Thalia's LAST adventure

If liberalism involves commitment to abstract principles, then what does conservatism involve? I like that the description of the colonies at this time does not sugarcoat anything, it tells it like it is. there was war, and it was violent, but it was pretty much the same everywhere else. It's shocking to think that that was the norm back then, constant wars in your country. It obviously would not have been war to the scale we would see (and might if trump doesn't get impeached soon) these days with nuclear weapons and large-scale weaponry, but it's still terrifying to think of your world as filled with nothing but war and destruction. At first I was worried that there would be accounts of how backwards Latin America was at this time for having so many wars, but I was glad (in a relieved way) that it was mostly just a sign of the times rather than a sign of those poor backwards countries. In another class, a student made a minimizing point about people from the 15th centu...

As always, the ignorance of those long dead, who were raised in a different time with very different ideals, does not fail to irritate me. Of course it's impossible to enslave all the Indigenous Americans because more than half the population has been slaughtered. It's horrifying that their next thought was to import more slaves from another continent. But how much can we blame these people when they thought that their actions were completely justified? Is it possible to blame them for modern-day problems like the mass incarceration of black men? It also horrifies me that Spain ordered a form of ethnic cleansing. Antisemitism has deep roots and I wonder, if they had known then about what the future would entail with the Holocaust, would they still have done it? In typing that, I answered my own question: absolutely. I haven't organized my thoughts on Casta paintings yet. Are they racist or are they a reflection on an identity crisis? They're definitely colourist, some...

I like the idea of history as non-linear, as events that we in the present have put together in order in a certain way that leads us to here and now, even though it never actually happened that way. I don't remember learning specifically about Columbus in elementary school except as a quick "this guy discovered this place" sort of deal and most of the social studies courses I took in high school were very Canada-forward (which makes sense in a Canadian high school). I don't believe I ever read anything particular about him until this course. Most of what I know about Columbus is information given to me through a very liberal perspective; people denouncing Columbus Day in the US and different states changing the day to Indigenous Americans Day. From the information I gathered in this week, Columbus himself was not a villain, but he is where today's current villains got their start from. This was the beginning of a very long war against indigenous peoples and rac...