Slaves?

Oh.

From my reading about the two of them re the topic, most of which has admittedly occurred in the last week, Benjamin Franklin is much more morally questionable as a slaveholder than U. S. Grant. (of course Franklin was born more than a century earlier)

Grant did briefly own one slave he freed years before the war; but as a general he smashed the Confederacy, and as president he crushed the Klan. He presided over the ratification of the 15th Amendment. People going after Grant probably just want to break things. https://t.co/rVtPOcvyAN

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) June 20, 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Slavery

and those monuments/museums to Washington and Jefferson aren't going anywhere soon (although Monticello's tours have gotten a lot more 'nuanced' apparently)

This revive demonstrates why, when System offers me a choice of existing threads I may want to append my post to instead of starting a new thread, I just ignore any options I don't recognize. Whoever wrote the manifesto quoted at the start of this thread is probably deep into QAnon by now.

btw, I agree about U.S. Grant. He was about as racist as the average American of the time, but he was no proponent of slavery.

I don't endorse the attached tweet, just was most useful for where I found the debate occurring

I just got into an argument with someone about James Marion Sims, "father of modern gynecology" who medically "experimented" on slaves, bc she was saying he was the same as Joseph Mengele. I thought that was a pretty morally questionable claim, since Sims was actually trying to cure people but did it under ethically questionable circumstances, whereas Mengele both tortured people for no reason and helped choose prisoners for the gas chambers. Nuances like that, which are pretty big nuances, can get lost in the fury, and sometimes it doesn't feel worth arguing over (do I really want to spend any energy defending a slave doctor who didn't use anesthetic on his patients because he wasn't Mengele?) but, you know, he wasn't Mengele. Sims also claimed he didn't use anesthetic bc of the risks of anesthetic compared to the risks of fistula, the condition he was treating. I'm sure his medical ethics were informed by racism, but he wasn't a mass murderer or sadistic torturer afaict.

fuck your nuances, wtf are you trying to do?

also fuck genocidal mass murderer grant and his defenders, death to america

there was a good piece in the latest new yorker about mengele:

He pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses but rather in a manner that his mentor and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards. . . . The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something even more unsettling. Mengele was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field. The science he pursued in Auschwitz, to the extent that we can reconstruct it, was not anomalous but rather consistent with research carried out by others in what was considered to be the scientific establishment.

death to America

the school shooters have been doing their level best, but there are only so many hours in a day

xp, Mordy I think that still elides the huge difference between "experimenting" in trying to cure someone of an incurable and painful condition vs heartfelt commitment to wiping out an entire ethno-religious group.

why are you pursuing this line now

perhaps he doesn't fall in line with 'fuck nuances, death to America' and wishes to discuss nuances

let's make a statue of Left, it will be the first one people shit on

I suppose if someone thinks a settler colonial shithole country based on slavery and genocide is defensible it’s not surprising they would want to downplay racialised sexual violence in the name of science

I don't think that's at all the point of that piece, which is partly that Nazi antisemitism wasn't really "aberrant" in the Europe of the time, and was carried out by respected professionals in their fields.

revive as a semi defence of man who massacred indigenous people followed by a semi defence of sexualised-racialised scientific brutality and I’m the bad guy here?

That was an xp

mine too the piece is fine

... and I’m the bad guy here?

Try to imagine a political conversation with disagreements of various shades in which no one is "the bad guy", only differing points of view. Then maybe you'll be less panicked when someone is critical your position.

this has me re-visiting "5" and finding an even deeper appreciation of it. the lyrics to "foot on necks" certainly stick out in a way they didn't the last time i heard it.

w0w

fuck i'm sorry

he wasn't a mass murderer or sadistic torturer afaict.

I thought this was a good overview: https://rewire.news/article/2017/08/24/statue-rethinking-j-marion-sims-legacy/

please replace "okay with" with "plenty happy to see the long overdue opportunity to enact"

“Nuance” is just a dressed up version of “he was a man of his taaaaahms” bullshit.

Too often just*

“Nuance” is just a dressed up version of “he was a man of his taaaaahms” bullshit.

We are always enmeshed in our times and our surrounding culture. If that is bullshit in your view, then you are just selectively blind to your own situation. Just about every culture on earth whose economic system could benefit from enslaved workers has practiced slavery, as opposed to subsistence cultures for whom another set of hands to work was more than offset by acquiring another mouth to feed.

The particular form of chattel slavery practiced in the Western Hemisphere by various colonizers from Europe happens to be one of the most brutal and inhumane variations on this nearly universal theme of history, but it was not really an anomaly in the broad history of humanity, whether of colonizers, indigenous or people of color.

This doesn't excuse or belittle its brutality, but it does lend a recognizable framework for what you are calling “he was a man of his taaaaahms” bullshit. You are not that different, broheem. You just don't seem to think it matters.

We are always enmeshed in our times and our surrounding culture.

And yet millions of people for hundreds of years had known chattel slavery was an abomination by the middle of the 19th century.

History books can place Grant and Sims in context, properly highlighting their crimes, their statues can go to hell.

As I said elsewhere, each generation can choose who they honor and how they honor them, so as to reflect their own ideals. There is no reason to honor Grant or Sims as heroes, if contemporary judgment says they are no longer worthy of societal honor. Times change and the world belongs to the living, as Thomas Jefferson (slave owner) was fond of saying.

imo, simply branding Grant as a criminal, even though he knowingly played a central, pivotal role in the war that emancipated all the slaves in the Confederate states, is to willingly play the part of a simpleton in regard to history. Your purist viewpoint may prevail, but only because there are plenty of simpletons around to agree with you.

Aimless otm

I mean, yes, tear down the statue by all means. We don’t need a statue of someone who symbolizes any level of medical disregard or dehumanization of black people. And yet we can tear down the statue without flattening history and deciding that everything associated with any level of badness belongs on the same trash heap of badness.

And yet we can tear down the statue without flattening history and deciding that everything associated with any level of badness belongs on the same trash heap of badness.

You're doing the "history flattening."

The key to your argument is that Sims was "actually trying to cure people" - but not the slaves he used for medical experimentation. They were lab rats, expendable. Sims did not, as I understand it, continue operating pro bono on enslaved women once his fistula technique was successful.

As mordy's article points out, Mengele (and other Nazi scientists) weren't just serial killers, they thought they were real scientists. The comparison of the two isn't insane.

tearing down a statue of grant is fucking stupid and the only ppl seriously trying to justify it are idiots

“As mordy's article points out, Mengele (and other Nazi scientists) weren't just serial killers,“

But they were serial killers. Sims wasn’t.

J.D. otm

is everyone pretending to ignore grant’s active participation in genocide or what

do people actually not know or is it just too painful to acknowledge whose land they’re occupying

since no one listens to me

Grant wasn’t the president of the land where I was born. Many of our people were still free. His “permanent peace” by genocide policy resulted in Native massacres, mass land theft, & the legal precedent of permanent US war — ie, the Modoc War & Geronimo’s hunt & capture.

— Nick Estes (@nick_w_estes) June 21, 2020

also the continuing sims apologism is beyond repulsive & deserves a way harsher response

given that the protesters also defaced a statue of miguel de cervantes, i'm guessing they didn't have any deep justifications for knocking down grant besides "hey, knocking down stuff is fun"

nice condescension. why shouldn’t people deface the cultural symbols of colonial occupiers? and have fun doing it?

god you're stupid

fuck you and your colonial ideology and great man fetish

hey we can't all have the ability to mind-read strangers

maybe these animals are just engaging in mindless thuggery, right J.D.?

maybe Left thinks this is his twitter acct?

maybe these animals are just engaging in mindless thuggery, right J.D.?

― never mind that shit, here comes scampo (Noodle Vague), Monday, June 22, 2020 12:34 PM (six minutes ago)

it's really pretty shitty of you to imply that i would ever say this, but hey i guess that's the wonderful world of the internet in 2020

Per the Morbs revive post, I was reading the first Library of America collection of Franklin's writing a while back, which (IIRC) featured, pretty much back-to-back, an unpublished argument for abolition and a letter where he offhandedly mentions having recently acquired one or more slaves. It was deeply demoralizing to read but also felt pretty emblematic of America's penchant for compartmentalizing their cognitive dissonance.

Can't believe we blindly stumbled without moral compass for twenty years. I for one am glad we finally have an upright ilx user telling us, once and for all, who should fuck off etc.

J.D. tbf i said it in the shittiest way possible and for that i apologise.

i *do* think there's only a difference of degree in "they didn't have any deep justifications for knocking down grant besides "hey, knocking down stuff is fun"" and that line of argument tho

you're making assumptions about protester's actions, everybody who wasn't there is making assumptions about protester's actions, what's telling to me is the kind of assumptions you make

Do you guys ever wonder why more Black people don’t post here?

(xxp) Upright or uptight?

Do you guys ever wonder why more Black people don’t post here?

Lately I mostly wonder why anyone does.

It’s a fair question

thx milo for your support, u can join Bernie on my shitlist

nearly every white American born before 1850 was pro-genocide

i'm fine with zero statues

NV -- i appreciate that, and yes that is fair. i was being way too glib.

really, sorry for being a dick about it

Adam Serwer is good but even if his argument is correct can you really blame people for breaking all of these statues at this moment?

NV otm.

In retrospect, I regret the Sims apology and take it back -- I was just bothered by the Mengele comparison but I don't consider Sims defensible in any way