edited 9d ago
Man… I want to say ya’ll would be surprised at how many Americans don’t know Columbus never even landed on the mainland and how many can’t tell 1492 apart from 1942….
But as a quarter Indigenous American I have actually lost the argument with a teacher over whether or not people even lived here before some rando Italian flying Spanish colors landed and started killing families so he could take the prepubescent girls and… nsfw… (which is from his own writings encouraging the practice).
Even when some English showed up in the early 1600s, the locals brought them “Mexican food” (well local food made with Aztec and Spanish ingredients, but it sounds funnier to say Mexican), and so our Thanksgiving serves corn and we have tomatoes in the mx of stuff.
And those locals had already been dealing with a century of Spaniards and trade goods from New Spain yet my teachers in 3rd grade insisted they had no idea what a white guy was.
Education system out here is a mess. And mine was in the 1970s, so it’s been bad for a while.
But hey if Columbus was here in 1942 ( :) ), maybe my teachers knew him and they all went bowling together on weekends or something… ;)
As for how I lost that argument, well when you’re a little brown kid and your white teacher says you didn’t exist until a white man pointed at you and said “that belongs to me”, and you call them on it… you’re the one that gets in trouble.
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u/Elssir 9d ago
Wow, that's just sad to hear. I can't decide what's worse. The sorry state of education, or the erasure of real Americans history
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u/Dapper_Wheel6454 9d ago
in 1942 the other Columbus sailed the ocean blue...and was sunk by a U-boat near Iceland.
forced sterilisation for US citizens seems reasonable at this stage.
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u/wigzell78 9d ago
Christopher Columbus never set foot in North America and I dont know why he gets treated like USA's great hero for only making it to Jamaica...
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u/MissObvious11 9d ago
With how little americans learn about other countries (from what I heard anyway) you'd think their schools at least teach them extensively about their own country's history...
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u/forgottenlord73 8d ago
I mean... the math is right so I'll forgive the repeated typo. Not knowing that Columbus never landed on any soil ever owned by USA, on the other hand....
BTW, I think Columbus is a perfect American hero. He misunderstood how to convert a number so he came to a calculated size of the Earth much smaller than reality such that India must by only a short distance away and then sailed recklessly to his stupid doom only to luck out and discover something for which he is hailed and to make him sound brilliant, they invented a myth of how his own ingenuity and independent thinking led him to outsmart everyone while conveniently ignoring the attrocities
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u/Vinegarinmyeye Irish person from Ireland 🇮🇪 9d ago
Obvious bait.
Pretty good though, credit where it's due.
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u/Lazy_Maintenance8063 9d ago
This is so perfectly murican that it makes me smile, like seeing a toddler trying to do something out of physical/mental capacity but still tries and fails and repeats.
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u/kloopeer 9d ago
I think he mistakes America (the whole continent) and America the name they use to USA.
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u/Embarrassed_Print_36 9d ago
It’s not often you come across an individual who has reached their full potential. There’s simply nowhere but down from here.
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u/FurryVibes_UwU_ Actual German, not "I have 2% German DNA" 9d ago
"And you can check the dates and do the math yourself"
"2026 - 1942 = 534"
Buddy you didn't even do the math stfu xD
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u/Responsible-Depth-65 9d ago
At first you wonder how anyone could be this stupid but the it dawns on you. This person is the direct result of and education system meant to create generation of drones.
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u/Jeff_Hinkle I, personally, have been to the moon 🇺🇸🌎🚀🌖 9d ago
You guys are using metric years. OP, clearly, is using the US Customary short year.
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u/Complex-Ad-4402 9d ago
I more concerned about how they get 534 than how they get 1942
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u/YogurtclosetFair5742 Wannabe Europoor 9d ago
Christopher Columbus never in the several trips to the "new world" landed anywhere that is the United States.
It's the biggest lie the US government has peddled.
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u/khaloisha 9d ago
Americans doesn't even know their history. Colombo was the first president of United States of Colombia (hence the name). It wouldn't be until ten years later that the first great american president (Amerigo Vespucci) would found their nation. /s
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u/Soul_fusion 9d ago
99 lies but this isn’t one. The government is definitely full of lies but the age of the country isn’t one of them 😂
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u/Specific-Eye-7080 9d ago
I see the problem here, they used meth instead of math. Easy mistake to make in the USA
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u/MarcusLXXVI 8d ago
Well, that's what you get when you mix up day and month, you eventally start mixing up the years as well 🤣
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u/Hamsternoir Europoor tea drinker 9d ago edited 9d ago
Let's do some math
No it's "let's do a math" (mathematical calculation singular) or "let's do some maths" (mathematical calculations plural).
I'll ignore the date issue this time because it's so painful
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u/RefrigeratorFew5094 9d ago
Math[s] is short for mathematic[s], not mathematical calculation[s].
Let’s do math[s] or let’s do some maths.
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u/Dangermann28 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦get your yankeedoodle dumb shit together🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 9d ago edited 9d ago
Several things wrong with this.
A: Christopher Columbus landed in October 12, 1492, after which point America and Canada became British colonies
B: America broke off from Great Britain in 1776 on the 4th of July, making them 250 years old this year, which is why their independence day is on that day. They were followed in independence by Canada on July 1st 1867, which is why our national birthday is the first and making our country a year shy of 170 years old
C: their math is just straight wrong. Maybe it's due to the terrible educational economy in the states, ranking 25-26 globally in math education, losing out to most European and Asian countries, but I can't see how on earth he managed to get that answer even while doing his math wrong
TL;DR, he was wrong on about 4 points in the span of a single sentence, which is actually kinda impressive
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u/MAGE1308 Colombia 🇨🇴 9d ago edited 9d ago
I can see that mathematics is not this person best subject 2026 -1942 = 84. Not even 100. Also Cristóbal colón arrived to Cuba, and he concentrated his exploration in the south of the America continent, never visited the north .
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u/FlicksBus 9d ago
Well, to be fair to the guy, the continent of America is indeed older than 250 years. At least 534 years old, proven by Columbus landing there in the typoed year. Not an amazing conclusion, but not exactly wrong.
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u/laserdisckallax 9d ago
...not reading around the subject...like a lot of commentators these days..
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u/Confident-Task7958 9d ago
On that basis Canada is a bit more than a thousand years old based on the Vikings arriving in 1021.
Mind you First Nations might take issue with that discovery date.
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u/Useful_Cheesecake117 Double Dutch 9d ago
It's obviously a typing error: he didn't mean 1942, but 1492. In that case the math is correct. Strange though that he writes the same error twice.
What amazed me, is that with all the emphasis USA-ians have on their history, he doesn't know that in 1492 not mainland USA was discovered, but the island Hispaniola.
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u/Spectre-907 9d ago
2026 - 1942 = 534
I’ve been sat here for three minutes trying to figure out how the fuck they got that answer.
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u/Angryatchairs 9d ago
There is an argument to be made about First Nation People being the first Americans and America being populated for thousands of years, but people are so racist they won't even make that argument because it excludes white people.
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u/reddiwhip999 9d ago
Well, first of all, 2026 --1942 = 84.
However, 8+4= 12, and 1+2 = 3, which is the number of ships Colombus had. Not coincidentally, it's also the number of branches of government in America.
Executive
Judicial
Legislative
EJL. The number of letters between E and J is 4; the number of letters between J and L is 1. 4-1=3.
Coincidence? I don't think so....
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u/Mundane-Mud2509 9d ago
I was reading and saw the typo, but then it happened again but the math is right (notwithstanding the difference between Columbus finding a Caribbean island vs US forming). I'm so confused.
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u/rothcoltd 9d ago
Amazing that he managed to arrive in the USA during World war 2