He’s doubling down on his slavery remarks.
He’s also freaking out with paranoia. He invited a couple of his odious pals — Geraldo Rivera and Eric Bolling — to whine at each other in their very own little safe space (on Fox News!) about how persecuted they are by liberals who want them dead.
I don’t want them dead. I’d be content if they were fired for incompetence and I never heard from them again.
What’s also annoying is that they keep patting O’Reilly on the back and telling him he’s a “historian”. He’s not. He’s a hack who has a ghost-writer churning out conspiracy theory books that he slaps his name on. I like this comment: “History isn’t just a word, it’s a discipline“. O’Reilly isn’t qualified to use it.
If he were a historian, he’d know that Abigail Adams wrote about the slaves building Washington DC.
it is true Republicanism that drive the Slaves half fed, and destitute of clothing…whilst the owner waches about Idle, tho his one Slave is all the property he can boast, Such is the case of many of the inhabitants of this place.
Not much has changed, I guess.
I also rather like this paraphrase of O’Reilly’s claim.
"Slaves were beaten, tortured and raped with impunity. Their children were sold for money. Slaves were well-watered."
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) July 28, 2016
Never forget: they were slaves, with all the deserved horror that word evokes. Americans stole people’s freedom and dignity and used them for profit.
Which is also a nice summary of modern Republicanism.
Resign, Bill.
This sounds awfully similar to Ham and Comforts apologism for biblical slavery
In a global sense, this man represents what is wrong with the country. Pure and simple.
Look at the “knowledge” held by Fox viewers compared to the reality in virtually any subject.
I have been watching Game of Thrones and the Trial by Combat (option only available to nobles) has always struck me as only valid if the society doesn’t care about truth. In a similar vein, whenever O-Reilly is challenged and feels threatened, he invites his adversaries to come onto his show. Which at first seems ‘noble’ and is in the Trial by Combat sense. Even if he is beat, they will edit out portions and make it appear that Bill has vanquished his opponent all for the goal of hiding the truth.
He needs a bigger shovel.
re 4:
(?) riffing on “if at first you don;t succeed get a bigger hammer” :-)
I get the point. he needs do dig himself so deep he vanishes from sight and can never climb back into sunshine.
ORLY really needs to go flush himself out of the world.
gak I hate him so much I’ll run out of hate words
It doesn’t matter if slaves were fed and clothed and put up in decent housing They still were, you know, slaves. The freedom given their masters was denied to them. They were human beings who belonged, in every sense of the word, to another. Christ, a child would see that is evil and wrong. What the fuck is wrong with O’Reilly and those of his ilk.
O’Reilly should replace a sarcastic “oh, really?” when someone spectacularly misses a point.
No slave has ever been well treated. As numerous people have noted, if Bill think it’s so fine, he should sign up. There’s still opportunities for enslavement in our world, or what amounts to slavery if you look at the prison system in Mississippi and some other Southern states.
It’s probably lost on BO’R that his precision founding poo-poos were terrified of their slaves. Slave revolt was a reality and the best way to prevent it was preemptively. The least sign of resistance was greeted with a beating, if not worse. Likewise, ferreting out weapons among slaves was one of the jobs of the slave patrols, called “well-regulated militias” in the 2nd Amendment.
As for the Bible’s justification of slavery, that’s raises an interesting paradox. The narrative running through the Pentateuch is of an enslaved people escaping to freedom. While that narrative is clearly ahistorical, it is evidence that the some of the writers thought freedom was better than slavery.
“precision” = “precious” F•••ing auto-correct
“Well-regulated militias” were tasked with making sure slaves weren’t stockpiling weapons?
Could I get a citation for that, please? I’m not saying it’s false, I’m just surprised that I’ve never heard it before.
re 7:
yup. that’s why his “enemies” (rational people) have nicknamed him with the texting abbrev of ORLY that was originally used to be the minimum character form of “oh really?”
Because every thing Billy says makes rational people react by posing that question to the TV image of Billy blabbering away.
I will go off the rails a minute and coin a new TLA, the 4LA (meaning Four(4) Letter Acronym )
gosh, don’t tell me it already exists, even if so, I still coined it originally.
Believe me. Believe me. Believe me.
3 times a charm donchano…
oops that derail was inspired by ORLY, but that ain’t an acronym anyway so not EG 4LA, but 4LAs do occasionally exist so I still claim coinage of that TLA for the 4 letter type. gee wiz(ard)
Quite some time ago I read a paper by an economist that argued that “trial by combat” and dueling serves a rational purpose in a society that lacks access to information (like forensics or credit reporting). Roughly speaking, reputation stands as a (subjective) proxy for unavailable (objective) information like credit, reliability, or innocence, and a willingness to take a significant risk to defend your reputation is useful evidence.
It would be hard to lay my hands on the paper now, but IIRC it modeled this using game theory, and pointed out that a habitual defaulter or a habitual criminal will be forced to defend their reputation repeatedly, which carries a significant risk of dying in a duel or combat. An honest person will tend to face few such challenges, and a correspondingly low risk. The willingness to accept that risk demonstrates that you are either: innocent, and rationally accepting of this slight risk; guilty, and an overwhelming duelist; or guilty, and an idiot.
The key is to realize that societies where dueling was common were also societies that couldn’t perform forensics, or transmit credit information from distant locales, or do background checks. It’s not that they placed low value on truth, but that they lacked the means to find out the truth and settled for a proxy that was more reliable than a coin flip.
If we used trial by combat today, in lieu of DNA testing, then it would indeed mean that we placed a low value on truth.
whywhywhy @3:
No, you are missing the point. Trial by combat (or by talk-show “debate”) has always been favored by political bullies. Antonin Scalia even regretted that we no longer choose our head of state through armed combat. His reasoning was instructive: it allows the common people to see that God’s Will has been served, and helps them to accept unquestioningly that the government, which wields the Sword of God’s Justice here on earth, must never be limited or judged by the moral standards of mere humans. That’s why he supported the death penalty in spite of opposition from his own Catholic Church, which he pointed out was merely human moral guidance, and had never been invested with the same divine “infallibility” as its opposition to abortion.
It’s not that they don’t care about truth; it’s that they have a far different definition of “truth” in which evidence and reason play no part — where they are indeed a hindrance. That’s why conservative support for education begins and ends with “spiritual education,” and why reality, as we all know, has a liberal bias.
Per #12 above, I would suggest that “talk-show ‘debate'” is not really analogous to trial by combat. Or at least, is only weakly so. Assuming that the analysis I cited from memory is reasonably accurate, the key elements of trial by combat are: inability to get at the truth directly; the public’s willingness to accept the outcome as binding; and the challenger’s willingness to risk significant stakes to defend their claim.
“Debate” is a good bully move, but the stakes are pretty low: in most cases both participants can claim they won, so there is not even a significant risk of lost reputation. Also, accurate information is accessible in most cases, so the debate represents a conscious choice to forego accurate information in favor of a sideshow.
In short, even though the analogy of combat=debate is suggestive, I don’t think it holds up to any kind of scrutiny.
What the fuck was O’Reilley’s original point in the first place? So for as I can tell Michelle Obama’s comment of her african-american girls playing on the lawn of the white house built by slaves was entirely in the context of opportunity and progress. What does the condition of slavery which was never mentioned have to do with anything?
Is O’Reilley claiming that slaves had the opportunity to be president in 1809? That slavery is as valuable an opportunity as presidency and there is no discernible difference? That there *hasn’t* been opportunity and progress? That America is not a land of opportunity or progress?
Seriously what the fuck was he talking about and why?
Or is he simply knee jerking responding to “A liberal mentioned race– time to blast that slavery was hunky-dory and there is no and never was any problem with race”.
the only way anyone can offer any defense of slavery of any kind is to reject the basic equality of all people and embrace the notion that there are superior and inferior people, to embrace that there is a moral basis for class distinctions that there are those who deserve to have unlimited power and over others.
Of course they are included in that chosen and blessed group (in there own minds) who deserve the right to own other people.
a completely anti-democratic idea.
uncle frogy
Or that might makes right, which is almost but not quite the same thing. E.g., he might reject that black people are inferior, and instead argue that if they had managed to enslave Europeans before the Europeans got around to enslaving them, then it would be fair dinkum.
He was seeking to diminish the accomplishments of the first black president and his family.
Of course they were well-fed, pretty much any slaves doing manual labor would have been well-fed. Why? Because they’d get up every day to engage in a very long day of SLAVE LABOR. A slave workforce isn’t very effective if it consists of under-fed slaves with no muscle mass who can’t effectively perform hard work.
Like, no fucking shit, how is this difficult.
I was thinking that conservatives still think of black people in terms of property. Notice that when they discuss inter-racial sex, they immediately start talking about “our women”. And when black folks start tearing stuff up, the conservatives start saying that they are destroying their own property, and that is evidence they are bad people. And everybody has a right to own guns, except black people.
There’s more to think of, but there seems to be something to it.
I think he was explaining why no one should ever speak of slavery ever. which he demonstrates by talking about it and using the word repeatedly, telling people to never mention the word. (because it was such a good thing, don’t ever talk about it.)
but, but, but, of course not.
he was just defensively taking the mention of it as insulting it. so he mansplains it to be a good thing Michelle mistakenly disparaged based on anti-slave propaganda. Slavery built this country so we should *cough* *spit*
On the “What the fuck was O’Reilley’s original point in the first place?” thing, I suspect it’s just what Ed Brayton calls Obama Derangement Syndrome: Anything President or Ms Obama says or does, or doesn’t say or do, must be wrong, because reasons.
My thanks to O’Reilly for demonstrating the exact thing I pointed out in my late post in the last thread on the topic. This is always the justification used by “benevolent slavemaster” mythicists. It is based entirely on assuming that a slavemaster would treat a slave the same way a farmer would treat a farm animal. And it’s absurdity of the highest order because 1) human beings are not the product of thousands of years of domestication and 2) if you are treating another human being like a farm animal instead of treating them like a human being, you are by definition not treating them well. In any sane country, spouting this kind of nonsense on prime-time television would kill your career and relegate you to the dustbin of history. But we have seen quite clearly this election cycle that sanity is in short supply here.
I really don’t see much difference between trial by combat and “debate” on the terms of talk shows (or even modern formal academic debate, which, if a recent NPR story has it right, has evolved into a duel of fast-talking flim-flam where nothing counts except the number of standard talking points that are spewed — but that’s another subject).
inability to get at the truth directly;
[Directly? Truth is never available directly. In science, it is hard work. In spiritual terms, it is a matter of ecclesiastical authority. In “debate,” ignorance will do nicely. “The tides come in and the tides go out. Nobody knows how that works!”]
the public’s willingness to accept the outcome as binding;
[In a closed society, that means authority. In a more open society, ignorance and gullibility will suffice.]
and the challenger’s willingness to risk significant stakes to defend their claim
[There’s the rub, and is why so many scientists won’t debate on talk shows and other such venues. The uneven dueling field makes defeat or the appearance of defeat more probable, and discourages the public acceptance of reason.]
In both cases, it’s easy answers (no special preparation is necessary beyond developing a winning combat/debate style) versus hard work; playing to the prejudices of ignorance (which is always in ready supply) rather than discernment and education; and in many cases, the stakes are quite high — even, arguably, the survival of our scientific civilization.
The “tides” bit is, I think, a telling similarity. The ultimate trump (!) card is ignorance, but not naked ignorance: it is clothed in the piety of self-effacement. “I” don’t understand how the tides work, nor how one side wins over the other in the Royal Wars; but God certainly does, because He makes it all work out as it should. Don’t try to understand it, just give your support to the one that promises to be the savior, and forget the side that says we all have to work together to understand the real world.
In the US, we’re about to see the biggest political trial by combat we’ve seen in nearly a century, and it will take the form of a reality show debate. The world will be watching. I’m sorry it happened that way, but that’s where we are. Let’s hope we’re not all fired.
It’s actually more of a Founding Fathers Derangement Syndrome: any suggestion that the Founding Fathers were anything other than good, just, and conservative must be challenged. Michelle Obama suggested the Founding Fathers used brutal slavery to build the White House, therefore the record has to be set straight that the perfect Founding Fathers must have only used the most well-meaning slavery possible to build the White House.
dannysichel @ #10
I would have to go digging deeper than I just did to find the article again, and I’m a bit busy for that at the moment…maybe later. However, I recently read an article about the reason for the 2nd Amendment, which was to protect the right of the states to maintain slave patrols. It described what the slave patrols did, one of which was periodically visiting slave quarters to search for weapons. They also rounded up run away slaves. As a state financed militia, slave patrols were a service provided by the states.
Ah…here’s something from Wikipedia along the lines of what I read: ‘Eventually, slave patrols expanded to be year-round, not just on holidays. Slowly, new duties and rights of patrollers became permitted, including: “apprehending runaways, monitoring the rigid pass requirements for blacks traversing the countryside, breaking up large gatherings and assemblies of blacks, visiting and searching slave quarters randomly, inflicting impromptu punishments, and as occasion arose, suppressing insurrections.”[5]’
[5] Is a reference to: Hadden, Sally E. (2001). Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press.
I thought the “well-watered” line was a reference to Houseplants of Gor, a famous parody of the execrable Gor novels and their slavery apologia.
I just noticed that blurb next to his head lauding Washington for taking care of the slaves. Do you suppose Mr. Historian doesn’t know that the White House was burned down in 1814 and rebuilt…with slaves!? By that time, slaves were probably treated even worse than at the time of construction of the first White House because slavery had become a more divisive issue in the country and the Haitian revolt scared the bezeebus out of slave holders.
The differences I’ve suggested are:
(1) Society doesn’t accept the outcome of the debate as a binding result, while trial by combat is accepted as equivalent to a verdict at trial.
(2) The participant risks nothing engaging in debate, because they can always spin the outcome as a victory anyway, so there is no disincentive to participating and the willingness to do so communicates nothing meaningful about the participant.
(3) The debate is not a proxy for unobtainable data; the data is perfectly obtainable, and the participants are intentionally hoping you’ll disregard it and instead pay attention to their sideshow.
True but beside the point. Your willingness to risk your life to protect your reputation is a proxy for something I’d rather have, but can’t obtain. In the case of a duel, that’s a reasonably accurate record of your past financial dealings. In the case of trial by combat, that’s witness testimony or forensic evidence.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but again this misses the point. Several very different societies had versions of dueling (to settle private disputes) and trial by combat (to settle public disputes). What they had in common was that the parties to the dispute would consider the matter settled once the duel or combat was over. This is far from true of a debate.
Right. There’s no risk, and therefore the willingness to participate doesn’t signal anything about the participants. If you’re willing to accept a substantial risk, such as death, we have basis to believe that you’re innocent, because in the iterated game you would be a great fool to accept such a risk if you weren’t in the right.
No: trial by combat is a social construct found in societies where solving crimes directly is effectively impossible, not hard. Those same societies throw away trial by combat when they develop more effective methods of resolving criminal cases. It’s not coincidental that no society has both trial by combat and Internet-connected DNA labs.
You’re basically saying that societies that had trial by combat did so because they were stupid. I’ve clearly asserted the opposite, with a sketch of the reasoning for that position. By simply re-asserting that it was a stupid institution that they stupidly adopted because they were a bunch of stupid stupids, you’re just begging the question.
You’re equivocating “stakes” here. The combatants have nothing to lose, and no disincentive to participation. Therefore the willingness to participate communicates nothing.
If Ken Ham and Bill Nye both agreed that the loser, as determined by a mutually agreeable panel of judges, would be fed through a wood chipper, then their willingness to debate would tell us something. Namely, that both were quite certain of their correctness (because Nye really IS correct, and Ham is that big a zealot).
But as an aside, the idea that a televised debate threatens the survival of civilization or of science is beyond melodramatic.
And now I’m picturing Bill Nye merrily stuffing Ken Ham head-first into a wood chipper. Thanks. I needed that. BILL BILL BILL BILL!
I went and looked up trial by combat, because (disclaimer) I am not a historian. I didn’t read the primary sources or anything, but the summary I read did comment that trial by combat is only allowed in cases where there is no confession, no eyewitness, and insufficient evidence for a conclusive verdict.
Coming full circle, it’s debatable whether Tyrian Lannister would be granted trial by combat, since finding his personal dagger on the assassin might be deemed sufficiently conclusive evidence to preclude it. GRRM, unsurprisingly, cribbed medieval customs without concerning himself much with accuracy.
That’s the wonderful thing about writing fantasy. There is no need for historical accuracy since there is no pretense of being historical fiction. (That’s not a knock on GRRM, by the way.)
The GOP long ago learned that you can remedy a hole by just digging everything in sight.
PZ:
I’m not sure O’Reilly & friends can be properly called incompetent. It seems to me they are extremely competent at spreading malicious lies & misinformation and making lots of money by doing so.
Don’t underestimate the enemy. These are criminals, not just fools.
Clearly we need to institute Trial by Wombat.
A Masked Avenger:
I think that the central point of our disagreement — do participants in contests by combat (or media debate) do so rationally — may not be resolvable. I’d suggest it as a subject for research, but I wonder if either the combat or wood-chipper phases would pass muster in an ethics panel. I don’t know whether the debates this fall will be better or worse. One side already claims to favor torture.
Azkyroth:
Trial by Wombat? I was thinking Tasmanian Devil (as depicted in Warner Bothers cartoons). I also recall a Warner Animaniacs episode with Slappy Squirrel seeking justice over Walter Wolf through the court of last stick of dynamite. As Skippy said: “Spew!”
themadtapper @25:
Fixed that.
“Ladies and gentlemen….the wood chipper OF SCIENCE!” *dramatic trumpets*
@Scientismist: come on. The central point of your disagreement was your assertion that debate is the same as trial by combat. A Masked Avenger very effectively disproved your point. You are now employing the rhetorical tactic where you attempt to call it a draw by sidestepping all of the other points of disagreement and announcing that a separate side issue “may not be resolvable”. Please, do not.
Scientismist,
The game theoretic analysis is pretty cogent I think, and the fact that combat (or trial by ordeal) were disallowed when guilt could be proven to the satisfaction of whatever passed for a court strongly supports this conclusion.
As a more general observation, I think it’s a mistake to chalk things up casually to stupidity. Humans, like natural selection, are very practical, and they tend to adopt things because they work. But also like natural selection, they often are optimizing a different objective function than you imagine. Sop posing that they’re idiots says more about us than about them.
Surely O’Reilly merits the Father Coughlan prize.
… or at least the Pastor Ray Mummert prize.
A Masked Avenger@12, 29,
While I don’t claim any disproof, I must say your unnamed economist’s claim for the rationality of trial by combat and duelling in societies without the means to determine guilt or fault by forensic means strikes me as all too similar to the “Just-so” stories of evolutionary psychology – and likely the product of the dogmatic “rational choice” school of economics – but I’d be interested in the paper if you have a reference. I can, however, think of a number of objections. For one thing, it would mean that those who were expert combatants could (literally) get away with murder, both because others would fear to challenge them, and because they could provoke duels with those they wished to kill. For another, many of the same societies also used torture to extract confessions – a method guaranteed to produce false results.
Further to #42, the history of trial by combat in Britain is described here. It appears to have fallen out of actual use by the end of the 16th century, although it was not formally abolished until 1819. Even the latter date is well before effective means of determining guilt or innocence were instituted in the British legal system – results of trials would depend more on the social standing of the accused or the disputants than anything else. In most cases, the accused had no right to legal representation, for example, and nor was there any effective body to conduct investigations.
I wonder if that was the reason “seconds” became part of this.
if someone chose to duel you, you could always name a champion to duel in your place.
would not only be more fair to participants who had no skill, or a severe liability of some kind, but also prevent the use of duels as primarily objects of legal murder.
Ichthyic@44,
“Seconds” were the ones who arranged the venue, brought and prepared the weapons, handled any pre-duel negotiations, and carted you away if killed or injured – quite different from champions. I’m not sure what the rules were about the latter, but I don’t think it’s true you could “always name a champion to duel in your place”. To the extent that you could, that would undermine the supposed function of duelling A Masked Avenger mentions – it would mean whoever could hire the best champion would come out on top. In effect, this did happen in the early modern era, and indeed, often still does – but the champions were lawyers fighting with words, in court, rather than with swords or guns.
O’Reilly : historian :: Drunk : Lamppost
For a science fiction perspective.
The Beer Appreciation Society of Historic Lamps and Poles will be having a HIC! at you…
Scientismist @36: No, see, how Trial by Wombat works is that you and your accuser each have to dig a fully-grown wombat out of its burrow without getting clawed, bitten, pissed on, butted in the knees, or losing the undercarriage of your car. The winner is the person who manages to get the wombat (still alive) to the judges, and then manages to set it free without it damaging any of the judges (or their vehicles[1]) in the fastest time.
If it turns out the result of such a trial is unable to be determined, the next trial is by inland taipan (where you get bitten by the snake, and whoever survives is considered the winner). That one usually works quite satisfactorily.
[1] Why all the references to vehicles? Because when a wombat gets hit by a motor vehicle, the wombat tends to survive, while the motor vehicle tends to lose significant chunks of its undercarriage. Wombats are essentially a species of mobile, fur-covered concrete block.
@eyesoars, #46
Maybe this is a standard reference and my brain is failing me, but my efforts to understand this work best with
historian => history
Is it possible that this revised analogy works as well or better:
?
ORLY knows as much history as drunks know about lampposts. Good place to lean, is all.
@eyesoars, #46
Maybe this is a standard reference and my brain is failing me, but my efforts to understand this work best with
historian => history
Is it possible that this revised analogy works as well or better:
?
I could have sworn that I changed historian => history last time. :sigh:
You just attended a meeting of The Beer Appreciation Society of Historic Lamps and Poles ?