WhatsTheHoldup

Oh I'm definitely in alignment! You clearly have a depth of knowledge, apply healthy nuance, and insofar as we might disagree we would be able to resolve it through analysis of evidence.

I was originally poking fun at the lack of nuance in your original description but you've more than corrected for it in your follow up comments and i dont think we're really disagreeing more than that.

I was arguing Jefferson really should be remembered as a hypocrite, someone who behaved differently than he argued one should in the abstract. He dreamed of an imaginary world where all life's problems smoothly go away without him having to sacrifice much and it all just sorting out on its own.

I say all this because when I was a teenager I pointed to him a lot as a bastion of progressiveness in America's founding, and often used him to argue that the US was not founded as a Christian state because he clearly wasn't Christian. The stuff I learned about him in textbooks and in school conveniently left out the much darker shit he did.

You know what, that's totally fair. Sorry for being dismissive, I saw the other commenter compliment your informative write up and I immediately felt guilt for being so dismissive.

I think to me I've always heard of the founding fathers in the opposite context.

What I've heard is the noteworthy part was not that these were a bunch of progressive, worldly, enlightened people who for some reason had these odd backwards blindspots.

But that they were a cruel, racist, sexist, homophobic, religiously extreme backwards people who are noteworthy because in spite of that some of them came up with these seemingly contradictory progressive views for the time.

People were able to intuit out that slavery was bad as an intellectual pursuit while still being insensitive and cruel towards their slaves. This is an unusual thing as people tend to try to justify their evils but here we have at least some societal willingness to try to talk about this and move past it.

Jefferson is not a man to idolize, I will fully agree, but there's more to his philosophy to be learned than simple psychopathy.

He planned on ending the slave trade, but his actions and many of his writings seem to indicate that he planned on maintaining the system of slavery for his own gain.

Yes. So you keep reiterating the evils he's done I already agree with. He did self benefit from slavery, he perpuated it because it was convenient to him and he applied a different standard to himself than he did others.

Him being a hypocrite is not what I'm challenging.

Everything I didn't respond to it's because there's nothing to challenge. He did all these things.

What I'm responding to was whether or not he intended for the institution of slavery to grow or shrink after his death.

Everything he's written says his intellectual desire was for it to "eventually" (meaning when convenient for white people) go away.

Which is kind of the equivalent of turning down the orphan crushing machine to a slower pace. Not even turning it off, just making it slower.

Yes I think that would be putting it in proper context.

This seems to also point to him be hugely racist and believing that he could use black people like cattle to get out of debt cause they were "inferior." I feel like what you quoted mostly supports what I'm saying. The dude perpetuated slavery for his own personal gain while denouncing it publicly to appear more liberal.

Read through this again with the following context in mind. What you said earlier:

I don't quite follow, but I personally don't assume anything about you. I do agree that lemmy, and the internet at large, has become a weird obstacle course.

What assumption I'm feeling is put on me is this idea that I'm not "mostly supporting what you're saying" when the only thing I want to clarify is what Jefferson's true intentions (intellectually dishonest or not) truly were.

I get where you're coming from and why you typed up 4 paragraphs condemning his horrible actions before we are allowed to acknowledge that he did one or two okay things.

It's just frustrating that we still live in a such a racist society that you felt like you had to type that up before you could approach the nuance.

I wish we could talk plainly to each other without this underlying paranoid one of us might accidentally come across pro the thing we are obviously very anti.

I for sure agree that it is nuanced, but it's also rather reductive to just leave it at, "he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves."

I specifically said "While there's no shortage of slave related evils to blame him for this is also the man who ended the trans atlantic slave trade."

Because I was thinking of exactly all the things you listed.

I don't like the accusation that I'm being reductive because I'm not restating a history textbook when acknowledging the countless evils he's done. I didn't mention them because I'm not challenging them and I fully understand the evils he's done.

I didn't reduce anything, I specifically acknowledged his evils before giving him credit for ending the slave trade.

So he was outwardly trying to end the slave trade because he had a plan to perpetuate slavery by breeding.

While that is exactly what ended up historically happening, especially due to the invention of the cotton gin, I would appreciate a source that this was Jefferson’s stated intentions.

From the mid-1770s until his death, he advocated the same plan of gradual emancipation. First, the transatlantic slave trade would be abolished.10 Second, slaveowners would “improve” slavery’s most violent features, by bettering (Jefferson used the term “ameliorating”) living conditions and moderating physical punishment.11 Third, all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free, followed by total abolition.12 Like others of his day, he supported the removal of newly freed slaves from the United States.13 The unintended effect of Jefferson’s plan was that his goal of “improving” slavery as a step towards ending it was used as an argument for its perpetuation. Pro-slavery advocates after Jefferson’s death argued that if slavery could be “improved,” abolition was unnecessary.

Jefferson’s belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs. He thought that white Americans and enslaved blacks constituted two “separate nations” who could not live together peacefully in the same country.14 Jefferson’s belief that blacks were racially inferior and “as incapable as children,”15 coupled with slaves’ presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jefferson’s emancipation scheme.

https://www.monticello.org/slavery/jefferson-slavery/jefferson-s-attitudes-toward-slavery/

Alright fair you are old. Just not because of COD WWII lmao.

COD WWII is my favorite multiplayer ever.

Yes I’m old.

Your favorite game is the fourteenth entry in the franchise. Calm down with the "old" lmfao.

The guns exist out there and the protesters exist out there. You'd just need some mobilizing incident to spark them not to leave the guns they already own at home next time.

It seems an easier solved problem than you let on.

god forbid a woman have a grasp on her own sexuality

I don't think people have an issue with her having her own sexuality.

I think people have finally woken up about the sickening exploitation in the entertainment industry and the way women are sexualized and pressured by major labels then thrown away when they aren't "sexy" anymore, absolutely destroying their mental health and sense of self worth as going far back as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Amy Winehouse, Amanda Bynes, Brittany Spears, etc.

I feel like that's incredibly reductive and it just kind of bothers me every time I see it.

Well, except for Jefferson. His reasons are more rooted in being an incredibly lazy psychopathic rapist

Lol.

While there's no shortage of slave related evils to blame him for this is also the man who ended the trans atlantic slave trade.

Do you not feel this description of his motivations might be a bit reductive?

This is the plot of Click

And are these your own views too? I thought you said you didn't know what to make of her.

Oh I get that comes across weird, I'm looking all this stuff up as you're challenging me on it and what I'm finding is starting to solidify my views a bit more.

I have to admit I'm not particularly invested in this issue, but I do think it's a gross mischaracterisation to say the letters post relationship somehow constitute an ongoing affair. They quite obviously don't.

That doesn't seem as obvious to the New Yorker

In 1950, seventeen years after they had last communicated, Arendt and Heidegger met again, when she went to Germany to help track down stolen Jewish cultural treasures. At times, she had been publicly critical of Heidegger’s behavior during his rectorship and afterward, but the renewal of their ties banished all her suspicions. “This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life,” she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife, as Heidegger wrote poems about her and told her things like “I wish I could run the five-fingered comb through your frizzy hair.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/12/beware-of-pity-Hannah-Arendt

(The author betrays a very obvious bias about what we're supposed to take away to be fair)

When I quoted her, my intention was simply to communicate that specific idea, with which I agree - not to evoke her as if she were some kind of infallible god.

Yeah I'm with you there.

As far as I'm aware historians have not found any evidence that Arendt was any more aware of the content of the notebooks than anyone else was.

That I'm not sure.

I don't think I really know enough to have a right to that strong a view when the historical record seems to be changing so recently and most of her letters are lost whole she kept all of Heideggers, but what I'm finding is a bit troubling tbh.

For over half a century she was considered the best source of insight into Eichmann and Nazi psychology.

With new knowledge about her conflict of interest and defence of Heidegger I'm left wondering how much of an expert she should be considered.

It seems from the evidence, Heidegger was a willing and complicit Nazi who wrote about genuinely antisemetic views. In that light, Hannah's defence of him is surprising.

I'm unsure of what go make of her psychological evaluation capabilities if she had such a glaring blindspot here.

I'm not in favour of abandoning the concepts of ideology and interpretation because Althusser murdered his wife, similarly I'm not going to abandon the concept of the banality of evil because Arendt was deluded about a creepy professor she had an affair with.

Right, neither am I.

That's why I didn't abandon it and instead said I am unsure what to make of it.

I'm not trying to come to a black or white conclusion, I think this is a complicated subject.

The romantic choices of many of us between the ages of 18-21 (her age during their actual affair) probably don't bear scrutiny.

I'm not scrutinizing her for any choices between 18 and 21.

This was a lifelong relationship, Hannah herself reached out and continued writing letters in his defense from the 1950s to her death.

An ex who later became a nazi (and then recanted) is probably an excellent example of how quotidian these kinds of evils can be.

Ex? No.

Recanted? They denied he had any nazi sympathy and claimed it was all a mistake

Later, in a 1969 birthday tribute essay “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Arendt penned what has generally been taken as an exoneration of Heidegger. In it, she “compared Heidegger to Thales,” writes Gordon, “the ancient philosopher who grew so absorbed in contemplating the heavens that he stumbled into the well at his feet.”

This was the accepted view of Heidegger until 2014 when the black notebooks came out

But major Heidegger scholars have responded in a variety of ways—including resigning a chairship of the Martin Heidegger Society—that suggest the worst. According to Daily Nous, a website about the philosophy profession, when Günter Figal resigned his position in January as chair of the Martin Heidegger Society, he said:

As chairman of a society, which is named after a person, one is in certain way a representative of that person. After reading the Schwarze Hefte [Black Notebooks], especially the antisemitic passages, I do not wish to be such a representative any longer. These statements have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become difficult to be a co-representative of this.

Hannah defends him as just so focused on high philosophy he never noticed the antisemitism

Recalls Adam Kirsch in the Times:

The seal was set on his absolution by Hannah Arendt, in a birthday address broadcast on West German radio. Heidegger’s Nazism, she explained, was an “escapade,” a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely “succumbed to the temptation … to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.” The moral to be drawn from the Heidegger case was that “the thinking ‘I’ is entirely different from the self of consciousness,” so that Heidegger’s thought cannot be contaminated by the actions of the mere man.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/03/martin-heideggers-black-notebooks-reveal-the-depth-of-anti-semitism.html

but I don't think it's a case of contagion.

Modern scholars seem to say otherwise

In a long, carefully documented essay, Wasserstein (who’s now at the University of Chicago), cites Arendt’s scandalous use of quotes from anti-Semitic and Nazi “authorities” on Jews in her Totalitarianism book.

Wasserstein concludes that her use of these sources was “more than a methodological error: it was symptomatic of a perverse world-view contaminated by over-exposure to the discourse of collective contempt and stigmatization that formed the object of her study”—that object being anti-Semitism. In other words, he contends, Arendt internalized the values of the anti-Semitic literature she read in her study of anti-Semitism, at least to a certain extent

https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/10/troubling-new-revelations-about-arendt-and-heidegger.html

Absolutely. Though, understanding him is a different question than voting for him.