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We shouldn't, but sometimes it's necessary to refute the wingnuts on every possible angle. Like the whole "Christian Nation" thing. You could respond that it matters gently caress all whether the guys who wrote the laws 200 years ago thought the legal system revolved around Christianity, because we make and interpret our laws for the present day, but rather than going in that direction, you can just point out, with sources, how completely wrong and backwards their claim about the founding fathers opinion on the subject is in the first place. I suppose it's giving in to the wingnuts' logic, but it's just so easy. ToxicSlurpee posted:The right doesn't give a poo poo what the Founders actually wanted. Also this. Does anyone think the Far Right actually cares (or knows, since the Far Right has shown again and again that their knowledge of history is abysmal) if the United States in the past was really some quasi-theocracy like they claim? No, they want a quasi-theocracy now, their "It was this way in the past, we swear!" attitude is just to try and pass their ideology off as conservatism, when it should really be described as a type of right-wing radicalism. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 10:53 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 18, 2014 10:38
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:35 |
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The most reprehensible thing I find about Thomas Jefferson, apart from him raping that slave woman, is how his views got progressively more pro-slavery as he got older, inherited more slaves, and sank deeper into debt because of his own extravagant spending. Like, he could rail against the evils of slavery when he was young, but once he started benefiting more personally from the fruits of slave labor, suddenly it was no longer as evil. Makes me dislike him even more than I think I would had he been a diehard slavery defender his whole life. Oh, and people like to defend Jefferson by calling him "a product of his time." gently caress that. Jefferson lived in an age where abolition was more talked about than ever, and where some of his fellow Founding Fathers freed their slaves, and three of them even became involved in abolitionist societies. Jefferson really had absolutely no excuse.
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May 21, 2014 01:19
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Last Buffalo posted:I wouldn't consider Jefferson particularly evil for his time. A lot of the founding fathers owned slaves and people who owned slaves were big on loving them. He's not some special case. it's more that his other qualities were quite remarkable and the slave poo poo really is in sharp contrast to that. I addressed this upthread. Yes, many of the other founding fathers owned slaves. But some of them freed those slaves. I don't give George Washington a lot of slack, he owned slaves his entire life, but he at least did slightly better than Jefferson by freeing them upon his death, and not selling or buying any more slaves after the 1770s. Jefferson couldn't even do that, wouldn't even free them after he would no longer derive any benefit from them. Oh, and of other founding fathers, Franklin and John Jay freed their slaves (during their lifetimes), Hamilton never owned slaves, and those three were active in anti-slavery societies. Jefferson probably lived during a Southern political climate that was more open to the idea of abolition than at any other time before the civil war, and he continued to own slaves, treat them brutally, and even, as has been mentioned upthread, tried to dissuade men of his exact same region and social class from from freeing their own slaves. There's no real excuse for him. Yes, Jefferson does and should get a lot of credit for the separation of church and state stuff, but he was an awful person.
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May 21, 2014 05:26
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Pretty sure America has killed more natives than Hitler killed Jews. The primary reasons Hitler is so vilified is because he was our enemy and he was the most recent genocidal maniac we fought in a major war. Yes, he was among the worst but Stalin was arguably even more terrible, but Stalin was our bro...... I understand what you're trying to say, but holy poo poo, do some research before making claims like this. There weren't 20 million people in North America the year Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Most Native American tribes, by the time diseases had taken their toll, consisted of less than 10,000 people by the time they started being invaded by white settlers, that's why they had so little chance of resisting. Tallying up all the deaths tolls from every US-Indian war (and the US Army had no reason to underestimate kill numbers, they were often proud of how many "savages" had been killed during a given battle), and even including the Trail of Tears, it is unlikely that the US Army could have killed any more than 20,000 American Indians during the entire history of the United States. I'm not trying to excuse what happened to Native Americans, because tens of thousands of people died and entire cultures were wiped out, but the scale was not comparable to the Holocaust, and it happened over a period of more than 100 years, not 12. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 06:09 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 06:07
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ToxicSlurpee posted:So what you're saying is that anybody walking down the street that wants to punch you square in the face has every right to do so because, gently caress it, who cares, people get punched in the face all the time? I want to make sure I understand where you stand on these issues because I know of a lot of faces that I think need punching. No, but if most everyone went around punching people in the face with brass knuckles it'd be slightly different. Although if we really want the analogy to be accurate, only minorities could be punched, and this would be part of a greater longstanding tradition of smashing in the faces of certain classes of people, which was only now coming under question, with some people declaring themselves avowed anti-punchers. Also, while traditionally it had been acceptable for Christians to punch any non-Christians in the face repeatedly with brass knuckles, with Christians being exempt from such treatment, a new paradigm had emerged during the last century where strangely, only people of a certain group could be punched repeatedly with brass knuckles, regardless of their religion, and punching non-Christians not part of the designated punching group was no longer lawful. This was justified by certain members of the upper class of punchers stating that the group in question were in fact better off and in better health being punched in the face with brass knuckles by them. ....I have no idea why I wrote all that, but it's the middle of the night.
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May 23, 2014 10:59
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Slanderer posted:I think it was mentioned in passing in school that it wasn't uncommon for indentured servants to be used for the particularly dangerous work in crappy malarial swamps, since slaves weren't generally a disposable investment. The indentured Irish, though, totally were (it didn't help that they weren't considered "white" back then). Irish Indentured servants died in droves in the malaria-ridden Caribbean and southern mainland colonies, but the ones who survived generally worked their way up as white overseers and managers, and their descendents became part of the slave-owning class, especially in the Caribbean. The sort of stuff that's became popular recently about Irish laborers in the 17th century being treated just as badly as slaves on plantations were is way overblown.
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May 23, 2014 13:07
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 17:35 |
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How many people was Thomas Jefferson actually responsible for killing? I started out near the start of this thread talking about how awful Jefferson was, but I think it's been derailed by hyperbole.
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May 25, 2014 22:58
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