DeSantis signs bill requiring FL students, professors to register political views with state

[Jarhyn]

I think eating beef is not good for the environment but eat it anyway. IMO, we all can have our little character flaws, and do not have to try to be saints. Trying to be saints has turned many places into hells of a sort. OTOH, there are minor character flaws and major ones. Treating people like property was a major flaw. Also, one can be progressive for one's time, and later have the same POVs viewed as regressive. Maybe we should judge people based on their times and the social standards that prevailed during their times.

There's an idea in my head, half-formed. Essentially, "judgement is a fool's errand."

I fully understand there are as Swammerdami points out a number of things about life in our era which even today I find reprehensible, but also inescapable. Eating meat is one of those things.

We can not only judge the past by the standards of today but judge today by the standards of the future, because anyone with half a brain can mostly already see what many, though not all, of those standards will be.

Really, though, it's a fool's errand to say "this person violated" or "this person didn't".

Instead, we should ask "how hard did this person work to identify rather than justify their violations, and minimize them where they could?"

That's all we can ask of anyone is to put in the work that can be expected of them to improve.

Indeed, the destination is entirely unattainable and to try too hard to attain it too quickly or too completely will only ever result, as you say, in pain.

Edit: as Gospel points out, though, I'm pretty sure MOST of us have in fact been able to avoid raping folks.

Even so, go back far enough and rape was commonplace, and indeed it could be easy to be born into a situation where it is inevitable that someone would be required to rape someone else. As awful and tragic as that is, I would as soon prefer to judge folks on how they learned to resist evil, both from within and suggestions from their peers.

 

[lostone]

I concur that it makes good sense to acknowledge the degree to which any person tried to minimize their moral shortcomings. IMO, there are no saints. I eat meat, but I acknowledge the moral issues it brings, as well as the environmental issues it leads to. If and when vat grown meat can be produced as a substitute, I will support it. The same goes for seafood farms. And population control.

 

[bilby]

In the late 1700's, the cotton gin was created. Actually an old technology known from India but improved and soon improved beyond Eli Whitney's design. A slave cleaning cotton by hand might at most clean 2 pounds a day. Soon, by the early 1800's with a gin, hundreds of pounds could be cleaned in a day. Cotton became cheap and in Europe, in demand for making cloth. Production of cotton rose by several orders of magnitude. But to do that needed slaves to plant cotton, pick cotton, man the gins and do farming to feed slaves. Slavery became big business. Not so important in Northern states that were not cotton growing states. American slavery was cruel chattel slavery. Pre cotton gin, slavery was moribund in America. Political crisis came about as slave owning states tried to expand slavery to territories, and Northern states tried to ban slavery.

Context, context, context!. History, history, history! Banned on order of GOP politicians in schools, because "CRT! CRT! Cultural Marxism! Oh Noes!".

Indeed, a large part of the reason why Caribbean and South American slavery was bigger than North American slavery was that sugar plantations were big business before (and during) the time that cotton plantations became big business.

Farming sugar cane, before mechanised cane harvesters were invented, was one of the worst jobs in history; Few would do it voluntarily.

 

[bilby]

And this folks, is how History should be taught (when age appropriate of course). Not in a way that woke white America wants to hear it. such as "Jefferson was a founding father that drafted the Declaration of Independence, .. The end" But the full story, Jefferson was a founding father who not only drafted the Declaration of Independence, but also owned slaves and raped a young girl.

You can't teach children things like that, it flies in the face of the certainty that society can be neatly divided between 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.

The entire American self identity, legal system, economic system, and political system would become unrecognisably changed if people were to lose that anchor.

Next you will be telling us that folks in the old west didn't pick what colour hat to buy based on whether they were a hero or a villain.

 

[bilby]

I concur that it makes good sense to acknowledge the degree to which any person tried to minimize their moral shortcomings. IMO, there are no saints. I eat meat, but I acknowledge the moral issues it brings, as well as the environmental issues it leads to. If and when vat grown meat can be produced as a substitute, I will support it. The same goes for seafood farms. And population control.

Population control is assuredly evil. Ask the Chinese.

 

[Jarhyn]

And this folks, is how History should be taught (when age appropriate of course). Not in a way that woke white America wants to hear it. such as "Jefferson was a founding father that drafted the Declaration of Independence, .. The end" But the full story, Jefferson was a founding father who not only drafted the Declaration of Independence, but also owned slaves and raped a young girl.

You can't teach children things like that, it flies in the face of the certainty that society can be neatly divided between 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.

The entire American self identity, legal system, economic system, and political system would become unrecognisably changed if people were to lose that anchor.

Next you will be telling us that folks in the old west didn't pick what colour hat to buy based on whether they were a hero or a villain.

In fact, I have a dark gray stetson and a sand colored stetson. I have one of each.

I couldn't imagine wanting a white hat or a black hat, though. Too bright/hot.

Heresy, I know.

 

[lostone]

I concur that it makes good sense to acknowledge the degree to which any person tried to minimize their moral shortcomings. IMO, there are no saints. I eat meat, but I acknowledge the moral issues it brings, as well as the environmental issues it leads to. If and when vat grown meat can be produced as a substitute, I will support it. The same goes for seafood farms. And population control.

Population control is assuredly evil. Ask the Chinese.

Future generations may wish we had imposed more population control.

 

[lostone]

Do we teach history, or mythology, propaganda? If we teach history, then we acknowledge that we come from a flawed past with flawed leaders.

 

[lostone]

The historical question of what is right and what is wrong is interesting in itself. I once got into a hot discussion with a high school AP history teacher who defended Ghenghis Khan against my negative view of him. Ghenghis was responsible for as many as 40 million deaths. This history teacher maintained that Ghenghis brought 200 years of peace to a troubled area.

 

[bilby]

The historical question of what is right and what is wrong is interesting in itself. I once got into a hot discussion with a high school AP history teacher who defended Ghenghis Khan against my negative view of him. Ghenghis was responsible for as many as 40 million deaths. This history teacher maintained that Ghenghis brought 200 years of peace to a troubled area.

Authoritarian regimes are often very safe and peaceful, at least for those not declared to be enemies of the regime.

In 1930s Germany, the Kripo saw dramatically decreased workload, and even the Orpo saw a decline in petty offences. But the Gestapo were very busy indeed (to the point where they grew until they absorbed the Kripo, whose work had become increasingly political in scope, in 1939 to form SiPo).

A similar thing happened in the UK in the early 1940s, as wartime measures dramatically reduced public freedoms, with an associated drop in crime (though some of that was due to criminals being drafted to the armed forces), but a large uptick in political and espionage investigations by domestic agencies with only very limited oversight and very significant powers to arrest people on pretexts that wouldn't have been allowed before the outbreak of war. Indeed, it was this sharp move towards authoritarianism in the name of national security (and it's failure to revert to the status quo after 1945) that inspired George Orwell's 1984.

 

[bilby]

I concur that it makes good sense to acknowledge the degree to which any person tried to minimize their moral shortcomings. IMO, there are no saints. I eat meat, but I acknowledge the moral issues it brings, as well as the environmental issues it leads to. If and when vat grown meat can be produced as a substitute, I will support it. The same goes for seafood farms. And population control.

Population control is assuredly evil. Ask the Chinese.

Future generations may wish we had imposed more population control.

Maybe, but almost certainly not, so why worry about that in particular? There are a vast number of more important and obvious things we can do to avoid their future wishes that we had acted differently.

After all, "Population" and "future generations" are different ways of saying the same damn thing. It's like all the bad stuff in my country's history being done by "European settlers", and all the good stuff by "Early Australians", who turn out to both be the exact same group of people. The European settlers slaughtered the aborigines; The Early Australians built the infrastructure we use today. Population is bad, but future generations need our care and protection.

 

[lostone]

I'm not even sure history judges people - maybe history merely records their actions, and it is people who judge people.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I concur that it makes good sense to acknowledge the degree to which any person tried to minimize their moral shortcomings. IMO, there are no saints. I eat meat, but I acknowledge the moral issues it brings, as well as the environmental issues it leads to. If and when vat grown meat can be produced as a substitute, I will support it. The same goes for seafood farms. And population control.

Population control is assuredly evil. Ask the Chinese.

But there are ethical ways to do it.

 

[Gun Nut]

Do we teach history, or mythology, propaganda? If we teach history, then we acknowledge that we come from a flawed past with flawed leaders.

We teach to the age of the student. Just like we do not get into the complexities of irrational numbers in 4th grade, or teach sex education in Kindergarten, we also do not teach the horrors of war or the intricacies of what morality is at that age. Education comes in layers, the first layer being the most simplistic explanation of something.

 

[Bomb#20]

Slavery in Brazil had no impact on the death toll in America, nor the following reconstruction and then Jim Crow rule of law.

... We did not violently seize Florida because we wanted its beaches to relax on. We wanted its wealth, and that wealth was contingent on the brutal mistreatement of its human capital. Indeed, the proximate causus belli with Florida was that our escaped African and Seminiole slaves were disappearing into their territory, providing Andrew Jackson with his pretext for invading the peninsula.

And how did the relative treatment of slaves in Brazil affect this?

If Brazilian slavers had treated slaves better they'd have bought fewer, so the slave ships would have sailed further in search of markets and offered more kidnapped Africans for sale in the American colonies, driving down the price here. This would have reduced both the incentive for Jackson to seize Florida and the incentive for American slavers not to murder slaves.

 

[Bomb#20]

To clear things up, the 1820 census states that of the 9.6 million US population (can't use the word citizen really), 1.5 million were slaves, or about 16% (1 in 6).

I think Bomb#20 brings up some good points, but also lacks remembering there is only so much time in US History, to be teaching broader World History... of which there is generally a class for that too, where global slave trade can become a valuable thing. Were slaves in the US treated better than in Haiti. Most certainly yes. How important is this though? Bomb#20 wants to go deep on slave trade economics when there is limited time to actually get that deep into subjects. We didn't really even delve into that level of minutia in US History AP, and that class delved much deeper than the regular standard level US History class.

Effectively, alt-right'ers want to teach the Civil War wasn't just fought over slavery. And Bomb#20 is complaining that liberals aren't going deep enough into the minutia of global slave trade economics.

This is not broader world history; it is not "going deep"; it is not "minutia"; and the people I'm complaining about are not liberals. The point I am making is fundamental to understanding the institution of slavery as practiced in America, and it could be covered at an elementary school level in about 15 minutes of class time.

How cruelly or mildly slaves were treated depended on how much they cost to replace. This observation gives the lie to all the customary rationalizations pro-slavery people used to defend the practice. It wasn't about bringing Africans the benefit of Christianity, or about saving them from nasty, brutal and short lives of savagery in Africa, or about their being child-like creatures for whom freedom would be the same as abandonment, or even about their being unworthy of freedom due to racial inferiority. If those had been the reasons for enslaving Africans then slave-owners would have treated them pretty much the same regardless of where they were shipped to. It follows that the slavers' motive was to get unpaid labor, pure and simple.

So Politesse's analogy of mob capos was spot on. When mafia bosses can steal more by extorting, they extort; when they can steal more by murdering, they murder. Slavers made the exact same calculation. So slavers were not benighted ignorants who didn't have the benefit of our more enlightened perspective; slavers were not followers of the traditional practices of a vanished culture that other cultures aren't equipped to judge; slavers were just common criminals.

 

[Bomb#20]

My post wasn't meant to be that realistic, more instead about the behavior, intent and direction of the Reich-wing. A major hurdle is the teachers' union in that regard, but those safeguards like a union and the left are also things Bomb#20 screams about while being too dismissive of draconian move after draconian move by GOP policy and legislation. So I think the post is a fair expression.

Why did you write that? Can you quote me screaming about safeguards like a union? Did you mix me up with some other poster who screamed about unions because although your ingroup are all individuals, your outgroup are all interchangeable parts? Or did you just completely fabricate the charge that I'm against unions out of whole cloth because you like unions and you hate me?

Ah well, I guess I should be glad that at least the opinion you made up and imputed to me wasn't racism this time.

 

[laughing dog]

Why did you write that? Can you quote me screaming about safeguards like a union? Did you mix me up with some other poster who screamed about unions because although your ingroup are all individuals, your outgroup are all interchangeable parts? Or did you just completely fabricate the charge that I'm against unions out of whole cloth because you like unions and you hate me?

Chill out. It was parody. And a pretty good likeness, as your ridiculous mini-explosion shows.

 

[laughing dog]

Slavery in Brazil had no impact on the death toll in America, nor the following reconstruction and then Jim Crow rule of law.

... We did not violently seize Florida because we wanted its beaches to relax on. We wanted its wealth, and that wealth was contingent on the brutal mistreatement of its human capital. Indeed, the proximate causus belli with Florida was that our escaped African and Seminiole slaves were disappearing into their territory, providing Andrew Jackson with his pretext for invading the peninsula.

And how did the relative treatment of slaves in Brazil affect this?

If Brazilian slavers had treated slaves better they'd have bought fewer, so the slave ships would have sailed further in search of markets and offered more kidnapped Africans for sale in the American colonies, driving down the price here. This would have reduced both the incentive for Jackson to seize Florida and the incentive for American slavers not to murder slaves.

As usual you missed the point. I did not ask about the hypothesized effects of better treatment of slaves in Brazil but the effect of the actual treatment of slaves in Brazil on slaves in the US.

 

[crazyfingers]

I am trying hard to imagine what i would do as a college student. It's frankly beyond reality that I could have been asked this. Besides, young adults change so much in college. It's a moving target.

But depending on the fine print my response on how I would answer these questions 40 years ago tend toward "fuck off and die" to "screw yourself with a 2-inch bit power drill" for all questions. I cared about my freedom of thought then as much as I do now. Fuck em.