Fucking Jefferson.
Chad Big Ben as usual 🙏
Also of note, Jefferson’s limited (theoretical, rather than practical, considering that he never made any serious attempt to free his own slaves) anti-slavery views distinctly did not come with anti-racism. Ben Franklin, on the other hand, became an anti-racist as he interacted with Black folk on an equal basis, noting that the difference between white and Black folk was merely visual rather than mental.
A lifetime of sex, drugs, and socially progressive politics is pretty based
Sounds pretty punk
Punks are a bit more nihilistic than Franklin was, I think?
You’re on a solarpunk instance and you think punks are nihilist?
In my mind the punks arose in England at a period where the UK was enduring ongoing pain from the end of their global empire. Quoting the Sex Pistols:
No future, no future for me No future, no future for you
The solarpunk movement is different. It shares the punk recognition that mainstream ideas are poison, but in the rejection it embraces a hopeful attitude, with the belief that people can work together to make things better.
I always saw the rhetoric as disrespect and irreverence for Thatcherite wankery, rather than nihilism. All the punks I know care about people, which is why they are so angry with the anti-people forces of corruption and corporatism.
Anarchy, which has been inextricable from the punk movement since the start, isn’t nihilism. it requires a belief in people’s capacity to self-organise, to help each other, and to resist the jackbooted thugs trying to stamp on your face by kicking them in the bollocks first.
Solarpunk grew out of that movement as a way to become decoupled from the grid, and free oneself from polluting industries altogether. Don’t fight to become the overlord, like democrats. Reject the overlord, deny their power, and live your life without their strings.
Capital is a crime. Don’t be an accessory.
Also Franklin toured the finest bedrooms in France.
Where the gigachad Thomas Paine?
Yeah, perhaps highlight the people who never owned slaves instead? Like Paine and John Adams (although he was curiously enough not an abolitionist)?
“Is it better to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort” —partysnacks
everyone is born good, they become evil.
“is it better to overcome your decision to be evil, or just not be evil to start with”
You’ve never really spent much time with infants and young children have you? Empathy is a skill we learn in order to survive in our social system. It is not something we are born with. We are born as bundles of pure self without any sense of other things as independent things that exist even when we can’t perceive them (let alone other independent selves like us). As we mature, empathy is a choice we cultivate in our selves. I may believe that most people are basically good (or want to be good) and everyone has the potential to be good, but no one is born “good”. When we are born, good and bad are concepts that have no meaning to us beyond what is good or bad specifically and only for ourselves.
youre right of course. and its something i will learn with time i guess. my idealism is definately something i should be wary of. thanks
I’ve been there. It’s hard. Please continue to be idealistic about the potential of people. Balancing hope against grounded expectations is a worthy goal though.
If you (not you specifically) already believe that you are a good person, will you continue to work to be a good person? I know that for me, I feel better believing that I am not actually good, but that I’m trying to be. I feel that holding on to that idea will serve me best. And it doesn’t hurt to remember that other people are also often just trying to be that better person in their own way (or at least I hope most are, some obviously don’t consider it at all). Of course people will disagree about what that looks like for themselves and others. Empathy isn’t an end or a given, it’s constant work.
Literally everyone from more than 200 years ago would seem, at best, quirky by modern standards. Measuring by a modern stick is like measuring ants in miles. You can definitely do that, no one will stop you, some might even come to watch, but you’re setting yourself up for a frustrating experience.
“He improved for the times” is a far more useful way to see it, imo.
Alexander Hamilton: -_-
The thing I find wild, even with guys like Franklin, is that they ever had slaves at all. It’s not like it suddenly became immoral or they had no historical context for it that they would have only experienced the immorality by practicing it.
Historically, slavery was often viewed in a similar way to poverty - “It would be great if there was a world without it, but the world, as it works, always has rich/free and poor/slave”
Thus, the thinking was not “Slavery itself is moral or immoral” but “There are ways of treating slaves that are moral and immoral.”
…slavery existed for hundreds of years before europeans came the new world
Thousands of years. Slavery is as old as history, probably older.
That’s kinda my point. Did you misunderstand my comment?
did you mean never instead of ever?
People’s morals are mostly determined by their parents and the status quo and it takes a lot of energy to change that. Haven’t you made a moral lifestyle changes as an adult?
That poor woman.
does any one got a source on the cuck Thomas Jefferson ?
Read up on Sally hemings. She was his wife’s slave and believed to be half sister (cause her dad raped slaves). Jefferson in his later life was generally against slavery, but unwilling to put his money where his mouth was. Especially where it came to his (highly questionably consensual) side piece, Sally, or her (their) children.
