GOP Senator Tom Cotton describes slavery as "necessary evil"

I literally just realized that calling it a triangle vastly overstates what might have been transferred from Europe to Africa in relation to what was being transferred across the other two legs of that trip. It was only a triangle for the boats. For everything (and everyone) else, it was just a V.

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What a surprise, the man who had to pay $32 Million to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit doesn’t believe people should have to provide financial compensation for past sins.

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Let’s ensure everyone knows the names of the White House staffer and all others who enabled Trump the Unfit and his gang of thugs known as the Republican Party.

#NEVERVoteRepublican

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It is not particularly novel to refer to slavery as a “necessary evil.” It’s clichéd-- the standard phrase used by southern politicians until 1820, when they switched to paternalism.* I do not trust Tom Cotton not to describe the practice as a positive good.

*see Lacy Ford 2003 “Slavery and Racist Thought in the Old South: Reconsidering Race, Slavery and Power in a Slaveholding Society”

(I thought that the necessity of evil might be shaded by religious instruction. Cotton’s a methodist, so that means that George Whitefield might be relevant. Though Whitefield defended slavery, I’m not sure he used the phrase “necessary evil”.)

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Don’t forget Nikki Haley, the acceptable “moderate” minority face of Trumpist fascism.

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You mean, Vince Foster?

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You should believe people when they show you who they are, if I may paraphrase Maya Angelou here. He’s not trolling. He believes this shit. We have to start taking these people seriously, because this is how we got to a Trump presidency.

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Why not? They manufactured the Seth Rich and Benghazi conspiracies largely during the 2016 campaign.

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We’ll never know for sure but I think it was expansion/escalation of his mission. It’s one thing to rally Blacks around your cause but when you start to engage poor whites on the topic of their own subjugation and exploitation, that’s a bigger threat. We’re in violent agreement, I think.

I think it’s pretty clear that he’s a traitor–

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Yep.

All because she dared to have a career prior to becoming the first lady. President Clinton offered her services as a unpaid lawyer/policymaker and the GOP had a fucking fit. They wanted her to bake cookies. (An actual argument made by 1993 GOP.)

Highly unqualified Ivanka is doing the same thing. Why hasn’t the GOP complained about this?

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But if you’re Tom Cotton or a generic Trumpist Republican and your worldview is that white Americans of European descent are rightly at the top of the U.S. social hierarchy, dispensing benevolent tyranny to those of darker skin tone, slavery starts to look more and more necessary. (I think you address this point with your point that historical understanding matters.)

I assume that Sen. Cotton, approving of slavery, would not object to being enslaved himself. Get the chains and branding iron.

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Oh I have no doubt he believes in most of what was in the op-ed, but he’s saying somewhat different things to different media outlets. In that way he’s effectively gaming the media to maximize divisiveness among the different audiences. So perhaps troll was the wrong word, but nonetheless he is a smooth operator and should stay on the lefts’ radar. Would not surprise me in the least if he makes a play for the White House in four years.

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Partly, he got way more votes then anyone should be comfortable with because is openly racist (or is he just barely not openly racist? Whatever, it is pretty clear what his position is). He also got votes because people were unhappy with the other candidate, and thought Trump would shake things up, or even just that voting for Trump, having him come close would shake things up.

I’m making this claim because while he still has way more support then anyone that incompetent should ever get he has reliably little support outside the Republican Party, and in 2016 he got a lot of votes from outside the Republican Party.

I mean, that isn’t super strong evidence, maybe all those independent voters came for the racism and left because of the incompetence. I could be deluding myself as to why they voted for him before and appear unwilling to do so now.

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You would like to think that. I would like to think that.

What fake news means now is “something someone in the news has said that I don’t like, and will now take issue with, anyone loyal to me will now act as if it was false, and anyone who is disloyal can make themselves a target by blathering on about truth and facts and all that lame crap nobody in power cares about”

It is just like all the flimsy denials people use to use when the facts were against them like “out of a million people that can somehow be called scientists we found 7 who claim climate change isn’t real (except we don’t say the million part, we just talk about these seven science like there are many thousands of them)”…except without needing to craft a misleading partial truth to mask each lie. Or even a misleading lie to mask each lie. It is the one universal lie.

On the contrary, she was teaching criminology.

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Tom Cotton is a wholly unnecessary evil.

Ginning up this nonsense while John Lewis is laying in state wasn’t an accident.

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Most of the founding fathers would have agreed that tolerating slavery was necessary to preserve the Union and the non-slave-owning half (and some of the slave owners like Jefferson) would have comforted themselves with the belief that it wouldn’t last.

If slavery was necessary to “preserve the Union,” then should “the Union” have been preserved?

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