Quote Originally Posted by nightflier
Sticks, you've been inconspicuously quiet. Are you still lurking around?
Nope...no lurking...I've had a major push at the beginning of this week in order to be fully free and available for this vacation and the Chicago AR Summit...Swishy, Autumn, Mid-Fi, I shall see ye all on the morrow...

There's been a lot of great points and a comendable amount of civility in this thread...there's been some Inaccuracy too. Historical fact doesn't change because it doesn't meet with our current set of precepts or it "hurt peoples delicate feelings"...as just one example the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and followers of Mithras did not, in fact, fare any better under Muslim rule that the subsequent Christian empires...when historians say "marginalized" they mean peeps got killed.

My pont of this thread, within the context of what else has been occuring on AR, is that human history is full of tragedies, evils commited by virtually every group that has come to power...regardless of theology or doctrine. Everytime you get more than two people in a room the possibility of lynch mob mentality and malfeasance increases exponentially.

I would suggest that in order to maintain a longterm involvement in a site like this, one must be relatively "successful"...by that I mean, that while one might not be fantastically rich, you prolly don't live in a desert

Until we recognize that it's in all our best interests that everybody be educated, that everyone be given an opportunity to succed or fail...and until we discontinue our decades old, emperialistic tendency of supporting petty despots and mock royalty who, in turn, manipulate the downtrodden masses...well, we're gonna continue to create underclasses that will lash out, will seek to oppress, seek to control...simply, seek to survive and do so in the only given eschatological context with which they are familiar.

...and none of this changes if one buries his head in the sand like an ostrich and engages in historical revisionism.