Mine’s a tie between a near future and a not so near future sci-fantasy bazinga take:
“Self-driving cars are the key to a post-scarcity future!” (when asked how the fuck that conclusion was drawn, I was told “do the research.”)
“Even if climate change is proven to actually be a problem, climate doesn’t matter in space. We can have fully sustainable cattle farms in orbit producing as much meat as we need. Elon Musk.” (yes, that bazinga fuck actually said “Elon Musk” at the end of that claim like it somehow stamped a seal upon the rest of the take)
NATO is a defensive alliance
Whatever variations on the theme of streamerbros assuring their audience that they don’t need to do the reading (“Just watch my streams where I skim Wikipedia and provide a terminally-online westoid hot take instead - you’re actually the smart one because you don’t even need to read a book; your opinions are always correct by default! Now that you’re sufficiently flattered send me a superchat, you filthy little paypiggies!!”)
You can’t judge historical figures by today’s moral standards (Often used to run defence for slave-owning US politicians oblivious to the fact that there were people, including political philosophers, of the same era who denounced slavery. Also, fuck you, I’m going to judge people by today’s moral standards and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.)
The “Can’t judge history by modern standards” take is asinine because new information frequently alters or outright negates old information. Asbestos was once regarded as safe for use as insulation, for instance, but as time went on it was determined that it caused mesothelioma. As a consequence, asbestos is no longer regarded as safe by most.
It’s also a weird sort of historical revisionism because it implicitly assumes that people in the past were one homogeneous blob which all shared in the identical set of moral standards.
Like, at which point in time did everyone unanimously agree upon moral standards again? Remind me.
Not to mention the fact that it’s inherently classist and racist; it might have been considered “moral” to incite pogroms against Jewish people in European history but… that’s only according to the people who held the most influential positions in politics and philosophy. You can’t tell me that the family of Jewish people who had to flee their village because they risked getting lynched were like:
“This is a terrible tragedy that has befallen us and we have lost everything. However it should be noted that, on the other hand, it is entirely morally-justified.”
So when people talk about the moral standards of history, they’re talking about the moral standards of those who held hegemonic power over society (and that basically means wealthy white men) to the exclusion of everyone else.
This is the thing I always bring up in these arguments. Like, yes, most slave owners thought slavery was cool but I’m pretty sure most of the slaves disagreed. It’s a really chauvinist viewpoint that disregards most of the people living in the period being discussed.
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“I dream of a society in which I would be guillotined as a conservative”
— Proudhon
there’s two kinds of “judging history by modern standards”,
there’s using it as equalizing bleach, ‘people of their time’, ‘i can worship a mass murderer if i want to’—this is navelgazing and ignorant.
and there’s trying not to take our ‘baggage’ with us when we study the past. ‘morals’ encompasses a lot more than murder and slavery being bad and it’s important to try and perceive things as much as practicable in the ways they were in the past. most dramatically and acutely this is reflected in sexuality–the whole ‘historian says they were just friends’ joke is the result of taking a modern (victorian) moral standard into the past, and misinterpreting evidence around that. people can also do this from a good moral analysis, iirc it was st augustine(?) that had a lot of writing about the importance of sex within marriage–and the good feminist critique of that was interpreting it as cementing patriarchy in christianity, controlling women’s bodies. but the particulars of the terminology used has more recently cast doubts on that interpretation, was it actually about telling men not to patronize brothels and their unmarried, -enslaved- workers? that’s a pretty dramatically different read we couldn’t make if we took our modern prejudices against christianity & marriage into the past but goes some way to explain why early christianity was so popular with women and slaves.
the lazy excusal version of ‘judging history’ is a pretty typical case of a complicated concept in a field being hazily remembered & used as a rhetorical bludgeon—with a little help from some bad faith professionals using it cynically, of course.