dagblog - Comments for "WE DID NOT NEED A CIVIL WAR?"

Thank you.

moat — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 23:28:55 +0000

In reply to Moat, this is most poetic.

Thank you for the thumbs up.
The "fade away" dream is an extension of resisting change in the present moment. It is a kind of nostalgia.
Not all nostalgia is bad. Writing a version of the past that helps one make connections is a part of life. Michel Foucault made a good point on this matter:

All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it's quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it's good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It's a good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it's a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded.

That point of view isn't stuck with the job of explaining what fight was necessary or not. Martin Luther King Jr. explained why he couldn't wait right now. He didn't waste time talking about why other people couldn't wait in the past.
And that signals the absurdity of the modern Conservative movement. Goldwater acknowledged the evil of racism but said it was wrong to try to fix it directly. Nobody raises their children to think like that about their own lives.

Moat, this is most poetic.

Richard Day — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 22:15:54 +0000

In reply to One feature common to all

Moat, this is most poetic.

I just kept thinking of this 'revisionism' lately.

Somehow slavery would have simply faded away.

When in fact, following the deaths of 650,000 Americans it took a hundred and fifty years for slavery to end.

But has it ended after all?

MLK certainly had a dream.

But others lie in their own diverse dream universe, I guess.

WELL PUT MOAT!

One feature common to all

moat — Mon, 02 Apr 2018 21:14:02 +0000

In reply to WE DID NOT NEED A CIVIL WAR?

One feature common to all writers of alternative history is that they always cheat at their own game. It is all very well to point at particular events that set into motion many others and observe that things would have happened differently if the particular event did not happen. That is painfully obvious.

But we are not chess pieces that can be lifted from the board at random by some capricious divinity. If the event in question did not happen, one doesn't get to still keep all the other ones that did. Accepting that our past was not necessary does not give anybody the power to see what the past that didn't happen turned out to be. One cannot do that even the context of one's own life. Picture the arrogance needed to scribble generations of mankind into such a dream.