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Generalfrevious and thejediknightusezni,
Shape up or ship out. There will be NO FURTHER WARNINGS. If you can’t moderate your own behavior, you WILL BE BANNED. Whether or not it’s permanent will be up to Jay.
Now stop stinking up the joint.
Tell them if they don’t do as you wish, you will become angry and use your magic.
chyron just put a big Ric pic in your sig and be done with it.
Where were you in '77?
BBC has the worst link addresses.
Think of the benefit of losing Bannon. This could be a way for Trump to lose his alt-right support, without which he has no hope of reelection. I doubt he would govern differently without it, but it also could be an opportunity for Republicans in Congress to throw him off without worrying about their own base. Really, this is a very good thing!
You are very hopeful. I think despite all the commentary that Trump shot himself in the foot over Charlottesville, that man is nothing if not showbiz, and he knows his base. If reports are accurate on this matter, he was planning to put Bannon back into running his propaganda network full-time before Charlottesville so that Bannon could keep pushing the Nazi storyline without becoming the story himself. But Trump couldn’t lose Bannon without losing the Nazis, because he’s been coy about his own leanings. So he arranged a “yes, Trump’s a Nazi just like you” news cycle week so that when Bannon left, the Nazis would stay. He could have done this no matter what happened in Charlottesville, just with non-sequiturs about Washington and Jefferson. It worked, and they’re staying.
I don’t know. The ousting of Bannon was not on friendly terms, and I have a hard time believing it was part of some grander scheme to solidify the president’s already solid alt-right base. It certainly does nothing for those who are more moderate. Bannon appears to be pretty upset with this whole business, and if the recent Breitbart headlines are anything to go by, Bannon may actually turn Breitbart readers away from President Trump. Even if only a fraction give up supporting him, it will truly hurt his numbers and his future political prospects.
The Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office of Albemarle County has issued four warrants for Christopher Cantwell, the weepy men’s-right-activist-turned-neo-Nazi who was prominently featured in a Vice documentary about the white supremacist rallies Charlottesville earlier this month.
In addition to losing his ability to find love on OK Cupid, Cantwell now faces four felony warrants related to the “illegal use of gases, and injury by caustic agent or explosive,” the Boston Globe reports.
Cantwell told the Globe he believes the warrants are related to an image where he’s “pepper-spraying a guy straight in his face as he’s coming toward me.”
“I thought that spraying that guy was the least damaging thing I could do,” Cantwell said. “In my left hand I had a flashlight. My other option, other than the pepper spray, was to break this guy’s teeth. Okay? And I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted him to not hurt me.”
I’m going to probably really get it for this, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Not everyone that upholds Confederate leaders or their statues is in favor of slavery, white supremacy, or racism of any kind. I served my mission in Atlanta, GA, and there were many people who idolized the leadership of the Confederacy and minimizing the slavery aspect.
You see, I believe that a large part of people’s unwillingness to let go of that side of history is due to the very nature of the Civil War and its loss. Sociology is an interesting thing, and people often shape their self-image based on complex factors. After the loss of the Civil War, people had to reshape their thinking. It was a crushing blow to their self-image. As those states were restructuring their laws, economy, and moral outlook, people had to adopt different means of accepting the loss of the War. The South has a very distinct culture, and that loss was a threat to their own culture. Over time, many came to accept that slavery and racism were wrong, but adopted a view that the Civil War was about much bigger things than that, and that slavery was merely a secondary issue. As with any nation’s or culture’s history, a certain amount of apologetics and whitewashing go into it in order to avoid the psychological dissonance one feels of being part of something unethical. Remember, many Germans should have known that their own Third Reich was engaged in an unjust and evil war with accompanying horrors, but they turned a blind eye because they could not believe that they could engage in something so immoral.
My point to this is that there may be good qualities to many Confederate leaders. There are many good qualities of Southerners who uphold them as idols.
BUT
What they and we need to understand is that there really was an evil issue at the heart of the CSA. We need to be understanding of their cultural identity as it is so wrapped up in the good of that short-lived nation. We do need to remove those statues and flags from places of prominence. However, we must do so with respect and with accompanying education so that the people whose identities are threatened understand the true nature of the Confederate cause. This will avoid violent situations and will result in a better educated, and possibly less resentful and racist, nation. When you rip down a deeply ingrained cultural icon, sometimes all it does is validate certain misguided beliefs.
While I disagree with a few points of this*, I’d like to add more nuance to the counter-argument than you’ll typically find. The easy counter-argument is: the Germans as a whole eventually owned up to their terrible past, didn’t whitewash nearly as much as we still do, and came out of this truthful soul-searching a decent people with a strong sense of national identity in spite of their history. The nuance: more in the West than the East. You see, Nazism is on the rise in Germany as well, but it’s far more prevalent in the East. I blame the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan jump-started a period of enormous prosperity in Germany, but only in West Germany. Nazism thrives on the fabrication of a distant past golden age, and the West was simply too prosperous for many to look beyond the present. The East on the other hand jumped from hardship to hardship, and imagining that things were better in the past was an easier thing to swallow.
As I said, culture is a complex thing. German identity is not what it used to be. National socialism was so much about national identity that your self worth was swallowed up in the greater good of the fatherland. Your wants and needs are secondary and your value depends entirely on your contribution to the well-being of the Reich. The development of European integration was a major step in reducing future war after the devastation caused by extreme nationalism through the centuries, climaxing in WWI and WWII. Today, the German identity is rather weak, especially compared to the Germany of the past, and has in a sense been replaced with trans-European identity.
Acceptance of the wrongs of the nation and the push for a broader unity allowed for the German people as a whole to adapt to loss of the war. On top of that, many in Nazi Germany were unaware of the full scope of the horrors the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jews, Roma, and other minorities or undesirables. The sudden revelation of such evil (as opposed to acclamation over time) jolted many into recognizing the errors in that policy, and the nation as a whole rejected that ideology.
In the South, I believe the situation was ripe for a different means of trying to cope with the loss of the Civil War and realization of the wrongs of their cause. The entire populace knew that they were engaging in slavery. Even after its fall and the subsequent economic upheaval, people clung the ideas of black inferiority because they never had been taught differently. It took a lot longer for it to sink in that, yes, the Confederate cause was wrong. Out of this realization grew a desire to justify the existence of Southern culture. “We couldn’t have been all wrong, could we? There must have been some nobility to our cause!” Thus the Lost Cause movement was born.
I’d also like to strongly agree that the South has a very distinct identity from the rest of the nation. It also extends beyond the historical boundaries of the Confederacy–I’d say the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently excised probably form a much more accurate boundary, sometimes going very far north indeed. The so-called melting pot bubbles a lot less in this part of the country. The idea of waves of immigrants bringing prosperity is something they read about happening elsewhere, with suspicion. The history of military victories starting with the Revolution and only failing in Vietnam was nonsense – the South has been losing battles far longer than that, what was one more defeat to add to the pile?
You bring up a good point here. There has always existed greater cultural homogeneity in the South, as it has always been a place of less exposure to outside influence and less immigration. As such, I am certain it has taken longer to adapt to the notion of right and wrong in terms of race and ethnicity. Bear in mind that it is human nature to be suspicious of anything unfamiliar. If you grew up in an all-white family in an all-white neighborhood in an all-white city where education was geared towards whites, then you would likely be racist when encountering blacks for the first time. So yes, the South has taken longer to adapt to tolerance that much of the rest of the nation has already adopted.
That said, I do not believe those statues and flags necessarily mean that everyone who adores them wishes to maintain a nation of white superiority. I feel that, in most cases, they are simply ignorant to the offense it may cause, instead clinging to the pseudo-religious yearnings of a regional (not necessarily racial) identity they are afraid of losing.
Taken in combination, I think the South needs a Marshall Plan. They may take it as a second Reconstruction, and I suppose in many ways it could be fairly called that. But the point is that as long as so much of the South is left out of economic prosperity, the past will keep beckoning, as it does in the former East Germany. But this is only part one – the Democrats pulled this off already once before with the upper midwest, using unions as the foothold to prosperity, which for a time overrode the inherent racism there. The problem is, like good socialists (and I include myself as a self-critical member of that group), they thought that once they solved the economic problem, the racial problem would solve itself. And that was baloney.
A Marshall Plan for the South…A Second Reconstruction…It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’m certain I can get behind. Bear in mind that there are some very wealthy people in the South, and much of the poverty is in fact among the black population. When I lived there, I saw a great deal of prosperity, especially among the whites. I feel a Second Reconstruction could be overall beneficial, but it would still leave the large disparities in socioeconomic and racial groups. Perhaps an economic plan that fosters independence, investment, and changes in behavior instead of simply investment in infrastructure. I just took a class on how certain economic programs find greater lasting benefit when they target only the poorest and change behavior, rather than simply throwing funding at social programs. They are both more fiscally responsible and find greater lasting change.
* Specifically, I’d say that at some point, self-delusion and denial adds up to effectively justifying slavery, white supremacy, and racism (because turning a blind eye to the past is not so much different than turning a blind eye to the present, and the motivations can be similar). And I’d add there’s more going on than self-delusion and denial in many or even most cases, such as our current Attorney General, who is a Confederate-botherer of the first order.
I don’t disagree there is a great deal of self-delusion. I am saying that such is not always malicious in intent, even if the consequences may be more serious than recognized by the deluded (i.e. allowing Confederate statues to remain for historical value also gives further justification to those who in fact still support the CSA’s true primary cause).
I wanted to make a statement about white privilege and its use to justify the behaviors of others. White privilege is a real thing, but I also think it is taken to an extreme. Racism is a pernicious evil in any iteration, but it is also an inescapable fact that virtually everyone who posts on this forum likely holds at least some racial prejudice. Since whites still generally hold the majority of the nation’s power, minorities still suffer from some unfortunate aspects of white privilege.
That said, it is not a universal situation, nor is it an excuse. I find it hard to believe that anyone here who justifies the wrongs of a member of a minority would believe that that individual is somehow inferior to whites. Yet, when you justify those actions, you are in fact dropping the average level of dialogue. You are lowering your expectations of minorities.
For instance, I may say that I do not approve of Malcolm X’s methods or the Black Panthers. I may say that I do not approve of racist comments by “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright. I may say that I think there is a certain amount of oversensitivity on certain topics, such as selling football players (of all races) on a fantasy football game. Yet, I have no say on these things because of white privilege. How does this argument elevate the level of dialogue. How does lowering the expectations of blacks (or Latinos, or Asians, or women, or LGBT) so that they actually are pardoned for glaring offenses, while I as a white man would be condemned for often unintentional mistakes, promote a nation of equality.
Really, pardoning such behaviors only furthers racial strain. It convinces black people to see malicious intent in even the benign, which decreases dialogue. It holds people to different standards, and people only live up to (or down to) what you expect of them. In other words, in the interest of racial equality and my love towards minorities, I am actually admitting that I expect less from members of a minority! It fosters feelings of unfairness among many whites. And yes, if a white man is insecure, he must be racist, I know, but the reality is not truly so simple. However, there are varying degrees of racism, and holding people to different standards will only drive those who may be on the fence on their racist views deeper into them.
Regardless of the extent of white privilege, we should never (or perhaps seldom, since only Sith deal in absolutes) hold whites and blacks to different levels of expectations. If we do, we prolong the divide. If we hold the same expectations, blacks (whom we all agree are equal to whites) will rise to meet those standards. Whites will come to see the equality and recognize it more. Instead of ostracizing those who fail to see the equal value, we give opportunities for all sides to come together and recognize the value on their own.
Whites are not genetically more prone to racism. Blacks are not somehow immune to it. We must fight it in all its forms and from all sources. Otherwise, those who claim to advocate for equality only continue to perpetuate inequality.
Steve Miller is still in the White House, and he’s no panacea either.
Steve Miller is still in the White House, and he’s no Panaka either.
Well, not everyone can be.
But it would bring more diversity to this administration!
Hmmm…on the one hand, Panaka killed Ric Olie so he’s obviously evil. On the other hand, he does make delicious Panakacakes.
Journalist hack bullies an 11-year-old.
That’s pretty scummy.
You probably don’t recognize me because of the red arm.
Episode 9 Rewrite, The Starlight Project (Released!) and ANH Technicolor Project (Released!)
By and large the press leaves presidential kids alone. That’s the way it should be.
Where were you in '77?
If you’re going to blame anyone for that, blame his shit parents.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Edmund Burke said:
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Perhaps that is what they thought just before they turned the hoses on MLK.
Perhaps they did think that but they were idiots then. MLK =/= Nazis.
true, but it happens sometimes in society (Germany 1930s and the South of the USA) that ideas from the Nazis/KKK are more popular then the ideas of MLK. In order to make sure MLK’s freedom of Speech is protected in such an era, we protect the Nazis/KKK(unless they become violent and/or break the law).
Also to put it as simply as possible… Good people fighting back against bad violent people for a very good reason =/= Good non-violent people being attacked by the state for a very bad reason (That sounded like a Trump sentence. Sad).
I would agree if the bad people in fact become violent. But if they do not, attacking them is assault. For the government not to protect them from assault because their opinions are unpopular, is violation of free speech. In other words an assault against a peaceful KKK protester needs to be treated the same by government as they would treat an assault against a peaceful civil rights protester.
An example of that would be if you said a guys wife was ugly and the state imprisoned you for saying it (probable FOC denial). Compared with you saying a guys wife was ugly and then that same guy punching you in the face. No denial of FOC but maybe you learned a lesson in politeness. Some people might deal with that situation differently…
but still, the guy that punched you in the face is guilty of assault. If the government does not charge him solely because they don’t like what you said about the guy’s wife, that would be denial of free speech.
Of course some countries have libel laws, to prevent FOC from allowing people to just lie and defame other people without consequence. So if somebody, for example, lied about your father being part of the plot to kill JFK, you could sue them for defamation of character. Some people might deal with that situation differently…
We do have libel laws here, for when people say facts that are lies.
I’m going to probably really get it for this, but I’m going to say it anyway.
Not everyone that upholds Confederate leaders or their statues is in favor of slavery, white supremacy, or racism of any kind. I served my mission in Atlanta, GA, and there were many people who idolized the leadership of the Confederacy and minimizing the slavery aspect.
You see, I believe that a large part of people’s unwillingness to let go of that side of history is due to the very nature of the Civil War and its loss. Sociology is an interesting thing, and people often shape their self-image based on complex factors. After the loss of the Civil War, people had to reshape their thinking. It was a crushing blow to their self-image. As those states were restructuring their laws, economy, and moral outlook, people had to adopt different means of accepting the loss of the War. The South has a very distinct culture, and that loss was a threat to their own culture. Over time, many came to accept that slavery and racism were wrong, but adopted a view that the Civil War was about much bigger things than that, and that slavery was merely a secondary issue. As with any nation’s or culture’s history, a certain amount of apologetics and whitewashing go into it in order to avoid the psychological dissonance one feels of being part of something unethical. Remember, many Germans should have known that their own Third Reich was engaged in an unjust and evil war with accompanying horrors, but they turned a blind eye because they could not believe that they could engage in something so immoral.
My point to this is that there may be good qualities to many Confederate leaders. There are many good qualities of Southerners who uphold them as idols.
BUT
What they and we need to understand is that there really was an evil issue at the heart of the CSA. We need to be understanding of their cultural identity as it is so wrapped up in the good of that short-lived nation. We do need to remove those statues and flags from places of prominence. However, we must do so with respect and with accompanying education so that the people whose identities are threatened understand the true nature of the Confederate cause. This will avoid violent situations and will result in a better educated, and possibly less resentful and racist, nation. When you rip down a deeply ingrained cultural icon, sometimes all it does is validate certain misguided beliefs.
While I disagree with a few points of this*, I’d like to add more nuance to the counter-argument than you’ll typically find. The easy counter-argument is: the Germans as a whole eventually owned up to their terrible past, didn’t whitewash nearly as much as we still do, and came out of this truthful soul-searching a decent people with a strong sense of national identity in spite of their history. The nuance: more in the West than the East. You see, Nazism is on the rise in Germany as well, but it’s far more prevalent in the East. I blame the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan jump-started a period of enormous prosperity in Germany, but only in West Germany. Nazism thrives on the fabrication of a distant past golden age, and the West was simply too prosperous for many to look beyond the present. The East on the other hand jumped from hardship to hardship, and imagining that things were better in the past was an easier thing to swallow.
As I said, culture is a complex thing. German identity is not what it used to be. National socialism was so much about national identity that your self worth was swallowed up in the greater good of the fatherland. Your wants and needs are secondary and your value depends entirely on your contribution to the well-being of the Reich. The development of European integration was a major step in reducing future war after the devastation caused by extreme nationalism through the centuries, climaxing in WWI and WWII. Today, the German identity is rather weak, especially compared to the Germany of the past, and has in a sense been replaced with trans-European identity.
Acceptance of the wrongs of the nation and the push for a broader unity allowed for the German people as a whole to adapt to loss of the war. On top of that, many in Nazi Germany were unaware of the full scope of the horrors the Nazis were inflicting upon the Jews, Roma, and other minorities or undesirables. The sudden revelation of such evil (as opposed to acclamation over time) jolted many into recognizing the errors in that policy, and the nation as a whole rejected that ideology.
In the South, I believe the situation was ripe for a different means of trying to cope with the loss of the Civil War and realization of the wrongs of their cause. The entire populace knew that they were engaging in slavery. Even after its fall and the subsequent economic upheaval, people clung the ideas of black inferiority because they never had been taught differently. It took a lot longer for it to sink in that, yes, the Confederate cause was wrong. Out of this realization grew a desire to justify the existence of Southern culture. “We couldn’t have been all wrong, could we? There must have been some nobility to our cause!” Thus the Lost Cause movement was born.
I’d also like to strongly agree that the South has a very distinct identity from the rest of the nation. It also extends beyond the historical boundaries of the Confederacy–I’d say the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently excised probably form a much more accurate boundary, sometimes going very far north indeed. The so-called melting pot bubbles a lot less in this part of the country. The idea of waves of immigrants bringing prosperity is something they read about happening elsewhere, with suspicion. The history of military victories starting with the Revolution and only failing in Vietnam was nonsense – the South has been losing battles far longer than that, what was one more defeat to add to the pile?
You bring up a good point here. There has always existed greater cultural homogeneity in the South, as it has always been a place of less exposure to outside influence and less immigration. As such, I am certain it has taken longer to adapt to the notion of right and wrong in terms of race and ethnicity. Bear in mind that it is human nature to be suspicious of anything unfamiliar. If you grew up in an all-white family in an all-white neighborhood in an all-white city where education was geared towards whites, then you would likely be racist when encountering blacks for the first time. So yes, the South has taken longer to adapt to tolerance that much of the rest of the nation has already adopted.
That said, I do not believe those statues and flags necessarily mean that everyone who adores them wishes to maintain a nation of white superiority. I feel that, in most cases, they are simply ignorant to the offense it may cause, instead clinging to the pseudo-religious yearnings of a regional (not necessarily racial) identity they are afraid of losing.
Taken in combination, I think the South needs a Marshall Plan. They may take it as a second Reconstruction, and I suppose in many ways it could be fairly called that. But the point is that as long as so much of the South is left out of economic prosperity, the past will keep beckoning, as it does in the former East Germany. But this is only part one – the Democrats pulled this off already once before with the upper midwest, using unions as the foothold to prosperity, which for a time overrode the inherent racism there. The problem is, like good socialists (and I include myself as a self-critical member of that group), they thought that once they solved the economic problem, the racial problem would solve itself. And that was baloney.
A Marshall Plan for the South…A Second Reconstruction…It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’m certain I can get behind. Bear in mind that there are some very wealthy people in the South, and much of the poverty is in fact among the black population. When I lived there, I saw a great deal of prosperity, especially among the whites. I feel a Second Reconstruction could be overall beneficial, but it would still leave the large disparities in socioeconomic and racial groups. Perhaps an economic plan that fosters independence, investment, and changes in behavior instead of simply investment in infrastructure. I just took a class on how certain economic programs find greater lasting benefit when they target only the poorest and change behavior, rather than simply throwing funding at social programs. They are both more fiscally responsible and find greater lasting change.
* Specifically, I’d say that at some point, self-delusion and denial adds up to effectively justifying slavery, white supremacy, and racism (because turning a blind eye to the past is not so much different than turning a blind eye to the present, and the motivations can be similar). And I’d add there’s more going on than self-delusion and denial in many or even most cases, such as our current Attorney General, who is a Confederate-botherer of the first order.
I don’t disagree there is a great deal of self-delusion. I am saying that such is not always malicious in intent, even if the consequences may be more serious than recognized by the deluded (i.e. allowing Confederate statues to remain for historical value also gives further justification to those who in fact still support the CSA’s true primary cause).
I wish we could get Ferris’ take on this. I remember way back on another forum we talked about the Civil War. He believed in the lost cause. It wasn’t false to him. He believed that the South was right in the Civil War. He said he believed slavery was wrong, but he believed that the war about more than just slavery. He called the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression(I kidded him and said I didn’t remember Canada being aggressive). He said the North had control of the Federal government was oppressing the South. He talked about the Morrill tax and such. He said the war about states rights and such and that it was perfectly Constitutional for a state to secede from the Union. I think he said he had ancestors that fought in the Confederacy. I am willing to bet he doesn’t like the removal of the Confederate statues. It would in interesting to have his take. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but I do think maybe he made compelling case that states should be able to secede from the Union if they want to.
Journalist hack bullies an 11-year-old.
I agree there are times when Barron Trump should dress up, but not all the time and not every public appearance. But we have more important things to worry about than that. Also it needs to be kept in mind, that no one elected Barron, he didn’t have any say in moving to the White House, and he doesn’t work for us.
Think of the benefit of losing Bannon. This could be a way for Trump to lose his alt-right support, without which he has no hope of reelection. I doubt he would govern differently without it, but it also could be an opportunity for Republicans in Congress to throw him off without worrying about their own base. Really, this is a very good thing!
You are very hopeful. I think despite all the commentary that Trump shot himself in the foot over Charlottesville, that man is nothing if not showbiz, and he knows his base. If reports are accurate on this matter, he was planning to put Bannon back into running his propaganda network full-time before Charlottesville so that Bannon could keep pushing the Nazi storyline without becoming the story himself. But Trump couldn’t lose Bannon without losing the Nazis, because he’s been coy about his own leanings. So he arranged a “yes, Trump’s a Nazi just like you” news cycle week so that when Bannon left, the Nazis would stay. He could have done this no matter what happened in Charlottesville, just with non-sequiturs about Washington and Jefferson. It worked, and they’re staying.
I don’t know. The ousting of Bannon was not on friendly terms
It wouldn’t be the first time there was a stage-managed fight between Trump and a senior official. The supposed “fight” between Trump and Sessions went poof the second Murkowski prevented Trump from making a recess appointment replacing Sessions. That’s what the fight was there for. I imagine the fight between Trump and Bannon was to help Bannon assert that he was running a “media outlet”.
The growing number of football players protesting the National Anthem depresses me.
Journalist hack bullies an 11-year-old.
That’s sickening. Not only is his dad 70 years-old, but his dad is Donald Trump and his mom is Melania Trump. He’s got enough problems without the press bullying him.
The Person in Question
The growing number of football players protesting the National Anthem depresses me.
I don’t see why anyone cares what football players think.
The Person in Question
The growing number of football players protesting the National Anthem depresses me.
The fact that it bothers you depresses me. Well not really, but I don’t think it should depress you that people choose to protest in a non-violent manner.
Journalist hack bullies an 11-year-old.
That’s sickening. Not only is his dad 70 years-old, but his dad is Donald Trump and his mom is Melania Trump. He’s got enough problems without the press bullying him.
Lol true.
The growing number of football players protesting the National Anthem depresses me.
The fact that it bothers you depresses me. Well not really, but I don’t think it should depress you that people choose to protest in a non-violent manner.
I certainly prefer non-violent to violent, but I do wish everyone could see that the National Anthem is not a time for protest.
Just to be clear, I do agree that it is their constitutional right to protest during the Anthem(and I wouldn’t want that changed).
I do wish everyone could see that the National Anthem is not a time for protest.
In your opinion. But we’ve been down this road before.
