Do yall seriously think there is anything better to run a galaxy with than old white men? I mean, look where we are today because of them!
I don't know. I would have to meet each of those old white men personally; becasue I don't believe in stereotyping people by arbitrary attributes such as age, skin color, and sex.
Well that simply isn't the case. While the road has been anything but smooth there had been a general trend towards progressive ideals throughout history, and things are much better than they once were. I am married to my wife by mutual choice as an equal, I do not own her, and cannot legally beat, control or rape her. She can vote, hold a professional job in her own right, choose whether to bear children, and decide on matters of divorce herself. That is the positive change of history at work in my own life. You seem to believe that progressives feel that everything is awful because we always seem to be wanting change - in fact we want to continue the positive changes achieved by those who came before and banish the side roads (racism, imperialism, social Darwinism etc) to history. The sort of people who believe having a black woman in a leading role is "white genocide" are very much lost down those side roads.
What are "progressive" ideals? What does it mean to be progressive? In order to progress one must have a goal a reference point from which to measure. I would argue that that goal is has changed through out history and that everybody is a progressive to their own cause. Are things really much better than they were? It wasn't until agriculture that people started owning each other in the first place. I believe this perceived general trend is an oversimplification of history.
To illustrate my point you speak of mutual choice in marriage partner is a positive. Yet look at the huge divorce rate. So just as there is great satisfaction in being able to choose ones own mate(s). There is also a huge drawback in that people make bad choices and suffer the consequences. Now I'm not contrasting this with coercion, I'm contrasting it with excluding family from the decision making process. But again, even in a situation where families agreed on marital spouses it would still not be a perfect system. It just depends on what the end goal you have in mind is. Is individual choice more important than making better choices?
My point of all that is this. There can never be a perfect system. There can never be a golden age. There can only be flawed systems which are perceived as good or bad depending on one's reference point.
What are progressive ideals? What would the ideal progressive society look like? Because I'll bet that even if such a society existed, it would still change into something else. A new wave of "progressives" with different ideals would come along wanting to "make things better." Because change is always constant.
You are aware that the two/thirds thing was about anti-slavers in congress inhibiting the power of slavers to use their slaves to vote? It was never about non-Whites being only two/thirds of a person. Anti-slavers (who were White) put that into place.
Admittedly a faulty generalization on my part to make the point. Which was, social change is difficult without allowing contrasting opinions. You cannot make correct choices in an echo chamber.
Institutional Racism still exists and it's quite violent against marginalized groups. If your words are backed by it, then they are not words anymore, they are a form of coercion.
Which was my point, for both sides.
Another form of coercion is denying the historical impacts on the material conditions of marginalized people living today. In doing so, you deny any possibility of reparation. Denying a group of people the same privileges as all the other groups is very violent.
This would make an excellent discussion. But I don't have time for it right now.
I disagree. You can never change minds, but you can remove them from power so they can never hurt anyone again.
Hmmm. Based on my personal experience with my own mind, minds can indeed be changed. As I stated before I don't believe you can change minds when you call people "idiots," or "wrong," or attack them. But you can change minds when you subtly guide them so they discover truths by themselves. So let me rephrase. I agree that you can never change someone's mind, but you can help them to change their own.
I also disagree with your other point. Conservatives are always conservative and liberals are always liberal. Only the positions change. Liberals grow and accept more and conservatives eventually accept the new normal. But conservatives have always been against progress.
I don't understand why you're disagreeing with me because this is exactly what I said, minus the "progress" bit*. Case in point there was a time when so-called "traditional marriage" was a radical new liberal ideology. Now it's a conservative one. Eventually, the views liberals espouse today will be the platform of conservatives of the future. While liberals of the future will have found some new cause of the decade to rally around. It has never been different and it will never be different.
*because progress can only be made in reference to some end goal. That goal has and always will change, so I would say "conservatives have always been against change." Which itself is ironic because conservatives are very much in favor of change as long as it is change towards their ideals. So really both liberals and conservatives are progressives, they just have different end goals in mind.
