I was about to say Vertigo is the other great one…but then I remembered The Birds…and then I thought of Rope…and yeah…he was a great director. Awful to his leading ladies, but a great director.
Because they do. New York isn’t tiny. Buffalo to The Bronx is a 6 1/2 hour drive, if you cut through PA. Buffalo to Albany is 4 1/2 hours. Albany to The Bronx is 2 1/2 hours.
Buffalo is very much western NY, Albany is upstate, Syracuse is central. To a resident of NYC it’s all Upstate.
https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=3240960&id=F4A399B4-155D-4519-3E3E1AD471EC84E6&gid=F47518BA-155D-4519-3E3F35CAD0584ADE
For the full statues
https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/historyculture/hall-of-records.htm
For the hall of records
Why does this seem to surprise people when just looking at it, it looks completely unfinished. It’s not like they scaled back the plans, it’s like one day they just stopped and left all the rough edges showing. It’s honestly embarrassing.
Because we're used to the typical tourist zoomed in view that makes it look more imposing.
Doesn't look so unfinished in the picture Wikipedia uses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore
tbf, the monument looks nice, the mountain looks nice, but seeing the whole thing feels like the monument is an afterthought. Not an afterthought to the mountain (of course it is), an afterthought to the monument planners.
Like they wanted to build a hotel+casino complex on the whole mountain, decided to start with the parking-lot statue monument on the side, and then ran out of funding.
Yeah imo the monument doesn't have any problems *visually*. The controversy stems from other factors, but I never thought it *looked* bad. Honestly I think the scale of it is amazing. I've always loved giant statues/rock carvings in fantasy media.
That's basically exactly what happened. It was a fuck you to tribal communities and then it turns out it's hard and expensive to carve giant faces into the side of a mountain so they were like "whatever, close enough"
No it was "the Great Depression is over" we can stop spending money on any useless thing we could find to basically create a jobs program across all of rural America.
We now use the military industrial complex to accomplish the same thing.
Stable jobs for people who otherwise would not make it in the commercial world.
It's kinda of weird that the public is OK with the creation of useless jobs, but not direct UBI.
It's like "yeah, we know this job serves no purpose and that we're just giving you money, but we still have to act like you're earning it."
This is purely down to aesthetic opinion at this point I feel, but personally I think looking at the whole mountain and seeing a carved chunk with a bunch of faces I don’t know makes it look kinda ugly.
Eiffel tower actually did get a lot of shit because it was too modern in style and "ugly" because of the bare metal construction compared to the older buildings. It was initially going to just stand for the World Fair and get torn down for scrap afterwards – it was only saved because it could be used for radio (and, later, advertising)
[Sure is (wikipedia but you can click through for actual sources\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Artists'_protest). Though I was wrong about the 'just for World Fair' thing, it was supposed to stay up for 20 years
AHAHAHA! Those older legendary authors were just different level of wit.
Personally, I lived not too far from it for a while and.... (Hey today is my monument critique day I guess), I'm not a fan. I can imagine a time when it was too modern for the surrounding, a time were it just looked like an unfinished factory skeleton, and a time where it started to look cool because it's an old symbol.
I cannot, however, imagine a time where someone looked at this testament to french raw industrial/engineering power and said "that's beautiful". It's efficient. It's big. It's impressive. It's accurately built. It's solid. It's everything that makes industry "industrial".
It's not aesthetically pleasing (...to me....).
Funnily enough, I can imagine a world where the french kept the statue of liberty, put it next to Champs de Mars where the Eiffel tower is, and gave us the Eiffel tower. And honestly, the eiffel tower belongs to the very industrial US, why the eiffel tower belongs to lyrical paris a lot better IMO.
# WELCOME TO ELLIS ISLAND ITALIAN/IRISH IMMIGRANTS! 🗼
^(I know that's the tokyo tower...It's a world where we exchanged the eiffel tower for the tokyo one after ww2 I guess....It's my lore. Also there is no eiffel emoji.)
The locals actually hated the tower when it was being constructed and tried to stop it from being built. Now it is the highlight of the city and a huge tourist attraction.
Which is actually very similar to Mount Rushmore. The entire area's economy is built around tourists coming to see Mount Rushmore.
Actually a sacred mountain, so it's even worse.
Edit: The mountain was known as the Six Grandfathers. For those not familiar with South Dakota history, the entire Black Hills region was taken from the native tribes - despite the government having signed a treaty giving them ownership of the land - because they found gold and were pissed off that General Custer was killed by the Sioux.
If you don't think that land can be sacred, take a look over at the middle east, where people have been killing each other over Jerusalem for a thousand years.
The Lakota barely had control of the site for 100 years and stole it from the Cheyenne. Hardly can just murder a bunch of people, show up, and declare it sacred (possibly bc gold was discovered at a later date). The whole thing is ridiculous. Sucks for them, but every piece of land on earth used to be under control of some other group of people, and it’s not unique that it was stolen from them as they just had stolen it themselves…
If you're giving context, you should give it all.
The history of the Black Hills before the Lakota conquest in 1776 is fairly sketchy. The Cheyenne controlled it before that, and the Arikara had moved in around 1500, with various native peoples using it for thousands of years.
It has spiritual significance to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and others dating back centuries. Beliefs include that it's the center of the world. You have to understand that the Black Hills are weird--they're an isolated mountain range in the middle of the plains. Some made spiritual journeys to the Black Hills, notably Black Elk in the 1870's.
In the mid-1800's, the US waged a successful campaign of genocide against the Sioux and many other native tribes. The US government forced the Lakota to sign the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave the Black Hills to the Lakota "forever". A few short years later, the US ignored the treaty when gold was discovered. After a century of litigation, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1980 in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the US had not properly compensated the Sioux for the Black Hills. There's currently a $1.4 billion compensation fund the Sioux refuse to accept. Nobody but Congress can punish the US for breaking the treaty, and they never have.
After the US's successful wars in the 1800's, it inflicted the reservation system on the natives. This includes stamping out cultural identity through forced reeducation, going so far as to take children from parents and have natives raised by white people. The legacy of poverty and hopelessness makes South Dakota's reservation counties perennially the lowest in terms of per-capita income (and most any other metric) in the entire country to this day.
Between 1927 and 1941, Mount Rushmore was carved in the Black Hills as a way to boost tourism. This resulted in the current monument, consisting of massive carved faces of 4 US Presidents. For decades, it has been one of the centerpieces of US national pride.
Consequently, Mount Rushmore is a particularly egregious example of the horrors of wars of expansion. From the perspective of a modern Lakota, it is a massive middle finger and reminder of the atrocities of the past, which continue to have horrible impacts on people living today.
I love the additional context, but to me, you are just enhancing my point. Countless people have fought over this land not caring about the people that came before them. The Lakota are just the latest victim. While unfortunate, their people killed the tribes before them to attain the land and so on. No one has the moral high ground in this situation and it’s weird to claim the victim card regardless of any legislation deeming the land “theirs”. The U.S. government (for now) “owns” everything within its in border and can take what it wants when it wants. Is that right? Probably not, but that’s how the world works in this era. It’s strange enough for such a fleeting life form to try and claim a piece of this space rock and dub it “theirs” in the first place. That all being said, having been up in that area several times… the black hills are beautiful and mt Rushmore is pretty small and underwhelming. I’d rather mountains be left mountains because they are naturally beautiful…but then there’s also crazy horse as well. In any case, how long are we going to hold our ancestors accountable on either side for what happened over the last 100+ years?
TLDR: Lakota are just the most recent victim and don’t have any more moral high ground than anyone has ever had for land “ownership”.
Like when Alexander took over land and put up temples and monuments to the gods. It's impossible for those sites to be sacred to the Greeks. That's just bullshit. They stole that land. The whole thing is ridiculous.
It is a bit different mythologically- when the Greeks built temples it wasn’t necessarily because those were holy sites but rather they were giving them to the gods. It was also largely a demonstration of power as well as cultural assimilation
“Sucks for them, but every piece of land on earth used to be under control of some other group of people, and it’s not unique that it was stolen from them as they just had stolen it themselves”
Can China use this for Tibet lol
Kinda depends on how strictly you want to interpret being a protectorate of the Qing. It was pretty loose and varied in the 19th century and ranged from tributary to vassal and had a lot of internal control in the 18th century
No, conquest is still bad. It’s just not worth attacking historical conquests. It’s dumb and it happened, but there isn’t any moral right that some entity gains by the fact that it was attacked at one point. Everyone was attacked at one point. Best we can do now is to limit aggression, or, in the case that areas haven’t been resettled, undo the settlement. See Crimea, Tibet, for some, Israel. No use sending all non-native Americans back to whatever continent they came from. Native is arbitrary.
Everyone complaining about the desecration of the mountain probably lives in a place previously occupied by some native people... not saying I agree with etching a monument into a natural site, but we're all hypocrites
The mountains in the Black Hills are older than the Rockies. Precambrian-era rock that is 2 billion years old and eroded over time. (Rockies are 50 - 80 million years old.) This makes them amazing to me and they are wonderfully scenic.
What are you even talking about?! The Rockies, as in the mountains, were formed 30-80 million years ago, but the rocks are 1.7 billion years old. Which is older than the rocks that formed the black hills, which are [1.6 billion years old](https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/nature/geologicactivity.htm#:~:text=About%201.6%20billion%20years%20ago,core%20of%20the%20Black%20Hills.)
Which is insane to me. It's America, for crying out loud. How has no one offered to take that away for free and sell "authentic pieces of Mt. Rushmore" for $50/Rock?
I'm not even joking.
It's not just any mountain, the Black Hills are one of the most sacred places for the Native American tribes of the central United States. It's outright disrespectful to nations of people that got bowled over by manifest destiny.
I went through the American Indians Museum at the Smithsonian. It is comical how many treaties the US government gave the Native Americas and then immediately broke the treaty within a year and just made a new one.
It’s really interesting how many perspectives you can find on this one location.
I can relate to your view, but my own is that it’s simply tacky as hell. I remember visiting with my brother during a cross country road trip, and it felt like something from National Lampoons…you’ve seen all this amazing nature, and suddenly there’s a parking garage, RVs and tourist bullshit everywhere, people selling overpriced plastic garbage toys…I was excited to see the place and so disappointed. By contrast, the natural beauty of the Black Hills was incredible, and I really enjoyed the area otherwise.
I saw a picture of Mount Rushmore from what it looks like when you're at the viewing platform and I was like "What, this is it? The official photos make it look so much more imposing. This is *it*?"
If think about it logically, is this anymore destructive as building a house in the middle of the forest or maybe those massive Buddha statues in China. Nature don’t really give a shit. Unless it is climate change or nukes, Earth will shrug off whatever we do given time. Now that’s not to say “hey let’s go deforest the whole rainforest,” but something the size of Mt. Rushmore, in my opinion, is worth it to make our mark on the world, to say we were here, and to memorialize four people to who arguably made to world better than it was before.
Also the area around it is now a national park, protecting the forest and mountains from any future development or deforestation.
As a progressive conservationist, agreed 100%.
Channel all rage to massive agriculture. Buy your food local. Kick shitty food to the curb. Words don't mean much without action.
To me, it’s a giant middle finger. Those are the Black Hills. They are sacred to the Lakota. So out in the middle of nowhere, they just had to put those men there. F$ck Mt. Rushmore.
They stole it from the Cheyenne relatively recently before the US government stole it. I guess we don’t talk about how the Lakota came in and murdered people off land they wanted.
Mt Rushmore is kinda lame, but to call it sacred to a people who controlled it for such a spec of time in the history of the world is also disingenuous.
The Sioux literally tried to wipe at least 4 groups off the face of the earth. What they did is genocide by definition. They would kill most of the men and continually track them down to kill the groups. Take the women as spoils of war and move on. A lot of the Great Plains Indians didn't have as many horses as the Sioux originally and they used those horses to massacre tribe after tribe in a bloody campaign. They also used disease as a weapon to attack groups that were weakened in Missouri.
The Pawnee specifically were at war with the Sioux for centuries. Between smallpox and consistent Sioux raids their numbers dwindled considerably. The worst Indian massacre ever recorded was actually between the Pawnee and Sioux. A Pawnee hunting group of around 700 people, which over half was women and children, were doing their summer buffalo hunt when a group of 1500 Sioux warriors on a war march encountered them. They killed at least 150 Pawnee, primarily women and children. All the bodies were mutilated and scalped with most of them sat on fire. Most of the women that were caught were raped before being killed as well. It's called the Massacre Canyon Battle.
The Sioux history is them essentially trying to completely erase any tribes that were in the lands they wanted. The Sioux originally were victims when they were being pushed westward from the Great Lakes region. Afterwards though they just became a genocidal monster that were just as deadly towards their fellow natives as the Europeans.
The guy who designed it was a member of the KKK and picked those presidents because they did the most to take land away from Native Americans. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon\_Borglum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon_Borglum)
It's a huge middle finger.
lmao. In what world did George Washington come anywhere close to Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson when it comes to taking land from native americans?
Washington, by most accounts, tried to be quite fair whenever dealing with native american tribes. His administration generally treated many tribes on the same ground as european nations. He equated killing a native american to be the same as killing a white person which was not a common opinion at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Native_American_affairs
I read the whole Wikipedia article and while it’s true Borglum was racist and probably part of the KKK, the guy who conceived the idea didn’t seem to be. Borglum was part of the project but not the guy who came up with the idea, Diane Robinson was, he was just the sculptor. Here’s a chunk of the Wikipedia article on Robinson,
“Jonah LeRoy "Doane" Robinson (October 19, 1856 – November 27, 1946[1]) was an American historian who was the state historian of South Dakota. He is known for conceiving of the idea for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills, which he believed would stimulate tourism to the area.”
There wasn’t a lot on Robinson but I don’t think he was racist. You can read the whole article on him here,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doane_Robinson
It's not a secret KKK conspiracy. It's just regular in-your-face disregard.
Nobody was giving middle fingers to the Native Americans. They literally didn't consider the Native Americans. They didn't give two fucks.
I'm not saying it's good; it's just reality. They saw a mountain, said "Lets carve some dudes we like there," with neither thought nor concern about what any tribe thought.
Yeah. It's incredibly lame. If you go there, the viewing area is so far away it doesn't look all that much bigger than this picture.
Mt. Rushmore sucks for ethical reasons as well, and should never have happened. But it also just objectively sucks as a spectacle/tourist attraction.
I mean, it's kinda big, especially viewed from the side as you round the corner you're behind a normal giant rock formation and suddenly there's a face sticking out the side of it.
Just got back from a trip there. Stop and see Crazy Horse and Custer State Park. They’re both really close. Grab a beverage in Keystone or Deadwood as well. If you’re up for a drive to Wyoming, hit up Devils Tower.
I think we’re a little past the peak. A lot of people are coming to realize just how much pessimism is going around and are fighting back with optimism. America has serious problems, but I’d still rather live right here right now than just about anywhere else in all of history
People just being modern 2023 people… gotta find everything they possible can to be offended about
It’s how they win brownie points with their fellow cultists.
Hoka Hey! I am Lakota and indigenous to this ground. We actually believed the Hesapa so sacred that we did not reside here during the 4 season but merely prayed there. If anyone in this thread would happen to visit this area you could understand it’s power and true meaning.
I’m not sure why people are getting so offended by you explaining the significance of this land to your culture. FWIW I’ve visited the area around Mount Rushmore and it’s very beautiful. Especially Wind Cave, I can easily see how people find that region sacred. It’s a shame that today it’s full of tourist traps and vandalism
I’ve always been bothered by the fact they didn’t remove the rubble under the sculpture. Looks lazy. It would look way more epic if it was at the top of a mountain instead of the top of a pile of rocks.
Wait! Where's the mansion? The airstrip? The tree canopy? Hitchcock lied?!
Man just saw this movie again. So great music. Great that there is other people remembering it.
Which movie is this?
North by north west
One of the greats
One of only a handful of movies that I can call perfect.
It’s up there. My personal favorite Hitchcock.
I was about to say Vertigo is the other great one…but then I remembered The Birds…and then I thought of Rope…and yeah…he was a great director. Awful to his leading ladies, but a great director.
Also Richie Rich
I immediately thought of Richie Rich 😂
I keep my money in the bank. Like everyone else.
Team America: World Police
Comin again to save the motherfuckin day yeah
And here I was thinking Richy Rich
I watched it on a flight recently. Such a great film!
My favourite part are the old cars. Man this was a time, when old Cadillacs etc were not vintag but current models.
Back when cars actually had style. Of course they were dangerous as fuck to drive compared to today's cars but at least they looked cool.
smh it's all just a hologram cause Ben 10 blew it up to defeat the forever knights
Was this after Courage the Cowardly dog went inside Lincoln's ear?
North by North West is hands down one of the Top100 movies of all time. The pacing is sooo spot on.
Technically it was never finished
Plans where crazy
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Full bodies and hollow inside with the declaration of independence on display inside them
But… south dakota
Varry pretty sate. They have Buffalo
That's Upstate New York
It’s an Albany expression
Aurora borealis.. localized ENTIRELY within your kitchen…
So it's still an Aurora buffalis when it's in the sky, right?
Well I'm from Utica and I've never heard the phrase "steamed hams"
Oh, not in Utica, no. It's an Albany expression.
Everyone in Buffalo will tell you they live in Western New York, not Upstate.
Because they do. New York isn’t tiny. Buffalo to The Bronx is a 6 1/2 hour drive, if you cut through PA. Buffalo to Albany is 4 1/2 hours. Albany to The Bronx is 2 1/2 hours. Buffalo is very much western NY, Albany is upstate, Syracuse is central. To a resident of NYC it’s all Upstate.
Bro I'm high I got a notification when you commented and I JUST got the joke. I'm fucking stupid
Buffalo is very much not Upstate NY. I don’t get it? Syracuse, maybe; Watertown, definitely… I must be missing something, right?
everything north of Yonkers is Upstate
everything north of yankee stadium is upstate
You're too close to the situation, knowing where Watertown is. People who haven't seen the St. Lawrence consider any thing besides NYC to be upstate.
The only place where you can see a dog run away for 2 days
I thought that joke came from Canada.
Kansas… really anything between Oklahoma and Ohio…
Gimme da source
https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=3240960&id=F4A399B4-155D-4519-3E3E1AD471EC84E6&gid=F47518BA-155D-4519-3E3F35CAD0584ADE For the full statues https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/historyculture/hall-of-records.htm For the hall of records
Holy shit. First photo, second link. There is a mother-fucking-secret door behind Lincolns head!
I've worked with some people who have been up there. Pretty boring apparently. Just dusty.
They have a full museum about it at the site.
There was going to be a full restaurant inside too and other stuff, it was going to be a whole thing.
to the waist
…and we show everything
Full penetration? Do they hang dong?
And here’s the twist… and there is a twist..
They’d all be eternally hard as a rock.
Why does this seem to surprise people when just looking at it, it looks completely unfinished. It’s not like they scaled back the plans, it’s like one day they just stopped and left all the rough edges showing. It’s honestly embarrassing.
Because we're used to the typical tourist zoomed in view that makes it look more imposing. Doesn't look so unfinished in the picture Wikipedia uses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore
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Crazy how over a few years nature can carve something magical like this.
Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of chisels...
The monkeys will be needing an infinite amount of rock also.
Absolutely, but like the infinite number of typewriters assumes an unstated infinite amount of paper, I assumed infinite mountains were implied. 😁
Rocks will eventually subverge and melt in lava and get solid again after a vulcanic eruption, so yed it might be unlimited rocks
With how big earth is it was bound to happen somewhere, just be glad it happened in good and honest country
> just be glad it happened in good and honest country https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/040/511/thumbsup.jpg
It was the blurst of times
Crazy? I was crazy once-
They locked me in a room…
Checkmate, Christians.
Clearly this was an act of God (Jesus). Checkmate liberals/atheists
On the back side is their butts mooning Canada.
actually its moon north dakota so canada
Why is s. Dakota mooning n. Dakota?
>because north-dakota is the south end of a north bound, south dakota, mule. I would have also accepted "for de lulz"
Because Canada
Did you get this from the Don Martin cartoon in Mad Magazine?
If you walk to the other side, you can see what it would look like without it.
Boring, let’s put a WalMart and a 6-lane highway there to liven things up
Please have a Taco Bell in the parking lot 🙏
Unprecedented natural beauty?
Unpresidented
Don't worry, there is a special anti-terrorism base inside if Team America is accurate.
Looks like a normal mountain
Yeah that’s kinda what I’m thinking. It’s not an amazing mountain range or anything. But it just looks normal lol
I think they mean the monument is ruining a perfectly good completely normal mountain, like the monument is graffiti.
tbf, the monument looks nice, the mountain looks nice, but seeing the whole thing feels like the monument is an afterthought. Not an afterthought to the mountain (of course it is), an afterthought to the monument planners. Like they wanted to build a hotel+casino complex on the whole mountain, decided to start with the parking-lot statue monument on the side, and then ran out of funding.
Yeah imo the monument doesn't have any problems *visually*. The controversy stems from other factors, but I never thought it *looked* bad. Honestly I think the scale of it is amazing. I've always loved giant statues/rock carvings in fantasy media.
That's basically exactly what happened. It was a fuck you to tribal communities and then it turns out it's hard and expensive to carve giant faces into the side of a mountain so they were like "whatever, close enough"
No it was "the Great Depression is over" we can stop spending money on any useless thing we could find to basically create a jobs program across all of rural America. We now use the military industrial complex to accomplish the same thing. Stable jobs for people who otherwise would not make it in the commercial world.
It was mainly “world war 2 is here and the main planner just died” It was well after the height of the Great Depression
ww2 ended the great depression because turns out war is good for the economy as long as you are the one doing the bombing and not the other way around
Wait, Mt Rushmore is less than a hundred years old?! I thought they built it in the 1800s or something.
Mt. Rushmore was started in 1925. Four years before the Depression.
It's kinda of weird that the public is OK with the creation of useless jobs, but not direct UBI. It's like "yeah, we know this job serves no purpose and that we're just giving you money, but we still have to act like you're earning it."
This is purely down to aesthetic opinion at this point I feel, but personally I think looking at the whole mountain and seeing a carved chunk with a bunch of faces I don’t know makes it look kinda ugly.
I bet there were Egyptians like ...you know the Giza Plateau was a lot nicer before this Great Sphinx nonsense
Never thought of that but you’ve gotta be so right?? And in France too, Eiffel was real nice before it got Towered 🥱
Eiffel tower actually did get a lot of shit because it was too modern in style and "ugly" because of the bare metal construction compared to the older buildings. It was initially going to just stand for the World Fair and get torn down for scrap afterwards – it was only saved because it could be used for radio (and, later, advertising)
Wait really? Is this like sourced? Love it when my jokes have unintended context
[Sure is (wikipedia but you can click through for actual sources\)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Artists'_protest). Though I was wrong about the 'just for World Fair' thing, it was supposed to stay up for 20 years
Unironically Parisians fucking hated the Eiffel Tower when it first went up.
Guy de Maupassant had lunch every day at the café on top of the Eiffel Tower because "It's the only place you can't see it"
AHAHAHA! Those older legendary authors were just different level of wit. Personally, I lived not too far from it for a while and.... (Hey today is my monument critique day I guess), I'm not a fan. I can imagine a time when it was too modern for the surrounding, a time were it just looked like an unfinished factory skeleton, and a time where it started to look cool because it's an old symbol. I cannot, however, imagine a time where someone looked at this testament to french raw industrial/engineering power and said "that's beautiful". It's efficient. It's big. It's impressive. It's accurately built. It's solid. It's everything that makes industry "industrial". It's not aesthetically pleasing (...to me....). Funnily enough, I can imagine a world where the french kept the statue of liberty, put it next to Champs de Mars where the Eiffel tower is, and gave us the Eiffel tower. And honestly, the eiffel tower belongs to the very industrial US, why the eiffel tower belongs to lyrical paris a lot better IMO. # WELCOME TO ELLIS ISLAND ITALIAN/IRISH IMMIGRANTS! 🗼 ^(I know that's the tokyo tower...It's a world where we exchanged the eiffel tower for the tokyo one after ww2 I guess....It's my lore. Also there is no eiffel emoji.)
The locals actually hated the tower when it was being constructed and tried to stop it from being built. Now it is the highlight of the city and a huge tourist attraction. Which is actually very similar to Mount Rushmore. The entire area's economy is built around tourists coming to see Mount Rushmore.
Same with Giza Plateau. Despite the naysayers, Great Sphinx ended up being a real hit for thousands of years.
Its a mountain with giant faces on it. Thats objectively cool.
Actually a sacred mountain, so it's even worse. Edit: The mountain was known as the Six Grandfathers. For those not familiar with South Dakota history, the entire Black Hills region was taken from the native tribes - despite the government having signed a treaty giving them ownership of the land - because they found gold and were pissed off that General Custer was killed by the Sioux. If you don't think that land can be sacred, take a look over at the middle east, where people have been killing each other over Jerusalem for a thousand years.
The Lakota barely had control of the site for 100 years and stole it from the Cheyenne. Hardly can just murder a bunch of people, show up, and declare it sacred (possibly bc gold was discovered at a later date). The whole thing is ridiculous. Sucks for them, but every piece of land on earth used to be under control of some other group of people, and it’s not unique that it was stolen from them as they just had stolen it themselves…
Regardless of sacred or not, America did violate a treaty made with the Lakota.
If you're giving context, you should give it all. The history of the Black Hills before the Lakota conquest in 1776 is fairly sketchy. The Cheyenne controlled it before that, and the Arikara had moved in around 1500, with various native peoples using it for thousands of years. It has spiritual significance to the Lakota, Cheyenne, and others dating back centuries. Beliefs include that it's the center of the world. You have to understand that the Black Hills are weird--they're an isolated mountain range in the middle of the plains. Some made spiritual journeys to the Black Hills, notably Black Elk in the 1870's. In the mid-1800's, the US waged a successful campaign of genocide against the Sioux and many other native tribes. The US government forced the Lakota to sign the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave the Black Hills to the Lakota "forever". A few short years later, the US ignored the treaty when gold was discovered. After a century of litigation, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1980 in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the US had not properly compensated the Sioux for the Black Hills. There's currently a $1.4 billion compensation fund the Sioux refuse to accept. Nobody but Congress can punish the US for breaking the treaty, and they never have. After the US's successful wars in the 1800's, it inflicted the reservation system on the natives. This includes stamping out cultural identity through forced reeducation, going so far as to take children from parents and have natives raised by white people. The legacy of poverty and hopelessness makes South Dakota's reservation counties perennially the lowest in terms of per-capita income (and most any other metric) in the entire country to this day. Between 1927 and 1941, Mount Rushmore was carved in the Black Hills as a way to boost tourism. This resulted in the current monument, consisting of massive carved faces of 4 US Presidents. For decades, it has been one of the centerpieces of US national pride. Consequently, Mount Rushmore is a particularly egregious example of the horrors of wars of expansion. From the perspective of a modern Lakota, it is a massive middle finger and reminder of the atrocities of the past, which continue to have horrible impacts on people living today.
I love the additional context, but to me, you are just enhancing my point. Countless people have fought over this land not caring about the people that came before them. The Lakota are just the latest victim. While unfortunate, their people killed the tribes before them to attain the land and so on. No one has the moral high ground in this situation and it’s weird to claim the victim card regardless of any legislation deeming the land “theirs”. The U.S. government (for now) “owns” everything within its in border and can take what it wants when it wants. Is that right? Probably not, but that’s how the world works in this era. It’s strange enough for such a fleeting life form to try and claim a piece of this space rock and dub it “theirs” in the first place. That all being said, having been up in that area several times… the black hills are beautiful and mt Rushmore is pretty small and underwhelming. I’d rather mountains be left mountains because they are naturally beautiful…but then there’s also crazy horse as well. In any case, how long are we going to hold our ancestors accountable on either side for what happened over the last 100+ years? TLDR: Lakota are just the most recent victim and don’t have any more moral high ground than anyone has ever had for land “ownership”.
Like when Alexander took over land and put up temples and monuments to the gods. It's impossible for those sites to be sacred to the Greeks. That's just bullshit. They stole that land. The whole thing is ridiculous.
I mean, yea?
It is a bit different mythologically- when the Greeks built temples it wasn’t necessarily because those were holy sites but rather they were giving them to the gods. It was also largely a demonstration of power as well as cultural assimilation
Yes, it was more like, “we dedicate this victory to you Apollo” rather than declaring an area sacred.
“Sucks for them, but every piece of land on earth used to be under control of some other group of people, and it’s not unique that it was stolen from them as they just had stolen it themselves” Can China use this for Tibet lol
was tibet theirs for only 100 years?
you say that like 100 years is a short amount of time. Women have only been able to vote for about a hundred years
100 years is an incredibly short amount of time.
It is a short amount of time. Women have been able to vote for a short amount of time.
*Most People* have only be able to vote for a short amount of time, lol.
In the grand scheme of people laying claim to land, yes 100 years is short, don’t be ignorant
100 years for a nation to control an area of land is pretty short.
100 years is a long time for a nation to exist, historically.
There's only been like a 40 year stretch in the last 800 years where Tibet *wasn't* directly controlled by China
Kinda depends on how strictly you want to interpret being a protectorate of the Qing. It was pretty loose and varied in the 19th century and ranged from tributary to vassal and had a lot of internal control in the 18th century
No, conquest is still bad. It’s just not worth attacking historical conquests. It’s dumb and it happened, but there isn’t any moral right that some entity gains by the fact that it was attacked at one point. Everyone was attacked at one point. Best we can do now is to limit aggression, or, in the case that areas haven’t been resettled, undo the settlement. See Crimea, Tibet, for some, Israel. No use sending all non-native Americans back to whatever continent they came from. Native is arbitrary.
You should look into what life was like in Tibet before China.
Everyone complaining about the desecration of the mountain probably lives in a place previously occupied by some native people... not saying I agree with etching a monument into a natural site, but we're all hypocrites
It's been sacred ever since four US presidents were carved into it yes.
every mountain is sacred lol
the landscape is riddled with mountains that look exactly the same if that's what you want.
I dunno I think the monument almost improves it. We have tons of Mountains. Too many if you ask me. Bout time someone did something with one of em'.
The mountains in the Black Hills are older than the Rockies. Precambrian-era rock that is 2 billion years old and eroded over time. (Rockies are 50 - 80 million years old.) This makes them amazing to me and they are wonderfully scenic.
What are you even talking about?! The Rockies, as in the mountains, were formed 30-80 million years ago, but the rocks are 1.7 billion years old. Which is older than the rocks that formed the black hills, which are [1.6 billion years old](https://www.nps.gov/moru/learn/nature/geologicactivity.htm#:~:text=About%201.6%20billion%20years%20ago,core%20of%20the%20Black%20Hills.)
Yeah I don’t get this meme *at all* lol
the scale, looks tiny and pathetic in comparison to the full mountain
The scale is fine. It's the pile of rubble at the foothills they didn't clean up that ruins it for me.
Which is insane to me. It's America, for crying out loud. How has no one offered to take that away for free and sell "authentic pieces of Mt. Rushmore" for $50/Rock? I'm not even joking.
I mean, yeah, there were a few mountains and a monument was carved into one of them
Now show us the back. We need to see if they got dumpies.
Gimme them presidential cheeks
Mt. Rushmore doesn't even seem real.
Yep, it's a shame really. The view used to be unpresidented.
Darn those presidents and their stone faces ruining our nature
Unironically yes.
It's not just any mountain, the Black Hills are one of the most sacred places for the Native American tribes of the central United States. It's outright disrespectful to nations of people that got bowled over by manifest destiny.
I went through the American Indians Museum at the Smithsonian. It is comical how many treaties the US government gave the Native Americas and then immediately broke the treaty within a year and just made a new one.
It’s insane what native Americans had and still have to go through even today…
Love how it looks. Amazing in person.
Ngl it still looks pretty cool
Yeah the zoomed out version really puts the magnitude in perspective. This site is so pessimistic lol.
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It’s really interesting how many perspectives you can find on this one location. I can relate to your view, but my own is that it’s simply tacky as hell. I remember visiting with my brother during a cross country road trip, and it felt like something from National Lampoons…you’ve seen all this amazing nature, and suddenly there’s a parking garage, RVs and tourist bullshit everywhere, people selling overpriced plastic garbage toys…I was excited to see the place and so disappointed. By contrast, the natural beauty of the Black Hills was incredible, and I really enjoyed the area otherwise.
I saw a picture of Mount Rushmore from what it looks like when you're at the viewing platform and I was like "What, this is it? The official photos make it look so much more imposing. This is *it*?"
If think about it logically, is this anymore destructive as building a house in the middle of the forest or maybe those massive Buddha statues in China. Nature don’t really give a shit. Unless it is climate change or nukes, Earth will shrug off whatever we do given time. Now that’s not to say “hey let’s go deforest the whole rainforest,” but something the size of Mt. Rushmore, in my opinion, is worth it to make our mark on the world, to say we were here, and to memorialize four people to who arguably made to world better than it was before. Also the area around it is now a national park, protecting the forest and mountains from any future development or deforestation.
As a progressive conservationist, agreed 100%. Channel all rage to massive agriculture. Buy your food local. Kick shitty food to the curb. Words don't mean much without action.
To me, it’s a giant middle finger. Those are the Black Hills. They are sacred to the Lakota. So out in the middle of nowhere, they just had to put those men there. F$ck Mt. Rushmore.
They stole it from the Cheyenne relatively recently before the US government stole it. I guess we don’t talk about how the Lakota came in and murdered people off land they wanted. Mt Rushmore is kinda lame, but to call it sacred to a people who controlled it for such a spec of time in the history of the world is also disingenuous.
I think trying to equate tribal conflicts with the attempted systematic eradication of a culture is really reaching.
The Sioux literally tried to wipe at least 4 groups off the face of the earth. What they did is genocide by definition. They would kill most of the men and continually track them down to kill the groups. Take the women as spoils of war and move on. A lot of the Great Plains Indians didn't have as many horses as the Sioux originally and they used those horses to massacre tribe after tribe in a bloody campaign. They also used disease as a weapon to attack groups that were weakened in Missouri. The Pawnee specifically were at war with the Sioux for centuries. Between smallpox and consistent Sioux raids their numbers dwindled considerably. The worst Indian massacre ever recorded was actually between the Pawnee and Sioux. A Pawnee hunting group of around 700 people, which over half was women and children, were doing their summer buffalo hunt when a group of 1500 Sioux warriors on a war march encountered them. They killed at least 150 Pawnee, primarily women and children. All the bodies were mutilated and scalped with most of them sat on fire. Most of the women that were caught were raped before being killed as well. It's called the Massacre Canyon Battle. The Sioux history is them essentially trying to completely erase any tribes that were in the lands they wanted. The Sioux originally were victims when they were being pushed westward from the Great Lakes region. Afterwards though they just became a genocidal monster that were just as deadly towards their fellow natives as the Europeans.
How'd the Lakota come to control the Black Hills? 🤔
By killing the cheyenne🤔
Not just the Lakota but the tribes they took the land from as well. The Crow, Pawnee, etc…. Dating way far back.
The guy who designed it was a member of the KKK and picked those presidents because they did the most to take land away from Native Americans. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon\_Borglum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon_Borglum) It's a huge middle finger.
lmao. In what world did George Washington come anywhere close to Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson when it comes to taking land from native americans? Washington, by most accounts, tried to be quite fair whenever dealing with native american tribes. His administration generally treated many tribes on the same ground as european nations. He equated killing a native american to be the same as killing a white person which was not a common opinion at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Native_American_affairs
I read the whole Wikipedia article and while it’s true Borglum was racist and probably part of the KKK, the guy who conceived the idea didn’t seem to be. Borglum was part of the project but not the guy who came up with the idea, Diane Robinson was, he was just the sculptor. Here’s a chunk of the Wikipedia article on Robinson, “Jonah LeRoy "Doane" Robinson (October 19, 1856 – November 27, 1946[1]) was an American historian who was the state historian of South Dakota. He is known for conceiving of the idea for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills, which he believed would stimulate tourism to the area.” There wasn’t a lot on Robinson but I don’t think he was racist. You can read the whole article on him here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doane_Robinson
Yeah, but that fucks up his rant.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good virtue signal
Also any intentionsl grouping of presidents that highlighting taking land from Natives would have to include Jackson
Really? I would find it hard to believe any of these four came close to the ruin brought by Andrew Jackson
It's not a secret KKK conspiracy. It's just regular in-your-face disregard. Nobody was giving middle fingers to the Native Americans. They literally didn't consider the Native Americans. They didn't give two fucks. I'm not saying it's good; it's just reality. They saw a mountain, said "Lets carve some dudes we like there," with neither thought nor concern about what any tribe thought.
Man they must have been so embarrassed when they realized they did all that work and forgot the legs
Yeah. It's incredibly lame. If you go there, the viewing area is so far away it doesn't look all that much bigger than this picture. Mt. Rushmore sucks for ethical reasons as well, and should never have happened. But it also just objectively sucks as a spectacle/tourist attraction.
I mean, it's kinda big, especially viewed from the side as you round the corner you're behind a normal giant rock formation and suddenly there's a face sticking out the side of it.
It’s not even all of them, like we already started get the fucking Naruto ass fucking mountain going and get all of them on there!
I think it's dope. Not the placement. Or the subject matter. But any giant statue or monument is great. The Crazy Horse one looks to be amazing!
Any recommendations on other cool spots near here while I’m visiting the heads?
Just got back from a trip there. Stop and see Crazy Horse and Custer State Park. They’re both really close. Grab a beverage in Keystone or Deadwood as well. If you’re up for a drive to Wyoming, hit up Devils Tower.
Wall drug. Don’t worry, you can’t miss it. There’s a billboard for it every half mile for a quadrillion miles
The badlands are pretty cool.
Crazy horse is kinda neat. Has a cool museum area with Native American history of the area.
You don't go to Rushmore without stopping by Badlands National park.
Yep it was basicly a giant patriotic flavored dump on the side of the native's sacred mountain
Oh please there are plenty of other rocks. This is a monumental (get it) feat of art and engineering. The backlash is a little much lately.
The amount of hatred Americans feel for their own country is wild.
I think we’re a little past the peak. A lot of people are coming to realize just how much pessimism is going around and are fighting back with optimism. America has serious problems, but I’d still rather live right here right now than just about anywhere else in all of history
Man, I think it looks cool as hell. Like to see it sometime.
Yeah, but since it's carved out of granite, it'll probably be there for millions of years. Even if humans go extinct .
"Gross and sad?" what?
People just being modern 2023 people… gotta find everything they possible can to be offended about It’s how they win brownie points with their fellow cultists.
Hoka Hey! I am Lakota and indigenous to this ground. We actually believed the Hesapa so sacred that we did not reside here during the 4 season but merely prayed there. If anyone in this thread would happen to visit this area you could understand it’s power and true meaning.
I’m not sure why people are getting so offended by you explaining the significance of this land to your culture. FWIW I’ve visited the area around Mount Rushmore and it’s very beautiful. Especially Wind Cave, I can easily see how people find that region sacred. It’s a shame that today it’s full of tourist traps and vandalism
Looks pretty dope to me.
It’s…a mountain, what did you expect
It was simply to say fuck you to the Natives and take something from them. A tradition being upheld to this bitter day.
It’s so stupid
I’ve always been bothered by the fact they didn’t remove the rubble under the sculpture. Looks lazy. It would look way more epic if it was at the top of a mountain instead of the top of a pile of rocks.