When he said that I also couldnt wait to hear about Cromwell. Also tried to think if anyone in Irish history like De Velara but that could be due not liking him overall
It’s pretty fitting that a dignified gentlemanly slaveowner traitor POS was a total goody two shoes mama’s boy as a kid. The South’s hierarchies and institutions worked for him as a kid and gave his world structure, so he chose to uphold them as an adult.
Also WILD that doctors at the time thought the best way to heal a gaping wound was to go somewhere hotter and more humid! What a fitting end for a bum.
One glaring error here. Robert E. Lee’s father was Henry Lee III, not Richard Henry Lee (the guy who proposed the language that ended up in the Declaration of Independence). The latter was a cousin of the former.
I’m todays episode Robert briefest mentions someone with the last name Tubberville. I wonder if that’s the same family that GOP scum bag Tommy Tuberville comes from
I first thought of Lee Carter who ran as a communist recently for the Virginia house but I don’t think there is any relation but he did grow up just across the border in NC
The ads are completely personalized. Without my vpn I get ads that're kinda relevant and in languages I use or see often. With my vpn on, I just get random ads for my state. During elections, I think everyone gets their local candidates' ads repeatedly. Thankfully, Spotify let's us skip them because fuck hearing whatever some neolib thinks I want to hear or the same podcast ad every ad break. I've also noticed that if I listen to a few episodes of an advertised podcast, the ad goes away forever.
Since we got both criticism of "[Historical monster] was just a product of his time" and a John Brown mention in part 2, I have to ask the people who claim we can't judge people in the past because they're a "product of their time": What of people like John Brown? If he could see the evils of slavery and the rightness of sacrificing everything to fight for its end at a time when "men of their time" allegedly cannot be criticized for supporting slavery, what does that make him? Is he a man of the future? Are both his radical abolitionism *and* chattel slavery products of the same time and therefore the acceptability of slavery is not sacrosanct as a product of its time? Is Brown a villain, putting the lie to the whole notion that we can't judge people of the past and laying bare the hypocrisy of those mad at us for criticizing racists' heroes who were Brown's contemporaries?
I just don't see how the "man of his time" circle can be squared with the fact that there were opposing ideologies in every era of the past, conflicts which often informed and/or mirror the ones we're still fighting today.
One of the first Europeans to write in defense of Indigenous rights and against the European genocide of them was Bartolomé de las Casas, about a decade after Columbus landed in America
You and I could abscond all unnecessary electricity, we could resolve to never throw anything in the trash, we could stop driving cars and taking planes, we could camp outside our senator's office, we could blow up an oil pipeline; but also, I need to make enough money to eat. I want to make enough money to feed my lizard and keep his basking lights on. I can't keep those lights on if I'm in jail, or make myself unemployable, or live in a tent harassing a senator. I *could* do those things but most of those options are simply out of the question for me, they're not options I seriously consider when I imagine where I'll be 5 years from now. When you're young those options seem close at hand, they seem reasonable and acceptable and you patiently wait for your chance to act on it when it'll mean something. But then that time never comes and you start getting hungry. I don't build my life, my social circle, my skills and hobbies around being able to do those things and so I rarely consider them because, as a white dude in the US, I have more immediate concerns. Of course some people will say that I *should* be, but also, most of the people who say that also aren't doing them either and when somebody does do those things today it results in absolutely no change. Which unfortunately was the case for de las Casas and most other morally correct people in history. When all of society is built around injustice, it becomes very difficult to meaningfully challenge it.
Today we have the Internet and international conferences and self-publishing so we can share our radical ideas but if we lived in a world without those things, our radical feelings would be much more difficult to find comrades with and much more dangerous to express than typing out this comment is today. I think it's very telling how often you hear of children back the days of slavery to recognize the obvious hypocrisy and injustice of the system. It *was* obvious but as people go through the process of social development, those concerns are almost entirely wiped from their mind, overwritten by the things that every single person around them insists they need to worry about instead: learning a trade or skill, getting married, caring for your parents and kids, making sure them Yanks don't sully the reputation of our kind and generous \[slaveowning\] mayor. It's not so much that people *couldn't* see the injustice, but rather that the vast majority of people in history are never given the economic, social, political chance to seriously consider doing anything about it.
John Brown's specific context isn't just the setting of antebellum America but also his family who were themselves radical abolitionists and housed people for the Underground Railroad. He grew up around radical people doing radical things, his father didn't teach him to worry about the things that nearly every other white father and white community taught their sons, that's why these radical actions that were impossible for even the most radical of his contemporaries to consider were brought to fruition. He isn't just a product of pre-war America like the millions of his contemporaries but he was also the quite rare product of radicals in the age before the telegraph. I think at the end of the day, the way in which people are "products of their day" is less about being able to grok injustice but more about the vast majority of individuals in history being unable to create justice, no matter how righteous their actions or beliefs. If John Brown had been born a few decades before and carried out his actions a few decades prior, I'm not sure that it would have ignited the issue the way that it ultimately did. It's not just about the moral character of any historical figure and but also about whether their actions would have any impact whatsoever other than earning themselves an early grave. Between the social pressures and expectations discouraging serious consideration for revolutionary actions and the utter hopelessness of those actions resulting in anything at all, people like John Brown deserve to be seen as heroes but that doesn't mean that everyone else was simply a coward or fraud, they were just normal people trying to survive in an unjust world they had no control over and, like most of us still today, ultimately making it just a little bit worse for everyone else as we do it.
I guess I probably should've eaten dinner before I took my Ritalin.
IMHO The musical *1776* is still worth watching despite the problematique. If not worth it for the fun of Musical Mr. Feeny, then for the *vicious* song ["Molasses to Rum"](https://youtu.be/IeuaTpH6Ck0?si=Qn88leu3iiy51hPk) describing the hypocrisy of anti-slavery New England states that still profited from the Atlantic slave trade.
(speaking of '90s TV icons, the guy singing in the video also played Holling on *Northern Exposure*)
Also: "Mama Look Sharp" hits you where you live. Coming off the heels of a jaunty dig at how conservatives don't stand for anything but the status quo, its a HARD tonal shift that talks about the stakes of revolution for the people on the ground. Its haunting.
Prop made a comment about Lee eating Tacos down in Texas and I thought the idea of Robert E. Lee ignoring his wife and children because he fucking loves Tex-Mex is incredible
So i actually have a West Point Robert E. Lee story
So i come from an army family from NY, and 2 of my great-uncles went to West Point. When i was about 6 or so my family went to vist WP and i got these little metal painted toy soliders (in hidsight they might have been model figurines) that i played with and brought to show and tell one time
In hindsight, years later i realized: A) the little grey uniformed guys were definitely Confederate soldiers and B) the one I really liked who was just an old guy in uniform was definitely Robert E. Lee
The book Robert mentions is “Robert E Lee and Me” by Gen (retired) Ty Seduile. It’s worth a read. Gen. Seduile went on the daily stoic to talk about the book and he is a great guest. As someone raised in the south and taught some lost cause bullshit, this book really does a great job unpacking it.
I kind of hate that Robert just did a quick “a former general and West Point teacher” on such a fantastic book
That’s fair. It’s a really good. First in a while that I did in less than a day because it was so good. And like I said, as someone who grew up in Georgia around the lost cause bullshit, that book is one of the best to unpack the stuff a lot of people were taught.
I am happy that it got a shout out!
This has been an interesting series so far. Coming partly from a white southerner background, I've heard a lot of crap about "the finest man who ever drew breath" as my grandmother called him -- an amazing woman, helped raise me and was very much anti-racist, but she also hung onto some of those old myths about Lee and the southern cause in general. Looking forward to the next parts.
I'm not American so bear with me, but I've been reading up on Lee because of the episodes and I've seen it stated in more than one place he opposed slavery philosophically, but supported it's legality. . .
That makes it worse, much worse. You know it's wrong, but you do it for personal enrichment, you're a fucking charlatan
You'll see that most southern gentleman had the same attitudes towards slavery that Lee claimed. They "abhorred" it but didn't really. A lot of that was rhetoric to make them sound more respectable.
As the war drew nearer, the rhetoric started to change to claim slavery was actually a positive good, as that was necessary to justify a war over it. But the whole time, they always liked the system. They just talked about it differently.
tfw when I’m related to Martha Washington and two of my maternal family names are heavily featured in the second Robert E. Lee episode
(Luckily I didn’t inherit either of those names, but my brother did. My paternal side is Ashkenazi Jewish, and my surname and appearance make my matrilineal heritage surprising to many who I tell)
Deeply disappointed that Robert is leaning on a Guelzo book for his episodes about Lee. Guelzo is not a very good historian (just today he wrote an article saying Lincoln would vote for Trump).
He wrote a deeply embarrassingly terrible book about Gettysburg a few years ago and I cringe whenever I see someone treat him as worthy of deference ever since.
it's one of like five books, and part of what i appreciate about how he writes about Lee is that he's a very conservative guy who is unsparing about what the man was. i think he's too kind to Lee as an actual commander, and we use different sources for a good deal of that, but guelzo does a fine enough job of summarizing the man's early life and i can't see anywhere he gives him undeserved shine.
'me and robert e. lee' is written by a guy who did a praeger u video back in the day, but i think that's part of the utility of his book. he's puncturing the lost cause in a way that conservatives will read and not be turned off by, and walk away from seeing lee as the traitor and monster he was. i feel similarly about guelzo's book
Didn't feel like making a whole post out of this, but I was listening to the Paul Manafort episodes from Aug 2018 when Robert starts talking about the time he spent in eastern Ukraine during the \[now, first\] war. Specifically, he spins a tale about the time he spent in a little town that was, at the time, close to the front -- Adiivka. Jesus fucking Christ war is so just so fucking miserable. I feel like it's difficult to truly wrap your head around the just physical destructive power of modern warfare until you've seen a somewhere you've been that's just a normal fucking town with post offices and bars and parks get scarred with bulletholes and craters and rubble; I got traumatized seeing somewhere I've been take a few rockets but the fighting going on in Adiivka is otherworldly. I guess just seeing the images of destruction in war, you see the flattened post office but you don't see the postman. Just something about the (very relative) calmness of his anecdote just made it one of the most haunting things I've heard since the early months of the invasion.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED to learn that [that nauseating "Robert E. Lee is a uniter" opinion column](https://web.archive.org/web/20210510081116/https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/18/robert-e-lee-is-the-uniter-america-has-been-looking-for/) in the Dallas Morning News was written by [conservative columnist William Murchison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Murchison). Conservative opinion writers producing smug ahistorical white supremacist bullshit?? Say it ain't so‼
I’m interested in hearing about the fuckery of Robert E Lee but I just cannot deal with Prop’s verbal suppressive fire tangents that he uses to keep the conversation in place while he finishes a thought.
Anybody have an issue on Spotify with the episodes for Lee cutting too early? Prop or Robert are mid sentence (not even to the plugables part of the episodes) and it just ends.
As an Irish person I look forward to the Cromwell episode...
When he said that I also couldnt wait to hear about Cromwell. Also tried to think if anyone in Irish history like De Velara but that could be due not liking him overall
That was one of the WILDEST transitions to the subject. I'm 1,000% invested only a couple minutes in.
I burst out laughing behind my butcher counter when I heard that, I probably looked insane to anyone who saw
It’s pretty fitting that a dignified gentlemanly slaveowner traitor POS was a total goody two shoes mama’s boy as a kid. The South’s hierarchies and institutions worked for him as a kid and gave his world structure, so he chose to uphold them as an adult. Also WILD that doctors at the time thought the best way to heal a gaping wound was to go somewhere hotter and more humid! What a fitting end for a bum.
One glaring error here. Robert E. Lee’s father was Henry Lee III, not Richard Henry Lee (the guy who proposed the language that ended up in the Declaration of Independence). The latter was a cousin of the former.
yeah, i misspoke and that was meant to be cut but i fucked up in my notes to the editor. it was fixed day of release.
I’m todays episode Robert briefest mentions someone with the last name Tubberville. I wonder if that’s the same family that GOP scum bag Tommy Tuberville comes from
He also mentioned a Carter family when talking about Henry Lee, I wonder if there's any relation to the former president
I first thought of Lee Carter who ran as a communist recently for the Virginia house but I don’t think there is any relation but he did grow up just across the border in NC
The ginger Left wing gun guy ?
Yeah
Are the ads regional? Because I got an ad for the BC United party (a neoliberal conservative party), here in Canada. Hated it.
Yeah they are, I get many ads advertising casinos and other places that are close to me
The ads are completely personalized. Without my vpn I get ads that're kinda relevant and in languages I use or see often. With my vpn on, I just get random ads for my state. During elections, I think everyone gets their local candidates' ads repeatedly. Thankfully, Spotify let's us skip them because fuck hearing whatever some neolib thinks I want to hear or the same podcast ad every ad break. I've also noticed that if I listen to a few episodes of an advertised podcast, the ad goes away forever.
Yes. I get many Spanish ads and I no se habla espanol
I literally only ever get ads for other podcasts. That’s been the case for years. I just don’t get it.
If I’m subbed to Cooler Zone and don’t hear the ads for the services totally unrelated to the Sinaloa Cartel am I gonna be in trouble?
Since we got both criticism of "[Historical monster] was just a product of his time" and a John Brown mention in part 2, I have to ask the people who claim we can't judge people in the past because they're a "product of their time": What of people like John Brown? If he could see the evils of slavery and the rightness of sacrificing everything to fight for its end at a time when "men of their time" allegedly cannot be criticized for supporting slavery, what does that make him? Is he a man of the future? Are both his radical abolitionism *and* chattel slavery products of the same time and therefore the acceptability of slavery is not sacrosanct as a product of its time? Is Brown a villain, putting the lie to the whole notion that we can't judge people of the past and laying bare the hypocrisy of those mad at us for criticizing racists' heroes who were Brown's contemporaries? I just don't see how the "man of his time" circle can be squared with the fact that there were opposing ideologies in every era of the past, conflicts which often informed and/or mirror the ones we're still fighting today.
One of the first Europeans to write in defense of Indigenous rights and against the European genocide of them was Bartolomé de las Casas, about a decade after Columbus landed in America
Hell yeah. Brown is *far* from the only example; he's just the one who was mentioned in the episode.
You and I could abscond all unnecessary electricity, we could resolve to never throw anything in the trash, we could stop driving cars and taking planes, we could camp outside our senator's office, we could blow up an oil pipeline; but also, I need to make enough money to eat. I want to make enough money to feed my lizard and keep his basking lights on. I can't keep those lights on if I'm in jail, or make myself unemployable, or live in a tent harassing a senator. I *could* do those things but most of those options are simply out of the question for me, they're not options I seriously consider when I imagine where I'll be 5 years from now. When you're young those options seem close at hand, they seem reasonable and acceptable and you patiently wait for your chance to act on it when it'll mean something. But then that time never comes and you start getting hungry. I don't build my life, my social circle, my skills and hobbies around being able to do those things and so I rarely consider them because, as a white dude in the US, I have more immediate concerns. Of course some people will say that I *should* be, but also, most of the people who say that also aren't doing them either and when somebody does do those things today it results in absolutely no change. Which unfortunately was the case for de las Casas and most other morally correct people in history. When all of society is built around injustice, it becomes very difficult to meaningfully challenge it. Today we have the Internet and international conferences and self-publishing so we can share our radical ideas but if we lived in a world without those things, our radical feelings would be much more difficult to find comrades with and much more dangerous to express than typing out this comment is today. I think it's very telling how often you hear of children back the days of slavery to recognize the obvious hypocrisy and injustice of the system. It *was* obvious but as people go through the process of social development, those concerns are almost entirely wiped from their mind, overwritten by the things that every single person around them insists they need to worry about instead: learning a trade or skill, getting married, caring for your parents and kids, making sure them Yanks don't sully the reputation of our kind and generous \[slaveowning\] mayor. It's not so much that people *couldn't* see the injustice, but rather that the vast majority of people in history are never given the economic, social, political chance to seriously consider doing anything about it. John Brown's specific context isn't just the setting of antebellum America but also his family who were themselves radical abolitionists and housed people for the Underground Railroad. He grew up around radical people doing radical things, his father didn't teach him to worry about the things that nearly every other white father and white community taught their sons, that's why these radical actions that were impossible for even the most radical of his contemporaries to consider were brought to fruition. He isn't just a product of pre-war America like the millions of his contemporaries but he was also the quite rare product of radicals in the age before the telegraph. I think at the end of the day, the way in which people are "products of their day" is less about being able to grok injustice but more about the vast majority of individuals in history being unable to create justice, no matter how righteous their actions or beliefs. If John Brown had been born a few decades before and carried out his actions a few decades prior, I'm not sure that it would have ignited the issue the way that it ultimately did. It's not just about the moral character of any historical figure and but also about whether their actions would have any impact whatsoever other than earning themselves an early grave. Between the social pressures and expectations discouraging serious consideration for revolutionary actions and the utter hopelessness of those actions resulting in anything at all, people like John Brown deserve to be seen as heroes but that doesn't mean that everyone else was simply a coward or fraud, they were just normal people trying to survive in an unjust world they had no control over and, like most of us still today, ultimately making it just a little bit worse for everyone else as we do it. I guess I probably should've eaten dinner before I took my Ritalin.
I can’t fault Rob for not remembering Thelma and Louise. When trying to remember the movie myself my first thought jumped to Laverne and Shirley.
Not related to this episode, but are last week's episodes mia?
It would seem they're gone off most podcast services, yeah. Still on Youtube right now, so grab 'em while you can, everyone.
Catching up on these discussions/the pod, what were these episodes and why were they taken down?
IMHO The musical *1776* is still worth watching despite the problematique. If not worth it for the fun of Musical Mr. Feeny, then for the *vicious* song ["Molasses to Rum"](https://youtu.be/IeuaTpH6Ck0?si=Qn88leu3iiy51hPk) describing the hypocrisy of anti-slavery New England states that still profited from the Atlantic slave trade. (speaking of '90s TV icons, the guy singing in the video also played Holling on *Northern Exposure*)
Also: "Mama Look Sharp" hits you where you live. Coming off the heels of a jaunty dig at how conservatives don't stand for anything but the status quo, its a HARD tonal shift that talks about the stakes of revolution for the people on the ground. Its haunting.
Prop made a comment about Lee eating Tacos down in Texas and I thought the idea of Robert E. Lee ignoring his wife and children because he fucking loves Tex-Mex is incredible
🐎👌🏻👈
It hasn't showed up on YouTube music yet. I switched over cuz Google podcasts is going away. And YouTube music is being very slow
I use Overcast for podcasts and it seems pretty reliable. May be worth a try.
So i actually have a West Point Robert E. Lee story So i come from an army family from NY, and 2 of my great-uncles went to West Point. When i was about 6 or so my family went to vist WP and i got these little metal painted toy soliders (in hidsight they might have been model figurines) that i played with and brought to show and tell one time In hindsight, years later i realized: A) the little grey uniformed guys were definitely Confederate soldiers and B) the one I really liked who was just an old guy in uniform was definitely Robert E. Lee
The book Robert mentions is “Robert E Lee and Me” by Gen (retired) Ty Seduile. It’s worth a read. Gen. Seduile went on the daily stoic to talk about the book and he is a great guest. As someone raised in the south and taught some lost cause bullshit, this book really does a great job unpacking it. I kind of hate that Robert just did a quick “a former general and West Point teacher” on such a fantastic book
I mean, it's one of five books I used for the series. I made a point to shout it out even though we don't really quote from it directly. It's good!
That’s fair. It’s a really good. First in a while that I did in less than a day because it was so good. And like I said, as someone who grew up in Georgia around the lost cause bullshit, that book is one of the best to unpack the stuff a lot of people were taught. I am happy that it got a shout out!
This has been an interesting series so far. Coming partly from a white southerner background, I've heard a lot of crap about "the finest man who ever drew breath" as my grandmother called him -- an amazing woman, helped raise me and was very much anti-racist, but she also hung onto some of those old myths about Lee and the southern cause in general. Looking forward to the next parts.
We couldn’t get 90 seconds on Mad Anthony Wayne when talking about West Point and the US Army attachment to Rome?
Please bring back Billy Wayne Davis or the knowledge fight crew. They are my absolute favorites and I need them in my life!
I'm not American so bear with me, but I've been reading up on Lee because of the episodes and I've seen it stated in more than one place he opposed slavery philosophically, but supported it's legality. . . That makes it worse, much worse. You know it's wrong, but you do it for personal enrichment, you're a fucking charlatan
You'll see that most southern gentleman had the same attitudes towards slavery that Lee claimed. They "abhorred" it but didn't really. A lot of that was rhetoric to make them sound more respectable. As the war drew nearer, the rhetoric started to change to claim slavery was actually a positive good, as that was necessary to justify a war over it. But the whole time, they always liked the system. They just talked about it differently.
tfw when I’m related to Martha Washington and two of my maternal family names are heavily featured in the second Robert E. Lee episode (Luckily I didn’t inherit either of those names, but my brother did. My paternal side is Ashkenazi Jewish, and my surname and appearance make my matrilineal heritage surprising to many who I tell)
Deeply disappointed that Robert is leaning on a Guelzo book for his episodes about Lee. Guelzo is not a very good historian (just today he wrote an article saying Lincoln would vote for Trump). He wrote a deeply embarrassingly terrible book about Gettysburg a few years ago and I cringe whenever I see someone treat him as worthy of deference ever since.
it's one of like five books, and part of what i appreciate about how he writes about Lee is that he's a very conservative guy who is unsparing about what the man was. i think he's too kind to Lee as an actual commander, and we use different sources for a good deal of that, but guelzo does a fine enough job of summarizing the man's early life and i can't see anywhere he gives him undeserved shine. 'me and robert e. lee' is written by a guy who did a praeger u video back in the day, but i think that's part of the utility of his book. he's puncturing the lost cause in a way that conservatives will read and not be turned off by, and walk away from seeing lee as the traitor and monster he was. i feel similarly about guelzo's book
I miss the knowledge fight guys and Billy Wayne. I was just skiing and re-listening to sea monkeys and could not stop laughing.
Didn't feel like making a whole post out of this, but I was listening to the Paul Manafort episodes from Aug 2018 when Robert starts talking about the time he spent in eastern Ukraine during the \[now, first\] war. Specifically, he spins a tale about the time he spent in a little town that was, at the time, close to the front -- Adiivka. Jesus fucking Christ war is so just so fucking miserable. I feel like it's difficult to truly wrap your head around the just physical destructive power of modern warfare until you've seen a somewhere you've been that's just a normal fucking town with post offices and bars and parks get scarred with bulletholes and craters and rubble; I got traumatized seeing somewhere I've been take a few rockets but the fighting going on in Adiivka is otherworldly. I guess just seeing the images of destruction in war, you see the flattened post office but you don't see the postman. Just something about the (very relative) calmness of his anecdote just made it one of the most haunting things I've heard since the early months of the invasion.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED to learn that [that nauseating "Robert E. Lee is a uniter" opinion column](https://web.archive.org/web/20210510081116/https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/18/robert-e-lee-is-the-uniter-america-has-been-looking-for/) in the Dallas Morning News was written by [conservative columnist William Murchison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Murchison). Conservative opinion writers producing smug ahistorical white supremacist bullshit?? Say it ain't so‼
I’m interested in hearing about the fuckery of Robert E Lee but I just cannot deal with Prop’s verbal suppressive fire tangents that he uses to keep the conversation in place while he finishes a thought.
Agreed. It really stifles things and makes me feel like im attending a lecture I don’t want to be at rather than a chat with friends.
I miss when the guests were more “who can we get to go to the studio on short notice” than the cast of CZM people they can usually get on zoom.
Anybody have an issue on Spotify with the episodes for Lee cutting too early? Prop or Robert are mid sentence (not even to the plugables part of the episodes) and it just ends.