Ok. Been too busy to read, much less post, but going to respond to this before reading more:
Jophiel wrote:
Sounds a lot like the "If you allow SSM then people will marry cats!" argument. You can probably list a lot of things Washington or Jefferson did that were non-slavery related. The sole reason Lee or Jackson has a statue is the whole "went to war against their country to preserve slavery" thing. I'd feel much more comfortable arguing the merits of a monument to Thomas Jefferson than one to Lee.
At least in the case of Jackson, that's false. They removed the plaque to him in Horton Plaza here in San Diego, in direct response to this nonsense (and presumably out of fear of it being vandalized, which is basically bowing to the "movement"). Um... He's honored around here for freaking saving the city during the Mexican American War. Nothing at all to do with Slavery, the Confederacy, etc.
Lee was a famous and popular figure before the Civil War. He opposed slavery (hated it, in fact). He just happened to be a General in Virginia and when his state chose to join the Confederacy, he continued to serve. Blaming him, or associating him with slavery is pure ignorance of the reality of the world at the time. So yes, it's not ridiculous to suggest that the same ignorance would/will bled over into other figures, completely unrelated to the Civil War itself.
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I don't believe there's any real mystery to Trump's response: He's catering to the Breitbart/Stormfront portion of his base that aligns with the "Alt-Right". He tries to make equivalencies between those advocating genocide and those standing up against genocide. He wants to blunt criticism against a portion of the vote he needs to survive by with "But, really, everyone is at fault here" statements while leaving enough plausible deniability for people to say "Well, he wasn't defending racism and Nazis, man!"
IMO, the problem is that most people can't grasp the difference between defending someone's opinion, and defending their right to express their opinion. This is a problem because it's pretty much required for the first amendment of our Constitution to actually work. That so many people think it's fine and dandy to infringe people's rights to assemble and speak because they don't agree with what they have to say is, IMO, far far far more dangerous to our civil society than the most racist and hateful thing someone might believe or want to express in the first place.
Put another way. Which is more threatening? A group of people who believe in racism, who's numbers have been steadily dwindling over the last century or so, and who are almost universally debunked and disagreed with by the rest of society when they do occasionally show up and speak, and who are barely able to gather a couple hundred people for anything they do? Or a movement that has been growing for some years now, in which unpopular or just opposition speech is routinely blocked via violent protest, and who have managed to get thousands of others to show up and join them, who in turn provide cover for their violent anto-free-speech actions under the guise of protesting against the content of someone else's speech?
We've seen this happen, not just to white nationalists, but to conservatives as well. Normal, mainstream folks are regularly being blocked from speaking at universities via rioting tactics by these antifa folks (the irony of folks who use the same tactics as the brown shirts calling themselves "anti-fascists" is yet another wonder of historical ignorance at play btw). It doesn't matter what you think of a speaker. They still have a right to speak. This group is challenging that fundamental right. And if we allow it, we lose that right ourselves. Once a group like that is so empowered, there's nothing other than fickleness to prevent them from deciding to use that power against speech that *you* agree with, and not just that which you don't.
This is the real problem at hand. And no, this is not me "defending" white nationalists. They're irrelevant. We should not allow our disagreement with them to blind us to the methodologies being used in this case. The real problem is the actions used by the counter protesters. Again, it's not about sides. It's about methods.
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Looking at the photos of the rally, I'm reminded of a time following the Dylan Roof murders when Gbaji once taught us:
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You think racists use the confederate battle flag as a symbol of their racism? Interesting. Go look up pictures of SWP tattoos or symbols. Notice something. They tend to be Swastikas, or Skulls, or other random things. Very rarely is a confederate flag or symbol involved.
Yeah, nary a Confederate flag was to be found among the Swastikas and other white nationalist symbols that night.
Seriously? Given that this was about defending a statue of a Lee, and that is
Lee's Battle flag, it's presence doesn't actually tell us anything at all.
Let's imagine there was exactly zero percent of the protesters who were white nationalists, racists, whatever. What flag would people have been waving? it's your own assumptions about the association and meaning of that flag that is leading you here. OMG! That's.. ridiculous.
You could literally declare any symbol at all to be a symbol of racism and make the exact same argument. If someone uses it, in your mind, that's proof that they are racists. So just by declaring a symbol you don't like to be "a symbol of racism", you can safely justify eradicating it.
Um... Which is part of the point I was making. Which flew over your head then, and still continues to soar.
Edited, Aug 28th 2017 7:26pm by gbaji