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on Open Mic for the week of 4/15/2024You know, I was going to have some wine tomorrow but maybe I'll have it tonight: Iranian Foreign Min…
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That certainly honors the dead of the Civil War. Yup honoring the soldiers of the Confederacy is what it’s all about.
Here is more of the same from a great CW blog where it’s clear the flag is about fighting todays battles and far less about the CW.
http://cwmemory.com/2015/08/01/confederate-heritage-has-its-day-at-stone-mountain/Report
Zic
Does your post have a actual point that you are trying to make and if so what is it?Report
I believe you are making it just fine.Report
ITYM “fascion”.Report
Reading up on the monument, it seems that the mountain was originally owned privately with several attempts made at carving the memorial, each one eventually falling short. Only after the Georgia legislature purchased the mountain in 1958 for $1.125M (approximately $9.2M in today’s dollars) was the monument completed. What a glorious uses of public funds and resources.Report
I assume you guys have seen this:
http://www.avclub.com/article/georgia-artist-starts-petition-add-outkast-confede-222482
The artist rendering is gold.Report
Ha! Yes, I did but had forgotten about it. Amazing.Report
At least we know that putting down a new Confederacy should be relatively easy if the people in the photographs are going to form the rank and file.Report
What a hill to choose to die on.
I’ve got at least two friends on Facebook who are very pro-Confederate, and while I deliberately avoid saying anything — I gotta admit, I can’t grasp what’s going through their minds.
I mean one of them clearly parrots the “The Civil War was about State’s Right’s, you only think it’s about slavery because of liberal brainwashing in school” (despite the fact that he learned that theory IN SCHOOL. I certainly recall that little bit of whitewashing. Starts in Junior High. The clever bit is somehow both teaching it AND making it seem like its’ being covered up).
It’s a flag of treason and failed rebellion. They lost the frickin war, and it was lost a long, long time ago. The whole thing WAS over slavery (I’ve read Texas’ secession letter, which is basically a long list about how slavery is awesome and they’re keeping it, because black people suck and white people rule ) and yet these morons go out there and fly it and pretend it’s about….something else.
Why? Got no idea. Don’t even care, really. Because frankly, I’ve met them – and most of them don’t know what the heck ‘state’s right’s means except as something they yell whenever government doesn’t something they don’t like (but is absent when it IS something they like).Report
Yeah, well the US flag is the flag of treason to the british empire. I’m sure if you asked a lot of brits, they’d say they didn’t loose the fight, they just decided it wasn’t worth it.
Perspective baby…perspective.
Oh, and “sniff, gawwwd bless ‘merica.” What, you didn’t expect pushback?Report
It’s only treason if you lose. And the CSA lost.Report
The victors write the history books.Report
Except the Civil War is a rare counter-example to that.Report
How do you figure that is even remotely true?Report
From when I took a US History class in the South.Report
Or the mythology surrounding a fictional “War of Northern Aggression” as a response Southern states exercising their constitutional right to self-determination by seceding which in turn created the Glorious and Noble “War of Southern Independence” from a rabidly tyrannical Federal gummint coupled with the willful rejection that slavery played any part in it.Report
Also, carpetbaggers. These were northerners rushing to cash in on the plight of the hapless southerners, right? The mere fact that “carpetbaggers” is the default term tells you all you need to know.Report
I went to school in the North (well, the West), and the vier of Reconstruction we were presented was completely pro-Southern.Report
As is the Peloponnesian War. But I digress.Report
We won, dude. Winners get to fly their flags. That’s how rebellions work. You win, you get to have your own country with your own flag.
You know that as well as I, so I’m puzzled at your response.
Actually I expected pushback. What’s been weird is how…hilariously bad it is. I mean, we’re talking a mix of out-and-out racism, complete historical ignorance, and then some weird mix of “Someone doesn’t like it so NOW I HAVE TO HAVE IT”.
I’ve been amusing myself by occasionally posting quotes from the various Declaration of Cause every time someone brings up “State’s Right’s”.
Because that’s my favorite bit, really. I know these people, some of them I went to school with. And they literally learned, in school, that it was both “about state’s rights” and that also schools wouldn’t teach you that. It’s hilarious.Report
Someone doesn’t like it so NOW I HAVE TO HAVE IT”.
Isn’t this a sentiment that is typical of the American character?Report
Someone doesn’t like it so NOW I HAVE TO HAVE IT”.
Isn’t this a sentiment that is typical of the American character?
Ehh, I don’t know if “typical” is the right word. “Definitive” strikes me as hittin closer to the mark.Report
It’s an aspect of certain personality and behavioral traits. It’s common among the scots/irish as well. You see that manifest itself in moonshine for one.Report
It’s like the sudden love of phosphate dishwashing stuff. Until it was banned, virtually nobody knew what the heck a phosphate was. Then suddenly a certain segment of people was stocking up, and swearing on a stack of bibles that phosphates were all that stood between them and dirty, bacteria laden dishes that would kill their whole family.Report
To be fair, for those who had older dishwashers, some of the first phosphate-free formulations didn’t do as good a job getting food residue off dishes (though the formulations have improved, and so have dishwashers). That was simple observation and nothing you needed a chemistry degree to understand; and (surprise surprise) poorer, older people were more likely to have older, less-efficient dishwashers.
But we shouldn’t let that get in the way of some good hyperbole that manages to work in the Bibles of that “certain segment”.Report
*shrug*. I personally know a guy who stockpiled the stuff. He had a washer that was less than five years old. He didn’t know what the heck a phosphate was, much less had done any comparative analysis.
He just knew it was being banned by “environmentalists” and stockpiled.
Admittedly, he’s also the sort of idiot who’d bypass his own emissions system to blow smoke out his truck if he had the time. (Which does, in fact, actually exist).
He defines himself by opposition. I haven’t asked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s picked up a half-dozen confederate flags. It’s all about WHO to him. If the “wrong sorts” are against it, he has to have it. Just to show them who’s boss.Report
We went through several brands of the newer formulations, and they all just plain sucked at cleaning our dishes. The only one that came close to the old formulas was (of course) the freaking priciest brand (and even it wasn’t quite as effective, we had to do more pre-cleaning).
Our old dishwasher finally died, so we have more options now (and I think they are better); but a lot of people were making a real complaint, whether they understood how phosphates worked or not.Report
What brand?Report
It was Cascade Complete I think? It’s liquid and had an orange cap. It’s like 8 bucks a bottle IIRC.Report
The thing is… the phosphate-free stuff doesn’t work as well. To the point that I’ve kind of given up on having cosmetically clean dishes and put forth more work to get them sanitary clean. I noticed this well before I learned that dish detergent ever even had phosphates. I found out about the phosphates thing from that noted right-wing outlet, NPR.
And was actually really annoying the assumption that noticing this was, from the get-go, assumed to be the product of an ideological commitment on my part. Yeah, I’ve taken to hand-scrubbing all of my dishes because I want to rail against liberals and environmentalists that much.
I mean, I’m not even committed to the notion that banning phosphates was a bad idea. I really don’t know and maybe it was worth it in the overall. But it turned out that the phosphates mattered.Report
#phosphatesmatterReport
#notallphosphates. (Like, not a chocolate phosphate.)Report
I may not know what a phospate is or what it does, that part is irrelevant. I do know that I like clean dishes.
In other news, the gov’t wants to limit how mauch water your dishwasher can use. Should we thank the gov’t bearucrats for caring so much?
http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/government-ruins-the-dishwasher-again
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/248385-industry-rails-against-obamas-dishwasher-rulesReport
What war losers flying their own racist war-losing flag might look like.Report
I wish a muthaf***er would!Report
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution via TPM:
A white, pro-confederate flagger’s attempt at outreach to a young black person by finding an enemy they can share:
“Yeah, we didn’t want our daughters to marry you and we didn’t want our children to go to school with you,” he said. “But you’ve got to realize something, your parents didn’t want it, either.”
Croft blamed integration and the civil rights movement on “Communist Jews” and said accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof “should have went to the synagogue, because that’s the enemy of all of us.”
Personally, I’d never heard the “communist Jews” justification of the civil war. I bet theories like this have been buried by liebrul academics for, like, centuries.Report
@stillwater this is some very old school conspiracy mongering. You don’t get weirdo theories like this anymore.Report
I wish you were right.
You may not get Jew-blaming on the civil war, or school [de]segregation – I don’t know, I’m not up on that.
But shadowy cabals of Jews (the Bilderberg group and the Rothschilds figure prominently) behind 9/11, water fluoridation, chemtrails, those terrifying vaccines, as well as every fluffy news story that’s currently distracting us from those very important topics? Oh yes. Yes indeedy.Report
I know a guy who, if you press him even a little, will come out with that stuff. He’s also a Franco-phile, as in Generalissimo (he’s Spanish), so…Report
Don’t you know? Everything was caused by Communist Jews. For that matter, there’s good reason to suspect that everyone in America is secretly a Communist Jew. (How else could they/we hide it so well?!?)Report
If Obama is a Communist Jew, how is he also a Kenyan Socialist Muslim?Report
@kazzy
His real father (Satan, obviously) gave him the demonic power to defy the Law of Non-Contradiction.Report
Because they’re the same thing.Report
Surely you’ve heard that race mixing is Communism. And I think the notion that Jews, being a mongrel rave, want to destroy the pure races by mongrelizing them is a has a long history as well. You’d know that if you weren’t a cuckliberal.Report
They wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. If the Brits had gone full bore in putting down the rebellion, they could have shut it down. Now that would have left them vulnerable to the French, so in the end it wasn’t worth the effort it would take to win it.Report
I don’t think this is true. Fighting a major war across an ocean using 18th century technology was a logistical nightmare. It is easy to point out that only a fraction of Britain’s military might was sent to North America. But you have to not only get the troops across the ocean, you have to keep them supplied.
A lot of things had to fall the right way for the Americans to win. I am not usually a fan of the Great Man theory of history, but George Washington was an exception. One stray bullet, or a gopher hole taking out his horse, and the revolution would have been finished. There was a lot of ways the Americans could have lost the war, but I don’t see what the British could have done differently to win it.Report
Even if the Brits had just been able to devote major naval assets that would have made it much harder for French troops to help us and could have prevented Cornwallis from being forced to surrender due to being blockaded at Yorktown. The Brits could have supplied themselves from the colonies. They wouldn’t’ have needed extensive over the ocean resupply.Report
The war was a stalemate long before Yorktown. The British were firmly entrenched in New York City. They could send out flying columns, so long as they were large enough, and they could occupy any given spot of ground they wanted. But so what? They took Philadelphia because that’s where Congress was. Congress decamped. The British problem was that they could sit in Saigon–whoops!–I meant New York City–as long as they wanted, but that wouldn’t accomplish their goal.
The point of the Cornwallis mission was to stir things up in the South in an attempt to separate the region from the rebellion. It didn’t work. The Battle of Yorktown has nothing to do with that. Cornwallis was on his way back and allowed himself to get trapped. (In fairness, who would have bet on the French navy winning a crucial battle?) Yorktown was a tremendous stroke of luck–good or bad, depending on your perspective. (Yet more evidence, by the way, that we live in a low-probability universe.) But had it not happened, Cornwallis and his army would have been back in New York, and the war would still be a stalemate.
Even Yorktown didn’t really break the stalemate militarily. The Americans still didn’t have anything like the force to assault New York. What Yorktown did was drive home to London that this wasn’t going to go away. Hence the serious peace negotiations that followed. Had the stalemate dragged on, they would have come around to this conclusion eventually. At that point all the Americans had to do was not lose, and Washington had figured out the generalship gig well enough by that time to not let his army get trapped. Quite the opposite. He had to be strong-armed by the French into marching to Yorktown.Report
The “just don’t lose strategy” worked as long as the Brits might get tired and didn’t want to increase their garrisons. If the colonies were more important than the French the Brits don’t get fatigued or decide we weren’t the effort. Washington had the correct, and only, winning strategy. But it was based on the Brits being pretty busy in other places. For places the Brits highly valued they put plenty of resources in like India. They didn’t leave India until they were broke and unable to keep in after WW2.Report
When we talk about the colonies being more important than the French, we have left the realm of “what could the British have done differently to win the war” and moved into an alternate universe entirely unlike our own. There was never any chance of the British waking up one morning to find the American flag flying over the Tower of London. That was a legitimate fear with regard to the French flag. The primary directive of British strategy from at least the mid-18th through the mid-20th century was to make sure the French (or later, the German) flag didn’t fly over the Tower. Unlike the United Federation of Planets, the British took their prime directive seriously. In practice this meant make a cross-channel invasion sufficiently risky that no one was quite willing to pull the trigger on it. Sending everyone off galavanting through North America was decidedly inconsistent with this imperative.
India was a different matter. It was vastly disunited, making conquest comparatively on the cheap possible through a divide and conquer strategy. Yes, the British military was getting pretty thin following WWII. But the other difference was the rise of a plausible Indian nationalism.Report
The Royal Navy was the foremost in the world, but the Patriots picked an opportune time, maybe the most opportune time, to rebel and take advantage of a force stretched thin. The RN had concurrent commitments in Gibraltar, the West Indies, home waters, and general protection of British (East India Company) interests in India and China. It was also a time of France having a halfway decent navy for a change, and Spain having its last gasp at power projection.
By circa 1780, the mainland North America part of the British Empire was the least valuable, (and a cost sink more than a revenue source) and thus, the most expendable – though I don’t think anyone made a formal cost benefit calculation. Still, with other colonies being very visible sources of specie and trade goods, and the obvious desire to protect the Channel and access to the Med, giving a short shrift to north west Atlantic for naval deployment and engagement was, in hindsight, the logical, and really, only choice.Report
Sure, but they had illegally videotaped the Brits’ signals, then used a deflated ball, so it wasn’t really a fair fight.Report
Don’t forget the unorthodox battle formations. Not technically cheating but sneaky nevertheless.Report
For a 1000x profit going to a better place than these chuckleheads, I’ll take a few flag rallies, my dear.Report