Par for the course. Most people that participate in this forum can't even comprehend that history has a profound effect on the present.
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
1. You do know that I *teach* history and its importance for a living, right?
2. The past matters. Funny thing, though: much of the evil (including the evil that comes from abuse of non-level playing fields and white privilege) comes because not because people ignore the past, but because people look only to the part of the past that fits their pre-existing beliefs and prejudices.
3. And one of the biggest ways to get "the profound effect of the past" wrong is to ignore the limitations of your sources. Especially when one's sources demonstrate by their actions and words that they have not thought carefully about cause and effect.
I could care less about what Colin Kaepernick does or says. Not because I don't understand the history of unlevel playing fields. Not because I don't understand the history of oppression. Not because I'm some whack-job racist and he's some black dude.
I could care less about what Colin Kaepernick does or says because he has never done or said anything about said unlevel playing fields and oppression that rises above the quality of Twitter opining. Because he has never said anything that suggests he has actually thought carefully about *how* those unlevel playing fields and that oppression lead to the necessity of any particular choice he might make about flags or about anything else someone should make choices about.
In short, he may be an idiot or he may not. I don't really care. But until he precedes some of his Twitter-type argument by evidence that he has not just cited the past but thought carefully about how the past and present and future actually connect, I see no reason to give any credibility to anything he says.
I continue to try to engage you on political/ideological/religious issues, Troy, because once upon a time, when I first joined the Packershome community, you were willing to engage issues, consider evidence carefully, and otherwise do what I have never seen from "public figures" and Twitter personalities like Colin Kaepernick. And so while I consider many of your beliefs to be idealistic and misguided Progressivism, I continue to be willing to engage you and that misguided Progressivism from time to time.
On the other hand, the more you continue restrict yourself to the cant and Twitter-like pronouncement of those Progressivist beliefs more appropriate to the soundbites of political advertisement than to reasoned public discourse, the more I re-consider the worthiness of talking with you on these issues.
If the last couple years of your posts here are any evidence, I expect you will respond by a sneer about the novels I write or another Twitterism or two about how you could care less about what this old white Biblical Christian guy says. That you could care less if leads me one step closer to my lumping you with the not-worth-listening-to Kolin Kaepernicks of the world who are unable/unwilling to seriously think about *how* we reason from the past. That you could care less if I decide your posts are unworthy of reading and scrolling past.
But whatever it means to you, it saddens me. Because you used to be one of the main reasons I thought this place was superior to all the other Packer fan communities out there.
I'm okay with you being an asshole. To my mind, some of the "pillars of a community" ought to be assholes, because without assholes we do indeed fall into greater and greater ignorance of our past. But when an asshole pillar becomes an unthinking asshole pillar unwilling to engage carefully with that past, well, that should be an occasion for community sadness.
Because that kind of asshole just accelerates the decline until what was a thriving community becomes nothing more than a ruin of crumbled pillars like the Forum in the center of Rome where tourists wander around pointing down the Via Fori Imperialli toward the Colosseum and bemoaning the evils of ancient Rome.
And that's just sad.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)