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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • The long standing definitions of the word that don’t necessitate that you can only be proud of things you’ve personally done seem like plenty good reason to me. National pride isn’t an excuse to be an asshole or a bigot or to oppress people, but national pride has never been necessary for people to exhibit that sort of behaviour. Being proud of your origins and your roots and where you’ve come from is not inherently a bad thing if you’re mindful about it. And just because you don’t personally feel proud of your own roots, and I’m sure your reasons for feeling that way are perfectly legitimate, that doesn’t mean you have to project your personal feelings towards your own roots on other people who feel differently about theirs.


  • There is nothing in the definitions of pride that necessitates it either, so yes including if you care about what it actually means rather than what you want it to mean. If you look up the definition of the word it includes multiple definitions of pride that do not require your own personal accomplishments or actions, and those are not new definitions. It’s extremely common in the English language for a word to have multiple meanings depending on the context they’re used in that may be connected but are not necessarily the same.




  • I mean there are different types of pride. Being lgbt isn’t a decision either, yet we have Pride, because being proud of who you are is often about more than just accomplishments, for many people it’s about accepting and embracing the parts of you that you can’t change. Just because you don’t personally like that it includes that definition, it doesn’t erase the fact that that is a part of the definition and has been for a long time.





  • I think “good person” is a nebulous and generally subjective term. If some people need an external factor to hold themselves accountable then as long as they willingly seek out that accountability then that’s all that matters to me ultimately, I’m not going to try and micromanage how other people reconcile with their own morality in a large uncaring universe, or act like I’m an authority on how people are supposed to be “good”, all I care about is how they treat other people at the end of the day. But a lot people use religion not as a way to hold themselves personally accountable for their actions, but rather as an excuse to get away with doing bad things and dictating how other people can live their lives without having to suffer consequences. They use it to ESCAPE accountability, and that’s when I take issue with it.







  • That depends on the culture and the method of distribution, many cultures that practice oral history did have widespread interest and access to it and an understanding of how their culture fit into the broader scope of the world to some degree, though the way they understood or related to it might differ from culture to culture (some cultures tie their history to places, or names, or events, or people or seasons, etc). As another example, the Romans are well known for their prolific historiography and many of their surviving texts are still referenced to this day. Look up Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, who were just as well known and respected as historians at the time as they are now. While written works such as the Encyclopedia Natural History (written by Pliny the Elder and believed to be the first encyclopedia) would often be released to the public to be copied and spread, they would also often recite written works orally so illiteracy wasn’t as much of a barrier as you’d think. Oral history is a lot more important in providing a record of a culture’s history as well as making that history accessible to others than a lot of people think. It was important in ancient Greece as well, and is a huge part of many other cultures around the world including many indigenous ones. It’s also not as inaccurate or unreliable as some people might think, as there were many methods these cultures used and still use to preserve the accuracy of their oral history as it was passed down from generation to generation.

    Now in terms of awareness, obviously there was propaganda and rewritten history going on back then just as there is now, but it’s not as if none of the citizens would have been aware of that. One of the papers I wrote for a class about the importance of comparing primary sources featured 3 different accounts of what Athens was like and the views people there held at a certain point in history from 3 different people of varying social and financial status, and there was absolutely awareness of that sort of dissonance between what their government claimed and what the reality was even among the more common folk. So I would say they did certainly have a significant understanding of how their culture fit into the broader scope of human history.