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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33252 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhere.

Agamemnon, leading the great expedition to Troy, had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds.

Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian pharaoh who, finding himself trapped in a burning room by his enemies:

took counsel at once with his wife, whom (it was said) he was bringing with him; and she counselled him to lay two of his six sons on the fire and to make a bridge over the burning whereby they might pass over the bodies of the two and escape. This Sesostris did; two of his sons were thus burnt, but the rest were saved alive with their father.

The great bulwarks of Christendom in Constantinople were fond of blinding or castrating political rivals and brothers in order to render them nonthreatening. Their successors in Constantinople would take it a step further, Mehmed II would legalize fratricide:

"Of any of my sons that ascends the throne, it is acceptable for him to kill his brothers for the common benefit of the people (nizam-i alem). The majority of the ulama (Muslim scholars) have approved this; let action be taken accordingly."

Later, Mehmed III would murder 19(!) of his brothers upon ascending the throne.

Meanwhile in the Americas, To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:

I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with, than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.

So either America should accept that the Chinese are people, or we should accept that Southerners weren't.

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