Don't forget the woke are blind to the moral atrocities committed by their past fellow travellers. White-washing socialism and communism, willfulling passing over suffering caused by bad governance. They honor their own villains and libel true heroes.
No one is morally perfect. There are always flaws. You open the door to political control. Shall we teardown MLK statues because he was a womanizer/misogynist and possibly a rapist?
Who gets to make that call?
You’ve fallen for a trap. The simple rule is- we should adore ancestors who made our world better. Did MLK have severe flaws? Yes- but is the world on net better?
Under that rubric, all the people the woke want to teardown should be revered- and all the people they want to elevate should be reviled.
I think this is the much better position. Sure everyone has faults and has done bad things, but what we put the statues up for is the exceptionally good things they did.
The problem is that today’s leftist midwits have been misideologized to believe that capitalism is bad.
So even if you could somehow get these leftists to grudgingly acknowledge that the Founding Fathers did some good (doubtful), they would argue that Lenin, Marx, Castro and Mao deserve statues, while JP Morgan, Sam Walton, Musk and Bezos deserve only to be buried - even alive, in the case of the latter two.
Yea, leftists have a wildly misscalibrated moral system and understanding of history. Even with the proper approach to "Hey, who should have a statue?" their ideas of good and bad are just awful.
You have articulated succinctly and well the problem with today’s woke left.
I believe I generally share most values (albeit with differing weights) with most old school progressives.
Meaning I’m in broad agreement with their objectives, and mostly disagree on methods (i.e. whether their means will achieve their desired ends).
But a world where they achieved their ends would be a pretty good one.
By contrast, a world where today’s leftists achieved their desired ends would be a horrible one indeed.
P.S. I disagree only with your claim of leftists having any “understanding of history” at all. Unless, of course, you mean it in the literal Orwellian 1984 sense.
Disagree. Washington and Jefferson were massive positive goods for us and the entire world.
Disagreeing with that involves systematically misunderstanding human history and/or being motivated by status games (which is actually what’s going on).
There are more complicated cases- Columbus, Mandela- but by and large the people we revered in 2005 all pass this test easily
Agreed re Washington and Jefferson**, but they were not representative of the majority on this score at the time. That's the point I'm trying to make here.
Regarding who's a hero and who's not, skilled propagandists (and the science has never been so sophisticated) can make nearly anyone believe anything, given a monopoly platform and a little time. They have "accomplished" incredible and incredibly destructive things in recent times, not just in woke "education", but also the COVID "public health" campaign, the abolition of biological sex, ongoing American war justifications, etc. etc.
--------------
**Although both slaveholders, Washington freed his slaves on death; Jefferson at times, and early on, argued for eventual universal emancipation.
Columbus got memorialized because Italian Americans wanted an “American” hero that they could look up to. Something to rally behind as they tried to understand how to integrate their Italian and American identities and communities.
MLK plays much the same role for blacks, despite his being a drunk violent womanizing communist that had a huge net negative approval rating at his death.
I don't think that's true of Columbus. The District of Columbia was created in 1790. King's College was renamed Columbia in 1784. Columbus, Ohio was founded in 1812. I strongly doubt that the great Columbian Exposition in 1893 was so named as a sop to Italian Americans.
Whether or not he ought to be, MLK is probably as close to a universal hero as exisits in the United States today.
I don't believe anyone or anything should ever be canceled. They should forever be left visible with forever evolving commentary. We should consider perpetually both historical figures *as well as* our previous judgments of them.
I don't think Columbus made the world better. Or, if he did so, it was totally by accident. I favor praising people who made the world better on purpose, even if they had flaws--as long as the benefits outweigh the flaws to a sufficiently large degree.
I hesitate to give them credit for this because they clearly only do it to certain people in the past. They don’t apply present moral standards to the Comanche, the Aztecs, or the Red Army. Only to people they view as pioneers of Western imperialism and/or Capitalism. I don’t think they have a disproportionate likelihood of condemning atrocities compared to the average person- they just use moralizing to attack figures they already hate.
Speaking of the Comanche ... I used to know very little about Indian history, in relation to Indians, probably because they have very little in the way of written history, and what they do have is pictorial.
There's a Finnish author, Pekka Hämäläinen (?) who has written about the Comanche and Lakota. The Lakota one seems to be infected by Project 1619, where he practically glorifies Indians killing women and children, both Indian and white, while condemning whites doing the same to Indians. But both are packed full of so much history that their worst defect is tedious repetitiveness.
The Comanche history was a revelation. Assuming what he has written is true, their culture was based on sharing in a way hard to fathom. They had no way of preserving meat, and no pack animals larger than dogs, until they got hold of Spanish horses. Firearms came later, and neither has much bearing on this.
To the Comanche, hoarding was a mortal sin. When a hunter had a good kill, he got to choose who to share with, but he could not choose to not share and to let the meat rot. It was everyone else's right, and duty, to steal from him what he would not share. Their culture was internally morally consistent.
Contrast this with the Spanish and later Europeans. When the Comanche met them, with their textiles and metal tools and horses, the Spanish were greedy immoral hoarders, and it was the Comanche duty to steal their excess. There was no compromise between the two cultures.
The closest I can think to reconciling them is to think that with horses and Spanish technology, the Comanche could have adapted to a modern life. Their reaction, of stealing from the Spanish, may have been natural and human, but it also condemned them to being parasites, stealing and not trading, and that was their doom. The author says their Comanche Empire lasted from around 1700-1850. One can sympathize with them losing their culture, but it was the horse which led them astray with the obsolete ethic of demonizing what they saw as hoarding without understanding it.
It's been a while since I read the book. You're probably right; they didn't let the Spanish raid them, and they treated other tribes with just as much disdain as the Spanish.
"No one has ever exaggerated the Comanche tortures. The authenticated accounts fill thousands of pages, and are altogether unreadable for men with normal nerves. They had great skill in pain and cruelty was their catharsis." Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision.
Moreover, these moral standards simply do not apply to *groups* -- period. We supposedly learned this lesson in the color-'blind' sixties from MKL and RFK et al.
Accordingly, the white males who did atrocities were not "white males" per se. They were, generally speaking, young, attractive, intelligent, more or less sociopathic, and especially early on, rich, politically connected, and especially, *risk-prone*. NOT the average white male, and certainly not all white males.
This should be precisely the same anti-stereotype (remember that word from the 60s-70s? I do!) metric that the ("liberal") establishment applies -- and should apply -- to inner cities populated primarily by Blacks, Latinos, etc where crime rate is high and guns abound.
And our 'owners' clearly know all these things. So do the math as to what' going on.
Sociopathic? I think that is about the last word I would apply to the founders. I wouldn't even apply it to George III or his ministers and Parliament.
"Sociopathic? I think that is about the last word I would apply to the founders."
I don't mean, by and large, the founders of the U.S. As I mentioned, I mean the woke-asserted "white males who did atrocities", such as anyone essentially bulldozing their way over natives from the early years through 19th century. That could include such people as Cortez and his army, US parties who reneged on treaties, including Trail of Tears and similar round-ups, massacres whites did, etc.
Of course, as Caplan points out, woke negative judgments seem to be applied by skin color, thus ignoring atrocities perpetrated by "people of color", which of course embodies the very definition of racism.
I took your "atrocities" to mean slavery, wars like the American Revolution, and other actions by the imperfect founders. If that was not what you mean, then I was wrong.
I would include slavers, but mainly those who implemented the practice in the first place, the "deciders" who made slavery legitimate, who began and then expanded the trade. Not as much those Southern, and especially lower-class, whites later who found themselves conforming to it as an existing system.
Because regardless of the clarity of the cruelty, slavery was widely accepted -- not just by conqueror but also in large measure by the conquered -- as "the way the world worked". (There is also that not-so-little problem of the Africans who gave up other Africans to slave traders.) Namely, the "superior" civilizations would, as a matter of course, conquer and/or control the "inferior" ones, even when the only difference between them was the measure of technology, in particular the weaponry.
I am quite sure that Bryan Caplan, if he had grown up in a society in which slavery was the norm and his people were enslavers, would not regard slavery as immoral. Therefore Bryan Caplan must be an evil, immoral person and judged accordingly.
How about trying to understand our ancestors instead of judging them? They're dead, after all.
Universal moral standards are fundamentally stupid, unless you believe in God. If you believe we, including our morality, are the product of natural selection, they make no sense.
We have no choice but to grade on a curve. By today's western liberal standards, everyone from the 1600s was a monster. Those the woke attack are typically much less so.
One other moral thinking trap along these lines is giving the losers/victims the benefit of the doubt. Just because one group succeeded in doing terrible things to another doesn't imply that the loser wouldn't have done just the same in reverse if circumstances had been different. I expect most times they would have.
“One other moral thinking trap along these lines is giving the losers/victims the benefit of the doubt. Just because one group succeeded in doing terrible things to another doesn't imply that the loser wouldn't have done just the same in reverse if circumstances had been different. I expect most times they would have.”
But, but, but… that’s just crazy talk.
When the nice folks that “Queers for Palestine” root for succeed, that part of the world will be much safer for queers and women and PoCs and Christians and both Shia and Sunni Muslims alike.
You’re just making shit up. You don’t know the counterfactual. The ones the woke deem oppressed are always better people.
The problem with these types of arguments is who is missing. Slavery was practiced in Africa and in the Americas long before the White Man showed up. The only ones who didn't seem to do it were the Incas and that might be in dispute The beginning of Roots it shows white men running through the jungle after back boys. In reality most of the time they were already captured by other black tribes who were more than willing to sell them. Africans resisted attempts by the British to end internal slavery in Africa well into the 20th Century. The Moors captured white people as well as black and sold them as slaves. Any discussion of slavery in the western world seems always based on what white people did to non white people. Not what non white people did to other non white people and to white people. If slavery of a black person by a white person is wrong isn't slavery of a white person by a black person also wrong and isn't slavery of a black person by another black person also wrong? Slavery was a universal practice for centuries. The great pretense is that it was always done by "others". Now move on to Child sacrifice.
[OG reply hidden by Substack and then falsely claimed by Substack to have been done so because of anything Bryan actively did.]
“Not what non white people did to other non white people and to white people. If slavery of a black person by a white person is wrong isn't slavery of a white person by a black person also wrong and isn't slavery of a black person by another black person also wrong?”
No.
Don’t you read Kendi and Critical Theory?
Only whites can be racists.
And because Muslims are minorities in Western countries, only Christians can be oppressors. (And Jews, too. Because [hidden by Substack].)
No, it is not rational to tear down statues of great men who benefited their nation simply because they committed alleged crimes against other nations? Why ? Because their nation is more important than other nations so the benefit they made towards their nation is more important than the alleged crimes they committed against other nations .
Every human being should rationally value their nation more than other nations (barring some uncommon extenuating circumstances). Why? Because this is a successful evolutionary strategy to prioritise those who are more genetically similar to you and is why we love our family members and relatives more than strangers, and why most people naturally have more affinity , trust , warmth, care for etc. people of the same race than people of other races. (Of course we can't test the genes of everyone we come across but using heuristics like ancestry, and nation/ethnicity is a good practical to get close to discerning who is more genetically similar to you)
If you disagree and think that every human being is equally important and valuable regardless of genetic similarity to you then 1. no you don't, you're probably just a hypocrite, since you probably prioritise your relatives over strangers 2. even if you're not a hypocrite and genuinely believe that nonsense, you're going to be a terrible parent since you'll be spending your time and resources trying to benefit all people of the world equally when no one is going to be a father or mother to your children except you or 3. you'll be a genetic dead end loser and to the extent that you aren't from wiped from humanity's genepool without a trace, it will be due to your relatives and extended family (your race) not being like you.
Societies which tear down statues of their heroes because of alleged crimes against other nations will be conquered by 3rd worlders taking advantage of their spinelessness and turned into 3rd world s***holes, which is happening in Europe right now as a result of them following Caplan's destructive and shamefully wrong, open borders recommendations.
Caplan is someone who has done more than most to spread evil in the world and cause many more innocent people in Europe to be raped, murdered and brutalised than would happen otherwise and he should have to face consequences for that.
I would argue that it's more helpful to focus on the accomplishments of ancestors than to focus on the faults of ancestors. People being inspired and motivated in the present is more important than people judging the past by the moral standards of today.
So I don't think it's rational to tear down statues of famous highly accomplished ancestors purely because they were guilty of moral flaws. People are clearly capable of respecting the great accomplishments of these ancestors without becoming supportive of their moral failings. Think of all of the people today who consider George Washington the greatest American President. How many of them do you think are supportive of slavery?
So wokeness isn't serving any actual useful purpose here.
This is a fair argument. I will emphasize though that wokeness doesn't consistently adhere to this moral universalism. Wokeness is characterized by a sacralization of certain minority groups, so they will engage in moral universalism when it comes to Europeans, but will not engage in it when it comes to other groups, where potential flaws can be seen as a product of culture or oppression.
Furthermore, even amongst people who will see past atrocities "in their historical context", as bad as such arguments can be, I don't think you would find any of them defending such atrocities if they were being done today. What I mean to say is that it isn't on any substantive level important to how we make moral judgments, and the position is likely adhered to more consistently than the woke viewpoint.
Perhaps it's a question of whether you prefer a consistent but incorrect worldview over a more correct but inconsistent worldview.
Yes. wokeness has moral standards that should be considered. But that’s not the wokeness that drives today’s progressive or young people. Their behavior is based on a strict set of good guys-bad guys, victims-oppressors, with the goal of overturning the white, European male power structure, and replace it with everyone else, regardless of merit. Their approach has been to seed doubt in our imperfect vision of the America dream as a land of opportunity. It’s about ideology, not morality.
Slavery started becoming obviously immoral when technology started replacing slave labor. I'm surprised an economist, of all people, doesn't recognize the effect of economics on ethics.
At this point I’m pretty much anti-history. If you want to make a claim about the current state of affairs (which is after all the Woke project and every other political project) limit yourself to proximate, currently active causes (at least until someone invents a time machine). The current use of history has almost nothing to do with learning from past mistakes, it’s overwhelmingly to incite identity-based outrage and mobilize a mob.
Don't forget the woke are blind to the moral atrocities committed by their past fellow travellers. White-washing socialism and communism, willfulling passing over suffering caused by bad governance. They honor their own villains and libel true heroes.
No one is morally perfect. There are always flaws. You open the door to political control. Shall we teardown MLK statues because he was a womanizer/misogynist and possibly a rapist?
Who gets to make that call?
You’ve fallen for a trap. The simple rule is- we should adore ancestors who made our world better. Did MLK have severe flaws? Yes- but is the world on net better?
Under that rubric, all the people the woke want to teardown should be revered- and all the people they want to elevate should be reviled.
I think this is the much better position. Sure everyone has faults and has done bad things, but what we put the statues up for is the exceptionally good things they did.
Of course you are correct.
The problem is that today’s leftist midwits have been misideologized to believe that capitalism is bad.
So even if you could somehow get these leftists to grudgingly acknowledge that the Founding Fathers did some good (doubtful), they would argue that Lenin, Marx, Castro and Mao deserve statues, while JP Morgan, Sam Walton, Musk and Bezos deserve only to be buried - even alive, in the case of the latter two.
Yea, leftists have a wildly misscalibrated moral system and understanding of history. Even with the proper approach to "Hey, who should have a statue?" their ideas of good and bad are just awful.
You have articulated succinctly and well the problem with today’s woke left.
I believe I generally share most values (albeit with differing weights) with most old school progressives.
Meaning I’m in broad agreement with their objectives, and mostly disagree on methods (i.e. whether their means will achieve their desired ends).
But a world where they achieved their ends would be a pretty good one.
By contrast, a world where today’s leftists achieved their desired ends would be a horrible one indeed.
P.S. I disagree only with your claim of leftists having any “understanding of history” at all. Unless, of course, you mean it in the literal Orwellian 1984 sense.
"The simple rule is- we should adore ancestors who made our world better."
Sure. But it is not at all a simple thing for a majority to recognize and agree to what has made the world better.
Disagree. Washington and Jefferson were massive positive goods for us and the entire world.
Disagreeing with that involves systematically misunderstanding human history and/or being motivated by status games (which is actually what’s going on).
There are more complicated cases- Columbus, Mandela- but by and large the people we revered in 2005 all pass this test easily
You are, of course, both correct.
It *should* be easy to agree on almost all of the historical figures who should be (net) revered.
But it is not, because leftists gonna leftist.
Agreed re Washington and Jefferson**, but they were not representative of the majority on this score at the time. That's the point I'm trying to make here.
Regarding who's a hero and who's not, skilled propagandists (and the science has never been so sophisticated) can make nearly anyone believe anything, given a monopoly platform and a little time. They have "accomplished" incredible and incredibly destructive things in recent times, not just in woke "education", but also the COVID "public health" campaign, the abolition of biological sex, ongoing American war justifications, etc. etc.
--------------
**Although both slaveholders, Washington freed his slaves on death; Jefferson at times, and early on, argued for eventual universal emancipation.
Who are you thinking of that has been properly cancelled? Columbus is the only one I can think of that I maybe agree with?
Are you thinking at Confederate memorials?
Columbus got memorialized because Italian Americans wanted an “American” hero that they could look up to. Something to rally behind as they tried to understand how to integrate their Italian and American identities and communities.
MLK plays much the same role for blacks, despite his being a drunk violent womanizing communist that had a huge net negative approval rating at his death.
I don't think that's true of Columbus. The District of Columbia was created in 1790. King's College was renamed Columbia in 1784. Columbus, Ohio was founded in 1812. I strongly doubt that the great Columbian Exposition in 1893 was so named as a sop to Italian Americans.
Whether or not he ought to be, MLK is probably as close to a universal hero as exisits in the United States today.
I don't believe anyone or anything should ever be canceled. They should forever be left visible with forever evolving commentary. We should consider perpetually both historical figures *as well as* our previous judgments of them.
I don't think Columbus made the world better. Or, if he did so, it was totally by accident. I favor praising people who made the world better on purpose, even if they had flaws--as long as the benefits outweigh the flaws to a sufficiently large degree.
I hesitate to give them credit for this because they clearly only do it to certain people in the past. They don’t apply present moral standards to the Comanche, the Aztecs, or the Red Army. Only to people they view as pioneers of Western imperialism and/or Capitalism. I don’t think they have a disproportionate likelihood of condemning atrocities compared to the average person- they just use moralizing to attack figures they already hate.
Speaking of the Comanche ... I used to know very little about Indian history, in relation to Indians, probably because they have very little in the way of written history, and what they do have is pictorial.
There's a Finnish author, Pekka Hämäläinen (?) who has written about the Comanche and Lakota. The Lakota one seems to be infected by Project 1619, where he practically glorifies Indians killing women and children, both Indian and white, while condemning whites doing the same to Indians. But both are packed full of so much history that their worst defect is tedious repetitiveness.
The Comanche history was a revelation. Assuming what he has written is true, their culture was based on sharing in a way hard to fathom. They had no way of preserving meat, and no pack animals larger than dogs, until they got hold of Spanish horses. Firearms came later, and neither has much bearing on this.
To the Comanche, hoarding was a mortal sin. When a hunter had a good kill, he got to choose who to share with, but he could not choose to not share and to let the meat rot. It was everyone else's right, and duty, to steal from him what he would not share. Their culture was internally morally consistent.
Contrast this with the Spanish and later Europeans. When the Comanche met them, with their textiles and metal tools and horses, the Spanish were greedy immoral hoarders, and it was the Comanche duty to steal their excess. There was no compromise between the two cultures.
The closest I can think to reconciling them is to think that with horses and Spanish technology, the Comanche could have adapted to a modern life. Their reaction, of stealing from the Spanish, may have been natural and human, but it also condemned them to being parasites, stealing and not trading, and that was their doom. The author says their Comanche Empire lasted from around 1700-1850. One can sympathize with them losing their culture, but it was the horse which led them astray with the obsolete ethic of demonizing what they saw as hoarding without understanding it.
I don't believe that the Comanches permitted the tribes they raided to take their stuff, even if they shared with other Comanches.
It's been a while since I read the book. You're probably right; they didn't let the Spanish raid them, and they treated other tribes with just as much disdain as the Spanish.
"No one has ever exaggerated the Comanche tortures. The authenticated accounts fill thousands of pages, and are altogether unreadable for men with normal nerves. They had great skill in pain and cruelty was their catharsis." Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision.
Moreover, these moral standards simply do not apply to *groups* -- period. We supposedly learned this lesson in the color-'blind' sixties from MKL and RFK et al.
Accordingly, the white males who did atrocities were not "white males" per se. They were, generally speaking, young, attractive, intelligent, more or less sociopathic, and especially early on, rich, politically connected, and especially, *risk-prone*. NOT the average white male, and certainly not all white males.
This should be precisely the same anti-stereotype (remember that word from the 60s-70s? I do!) metric that the ("liberal") establishment applies -- and should apply -- to inner cities populated primarily by Blacks, Latinos, etc where crime rate is high and guns abound.
And our 'owners' clearly know all these things. So do the math as to what' going on.
Sociopathic? I think that is about the last word I would apply to the founders. I wouldn't even apply it to George III or his ministers and Parliament.
"Sociopathic? I think that is about the last word I would apply to the founders."
I don't mean, by and large, the founders of the U.S. As I mentioned, I mean the woke-asserted "white males who did atrocities", such as anyone essentially bulldozing their way over natives from the early years through 19th century. That could include such people as Cortez and his army, US parties who reneged on treaties, including Trail of Tears and similar round-ups, massacres whites did, etc.
Of course, as Caplan points out, woke negative judgments seem to be applied by skin color, thus ignoring atrocities perpetrated by "people of color", which of course embodies the very definition of racism.
I took your "atrocities" to mean slavery, wars like the American Revolution, and other actions by the imperfect founders. If that was not what you mean, then I was wrong.
I would include slavers, but mainly those who implemented the practice in the first place, the "deciders" who made slavery legitimate, who began and then expanded the trade. Not as much those Southern, and especially lower-class, whites later who found themselves conforming to it as an existing system.
Because regardless of the clarity of the cruelty, slavery was widely accepted -- not just by conqueror but also in large measure by the conquered -- as "the way the world worked". (There is also that not-so-little problem of the Africans who gave up other Africans to slave traders.) Namely, the "superior" civilizations would, as a matter of course, conquer and/or control the "inferior" ones, even when the only difference between them was the measure of technology, in particular the weaponry.
I am quite sure that Bryan Caplan, if he had grown up in a society in which slavery was the norm and his people were enslavers, would not regard slavery as immoral. Therefore Bryan Caplan must be an evil, immoral person and judged accordingly.
How about trying to understand our ancestors instead of judging them? They're dead, after all.
Universal moral standards are fundamentally stupid, unless you believe in God. If you believe we, including our morality, are the product of natural selection, they make no sense.
We have no choice but to grade on a curve. By today's western liberal standards, everyone from the 1600s was a monster. Those the woke attack are typically much less so.
One other moral thinking trap along these lines is giving the losers/victims the benefit of the doubt. Just because one group succeeded in doing terrible things to another doesn't imply that the loser wouldn't have done just the same in reverse if circumstances had been different. I expect most times they would have.
“One other moral thinking trap along these lines is giving the losers/victims the benefit of the doubt. Just because one group succeeded in doing terrible things to another doesn't imply that the loser wouldn't have done just the same in reverse if circumstances had been different. I expect most times they would have.”
But, but, but… that’s just crazy talk.
When the nice folks that “Queers for Palestine” root for succeed, that part of the world will be much safer for queers and women and PoCs and Christians and both Shia and Sunni Muslims alike.
You’re just making shit up. You don’t know the counterfactual. The ones the woke deem oppressed are always better people.
You know, I gave this a Like, but they're going to tear down my statues some day (well if I ever get any statues).
Because I ate meat.
People everywhere have the morality they can afford.
So that's why world opinion forced Mongolia to tear down its huge statues of Genghis Khan!
Oh, wait, sorry, that didn't actually happen ...
The problem with these types of arguments is who is missing. Slavery was practiced in Africa and in the Americas long before the White Man showed up. The only ones who didn't seem to do it were the Incas and that might be in dispute The beginning of Roots it shows white men running through the jungle after back boys. In reality most of the time they were already captured by other black tribes who were more than willing to sell them. Africans resisted attempts by the British to end internal slavery in Africa well into the 20th Century. The Moors captured white people as well as black and sold them as slaves. Any discussion of slavery in the western world seems always based on what white people did to non white people. Not what non white people did to other non white people and to white people. If slavery of a black person by a white person is wrong isn't slavery of a white person by a black person also wrong and isn't slavery of a black person by another black person also wrong? Slavery was a universal practice for centuries. The great pretense is that it was always done by "others". Now move on to Child sacrifice.
[OG reply hidden by Substack and then falsely claimed by Substack to have been done so because of anything Bryan actively did.]
“Not what non white people did to other non white people and to white people. If slavery of a black person by a white person is wrong isn't slavery of a white person by a black person also wrong and isn't slavery of a black person by another black person also wrong?”
No.
Don’t you read Kendi and Critical Theory?
Only whites can be racists.
And because Muslims are minorities in Western countries, only Christians can be oppressors. (And Jews, too. Because [hidden by Substack].)
How do you not understand this?
No, it is not rational to tear down statues of great men who benefited their nation simply because they committed alleged crimes against other nations? Why ? Because their nation is more important than other nations so the benefit they made towards their nation is more important than the alleged crimes they committed against other nations .
Every human being should rationally value their nation more than other nations (barring some uncommon extenuating circumstances). Why? Because this is a successful evolutionary strategy to prioritise those who are more genetically similar to you and is why we love our family members and relatives more than strangers, and why most people naturally have more affinity , trust , warmth, care for etc. people of the same race than people of other races. (Of course we can't test the genes of everyone we come across but using heuristics like ancestry, and nation/ethnicity is a good practical to get close to discerning who is more genetically similar to you)
If you disagree and think that every human being is equally important and valuable regardless of genetic similarity to you then 1. no you don't, you're probably just a hypocrite, since you probably prioritise your relatives over strangers 2. even if you're not a hypocrite and genuinely believe that nonsense, you're going to be a terrible parent since you'll be spending your time and resources trying to benefit all people of the world equally when no one is going to be a father or mother to your children except you or 3. you'll be a genetic dead end loser and to the extent that you aren't from wiped from humanity's genepool without a trace, it will be due to your relatives and extended family (your race) not being like you.
Societies which tear down statues of their heroes because of alleged crimes against other nations will be conquered by 3rd worlders taking advantage of their spinelessness and turned into 3rd world s***holes, which is happening in Europe right now as a result of them following Caplan's destructive and shamefully wrong, open borders recommendations.
Caplan is someone who has done more than most to spread evil in the world and cause many more innocent people in Europe to be raped, murdered and brutalised than would happen otherwise and he should have to face consequences for that.
> Even kindergarteners can grasp the moral challenge
As far as I'm aware, most of human history never did on slavery https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/2072758022003143127
I would argue that it's more helpful to focus on the accomplishments of ancestors than to focus on the faults of ancestors. People being inspired and motivated in the present is more important than people judging the past by the moral standards of today.
So I don't think it's rational to tear down statues of famous highly accomplished ancestors purely because they were guilty of moral flaws. People are clearly capable of respecting the great accomplishments of these ancestors without becoming supportive of their moral failings. Think of all of the people today who consider George Washington the greatest American President. How many of them do you think are supportive of slavery?
So wokeness isn't serving any actual useful purpose here.
Do you eat meat?
This is a fair argument. I will emphasize though that wokeness doesn't consistently adhere to this moral universalism. Wokeness is characterized by a sacralization of certain minority groups, so they will engage in moral universalism when it comes to Europeans, but will not engage in it when it comes to other groups, where potential flaws can be seen as a product of culture or oppression.
Furthermore, even amongst people who will see past atrocities "in their historical context", as bad as such arguments can be, I don't think you would find any of them defending such atrocities if they were being done today. What I mean to say is that it isn't on any substantive level important to how we make moral judgments, and the position is likely adhered to more consistently than the woke viewpoint.
Perhaps it's a question of whether you prefer a consistent but incorrect worldview over a more correct but inconsistent worldview.
Yes. wokeness has moral standards that should be considered. But that’s not the wokeness that drives today’s progressive or young people. Their behavior is based on a strict set of good guys-bad guys, victims-oppressors, with the goal of overturning the white, European male power structure, and replace it with everyone else, regardless of merit. Their approach has been to seed doubt in our imperfect vision of the America dream as a land of opportunity. It’s about ideology, not morality.
Slavery started becoming obviously immoral when technology started replacing slave labor. I'm surprised an economist, of all people, doesn't recognize the effect of economics on ethics.
"Slavery started becoming obviously immoral when technology started replacing slave labor."
So Thomas Jefferson was wrong...all men are not created equal, and endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to liberty?
His revealed preference was to own and use slaves.
Yes, but he knew that slavery was immoral.
At this point I’m pretty much anti-history. If you want to make a claim about the current state of affairs (which is after all the Woke project and every other political project) limit yourself to proximate, currently active causes (at least until someone invents a time machine). The current use of history has almost nothing to do with learning from past mistakes, it’s overwhelmingly to incite identity-based outrage and mobilize a mob.