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Originally Posted by Belfaborac
No, I guess not.... The same could no doubt be said for the Anglo-Saxons when the Normans took over, or, if we go even further back, the inhabitants of Mari when the Assyrians sacked their kingdom around 1800 BC. Neither, however, has overly much to do with what happens today.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac
Indeed. The desire to keep one's country or anything in it in its present state for perpetuity is at best a frightfully naive notion and indicative of a lack of understanding both of how the world works and how societies advance.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac
I can't see how it sounds like that at all, to be honest. It certainly isn't even remotely close to what I meant or wrote, which was that almost all change is, and has always been, driven from abroad/outside/elsewhere.
Edit: i.e. isolationism equals stagnation, always. All of human history bears this out.
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The self-contradiction of saying the event of the past don't matter today and that the lessons of the past apply to the future aside, these arguments entirely miss this point.
Yes, change is inevitable. So is death. That doesn't mean we should happily rush in to accelerating that result.
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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
No man is an island.
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"I am a rock. I am an island." -- Paul Simon.
As I said, favoring 'isolationism' was a bit of hyperbole on my part. Working to preserve what we hold dear of our individual and cultural distinctiveness in the face of outsiders trying to foist on us the metaphorically plague-infested blankets of their own dear-held beliefs is what I am talking about.