BOTH SIDES

[Politesse]

Changing our minds is NOT the same thing as not having known.

 

[bilby]

These things were always known to be immoral.

Maybe not by all of the perpetrators, but certainly by all of the victims.

 

[Politesse]

Change the names of the groups and the locations of the atrocities and in fact, it has been very nearly universal that some of those in power treated some of those not in power as livestock, chattel, beneath consideration as fully adult humans. Including of course women of all colors and complexions and socioeconomic status. This is still going on and in fact there are some who want to bring back those days, right here in the US. And elsewhere.

How are we going to prevent that by chiding people for calling slavery wrong, or tiptoing around the actions of our forebears? By your logic it won't even be wrong anymore once the "other side" wins.

 

[Politesse]

These things were always known to be immoral.

Maybe not by all of the perpetrators, but certainly by all of the victims.

Shhh bilby, you know white Americans don't like to acknowledge that blacks might have had a right to fair treatment before the state officially granted them that.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Yes to above. Americans have a real problem with this "both sides' situation. Apart from the simplification - there are more than two sides, those sides aren't Republican and Democrat, as they are one of the sides. They are both on the right-wing. The sides aren't as people claim, Republican Party/Right and Democratic Party/Left. This is itself a simplification as the Democratic Party is both on the same side (the corporationist aspect), and also one of the groups opposing the Republicans and their allies.
It is corporatism/evangelism/right-wing in an unholy alliance as one side, opposed by multi-sided many much weaker groups.

The two sides thing is at its core an attempt to obscure the role of many, many, diverse and often conflicted constituencies that make up the actual American population. No one who has ever found themselved targeted by this government - that is, most of us - really has a Party. The Parties are selected, run, and controlled by a tiny aristocratic minority class that has little interest or even need to know about the daily lives of most Americans.

That is basically what the founders wanted, although we have had times when it seemed or we were headed in a better direction. I probably posted this before, but when the founders said that all men were created equal, what they really meant was that all wealthy white men were created equal. They never included women, poor white men, aka poor white trash as labeled by the British, or minorities, including the Native tribes that were here long before the wealthy white men took over.

There have been many times when we started to head in a better direction, but with each step forward, we sadly took steps backward, but nothing has been as horrible was what we are living through now, unless you can back to the days prior tot he Civil War. Anyway, I'm sure you all know that.

Our founders were a diverse group in their own way. Some were genuine humanitarians, deeply convinced of universal human equality and potential. Others had no interest in philosophy or morality, and wanted Britain out of their affairs for purely commercial and pragmatic reasons. The former party was victorious in including some humanist language in the Constitution, and in arguing for a system of regulated amendation to define the rights of the citizen and interaction. They failed on almost all points of actual policy, and it wasn't until after the Civil War that the 14th amendment clarified what should always have been obvious: that laws mean nothing if they do not apply equally to all citizens.

Even that promise has yet to be altogether fulfilled. Slavery has never been fully abolished. The US still holds colonial properties, to which it refuses to extend full citizenship or even a reasonable level of care. The poor are not guaranteed fair treatment in the legal system. Our history education conceals more from our students than it reveals to them, as a rule.

Fortunately, there are many who would like those things to change, and in every American generation there have been small, dedicated factions still pressing the government to make the promises of the Constitution. Unfortunately, we are currently losing. To a historic degree.

Which of the founders was a true humanitarian. I've looked up which ones didn't own slaves and couldn't find any. Sure, many of not most of them gave excuses for why they owned slaves, like the economy is based on slavery or we must give the state's rights to own slaves. I've read at ;east a few books that leave me believing the founders were hypocrites. Some put in their wills that the slaves would be freed upon their death. Some supposedly had good relationships with their slaves. Imo, that doesn't make a single one of them a humanitarian.

All of them were against giving women equal rights. And, there is that book called "Poor White Trash" that explains how the British tried to get rid of all the poor white lower classes by sending them to America where most of them ended up as indentured servants. Oh wait. I just remembered another book, by Ellie Mystal, "Allow me to Retort, A Black guy's Guide to the Constitution".

Of course, these things are or were never taught to us in public school. For that matter, Columbus was considered a great hero in NJ when I was a child. We were told so many lies or false beliefs.

I don't care if the economy was based on slavery. It was disgusting to enslave people. Why couldn't they give them jobs with pay, decent food and housing etc, instead of hoarding the money for themselves and sometimes treating their enslaved people in brutal ways. I'm sure you've read the narrative of Frederick Douglas, a brilliant former slave who taught himself how to read etc. He gave details of what it was like to be a slave. Sorry, but based on my reading, the founders were not humanitarians, but if you can provide some examples of those who were, I'm listening.

Heather Cox Richardson does a great job of telling us what the origins of the country were really about. Based on her expertise, I've come to believe that the founders were always about making this country for the rich white elitists at the expense of other groups. There are some nice worded things in the constitution but it seems to be that a lot of it was bullshit. If it was meant sincerely, women, the poor, and minorities would all have been given equal rights from day one. Now, we're heading back to those days.

But, I digress. Then again, we do seem to have a problem staying on topic lately.

None of that is helpful. Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd. What culture has ever existed that didn't do horrible things??? You might as well reference ancient Sumaria, trace all the cultures it spawned, all the ones spawned by those, and then say that no one prior to today should be taken seriously because Bad Things. Or maybe citing the potential destruction of the neanderthals by Homo sapiens should be brought to bear so that the entirety of every individual of the human race may be castigated and exorcised.

Of course that would mean you too, but whatever.

Oh, and if you want more Trump, keep throwing around terms like "rich white elitists." Maybe add in "white people problems" while you're at it.

This is moral relatavism nonsense. People hundreds, indeed thousands of years, ago knew slavery was wrong. It is why Spartacus revolted.
Calling people what they are won't give us "more Trump'. Also one of his platforms was the claim that a nebulous elite was in charge and he would rid the government of their influence. The irony of course is that he was and is a member of the financial/media elite and of the establishment, not some anti-establishment hero.

Not ALL people thought slavery was wrong. Shit, not all people today think it is wrong.

Yes, some people always knew slavery was wrong. But many or most people did not. Some people knew the earth was round and rotated on its axis and circled the sun long before most people recognized this fact.

Failing to acknowledge that humanity has changed its thinking on human rights is frankly ignorant.

Your final sentence contradicts the two sentences before it. The first two sentences say that many people have not changed.
Humanity has not changed much. Many people are more enlightened, but many are not - look at MAGA.
There was enlightened thinking on human rights among many people centuries ago, and there is unenlightened thinking among many in today's world - again look at MAGA, and many nations in Middle East and Africa and elsewhere that have bad things like child soldiers, torture, genocide, and so on. USA and some other Western nations can't be excluded - denial of women's rights and body autonomy, death penalty, etcetera.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Humanity has not changed much. Many people are more enlightened, but many are not - look at MAGA.

And in this you assume all MAGA are MAGA for the same reason. Some are out of ignorance, some out of greed, and I suspect a deeper look would reveal even more reasons/excuses.


Society's morals do change over time and as the Colonel said "Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd", and it is equally absurd to expect our political apparatus to turn on a dime and fully embrace egalitarianism. This is not recognizing the world in which we live, that radical change no matter how good many may see it to be can still cause upheaval and violence.
This is the point where one must consider more than the simplicity of right and wrong and take into account the varying character traits of all whom we have to share society with. The evil abhorrent fucks of the world are not going to just sit back and say, oh well, we lost. They are going to commit acts of violence.

 

[zorq]

Moore/Coulter. It's an old II meme that hasn't been used here for a while, and I am surprised that it hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet. But yeah...

Right wing rhetoric has been more toxic for decades. Words are important. We are reaping today the crops that the Right wing propaganda machine sowed those decades ago.

 

[Toni]

Changing our minds is NOT the same thing as not having known.

Plenty of people wholeheartedly believed that the Bible endorsed slavery.

As a young child, before I had actual words to articulate it, I knew that the racism expressed by family members was reprehensible and morally wrong. Did those relatives? Based on discussions/shouting matches I had as a teen-they truly believed that black people were inferior. Later, I saw my father wrestle a tiny bit with it but it was his absolute firm belief. Even as it strained some family relationships. I could not have disagreed more.

Did he ‘know’ better? Society confirmed his beliefs.

Sure there’s often a point in childhood when one ‘knows’ Santa is a fiction and your gifts come from your parents but you still ‘believe l’ because you enjoy the magic and fantasy.

This was not how it was for my father, for instance. While of course it was ‘convenient’ for a white person to believe that there was some inborn reason that they had some tiny amount of advantage ( my father grew up dirt poor) over people who were …more heavily pigmented.

 

[southernhybrid]

Yes Politesse, that is the book I was referring too. An excellent read for those who have no idea how poor white people were treated after being sent to the US.


"The other book is probably Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash"? A very worthwhile read, especially for anyone who has their head in the sand about the nature of our racial politics."

 

[Politesse]

Sure there’s often a point in childhood when one ‘knows’ Santa is a fiction and your gifts come from your parents but you still ‘believe l’ because you enjoy the magic and fantasy.

It's not a social crisis when someone's personal cognitive dissonance results in them giving people presents. When cognitive distortions result in murder, rape, kidnapping, and forced labor, the broader community has a moral responsibility to intervene, whether or not the perpretrator "knows" that they are doing wrong. Especially since most of the people in this situation were fully aware that slavery was immoral. Abolition was not invented from whole cloth in 1861. And I'm sorry, but I feel no particular compulsion to defend your grandfather's honor either. I'm sorry, he may have been kind to you, but he was racist, and if he was "ignorant" it was the purposeful ignorance of someone who refuses to listen to a moral argument, not a genuine and earnest lack of awareness that other viewpoints existed.

 

[Politesse]

This is the point where one must consider more than the simplicity of right and wrong and take into account the varying character traits of all whom we have

How this translates to blindly hero-worshipping the Founding Fathers, and getting angry when people criticize them, eludes me. If the world is complicated now, and it is the mark of both pragmatism and maturity to admit that, what is wrong with pointing out that it was also complicated in 1783?

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Humanity has not changed much. Many people are more enlightened, but many are not - look at MAGA.

And in this you assume all MAGA are MAGA for the same reason. Some are out of ignorance, some out of greed, and I suspect a deeper look would reveal even more reasons/excuses.


Society's morals do change over time and as the Colonel said "Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd", and it is equally absurd to expect our political apparatus to turn on a dime and fully embrace egalitarianism. This is not recognizing the world in which we live, that radical change no matter how good many may see it to be can still cause upheaval and violence.
This is the point where one must consider more than the simplicity of right and wrong and take into account the varying character traits of all whom we have to share society with. The evil abhorrent fucks of the world are not going to just sit back and say, oh well, we lost. They are going to commit acts of violence.

All past humans didn't do things for the same reasons as each other, therefore your statement about MAGA actually confirms what I said.
Additionally, ignorance and greed are not enlightened, so you also agree that MAGA are not enlightened.

What is this "society" you are talking about in "Society's morals"? The world is not one society, even parts of USA are not all the same.
Societies don't have morals (except in that the individuals that make up that society often adopt certain common standards), individuals do, and those personal morals can be changed, so for instance a person can go from being "bad" to "good" or vice versa.
Projecting today's values eg anti-abortion, racism, etcetera, onto an enlightened person of 250 years ago is absurd.

Egalitarianism is not simply a political thing, but a social thing, and a product of personal morals. Many European and other societies are more egalitarian than USA as they have superior societies. Your USA society has difficulties embracing modern values because your political and justice systems are primitive compared to rest of modern world nations.

Your simplistic quotes about "right and wrong" and violence, have no connection to what I said.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

None of that is helpful. Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd. What culture has ever existed that didn't do horrible things?

None.

Including our current ones.

Humans have always been vicious hypocritical arseholes who have done horrible things to each other, and there is exactly no reason whatsoever to assume that we are suddenly different in that regard from our ancestors.

Is it really your position that we should therefore not even try to do better than they did?

Talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Your great-great-grandparents were vile hypocrites. As were mine. And as are we all. That's not an excuse to stop trying to do a little better today than we managed yesterday.

I never said we shouldn't try. I don't where you derived that from. You're inferring something that isn't there.

 

[Toni]

Sure there’s often a point in childhood when one ‘knows’ Santa is a fiction and your gifts come from your parents but you still ‘believe l’ because you enjoy the magic and fantasy.

It's not a social crisis when someone's personal cognitive dissonance results in them giving people presents. When cognitive distortions result in murder, rape, kidnapping, and forced labor, the broader community has a moral responsibility to intervene, whether or not the perpretrator "knows" that they are doing wrong. Especially since most of the people in this situation were fully aware that slavery was immoral. Abolition was not invented from whole cloth in 1861. And I'm sorry, but I feel no particular compulsion to defend your grandfather's honor either. I'm sorry, he may have been kind to you, but he was racist, and if he was "ignorant" it was the purposeful ignorance of someone who refuses to listen to a moral argument, not a genuine and earnest lack of awareness that other viewpoints existed.

My apologies for attempting to come up with an entirely non-political example.

 

[bilby]

Plenty of people wholeheartedly believed that the Bible endorsed slavery.

To be fair, that's only because it very obviously does.

 

[Toni]

The unfortunate fact is that there are those who prefer monarchy, a rich upper class to tell everyone exactly what the rules are. I personally see such people as lazy minded and not very bright people who prefer to not have to think very hard.

The US Founding Fathers certainly felt that way.

They establised an aristocratic nation, with a rich upper class to tell everyone exactly what the rules are, but with the subtle twist that the (white, male) voters got to pick a subset of aristocrats (an 'Electoral College') who would pick a new king every few years (rather than waiting for the old one to die, and then replacing him with his son).

I think some of them were less than entirely lazy minded, but certainly they chose not to think very far outside the monarchist box they had just escaped.

Not really.

It may have escaped your notice, but I was agreeing with what you said...

For their time, the Founding Fathers were quite progressive.

Perhaps. But their time sucked even worse than ours does, so that's far from praiseworthy.

If you examine the context of the times: women worldwide were not cons deemed capable of managing their own affaires. Allowing slavery in parts of the US was a compromise that it would be easy to say should never have happened.

Very easy indeed. And back then, it was easy too - and lots of people were saying it.

Certainly we today would so argue. But it appeared to be the cost of unity—and unity was necessary to stand against Britain.

Ahh. They were forced to be total assholes by circumstance. Such an excellent excuse that we still use it to this very day.

I would argue that the US founding fathers had a more wide reaching vision of their newborn country that did Australia or any other nation at the time and for years after.

Australia didn't exist as a country until 1901, so that claim isn't coherent.

We rejected the crown outright.

No, you absolutely did not. You just changed the name of your ruler from "king" to "president".

As current events are making increasingly clear.

Under US law, states oversee ejections at the local, state and federal law.

And it's working so well that MAGA has taken control of most states, and all of federal government.

Shortly after the Constitution was adopted, property ownership was rejected in some states as early as 1792, it was finally eliminated totally in 1856.

I have to assume that this is not what you intended to say; AFAICS property ownership was, and remains, remains a key element of the US political environment.

Extending voting rights to non-whites and to women came later. Of course we think those rights should have extended to all US citizens who had reached the age of 21 ( and now 18) from the beginning.

And again, we are in agreement.

But that was not how the world worked even for forward facing new countries.

It could have been; The Founding Fathers were literally in the business of deciding how the world would work (or at least, how the USA would work).

Your comment seems like criticizing the Wright Brothers for not inventing jets.

Not at all.

Your comments seem like a knee-jerk patriotic defence of untenable national myths.

Wanting your country to improve is morally justified. Wanting it to have been better in the past than it actually was is reasonable, despite being unachievable. Pretending that it actually was better in the past, when it clearly wasn't, is both factually wrong, and morally hazardous.

It's the difference between wanting to make America great, and wanting to Make America Great Again. That 'again' demands a bunch of nonsensical and untrue beliefs about America having been great at some poorly defined point in the past. No country in history has yet achieved greatness, as defined by treating everyone in a moral and ethical fashion.

Of course, if you conflate meanings, you can achieve a lot of dangerous self-congratulation; "Our country is great" might mean "Our country refuses to mistreat human beings", but it might also mean "Our country has the power to destroy anyone who says anything mean about it". The British Empire claimed to be "great" in the latter sense, but the Founding Fathers had at least the wit to refuse to accept the British conflation of those two meanings of "great".

You seem to have your own mythology about the founding of the United States so I will leave you to it.

 

[bilby]

None of that is helpful. Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd. What culture has ever existed that didn't do horrible things?

None.

Including our current ones.

Humans have always been vicious hypocritical arseholes who have done horrible things to each other, and there is exactly no reason whatsoever to assume that we are suddenly different in that regard from our ancestors.

Is it really your position that we should therefore not even try to do better than they did?

Talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Your great-great-grandparents were vile hypocrites. As were mine. And as are we all. That's not an excuse to stop trying to do a little better today than we managed yesterday.

I never said we shouldn't try. I don't where you derived that from. You're inferring something that isn't there.

You implied that people 250 years ago should get a pass from us because their culture did horrible things as a matter of course.

If you accept (as you apparently do) that people today live in a culture that does horrible things as a matter of course, then it follows logically that you think people today should also get a pass from us.

 

[Elixir]

People have changed. More than once.
Egalitarian civilizations existed thousands of years ago. Tyranny seems to correlate with population densities. It’s no coincidence that Europeans settling in North America took such pride in “individual freedom”. It wasn’t even a problem to kill some indigenous people if they got in your way, but mostly there were just millions of square miles teeming with natural resources, there for the taking. Yay freedom!

 

[Bomb#20]

Which of the founders was a true humanitarian. I've looked up which ones didn't own slaves and couldn't find any.

Among the famous founders, just Thomas Paine, Samuel Huntington, and the Adams family. Also of course plenty of obscure figures -- Wikipedia says fifteen signers of the DoI didn't own any slaves.

Samuel Adams would be a better example, as he was a life-long abolitionist and used his influence as a business leader to discourage slavery in his nascent state.

The exception that proves the rule. Sam Adams received a slave as a gift. He freed her immediately.

This is moral relatavism nonsense. People hundreds, indeed thousands of years, ago knew slavery was wrong. It is why Spartacus revolted.

This is anachronism nonsense. Spartacus revolted because being a slave sucks. There's no record of Spartacus raising any objection to the enslavement of anyone besides himself and his own followers. Not wanting something for yourself in no way means you don't want it for others -- you might as well argue that every soldier who tries not to get killed knows war is wrong. The normal attitude toward slavery in ancient times was that it was a personal misfortune. There was no abolitionist movement; nobody even spoke out against it but a few scattered weirdos. The Persian Empire had laws against it, true; but they only prohibited enslaving Zoroastrians.

These things were always known to be immoral.

Maybe not by all of the perpetrators, but certainly by all of the victims.

There's a long list of former slaves who became slaveowners, in ancient times, in antebellum America, and elsewhere. Cicero famously observed "A slave dreams not of freedom, but of his own slaves." No doubt some of these were as hypocritical as Thomas Jefferson; but others undoubtedly absorbed the popular attitude of their times that slavery was fine as a practice and it was only sensible to want to be on the dishing out end rather than on the receiving end.

To my mind, the true test of whether some dead guys knew it was wrong is whether they lied about the reasons for it. The ancient Spartans ritually declared war on their slaves every year for hundreds of years after the original war, to perpetuate the fiction that the practice was still about war and not exploitation. During the Atlantic slave trade era, slaves were treated better or worse in the receiving countries according to how expensive or cheap they were to replace by kidnapping more Africans; that would not have been the case if any of their proffered justifications were their real reasons. So yeah, most of those perpetrators have to have known it was wrong.

But the more important point is that all the perpetrators should have known it was wrong.

 

[Toni]

None of that is helpful. Projecting today's values onto people some 250 years ago is absurd. What culture has ever existed that didn't do horrible things?

None.

Including our current ones.

Humans have always been vicious hypocritical arseholes who have done horrible things to each other, and there is exactly no reason whatsoever to assume that we are suddenly different in that regard from our ancestors.

Is it really your position that we should therefore not even try to do better than they did?

Talk about making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Your great-great-grandparents were vile hypocrites. As were mine. And as are we all. That's not an excuse to stop trying to do a little better today than we managed yesterday.

I never said we shouldn't try. I don't where you derived that from. You're inferring something that isn't there.

You implied that people 250 years ago should get a pass from us because their culture did horrible things as a matter of course.

If you accept (as you apparently do) that people today live in a culture that does horrible things as a matter of course, then it follows logically that you think people today should also get a pass from us.

I recognize that in today’s world, people do horrible things, as they have always done, and often far, far worse than what is happening on a widespread scale today.

These horrible things are far from confined to the US. I am passingly acquainted with the history of colonization, misogyny, and racism in Australia, in the past and what is happening today. For one example. But there are many many examples all over the world of terrible things being done in the name of ( insert excuse) .

For the most part, things have improved. Most people recognize that slavery is bad, that racism is bad, that rape is bad. Lots more people oppose wars of all kinds. Not everyone recognizes that these are bad if it benefits them.