Re: Pearls Before Swine: Uncle Is Not Good With Money

Scott Lurndal wrote:

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

On Sun, 9 Feb 2025, Chris Buckley wrote:

>
The whole reason I entered into this debate was not Trump, but the
claim that a survey of *historians* would possibly objectively rank
Trump.  I know historians. My father was a Republican historian and
for decades I would hear his stories of dwindling Republican presence
among historians. There weren't enough to get together for meals at
conferences by the time he retired.

>
This is likely true and pretty sad, and it's not a sign that historians
have changed so much that the Republican party has changed in that time.

 The sad part is that his father identified as a "republican historian".
 A real historian doesn't color their research with their own political > beliefs[*].

When I was at Texas A&M a senior history professor was facing charges of plagiarism.  He was clearly guilty, but he and his wife were politically very well connected - the person from whom he had "borrowed" didn't get tenure.  One feature of the article was that pretty much his entire output was dedicated to "proving" that the civil war had nothing to do with slavery.

 I wonder if his father's first name was William, but he identified
as a conservative writer, not an historian.

I recall one odious program in which he discussed evolution.  Fear of speaking from utter ignorance was not one of his characteristics.

 [*] Anyone who has studied history quickly becomes aware that historians
have unconcious biases, usually related to current culteral mores; some
historians writing in 1900 often cheered the concept of Manifest Destiny,
and the positive benefits (for the conquerers, not the conquered) of
colonization, for example.

And even the "positive benefits" for the conquered were often cited. Hard though it is to believe, not always hypocritically.
I recall reading of a conversation between David Lloyd-George, then a liberal firebrand, and Lord Beaverbrook, maverick conservative.  They both agreed that they were imperialists, and thought this a good thing for the world.
Romans were wont to comment how much better people were off under their empire.  Still if you were the slave grandson of a man captured in the conquest, the fact that your home town now had a  theatre and presented Greek plays might bizarrely not be enough compensation for working all hours of the day without compensation (aside from your daily porridge, of course!).  Ungrateful sod.
But then it was a common opinion among the Romans that some people are natural slaves.  And the proof that someone is a natural slave is that he was a slave.  An airtight argument and ignore that Spartacus behind the curtain.
William Hyde