Who the Hell is Dr. Silverstein and Why Should I Care?

My apologies for making yet another post for the ongoing troll roast.

When I thought I might get somewhere by asking for clarification on an analogy, Gabe brought up some glurge about an irrelevant professor named "Dr. Silverstein." I'm not particularly motivated to find out if he's a real, stupid person, someone intelligent whose had his views misrepresented, or some conveniently fictional straw man, but I'll press on with burning the straw man he was used for.

I'm against the Disneyfication of history in history classes. Unfortunately, there are a lot of "PC" hippie douches out there who don't want to say anything remotely bad about someone's ancestors, and far too many people who are too milquetoast to shoulder the "controversy" of telling the truth. Yes, there were some great figures in just about every culture, but there was also a lot of barbarism. Humans are all capable of great good and great evil.

The image of Dr. Silverstein, as described by Gabe, is a racist: He wants non-whites Disneyfied, but doesn't want to convey the same "privilege" to whites. I find that sort of thought disgusting, just like I find the Disneyfication of my white ancestors disgusting. Lots of humans did wonderful things, coming from many cultures and races. Those same cultures were brutal and superstitious. The people who were able to discover or invent new things deserve their kudos.

It's only recently, with the Enlightenment, that human brutality is waning (with no shortage of setbacks and obstacles). The ideas that our society is founded upon are not a product of racial genetics, just some people in the right social, economic, and scholastic circumstances getting inspired and successfully promoting those ideas. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the scientific method are not encoded into anyone's DNA. Someone raised in an environment where others share these ideas and pass them onto the next generation will be more likely to prosper.

I'm sure a lot of us as kids went through a phase of being angry over the crimes of someone's ancestors. I imagine some very rare hippie douches never did. It'd be nice if, for example, the European settlers got together with the Indians for a turkey dinner in November and puppy-hugging like in the saccharine Thanksgiving specials, but they didn't.

One of my history professors had a saying: "Nostalgia is the destruction of history." Yes, you can celebrate great figures of the past and their contributions to the world, but don't whine like a hippie douche when someone points out the darker parts. To me, it doesn't matter if you're Gabriel or this Dr. Silverstein. Disneyfying history is wrong, and even more so when you do it selectively.