[ExI] it's the yoga! was: RE: The Doomsday Clock

Dave Sill sparge at gmail.com
Mon Feb 12 18:11:55 UTC 2018


On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 12:35 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> Well, Dave, I do believe you have made a convert.  Quite a bit of evidence
> there, eh?
>

Cool. I've been debating things on the 'net too long to have any
expectation of conversion. Usually my goal is swaying undecided lurkers. :-)

It does, however, make me wonder just how effective it is.  In Britain I
> think that they went through a period where everyone had to be Catholic,
> and then (or vice versa), could not be Catholic - some of this went on in
> Europe too.  And why would anyone not take up their old religions and
> language when the heat to conform lessened?
>

Sure, but that's easier when you've got a rich written history and maybe
some elders who remember the old ways. In the case of the Native Americans,
the combination of disease, war, relocation, and assimilation made that
nearly impossible. And even if they could resurrect their language and
religion, there was no way they could return to their old ways of life due
to not being on suitable land, loss of bison herds, property ownership and
fences preventing nomadic living.

But it also reminds me of the evil done by the Muslims, forcefully
> converting people to Islam.  And the Jews in southern Iberia, etc.
>
> At a much lower level of evil, the changing of 'foreign' names for
> immigrants at Ellis Island - say from Wallechinsky to Wallace.
>
> Ah - we are not better nor worse than anyone else, are we?
>
> What history we study in school has little relationship to the whole
> picture.
>

That's all true. The question is how can we change ourselves so that stops
and doesn't happen again?

-Dave
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