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harlstark · 2 years

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A very long and revised theory about Stranger Things, and the Hellfire Club.

warnings: several mentions of murder, sexually imprudent topics, animal slaughter, and general themes of violence.

What is the hellfire club? (Historically)

The hellfire club is a British/Irish cult. Nobody knows exactly when it started, but some say it dates all the back to when Julius Caesar first bedded his wife. The first KNOWN date recorded of it was in the early 18th century. Two years after word spread about it, it got banned by British parliament—it must have scared them to great amounts to have it banned in just two years, but the thing is nothing exactly happened and it continued knowingly (possibly because they were just that afraid of it). They were known for drinking blood, pouring blood on them, eating cats, practicing satanic rituals, orgies, gambling, dining, ‘deflowering’ virgins(...), greeting people in the nude, literally getting away with murder—in one instance Lord Santry forced a man into intoxication then drenched him in alcohol and set him aflame, playing ruthless pranks on each other, valuing mischief and chaos, and more dastardly things. The first known club was set up by the Duke of Wharton, who had them play cards on Sundays, read Lucretius—an ancient philosopher, eating pigeon (their “Holy Ghost”), practice Satanism, and Sex. The most notorious rendition of the club, however, was lead by Sir Francis Dashwood, whose motto was “Fais ce que tu voudrais” meaning “Do as you will” as the belief of anarchist free will was one they held above all else. They drank blood from a cup balanced on the back of a naked woman, and were devoted entirely to hell raising and degeneracy. At this club, a stranger wandered in and played cards with them, and when one of the members looked down he spotted a cloven hoof where a foot might have been. Rumour has it that there are also often sightings of a cat with red eyes and the size of a Dalmatian, which haunts one of the buildings known where some of the meetings used to take place. In this location at West Wycombe, there were a series of underground tunnels, chambers, and caves, that were extended by the members. There is a stream that ends in a circular chamber a quarter mile in, and a banqueting hall that’s 40ft wide and 60ft tall—gothic style. On the walls of the caves there can now be seen carved head-like figures: one with a mitre and horns. There is also an old and moving statue of a woman. The club is rumored to still happen today, however nobody really knows much about it except that the meetings most likely take place somewhere in Ireland. All the members are/were well known politicians and aristocrats of their time. Benjamin Franklin, even, was an unofficial member of the club, and—according to historians, a spy. There isn’t much in depth info on the clubs, as in 1774 almost all documents in relation to it, were mysteriously burned by Paul Whitehead. “Poet Paul Whitehead, secretary and steward of the order, burned all incriminating records before his death in 1774. At Whitehead’s request, his heart was cut from his dead chest and given to Dashwood as a show of gratitude. Dashwood placed it in a marble urn, held a three hour funeral for it, and then interred it in a niche in the mausoleum on the hill. Mausoleum visitors were allowed to view and even touch Whitehead’s heart, but it was stolen in 1829. To this day, tourists still claim to see his ghost wandering through the mausoleum, as well as the caves below, searching for his missing heart.” (cult of weird)

How might this connect to Stranger Things?

It is perhaps possible that this hellfire club is the origins of both the upside down and abilities. As we know, 001/Vecna/Henry was born with his powers, so there is potential that an original member(s) tapped into abilities of some sort whilst practicing occultism, and Henry is a descendant of such a member—and possibly Will too if the theory about him having abilities ends up true. It could also have been when the first gate was opened. When we see Vecna descend into the upside down in 04x07, all there is surrounding him is practically smokey matter, without much solid form aside from what looks to be mountains—potentially the form the upside town took to mimic West Wycombe or another club location at its time of opening. Maybe this Dalmatian sized cat could also be a demogorgon in-show.

What is the Marvel Hellfire Club?

The hellfire club made its first comic book appearance in Uncanny X-Men #129 on January of 1980. It is based off of the historical version, but with a mutant-focused twist, so you can gather based on the information prior to this what they were like. Essentially however, it was a mutant terrorist organization, that attempted to fight against anti mutant actions, and believed that humans and mutants would never succeed in co-existing. They favored “excessive force and aggressive actions”. All the leaders of Hellfire club, aka “The Inner Circle” were killed by Reeva Paige aka The Black Queen, whose powers are mental distortion through a high note she can hit, that “directly affects the brain's neurochemistry, painfully distorting perceptions of reality, causing them to experience dizziness and hallucinations”. In the X-Men 134 comic, the headline states “The hellfire club has transformed the Phoenix into their black queen! Are the X-Men too late to save her?—Or themselves?!” The Phoenix, is Jean Grey, who was sent on a rescue mission, but ended up becoming captured by the island Krakoa, and eventually returned traumatized by a quote “mysterious cosmic force” upon returning home, then began to lose control, and turned against her previous allies. She has telekinesis, telepathy—which she lost for some time, she can astral project, and has mental detection, meaning she can sense the presence of other nearby mutants.

How might this connect to Stranger Things?

It’s highly possible that this is mainly connected to Eleven, Will, and/or Henry because of Jean’s history, as well as her powers. For El and Henry, the abilities are similar. For Will, the history of abduction and mental detection (him being able to sense the mindflayer) is. For Henry in particular, his similarity lies in his reign of terror during the Hawkins Lab Massacre. We also know however, that in 01x01 Will yells to Dustin “I’ll take your X-Men 134!” a blatant calling out to the comic in which Jean Grey becomes the Dark Phoenix. While personally I don’t believe Will is going to be seeing his villain arc anytime soon, I believe this could be in reference to season two, how the mindflayer took control of him. With all the similarities but also contrasting differences between Will and Vecna, to me, the two seem like perfect foils of one another.

#stranger things #stranger things theory #st4 #the hellfire club #hellfire club #stranger things 4 #will byers #eleven hopper #el hopper #Vecna #henry creel #001 #011 #byler #mileven #the upside down #theory #eddie munson

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Power Causes Brain Damage

Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, July/August 2017 Issue

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs--”You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)--failed to shake him awake.

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it?

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury--becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A 2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view--a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves--and backwards to everyone else. Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.

The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”

Mirroring is a subtler kind of mimicry that goes on entirely within our heads, and without our awareness. When we watch someone perform an action, the part of the brain we would use to do that same thing lights up in sympathetic response. It might be best understood as vicarious experience. It’s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone’s hand squeezing a rubber ball.

For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group’s? Less so.

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did--their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting--say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”--they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

Is there nothing to be done?

No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier--from time to time, at least--is to stop feeling powerful.

Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.

Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people--and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Finance last February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who hadn’t.

But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.

The point of the story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi’s mother, in the story, serves as a “toe holder,” a term once used by the political adviser Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.

For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”--with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”

Lord David Owen--a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron--recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that the medical literature doesn’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.

“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust--an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

I asked Owen, who admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a habit of reading constituents’ letters.

But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen’s hubris today might stem from his recent research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness. Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure.

#hubris #empathy #power and brain damage

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auskultu · 7 years

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Tuesday, February 21, 1967

The state announces that It will ask the death penalty as the trial of Richard F. Speck, 23, opens with tentative acceptance of two jurors. Speck is accused to murdering eight nurses in Chicago last July. “The state will ask the jury to return a verdict fixing the punishment at death," William J. Martin, Cook county assistant state's attorney and chief prosecutor, tells the court.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington announces that it has purchased the 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, “Ginevra de’ Benci.” The purchase price is reported to be a record 5 to 6 million dollars. It was paid to Prince Franz Josef II of Liechtenstein.

Anti-Viet war demonstrators attempt to mob Vice President Humphrey at Stanford university, but are halted by secret service agents and sheriffs deputies. Some of the demonstrators call the Vice President a "war criminal.” Screaming "shame, shame,” about 300 demonstrators rush at Humphrey as he goes into his limousine after participating in a student forum at the university auditorium. None of the students manage to get to Humphrey.

Henry Steele Commager, the historian, tells the Senate foreign relations committee that the United Slates does not have the resources to be a great power in Europe, Asia, and the western hemisphere simultaneously. “It is not our duty to keep peace thruout the globe, to put down aggression wherever it starts up, to stop the advance of communism or other -isms we may not approve of,” he says. The peace-keeping job is the duty of the United Nations but if it is not strong enough the United States should provide the authority and tools it needs, Commager says.

The Illinois Senate passes a bill changing the legal definition of intoxication. The measure, aimed at drunk motorists, provides that a person with 0.10 per cent of alcohol in his blood shall be considered intoxicated. The figure now is 0.15 per cent.

United States air force pilots attack a large convoy in North Viet Nam and destroy 42 of them and damage at least 20 others. The action starts when pilots prowling over the southern panhandle spot a large convoy heading toward the Mu Gai pass, one of the major infiltration routes into South Viet Nam. The Yanks sound an alert and more planes pour in. During a 10-hour period, air force F-105 Thunderchiefs and F-tC Phantom crews bomb and strafe the enemy.

Wall posters in Peking report a series of retrenchment moves in Red China's so-called cultural revolution. Included is the restoration to power of a purged Communist party leader, Japanese correspondents in Peking report. The posters say criticisms of "operation teams" deployed by Mao’s chief enemies last June and July have been ordered stopped.

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ruminativerabbi · 7 years

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The Art of the Deal

President Trump has come under particularly harsh fire lately for appearing not to know some basic facts relating to American history, at least some of which—that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, that Frederick Douglass lived in the nineteenth century, or that Andrew Jackson died more than fifteen years before the Civil War began—are generally considered to be more or less common knowledge. But it is also true that at least some of the above gaffes, all of which the White House tried to spin in a less embarrassing way once they were out there burrowing their way through the blogosphere and the online and print media, appear to be legitimately interpretable as mere slips of the tongue rather than proof positive that the President is unfamiliar with even the basic details of our nation’s history.

But one of the President’s recent remarks—his offhand comment the other day in an interview with Selina Zito on Sirius XM that the Civil War could have been avoided had someone of sufficient persuasive force fully trained in the art of the deal, perhaps someone like himself, been available to broker a compromise between the federal government and the states threatening to secede—struck me not only as not entirely wrong, but as something our nation would do well to take seriously and to ponder thoughtfully and maturely. (Just for the record, the notion that the President feels that he personally could have averted the Civil War is not something I came to on my own: in an interview with Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, President Trump apparently said openly that he believed that he personally could have “done a deal” to prevent the War Between the States from breaking out. To hear Jon Meacham report on that incident, just that click here, and listen carefully about 3.5 minutes into the clip.)

But the topic I wish to broach today is not whether the President’s sense of his own abilities as a negotiator is or isn’t grandiose, nor do I want to return to the topic of the degree to which Donald Trump is legitimately to be seen as a latter-day Andrew Jackson, whom he specifically mentioned in the Selina Zito interview as someone (someone other than himself, apparently) who could have prevented America’s bloodiest war if he had been in office at the time instead of the series of hapless losers who occupied the White House in the decade before Fort Sumter: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, Jr. (I wrote about the similarities between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump more than a year ago in the context of then-candidate Trump’s promise to make American great again. Click here to revisit those comments.) Instead, I’d like to focus on the question that lurks behind the President’s comments about the Civil War. Is war ever truly inevitable? Are all wars the result of failed efforts to prevent them? Does every war begin because no sufficiently skilled negotiator rose up before the actual commencement of hostilities to broker the kind of deal capable of bringing the sides to a non-violent solution to their dispute?

We can start with the President’s example, the Civil War, which was preceded by many attempts to find a compromise with which both sides could live. There was the Missouri Compromise of 1820, proposed by Henry Clay and supported by ex-President Thomas Jefferson, that attempted to preserve a permanent balance between slave-states and free-states. There was the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which attempted to mollify the southern states, particularly South Carolina, in the wake of the so-called Nullification Crisis of the mid-1830s. There was the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to deal with the slave/free status of new territories won in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, and which effectively, in the opinion of most historians, did delay the outbreak of hostilities by a full decade. (Just for the record, the single most odious piece of legislation ever passed by our American Congress, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, was part of that package. So compromise does not invariably lead the parties to it down a noble path.) And then there was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, engineered by Stephen A. Douglas, which effectively repealed the Compromise of 1820 by allowing the residents of both Kansas and Nebraska, then territories on their way to becoming states, to vote on whether to allow or forbid slavery within their borders. Those are the best-known examples, but there were also scores of other efforts to avert a war. As every eleventh grader knows, none of these efforts succeeded in the long run. And because no lasting compromise was reached, somewhere between 750,000 and a million Americans died…including more than 50,000 civilians on both sides and more than 80,000 slaves. So the question can be framed even more sharply: if the leaders on both sides had been able somehow to imagine the extent of the coming carnage, would they then have become able to find enough common ground to prevent the conflict?

It feels natural to insist that they could have. The North could have made its peace with the southern states’ right to secede—wasn’t the United States itself founded by people who insisted on their own right to secede from Britain? The South could have made its peace with there being legitimate limits to the rights of individual states in a union of united states. Everybody, had they only been able to see the mountains of cadavers on the ground at Gettysburg or Chickamauga in their magic crystal balls, would surely have understood the necessity of coming to terms without going to war!

But could they really have? When we are talking about territorial disputes relating to borders or property or money, it feels ridiculous to say that compromise is not always be an option. But once we begin to talk about institutions like slavery—an institution that treated human beings like chattel and which subjected people to brutality and violence that even beasts of burden are generally spared—when talking about something like that, is it rational to suppose that compromise could have been achieved? In the end, either slavery was going to be tolerated—perhaps restricted to certain areas or forced to function with limits imposed upon it, but nevertheless allowed to exist—or it wasn’t. When viewed that way, it feels strange to imagine that compromise could ever have been possible: what sort of grey area could possibly exist between legal and illegal?

Ben Winters’ novel, Underground Airlines, which I read last year, imagines a compromise averting the Civil War, but it is not a very realistic one. In the author’s fantasy, Lincoln is assassinated before even taking office and in the context of a traumatized nation in deep mourning a compromise is reached that allows slavery to endure in six states only. Georgia eventually gives up slavery in exchange for some hugely profitable government contracts and the two Carolinas merge into one state, thus yielding four states, the so-called Hard Four, in which slavery has endured into the twenty-first century. And so the book opens with a federal agent, himself a former slave, trying illegally to use his influence to gain his wife’s freedom and almost succeeding. But the book’s premise just does not ring true because, in the end, no one truly committed to the abolition of slavery could ever be party to a “compromise” that does not abolish slavery. When moral issues are involved, there is always a bottom line…and the existence of such a line precludes the possibility of compromise in its regard: like all lines, everything else in the universe has to be on one of its sides or the other!

Applying this idea to other contexts is both frustrating and slightly intoxicating. World War I, fought over issues that even today resist easy description and which yielded to the combatant nations only devastation and death, could surely have been averted by agile, clever diplomats. But could World War II have been averted? The world never tires of mocking the leaders of France, Italy, and Britain for their effort to avert war with Germany through a compromise with Hitler that did not actually involve any of the above-mentioned nations losing any of their own territory or ceding any of their own citizens’ rights. (I’m not sure that it is even legitimate to reference an agreement as a compromise if it doesn’t require the any of the parties to it to give up anything at all. At Munich, the Germans got what they wanted and the others gave up nothing at all except other people’s territory.) Nor was the failure of the Munich Agreement of 1938 end-result-neutral: it also gave the Germans almost a full extra year to prepare for war, which time made victory, at least in the initial German effort to overwhelm nations to the east and west, far more likely.

Could Israel’s endless war with its Arab neighbors have been averted by compromise? That too is a question worth asking…and particularly in the wake of Yom Ha-atzma∙ut, which this week celebrated the sixty-ninth anniversary of Israeli independence. Here too, it’s a matter of what you mean by compromise. The Partition Plan itself was a compromise, of course: the lands under British control east of the Jordan were excluded, and the remaining territory of Mandatory Palestine was to be divided into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab. The yishuv accepted the compromise, but the Arabs did not…and so went to war with the fledgling State of Israel shortly after independence was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. So, yes, compromise could have averted the ensuing bloodshed, but there would have had to be two sides willing to compromise, not just one. From the Arab point of view, no compromise was deemed possible if it led to the permanent establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. And so the answer here too has to be no: once the Arabs rejected a compromise the United Nations itself had formally endorsed, there was no real possibility of averting conflict without the Jewish side giving up their right to exist as an independent people in their own land.

So the President was both right and wrong in his comments about the Civil War. The chances that Andrew Jackson, had he been president in 1860, could have averted the war feel very slim. (The fact that Jackson, like four of his six predecessors in the White House, was himself a slaveowner hardly makes it feel likely that he would have brokered a deal that involved the abolition of slavery.) Nor does it seem particularly likely that even a deal-maker like President Trump himself could have negotiated such a deal successfully: in the end, either the states were going to be more powerful than the union that bound them to each other or it wasn’t…and slavery was going to endure somehow and somewhere, or it wasn’t. Once moral issues are in play—issues that by their nature resist compromise, like slavery or genocide—compromise becomes indistinguishable from acquiescence. And the inverse is also true: acquiescence to evil can never be rebranded as fair-minded compromise, not can the principled decision to look away from intolerable horror ever be justified with reference to how much better it would be if people just set their issues aside and choose to live in peace by ignoring evil.

#Donald Trump #Missouri Compromise #Civil War

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