Comment by clairity
3 years ago
you're entitled to your opinions, but it's really hard to believe your scholarship on the man when you've misspelled his name like 15 different ways. i'm willing to have my mind changed on who douglass was because i know i'm not an expert on his life, but your points haven't provided a coherent, convincing argument, and especially do not provide a coherent and convincing counterargument to mine. it doesn't even attempt to address my line of reasoning at all, but rather simply throws out more disconnected and unsubstantiated assertions.
my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved (some of) his aims by winning over those on the margin, not trying to necessarily win over the extremely prejudiced. this happened over a lifetime (some 80ish years), and who someone is is a totality of those years, not some arbitrary subset of them.
Basically, you know nothing about him and are willing to make up stuff based on own imagination.
> my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved
This is categorically false. You made that up, because you want it to be true (for mysterious reasons).
I write on mobile, I misspell. But, at least I took some interest in that man. And I did not made up whole life philosophy of man I don't know anything about living in social environment I know even less about.