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Post by Chesapeake on Aug 18, 2017 12:54:53 GMT -5
We fought a war over the A vs. B question, and it's still being debated.
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Post by epaul on Aug 18, 2017 13:13:20 GMT -5
Too many commentators...bla, bla, bla,...secede). Casual Paul, just to make sure that what I think I'm thinking is what I'm perceived as thinking... None of my Lee posts have been about you or your posts. I enjoy your posts and regard you as a fine addition to the "Paul" club on this forum, a club now rivaling the "Don" club in numbers and surpassing it in looks and female adoration. Your only contribution to my 'Lee purge' was one sentence, a sentence not even aimed at Lee as much as it was some Republican statue defenders. Regardless, that sentence popped my festering Lee boil, a boil that was ready and waiting to pop. As I said, I was primed. And once triggered, I was off on my own personal rant that had been stewing and bubbling inside my noggin. That's the way forums often work. It's the tricky part of how they often work. Too often a person might think a post is in response to them or about them when really it isn't. They just provided a spark- a thought, a sentence, a something- that set off a blaze in pile of dry kindling stacked elsewhere that had just been waiting for a chance to burn. My Lee rant was primed and ready and had its own origin, motive, and direction. If not your one stray sentence, some other sentence, maybe even a squirrel sighting, was going to trigger it. My argument was with a construction that lay within.
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Post by fauxmaha on Aug 18, 2017 13:21:12 GMT -5
We fought a war over the A vs. B question, and it's still being debated. Exactly. Sort of. One way of reading history is that the Civil War was fought over the primary issue of slavery and the derivative issue of a State's right to secede. To the extent that a war can settle an issue, those are settled. But ever since, in a lot of ways, Washington has actively claimed "more victory" than was at issue in the war. Washington thinks it can treat things as "The United States is one intact, integral, singular country with a bunch of little administrative subsections within it called states." Never mind that that wasn't what was at issue in the war, where Washington screwed up is that the Constitutional structure of our Federal government makes such a thing all but impossible to manage. (And speaking of odd historical twists and turns: The most energetic early adopter of this central concentration in Washington was President Wilson, who may very well be the most absolutely and apologetically racist President in history.) So we are left with this Federal government built around an explicit model of highly and deliberately diffused power. The whole system is built to make anything and everything really, really hard to do. On purpose. And this is the institution we, all 320 million of us, call on to do everything. Because 320 million people can agree on stuff.
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Post by billhammond on Aug 18, 2017 13:59:13 GMT -5
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Post by epaul on Aug 18, 2017 14:05:19 GMT -5
And as with all wars, the politicians have their reasons to fight and the soldiers have their own...and soldiers are often not even sure why they are there or how they got there, but once there, they are not fighting for the politicians or their talk, they are fighting for their buddies, their unit, to stay alive, and, well, because they are in a war and that's what you do. They are young.
[football analogy] You don't try win for the coach. You try win for yourself and the guys next to you.
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Post by Rob Hanesworth on Aug 18, 2017 14:27:49 GMT -5
Well put, Shannon.
What you say supports what I have read in the last few days that many of these statues were erected decades after the war as a defiant poke in the eye towards civil rights activity.
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 14:38:28 GMT -5
I don't really buy the "camel's nose" premise behind the quote. I think it's entirely possible to get rid of "Confederate" monuments -- especially when it can be easily illustrated that they are either anachronistically created or unwisely allowed to remain in the name of a familial solution within the general reconstruction. Whether it is probable that it would stop at that, I don't know. It wasn't long ago that the focus of monuments on public property was that of statues and artwork with religious content. Those are the kind of monuments I would apply the "Don't destroy our history" to. But that's because the impetus behind their destruction has been to re-write history in a manner that would suggest that it wasn't people of a Christian worldview that were instrumental in creating our secular government. I don't want that history re-written. I don't care if Confederate monuments are removed from public land. Well, I was wrong. Again. They're already calling for the removal of monuments to Washington and Jefferson. The camel's real and he's in the tent.
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Post by Chesapeake on Aug 18, 2017 15:07:22 GMT -5
Well put, Shannon. What you say supports what I have read in the last few days that many of these statues were erected decades after the war as a defiant poke in the eye towards civil rights activity. mmmmm.... I'm sure at least some of it had to do with racial antagonism; but I believe it was also a response to the fact that new generations had come along that were not familiar with the true horrors of slavery, and that tended to look at the antebellum South through rose-tinted glasses, a common habit among the late Victorians and their progeny. That's the zeitgeist that informed Gone with the Wind, published in 1939, written by a woman who had grown up with the myths of the happy banjo-playing slaves and kindly masters, and all the other delusional ideas. The book and the movie became smash hits because people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were pleased by those thoughts. By the way, the practice of putting up Civil War monuments wasn't limited to the South. You can hardly drive through a New England town of any consequence without seeing a statue of a Union soldier standing guard on the village green, back turned toward the South. (Mirroring the Southern soldiers, who gave their backs to the North.) For a time, it was a flourishing industry: you could order your statue, made of pot-metal to look just like granite, right out of a catalog. (I've written on this subject for Inside the Smithsonian magazine.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Aug 18, 2017 15:21:28 GMT -5
So far, "they" consists of an actor, a CNN commentator, and a Chicago Pentecostal pastor. (I only went about three pages into the Google results, so there may be more public and quasi-public figures, and there are certainly others sitting in living rooms or on barstools, watching the telly and saying, "Yeah, why not!" That is the inevitable result of the whatabout gambit in a public discussion. "Hey, what about X?" "Yeah, what about that!" [Chorus of "Uh, yeahs!"]
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 15:25:05 GMT -5
So far, "they" consists of an actor, a CNN commentator, and a Chicago Pentecostal pastor. (I only went about three pages into the Google results, so there may be more public and quasi-public figures, and there are certainly others sitting in living rooms or on barstools, watching the telly and saying, "Yeah, why not!" That is the inevitable result of the whatabout gambit in a public discussion. "Hey, what about X?" "Yeah, what about that!" [Chorus of "Uh, yeahs!"] Give them time. Nobody knew how to answer them. Nobody seems to know the answer. Pretty soon the SJWs are going to demand that we not have monuments to Carter, Clinton, or Obama because they all opposed gay marriage.
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 15:26:24 GMT -5
...just so long as none of the monuments to me are taken down, I'm okay with all this.
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Post by epaul on Aug 18, 2017 15:38:31 GMT -5
Pretty soon the SJWs are going to demand that we not have monuments to Carter, Clinton, or Obama because they all opposed gay marriage. John, sometimes I really wonder about you. Why on earth would single Japanese women care about statues of U.S. politicians? And why would they care about gay marriage one way or another. And what are you doing cruising the classifieds. Or are you doing it for L.J. ? LOFGP wants to meet SJW? (buy your own paper, LJ)
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 15:41:33 GMT -5
I've had the "boundaries" talk with LJ before. It did no good.
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Post by Russell Letson on Aug 18, 2017 15:46:54 GMT -5
That's why we need a wall.
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 15:50:12 GMT -5
And the simplest one to build would be the one around LJ. But we could do it in a humane way. It could be tall enough to keep him in and yet still short enough to throw food over. If we wanted to. If he behaved. Which he won't, and we already know that.
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Post by jdd2 on Aug 18, 2017 16:54:22 GMT -5
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Post by TKennedy on Aug 18, 2017 17:41:11 GMT -5
I can honestly say that when we had neighborhood wars every day in the summers of the early 50's I was never a Confederate or Nazi,
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Post by millring on Aug 18, 2017 18:03:16 GMT -5
We fought a war over the A vs. B question, and it's still being debated. I'm dying to know how this one came out. I still use both A and B and I never noticed animosity between the two. In fact, I never noticed anything between them. Now C is different. I couldn't help but notice how B came between C and A. Still, I always thought A and B somewhat allied. I've even used them side by side in a word.
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Post by jdd2 on Aug 18, 2017 18:10:42 GMT -5
With A, B, and C, I think A is the "different" one.
A E F H I K ...
B C D G J O ...
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Post by Russell Letson on Aug 18, 2017 20:46:18 GMT -5
Hey--I married C. So just, you know, watch it, bub.
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