But surely it doesn't matter whether people who lived through the events themselves are still alive. How we understand our history is a crucial part of how we understand ourselves and who we are in the present. Just look at the debates about the Civil War we've been having recently.

Just to be clear, I was talking about the language police. And they definitely do try to regulate language. It's just in the opposite direction that George Carlin would have liked.

Yeah, I'm going to say that the more momentous events never become a detached and sober part of some isolated history. Hell, people are still arguing over what Jesus meant when he said this or that.

Yeah. I guess what I'm getting at is that a lot of these matters are social issues rather than epistemological issues.

Good point about the civil war.

And frankly, the people who get all in a huff about "muh Confederate heritage", well these are people who I would like to offend.

But maybe being offensive to bad people isn't as helpful as hoped?

Gamergate through 2017 seems to have shown it only emboldens them and let's them ***** about being maligned by liberal fascists.

I get you. The gulags really were awful, on a level unlike any other prison system. Just if we're comparing Nazi camps to the Gulags, you had a decent chance of outliving the Gulag. Of course you reentered Stalin's vision of Russia, which was terrible as well but that's another story.

I think that Hitler's death camps were basically the worst kind of evil that could have existed, and you could place more suffering at his feet if you allow secondary causes (like putting responsibility on Hitler for British treatment of India). If we are comparing just the direct actions of both, Stalin was worse for average Russians than Hitler was for average Germans.

Also, not trying to like, deny the Holodomor, but regarding that there's legitimately no historical consensus unlike there is with the final solution. At best it was gross mismanagement and disregard for the lives of rural peasants that resulted in millions dead.

When I speak of the Holodomor, I mean the charge that Stalin increased the demands for food purposefully to starve and kill ethnic Ukrainians. For that it's circumstantial evidence, and plenty of that points to "probably", there's no smoking gun though.

Whether to call something "ethnic cleansing", "genocide", "racism" are absolutely heated topics that get people angry, as getting something labelled genocide for instance affords political leverage for the victim, allows people to condemn the accused publicly, and so forth. There's not really a "neutral" way to go about this for interested parties. I mean, anyone who denies the Armenian genocide is wrong, like on a factual level, but politics aren't about facts. I think that's part of why so many people hate politics.



Yeah, that's just related to people's brains and how we make associations. Whether or not someone came up with a fair academic definition for "concentration camp" and uses it to describe both Japanese camps and Nazi camps doesn't matter, as soon as you make the association on any level people go into a frenzy.

Well, yeah, very often that's precisely what we're talking about when we talk about "politicization": describing events or ideas in a way that suits the interests of a certain politically organized/mobilized group. So to politicize a topic is by definition to jettison any pretense to approach that topic in a disinterested, scientific way. One of the insights of identity politics groups is that the idea of meaning disassociated from any kind of political context is impossible (i.e., that there's no standpoint which is not conditioned by some specific political outlook; hence the slogan "everything is political"), and, therefore, advocates of various identity politics group assert that it's incumbent on minority groups to reimagine (or, more academically, to reconstitute) the humanities and other scientific disciplines in light of their differing identities and the specific demands that they entail.

I disagree. The fact that it’s incendiary terminology is important, because it forces receptive people to acknowledge their preconceptions. It sounds nice to use neutral language to have a dispassionate and hopelessly abstract discussion about how terrible it all was, but at the end of it, neutral language like “internment camp” is a euphemism meant to minimize a crime and remove the perpetrators from culpability. It’s a lot more important to unpack that assumption than drone on about how everybody agrees it was bad no matter what you call it.

“Not as bad as Hitler” isn’t good enough.

Up to a degree I agree with that version of identity politics. Like, yes, historically certain groups really were excluded from conversations, and yes, that did have an effect on discourse. This applies more to "softer" sciences than hard sciences. Like, in mathematics, I've discussed this with people I know, and roughly every single person I've ever encountered had reasonable views on the topic. In the softer sciences, it's less clear and the subjects are also less clear. History is really, really complicated, and we often project our own views and anxieties onto historical events. And because so much projection is involved, if you concentrate one kind of person studying history, you'll get one kind of viewpoint of history out.

Really not controversial in my view. It does go overboard at times, that's why conversation needs to happen to find a more decent middle ground. That's pretty much the whole point. A good example of this is the discussion about female Viking warrior. It's plain that there's two politicized views on the topic: a feminist one that's pretty eager to use history to show history is less male-dominated, possibly at the cost of honest scholarship, and the conservative one which is reactionary against changes in the social order. What's the "real" answer? Well, anyone being honest would say "we don't know for sure", but IMO any headlines saying "definitely a female warrior, no doubts" are jumping the gun for political reasons, and yeah, it's kinda stupid.

But really? If we didn't have people using history for their political points then what's the point? We use history to determine how to live today. If people weren't arguing over whether the female bones meant there was a decorated woman Viking, then what would any of the history be for? The point is that, politicization and fighting and all of this is incredibly human, it's just how we are, and any world view that tries to say something quintessentially human is "wrong" is probably rotted inside.

What I do try to avoid though at all costs is this sort of hysterical conservative bull****:



Oh, I know, it's just a "comedy" video by a "comedian". But there are lots of people who earnestly believe that universities are just shy of being literally that, but I think if one overemphasizes the irrational and ignore the rational, which is how most people seem to go about the world, then they'll honestly believe that's what the discussion is about.

Basically YouTube conservatives are ****ing dumb and should stop.

reid please trigger warning that **** in the future. i forgot i had ever seen it until now, because my family showed me that video right after i finished undergrad and they thought it was right on the mark and only slightly hyperbolic

Lmao a dude sent me that just a while ago because I was talking about climate stuff and every time he rebutted me using an elementary school understanding of science (with things like 'California is always in a drought') I just rolled my eyes. Somehow he thought that a land grant university in probably the second reddest area in the country would be just like that and that I was just injecting my SJW ideology into climate science and that was what was making people think climate change is happening.

We truly are the dead end of civilization.

Soft language

If Carlin were still alive, hearing that Washington is considering a "kinetic option" in North Korea would've killed him.

wtf

Is that like grabbing Kim Jong Un by the pussy or something?

It's euphemistic Washington jargon for "military action" or "attack".

[quote=Kyle Katarn]
You've got to be kidding me!
[/quote]

.

"It's not rape, it's spurious kinetic action"

Just a momentary loss of muscular coordination.