Post by jess stonehttp://www.houstonpress.com/arts/no-it-s-not-your-opinion-you-re-just-wrong-7611752
I spend far more time arguing on the Internet than can possibly be
healthy, and the word I've come to loath more than any other is
"opinion". Opinion, or worse "belief", has become the shield of every
poorly-conceived notion that worms its way onto social media.
<snark>
That was written by Jef Rouner, 7-23-2015.
Are you going to point out the bits that he wrote that were STOOPID?
Let's take
You saw this same thing recently when questions about
the Confederate flag started making the rounds. It may
be your opinion that slavery was not the driving cause
of the Civil War, but the Texas Articles of Secession
https://tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html mention
slavery 21 times (rights are mentioned only six, and only once
in a sentence that doesn't mention either slavery or how way
more flippin' awesome white people are than black people). Do I
even need to point out that some people are also of the opinion
the Holocaust was fake, and that their opinion means absolutely
nothing to the reality?
He demonstrates attrocious debating style by self-Godwinning; what a maroon.
Unless you slept through American history, students learned that the Civil
War had numerous causes. Yes, slavery was an important cause, and it was
an underlying reason for some of the other causes, but don't be totally
dismissive of all the other important causes. Wars generally have economic
causes; the Civil War didn't uniquely have no important economic causes.
Also, let's feign ignorance of how it is that Texas came to break away from
Mexico in the first place: It was over slavery. This would make the Civil
War Texas seceding for the SECOND time, which is rather different than
the rest of the states that formed the Confederacy.
That's like assigning highly moral motives to all abolitionists. Sure,
some abolitionists saw slaves as human beings unjustly and immorally
robbed of their liberty and dignity, but plenty of abolitionists didn't
want there to be any black people in the New World. In other words,
a lot of them were segregationists.
The first briefly successful political movement at integration, not just
ending slavery, was led by the Radical Republicans during the early years
of Reconstruction. That was a complete change of thinking from what many
abolitionists wanted.
It's so much easier to look at history through modern eyes and assign
modern motives to politics and important historical figures whenver
possible, than to discuss history as being made by highly imperfect human
beings who were a mix of good and bad.
But that's just my opinion.
