TIL: Today I Learned

[Arakhor]

If it wasn't for the occasional meat eating, I'd be God's gift to the environment then.

 

[Birdjaguar]

They certainly are not. Your subsequent elucidation of your position, quoted below, is incorrect. I can't imagine how I can be clearer.


I'm sorry, but I think that this is word salad and a very long way away from what the original topic was - or indeed anything else we've been talking about.

The topic under discussion started when two forumites pointed out that some dead men that they had originally liked and respected did disappointing things, too. You dragged that into the related-but-not-quite-the-same topic of "why judge people in the past by modern standards?" You built off it to describe your, um, give-everybody-from-the-past-a-number rating system, which is...well, it's very nice, and good for you, but it's a long way away from any point anybody else was trying to make. I get that you think that these things are all actually the same discussion, but they aren't, and your decision to shift the terms of the discussion over to what you want to talk about rather than what people have actually said is very frustrating to me.

Throughout, it's easy to notice a shift in the terms of the discussion with each of your responses. When TeeKay pointed out that using modern standards to talk about the dead is useful when dissuading modern people from being okay with the things that they did, you started talking about "influence" - nobody said anything about influence - and "value added" - also never discussed. In fact, nobody had even started to talk about their overall appreciation for any of the people under discussion yet. MagCult didn't say, "welp, now that I know that about Calvin Coolidge, a man I used to admire, I now hate him and think that everything he did was awful, and also he wasn't an important person in history or anything". Phrossack didn't say that about Teddy Roosevelt, either. You brought all of those assumptions in yourself. You're basically monologuing, and it doesn't matter if the post you're responding to is tangential at best to your point - you'll make it anyway.

What drew me into this discussion was the bit on standards. I'm mostly here because I feel very strongly that many of the times people claim that it's okay to write off horrible things that dead people did because it was supposedly morally acceptable at the time, those people are wrong. Those assertions are founded on a deeply flawed understanding of the past and an outright disrespectful attitude toward the dead. I am all for recognizing context and the sorts of choices that the people of the past would plausibly have made. It is often the thing that I choose to speak up about on the Internet in history discussions. Some of my favorite books and authors deal with approaching the choices that dead people made on their own terms, on subjects as disparate as late antique Rome and the Battle of Midway. And it's why I keep hammering away on this point.

I'm not here to talk about legacies or overall evaluations or your Gesamtnoten für berühmte Männer. My concern is that you are blithely waving your hands and saying "welp, it was just the way it was back then, no big deal, it's okay if I think this guy that did some awful things was still great". I don't really care what your overall opinion is of (insert whatever guy). What I care about is the "it was just the way it was back then". Not only does it turn an is into a should, it ignores the contemporaries who did not do that thing and, in fact, thought that it was horrible.

I'm not the one who mentioned the term "objectively evil", so I'm not sure why you expect me to talk about it. It certainly was not the "actual" topic of discussion. I have not even addressed objective morality and have no desire to do so. It's unnecessary to the points I've made or am interested in making.

Since y'all are basically ignoring what I have to say on the subject, and pulling your discussion into new and...exciting...areas, I'm gonna dip. Have fun.

Nice post. and I don't disagree with with your depiction of the progression. conversations move and change at the whims of the participants. I steer things one way, you steer them another, Tim in yet another direction. Anyone can steer them back.

I'm getting ready to go to Silver City NM for 6 days to teach a course so I may not be around much until the end of next week. I do want to respond to some of what you said. In fact, when I imply that "it was just the way it was back then" and no big deal, I am accepting the reality of the past as it was. You can add as much new detail as you like, that's fine. It doesn't change things that happened. Accepting the past at face value, doesn't change a "was" into a "should" at all. People do that on their own. We are very good at twisting the past to make it our own and we do so for personal and political reasons. And it doesn't ignore those contemporaries who were in opposition. They can certainly be part of the picture. If one focuses on Jefferson one can judge him based on whatever evidence one wants to use. You can do so narrowly or more broadly in the context of his peers or in the context of the abolitionist movement. You can also judge him through time. Saying that Jefferson "contributed" to the fabric of US history can be biased by the context one chooses to use and filters applied. It is easy to create a context that is more positive than negative just as it is to create one that is more negative. When I grew up much of Jefferson's less than savory life was never mentioned or perhaps even known yet. He was a mighty hero! We each weigh the factors we think are more important than those we think are less important. That is all our doing. Jefferson's actual life is what it was. Add all the details you like. I'm OK with that.

There are all the "facts" as we know them. Then there is the weighting of those facts in the context we choose to use them. You and I might choose different contexts to judge Jefferson and choose different facts and then weigh the importance of those facts differently. In the end two different Jeffersons appear. And I would surmise that neither is the full picture. And then we can argue about who is correct.

 

[Birdjaguar]

So we shouldn't find fault with Nazis, because they were a product of their time and place. What does this say about the neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers (public Holocaust denial is considered a hate crime in Canada)? These POSs are certainly not products of the time in which they were born, because they believe things that are now considered abhorrent by most modern North Americans.

You should read my posts more carefully. If you did you would see that I never espoused such thinking. Furthermore, neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, are most certainly a product of our time. They are here and active aren't they? They just draw upon the past differently than most other people. That is my whole point. The facts of the past are set and only "change" as we add to and clarify what we know. Looking back we filter and value those facts to fit our thinking and point of view.

 

[Mouthwash]

So we shouldn't find fault with Nazis, because they were a product of their time and place.

The Nazis overthrew a democratic government and enslaved and murdered minorities who had lived there for thousands of years. They'd be seen as bad people by medievals, ancient Greeks, pastoral tribesmen, whoever.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

TIL: Dachs is like german for badger. Someone was talking about weiner dogs on reddit and apparently their name (dachshund) is german for badger hunter or something. I forgot all the details because I was so excited to figure out the reference to one of my favorite posters. I vaguely remember @Dachs spelling this out before here on CFC but I'm not sure.

 

[Yeekim]

In that vein, in Estonian "to play a badger" (direct translation) means "to play a dirty trick" or "to let someone down".

 

[Takhisis]

The Nazis overthrew a democratic government and enslaved and murdered minorities who had lived there for thousands of years. They'd be seen as bad people by medievals, ancient Greeks, pastoral tribesmen, whoever.

Nah, all those things have been general human policies since pre-history. The British in Australia, they and other Europeans in their American, African and Asian colonies, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Goths, the Teutonic Knights, the Crusaders, the Normans, the Norse, Berbers, Carthage, all the Chinese dynasties, etc. etc. all established the precedent for genocide as accepted state policy. And they are the ones who won. The Aztecs were bloodthirsty maniacs who genuinely believed that if they didn't take the heart out of their hapless victims while still alive and then peel off their skin and wear it as a garment the Sun wouldn't come up tomorrow and the Chinese invented the horrifying practice of crippling women for life because it was ‘sexy’, but they get credit for having been thrashed by the Spanish and the British, respectively.

 

[Zkribbler]

TIL ... the meaning of "affray."

Five guys got into a fistfight at a Five Guys burger restaurant and were arrested for affray. Florida law defines affray as a first degree misdemeanor charge resulting from two or more people fighting in a public place and disturbing the peace,

 

[Kyriakos]

the Chinese invented the horrifying practice of crippling women for life because it was ‘sexy’, but they get credit for having been thrashed by the Spanish and the British, respectively.

Afaik, if you mean "bound feet", that was supposed to signify nobility or just affluence, because females with bound feet couldn't work in the fields even if they wanted to. I do agree that the result looked rather horrible. The practice died out in the early 20th century.
The idea that immobility= nobility or even divinity, is a very old one at any rate. You can also find it in one of Borges' stories (about the Yahoos), where the king has all limbs cut off exactly because he should never perform menial tasks like walking. For similar reasons, sages/prophets usually are blind (they don't need to be tied to the lower/material plane).

 

[Takhisis]

Yes, but it was taken to a logical and horrifying extreme in China. Leaving it at that for now, it's just an example of many societies which were just as brutal. Human rights and so on are a novel thing.

 

[Mouthwash]

Nah, all those things have been general human policies since pre-history. The British in Australia, they and other Europeans in their American, African and Asian colonies, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Goths, the Teutonic Knights, the Crusaders, the Normans, the Norse, Berbers, Carthage, all the Chinese dynasties, etc. etc. all established the precedent for genocide as accepted state policy. And they are the ones who won. The Aztecs were bloodthirsty maniacs who genuinely believed that if they didn't take the heart out of their hapless victims while still alive and then peel off their skin and wear it as a garment the Sun wouldn't come up tomorrow and the Chinese invented the horrifying practice of crippling women for life because it was ‘sexy’, but they get credit for having been thrashed by the Spanish and the British, respectively.

No, even then there was always a political aspect (crush rebellion in this province) or a religious one (convert the heathen). Rooting out millions of people from your society for slaughter on the basis of ancestry was something new.

 

[Kyriakos]

Yes, but it was taken to a logical and horrifying extreme in China. Leaving it at that for now, it's just an example of many societies which were just as brutal. Human rights and so on are a novel thing.

I think that many girls did the process (which has to be repeated for years, as they grow up) willingly, out of peer pressure. Maybe it can be seen as somewhat analogous to using a very tight corset in the belle epoch (which afaik did lead to miscarriages as well as children born with various deformities).

 

[Takhisis]

Mouthwash, we are getting dangerously close to the mod-banned Israel discussion zone, but the various genocides in the Ottoman Empire, especially the Greek and Armenian ones, had as little reason or excuse behind them as the Shoah.

And quite a few other genocides happened with as little justification.

I'll just drop a little gem here, by way of an example:

In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder".The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".​

(if you can stomach it, read the entire article)

 

[Kyriakos]

Mouthwash, we are getting dangerously close to the mod-banned Israel discussion zone, but the various genocides in the Ottoman Empire, especially the Greek and Armenian ones, had as little reason or excuse behind them as the Shoah.

And quite a few other genocides happened with as little justification.

I'll just drop a little gem here, by way of an example:

In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder".The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".​

(if you can stomach it, read the entire article)

If Mouthwash had bothered to read on his own people's plight, he would know that Hitler very specifically referred to how no one did anything or cared about the genocides by Kemal (armenians, greek, assyrians), so in his view nothing would be done about his own genocides.

 

[Samson]

TIL about Prototaxites, giant mushrooms from the Late Silurian to the Late Devonian periods (430 to 360 million years ago). They were 8.8 metres high, 1 metre across and by far the largest organism at the time.

 

[Mouthwash]

Mouthwash, we are getting dangerously close to the mod-banned Israel discussion zone, but the various genocides in the Ottoman Empire, especially the Greek and Armenian ones, had as little reason or excuse behind them as the Shoah.

I disagree. Most of the Jews were not even ethnically distinguishable from Germans or the populations they occupied.

How exactly are we getting close to an Israel discussion?

And quite a few other genocides happened with as little justification.

I'll just drop a little gem here, by way of an example:

In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder".The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".​

(if you can stomach it, read the entire article)

Well, I stand corrected then. But that was also not a respectable view in the 1940's.

If Mouthwash had bothered to read on his own people's plight, he would know that Hitler very specifically referred to how no one did anything or cared about the genocides by Kemal (armenians, greek, assyrians), so in his view nothing would be done about his own genocides.

The genocide of Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians was nationalistically-driven (and indeed your people carried out a similar slaughter of Turks). That doesn't 'justify' them, but I don't think they are comparable to the Holocaust.

 

[Arakhor]

Moderator Action: Backbiting is not only unnecessary, but also against the chief rule of not being a jerk.

 

[Lexicus]

I disagree with the assertion "at any given time there were adherents all along a continuum of positions." Throughout the vast majority of history slavery carried no moral tone at all, it was just how the world worked. Drop back 2000 years and it is unlikely that you could find anywhere in the world where you could say "slavery is objectively evil" and not have slaves and slaveholders alike looking at you with "what else do you do with captives?" on their lips. It may have dragged on in the US for a couple generations past its wider world expiration date, but that hardly makes US slaveholders some sort of oddities in the grand scheme of things, and certainly doesn't qualify them across the board as "objectively evil."

What makes US slaveholders unique in history is that they lived in a society the explicit premise of which was "all men are created equal." The idea of basic human equality was what never occurred to the ancients.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Yes, BJ, but there's a lot of people who actually say ‘person X did such a thing at a time when it was not immoral so we should still do it because of other things X did which are still not immoral’.

I have literally never heard anyone make that argument.

 

[Takhisis]

^You have been spared some of the darker corners of the Internet. I have seen some people who were banned here for Hitlerist apologism and symbology resurface in other websites with… shall we say, less severe moderation.