I posted [link]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYP8-oxq8ig&t=1s) to 1960 presidential debate on Digg with the title: “1960 presidential debate. No interruptions, no insulting, no screaming, just two gentelmen having civilized discussion.”. It got some likes but some comments are wild.
It almost looks like there are certain keywords that when their ears and brains detect, there is some trigger which causes brain areas responsible for logic and rationality to shut down.
And another thought I just had that i find interesting , is that it looks like there is plenty of white Americans, that shit on their own country because of slavery, but there is very small number of Germans that do the same because of WW2. Leftist Germans don’t hate their own country because of war attrocities, they focus their energy on stuff like LGBT, immigrant rights etc. I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that in war mainly white people were killed. Concetnration camps killed 3 million Jews and 3 million Poles. As bad as it sounds that leads to conclusion that nowadays white person has less “value” for these people, and what’s craziest it looks like that agenda is pushed by whites themselves as well.
In such moments I’m glad I was born in Poland and that Poland had nothing to do with slavery and was on the good side in world wars. We don’t have any internal guilt feelings sitting on shoulders that I’m sure is the case for some Americans or western Europeans.
You’re missing the point. In the 1800s, political discourse was massively shaped by the people who were allowed to participate. You didn’t have people using racial slurs or misogynistic language against each other because everyone was white and male.
Don’t look to the past for how things could be better. We can’t go back there, and we shouldn’t anyway because it was filled with injustice. The future is where we’ll find our greatness, we should work on that.
In the 1800s people were having 10 kids because half of them wouldn’t live past puberty. Then if you did, you’d probably get drafted and die in the civil war, or die from an easily treatable disease, or die during child birth.
I wish we could send conservatives back to the 1800’s, it’s what they deserve
The thing is 1800 is not just slavery and America was not the only place in the world that existed in that time. Believe it or not US is just about 6% of total land mass and 5% of global population. There were no black slaves in Poland, does that mean I can’t talk about how political discourse was conducted here? Similarly in other countries. You want to make conducting a political discourse a taboo because of slavery in America?
You called out white Americans specifically and now you want to make it about everywhere else? Okay then, smartarse, find me a place in the world in the 1800s that was a bastion of equal representation. I contend any “civility” in politics anywhere in the world at that time was highly partisan and relied entirely on the brutal suppression of dissenting voices. Good luck arguing against that.
I called out white Americans in a different context if you read the post again. This was second part of post when I talk about something else that I thought about, comparing white Americans and Germans shitting on their own caountry. It wasn’t the context of conducting the political debate. In this context in my original post there are only Nixon, Kennedy and word “gentlemen” in general brought up. It’s you who expanded context by not specifying society or country when you mentioned 1800s in later comment, I responded adequately.
It’s worth mentioning that there is no such thing as bastion of equal representation. Inequalities are everywhere, it’s just a matter of size.
I agree that 1800s bad for many people, but 200s were bad in a different way for other people in a different place, although maybe the scale was smaller. Should we make make philosphers like Socrates or Aristiotle a taboo topic because rich Greeks had African slaves? Same thing with Ancient Rome. You can taboo everything by having that way of thinking. 1800s are not special in this regard.
Also, from the beginning I only wanted to discuss the WAY those two people speak with each other, the WAY the debate, despite thir skin color or nationality. I wouldn’t care if they were black, yellow or whatever. It’s just a good example of the WAY they speak and I specifically mentioned that in the title. But for some reason you and users from the photo that were commenting keep drifting to other things and opening up completely new topics.