Maybe not Franklin. He’s on record as preferring older ladies.
So, you’re saying he would have only flown to the island for Ghislaine?
No, she’s not french
I don’t think they airplanes then
Founding fondlers
I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can’t be anything but counter productive.
For example:
Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.
That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.
On one hand, the “kind” slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.
On the latter interpretation, you’re claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren’t). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.
So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas’s phrasing “…in [rape] cases not a few,…”.
I don’t even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA’s commercial cotton slavery: it’s fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn’t move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.
If you’re going to broadly claim “America’s founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children” then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can’t open with…
These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.
…and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?
I really appreciate posts like this. Thank you for making Lemmy a better place!
baseless hyperbole
an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof
I do not think it is much of a stretch to think that there were a fuckton of rapists in times past, judging by the fuckton of rapists in contemporary time. To be honest, I think it is awful of you to assume that men in positions of power do not rape, when we have so much evidence that they do (and please do not talk to me about “not all men rape”, because that is not what we are talking about, we are talking about systemic issues).
Boys at 16 years old rape sleeping girls, because they can. Film directors and businessmen (unsuccessful ones as Trump as well) rape women and children, because they can. Slave owners raped their slaves, because they could. This is a question of power dynamics.
Bring receipts!
No.
Finding it offensive to expect evidence for any such accusation is absolutely asinine. What a stupid fucking conclusion.
Expecting an American to have historical literacy is considered one of their gravest insults. Akin to telling an Israeli they are bad at raping children.
Do you disagree on my remark that Trump is a pedofile rapist or only that about the slave owners that also happened to be founding fathers for a genocidal empire?
There exists ample evidence of how widespread rape is today and throughout history. I do not see why you give slave owners the benefit of doubt in this regard, seeing as they had a blatant and fundamental disregard for their fellow human beings, in their eyes property.
poor confused westoid still believes in the myth of abolitionists that own slaves
John Adams didn’t own slaves, but keep riding that ignorance.
Inb4 conservatives change from
“Mary was a teenager”
to
“The Founding Fathers were pedophiles too”
Not all. Pretty sure John Adams would not have been.
Hamilton and Jefferson would probably have written most of them though, about each other.
I don’t think they would have been called the Epstein files though. It probably would have been called the Franklin files. All of this stuff seems like Ben Franklin’s jam.
No I don’t think Ben Franklin would have done it for espionage or spying purposes I think he would have just done it for the love of the game.
I agree, Ben probably would have indulged and not cared about using it to his advantage.
Hamilton and Jefferson were absolutely cold blooded in their political pursuits and use of published letters. They would have used any opportunity to cut the other down. Maybe mutually assured destruction would have stayed their hands on that particular indulgence, though Hamilton did famously out his own affair to clear himself of the embezzlement allegation.
Franklin would have, for sure, but I’m pretty sure the rest of them would have just kept raping their own slaves.
Franklin famously preferred older women.
I did not know that, I just knew he liked French prostitutes.
How many MLs reading this are Americans?
O7
Ok, cool. I’m asking out of genuine curiosity. How does this post make you feel? You’re in the overlap of the targeter and the targeted.
As a show of good faith, let’s commiserate. I agree that our “founding fathers” weren’t good people by today’s standards, but I’m in the camp that their ideas of classical liberalism were fine. I feel shame that our country is built on genocide, slavery and exploitation, but at the same time, I want to hold our current leadership to a higher standard and ahem prosecute them. I understand that you don’t agree with classical liberalism, and that’s fine, I’m not looking to pick a fight. But I imagine you feel some confusion and conflict as I do?
Respectfully, your position doesn’t make sense. Liberalism brought us here. Liberalism was built on top of the slave trade, of colonialism, of plunder. This system produces people like Epstein and Trump.
With all due respect, that’s sounds like leaps of logic, like saying he scientific theory leads directly to and only to nuclear warfare.
Does classical liberalism only lead to slave trade/colonialism?
Do you know how many enlightenment figures were wildly racist, how many of them profited from slavery while pretending to stand for freedom? Scientific racism is a direct evolution from this.
As for whether liberalism now would lead to more of the same, of course it would, it has no built-in method for people to not be exploited, to discourage greed, to stop genocide, etc. How would you suggest we prevent any and all of this within liberalism?
I’ve been thinking for a long time that any large-scale organization will lead to greed, corruption, injustice, et al. It’s only since I’ve been reading about ML that I learned I lean anarchist. Vanguard parties sound like a bad idea to me.
Are we talking about liberalism or neoliberalism? My understanding is that liberalism is, ostensibly, grounded in enlightenment ideals.
Hey, i appreciate the chillness and will try to respond in kind. I can understand feeling conflicted, but personally I severed any emotional connection with this country several years ago after I could no longer reconcile my shrinking self-conception as “an american” with my growing self-conception as a human being. It’s not just that they were seperate; they were fully att odds with each other in a very physical, material way. If I recognize that there is no deep fundamental difference between my humanity and anyone else’s, and if I consider myself part of the human family, I can’t ignore the devastation that this military-economic-cultural thing we call America has wrought on our family. If I see myself as a cell in the body of nature, I can’t help but look at the effects of America and see it for a cancer. That doesn’t mean everyone in it is “bad” or “evil” of course, and i personally don’t believe in these concepts to begin with. The reality is more messy and complex than any quick moral assessment can say, but at the highest level the practical assessment is simple: America is a boat anchor on the neck of humanity. It’s military enforces an economic system that’s killing the world, the ideology it spreads is parochial and antisocial, and we who live inside it are both it’s victims and it’s accomplices, forced to work our lives away for rich pedophiles while economically supporting atrocities on other people elsewhere.
The desire to hold leaders to a higher standard is totally understandable, but the question of what they lead renders it moot in this case. American leaders are people who sit at the helm of a world-spanning death machine, and no decision they make, no matter how high-minded and well intentioned, can change it’s basic function, which is to churn human, plant and animal life into profit. Like Darwinism, the evolutionary pressures of capitalist imperial politics actively selects for these wretched people, and against anyone who might even try to rein in it’s excesses, even as ineffective that would be. The only way to hold the leaders of this system to a higher standard is to hold the system to a higher standard, and the highest standard this system can realistically be held to is to be dismantled and replaced with something capable of producing stable and equitable results. Capitalism itself is like a nanobot Grey Goo apocalypse: instead of breaking down everything to produce more nanobots it breaks everything down into profit. I consider it an existential threat to life on earth,and anything that upholds capitalism or stands in the way of it’s destruction to be an acceptable loss for the preservation of the biosphere.
I hope I haven’t gone on too long, but I feel that gets to the heart of it. For the love of humanity and all living things, I’ve forsaken any attachment to this predatory so-called society.
I’m guessing I got downvoted because I said I’m fine with classical liberalism?
Wait what?
I don’t care, get this misdirection off my feed worry about prosecuting the coconspiritors
Those who do not learn from history something something, nvm probably not important to anything happening today.
That quote comes from a longer quote, here’s most of it I think “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to hear about those who do not learn from history are doomed to hear about those who do not learn from history are doomed to hear about those who do not learn from history are doomed to hear about those who do not learn from history are doomed to hear about…”
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
MR. EVRART IS HELPING ME FIND MY HISTORY
I’m willing to bet $100 that Mao would also be on that list…
Typical western chauvinist lmao
An empty insult. There have been numerous sexual allegations against Mao in a way that don’t exist for more recent Chinese Leaders. Believing Women or admitting that it may be possible at least doesn’t make someone a western chauvinist. That’s just chaffing at anyone who offers any criticism whatsoever.
There have been numerous sexual allegations against Mao
Do you have a source for that? If you’re right I’d like to inform myself better.
That aside, I responded to a low effort accusation that corresponds to western chauvinism. I don’t always like spending disproportionate effort responding to that kinda shit.
Source: trust me bro, he was a communist so that means he’s bad
mao was never a billionaire or even rich
Mao was a dictator, he’s exactly the type of person who would be in the files.
A billionaire is just a capitalist dictator.
Lol “uh well he was a (thought-terminating epithet)”
the biggest hallmark of a dictatorial regime is characterized by the suffering of the country’s people.
china’s literacy; education & life expectancy rates went through the roof in china.
Is this how you’ve chosen to cope, by imagining that communists would also be pedophiles?
Hey, Xi Jinping is still alive, how come he isn’t in the files?
by imagining that communists would also be pedophiles?
Anyone can be a pedo.
Hey, Xi Jinping is still alive, how come he isn’t in the files?
I find it hard to believe that the Leader of China with access to his own intelligence agencies would be foolish enough to fall for a blackmail operation run by a guy with ties to Mossad, Trump, and the Saudi Royal family; assuming he even was a pedo. He might even be monogamous to his wife for all we know though information of his private life isn’t widely available.
As opposed to multiple leaders of the united states with access to their own intelligence agencies
I’m willing to bet money that a thing that never happened would have happened…
wtf even are you doing?
Curate your own feed, patriot.
And what pray tell is preventing those very prosecutions? You’re saying it’s leftists on the internet calling out systemic issues?
