I’m not allowed to be concerned with Israel fucking around with nuclear reactors and potentially creating a cherbobyl level meltdown illegally bombing them because Iran is a “bad guy”?

What is this “good guy” “bad guy” politics you’re talking about?

I’m not 3 you can use a bigger word.

I think the better way to analyze this situation is as “attacker” and “defender”.

Someone is starting a war, violating an international border, and instigating the first attacks. Who is it?

Mathcist

Oh we’re quoting the IAEA?

Speaking on the final day of the IAEA Board of Governors meeting, Grossi warned that attacks on nuclear sites are in direct violation of the United Nations Charter, international law, and the Agency’s Statute.

“I have repeatedly stated that nuclear facilities should not be targeted under any circumstances, as this could harm people and the environment. Such attacks have serious consequences for nuclear safety, security and safeguards, as well as regional and international peace and security,” Grossi stressed.

-Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

https://www.azernews.az/region/243249.html

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.

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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/

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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.

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