You seem to think you have some ground to stand on here to tell me what is correct.
What exactly affords you that arrogance?
You think a glutton shoving hot dogs down his face while kids starve in the streets is “non terrible” while a man who made life better for people of color on levels you can’t imagine or understand is “terrible.”
Just wait until you hear how many terrible things Jackie Robinson did.
Of course he will be given a less critical lens than Thomas Jefferson.
There’s also a lot of ignorance.
Melkerson and the cancel culture left ilk would see Mandela’s name on Epstein’s flight logs and get the vapors.
Hot take: most people who are famous athletes will be terrible people. Most are treated as special their whole lives and have a distorted sense of reality.
Fyp
Well at least according to the fainting couch class
This is the first Jim brown case:
Then-18-year-old Brenda Ayers says Brown assaulted her in a Cleveland Howard Johnson motel. Brown was charged with assault and battery. According to an Associated Press report at the time, Ayers said Brown “plied her with whiskey, slapped her face, hip and stomach and forced her to have sex relations with him on two occasions.” She broke down while testifying in court, saying Brown called her days before testifying asking, “Why was I doing this to him?” Brown denied having sex with her and assaulting her; his defense lawyer called it a shakedown plot for money. A Cleveland jury found him not guilty. Ayers later sued Brown for paternity and lost and sued for civil damages, the latter of which she asked to be dismissed.
Why do I not believe it is a shakedown after two courts found against her and in his favor? I am not saying a not guilty verdict means innocent. I mean we are digging through a lot of dirt and water to make mud.
I have to look at the other issues now.
If you don’t think slave holders and ordinary people that let Jim Crow happen are non-terrible then I don’t think those that practiced extreme misogyny and violence toward women can be classified as non-terrible either.
Lots of examples throughout history of people that did “great things” in the public sphere but were total assholes in private.
I do think for the purpose of these threads we are mostly judging public actions.
The decedent gets put in a thread and then their whole character can be discussed.
Nah, man. I’m just telling you to own the position that you are taking. You seem to not want to do it. That’s cool.
You wanna tell me which specific people we’re talking about here. I don’t want to have another James Brown situation.
I had similar thoughts after I read the first one. Then I kept going.
I don’t think “the vapors” means what you think it means. I’m just saying weigh all the shit and come up with an answer. Reasonable people can even disagree on what that ultimate answer is in some cases. In other cases, there should be no disagreement.
I agree with this, but you’re on Epstein’s Island with this view on this forum.
I’ll give you first and third. Fourth, I think we can construct a non-terrible case.
#2 is questionable. His own vice president John Adams, was openly anti-slavery. Adams was basically like “WTF, enslaving people is clearly wrong. I don’t know how the fuck anyone could do that.” Presumably GW came across that. If his contemporary could figure out, he probably should have been able to also.
You may be right. I’m not all that knowledgeable on history. I was shocked to recently read that even Lincoln’s reason for freeing slaves was more for economic reasons than for any moral objections to slavery he may have had
The problem with the people tearing down statues of Grant and holding Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington in disrepute is that they’re the exact same people screaming CONTEXT when a death row inmate is presenting mitigation evidence.
The inconsistency is jarring.
Lincoln freed the slaves because he had a country to save. Revisionism is a plague.
To add on to what Melkerson said, when George Washington was President the US capitol was Philadelphia while Washington, D.C. was being built. At the time Pennsylvania had a law called the Gradual Abolition Act that
freed people after they turned 28 and that automatically freed any slave who moved to the state and lived there for more than six months. Dunbar tells the story of how Washington got around it:
Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”
Completely agree.
“Let’s revisit how americans idolise dead slave owners to better understand the country”
And
“Let’s not murder a black kid with an IQ of 70 in a racist system.”
Completely inconsistent and jarring.
Need a third thread, bump when famous near saints die. Jim Brown not a near saint, but also not a complete deplo like el whowasitnow, who dedicated his professional life to the most deplo ends imaginable.
To add to the Washington discussion, he stipulated in his will that his slaves should be freed after Martha died. On the one hand, I suppose you could give him credit for eventually freeing them. On the other, it indicates that he might have had some reservations about slavery, but not enough to make the sacrifices required to give up the personal benefits of slave ownership.
He figured if he would avoid being too mean to the slave owners they wouldn’t lose their shit and shoot him.