I declare this offensive...

[liberty]

Anyone who’s offended by historical text has learned nothing from history and is not qualified to be called a historian. My God, it’s history and any historian or history buff will tell you the absolute truth of history is nothing ever stays the same and the future can always find fault with the past. Do you find this offensive?

https://www.legendsandchronicles.com/an ... %20fathers.

“ In ancient Roman society, the male was head of the family held almost absolute powers over his family. This was because ancient Rome was a patriarchal society where women did not have much say in private or public life. Children of ancient Rome were under the authority of their fathers. A father could decide almost everything for his children such as dressing, education, and lifestyle. One of the most brutal laws of Rome related to the Roman children was that fathers could even kill their children without breaching Roman law. “

If you’re too fragile to handle historical text you shouldn’t be a historian or even a history buff.

[MajGenl.Meade]

If you'd like to try history, sign up (free) for JStor (100 articles per month access). You'd find such as this:

[Burning Petard]

Out of kindness and respect fellow humans, Please note Gob's quote at the head of this thread is from "A famed British historian. . . . Professor Andrew Roberts". No mention of what Prof Roberts' specialty is. For Brit historians in general, the Declaration of Independence is a minor detail in their long-running conflict with France. This all could have been an exaggeration from an academic in order to call attention to the absurdity of 'trigger warnings'.

I have no assurance that our friend posting as 'Liberty' has the basic life skills to qualify as human.

snailgate

[Sue U]

Out of kindness and respect fellow humans, Please note Gob's quote at the head of this thread is from "A famed British historian. . . . Professor Andrew Roberts". No mention of what Prof Roberts' specialty is. For Brit historians in general, the Declaration of Independence is a minor detail in their long-running conflict with France. This all could have been an exaggeration from an academic in order to call attention to the absurdity of 'trigger warnings'.

I notice that nowhere in the article is the so-called "trigger warning" actually quoted or otherwise shown in context. So we really have no idea what it says or why, all we're getting is some fishwrapper scribbler's spin. And assuming that as usual Gob has sourced the item from the Daily Fail, the story is by definition designed to elicit the maximum outrage among its readership ("reader" being used in its loosest sense) -- particularly because the subject is not actually the supposed "trigger warning," but the self-important right-wing attention-seeking Conservative darling Andrew Roberts, who is apparently feeling a bit short of press mentions these days. He is outraged (for some reason), and you should be too! (Never you mind about any actual facts, circumstances or explanatory notes.)

[Gob]

Yeah, but it makes for laughs here.

How about an article in the Times, that highbrow enough for you?

Andrew Roberts FRSL FRHistS

(born 13 January 1963) is an English historian and journalist. He is a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society.

He has been a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London since 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ro ... historian)

[Sue U]

Yeah, but it makes for laughs here.

How about an article in the Times, that highbrow enough for you?

From The Times:

The National Archives in Washington DC has erected a “trigger warning” next to the founding 18th-century document of the United States, according to the historian Andrew Roberts.

Apparently Roberts -- or his publicist -- has sent the same stupid press release around to all the papers. One might hope The Times would still be professional enough to do actual reporting rather than parroting, but standards for news media generally have been in free-fall for decades and The Times proves it is no exception. Publishing this kind of tripe is whole lot cheaper (in every sense) than actual journalism.

[MajGenl.Meade]

ETA: In case it's not clear, this was posted in support of the "there's nothing to see here" by Sue

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... ings-plac/

In an online statement, the Archives -- formally, the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA -- notes it provides public access to millions of records, adding:

"The Catalog and web pages contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view. NARA’s records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance."

The Archives includes the warning on all documents across its collection of records of the U.S. federal government. In other words, the founding documents were not singled out, as Grothman’s tweet suggests.

The warning is general and automatically appears on every page of the online catalog, according to the National Archives communication staff.

It’s also important to note that none of the documents are altered or censored in any way.

[BoSoxGal]

[MajGenl.Meade]

My thoughts exactly - hurricane in a teapot.

[Big RR]

Point taken, but the allegation was that the language used somehow made it clear women could not be president; the fact that they participated as candidates in both primary and general elections clearly shows the falsity of this (since, if a woman could not be president, she could not run in either; FWIW, I haven't seen any 18 year olds running since they do not meet the Constitutional age limit). I was merely pointing out the silliness of that allegation.

[Sue U]

My thoughts exactly - hurricane in a teapot.

I agree it's ridiculous, but the problem is that this is the kind of bad-faith panty-twister regularly deployed by conservatives in general and U.S. Republicans in particular (see Politifact link above) for the sole purpose of driving a culture war narrative, in a transparent effort to keep their base "enraged and engaged." It's purposefully divisive and blatantly disingenuous, and is a despicable appeal to the naked tribalism that now substitutes for actual social policy on the right.

[BoSoxGal]

Yeah I confess my visual comment was a throw away; I do actually take this stuff quite seriously because it is all blocks in the wall of fascism the GQP/Trumpism party is in the ongoing process of building.

Last night I watched the Frontline episode MG posted in another thread and was thinking of all the mess and destruction of democratic ideals that they’ve been engaging in with the Big Lie about the 2020 election, just as Viktor Orban was announcing his victory in Hungary was so big it could be seen from the moon or some such nonsense.

And then this morning on the news it’s all discussion about fucking atrocities committed by Russians in eastern Ukraine and the fact that many in the GQP/Trumpism party have been apologists for Putin right along and wondering how many will stay in that mode of thinking such that if we somehow end up with Trump 2.0 or some different version of him in 2024, this country is really primed to fall onto a seriously ugly path.

Honestly thinking about the possibilities- which are entirely possible, we MUST stop thinking ‘it can’t happen here,’ -makes me queasy with anxiety.

We are cursed by living in interesting times. History is moving very rapidly just now, and the potential for it to turn out very badly is huge by any number of variations. America is a powderkeg of injustice and inequality and abhorrent economic disparities that leave tens of millions of people very angry about the lack of real opportunity for their children. The question of the day is, which match will light the conflagration and will it be healing fire that burns out the bad and leaves healthy forest behind, or will it destroy everything good? Sadly in America today politics are so toxic that the answer to that question is almost entirely partisan.

I’m trying to hold out hope for the good guys getting the win. Or the better guys, anyway.

[Big RR]

I can't argue with that BSG; the biggest problem for me is that these "interesting" times is that it has made me seriously question whether democracy is a viable form of government going into the future. And, even worse, if it is not, is there anything preferable that could replace it? When people are so willing to use their votes to vote in power-hungry assholes, and I seriously doubt that our experiment in democracy has all that much of a future.

[Burning Petard]

I recently heard of a metaphor from Carl Sagan back in the biggest days of the Cold War. As I remember it: "It is like two men who are very angry and afraid of each other standing ankle deep in gasoline in a closed room with poor ventilation. One has 400 matches. The other has 700 matches. Each is worried that they may not have enough matches."

Seems to me that is pretty much similar to the world's position on global warming today.

Anybody know if there is a version of the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' doomsday clock on their cover, for Global Warming/Climate Change?

snailgate

[Bicycle Bill]

Perhaps Putin will end up triggering WWIII; the ICBMs will fly and the A-bombs will fall.  Then the resulting nuclear winter will offset the global warming.

-"BB"-

[ex-khobar Andy]

Anybody know if there is a version of the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' doomsday clock on their cover, for Global Warming/Climate Change?

snailgate

For a while now climate change has been a factor in setting the clock - currently 100 seconds to midnight. I don't recall when they made that change. From the Bulletin's website:

The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.

Edited to add: I should have looked it up. They added climate change as a factor in 2007, if Wikipedia is to be believed. I did not chase the Wikipedia entry to its source.