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alaskaone
  • Rank:TAE Member
  • Score:19447
  • Posts:17177
  • From:USA
  • Register:12/03/2008 3:25 AM

Date Posted:05/25/2018 5:27 PMCopy HTML

We know how the Clintons dealt with disgrace and it's tempting to take note of the double standard applied to them... but let's not.

Paul Rueben, Bill Cosby, Morgan Friedman... the list goes on and on and on.  Notables in the distant past also engaged in disgraceful behavior... Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, FDR, Martin Luther King, Kennedy's... that list goes on and on, too.

It would be nice to point at a line and say past this point, you're shunned, if not imprisoned.  But what's the line?  And supposing that in addition to being a reprehensible cad, the person is also something special?  Dr. King was an asshole.  Held to today's standards, he'd have been run out of public life if not jailed and that can be said of pretty much all of the important political figures and probably the entertainers, too.

What's the line?  Violence?  Well, what is violence?  Today, it appears to be the case that speech is now violence so that line is getting pretty vague, too. 

I suppose I'm trying to ask, at what point does a person's positive attributes become disposable due to disgraceful behavior?  And what is, exactly, disgraceful behavior?  Not that long ago, being homosexual was 'disgraceful'.  Drinking alcohol was once 'disgraceful'.  Cheating on your spouse, leaving your spouse and kids, premarital sex, abortion, being noisy in church, shouting someone down... all considered disgraceful at one time or another, one place or another.

If words have no set meaning any longer, if identity has no meaning, if there are no commonly agreed upon moral and ethical presuppositions... well, I'm thinking that's a problem.
Come to the Dark Side. We have cookies. The advantage of insinuations over hard arguments is that they bypass critical thought. No one can respond precisely to a charge that is utterly vague or to accusers who will envelope any reply in a poisonous fog of further insinuations. ~ David Warren, The Guardian There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time and that captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes, the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid they become when someone else has control. ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” ― H.L. Mencken
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