This was an historical post dealing with the deplorable state of historical knowledge. It was prompted by astory wherein a lady believed the president was a Communist, but when pressed said that “Progressive” was a code word for Communist. It was not meant to be political and I was not using irony to escape scrutiny. Ihad expected an answer dealing with the question posed –historical ignorance permits words to be used in an Orwellian fashion–rather than being whisked away to the cornfield of irrelevance and chided.
I do think your post was political, even if you did not intend it to be so. In order to engage you in discussion about the “deplorable state of historical knowledge”, we'd first have to buy into your premise. That is, we would have to take a political interpretation – that Tea Partiers are ignorant when it comes to history – even though this not only has not been established, but has an uncanny resemblance to something like what Keith Olbermann would say.
Funny.. I have tried my entire life to keep my political views as much as possible away from my historical views, but everywhere I go to look for educational and enlightening discussion on historical subjects I seem to find the same old thing… It sort of angers me and quite honestly, usually ends up with me not returning…Hoping that is not the case here… so far I have enjoyed it…
As all of us know, politics and history intersect, and so sometimes it's impossible to keep politics completely at bay. I do think there is some leeway here on this forum (as long as it's in some sort of historical context) but for issues that are too non-historical (or altogether off topic) we have the “Roman Senate Chamber”. I set it up for this very purpose, and I sometimes move off topic threads there.I don't think that we have any trolls on the forum at this point, so things usually work out anyway. If things do get out of hand, I have Donnie as my “Commander Riker” to put the smack down. (NB: I almost forgot to mention that Donnie's forum, Writers of History, has an area for general and political boards where people go sometimes for miscellaneous discussions)
