Does the NYT not know about trolling, or the fact that they are being easily trolled by this guy? He certainly knows his audience.
The only thing that really surprises me here is that he was willing to come out and call slavery any kind of evil at all. That’s the sort of thing that gets you branded as a bleeding heart liberal SJW by most Trump voters.
Is he not planning to run for re-election or something?
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Harvard College and Harvard Law are places to become connected for your future career and wealth. There are lots of assumedly intelligent individuals that have lots of higher education from Ivy League schools that I wouldn’t let wash my car, let alone run my business.
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In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.-Robert E. Lee
I don’t know, I’m not inclined to give too much credit to Tom Cotton for expressing the same sentiment as one of the most famous leaders of the Confederacy dedicated to slavery’s preservation and expansion. Someone who considers it necessary maybe doesn’t mean the same thing by evil as you might expect.
Do you suppose Lee might have been one of the Founding Fathers that Tom was thinking about?
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I’m not reading his whole statement (because, oy vey), but “necessary” to what? My impression (not a historian) is that the languorous, plush antebellum life where you could take your time among the magnolia blossoms sippin’ your julep depended on slavery. But if all those White folk had just knuckled down and got to work they could have had a pretty successful agricultural economy. So slavery was “necessary” only to the leisure and comfort of the owner class.
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I don’t think they could create that kind of mythos over another female candidate quickly and easily. What female candidate compares today?
Two obvious choices are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
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I did understand your point, but I’m arguing that what does matter here is what he intends to convey, to his base, to us, to the country–it’s not pro-BLM or pro-reparations or even pro-historical accuracy. He has firmly placed himself in the white supremacist category and we have to deal with the fact that an elected official is making those arguments.
We have spent too much time in this country dancing around this issue, and it’s time we actually dealt with it. That’s why I’m saying it matters that we understand Cotton (and Trump and others) as they are meaning to be understood and we point it out to others who might be on the fence “both siding” this stuff. The more we understand their statements as explicitly white supremacist, the more we might convince those on the fence of that.
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Republicans telling on themselves again. When he runs for President in '24 (assuming bunkerbitch hasn’t declared himself President for Life) will he hid from this or embrace it?
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It is not. Just because something happened historically doesn’t make it necessary. Would you say that the Holocaust was a necessary evil or the Rwandan genocide? I’d hope not.
Which is a part of western philosophy that needs to be challenged and shown for the amoral and unethical world view that it is.
I don’t think calling it a necessary evil is understanding it, I think it’s justifying it, and that’s an entirely different thing than historical understanding. Historical understanding matters. We HAVE to work through what happened, why it happened, how it was justified, etc, but we don’t have to accept that it was “necessary” for making the world as it is. All that leads to is a continued justification for this sort of thing.
It happened, yes. Was it necessary? Fuck no.
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My liberal arts education was a long time ago, but I think the premise was that democracy depended on having an educated leisure class, and the existence of that depended on slavery. The idea that everyone could vote would have horrified the Greeks, not to mention the southern slave lords. Even the idea that non-land-owning White people should vote only goes back to President Jackson. The “everyone should vote” idea is quite recent. As far as I know, anyway, which isn’t all that far, TBH.
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I’m aware. Doesn’t make it a morally or ethically defensible position, which was my point.
As Marx said (and I’m paraphrasing here), at some point, philosophers need to stop being lazy assholes and work towards positive change. Sitting around justifying violent subjugation of people isn’t exactly doing that.
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If people (by which I mean white people) understood that the value, as an asset, of enslaved people in 1860 was greater than the rest of US commerce, that Lehman Brothers (as an example) has roots in the cotton trade which was uneconomic without enslaved, ie wageless, labor, and all the associated ways that people brought from Africa were worked and exploited, maybe they would get it, that this country’s wealth was based on stolen labor. To say nothing of the land…
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This!
The problem here is that Tom Cotton feels that stolen labor and land are entirely justifiable, as it’s given us a country that… check notes continues to oppress a variety of different people…
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Aren’t his comments in the context of him not wanting the 1619 project taught in schools? How does slavery being an “necessary evil” justify not learning about it?
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Because if you learn about it in a historically accurate manner, then it undermines the argument for it being “necessary”. Where if you just gloss over it with language about the triangle trade and how white dudes finally “ended slavery” [narrator: they did not] you can continue to justify it as “necessary”. He sees the accurate history as “marxist propaganda”.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory, this as late as 1858, is something some people still believe. When MLK expanded his work to encompass class, he had to be stopped. And it’s so deeply engrained, the overlords don’t even have to recruit assassins…they are already out there, armed and ready.
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Wait: what outing of the My Pillow Guy© did I miss?! The first time I saw him in a commercial, with his crucifix outside his collar and then the “customer” after sleeping wearing the same efn blue shirt, I KNEW he was a horrible human
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30 years. It started with Whitewater. The GOP has spent millions of tax dollars and close to 5 years of actual time honing an image that Clinton is an unlikable bitch. And the fact that a BB Reader repeats how unlikable she was merely reinforces the fact that the GOP are masters at the Lockstep and at Disinfo.
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I don’t think he was shot because he turned to class, but due to his entire body of work that challenged white supremacy.
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Bingo: slavery was required if you weren’t born into the 1%. And no one that settled here pre Revolution was in that class when they arrived. I believe most of the F. Fathers knew just how shitty slavery was, especially when “all men are created equal” was efn written down in the final document, but carried on anyway cuz wealth.
