Nikki Haley and the Confederacy

    Nikki Haley was hailed as one of the adults in the room when she joined the Trump administration. She went to disappoint expectations by becoming another Trump toadie.

    I’d thought Haley was better than that. I was wrong. She was one of the heroes in my 2016 book, Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump. Even after accepting a job in the Trump administration as ambassador to the United Nations, I hoped Haley could walk the tightrope of maintaining her dignity and reputation as a serious conservative while remaining relevant in a party that has become dramatically more populist and nationalistic in the Trump era. 

    Although she pulled it off longer than almost anyone else, she’s fallen off. Since going to work for Trump, she has gushed about Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, said she is "proud" of Diamond and Silk, and called Jared Kushner a "hidden genius." Weak.

    It’s really hard to take Haley seriously now, as she praises Trump in her book while taking a few cautious shots at specific actions. You can’t cut her much slack, because—unlike some Trump sycophants—it’s clear that Haley knows better, yet is bowing to Trumpism to advance her political career.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/nikki-haley-is-the-latest-adult-in-the-room-to-exit-with-pie-on-her-face

    Here is Haley in 2005, telling us why the flag had to come down

    Haley said national conversation about being viewed differently because of your ethnicity forced her to reflect on here days growing up as a minority in a small town in South Carolina.

    One day her father drove to Columbia to buy produce at a fruit stand when two police officers were called to the stand to keep their eyes on him. The officers just stood at the register until Haley's father made his purchase.

    "I remember how bad that felt. And my dad went to the register, shook their hands, said thank you, paid for his things and not a word was said going home. I knew what had just happened," Haley said. "That produce stand is still there and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate Flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling."

    The future generation 

    Haley said the importance of teaching the next generation about how to treat people was a major motivator of her decision.

    "The biggest reason I asked for that flag to come down was I couldn't look my children in the face and justify it staying there," she said. 

    Haley said racism is a reality that parents can't afford to ignore and must be proactive in addressing with their children. 

    "You're not born with hate, you're taught hate," she said. "Parents need to be very conscious of the fact that that flag hurts people and they need to talk to their kids about it."

    https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/politics/nikki-haley-confederate-flag-removal/index.html

    Haley's status was boosted by a media that claimed she was a hero in the removal of the Confederate flag after the murder of members of Mother Emanuel in Charleston. In truth, Haley was a profile in cowardice.

    Comments

    "The Half has Never Been Told, Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" 2014, by Edward Baptist,  relates the real  "service and sacrifice and heritage" of the Confederate States, white supremacy and slavery, represented by the Confederate flag. 

    From 1800 to 1860  American enslavers boosted cotton picking speed by a factor of ten. Slave labor is documented in logs as more than twice as productive by weight/day/person as that by "free labor" post Civil War.   Picking was the key bottleneck in cotton production until mechanical harvesting machines were introduced in the 1930s.

    Baptist shows that the enslavers "whipping machine", a true legacy of the South, was responsible for boosting production of cotton, providing a bonanza from the slave labor camps from South Carolina to Texas. From the book:

    "For many southwestern whites, whipping was a gateway form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism. In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture: carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs. Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions,” burning, even waterboarding. "

    The bodies of the enslaved, of all ages, were also critical as collateral for enslaver loans from Wall Street and British banks.  For over 50 years cotton was the chief American export exceeding all other exports combined every year, providing critical backing of American currency and banking capital for the industrialization in the north.


    Thanks for reminding me.

    The nonsense continues 

    The University of North Carolina has agreed to pay a group linked to the promotion of racist ideas $2.5 million in a settlement for a lawsuit that is drawing scrutiny from lawyers.

    The case stems from the provenance of the Confederate monument known as "Silent Sam," which was erected on the UNC Chapel Hill campus in 1913 and torn down by protesters in 2018.

    A group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) filed a suit against the college to gain possession of the statue, despite them having no legal claim to Silent Sam. The day before Thanksgiving, UNC settled the suit, agreeing to not only hand over the statue but also pay the group $2.5 million to preserve it.

    https://www.newsweek.com/unc-silent-sam-confederate-group-25-million-1475513

    Stephen Miller, a white supremacist works in the White House.

    According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which got its hands on more than 900 of Miller’s emails, more than 80 percent of the stash “relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration.”

    Miller pushed links from the white supremacist site VDARE, articles about a supposed “white genocide,” and touted a French novel, The Camp of Saints, that is popular with white nationalists and Neo-Nazis. 

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-is-what-we-thought-he-was-a-racist-a-nativist-and-a-white-supremacist

    When Susan Collins announced her support for Brett Kavanaugh. One of the two women behind her was Cindy Hyde-Smith

    https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article219570050.html

    Hyde-Smith's claim to fame?

    Cindy Hyde-Smith laughed her way into the United States Senate on Tuesday. The runoff election between her and Mike Espy, a black Democratic former U.S. congressman and one-time U.S. secretary of agriculture, ended decisively, with Mississippi’s white and conservative majority handing the Republican incumbent a 9-point margin of victory, according to exit polls. The final weeks of Hyde-Smith’s campaign were controversial. First came footage of her remarking, in response to praise from a Tupelo cattle rancher, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be in the front row.” Then came footage of a campaign stop in Columbus, where she quipped, “[There’s] a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.” Most recently came revelations she had been photographed at Jefferson Davis’s Biloxi home in 2014 wearing a Confederate soldier’s hat, describing it, and similar artifacts, as “Mississippi history at its best!”

    https://www.thecut.com/2018/11/cindy-hyde-smith-mississippi.html

    Haley, Collins, and Hyde-Smith are doing this in plain sight.


    WaPo on what Haley gets wrong about the flag

    It is important to note how Confederates understood their cause and symbols. The second national flag of the Confederacy, often called the “stainless banner,” was a white flag with the Confederate battle flag in the canton designed to symbolically evoke racial pride. An 1863 editorial supporting the new design declared that "as a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”

    The white-supremacy movement did not hijack the memory of the Confederacy; in many ways, the modern white-supremacist movement evolved out of the failed Confederate movement. Confederate veterans were rarely embarrassed when called white supremacists. In fact, Julian Carr, who led the United Confederate Veterans and spoke at more Confederate monument dedications than perhaps any other North Carolinian, campaigned for U.S. Senate in 1900 under the slogan, “The White Man Must Rule or Die.” He lost his primary because he was seen as too friendly toward African Americans.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/08/nikki-haley-gets-history-confederate-flag-very-wrong/


    While everyone's having fun Northsplainin', for those who want some context, there was quite a lot less overt racism to flag use in the 70's and 80's, and even a song like "the South's gonna do it again" didn't have a "let's revive slavery" feel, but more just that the South can regain some greatness. (remember the vibe of southern rock 'n Roll in the Carter White House). Probably the final change came in countering Clinton/Gore, making all the Trent Lott/Tom DeLay/Newt Gingrich types come out in full venom to build up the poor man's resentment rather than let's party rednecks.


    The Lost Cause excuses no longer matter. 
     

    Edit to add:

    The majority black citizens of Birmingham want Confederate statues gone. The white state judges say the statues can stay up. Fuck the excuses.

    2nd Edit to add

    You reference entertainment that Is unfamiliar to me.

    Can you understand the outrage and justifiable anger people felt when the pastor of Mother Emanuel was eulogized under the Confederate flag? 


    Good point, I suspect that context is part of the beginnings of the southern whypipple's victimhood complex that eventually begat Trump....cancel culture police should beware that when policing is applied without nuance there is often blowback years down the road...


    Southern whypipple have lamented the Lost Cause for over 150 years. That begat the Klan. That begat sundown towns. That begat the Red Summer. That begat lynchings. That begat Jim Crow, That begat complaints about the Civil Rights movement. That begat voter suppression. That got whites and ethnic minorities to elect Obama. That got the majority of whypipple to ban together to elect Trump. The majority of whypipple are likely to vote for Trump again. If black people stop mentioning the Confederacy after people like Haley bring it up, I'm sure that whypipple won't vote for Trump again.


    If you can't differentiate 160 years ago from 40 years ago from 18 years ago, your rantings don't much make any sense, except to give you a false sense of purpose or analysis. And oddly enough, they take away the one major positive, that unlike Malcolm X's pessimism, MLK was right - white and black could get along, develop civil society, build that dream. It wasn't perfect, there was far to go, but it was positive.

    PS - it wasn't "The Lost Cause" in the 70's, at least where I saw. But that'd ruin your narrative.


    Yawn.

    The Lost Cause is exactly what Haley argues today.

     

    The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

    Want to Read

     

    The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

    by 

    Edward H. Bonekemper III

     4.09  ·   Rating details ·  227 ratings  ·  53 reviews

    The former Confederate states have continually mythologized the South’s defeat to the North, depicting the Civil War as unnecessary, or as a fight over states’ Constitutional rights, or as a David v. Goliath struggle in which the North waged “total war” over an underdog South. In The Myth of the Lost Cause, historian Edward Bonekemper deconstructs this multi-faceted myth, revealing the truth about the war that nearly tore the nation apart 150 years ago

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25404809-the-myth-of-the-lost-cause

     

    The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

    Want to Read

     

    The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History

    by 

    Gary W. Gallagher (Editor), 

     

    Alan T. Nolan (Editor)

    Keith S. Bohannon (Contributor)

    Peter S. Carmichael (Contributor)

    Lesley J. Gordon (Contributor)

    Charles J. Holden (Contributor)

    Lloyd A. Hunter (Contributor)

    Brooks D. Simpson (Contributor)

     , more…

     3.81  ·   Rating details ·  156 ratings  ·  26 reviews

    Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states' rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, skillful propagandists have been so successful in promoting this romanticized view that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own. Misrepresenting the war's true origins and its actual course, the myth of the Lost Cause distorts our national memory. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, nine historians describe and analyze the Lost Cause, identifying ways in which it falsifies history -- creating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/353218.The_Myth_of_the_Lost_Cause_and_Civil_War_History

    Your arguments are Lost Cause arguments

     


    The myth continues 

    White Southerners’ belief that Confederate monuments accurately reflect and honor the true history of the South is so widespread that it feels almost congenital, the kind of thing a white Southerner is born knowing. But that belief was spread through generations of coordinated educational efforts, political lobbying and strategic monument-building — all efforts carefully orchestrated by Confederate lineage organizations such as the UDC.

    The recent Circuit Court ruling preventing the city of Charlottesville from shrouding or removing Confederate statuary from local parks reminds us how deeply and legally, organizations such as the UDC have implanted the Lost Cause’s falsified version of history across the landscapes of the South.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/05/16/why-young-southerners-still-get-indoctrinated-lost-cause/

    Edit to add:

    Why should people have to tolerate statues honoring traitors? The eulogy requiring Pinckey to be under a Confederate flag made no sense. Place Confederate crap in museums.

    2nd Edit to add:

    From a WaPo article right after Charleston. Opinion from a historian 

    When people say 'heritage not hate,’ they are omitting the obvious, which is that that heritage is hate. When someone says it’s about history, well, that particular history is inseparable from hate, because it is about hate. It’s about racism, and it’s about slavery.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/19/what-the-confederate-flag-really-means-to-america-today-according-to-a-race-historian/

    It does not matter that you are not offended.

     


    I never saw a fucking civil war monument I can remember except at some battlefield, including Gettysburg. In your cornpone version of history, white folk be gathering around the campfire singing it out for Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson. Frankly I remember more David Bowie and Black Sabbath. But you keep your little story - I'm sure it warms your heart. Again, I'm describing a period when some if this shit started to go away, not saying it never existed.


    It is still with us. The post is about what Haley says today. She is parroting the Lost Cause arguments. The Confederate flag being on SC state grounds is a recent event. Judges ruling that Confederate statues have to remain in place in Charlottesville and Birmingham, despite the feelings of local citizens, are current events. UNC paying a Confederate group millions of dollar is happening now.

    The shit is in front of our faces.

    Edit to add

    The Heritage not Hate meme is found on white supremacy websites 

     

    Here is a response from the WaPo

     

    It’s about heritage, not hate, I hear.

    This is sometimes naive, sometimes disingenuous, sometimes downright ignorant and sometimes a mingling of all three.

    I’m all for remembering history. I’m all for celebrating heritage. I’m all for celebrating the South. It has grits. It has Faulkner. It has barbecue. (Dang, I’m hungry now.) I’m just confused by the logic here. Why, if what you want to do is celebrate the South — but not the racist, ugly parts of the South — would you choose to do so by waving a symbol literally used by the Confederacy? This just seems like the least efficient possible route of achieving what you say you want to achieve.

    If people tried to convey other messages that way, Hallmark would totally have to rethink its business model.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/06/19/the-trouble-with-heritage-not-hate/

     

    From Sojourners

    For my friends and family who might truly believe that the Confederate flag is merely a symbol of heritage and history, the images on display in Charlottesville show that for many — on both sides — the flag is the ultimate symbol of hate in this country. You can no longer defend a symbol that cannot be separated from white supremacy and racism.

    https://sojo.net/articles/false-narrative-heritage-not-hate

    From the Daily Beast

    However, if progress is our aim, we should examine the inherently (yet possibly unintended) oppressive nature of the “Heritage not Hate” message.

    The choice of Stone Mountain as the venue shows how celebrating “Heritage not Hate” is impossible. In 1915 the second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain. (The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by veterans of the Confederate Army and existed until 1870, when the federal government passed the Force Acts, which protected African-American liberties, and suppressed Klan activities.) A year later the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) began carving Jackson, Lee, and Davis on the face of the mountain. The UDC’s primary objective may have been to celebrate their forefathers, but to believe now that these women did not hold bigoted beliefs that would be frowned upon today is delusional. Southern heritage and hatred are so interwoven that entertaining the idea that the two can be separated borders on lunacy.

    This rally purported that within the Southern context, heritage and hate can be separated, and that collectively we can celebrate a history of white supremacy while ignoring that history’s hatred of non-whites. There is no evidence that this argument holds any water, and it only represents a sad attempt at saving face and perpetuating a false, idyllic narrative of constant white ascension in the United States.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/heritage-not-hate-sorry-white-south-they-go-together

    You keep targeting me with negative comments, but I provide links to support my position. Mine is not a lone voice.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    You keep ignoring my points and instead go out Googling to find people who you feel are allies to bolster arguments I'm not disputing. I quite readily accepted that Confederate statues had reached end-of-life (aside from a few museums) with Landrieu's excellent speech if not others. I was pointing out that the state of *the flag* in the 70's (Haley's early days) was less brazenly nostaligic for slavery as some promote it today, and as a kid I didn't run into many (any?) confederate statues, and they certainly weren't revered or made mention of, at least in my circles. You can Google all you want, and it still won't change my own observations, and you keep Googling for very different time periods - for what reason, I've no idea.


    Read my post at 7:54 AM, it addresses the flag.

    Black people were not focused on the Dukes of Hazzard or Lynard Skynyrd. King had been assassinated. Chisholm and Jackson ran for President. The Black Power movement and fighting for jobs and education was in the forefront.

    No one cares what was happening in your isolated life in the 70s or 80s

    We are in 2019.


    In the 1970s and 1980s while you paid attention to "just a couple of good ole boys" and Sweet Home Alabama", blacks were facing Republican foes like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

    In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Partyelectoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the Southby appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3] As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right.[4]

    The "Southern Strategy" refers primarily to "top down" narratives of the political realignment of the South which suggest that Republican leaders consciously appealed to many white Southerners' racial grievances in order to gain their support.[5] This top-down narrative of the Southern Strategy is generally believed to be the primary force that transformed Southern politics following the civil rights era.[6][7] This view has been questioned by historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin M. Kruse and Joseph Crespino, who have presented an alternative, "bottom up" narrative, which Lassiter has called the "suburban strategy". This narrative recognizes the centrality of racial backlash to the political realignment of the South,[8] but suggests that this backlash took the form of a defense of de factosegregation in the suburbs rather than overt resistance to racial integration and that the story of this backlash is a national rather than a strictly Southern one.[9][10][11][12]

    The perception that the Republican Party had served as the "vehicle of white supremacy in the South", particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win back the support of black voters in the South in later years.[4] In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote.[13][14]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

    While you may have felt things were better, blacks were paying attention to a Republican attack rather than a television show and a rock band.

    From the same Wiki link

     

    Although the phrase "Southern Strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it[15] but popularized it.[16] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting:

    From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[1


    rmrd back on his Google thang. Dude, Goldwater was history in 1964 - pre-Civil Rights Act/Voting Rights Act/Texan LBJ's Great Society- pretty sure you can look it up. Nixon was disgraced and resigned by '74, on the ropes the whole year before. So the only one that fits the time period I noted is Reagan with Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy. But fuck, Jimmy Carter was in the White House 77-81 and you completely left him out of your rebuttal - wassup with that? And while I see what good ol' boys in pickups in the White House - Willie Nelson and mixed race Allman Brothers performing - not quite sure where you address the flag and statues, trying to address what was the feelgood sentiment that the Southern Strategy tried to waylay.


    Carter had four years, then came Reagan. Wassup with leaving him out? Reagan began his campaign in Mississippi 

    And as Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and now a leading Democratic pollster, found in his classic 1985 study of Macomb County, Michigan, the entire phenomenon of "Reagan Democrats" was built on racial resentment. "These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics," he wrote. "Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live."

    So when Reagan's vice president ran to succeed him, it was little surprise that he would employ an inflammatory racial attack against his opponent, repeating over and over again the story of escaped convict Willie Horton. If Michael Dukakis were elected, George Bush's campaign convinced people, hordes of menacing black felons would rampage through the land, raping white women and emasculating their husbands. They didn't say it in quite those words, but they didn't have to; Horton's mug shot (aired endlessly on the news) and the story of his crimes was more than enough. While Bush is now treated as a noble and kind elder statesman, we shouldn't forget that he ran one of the most racist presidential campaigns of modern times. "By the time we're finished," Bush's strategist Lee Atwater said, "they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."

    https://theweek.com/articles/562088/southern-strategy-dead-does-republican-party-have-alternative

    Reagan began his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi 

    Reagan talked about welfare queens

    You think blacks were concerned about a television show?

     

    Nixon

    In the fall of 1971, the Nixon administration was engaged in a massive welfare-reform effort, and was also facing school busing. These two issues apparently inspired Nixon to examine more deeply his own thinking on whether African Americans could make it in American society. Only three weeks before the call with Reagan, Nixon had revealed his opinions on Africans and African Americans in a conversation with the Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had briefly served in the Nixon administration. Nixon was attracted to the theories of Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen, which linked IQ to race, and wondered what Moynihan thought.

    “I have reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me … that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, is probably … very close to the truth,” Nixon explained to a quiet Moynihan. Nixon believed in a hierarchy of races, with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and Latinos. And he had convinced himself that it wasn’t racist to think black people, as a group, were inferior to whites, so long as he held them in paternalistic regard. “Within groups, there are geniuses,” Nixon said. “There are geniuses within black groups. There are more within Asian groups … This is knowledge that is better not to know.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-reagans-racist-conversation-richard-nixon/595102/

     

    Nixon on the phone with Reagan from the Atlantic 

    Even though Reagan had called Nixon to press him to withdraw from the United Nations, in Nixon’s telling, Reagan’s complaints about Africans became the primary purpose of the call.

    “As you can imagine,” Nixon confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”

    The president wanted his patrician secretary of state to understand that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to. “You know, but that’s typical of a reaction, which is probably”—“That’s right,” Rogers interjected—“quite strong.”

    Yep times were great.

     

     

     


    How'd you get to Willie Horton? That's Boston. Nothing to do with flags or statues. You got ADHD? Or is this just a scatter all "anything that affected black people for the last 2000 years" segue? And no, you don't have to quote Lee Atwater stuff back at me - I'm rather well-read, believe it or not.


    No ADHD. Simply pointing out the steady deterioration over time. Your enjoyment of a television show and a band which you claim meant the South was changing meant that black people were having that great change experience. You may be well read on Lee Atwater, but you apparently think that he wasn't more important in shaping the black view of the South than the Dukes and Lynard Skynyrd.

    The Confederate statues and the Confederate flag are not benign symbols.


    Keep not listening - you do it well.


    oh but all the preaching tying every racist thing under the sun for 200 yrs. to the flag has finally convinced me! Let's ban the Confederate flag!  Racism solved! The troubles over!


    No one argues that the Confederate flag being gone cures racism. But it might indicate that black aren't getting their shins kicked as much.


    You are not saying anything of value. Blacks in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag down in the same period when you are saying that Skynyrd was making a change. How quickly that supposed change vanished. 

    You will probably blame the failure on black people.


    Was thinking of that great anthem "The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down" written by that Southern (Canadian) boy Robbie Robertson and covered by that intractable White supremacist from NYC Joan Baez. Seems I remember a big singalong in that D.W.Griffith wannabe Scorcese's "The Last Waltz" in Madison Square Gardens? What's up with that? Just a bunch of racists, right?


    The songs had nothing to do with the symbolism of the flag to black people, then or today. You are living in a bubble.

    The Confederate statues have gone stale. The Confederate flag has gone stale. The flag is a racist symbol. If you are black and a car flying a Confederate flag pulls up, your first thought is not Lynard Skynyrd.

    Edit to add:

    Your first thought wasn't Lynard Skynyrd in the 1970s or 1980s either,


    Man, you can't read for shit.

    I was pointing out that the state of *the flag* in the 70's (Haley's early days) was less brazenly nostalgic for slavery as some promote it today, and as a kid I didn't run into many (any?) confederate statues, and they certainly weren't revered or made mention of, at least in my circles.

    Take a night class. You can Google, but too many words clutter up your mind.

    Yes, the "Lost Cause" in the 70's for a lot of white folk - South and North - was more tinged with the collapse of a civilization, not "whoo boy, we was doin it right and then them damn Yankees come en screw it all up". But I don't recall anyone protesting The Band or Joan Baez either - my guess is "The Night..." didn't piss off blacks at the time because it was just a nice sad memorable song, and not laced with racist objectionable phrases or tied in with some racist political agenda - it was just about normal people and how they might view the collapse of their world. Somethign wrong with that?


    I was pointing out the Confederate flag was not benign to black people. Ever.

    You are in a bubble so you don't feel the impact.

    The flag praises the Lost Cause and expresses defiance of the nation's demographics.

    The statues and flags impact people of color and others not trapped in your bubble.

    Here is what the Black Caucus in South Carolina was doing in the 1970s

    Black South Carolinians have been asking for the flag's removal since 1972, and it's been a formal demand of the legislature's Black Caucus since 1977. In 1994, the legislature seriously considered a compromise, but it later fell apart.

    https://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8818093/confederate-flag-south-carolina-charleston-shooting

    This is not about you.


    And is the Confederate flag over the Capitol different than the Confederate flag on a pickup?


    An idiot can pull up on sometime in his pickup flying a Confederate flag. That idiot should not be surprised if considered a threat.

    Edit to add:

    The flag goes hand in hand with other racist symbols

    An avowed racist, who murdered a black man in 1998 by tying him to a truck and dragging him three miles down a Texas road, will be executed this week.

    John William King, 44, who is inked in racist tattoos, orchestrated the attack on James Byrd Jr in Jasper, Texas, is slated to be put to death Wednesday. 

    His tattoos include a woodpecker in KKK garb, a silhouette of a black man lynched from a cross, the lightning-bolt SS of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, and the words "Aryan Pride." There also is a crest with a Confederate flag and a burning cross. 
     

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6944641/Avowed-racist-ringleader-horrifying-1998-murder-black-man-executed-week.html

    You are well read enough to know this.


    And they should ban trench coats because the guys at Columbine wore them. Ban hoodies as well - I hear they're tied to rampant criminality.


    Hey, great idea, that would stop all the school shootings!


    An idiot can pull up on sometime in his pickup flying a Confederate flag. That idiot should not be surprised if considered a threat.

    That is not a ban. It is noting that the idiot with the Confederate flag will be viewed with suspicion. You think that an unknown guy who walks up to a black family gathering is not going to be viewed with suspicion?

     


    hey are you suggesting individuals still have freedom of speech in the U..S.? and that a rebel flag might not always say "lost cause" and as a matter of fact the owner of a pickup truck with a rebel flag bumper sticker may be saying something we don't get because he don't know nothing bout no history....?


    See below


    Seriously, PP, your intriguing points along this line got me thinking about how the Reagan era "southern strategy" may have intentionally co-opted and tried to strangle "lost cause" thinking. Yes, they were appealing to racism. But at the same time, you got all this stars-and-bars one-country patriotism being sold, i.e., Lee Greenwood's I'm Proud to be An American type of stuff. A unified 50 states under one flag. That hippies should stop burning the stars and bars implies Confederate sympathizers should also stop dissing it and stop worshipping a rebel cause. No more lost cause, one union, shining city on a hill under god-fearing Saint Ronnie (a narrative appealing to like yankee auto workers as well...)


    Two North Carolina towns cancelled Christmas parades because the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were going to be able to let their Confederate flags fly on floats. Leadership of both towns said the problem was outside agitators, not the Confederates.

    “The decision to cancel this year’s parade is not a reflection on our community or our wonderful people. Rather, it’s an unfortunate consequence of what happens when outside agitators make it known they will use local events like our parade to sow hate and spark chaos.”

    “They're a hate group—they hate people that have a different color of skin. And I just don't feel like that belongs in a parade.”

    That’s a dog whistle to people who miss the fabricated past when we all shut up and got along. Jones didn’t acknowledge how decades with Confederate-flag-waving Civil War apologists in Wake Forest’s Christmas parades felt to black constituents. Instead, she leaned into the boogeyman of “outside agitators” supposedly planning to “use the occasion to promote their political agenda without any regard for the health and safety of our citizens” to fret over how “times have changed.” She mourned the “wonderful spirit” of Wake Forest that had been on display in past holiday parades offering unmasked nostalgia for the pre-emancipation South. 
     

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-daughters-of-the-confederacy-spoiled-christmasand-public-officials-instead-blamed-outside-agitators?ref=home

    This is happening in 2019.


     

    I wonder what Murray Kempton would say.

    In July 1945 , ,writing later, he described a Japanese soldier crawl under fire and pull back another previously wounded one,

    Then  Kempton’s buddy was shot.

    As scrambling  back to safety Kempton heard him  moan “ You aren’t going to leave me are you”, Which was exactly he'd intended to do , Kempton wrote . Until  shamed into doing what he had just observed an opponent  do: rescue a wounded soldier  under fire.

    Writing later Kempton knew the record of the Japanese military brutality.The Bataan Death March was a fact,

    But  all facts are facts .So when he observed a case of heroism Kempton wrote he had observed a case of heroism. And when  NCD writes that Confederate cotton growers set  new records for  production by  setting new records for whipping that was a fact.

    Like Picket’s charge .Or any other brave event . Even  it is exploited by  the Lost Cause .Will that acknowledgement be used to advance harmful  positions?.Sure .

    That happens with Free Speech.


    Using this logic, we should erect statues to brave Nazis?

     


    We have statues to brave Romans, who enslaved and terrorized across Europe and North Africa. That's kind how history works. Pretty sure Romania has statues for Vlad the Impaler (Count Dracula), Italy of Catherine di Medici, one or two statues of Napoleon? Or Cromwell? Genghis Khan? Columbus and Cortez? Tito? Sir Francis Drake? Andrew Jackson even has the $20 bill.how about those Mayan ruins celebrating early slavery, intertribal conquest and live sacrifice, Aztec ruins celebrating the same only slightly later?


    Those statues are on the Romans, etc. Columbus Day is now called Indigenous People's Day in some cities. Times change. The Confederate flag is associated with the ongoing suppression of minorities today. Heritage and Hate cannot be separated.

    Jackson should have been replaced by Harriet Tubman, but we have a white supremacist administration.

    Extensive work was well underway on a new $20 bill bearing the image of Harriet Tubman when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced last month that the design of the note would be delayed for technical reasons by six years and might not include the former slave and abolitionist.

    Many Americans were deeply disappointed with the delay of the bill, which was to be the first to bear the face of an African-American. The change would push completion of the imagery past President Trump’s time in office, even if he wins a second term, stirring speculation that Mr. Trump had intervened to keep his favorite president, Andrew Jackson, a fellow populist, on the front of the note.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/us/politics/harriet-tubman-bill.html

    Edit to add 

    Not going to investigate the others, but the Vlad statue in Bucharest is in a museum. The city is interesting as you head downtown you see buildings with bullet holes from the revolution. Truthfully, what other countries do has nothing to do with the discussion about Confederate displays in the United States.


    If shouldn't bring up other countries, why the fuck do you bring up Nazis?

    Using this logic, we should erect statues to brave Nazis?



    Now you're just getting stupid.


    Yes.

    Or at least Germans should. As we  do Patton.

    Some victims behave nobly. Some survive by  stealing food . From the weakest.

    Ultimately the goal is for us ,now,  to live here  in better harmony . That is not advanced  by falsely denying the good

    qualities  their ancestors had  mixed in  with  their  bad ones. 

    I've never met anyone who liked being kicked in the shins. Have you?

    Maybe  it seemed justified.  Well deserved.

    It doesn't make them want to vote for your candidate.

     

     

     


    I've never met anyone who liked being kicked in the shins. Have you?

    everything I've ever read by rmrd tells me he wants to kick all the people he thinks are bad as often as possible, he believes kicking is a good thing and advances humanity in the end, just keep kicking 'em.


    p.s. Interesting this op-ed should appear just now, and why I posted it: on Keynes' opinion on what happens when you kick them when they are down.


    Removing Confederate symbols is equivalent to kicking people in the shins?


    you're the one who threw the statues in, the Haley thing about the flag was different and Peracles actually started  to address how. But it's your blog and carry on tying everything together as one big evil with no nuance, it's the political propaganda way. I'm waiting on you to throw in the NFL now and BLM. Columbus Day, I see you already threw that in. Why doncha just make one blog over and over titled "All Racism"? It would be so much clearer that's what you want to discuss.


    You cannot separate heritage from the hate. Whether it be the flag or the statues, it is all about white supremacy. Haley went from saying that she couldn't look her children in the eyes in 2015, to the heritage not hate message today.  Charlottesville was about statues. Charleston was about the flag.

    America’s latest conflict about race began with a mass shooting, a flag, and some statues.

    In Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacist protesters descended onto the city earlier in August to protest the city’s plan to take down Confederate monuments, particularly the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The city responded to the protests on Wednesday by covering the monuments with a black tarp

    In Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray responded to the Charlottesville protests by speeding up his own city’s plans to tear down Confederate monuments. In Durham, North Carolina, protesters in August pulled down a statue dedicated to Confederate soldiers. Baltimore took down its Confederate monuments literally overnight as well.

    Why does America suddenly care so much about these old pieces of metal and stone?

    The current battle actually goes back to a mass shooting in 2015, when self-described white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof drew a lot of attention for posing with the Confederate flag in images that came out after the shooting — and that helped spur a fight within South Carolina about whether it should take down a Confederate flag that had flown at the state capitol for years. The state eventually agreed to officially take down the flag (after it was unofficially taken down by activist Bree Newsome). 

    Since then, many cities and states, particularly in the South, have been questioning their own Confederate symbols. The argument is simple: The Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States, and that isn’t something that the country should honor or commemorate in any way.

    https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/8/16/16151252/confederate-statues-white-supremacists

    The battles are the same

    How do you feel about Pinckney's body being eulogized under the Confederate flag?


    You know, when Hutus killed a few hundred thousand Tutsis, a few years after Tutsis killed a few hundred thousand Hutus, weren't a lot of white supremacists around, nor the 5 million killed (plus more raped) in the Congo 20 years ago. Don't recall a lot of white supremacists in Pol Pot's group as he took out a million+ in the killing Fields, don't remember White Supremacy as part of Mao's little red book as he killed 10 million in The Great Leap Forward and another 10 million in The Cultural Revolution. A lot of Lost Causes in this world - not sure you can blame them all on whitey, but keep trying -it's a hobby that'll keep on giving.


    The discussion is about the United States. The Lost Cause under consideration is the one happening in the United States.


    You cannot separate heritage from the hate. Whether it be the flag or the statues, it is all about white supremacy.

    So ignore what humans do, and let's just pretend the South is a super special case. Can't separate heritage from hate? What kind of racist bullshit is that? Of course you can. Roughly the same heritage people were involved in criminal cotton slavery in one state, in the next state they were mostly non-participants. Of course there was plenty of hate towards the South too - some completely justified, some generations old ethnic/religious bullshit. The Irish and Scots were the English's niggers for a long while before the English discovered/built its slave ships and trade. Read about Cromwell - adored in England, hated in Ireland. Potato famine? English wouldn't open the foodstores while the Irish were dying en masse - had to meet exports back to England. That took place just 10-15 years before the Civil War. Think that didn't rub off in the New World, all them Scarlett O'Hara country redneck vermin making up the most immigrants per year over most of the 19th century?


    Not to mention whaddabout (tribalism, such a wunnerful thing?) Just imagine the complicated logarithms it's gonna take to figure those reparations according to "heritage". How much does Liz Warren owe, for example? Will it be rated to six degrees of separation? And how does one parse how many slaves by each tribe over how many years for what reasons (another lost cause?) and influenced by what motives (lost cause!) ? I guess one could always argue: but my great great grandaddy, wasn't that kind of Cherokee? Saints vs. sinners, winners vs. losers, outside of political elections, not always easy to figure. Me, I started leaving my tribe at 17 and made the final break at 19. Really despise when they try to drag me in again.


    Nothing in your rant has anything to do with the topic being discussed.


    The Confederate statues and the Confederate flag were/ are used as intimidation of black people. Heritage = Hate. 
     

    The flag

    After the Civil War ended, the battle flag turned up here and there only occasionally -- at events to commemorate fallen soldiers. 

    So, when did the flag explode into prominence? It was during the struggle for civil rights for black Americans, in the middle of the 20th century.

    The first burst may have been in 1948. South Carolina politician Strom Thurmond ran for president under the newly founded States Rights Democratic Party, also known as the Dixiecrats. The party's purpose was clear: "We stand for the segregation of the races," said Article 4 of its platform. 

    At campaign stops, fans greeted Thurmond with American flags, state flags -- and Confederate battle flags.

    But desegregation progressed.

    As it passed milestones like the Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education, which gave black American children access to all schools, the Confederate battle flag popped up more and more.

    https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/24/us/confederate-flag-myths-facts/index.html

    The statues

    “Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s.

    https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments

    White people and other ethnic minorities are joining blacks in protesting these traitorous symbols.

    It was an abomination for Pinckney to have his body under a Confederate flag.

     

     

     

     

     


    For 150 years, black people have been "kicked in the shins" by being fed a false narrative that the war was not about slavery. The flag and other Confederate paraphernalia are offensive, that is why they are used by white supremacists. Instead of honoring traitors, perhaps we should focus on telling the truth. Regarding the vote, what does the other side have to do to make us feel better? I refer you back to King's letter from a Birmingham jail. Moderates are a hindrance to progress. The statues and flags will continue to come down, despite your inaction.

    If Trump is re-elected, it will not be the fault of Warren, Buttigieg, Biden, blacks or Progressives. The re-election will be laid squarely at the feet of the majority of white voters who like what Trump is doing.


    Who is your intended audience for the lecturing and yelling here at Dag? What is the purpose of your rants and lecturing? If they even turn off most members here who already are not going to vote for Trump? It is to express hatred, bitterness and anger, is it not? How does that help anything? Are you going for the smallest number of allies possible, is that the plan?


    I thought that a discussion was happening. I am arguing that the Lost Cause explains the Confederate statues and the need for the Confederate flag. I am not yelling. I am stating a position. Others disagree with my position on the Confederate statues and flag. I provide links to support my position.

    Along the way, I ask what the other side has to do to appease us? I don't think that Progressives create Trump supporters, I think Trump supporters vote in their own self interest. 
     

    Edit to add:

    How is stating the fact that a majority of the white vote may go to Trump yelling? It means that a coalition of whites and ethnic minorities have to ban together.


    The Sour Grapes smell of defeat is settling over the Resistance Camps long before the decisive battle of this New Civil Wat  has even begun. It's pathetic to watch snowflakes seek succor from RINO quislings like Matt Lewis While brilliant Young Conservatives such as Candice Owens and BCP lead millions out of indentured servitude on the dem plantation and arm them to fight for the Army of The Republic.


    Candace Owens was kicked out of Turning Point

    “When we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist.” she said. 

    “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine,” Owens continued, while standing next to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. 

    “The problem is he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. To me, that’s not nationalism. So in thinking about how it could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism, I really don’t

    That little thing with Jewish people was OK.


    RM, you must have been asleep when Owens responded to that juvenile cherry picked smear by the despicable Ted Lieu was made who believes Black people aren't smart enough to read the whole interview and understand it. She showed her teeth and used her sharp wit to take a big bite out of that punk while also silencing the  illiterate Jerrod the Huts' whining who was also trying unsuccessfully to silence her with lies. 

    Owens quit her job at TPUSA to lead the timely and much more important Blexit Movement that has produced incredible success  in freeing peoples' minds from the dem plantation. 


    The truth about Blexit

    Recently, “Blexit” launched as a new campaign encouraging Black people to leave the Democratic party, announced by conservative African-American pundit and avid Trump supporter Candace Owens. You may have seen the controversy: shortly after famed rapper Kanye West met with President Trump, Owens credited West with the design of the campaign’s merchandise. West denied his role and denounced the campaign. Owens backtracked her statements. But this MAGA-endorsed controversy is not the controversy I’m here to talk about.

    “Blexit” was in fact already a movement — that has nothing to do with a political party, logo disputes, or a rapper’s media frenzy. It was and continues to be a strategic move towards Black economic independence by encouraging African Americans to leave the traditional financial systems that have for so long taken advantage of the Black community . This new use of the term “Blexit” — as an attempt to attract African Americans to the Republican Party — was used without permission and is merely a distraction from the original commendable mission of racial and economic justice. Let’s explore the true meaning of the term and the movement it’s propelling.

    Me’Lea Connelly originated the term in 2016 — a timely play off Brexit — to encourage fellow Black Americans to explore alternatives to extractive financial systems in the name of economic justice. Notably, Blexit formed as the product of community meetings after the police killing of Philando Castile in Minnesota; which has been referred to as the second worst state in the country for black people. To address racial oppression at large through economic activism and black-owned institutions, the Minneapolis-based grassroots non-profit supports African Americans exiting the financial “system of oppression. It’s about starting to build a system that can support us and be a healing institution for this country,” according to co-founder Jonathan Banks.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/morgansimon/2018/11/21/will-the-real-blexit-please-stand-up/#75f1f39d40e7

    You don't post links because you are lazy and stupid.

     

     

     

     


    RM, I didn't know this bit of trivia but it's a great story. Owens will be honored for saving the Blexit idea from the clinging hands of separatist Marxist Collectivists, what a coup!

    Now Black folks can move forward along with Owens and use Trump's Economic Enterprise Zones for the opportunity to work for and invest in their individual economic development that will benefit their communities in many ways.They don't have to retreat into commie enclaves where their investments would only finance more commie enclaves.

    I'm beginning to understand why you continue to display your love of links. You seem to fear Free Thinking and individual thought. You seek shelter and the false security of groupthink or to be more precise you parrot whatever the Masters of the collective tell you to believe. What a sad existence.


    I provide links to show Owens' theft of Blexit and to counter your bullshit.

    I do have to admit that you are entertaining and confirm my impression of the low intelligence level of Trump supporters. You actually think that you are scoring points.


    an idiot can pull up on sometime in his pickup flying a Confederate flag. That idiot should not be surprised if considered a threat.

    That is not a ban. It is noting that the idiot with the Confederate flag will be viewed with suspicion. You think that an unknown guy who walks up to a black family gathering is not going to be viewed with suspicion?

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/10/2019 - 7:52pm

    You think white families are not afraid of weird strangers and suspicious of them? especially biker looking folks wearing nasty scary stuff like chains, black leather, tattoos, confederate flags and nazi and other bad ass insignia? That's the whole idea of dressing like that: to scare nice families! Do you really think whites are never afraid of other whites?!!! 

    All the places you've taken this conversation are: ridiculous. Not just peddling, but romanticizing fear of the other


    P.S. I happened to think the Matt Lewis article in the Daily Beast was quite good. He called her on her dishonest spin for political expedience. But you took it allover the place to other times, memes and planets as usual, then argued with strawmen to try to make sense of  the nonsense mishmosh romantic victimhood narratives and how nothing has changed for 150 years.

    You blog, and your commenters can be critical and dismissive if they see sloppy thinking (or say, propaganda): that's the way it works. Amazingly: smart writers tend to welcome that kind of criticism learn from the audience and adjust their arguments and style to persuade rather than repeat the same things over and over and over.


    romanticizing fear of the other

    Fearing a guy waving a Confederate flag is rational. It is not romanticizing fear. It is reacting to a symbol used to intimidate and terrorize. The entire history of the flag is about oppression. 
    Your posts have become nonsensical. Your major concern is what has to be done to give aid and comfort to Confederate flag wavers. You require nothing of them. You only want to keep them happy. You are the one who wants their love. What does the Confederate flag waver have to do to make us feel safer?


    Over here in Europe I was as surprised as any to see rebel flags on summer cottages - are these people racist? Or just associate the image with country music/southern rock, being a Waylon/Willie rebel, fighting back against "the man", outdoor shit? I mean, people who've never touched a cow even in northern cities wear cowboy hats and go to cowboy hats, and btw those cowboys killed a lot of Mexicans and Indians (Corman McCarthy's Blood Meridian being one of the best deconst uctuons of that romantic image). 70's Travolta, "Urban Cowboy", remember? You take all symbols literally? You just may have Autism or Asperger's- ask your physician l, or read "A Curious Incident of a Dog..." to see if you relate to the narrator (probably not black, so a non-starter, but I tried...)


    I thought of this simple description: that for many the confederate flag went from representing a rebel with a lost cause to James Dean-ian rebel without a cause.Especially after state and local governments disavowed flying it. But before that, too. Just rebelling for the heck of it, the party hard thing, the "fuck the man" thing, the "take this job and shove it" thing, the loner thing, the guy that can't stand the ties of like marriage or fidelity, all that shit, that's the tie-in with country music. The kinda people you are talking about, to me, these are not fans of confederate statues, they don't give a shit about the history, don't study history, could care less.


    Yes, it's a country version of punk essentially. Or even Jack Kerouac's Beats. Just different soundtrack, less jazz, less screaming.


    Tho folks who carry Confederate paraphernalia can expect the same response as if they are wearing Nazi symbols.


    And that's where you jump the shark. Hitler pulled off the beerhall putsch in Munich, but that doesn't mean Barbarians cancel Oktoberfest or change Bayerisch to something else, or that Germany stops calling itself Germany. It's a decade+ of great shame in a country's history. The South was/is a region sharing many values and lifestyles and ethnic similarities, not just cotton-based slavery. You'd probably demand they stop calling themselves "the South" if you could, except if course an exemption for black people to do what they please.


    No shark jumping. Your post is irrational. You can party in Germany, but Nazi gear is a no-no.


    The Confederate flag is not Nazi gear. The Confederate flag did not fly over plantations. Lincoln fought to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves - that came 18-20 months into his war as a morale pick me up.


    Sigh

    The Confederacy fought to expand slavery. The Confederacy lost rather than arm black people. The Union armed black soldiers and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation freed slaves in the Confederacy. The Confederacy hated blacks so much, they couldn't see them as soldiers. The Union form black troops, which situation was better? Lincoln and Douglass formed a friendship. Davis ran away in women's clothing.

    And

    The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Arguably one of the most consequential amendments to this day, the amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress. 
     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

    So, once again, fuck the Confederacy.

    Edit to add:

    What is the fucking point of Confederate flags not flying over plantations? The plantation owners fought in the war and forced enslaved people to accompany them in battle. The plantation owners had flag bearers on the battlefield. Your post is irrational.


    If you're going to invoke the Nazi flag and all its atrocities, at least try to be historical. As usual you want your cake and eat it to. Don't work like that.


    Confederates did not commit atrocities? You are whitewashing history.

    Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.

    A major contributor to the high infant and child death rate was chronic undernourishment. Slaveowners showed surprisingly little concern for slave mothers' health or diet during pregnancy, providing pregnant women with no extra rations and employing them in intensive field work even in the last week before they gave birth. Not surprisingly, slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth, or what we would today consider to be severely underweight.

    Infants and children were badly malnourished. Most infants were weaned early, within three or four months of birth, and then fed gruel or porridge made of cornmeal. Around the age of three, they began to eat vegetables, soups, potatoes, molasses, grits, hominy, and cornbread. This diet lacked protein, thiamine, niacin, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D, and as a result, slave children often suffered from night blindness, abdominal swellings, swollen muscles, bowed legs, skin lesions, and convulsions.


    http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3040

     

    The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the largest movement of people in history. Between 10 and 15 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900. But this figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a result of the slave trade. At least 2 million Africans--10 to 15 percent--died during the infamous "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic. Another 15 to 30 percent died during the march to or confinement along the coast. Altogether, for every 100 slaves who reached the New World, another 40 had died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.


    http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446

    Southerners need something new to celebrate. The Confederacy is not a cause for celebration. The Confederacy wanted to expand enslavement.

     

     

     

     


    We are discussing the Confederate flag in the context of the United States with its history of enslaving black people. You keep avoiding the issue. A black family seeing a white man carrying a Confederate flag is being rational when they are suspicious. Your posts are also ridiculous. 


    A white man *carrying* a Confederate flag? Like duh. I get worried anyone carrying *any* kind of flag. I thought we were mostly talking about the flag on pickups or flyers or t-shirt or notebook vs the inappropriateness of having on a gov building.


    You think this shirt wouldn't be viewed with suspicion?

     

    The person has a free speech right to wear the shirt, but you're going to keep your kids closer to you.

    Edit to add:

    There is evidence of people wearing Confederate gear attacking blacks at random. There are not multiple cases of blacks punching out whites wearing Confederate gear.

    Hate crimes are on the rise

    https://depts.washington.edu/hiprc/blacks-minorities-disproportionately-impacted-by-hate-crimes/

     

    Whypipple have gone crazy.


    Quite a few cases of blacks attacking whites for whatever reason. I see the shirt as saying "leave me my culture" the way punks want to wear mohawks and Doc Martens, blacks want to wear braids, others want to do their thing. If they go all supremacist on you, then worry. They might just be typical suthurners w no ulterior motive.


    You can have whatever delusion you wish. I don't have to wait for all to go white supremacist. If the Confederacy is all they get out of the South, they have a problem. I'm not going call for harming people wearing Confederate gear, but I'm not going to trust them. You, of course, face zero risk from the Confederates.  


    Huh? You think I fit in easy down there? Again you're not paying much attention.


    You are the one celebrating their "rebel". spirit. You can't separate the heritage of the "rebels" from the evil of the Lost Cause.


    Ah now here you have finally drilled back to addressing the topic you yourself brought up at the start and your opinion on it!

    And Peracles disagrees. Now, one could actually start a discussion. All the rest was nonsense distracting prologue.

    First there were like a hundred comments that had little to do with it, lots of googling, lots of unrelated links and even made up arguments with strawmen. A story on one aspect of racism always turns into preachy lectures with lotsa links that ends up as: everything has to do with everything else and blacks are the worst victims evah in the history of the world, MLK and the 60's always gets thrown in there....anything you can think of that upsets you. No progress has been made, no justice, no peace, everything the same as Jim Crow days. Surprised BBQ Becky didn't show up....

    I.E., what is the purpose of bringing up the guy convicted for the horrific dragging crime? It's proof of progress that he was convicted! Jim Crow, lost cause would be: he got away with it.

    What Peracles is trying to say is that things are not the same now and suggesting that whether or not people use the flag to symbolize something has nothing to do with acting out. There are bad people, they are not going away if you like took a flag away from them or their goth clothes away from the Columbine shooters. We get that the flag signifies different things to different people, including Southern blacks, but once it was not flown by government what don't you get about: you won?There has been great progress, admit it and stop some of the victim role. They get arrested if they do wrong thinking of lost cause or whatever they are thinking about. It's the acts that are against the law, not the thought. And yes, we have freedom of speech and they can think about lost cause if they want to.


    You are the one missing the point. The context of the Confederate flag has not changed. You are the one calling blacks victims. You are the one saying that it is our obligation to "understand " the poor Confederates. What is their obligation to us?
     

    The Confederate paraphernalia went up to intimidate black people. Blacks are fighting to take the symbols down. No one thinks Confederates are going away, but we can get in their face like they get into our faces. You are actually comparing Goth clothing to Confederate gear. You have zero understanding of historical context. As I said, you exist in a bubble.

    Confederates are not going away. Conservatives are not created by pointing out history. Victims sit in their corners and whine when other people take action. Victims worry about causing a civil war by speaking truth. Victims are oblivious to the fact that the Confederate in the White House is holding rallies geared to inciting a civil war. Victims think people speaking ou are the problem. Enjoy your bubble.

    Edit to add:

    There are racial discrepancies in health care, housing, the justice system, etc. pointing out these facts is not victimhood but providing information to form a plan of attack. You can't see that from your bubble. Thank goodness you are not in a decision making position where you could actually do harm.

     

     


    Bo Jangles and Stephen Fetchit were great performers for their time. Booker T Washington was felt to be behind the times even during his lifetime. Times change. The Confederacy is not all that the South has to offer.

    Edit to add:

    Another amazing thing is that the argument is made that the way the Confederate flag was used in the 1970s and 1980s was changing. Yet organizations like the NAACP were working to have flags taken down. The underlying assumption is that the NAACP's perception, not those of flag supporters, was wrong. In the current discussion it is assumed that people who disagree with the flying of Confederate flags or wearing Confederate gear are wrong. The argument has always been that the whypipple should determine how the flag is perceived. Nothing has changed.


    I never argued working to take down the flag was wrong. Whining like a bitch and using shotgun logic doesn't much help convince anyone of anything.


    You argue that we give people who love the Confederates the benefit of the doubt. You are the bitch in this scenario. I don't have to convince you, there are already people working to get the traitorous flags down.


    Sorry, but sticking up for your state was not traitorous.
    There was no pledge of allegiance to the US flag back then,
    considering "States Rights" was certainly a principle for the Founding Fathers
    and decades after. Come to think of it, I think Lincoln buried that ideal.
    Anyway, I was talking about people who have a flag on their pickup -
    "love the Confederates" might be a gross generalization.
    But keep on spinning.


    The folks who wear Confederate gear in public can be expected to be looked upon with suspicion. The gear is associated with white supremacists and those who wear the gear know how the Confederacy is view.

    Confederates did believe in States Rights. Confederates demanded that states who had laws that said enslaved people who crossed their borders were free had to return these newly freed people back to their enslavers.

    The Confederacy was formed to make future states the joined the United States could be slave states.

    South Carolina

    -----

    In its constitution, Confederate leaders explicitly provided for the federal protection of slaveholding:

    “In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”

    It’s a provision that clashes jarringly with neo-Confederate mythos—how could the South secede to preserve states’ rights if its own constitution mandated legal, federally protected slavery across state borders?

    South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. On Dec. 24, 1860, its government issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” In it, South Carolinian leaders aired objections to laws in Northern states—specifically, those that sprung from the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that state authorities could not be forced to help return fugitive slaves to the South. Ensuing individual state legislation in New England would double down on that very ruling, expressly forbidding state officials from enforcing the federal Fugitive Slave Acts, or the use of state jails to detain fugitive slaves

    In effect, South Carolina seceded because the federal government would not overturn abolitionist policies in Northern states. South Carolina seceded because the federal government would not violate a state’s right to abstain from slavery and its concomitant policies.

    -----

    https://qz.com/378533/for-the-last-time-the-american-civil-war-was-not-about-states-rights/

    You continue to peddle Lost Cause lies.

    People who wear Confederate gear want to gaslight the country. Some of them, like Dylann Roof, are threats to the nation.

     


    Response to AA above

    hey are you suggesting individuals still have freedom of speech in the U..S.? and that a rebel flag might not always say "lost cause" and as a matter of fact the owner of a pickup truck with a rebel flag bumper sticker may be saying something we don't get because he don't know nothing bout no history....?

    This was her response to my stating the obvious, a group of black people would view a white man carrying a Confederate flag with suspicion.

    I previously asked if the family of Reverend Pinckney should have to face the indignity of his body eulogized under a Confederate flag. We ignore their pain but shed tears for those who are questioned about using the Confederate flag.

     

    There is an appropriate response in the Chicago Tribune

    Whitewashed history and a lack of empathy, promoted by political leaders, seem to foster nostalgia for a past than never was. Bad history allows the terrorist attacks at Charleston and Charlottesville to appear as aberrations instead of part of a longer history of white-supremacist violence.

    Only by ignoring the long history of racial discrimination and violence can we pretend racism is just a problem in the hearts of a few and not a persistent, institutional issue. Indeed, racism and white identity politics still play a major role in our political discourse. Pretending racism isn't a problem may appeal to some white voters, but it's bad for the country.

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-nikki-haley-confederate-flag-20191209-hsyiwmzmmjblpp4qrbsgkbxfbq-story.html

    Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was hijacked. Nikki Haley is a liar

     

     

     


    Saw this at WaPo:

    I live in Mississippi.

    I know what that flag stands for.

    Dylann Roof got the meaning of that flag 100% correct.

    It stands for keeping blacks in perpetual terror and telling them, in no uncertain terms, that their citizenship will ALWAYS be lesser than a white person’s.

    And if you hang around any person who flies that flag down here long enough they will happily say so.


    How she has responded:

    She tweeted that on Dec. 11 and retweeted it on Dec. 13.


    Interesting side note--I just ran across Wells Fargo tweet quoting her in their picture as regards the global economy and their Nov. Global Investment Symposium advice for investors titled A Year Before Election Day: What Matters Most:

    Find out what the elections could mean for your portfolio. https://t.co/Md7Vo7AnVN #Election2020 #WFInvest pic.twitter.com/tBMIVJGpSq

    — Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management (@WFInvesting) December 13, 2019

    Why they chose her, I have no clue.


    Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, effectively discounts the accuracy of pundits, economic or otherwise, from long term studies of their work. 

    He notes an interesting point on forecasting events, that there was a 50% chance Hitler was born Heidi not Adolf. An alternative, equally likely, event that could have completely altered the history of the  20th century.


    90% or more of company profits over the years are from Black Swans, wild developments that no one can predict,. So all this patting on the back for investors is trying to squeeze out a 5-10% living while hoping to be lucky enough to accidentally catch a good Black Swan (an iPhone, not a late Nokia or Enron)


    South Carolina is not healed. Haley just poured salt on the wound.

    Edit to add:

    The Confederacy was built upon enslaving black people. The Confederate flag re-emerged as a symbol of protest against civil rights. Now, we are told the flag is just about heritage. We are told we can separate things. This despite the fact that many tell us that the flag has nothing to do with racism.

    When Tamika Mallory of the Women's March talked about of her love for Louis Farrakhan, she was condemned for supporting an anti-Semite. Mallory says that she disagrees with Farrakhan's rhetoric. Mallory only supports the good that Farrakhan does in the black community.. No anti-Semitism here.


    No, you were told you *can't* blithely separate things, that unlike the Nazi flag, the Southern flags refer to both the Confederacy as a breakaway region (expressing both their right to self-determination & exemplifying their contempt for black people's freedom & self-determination), as well as southern culture, as well as a types of music as well as a symbol of rebelliousness/stick it to the man, as well as country life, as well as a symbol of being resistant to Civil Rights, et al. And *never* said that the flag has *nothing to do with racism". More made up shit.
    The US flag was taken on many a KKK raid with cross-burning - are you going to ban that flag? Is it an essential part of the anti-black experience, the horror of the stars and stripes? That flag was used to conquer the west, wiping out Indian/Native civilizations as well as stealing huge amounts of land from the Mexicans. It must be terrorizing for every Hispanic American to see that flag flying over the courthouse, with kids yelling, "the Cavalry's coming, the Cavalry's coming".

    "Mallory only supports the good that Farrakhan does in the black community.. No anti-Semitism here." - yeah, Leni Riefenstahl just wanted to make creative films - she didn't hate the gypsy kids the Nazis pulled out of concentration camps to be in her films. No anti-gypsy sentiment here. Seriously, you've been working on this for decades - is this as shitty as your argumentation's gotten? So Trudeau didn't *mean* anything bad from wearing blackface, so why doesn't he get excused like you excuse Mallory? Quite the double standards you've got while wielding your razor. Why is it not okay then to recognize the good that Woodrow Wilson did even while acknowledging his racist civil service policies? Why can you not acknowledge that some Confederate soldiers were simply soldiers doing their jobs, as usual not asking political questions, so could be honored as soldiers, not as racists or slave owners? You want 1 set of rules for blacks, 1 for whites apparently - which is usually called "racism".


    The Confederate flag is equivalent to the flag of the United States in your eyes? The Confederate flag stands for nothing worthy of honor. Confederates were fighting for enslavement of black people. Mallory supports an anti-Semite. Confederates lost rather than arm blacks, because they viewed blacks as inferior. Blacks were able to vote, something that would have never happened in the Confederacy.

    The Confederate flag re-emerged as a symbol to intimidate blacks who wanted full citizenship rights. The United States flag was flying when black were freed. The flag has flown over some horrible events. Everything the Confederate flag flew over was dedicated to enslavement. They even tried to convince us that blacks fought for the Confederacy to pretend that the Confederate flag was honorable. Confederates were really honorable at Fort Pillow.

    Mallory was forced out of the Women's March. Trudeau is Prime Minister of Canada. There is a respected Woodrow Wilson Center. Only Mallory was cancelled. There is double standard, and it is the one you want to apply selectively in favor of the Confederates.

    You are ranting. Lots of Confederate whataboutism. Confederates fought for slavery, Fort Pillow proved their viciousness. Nothing of honor to see here. Slowly, but surely Confederate flags will come down. 
     

    Edit to add:

    Germany does not glorify Nazis. Current citizens Germany have family who were Nazis and fought in the war. We should not celebrate Confederates in the United States. The Confederate flag in its current context is a symbol for white grievance. It is not a unifying symbol.

     


    Lots of verbal jacking off to miss the point that Old Glory waved over good ol Indian and Mexican casualties and other US atrocities. Never been a big fan of flags, perhaps since the school principal caught me slyly flipping the bird at one. Seems I didn't make the school Annual that year.


    No jacking off. I simply pointed out that while the flag of the United States has many problems, EVERYTHING that the Confederates flags stood for was evil. Whataboutism fails. 

    Edit to add

    As more research is done, the worse the Confederacy appears. The government was an aristocracy with willing dupes who wanted it known that at least they weren't niggers. Fort Pillow had white Southern Unionists fighting along with the US Colored Troops. The  Baptist and Methodist churches split because of the stench of the Confederacy. West Virginia came into existent because citizens said no thanks to Confederate traitors. Every Confederate state except South Carolina had troops fighting for the Union. Jones County, Mississippi refused to fight for the Confederacy, and formed a guerilla army along with blacks fighting against the Confederates. The argument that Confederates were fighting for their states and not white supremacy is a farce. It has been 150 years, time for the South to truly join the Union. 


    Your posting history here has revealed you to be obsessed with the historic meanings of symbols when meanings of symbols change all the time and lose or gain power through the eye of the beholder.

    The Daily Beast article you cited on Haley doesn't even mention the Confederacy! It is about her suspected insincerity about Trump for political expediency.

    You read it and started thinking about the Confederacy and decided it was about the Confederate flag! And that like Nikki Haley is a secret Confederate sympathizer, or what?

    And most people care about the Confederate flag and statues very little in the scheme of things since it is no longer flown over any government building and it's the 21st century and they got new problems.

    I glean from all of this: you are absurdly obsessed with Confederate symbols, they mean something to you as if it were still 1910, they frighten you. And you think getting rid of them will accomplish something important, like I dunno, cause Trump to disappear or that through knowing how people react to them, you can read their hearts and minds about today's politics. Unfortunately, lots of people like, say, Diamond and Silk, are not cowering in fear of the Confederate flag, and this drives you nuts.

    Peracles is right to equate this with U.S. flag nuts, who think not respecting the flag enough means a person is not a patriot.

    As to your druthers, why don't you just come straight out and say it that you think those who give Trump a posititive approval rating are all the same as the old Confederate patriots, and you think we should have never stayed a Union, that the Civil War should have ended with us as two separate countries and maybe we need to still do that? Why keep beating about the bush? This appears to be the heart of your obsession. You don't like those people and think it is not possible that they be tolerated but they need to be banished from your country. And a good litmus test for who those  are is whether they support banning certain flags and statues.

    Such an absurd way to think about things.


    I'm trying to figure out if Gone With The Wind should be banned.
    And those Southern accents - it's like listening to back chatter at Auschwitz. Why exactly *don't* they speak English?


    Unfortunately, thinking about symbolism, those in the U.S. with some years yet to live should probably be more concerned about figuring out which movies are being banned or not in Russia and China and India/Pakistan....


    PP, was just outside interacting with the Dominican immigrant neighbors bout something. Afterwards my mind jumped to: how the Confederate flag must mean jack shit to them! Then I my mind jumped to how the Puerto Rican flag definitely means a heckuva lot to a lot of different people when it's flown here in the NYC area. And how I would interpret that meaning for most, sort of like you were trying to describe many of the Confederate flag users in this day and age: the message is basically: fuck you! wink


    and then: how neither means jack shit to the young Chinese-speaking family that just bought the house one door over and paved over their little spit of land which once had a tree and bushes and flowers, so there would be another parking place....America,what a country!


    What does Richard Gere's Tibetan flag mean to the Chinese, what does the Chinese flag mean to Uyghurs, what does the Japanese flag mean to Koreans, what does the Union Jack mean to Indians and Jamaicans, what does the Belgian flag mean to Congolese, what does the Catalonian flag mean to Spanish, what does the Turkish flag mean to Armenians and Syrians, what does the French flag mean to Vietnamese, the Portuguese flag to Brazilian slave descendents,... How do Mexicans feel about Texas' Lone Star, used to import slaves and steal north of the Rio Grande... The Maple Leaf to Acadians/Cajuns put on leaky ships in Canada and sailed to New Orleans...


    Gee. Why would I bring up Nikki and the Confederacy after reading an article about how disappointed the author was in Haley? Perhaps it was because Haley opined about the meaning of the Confederate flag mere days before the article in an interview with Glenn Beck. It was in the papers.

    From the WaPo

    Much of the crowd cheered as state troopers lowered the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House’s grounds in 2015. In response to the murder of nine parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) had ordered its permanent removal. At the time, it seemed that perhaps Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, recognized that the symbol had long divided South Carolinians due to the racist associations the flag held.

    So much for that. On Friday, Haley declared the Confederate flag was “hijacked” by the racism of a single white supremacist terrorist in 2015, and that before then, “people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.” While perhaps a shrewd statement for a potential presidential run, Haley was not presenting accurate history.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/08/nikki-haley-gets-history-confederate-flag-very-wrong/

    The interview was another example of how Haley is a disappointment. 


    The Civil War and the Confederacy are still with us. There is protest over UNC paying a Confederate group to store a Confederate statue. This is happening in 2019. You are in a bubble.

    Some are calling it a “payoff.” Others have called it “hush money” and “reparations.” The University of North Carolina System is calling it “a lawful and lasting path” to prevent Confederate statues and insignia from finding homes on its campuses.

    But what it is, in practical terms, is $2.5 million handed directly from North Carolina’s public university system into the open palms of a Confederate group, which will bear the responsibility for taking and preserving “Silent Sam,” UNC-Chapel Hill’s controversial Confederate statue.

    https://www.theroot.com/reparations-for-confederates-unc-system-trustees-fac-1840517913

     


    Thank you for demonstrating your lack of knowledge by mentioning Diamond & Silk.

    I am unreasonably fascinated by Diamond and Silk, the live-stream bloggers who became Fox News’ resident black Trump supporters back in 2016. The duo — real names Lynette Hardaway (Diamond) and Rochelle Richardson (Silk) — distinguish themselves from the hundreds of other con artists on the margins of Trumpworld by having a schtick so phony and lazily constructed that it could plausibly be an elaborate Dadaist prank. Everything about the Diamond and Silk enterprise is artificial, and obviously so. Both women were Democrats until 2015 — their first video, not yet deleted, was pro-Black Lives Matter — but switched parties, interestingly, the minute it became profitable to do so. Their contrived on-screen personas have been mocked on the left, but also by black conservatives such as Fox’s Juan Williams and CNN’s Tara Setmayer, who have both described the duo as a “minstrel show.” And for all their bluster about supposedly being censored by social media platforms during their Congressional testimony earlier this year, very little of their popularity is attributable to social media — almost every YouTube result for “Diamond and Silk” is a Fox News clip uploaded by the official Fox News account.

    https://theoutline.com/post/6705/diamond-and-silk-dummycrats-review?zd=1&zi=74jeplcb

    You are so gullible that you think Diamond & Silk are credible. You need to consider life outside your bubble.
     

     


    Latest Comments