The Confederacy - Erasing History

Halifax2TheMax

PJPOWER said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

mrussel1 said:

The Confederacy:  Erasing History

Or as we say in these parts, "The Confederacy:  Erasing Erhnocentrism".

God damn, I hope our southern brothers and sister and northern brother and sister will someday learn to get along.  That or set off a long line of nukes at the Mason Dixon line to form a no man's land and say fuck all, we're done with each other.  The former would be so much more pleasant though.

Fuck Texas. Give it back to Mexico. Better yet, let it secede and then be taken over by Mexico. Why pay to dispose?

My thoughts on California as well!

Elected officials from California never publicly stated they should secede because a black man was elected president or that the AHCA passed.

mickeyrat

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession states.

brianlux

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

mrussel1 said:

The Confederacy:  Erasing History

Or as we say in these parts, "The Confederacy:  Erasing Erhnocentrism".

God damn, I hope our southern brothers and sister and northern brother and sister will someday learn to get along.  That or set off a long line of nukes at the Mason Dixon line to form a no man's land and say fuck all, we're done with each other.  The former would be so much more pleasant though.

Fuck Texas. Give it back to Mexico. Better yet, let it secede and then be taken over by Mexico. Why pay to dispose?

And strand Willie Nelson and and everyone else in Austin?  I'll bet... no, I know there are many fine folks in other parts of Texas who are there because of work and/or family or whatever. 

My wife went to San Antonio, TX not long ago to visit her aunt who is religious and took my wife to her mostly conservative republican Baptist church.  (Not my wife's thing but she didn't want to be rude and say, "No".)  She was quite surprised to find that this church is providing sanctuary for some immigrants.  Imagine that!

With all due respect, H2M (and you know I do respect you), if we showed support and gave thanks for these kinds of positive actions, we could be part of bringing people together rather than saying fuck them, go to hell, etc. 

Yes, I know, I'm awfully damn idealistic but so be it!

brianlux

PJPOWER said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

mrussel1 said:

The Confederacy:  Erasing History

Or as we say in these parts, "The Confederacy:  Erasing Erhnocentrism".

God damn, I hope our southern brothers and sister and northern brother and sister will someday learn to get along.  That or set off a long line of nukes at the Mason Dixon line to form a no man's land and say fuck all, we're done with each other.  The former would be so much more pleasant though.

Fuck Texas. Give it back to Mexico. Better yet, let it secede and then be taken over by Mexico. Why pay to dispose?

My thoughts on California as well!

LOL.  I don't know why I laugh.  I guess I have to.

Born and raised and lived here most of my 66 years.  California has been loved to death.  Too many people have moved here, over-crowed the place, despoiled and trashed many of it's natural beautiful features and poisoned it with decades of fertilizer and herbicides.

I have had no children and made every effort to live as cleanly on the land base as possible so when others say "Fuck California" I have to laugh.  Yes, it's been fucked, but by whom?  Ah ha. 

JC29856

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

mrussel1

JC29856 said:

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

Did anyone suggest burning history books? What about eliminating Civil War classes? 
Is the only reason you know about the Magna Carta is because you saw a statue? Is that your only method of learning?

You're really terrible at debating... just the worst. 

brianlux

JC29856 said:

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

If you're beating your child, not you should not fight your spouse who is trying to stop you from doing that.  You should turn yourself in or get some psychiatric help.

mcgruff10

it is ironic how a protest march by nazis/alt right racists/kkk in charlottesville to preserve confederate statues in public has now started a domino effect of just the opposite.

Go Beavers

mcgruff10 said:

it is ironic how a protest march by nazis/alt right racists/kkk in charlottesville to preserve confederate statues in public has now started a domino effect of just the opposite.

When denial and avoidance is maintained for too long, the pendulum of humanity swings quickly.  

JC29856

brianlux said:

JC29856 said:

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

If you're beating your child, not you should not fight your spouse who is trying to stop you from doing that.  You should turn yourself in or get some psychiatric help.

whats the phrase...causation false equalalence.
beating my kid = slave owning 
BUT I'm not fighting back or defending beating my kid, I'm fighting back because I was attacked/invaded. If you look close enough there is a difference. it's minute but it's there and very easily misrepresented/spun.
Free spun Saturday!

brianlux

JC29856 said:

brianlux said:

JC29856 said:

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

If you're beating your child, not you should not fight your spouse who is trying to stop you from doing that.  You should turn yourself in or get some psychiatric help.

whats the phrase...causation false equalalence.
beating my kid = slave owning 
BUT I'm not fighting back or defending beating my kid, I'm fighting back because I was attacked/invaded. If you look close enough there is a difference. it's minute but it's there and very easily misrepresented/spun.
Free spun Saturday!

The Confederacy:  Erasing Equalalence

Spin spin!

mickeyrat

JC29856 said:

mickeyrat said:

JC29856 said:

Give me slaves or give me death! 
I'm suppose to believe that confederates were the only soldiers in the history of civilization that fought and died for owning slaves, that farmers chose death with slaves over life without. 

well, thread integrity kinda says we're dealing with the traitors in the failed succession

thread is about whitewashing history, you don't like playing pretend?
pretend I'm a spouse wishing to leave a relationship because I like beating my child, Im not leaving my spouse because I'm beating my child I'm leaving because I'm being attacked by my spouse for beating my child. should I not fight back?

duly noted, you have joined the ranks and now are officially recognizes as lieutenant thread integrity officer. 

umm, isnt the when and why of these monuments a whitewashing of history to begin with?

now I propsed over on adbook that maybe another way is to move most from public prominence, say from courthouses and town squares, to someplace more conducive to a history lesson. then you add a series of plaques or markers with the facts of just who they really were and how these men lived, before during and after the war.

with any art you let the viewer decide what it means.

mickeyrat

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/17/yes-washington-and-jefferson-owned-slaves-trump-is-still-wrong-about-robert-e-lee/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.b6d654e64524

Is it still okay to venerate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?
The president's stand for the Confederate hero represents the kind of moral relativism that conservatives usually decry.
By David A. Bell


George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln said: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality.” Woodrow Wilson was a staunch segregationist. All of them held the highest office in a nation that denied women the right to vote until 1920 and denied gays and lesbians the right to marry until 2015. Should we, as a country, still be honoring these men today?

That’s the question that we’ve grappled with, anew, since Saturday’s tragic events in Charlottesville and President Trump’s subsequent response, but it’s not a new one. Two years ago, students at Princeton University, where I teach, occupied the college president’s office to demand that the name of Wilson — our most famous alumnus and a former Princeton president — be removed from our school of public policy and international relations and an undergraduate housing complex. This year, Yale University announced that it would rename a residential college named for Vice President John C. Calhoun, a fervent defender of slavery.

It is easy to take the position that Trump did, effectively, on Wednesday, when he tweeted, “Can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!” After all, the argument goes, weren’t these iconic figures simply men of their time? Weren’t their opinions and practices entirely ordinary for their social and political milieus? By the same logic, Trump implies, we should still respect the memory of figures like Gen. Robert E. Lee, the statue of whom the Charlottesville City Council recently voted to remove. Indeed, in an NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll released Wednesday, 62 percent of respondents said statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy should remain as historical symbols.

But Trump’s rationale falls short for two reasons.

First, while slavery may have been utterly ordinary in Washington’s time, and overt racial discrimination equally commonplace in Lincoln’s and Wilson’s, neither was universally defended at the time. Even in the 18th century, for those with ears to hear, numerous voices were making reasoned, impassioned cases against slavery. If a prominent American revolutionary like Benjamin Rush — friend of John Adams and signer of the Declaration of Independence — could conclude that slavery was a direct violation of the laws of nature and religion, why not Washington or Jefferson?

Second, the argument that these men were just men of their time is an example of something that political conservatives otherwise generally profess to loathe: moral relativism. The idea that different standards of truth and morality may obtain in different times and places. Few people in the United States today would defend the practice of female circumcision, for instance, even though it is entirely ordinary in some parts of the world. Most people would say that no matter how customary, or perhaps even virtuous, this practice may seem to its adherents, it is, in fact, an affront to human dignity and human rights. Was slavery any less of an affront? No.

In the end, if we are to have any confidence in our own moral standards, we must believe that these standards are universally applicable, across time and space. And so, we must be ready to criticize figures in the past for attitudes and practices we consider abhorrent. If our moral standards are to have any meaning, then they don’t simply apply because we believe in them. They apply because they are right.

Yes, we also need to acknowledge that an overly rigid application of this principle would soon leave us with very little history to honor and celebrate, because few, if any, prominent figures of the past lived up to the moral standards of 21st-century Americans. Taken to the extreme, it would, indeed, mean tearing down the Washington Monument, and perhaps even the Lincoln Memorial.

But countries need their history. They need heroes and leaders to venerate, to inspire new generations, and to act as a source of unity. National unity can be a very fragile thing, as Americans today know all too well. Revolutionary movements have sometimes tried to consign their national pasts to the dustbin of history and to start over. The French revolutionaries famously introduced a new calendar, numbering the years from the birth of the French republic in 1792 and condemning nearly all of what came before as darkness, feudalism and superstition, unworthy of veneration. It didn’t work. Such attempts at erasure go against the deeply human need to feel a connection with the past.

The conflict, then, is one between two principles. On one hand, we should not honor people who did things and held beliefs that were morally objectionable. On the other, we need a common history we can take pride in as a nation. It is a conflict that cannot be resolved with cheap sound bites of the sort uttered by the president and his backers this week. They can be resolved only with careful, reasoned judgments, backed up by logic and evidence.

When it comes to particular figures in the past, such judgments involve, above all, looking carefully at their entire historical record. In the case of Washington, it involves weighing his role as a slave owner against his role as a heroic commander in chief, as an immensely popular political leader who resisted the temptation to become anything more than a republican chief executive, and who brought the country together around the new Constitution. Calhoun, by contrast, devoted his political career above all to the defense of slavery. The distinction between the two is not difficult to make.

Lee’s case is clear-cut. Whatever admirable personal qualities he may have had, he was also a man who took up arms against his country in defense of an evil institution. In my view, he doesn’t deserve to be honored in any fashion.

There are many historical figures in the American past whose overall record is complex, difficult and deeply ambiguous — Wilson comes to mind. But reasonable people can come to different judgments about them. Accepting the need for a past we can take pride in also imposes on us the duty to take history seriously.

We must always be ready to go back to the sources, to read, think and discuss. Our history is neither a monstrosity to be exorcised nor an altar to worship at. It is the record of the actions of millions of imperfect human beings. Deciding whom to honor and whom to condemn in this record requires more than 140 characters. It requires serious thought and discussion. As citizens today, that’s what we owe to the past.

mcgruff10

If you have a few minutes check out this informative article from the nytimes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/confederate-monuments-southern-history.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

mrussel1

^^Both good articles and worth a read.  

I agree with the Post opinion writer.  Jefferson and Washington were flawed.  There's no debating that.  But they aren't defined by their slave ownership or defense of it. Lee, Jeff Davis, etc. all took up arms for the defense of the enslavement of part of God's creation.  There can be no Christian or moral defense of it.  The line between the two is bright.  

JC29856

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/education/nearly-200-schools-are-named-for-confederate-leaders-is-it-time-to-rename-them/2015/06/24/838e2cc0-1aaa-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

Rename them? shouldn't we tear them down? let's start in the ivy league with Brown.

brianlux

JC29856 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/education/nearly-200-schools-are-named-for-confederate-leaders-is-it-time-to-rename-them/2015/06/24/838e2cc0-1aaa-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

Rename them? shouldn't we tear them down? let's start in the ivy league with Brown.

How about if there's a problem with the name just anagram it and use the money saved from rebuilding or tearing down to improve educational materials and such.

Robert E. Lee High School becomes Bro Lee Tree High (has a nice ring to it, huh?) and the kids get a better education.

JC29856

brianlux said:

JC29856 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/education/nearly-200-schools-are-named-for-confederate-leaders-is-it-time-to-rename-them/2015/06/24/838e2cc0-1aaa-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

Rename them? shouldn't we tear them down? let's start in the ivy league with Brown.

How about if there's a problem with the name just anagram it and use the money saved from rebuilding or tearing down to improve educational materials and such.

Robert E. Lee High School becomes Bro Lee Tree High (has a nice ring to it, huh?) and the kids get a better education.

Seems logical, I'll compromise on the renaming but not on Brown U. Brown U must come down. Maybe I'm still upset over the rejection but if I had known it was literally built by slaves I would have never applied.

brianlux

JC29856 said:

brianlux said:

JC29856 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/education/nearly-200-schools-are-named-for-confederate-leaders-is-it-time-to-rename-them/2015/06/24/838e2cc0-1aaa-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html

Rename them? shouldn't we tear them down? let's start in the ivy league with Brown.

How about if there's a problem with the name just anagram it and use the money saved from rebuilding or tearing down to improve educational materials and such.

Robert E. Lee High School becomes Bro Lee Tree High (has a nice ring to it, huh?) and the kids get a better education.

Seems logical, I'll compromise on the renaming but not on Brown U. Brown U must come down. Maybe I'm still upset over the rejection but if I had known it was literally built by slaves I would have never applied.

Interesting, I didn't know that.  Looked into it and found this:

"The Brown report is the latest revelation that Northern businesses and institutions benefited from slavery. Countless other institutions might be surprised, and ashamed, if they dug deeply into their pasts as Brown has over the past three years."

But rather than the high cost of tearing it down, how about these suggestions?:

" The committee makes sensible recommendations — creating a center for the study of slavery and injustice, rewriting Brown’s history to acknowledge the role of slavery, creating a memorial to the slave trade in Rhode Island, and recruiting more minority students. Other proposals are more problematic. But the value of this exercise was to illuminate a history that had been “largely erased from the collective memory of our university and state."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/opinion/23mon3.html

Smellyman

brianlux said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

brianlux said:

mrussel1 said:

The Confederacy:  Erasing History

Or as we say in these parts, "The Confederacy:  Erasing Erhnocentrism".

God damn, I hope our southern brothers and sister and northern brother and sister will someday learn to get along.  That or set off a long line of nukes at the Mason Dixon line to form a no man's land and say fuck all, we're done with each other.  The former would be so much more pleasant though.

Fuck Texas. Give it back to Mexico. Better yet, let it secede and then be taken over by Mexico. Why pay to dispose?

And strand Willie Nelson and and everyone else in Austin?  I'll bet... no, I know there are many fine folks in other parts of Texas who are there because of work and/or family or whatever. 

My wife went to San Antonio, TX not long ago to visit her aunt who is religious and took my wife to her mostly conservative republican Baptist church.  (Not my wife's thing but she didn't want to be rude and say, "No".)  She was quite surprised to find that this church is providing sanctuary for some immigrants.  Imagine that!

With all due respect, H2M (and you know I do respect you), if we showed support and gave thanks for these kinds of positive actions, we could be part of bringing people together rather than saying fuck them, go to hell, etc. 

Yes, I know, I'm awfully damn idealistic but so be it!

Nah.  H2M is right.  Texas sucks.