What would Atlas be like if it existed in the past?

[Kuumo]

GenXerModerate GenXerMAModerate Sr. Member ★★★★ Posts: 2,351

GA-GOV 2002 megathread « on: November 4th, 2002, 8:43:27 pm » Christ on a cracker. There is no way Georgia elects a Republican governor. They've had all Democrat governors since Reconstruction. Sonny Perdue is doomed. As for the Senate race, I remember when you guys thought Max Cleland would lose in 1996, and what happened there? Georgia is not happening. PERIOD. Write it down.

[Kuumo]

KamalaHarrisVP Sr. Member ★★★★ Posts: 2,759

Re: Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans « on: March 20, 2124, 10:12:53 pm » I'd like to address the Muslim question one last time, because I think there is something all of you are missing about anti-Muslim sentiments. The Muslim religion and Muslim nations in the Middle East had persecuted Christians for centuries and attempted to wipe it out completely. The 9/11 attacks were real. So was the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Taliban, and the Islamist terrorist groups that terrorized Syria and Somalia. Why mention these sorry names? I do so because these were not just isolated events, but a series of particularly brutal past episodes that highlighted Islam's continuing attitude toward Christianity. The wars of religion may have been over, but the early 21st century Muslim religion's line toward Christians was little different than it had been centuries earlier; that these were unsaved heretics who should be brought to terms with the Last Word of God by any means. If anything, the Muslim position on this issue only hardened in the 2000s, as the Muslim faith saw itself as a bulwark against the advancing tide of Western liberalism and became increasingly more reactionary and authoritarian. If you were an American Christian, I think you'd have every right to be horrified by what was going on in the Middle East. Now imagine that in this same period thousands of Muslims, followers of a religion which nominally considers your faith to be a fatal error that needs extirpating, begin arriving on your shores. Did Muslim immigrants really want to impose sharia law in America, and was nativism therefore justified? Of course not, but it makes it a somewhat explainable phenomenon, instead of an inexplicable response to a nonexistent threat. You might be frightened and hostile, too. Moreover, the events which I mentioned at the start are just a few of a long series of persecutions that formed an essential part of Christian identity. For many Christians, the idea of being an outsider was deeply ingrained. It was these outsiders, the Pilgrims and their descendants who had left England to practice their religion freely, that played a major role in the founding of this country. America became their country, and it reflected their values as the downtrodden. The United States was to be a republic, not a dictatorship, and it guaranteed certain inalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There was to be freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and a free press. For once, the outsiders had won, and the end result was this great experiment in democracy. I am thus inclined to forgive them even if they failed to recognize that the Middle Eastern Muslim immigrant of the early 2000s was much the same outsider, fleeing persecution at home and looking for a better life abroad, that their ancestors had been a few centuries earlier. Pardon me, but when the losers for so long finally win and then turn their guns on their perceived enemies, even if misidentified in the form of the Middle Eastern refugee, it's hard for me to feel that bad for the poor, poor Muslim. If anything, I'm surprised by how resolutely most Americans stuck to their belief in freedom of religion, and how tame the so-called "persecution" of Muslims was. As far as I'm aware, there were no tribunals, high courts, religious tests, or legal discrimination of any sort. There were riotous mobs, but the state was not using its power to crack down on religious practices, as Muslim countries in the Middle East were still doing at that time. In short, I guess the points I'm trying to make are 1) Nativism wasn't totally irrational and 2) Early 21st century anti-Muslim sentiment was pretty mild.