> I take it you agreed with everything else I said about language etc?

Not at all; I just didn't feel like repeating myself.

> I would ask you not to call me arrogant.

I apologize. I think the better term might be "ethnocentric", in the sense that you are using your own culture as a frame of reference to judge other cultures, in this case that of colonial Spain. Which isn't necessarily a problem--most of us do the same thing--but it's good to be self-aware about it and to understand that this inevitably leads to conflict between cultures, of exactly the type that we've been discussing. I'm just trying to get you to back up far enough to see that. More about this later.

> It seems you're arguing that the cultures that were there weren't eradicated at all and still exists happily

As I've been saying, what actually happened is a matter of degree that doesn't quite fit the term "eradication". If you took a late 19th century Prussian and showed them modern day Germany, they would probably lament that their Germany no longer exists. You would probably get a similar answer from a Meiji-era Japanese. And I think we agree you'd definitely get the same answer from a 16th century Mexica. Some version of all three cultures exist today, but all three cultures were bloodily dominated by a foreign conqueror with fundamentally incompatible values and then forcibly reshaped to fit those values. It's harder to see the parallels because you and I are closer to the values of 1940's America than 16th century Spain, but in principle it's the exact same thing.

> while also telling me to accept that they didn't have enough might to be right and that's why they had to go.

Not at all. I'm trying to take things up a level of abstraction and point out that your rejection of "might-makes-right" is, in and of itself, an expression of your own cultural values.

Let me see if I can illustrate this another way, with an anecdote from the British rule of India. In some parts of India, there was a religious custom, "sati", in which a widow would be burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The British found this horrifying. Charles James Napier was one of the British governors in India, and he enforced the British policy of prohibiting sati. When the priests complained to him that sati was simply part of their religious customs and that their customs should be respected, Napier replied, "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

At some point, this sort of thing inevitably happens whenever two cultures are incompatible enough. Let me try and pull in the last piece now.

> But the original reason why I commented to you was to take issue with your claim that "everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated."

If you'll give me enough leeway not to take the word "everyone" completely literally, I think my claim is pretty defensible. For instance, virtually everyone did seem to agree that ISIS needed to be eradicated. There are some principled pacifists who would have preferred to leave ISIS alone, but I think it's perfectly fair to consider those people a fringe, especially if they, themselves, were directly being attacked by ISIS--not just to the degree of random acts of terrorism but in the way ISIS was violently invading parts of the Middle East in their heyday.

Was ISIS a "culture", or just a radicalized mass movement of murderous fanatics? They considered themselves a caliphate. I'm sure the Aztec priests who hauled unwilling victims to the top of a pyramid and cut out their still-beating hearts on a regular basis also had a certain self-regard, just as I think the Spanish probably considered them a bunch of murderous fanatics. And look, I agree that the Spanish in total did a lot of terrible things in Mexico, but I don't think eradicating a religion that is centered around hauling unwilling victims up a pyramid and cutting out their still-beating hearts was a bad idea, just as I don't think it was bad for the British Empire to prohibit sati or to (eventually) stop the slave trade, even though the slave trade was a long-standing practice of many west African cultures. That's not the same as endorsing everything they ever did, any more than I endorse everything the Allies did in the Second World War.

My point here is that there are always going to be limits to cultural relativism, and that almost every culture in the world is eventually going to try and reshape other cultures to be more compatible. And when it comes to my personal preferences, I think I am actually much more on the "just leave other cultures alone" side than most people. But there's always going to be some limit to that, and even the decision of where that boundary lies is just going to depend on your culture. There's no neutral middle ground outside of anyone's cultural values here.