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> facts like that are boring as tar More to the point, typical cable news viewers much prefer someone to tell them what to think. There are plenty of people w

> facts like that are boring as tar More to the point, typical cable news viewers much prefer someone to tell them what to think. There are plenty of people who watch C-SPAN, but watching C-SPAN lacks context and doesn’t give the full story anyway; maybe half of the politicians at any given hearing are spewing ignorant misunderstandings or deliberate misinformation, grandstanding, and hoping for soundbites that will please their supporters when replayed on the news. The folks on the other side of the hearing tend to be circumspect, to put it mildly, because there are serious risks to revealing too much publicly. Others read transcripts of un-televised hearings, long investigative reports, government documents, independent statistical analyses, etc. But most people don’t have the time or spare thinking space to figure out their own unique conclusions starting from primary sources about every possible topic. > could just read the various Declarations of Causes First, it’s not clear who you mean by “practically no one”, but I’m pretty sure that any undergraduate Civil War history course is going to involve reading these. Many high school students surely read them. But if you take a few minutes to read them, they make it very clear that perpetuating slavery was the Confederate rebels’ primary concern. Which is the same thing most historians will tell you if you ask for a 1-sentence (or 1 page) summary of the war. Here’s the second sentence of the Wikipedia article about the Civil War: “The Civil War began primarily as a result of the long-standing controversy over the enslavement of black people.” But that’s not the whole story of a gigantic war involving millions of people. It is true that in the US South, white elites have undertaken a century-long propaganda effort (with help from a few fringe revisionist historians) to minimize the public’s impression that the Civil War was about slavery and to rehabilitate the Confederacy. This has been largely ineffective at changing the minds of historians, but if you ask many modern-day “conservatives” who are caught up in that propaganda cloud, you may hear that the Civil War was about “states’ rights” and that slavery was a marginal consideration.

deleted 7y ago
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celticmusic 7y ago
that's unfair, I love to think, but when my mechanic has a recommendation, I take it. I don't want to have to be as knowledgeable as my mechanic.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I think you both may be slightly missing what I'm saying. Let's suppose that people do simply want to be told what to think. Well, in such a case, it would be simple to get a viewer of, say, CNN, to watch FOX instead. After all, they just want to be told what to think. But we know this is not the case. It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead. I'm positing that this is because we all adhere to some preexisting world view that, for most, won't really change in any case. Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views. Certain reliefs in Egyptian temples displayed an alarming, to us, amount of explicitly sexual activity among everyone from the pharoah, to the high priestess, to the slave. So we erased it where we could erase it, and don't talk about it where we couldn't erase it. Ditto for pagan rituals, so we replace them with good, clean, Christian rituals that weren't so lascivious. But I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. You figure it out. Again, the Declarations of Causes explicitly state that maintaining slavery is the principle aim of the states in the Confederacy. So if we want the spark of that conflict to be something else, we just ignore those documents and focus on the material put out by historians better aligned with our thinking. I posit that in all of these cases, we do those things to protect our belief system.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    > It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead. Both CNN and FOX are terrible sources, mostly consisting of bloviating pundits with very scarce factual content. Both come with heavily pro-corporate pro-military pro-US-government viewpoints. The main difference is that CNN has at least some basic standards of journalistic ethics, and wasn’t explicitly set up to be one political party’s propaganda arm. But if someone wants to learn the basics about the daily news, watching CNN is also not a very effective use of time. > studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor What exactly do you think happens in undergraduate history classes? What do you think historians spend their time doing? The historians I know all but live in archives and libraries. > I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. Yes, both hares and eggs are fertility symbols. But I’m not sure what your point is exactly. Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic.

deleted 7y ago

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celticmusic 7y ago

that's unfair, I love to think, but when my mechanic has a recommendation, I take it. I don't want to have to be as knowledgeable as my mechanic.

bilbo0s 7y ago
I think you both may be slightly missing what I'm saying. Let's suppose that people do simply want to be told what to think. Well, in such a case, it would be simple to get a viewer of, say, CNN, to watch FOX instead. After all, they just want to be told what to think. But we know this is not the case. It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead. I'm positing that this is because we all adhere to some preexisting world view that, for most, won't really change in any case. Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views. Certain reliefs in Egyptian temples displayed an alarming, to us, amount of explicitly sexual activity among everyone from the pharoah, to the high priestess, to the slave. So we erased it where we could erase it, and don't talk about it where we couldn't erase it. Ditto for pagan rituals, so we replace them with good, clean, Christian rituals that weren't so lascivious. But I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. You figure it out. Again, the Declarations of Causes explicitly state that maintaining slavery is the principle aim of the states in the Confederacy. So if we want the spark of that conflict to be something else, we just ignore those documents and focus on the material put out by historians better aligned with our thinking. I posit that in all of these cases, we do those things to protect our belief system.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead. Both CNN and FOX are terrible sources, mostly consisting of bloviating pundits with very scarce factual content. Both come with heavily pro-corporate pro-military pro-US-government viewpoints. The main difference is that CNN has at least some basic standards of journalistic ethics, and wasn’t explicitly set up to be one political party’s propaganda arm. But if someone wants to learn the basics about the daily news, watching CNN is also not a very effective use of time. > studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor What exactly do you think happens in undergraduate history classes? What do you think historians spend their time doing? The historians I know all but live in archives and libraries. > I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. Yes, both hares and eggs are fertility symbols. But I’m not sure what your point is exactly. Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic.