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He was a slaver. That's at least one thing to hold against him, to say the least. Everything named after him should be renamed, all statues of him in public pla
by mlinksva 10y ago
He was a slaver. That's at least one thing to hold against him, to say the least. Everything named after him should be renamed, all statues of him in public places should be toppled.
- AlexeyBrin 10y agoWhy not re-write all history books in the name of today's political correctness? If we don't like something just erase it.
- mlinksva 10y agoI don't want to erase slavers from history books, only from positions of honor. Stalin and Hitler should be remembered accurately, not honored. Same for other slavers.
- afarrell 10y agoI'm no fan of slavery, but far too many things are named after Columbus, Washington, Caesar, Alexander and the others in history who have taken and held slaves.
- mlinksva 10y ago1 thing is 1 too many. All should be renamed. Yes, that's a lot of things.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoNothing can ever be named after anyone then, because all humans are flawed.
- solipsism 10y agoA silly straw man. No one said things should only be named after flawless humans.
- mlinksva 10y agoIndeed. I would not mind if naming things after individual humans was seen as profane and never done. But I have a far, far lesser goal: ending the naming of things after humans who have claimed to own other human beings.
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoWhere does one draw the line then? Clinton has done plenty of awful stuff; I can totally imagine that in the future plenty of people will name stuff after her if she has a decent presidential term.
- ubernostrum 10y agoNo, because a while back we passed a law that all things must be named after Reagan. I'm just waiting for the Ronald Reagan Memorial Lavatory to show up at a highway rest stop...
- solipsism 10y agoOne draws the line wherever one draws the line. You have your own line, no doubt. mlinksva is stating his/hers. Intelligent people can disagree. It's completely subjective.
- triplesec 10y agoI think the objection being implicitly raised by GP here was rather of the problem of 'at what human flaw should we stop toppling statues and celebrations as we update our morals over time? '. It appears to be a valid question, in that slippery slope is not always a fallacy.
- WalterBright 10y agoAn interesting modern trend is deconstructing heroes of the past - Jefferson, Edison, the Wright Bros, etc., and elevating forgotten figures to heroic status - Tesla, Sacajawea, Gustav Whitehead, etc. I don't think there's really a right and wrong here, it's just the fashion of the times. Who knows who will be rehabilitated 100 years from now and who will be stricken from the monuments :-)
- golergka 10y agoIf you hold all the personalities of previous eras to today's moral standards, whom will you be left with? Let me explain my idea on another, more clear cut example. Ancient Greece and Rome have been built on slavery. Almost all powerful and even educated men of that time used slave labour. Should we remove them from philosophy books and rename the months? Should we just proclaim that everyone who lived then was evil, except the poor and the slaves themselves? But even they didn't hold some higher moral values, they just didn't have the means to enslave other people. So, we probably should say that everyone in ancient world was evil, period.