Boots & Sabers

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Owen

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2040, 22 Aug 17

“history is ethically circular”

From the incomparable VDS.

We are in an age of melodrama, not tragedy, in which we who are living in a leisured and affluent age (in part due to the accumulated learning and moral wisdom gained and handed down by former generations of the poor and less aware) pass judgement on prior ages because they lacked our own enlightened and sophisticated views of humanity — as if we lucky few were born fully ethically developed from the head of Zeus.

[…]

Be careful, 21st-century man. Far more hypercritical generations to come may find our own present moral certitude — late-term and genetically driven abortion, the rise of artificial intelligence in place of human decision-making, the harvesting and selling of aborted fetal organs, ethnic and tribal chauvinism, euthanasia, racially segregated dorms and “safe spaces” — as immoral as we find the sins of our own predecessors.

For the last decade, we were lectured that the arc of history always bends toward our own perceptions of moral justice. More likely, human advancement tends to be circular and should not to be confused with technological progress.

Just as often, history is ethically circular. No Roman province produced anyone quite like a modern Hitler; Attila’s body count could not match Stalin’s.

[…]

The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.

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2040, 22 August 2017

54 Comments

  1. Kevin Scheunemann

    It is hilarious to see liberalism practice moral absolutism ( and judgmentalism) on something.

    Normally, liberalism prides itself on its shifting moral cowardice and embrace of present day deviancy. Why is moral deviancy of the past now the moral stand to take on? What if they find out Robert E Lee cross dressed as a confused transgender? Wouldn’t tearing down his monument be hate speech in liberal lexicon at that point?

  2. Kevin Scheunemann

    Essentially Democrats ripping down Monuments of past Democrats. Shows the sickness of liberalism through the ages. Liveralism cannot get it right because they attempt to live outside Christianity and grace of Christ.

  3. Le Roi du Nord

    Interesting you would comment about moral absolutism when you are always preaching about how you know the absolute truth.  Ironic, no?

    I personally don’t care if the monuments stay in place or not, history is still history.  But remember that history tells us that Lee was a traitor, joined an enemy army, invaded US soil, and through his actions many died horrible deaths.  Not very patriotic.   And a brief glance at historical political philosophies would debunk kevin’s “Monuments of past Democrats” claim.

  4. dad29

    You are morally certain that Lee ‘was a traitor….invaded…(etc.)’

    It is impossible that Lee saw the Union as a voluntary thing–as did the Founders.

    Ah, the judgmentalism, the moral preening.  Lovable qualities.  Ignorant, too.

  5. billphoto

    Please don’t feed the trolls.  Did some research beyond the typical trolls “will lie, exaggerate, and offend to get a response”  and found some interesting theories put forward.  Canadian researchers found the “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism scores were so strong that it might be said that online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists.  One researcher opined that the troll may experience some sort of sexual gratification when an offensive post is acknowledged.  Explains a lot.

  6. Paul

    That is true, Bill.  The white supremacist troll has posted pornographic links here previously.

  7. billphoto

    Looking backwards, today’s progressives are following the tactics of the despots of history and more recently, ISIS.  Even the violence perpetrated by the radical left at the Phoenix rally, according to CNN, is President Trump’s fault stating “Trump rewrote the history of his response to violence in Charlottesville and reignited the culture wars.”  So Antifa and their ilk attacked the police but they bear no responsibility for their actions.  Sounds to me like President Trump’s was with the media is right on target.

  8. billphoto

    oops, meant WAR with the media.

  9. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    My moral absolute truth does not shift.

    Liberalism has prided itself on on not having moral outrage, even on the worst social deviancies.

    Would liberals be ripping the statues down if Lee was a transgender cross dresser? I think liberals would be celebrating them, despite his other moral failings on being on wrong side.

    My point is liberalism only has moral absolutes on when it wants to and they make little sense.

  10. Major Booris

    It is impossible that Lee saw the Union as a voluntary thing–as did the some Founders.

    “I return my thanks for the copy of your late very powerful Speech in the Senate of the United S. It crushes “nullification” and must hasten the abandonment of “Secession”. But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.”

    – James Madison, to Daniel Webster, 1833

    In other words, while recognizing the right to extraconstitutional secession, that is, revolution, in cases of “intolerable oppression” (as in the War of Independence), Madison strongly believed there was no mechanism for voluntary secession by constitutional means.

    In other other words, if you want out of the Union, take your best shot, but don’t whine about being branded traitors if you lose.

  11. Jason

    >Please don’t feed the trolls.  Did some research beyond the typical trolls “will lie, exaggerate, and offend to get a response”  and found some interesting theories put forward.  Canadian researchers found the “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism scores were so strong that it might be said that online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists.  

     

    This actually explains almost perfectly what I heard about HRC’s new book.  I’m sure there are countless examples within the text, but in particular the article I was reading focused on her recollection of a debate with Trump.  She labeled him as being “Creepy” and pacing around her, invading her personal space, and breathing down her neck.  Yet from my recollection of that debate, he stood his ground and indeed she was the one walking in front of him while making her points.  What a troll she is.

  12. Paul

    So show us where you’ve criticized the Calexit folks for the same thing?

    Idiot.

  13. Major Booris

    Calexit is nonsense peddled by morons.

    Now get your fucking shinebox, Tommy. Men are talking.

  14. Paul

    I don’t see any men talking, and certainly not you. Here’s hoping your grandkids do you a favor and pull a Menendez on you.

  15. Le Roi du Nord

    Major:

    Great quote and analysis.  Lee was a traitor, history proves that.

    And don’t let bill and paul bother you; they have nothing to add, nor anything to lose.

    Keep up the good work.

  16. Paul

    Now you’re fucked, Booris. The Neo-Nazi is taking your side. You better disavow him.

  17. billphoto

    You can’t make this stuff up.  ESPN  as removed announcer Robert Lee, a 30 year old American of Asian descent, from its broadcast of the University of Virginia’s first football game next month because he has the same name as a Confederate general memorialized in statues that are being taken down across the country.

    There must be some contest out there to outdo Maxine Waters.

  18. Le Roi du Nord

    From SI:  “In what ESPN says was a joint decision between the broadcaster and the company, Lee was removed from broadcasting Virginia’s season-opening football game on Sept. 2 against William & Mary because of the similarity of his name to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. He was re-assigned to call Youngstown State at Pittsburgh on ESPN3 on the same day”.

    Note that it was a joint decision.

  19. Paul

    Nobody cares, white supremacist troll.

  20. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    Let me put it in a simple way you can understand.

    Democrats 1863:

    “Without slaves, who will pick our crops?”

    Domocrats 2017:

    “Without illegals, who will pick our crops?”

    There is no historical flip in ideology. That is the drunken dream of liberal revisionist historians in denial that modern day liberalism is slavery.

  21. Le Roi du Nord

    ““Without illegals, who will pick our crops?””

    Actually, that quote came from every farm organization in the country.  Pretty conservative folks, those farmers….

  22. Paul

    Nobody cares what you think, white supremacist troll.

  23. billphoto

    “Just remember, ….  You can look it up.”  Please don’t feed the troll.

  24. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    Those giant illegal immigrant employing farmers are Democrats. Democrats support illegals.

    The law abiding, non illegal immigrant employing, farmers tend to be conservative.

    Nice try.

  25. Le Roi du Nord

    “Those giant illegal immigrant employing farmers are Democrats. Democrats support illegals”

    Nope, they all aren’t.  Bill Bruins would be offended by that comment.  WI Farm Bureau, DBA, etc, all very conservative, have come out against whatever trump’s  immigration policy of the day is .  And yes, bill, you can look it up. .

  26. Paul

    White nationalist trolls are in no position to lecture others.

  27. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    Democrats promote illegals at party platform level. Republicans do not.

  28. billphoto

    I have to admit the comedic value of this thread is immense.  Speaker Ryan is an open borders guy.  So is the Chamber.  Tourism centric businesses at places like the Dells also want more imports rather than hiring Americans. There are plenty of capable people gathered outside the liquor stores on the north side of Milwaukee that could work but saying that would be racist.

    I agree with President Trump’s immigration policy but he does not just have the liberals working against him but also many members of his own party addicted to cheap labor while the unemployment rates of young African-Americans is still unacceptably high.  Depending on who is playing with the statistics, that number is between 27% and 50%+.  You can look that up.

  29. Le Roi du Nord

    k:

    Wrong again.  Man up and admit you goofed.

  30. dad29

    Well, yes, but your (Lincolnesque) reading has its own problems:

    …This Humean notion of Americanism that acknowledges the right of a self-governing people to secede is framed in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is primarily a document justifying secession, but it has been thoroughly corrupted by Lincoln’s reading of it and the ritualistic repetition and expansion of that reading. The Lincoln tradition reads the Declaration as affirming a metaphysical doctrine of individual rights (all men are created equal) and takes this to be the fundamental symbol of the American regime, trumping all other symbols, including the symbol of moral excellence internal to those inherited moral communities protected by the reserved powers of the states under the Tenth Amendment. Indeed, this tradition holds that the Declaration of Independence is superior to the Constitution itself, for being mere positive law, the Constitution can always be trumped by the “higher” metaphysical law of equality….

    What does that mean in the real world?

    …The Constitution of the United States was founded as a federative compact between the states, marking out the authority of a central government, having enumerated powers delegated to it by sovereign states which reserved for themselves the vast domain of unenumerated powers. By an act of philosophical alchemy, the Lincoln tradition has transmuted this essentially federative document into a consolidated nationalist regime having as its telos the instantiation of an abstract metaphysical proposition about equality. Such a proposition, in so far as it is taken seriously, must give rise to endless antinomic interpretations, and being metaphysical, these interpretations must stand in ultimate and implacable opposition. In this vision, the reserved powers of the states vanish, and the states themselves are transformed into resources for and administrative units of a nationalist political project “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” So well established has this inversion become that Mortimer Adler could write a book on the Constitution using for the title not the words of the Constitution, but those of the Lincolnian Declaration: “We Hold These Truths…

    So in reality, Lincoln was the one who committed treason against the Constitution.

    More:

    …The new Constitution, ratified in 1789, delegated enumerated powers to a central government whose laws would be supreme on matters of foreign treaties, defense, and regulation of foreign and interstate commerce. The Bill of Rights was added not as a massive grant of power to the central government to enable it to police supposed violations of individuals’ rights by the states (as it is corruptly interpreted today), but primarily to protect the moral and political societies of the states from the inevitable tendency of the central government to engross more power than had been granted to it. The capstone and meaning of the Bill of Rights is the Tenth Amendment, which affirms the sovereignty of the states in declaring the powers of the central government to be enumerated and “delegated.”…  See:  https://mises.org/library/voluntary-federation

    These days, that is a commonplace amidst any group of actual Conservatives–and of course, it is anathema to an group of Liberals.

    Prescinding entirely from the ‘slavery’ question was the reality that the North had the South in a vice-grip and was robbing the South blind through its system of tariffs.  You may not think that being robbed blind is an excuse for departure, but clearly, the South did.

    And by the way:  since Lee was NOT declared ‘treasonous’ by any Northern court, (nor high-ranking Northern official) either during the War or afterwards, where do YOU get the authority to so declare?

  31. Paul

    Fuck this Nazi troll.

  32. Le Roi du Nord

    And yet another opinion:

    “Many Americans were and are torn in their view of General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), the famed Confederate Army commander. Lee has been applauded for his gentlemanly demeanor and shrewd military expertise; he stands in the American military pantheon alongside Washington, Jackson, Grant, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Patton, and Powell. Yet there is an obvious difference between all these men and Robert E. Lee, for Lee not only fought for the American flag, he also fought against it. Robert E. Lee was, by traditional definitions of the term, a traitor”.

    Source: A Patriot’s History of the United States.

  33. Paul

    A white supremacist quoting Zinn. Two authoritarian peas in a pod…

  34. Major Booris

    Ah, the Mises Institute, of course. I thought I smelled something Austrian about that second section. Suffice it to say that an organization holding such positions as,

    Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. […] Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such “neglect” down to a minimum.

    -https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights

    would hold some similarly, shall we say, iconoclastic positions on American history. Anyway, my point stands that the Founders were not in lockstep regarding the question of legal secession.

    And by the way:  since Lee was NOT declared ‘treasonous’ by any Northern court, (nor high-ranking Northern official) either during the War or afterwards, where do YOU get the authority to so declare?

    This is a child’s reasoning, no different than “Momma said not to TOUCH the cookies, so I’m using a fork.”

    Jefferson Davis wasn’t charged with treason, either. No one was. That darn Lincoln and his dastardly ‘malice towards none’ position shielded former Confederates from criminal charges, confiscation of property (human property excepted), and, aside from the temporary loss of voting rights for a small fraction of wartime civil and military leaders, official censure.  History has shown that his choice accelerated the reintegration of the former Confederacy into the Union, promoted national unity, and allowed Southerners to preserve their dignity and cultural narrative with the evolution of the ‘Lost Cause’ mythos in the 1870s and 80s.  On the balance, a good thing from a nationalistic point of view. However, even at the time, there were many who believed that this approach went beyond mercy for a defeated foe and, by failing to expressly condemn the philosophical core of the rebellion, led to an environment that would allow-

    “The crime of treason [to] be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand-in-hand with the defenders of the (US) Government.”

    -Gen. George Thomas, 1868

  35. Paul

    Lincoln was willing to move on. Two bad you two pigfuckers can’t do the same.

  36. Paul

    That’s “too” bad…but you’re both still pigfuckers.

  37. dad29

    I’ll take von Mises ANY day over that notorious commie Zinn, thanks.

    The Founders were ‘not unanimous’ on the matter.  They could not have been, based on the plain language of the 10th Amendment.

    And in fact, you arrogate to yourself the privilege of calling Lee a traitor, when Lincoln did not.  So Lincoln was wrong?  Then maybe he was wrong about secession, too, eh?

    History has shown that his choice accelerated the reintegration of the former Confederacy into the Union, promoted national unity, and allowed Southerners to preserve their dignity and cultural narrative with the evolution of the ‘Lost Cause’ mythos in the 1870s and 80s.

    Sounds like a lot of unproven assertions there, my man.  “Accelerated”?  Really?  From what alternative time-frame?  “Preserve dignity” with the carpetbaggers running the show?  Really?

    Doesn’t Zinn have something to say about that through the lens of Marx?

  38. Paul

    And Dad29 just beat the everliving shit out of Major Booris.

  39. Major Booris

    “And in fact, you arrogate to yourself the privilege of calling Lee a traitor, when Lincoln did not.”

    Ahem.

    “Gen. John C. Breckinridge, [b]Gen. Robert E. Lee[/b], Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Gen. John B. Magruder, Gen. William B. Preston, Gen. Simon B. Buckner, and Commodore Buchanan, now occupying the very highest places in the rebel war service, were all within the power of the government since the rebellion began, [b]and were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now.[/b]”

    – Abraham Lincoln, letter to Erastus Corning, June 12, 1863

  40. Paul

    Pick your teeth up off the ground, bitch.  Dad29 just beat the shit out of your punk ass.

  41. Paul

    “Major Booris was a fuckwit punk bitch.  Fuck him.”

    – A. Lincoln, June 30, 1864

  42. Major Booris

    “The internet saved our lives. Now Father can just scream at computer people when he’s regretting his terrible choices instead of beating us.”

    – Paul’s family, just now

  43. Paul

    That fell about 70 yards from making sense. But try again. Maybe your grandkids can take you out of your misery.

  44. billphoto

    Talk about circular history.  Repairman came to my home.  Nice fellow until I said something about Trump not getting a fair shake from the media.  Ka-boom!

    Repairman says,”Trump is going to kill us all.  Hillary was terrible, too.  Bill should still be in the White House.

    Me, “You mean Barry, I mean Barack Obama?”

    Repairman, “No, Bill Clinton!”

    Me, “Clinton left the White House because they ran out of interns.”

    Repairman, “That was a right wing Republican plot against Bill.  He never did none of that stuff.”

    This is why feeding the trolls is bad.  Does not matter what reality is, they cannot accept the truth.

     

  45. Kevin Scheunemann

    But it is still fun to smack Nord with the truth constantly.

  46. Le Roi du Nord

    k:

    Let me know when you start.  Not much you have said makes even the lowest echelons of the truthiness scale.   Prime example is your 6000 year old earth claim…..

  47. Paul

    Nobody gives a flying fuck what your opinion is, white supremacist troll.

  48. billphoto

    Selective acceptance on any ideology is still DENIAL.

  49. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    I was willing to take on the creation debate, all you had to do is explain your “proof” for the “singularity” before the Big Bang so we can understand what you truly, really mean by “proof”.   If you can admit your proof on that is really faith, we can have a productive debate.   I cannot have a productive debate with you if you hold yourself to a different standard on “proof” and hold me to super strict scrutiny on “proof” that does not exist for you.

    You punted.

  50. Paul

    He punted because he was late for a cross burning.

  51. Le Roi du Nord

    k:

    I have provided plenty of peer reviewed scientific proof that the earth is greater than 6000 years old.  You have provided nothing to the contrary.  All you want to do is change the subject.

    bill:  Glad to see you agree.

  52. Paul

    Nobody cares, white supremacist troll. Leave. G

  53. Kevin Scheunemann

    Nord,

    We have not agreed on what “proof” really means. By taking your position on earth being more than 10,000 years old, you subscribe to the so called Big Bang theory version of creation. Where did the singularity come from? What proof do you have? Simple question, you are scared to answer. Why?

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