Pence says we’ve always cherished the ideal
Mike Pence declined to say the words “Black lives matter” during an interview with an ABC affiliate in Pennsylvania, instead saying that “all lives matter.”
“Let me just say that what happened to George Floyd was a tragedy,” Pence told ABC6 in Philadelphia, when asked directly if he would say that Black lives matter. “And in this nation, especially on Juneteenth, we celebrate the fact that from the founding of this nation we’ve cherished the ideal that all, all of us are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And so all lives matter in a very real sense.”
Uh, sir, no, sir, that’s exactly not what we celebrate especially on Juneteenth, because it is not true that from the founding of this nation we’ve cherished the ideal that all, all of us are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. That’s the whole point, you dumb fuck. Juneteenth celebrates the official end of slavery – of slavery. A nation that allows slavery is not one that cherishes the ideal of equality. It’s very much the opposite, sir. A nation that allows slavery is about as anti-egalitarian as it’s possible to be, short of making soup out of people. We allowed slavery until 1865, and after that we allowed something way too close to it for another god damn century. That’s the point.
Is he stupid, or does he think we’re stupid?
Well I don’t think he’s smart…
I would push back against that a bit.
A nation that allows slavery is certainly one that does not realize the ideal of equality. However, I’d say that it is possible for a nation to cherish an ideal while failing to live up to it, just as it’s possible for a person to cherish an ideal while failing to live up to it. What a person or nation is often differs starkly from what that person or nation aspires to be. I may value honesty, yet be dishonest; value self-discipline, yet eat compulsively; value courage, yet shrink from conflict. So too a nation may value equality, yet fail to reach it; value the general welfare, yet fail to promote it; value justice, yet fail to achieve it.
It is valuing an ideal that motivates progress. A person or nation that does not cherish an ideal is untroubled by not reaching it and has no reason to effect change with respect to it. If the arc of history bends toward an ideal, then we are justified in saying that ideal is valued. If that history is replete with lives laid down in pursuit of that ideal, then we are justified in calling that ideal cherished.
Nullius, I could agree with that in principle, but…our nation did not aspire to that ideal. It aspired to an ideal of equality for white male persons. There was no aspiration to allow either black people or women people to share in the equality. Slavery was not only tolerated, it was a cherished practice in parts of the country, so cherished that we split the country in two and fought a bloody war because they wanted so badly to keep the practice intact.
So while it may be possible to cherish an ideal you never live up to (I do that myself), there is no evidence that the US ever cherished the ideal of equality for all.
iknklast: The history of moral progress has often been one of identifying a new principle and applying it to the closest in-group, and over time its application expands to more distant groups. This has been true of nearly every moral precept humans have ever conceived, from voting and property rights all the way down to homicide. Each is endorsed narrowly before it is endorsed broadly.
Why is the South’s seceding evidence against, but the War itself not evidence for? Indeed, the South would not have felt it necessary to effect separation had not there been social and political pressure against their peculiar institution.
iknlast:
The US was never united over anything. But a majority of Americans were prepared to get rid of the Confederacy, and historians have debated the issues ever since.
Slavery supporters could quote the Bible (a rather commonly cited source in the US) on it, cite ‘the descent from Ham’ of all the slaves and whoever else they fancied to include in their category of racial inferiors. Abe Lincoln held in his Gettysburg Address that “all men are created equal;” which was not too bad for his day and age, as he was concerned with racism, not sexism.
Which goes to show I think that a racist will probably be a sexist as well, and anti-racists will probably place their anti-racism at a higher level of importance than their anti-sexism; to the extent that they have any of the latter at all.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts/from-noah-s-curse-to-slavery-s-rationale.html
It sure seems so, doesn’t it. The general rule of thumb seems to go something like this: If women (as in “biologcal females”) and some other group (Muslim fundamentalists, Trans people etc.) are making competing claims of discrimination, the latter group gets to claim victory for its framing of the issue for free, and you don’t even need to listen to the former. In short: “Never side with the Karens”.
‘All lives matter’ is such a facile and malicious reply to BLM. I wonder how many of them are vegetarian, and where their definition of ‘all lives’ stops. Any? I also wonder how many of the trophy hunter 2A types spout this hypocrisy. Of course I’m defining *all* in a literal sense, as if words mean things and concepts are capable of being understood by reasonably intelligent people. I know, good luck with that…
I still think Pence is smarter than Trump, but again, it doesn’t take much.
Maybe he means ‘all *human* lives’, so I wonder where he stands on the death penalty then? Maybe he means just the lives he finds valuable, which brings us right back to BLM.
There’s no need to tell people what they already know or already agree with. The strawman “Only black lives matter” is obviously false, but there is no need to say so explicitly since we don’t as a matter of fact live in a society (not in my country and not in the U.S) where a significant part of the population or even the state itself act as if it were true. The sentence “Black lives also matter” (the only honest interpretation of “Black lives matter) is true, and it needs to be said since we do in fact live in a society (in my country and even more so in the U.S) where a significant part of the population and even the state itself acts as if the truth of the sentence were up for debate.
#9 Right, most decent people know that black lives matter, and the target of the message is not even the overt racists that don’t agree with that statement. It’s aimed at the people who aren’t fully aware of the systemic racism problem, or who ignore it, and especially the ones who are in a position to improve the situation. To reply with ‘all lives’, or ‘blue lives’, or anything else is dismissive and is either a deliberate attempt to downplay the importance of the message, or is more of the same head-in-the-sand attitude of apathy and status quoism.
Nullius in Verba #3 wrote:
True. Yet many of the people who valued both equality and slavery (and equality along with the subjugation of women) sincerely believed that the facts showed that race and sex were hierarchical arrangements of capacity and ability. Just as there’s nothing unequal about letting high school kids play with a real bat and ball instead of the toddlers’ nerf set, blacks and women couldn’t handle what white men could. Nothing unfair about it.
The ideal of equality would go nowhere without ideals about learning and experiencing the new. Ideals will both make us uncomfortable when we fail to live up to our standard and give us the tools to allow us to recognize that we shouldn’t have been comfortable in the first place.
Samuel Johnson: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
A driver: “Because, Mr. Johnson, I am talking about MY personal liberty to do whatever the Hell I want to do without any damned federal government interference. I have the liberty to own slaves. My slaves have the liberty to attempt to leave. I have the liberty to maim or kill them for trying. Liberty for me is liberty for all, see?”