Confederate flags, tinfoil hat crowd and other nutters.

I was remembering what happened earlier this year in Missouri when St. Obama and the racial division-its showed up another community, then they flocked to South Carolina to start up the current controversy.

I'll speak my mind when I wish. Oddly I think you should too. If we on opposite sides of this issue cannot calmly discuss the issue the division may be too deep. We don't need either a race war in this country, or another civil war. That the black community has a legitimate grievance with the police (racial profiling, excess deaths due to choke holds etc.) I have no doubt they have and continue to occur, but burning and looting business is not the image of those with a justifiable grievance, but of uncivilized criminal thugs.

I don't think crass desecration of grave is the image your side may wish to show to the world. Nor do I think those with racist views against black Americans would be justified it taking revenge on Black Lives Matter by desecrating Martian Luther King's grave either.

Poker

gcomeau wrote:

pokermind wrote:Hmm, bad manners, total lack of common courtesy, desecration of the dead, riot, looting, anarchy are all justifiable to further your political agenda? I don't thinks so. I remember what my daddy once said, "Good manners cost you nothing, bad manners can get you killed," just saying. Sooner or later someone is going to get killed pulling these stunts, mark my words.

Poker

Where the hell did you pull "riot, looting and anarchy" from in this conversation? Go play with your strawman somewhere else, nobody has said those are ok.

pokermind wrote:I was remembering what happened earlier this year in Missouri when St. Obama and the racial division-its showed up another community, then they flocked to South Carolina to start up the current controversy.

I'll speak my mind when I wish. Oddly I think you should too. If we on opposite sides of this issue cannot calmly discuss the issue the division may be too deep. We don't need either a race war in this country, or another civil war. That the black community has a legitimate grievance with the police (racial profiling, excess deaths due to choke holds etc.) I have no doubt they have and continue to occur, but burning and looting business is not the image of those with a justifiable grievance, but of uncivilized criminal thugs.

I don't think crass desecration of grave is the image your side may wish to show to the world. Nor do I think those with racist views against black Americans would be justified it taking revenge on Black Lives Matter by desecrating Martian Luther King's grave either.

The problem I have with your comments on this is you keep playing this false equivalency game. First it was people who protest a monument to champions of slavery by spray painting a statue are just as much "thugs" as KKK members who hood up and terrorize racial minorities.

Now it's doing anything to these monuments glorifying a Confederacy that stood for the enslavement of black people would be like defacing the grave of a hero of the civil rights movement.

These things you keep comparing are not even *close* to the same. In any way. And yet you keep just acting like they're both equally bad. One of them is arguable not bad period.

Hmm, The Constitution's first amendment guarantees freedom of speech, press, and religion. Even unpopular speech, presses, and religions. Therefore General Forest's monument and Martian Luther King's monument enjoy equal protection under the law. Even if General Forest was a former used slave salesman, General who executed surrendered black troops during the Civil War, and founded the KKK, take your pick of the most heinous; while Martin Luther King was a shining light in the non violent civil Rights movement both monuments are protected under free speech. IE Both have equal protection under the law.

The Civil Right's movement was about equality under the law, the opposite of the Jim Crow laws. Martin Luther's dream was a nation of decedents of former slaves and former slave owners getting along. Care to explain how desecrating the graves of the ancestors of those slaveholders is going to accomplish this goal of Martin Luther King's dream?

That is why I equate them they are equal, and treating them as not equal, thus allowing desecration and vandalism of one without allowing it of the other is discrimination, something else Martin Luther King was against.

Poker

pokermind wrote:Hmm, The Constitution's first amendment guarantees freedom of speech, press, and religion. Even unpopular speech, presses, and religions. Therefore General Forest's monument and Martian Luther King's monument enjoy equal protection under the law. Even if General Forest was a former used slave salesman, General who executed surrendered black troops during the Civil War, and founded the KKK, take your pick of the most heinous; while Martin Luther King was a shining light in the non violent civil Rights movement both monuments are protected under free speech. IE Both have equal protection under the law.

That freedom thing does not include criminal acts, nor monuments to dead people. That has no connection what so ever with freedom of speech etc..

Putting up monuments dedicated to war criminals is not a good idea, nor is it a sane idea.

It´s something that has almost caused war between China and Japan, despite the fact that the Japanese monuments in question are not for specific people, their dedication merely include some nasties along with the rest.

Do you realise that what you have said means you consider the right to put up monuments dedicated to SS "special units"(that´s the massmurder units by the way) falls under freedom of speech/religion/press...

While i don´t agree with desecration at all, putting up monuments to honor people that should first of all be remembered for their crimes, really, REALLY bad idea.

Tenshinai wrote:
And exactly why would it matter what the soldiers doing the fighting thinks about it, when they are ordered around by their superiors who in turn are taking their cues from those "statesmen" you dismiss so easily?

Try reading letters to families from German soldiers in WWII. The vast majority there also didn´t fight for doing nasty stuff to a bunch of people they don´t even know.
And even those who did, often did not write about it openly. Just as those who opposed anything rarely did either due to censorship of such letters.

I hope you realise now how terrible your justification/excuse above really is.

Actually I was thinking about those Germans. There is ahuge difference between those who are willing to go out and but their life on the line and those who are just out to kill people, for that case.

Matter of fact those that are willing to do things with no personal risk remind me of what poker is talking about defacing statues and such. Not in degree of course but in kind.

Mostly the confederate soldiers fought for personal liberty. Never had any problem with the individual soldiers of the Japanese or the Germans. Prison guards who abuse people in both cases, of course.

None of this is as simple as the media or glossed over history makes it appear. Or I can represent in a simple text post. None of it is simple opposite colors. All of it shadings. To just desecrate things without understanding the individual case is willfully stupid to compound the problem and polarize a society. As has been said just a way for fanatics to get their "thug" on. IMO

Enjoy,
T2M

pokermind wrote:Hmm, The Constitution's first amendment guarantees freedom of speech, press, and religion. Even unpopular speech, presses, and religions. Therefore General Forest's monument and Martian Luther King's monument enjoy equal protection under the law.

Equal protection from government censorship.

Not equal protection from people thinking if someone puts up a monument to racist assholes they are a gigantic asshole themselves and they're getting protested against.

(The people who spraypainted that message on the statue were expressing their speech too btw. And their speech was at least on the right side of morality... or would you care, as I asked earlier, to express any disagreement with the general principle they expressed that people who get hundreds of thousands killed in the cause of fighting for the oppression of an entire racial minority shouldn't be glorified?)

The Civil Right's movement was about equality under the law, the opposite of the Jim Crow laws. Martin Luther's dream was a nation of decedents of former slaves and former slave owners getting along. Care to explain how desecrating the graves of the ancestors of those slaveholders is going to accomplish this goal of Martin Luther King's dream?

It's a bigger step in the right direction than putting up with those slave owner's descendants making overt racist displays glorifying slavery for the last 100 years in everywhere from the public square to the state house.

Frankly it is FAR overdue for people to be taking a stand and forcing a facing of the issue.

thinkstoomuch wrote:Actually I was thinking about those Germans. There is ahuge difference between those who are willing to go out and but their life on the line and those who are just out to kill people, for that case.

Matter of fact those that are willing to do things with no personal risk remind me of what poker is talking about defacing statues and such. Not in degree of course but in kind.

Mostly the confederate soldiers fought for personal liberty.

Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on that, unless we're talking about "the personal liberty for white people to keep owning black people".


I find it entirely credible that the average German soldier didn't have a grasp on what was going on in Buchenwald or Auschwitz. And the cause of the war was hardly ever to go get the Jews, it was almost entirely nationalistic, the Jews were just used as convenient scapegoats and punching bags to whip up certain elements of German society with.


But in the case of the Confederacy we are dealing with a *completely* different situation. The cause of the secession of the slaveholding states was expressed clearly and repeatedly and publicly as the preservation of slavery. It was in every states articles of secession, it was in the public addresses, it was EVERYWHERE. They were fighing FOR SLAVERY and everyone knew it. Everyone.

And slavery wasn't something that only happened in a few isolated camps that only a limited few ever saw so they didn't understand what was involved, slavery was *everywhere* in those states and had been going on for a very long time. Those soldiers knew perfectly fucking well what they were fighting for whether they spent a bunch of time talking about it in their letters home or not.

Hmm Given:

gcomeau wrote:

Pokermind wrote:The Civil Right's movement was about equality under the law, the opposite of the Jim Crow laws. Martin Luther's dream was a nation of decedents of former slaves and former slave owners getting along. Care to explain how desecrating the graves of the ancestors of those slaveholders is going to accomplish this goal of Martin Luther King's dream?

It's a bigger step in the right direction than putting up with those slave owner's descendants making overt racist displays glorifying slavery for the last 100 years in everywhere from the public square to the state house.

Frankly it is FAR overdue for people to be taking a stand and forcing a facing of the issue.



It's a bigger step in the right direction than putting up with those slave owner's descendants making overt racist displays glorifying slavery for the last 100 years in everywhere from the public square to the state house.

Frankly it is FAR overdue for people to be taking a stand and forcing a facing of the issue.

I guess you'll have agree with the KKK about removing Martian Luther King's birthday from the National Holidays, he believed in non violence, and trying to get along with people, not dissing people, so put on a white sheet you earned it. So you have to diss other people to feel important. You are losing the respect of liberals by the crass actions of desecrating graves the actual Racists hate you anyway. Well when your poor manners get you killed know you have no one to blame but that face in the mirror

Poker

pokermind wrote:Hmm Given:

gcomeau wrote:It's a bigger step in the right direction than putting up with those slave owner's descendants making overt racist displays glorifying slavery for the last 100 years in everywhere from the public square to the state house.

Frankly it is FAR overdue for people to be taking a stand and forcing a facing of the issue.

I guess you'll have agree with the KKK about removing Martian Luther King's birthday from the National Holidays, he believed in non violence, and trying to get along with people, not dissing people, so put on a white sheet you earned it.

Last I checked it would be a pretty big stretch to call wielding spray paint against a big hunk of rock "violence".


As for not "dissing people", I find myself again calling bullshit in this thread. King's ultimate goal was for everyone to get along, but he never said one damn word about not speaking out about or confronting racists on the road to getting there. In fact, he spent his entire life "dissing" racists. I mean seriously, do you not understand what he meant when he said things like this?

"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is force to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored."

He was ALL ABOUT getting in people's faces and confronting them and forcing them to deal with this stuff. That was the entire point of what he did. FFS, he wrote the above FROM JAIL. How do you think he got put in there? It wasn't by going out of his way not to "diss" racists.


As for your suggestion that I have earned putting on a KKK sheet for speaking out *against* racism, too hilarious to even bother responding to honestly...

Let's see, Missouri earlier this year .....
would that be the case in which a policeman
threw a black teen to the ground at a swimming pool?

Or the case in which a policeman killed an unarmed man?

HTM, PHL

pokermind wrote:I was remembering what happened earlier this year in Missouri when St. Obama and the racial division-its showed up another community,
[snip - htm]