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I find the most productive political discussions are about history. Most people don’t know any history at all, so a willingness to discuss the reason we have th
by sevensor 2y ago
I find the most productive political discussions are about history. Most people don’t know any history at all, so a willingness to discuss the reason we have the Third Amendment, or the lasting effects of King Leopold’s dominion in Africa, or the Peleponnesian War, makes for a good discussion, and the distance makes people less emotionally tied to their positions and more willing to accept nuance. If we find we disagree, this also gives us social cover to pretend the topic isn’t intensely relevant to the present day.
- DeathArrow 2y agoAlso, present day politics is in many cases determined by history.
- sevensor 2y agoExactly! What makes history relevant is that we are still living in it.
- niemandhier 2y agoMaybe the long peace within the US changed things, but in most countries and especially in Europe discussing history in a room with more than 2 nationalities is a good recipe to sow dissent.
- sevensor 2y agoGood point. I live in the US and I wouldn’t start with the American civil war. Talk about other people’s history. I’ll trade you the American Civil War for the Franco Prussian War.
- Spooky23 2y agoThe American Civil War is a great place to start. You can very quickly assess where somebody’s head is at and move on quickly.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoThat depends on what your purpose is having a conversation is in the first place
- pixl97 2y agoI mean it is a good filter to understand someone with. When I moved from the midwest to the south as a teenager and learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that you begin to understand there are some people that are deeply entrenched in their views and you have to make a judgement on how much time you're going to spend dealing with that.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think entrenchment is a description of both sides, has neither I really willing to budge. I think the critical I think the critical criteria is how much you have to deal with it at all. Is it an interesting conversation that you can have once in awhile, or something that gets inserted into every conversation. I think the civil war is interesting and nuanced topic to interrogate once in awhile, and can usually find some points of agreement with most people. The legal, moral, and philosophical questions around it are fascinating. For example, how do you reconcile people's right to self-determination with a desire to carry out abhorrent actions. Historically speaking, the civil war and failures of reconstruction are probably the single most defining aspect of modern American political life.
- Spooky23 2y agoI agree and I’d think we’d have a good time chatting about it. To me, the concepts of self-determination and owning humans are in conflict. I think it’s appropriate and important to honor the gallantry and sacrifice individual soldiers. But it’s important to appreciate that the Confederacy was explicit in its evil, and the labor of those soldiers in civilian life was cheapened by the aristocrats who founded the Confederacy to preserve their human property. And the (specious) ideals of self-determination were discarded as the demands of the first modern war demanded centralized control.