[Potemkin]

What threats to English literature are you worried about? Trigger warnings and shit? Do you go to a university? No? Then you have nothing to worry about. Read in peace and quit bitching.

But... but... you don't understand, RA. Hong Wu might be reading a copy of Sense and Sensibility in a public park, when a hairy-faced Musselman might come along, snatch the book out of his hands and rip it to shreds in his big, strong Musselman hands while yelling something about Jane Austen being an infidel female. Who will protect him, RA? Who?

[Red_Army]

You're too old Pot. Rainbow Crow will be reading on his kindle fire and the Musselman won't know if he's reading Jane Austen or a Hadith.

Also I don't think he leaves his house. He just gets triggered by the web presence of SJWs who are probably just people like him trolling 50% of the time.

[mikema63]

I never troll. Anything written before 2000 and anything that wasn't written by a politically correct sjw liberal should be banned for the safety of safe spaces everywhere.

[Oxymoron]

Time is a human invention and how we perceive it is relative. So nothing exists and all exists always and never.

[yiostheoy]

But... but... you don't understand, RA. Hong Wu might be reading a copy of Sense and Sensibility in a public park, when a hairy-faced Musselman might come along, snatch the book out of his hands and rip it to shreds in his big, strong Musselman hands while yelling something about Jane Austen being an infidel female. Who will protect him, RA? Who?

Concerning the yanking away and tearing up of books, I have come to realize that many Muslims probably hate the Bible as much as I hate the Quran. And as much as I want to collect all the Qurans in the world and burn them, there are probably many Muslims who would like to collect all the Bibles and burn them. Opposing ideologies about baptizing all the world versus the 70 virgins implied for martyrs leads to ideological warfare. Us versus them quickly results and boils over into open warfare, or as Islamists call it, jihad. I suppose there is no solution. Israel is not leaving anytime soon, and the USA will not abandon a major strategic ally.

As far as protection, everyone needs to be armed and on the lookout not only for jihad but major crimes as well. Robbery has always been popular. So have hate crimes. There is also the classic serial killer who lures his or her victims and then kills them for the sheer pleasure of it.

The world is truly a very dangerous place. And the God(s) who created it seem to be Deist not Theist.

[yiostheoy]

Some people like to deny that the Holocaust occurred or that the Armenian Genocide took place. Feelings on this are so strong that denying this events is a criminal act in some country. There are also those who contend what America never landed a man on the moon.

This denial of well known specific historical events got me thinking.

What if they're right, but more generally?

It's not that those events didn't happen--what if nothing ever happened?

What if the past isn't past--because there is no past?

Is all of history simply a made up lie?

I'd like to see our resident "historians" (a lie concocted by the historohoaxists) try to prove anything ever happened.

I'm waiting.

My own approach to understanding history is to focus on the primary sources that lead us to surmise what we call history as we tell it.

When Herodotus first invented history telling, he used numerous verbal sources and in some cases he even investigated on his own.

For the rest of us, we can look at pottery shards, arrow tips, carvings in stone and bone, stratified litter, baked clay tablets, cuneiform, hieroglyphic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin writings, palace ruins, tombs, and so forth.

For anyone severely afflicted with what philosophers call skepticism, not even cogito ergo sum resonates however. In that case you would be just beating your head against the wall as the skeptic vociferously drags you along ad nauseam.

What else were you waiting for?

[Albert]

Is Dave having a metaphysical crisis?

[The Immortal Goon]

There is currently no attempt in the west to destroy white history or any other such clap-trap. As we speak, the Chinese are actually doing a rather ambitious project to preserve Irish-American history, actually.

And this brings us to one of the problems; what do you mean by, "White history?" Because what we consider white has only been true for, what, fifty years when Eastern Europeans were brought into the club by some?

As mentioned, things are constantly being interpreted. And I've harped on this before, but as dumb (and ignored by faculty who guard their academic freedom jealously) as safe spaces and trigger warnings are, they're not half the threat that creationists and Bible-literalists are in the West. Even with literature, the right has demanded far more books be banned than the left ever has.

Really, you want a huge variety of times and places if you are to understand something. If you want to know about the Roman Empire, start with Gibbon from 1776, Durant from the middle of last century, Grant from a more contemporary place, and the. A JSTOR article from last week, and then start in with Tacitus for yourself. You'll know way more about Rome by looking at what these different times and places said about it than you would clutching to a single year when you imagine every episode had the world figured out before it went into decay.

After that, it might be interesting to read about imperial China and how it's ebb and flow mirrored what was going on with the other side of the landmass, and then understand the reverberations of Rome.

History is awesome because there are so many ways to look at it.

[Albert]

TIG what is your view on Colombus? Do you think he was a great explorer worth the praise and admiration? Who discovered the new world for Europe?

[The Immortal Goon]

Do we need to qualify him personally with attributes such as "great?" Alexander was great. Alfred was great.

Columbus was at the right place at the right time. His journal is sort of funny as he comes off as dopey since the Taino recognize what a great event this is while he's assuring his boss, the monarchy, that he'll be in China to deliver a letter any day now. But other than that, he's a product of his time and place and seems cruel by our moral standards. Though these standards have no problems at all with child sweatshops and blood diamonds either, so I have no moral judgements to put upon him.

The Vikings certainly preceded Columbus to the New World, but their network dissolved after 1066 when England was taken from their sphere and brought into Latin Europe.

I understand why natives don't like him. But globalization happens. I don't have a moral spin to put onto Columbus or his events one way or the other.