We are native Richmonders and also the great, great grandsons of Stonewall Jackson. As two of the closest living relatives to Stonewall, we are writing today to ask for the removal of his statue, as well as the removal of all Confederate statues from Monument Avenue. They are overt symbols of racism and white supremacy, and the time is long overdue for them to depart from public display. Overnight, Baltimore has seen fit to take this action. Richmond should, too.
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Confederate monuments like the Jackson statue were never intended as benign symbols. Rather, they were the clearly articulated artwork of white supremacy. Among many examples, we can see this plainly if we look at the dedication of a Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina, in which a speaker proclaimed that the Confederate soldier “saved the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South.” Disturbingly, he went on to recount a tale of performing the “pleasing duty” of “horse whipping” a black woman in front of federal soldiers. All over the South, this grotesque message is conveyed by similar monuments. As importantly, this message is clear to today’s avowed white supremacists.
As is usually the case here in USAmerica Inc, we get hung up on the symbol itself - or we get too use to feeling comfortable with the hagiographic bullshit swirling around those symbols - and we forget about what the damned thing actually stands for.
So, this isn't fully baked yet - it has to be submitted for peer-review and then maybe we'll see it in the journals. Vox, Brian Resnick One of the starkest, darkest findings in the survey comes from a simple question: How evolved do you think other people are?
Kteily, the co-author on this paper, pioneered this new and disturbing way to measure dehumanization — the tendency to see others as being less than human. He simply shows study participants the following (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human.
Participants are asked to rate where certain groups fall on this scale from 0 to 100. Zero is not human at all; 100 is fully human.
- and (btw) - Also important: Alt-righters in the sample aren’t all that concerned about the economy. The survey used a common set of Pew question that asks about the current state of the economy, and about whether participants feel like things are going to improve for them. Here, both groups reported about the same levels of confidence in the economy.
What’s more, “the alt-right expected more improvement in the state of the economy relative to the non-alt-right sample,” the study states (perhaps because their preferred leader is president). Fake Jesus wept.
Christopher Cantwell - Alt-Right, Smug-White, Fucking Nazi Ass-Wipe - the guy they spotlighted in that VICE piece on HBO a few days ago. It's the Age Of Poor Poor Pitiful Me.
Something that just got clearer: these jagoffs talk trash all the time about how "all those people" are getting everything for free, and they're a burden to society, and honest tax-paying Americans always have to pick up the tab, and blah blah blah.
But Cantwell's not bitchin' because somebody else is gettin' the goodies - he's bitchin' cuz he's not gettin' the goodies.
There's a lot of weirdness rattling around in my brain about all this - economic pyramids, and wealth disparity, and Maslov's Hierarchy, and the downward pressure of that Supply Side crap, and what always happens when there's too much power in too few hands and too many people with nothing more to lose.
The kicker is - I wasn't expecting Cantwell to be so scared. You don't cry like that if you're not scared. And that's quite the odd little wrinkle.
This is not right. Even though I sure as hell understand the impulse, I can't encourage or approve or condone. I have to condemn this action unless these people stayed to be arrested and jailed and fined for it. Civil Disobedience is not about Justice if you don't follow through - you have to play the whole 9 innings.
We need to maintain a healthy skepticism and be wary of "movements". Once put in motion, these things take on a life and a will of their own, and they can go in directions we can't anticipate and don't control.
We are at what Lisa Hickey rightly calls an inflection point in the United States. White Supremacists and White Nationalists are marching around the nation, ostensibly to protest things like the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. It is time for every white person in this country to decide where they stand. It is far too easy to describe the torch-carrying Supremacists as some other sort of species, as monsters and not as humans.
We can create mental walls: They are them, and we are us. We’re not like them. But this is intellectually dishonest. These people are our co-workers, our family, and our friends. They’re people we pass on the street.
From 2014 in PoliticusUSA: During the protests against America’s involvement in the Viet Nam war, it became very popular for warmongers and so-called patriots to tell young men facing losing their lives in a worthless war and those protesting to save them that this is “America, love it or leave it.” The implication was that since Congress adhered to the Constitution in waging war, regardless the devastating consequences, the American people were obliged to either show their love of country and support the war or get out. There is a segment of the population today that hates America, its people, and the nation’s founding document, but instead of packing up and leaving the country, they have tasked Republicans to punish the entire population by legislating that all Americans suffer their lifestyle founded on poverty, bigotry, ill-health, and religious ignorance. Although there are Americans who hate this nation across the country, it is the former Confederacy that is punishing the people because they failed in their attempt to destroy America of their rejection of the United States Constitution they claim to love.
Southern states are still resentful they were unable to rip America apart because the Constitution forbade them from keeping dark-skinned human beings as livestock, so they spent the past 149 years punishing different groups of Americans based on their religion’s instruction manual (Christian bible). Over the past thirty years, angry southerners began electing Republicans to strip everything from the people until they relented to a government by bible that drove their attempt to restrict other Americans from their Constitutional freedoms. Republicans have happily accommodated southerners to bring down the rest of the nation to their level of poverty and distress that southern red state voters embrace so long as they have imaginary enemies who believe Americans deserve more than slave wages, sickness, dire poverty, prayer, and firearms.
A drunken American tourist has been beaten up in the German city of Dresden after he repeatedly raised his arm to give the Nazi salute, police said.
The 41-year-old man, who was lightly injured in the attack, was being investigated for violating the law against the use of symbols from banned organisations, Dresden police said in a statement.
The incident happened on Saturday morning as the tourist, who was “strongly under the influence of alcohol”, left a bar in the eastern city’s Neustadt area and repeatedly gave the Hitler salute on the street.
“An unknown passerby then beat up the man and slightly injured him,” the statement said. Don't Be A Sucker
History doesn't actually repeat itself. But because we tend to make the same mistakes every hundred years or so, it sure as fuck rhymes.
They're fucking Nazis, you feeble minded corporate tool. You're not going to lose votes saying "I deplore fucking Nazis." #Idiothttps://t.co/I2VgUStEC9
The bar is being lowered pretty much in keeping with 45*'s eroding approval numbers. Baltimore Sun, Dan Rodricks: Did anyone expect President Donald J. Trump to wax eloquent and consoling with regard to Charlottesville? Did we really think he would condemn the torch-bearing white supremacists who assembled there? Do a majority of Americans count on Trump to provide wisdom, guidance and inspiration in times of trouble?
No. No. And no.
Handed an opportunity to shock us with a display of principled leadership, Trump on Saturday could have distanced himself from the alt-right and white nationalists he empowered with his “Make America Great Again” campaign. But he did not come close to that. He never uttered any of the descriptors we use for people who carry Confederate flags and chant, “Jews will not replace us.”
Instead, he blamed “many sides” for the violence that erupted in Charlottesville. “Many sides” presents a false equivalence, putting neo-Nazis on the same footing as those who stand against them.
I do believe we just heard a Press Poodle pointing out one of my pet-peeve Logical Fallacies (False Equivalence) when it comes to our Great Debate these days.
What can you say about a country where a guy would be willing to lay down his life protecting the rights of people who would just as soon see him dead? That is indeed a wonderment, but you say, "God bless the United States of America."
Charlie Pierce at Esquire has a quick and partial recap: I see that the Bedminster Improv opened early on Thursday.
"Frankly, the people who were questioning that statement, was it too tough? Maybe it wasn't tough enough. They've been doing this to our country for a long time, for many years, and it's about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country and for the people of other countries. So if anything, maybe that statement wasn't tough enough. And we're backed 100 percent by our military, we're backed by everybody and we're backed by many other leaders. And I noticed that many senators and others came out today very much in favor of what I said. But if anything that statement may not be tough enough… Sure, well always consider negotiations. But they've been negotiating now for 25 years. I talk. Somebody has to do it. -snip-
But Putin threw out our diplomats.
"I want to thank him because were trying to cut down our payroll, and as far as I'm concerned I'm very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. There's no real reason for them to go back. I greatly appreciate the fact that we've been able to cut our payroll of the United States. We're going to save a lot of money."
I hear the late show is completely different. That's frightening.
Seems to me this is exactly what Obama was talking about - "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." The rubes get played - there's one born every minute, and two slickers like 45* to take him for every nickel he's worth.
Supporter: 'When Trump speaks you can understand him, don't have to look up the big words; If he had to cheat to get in, I'm OK with that.' pic.twitter.com/tCMOjoBZlb
Whooo yeah - sure glad I chose to be born white, and middle class, in the American suburbs. Best decision I ever made. I realize folks who post this crap on social media aren't consciously going outa their way to be shitty. This is not intended to be mean-spirited. Indeed, it's supposed to be a good Life Lesson for all those mopey little pity puppies out there who just need to buck up and put on their big-girl panties and lace 'em up and get in there and blah blah blah. But the lack of intent to be shitty doesn't make it less shitty for someone not born to the dominant demographic. We start with a (mostly) appropriate feeling of pride and gratitude where our own situations are concerned, but we end up with the kind of bullshit attitude that poor people are poor - and they have all those poor people problems - because they're somehow morally deficient. And that ends up making us say some of the stoopidest fucking things:
Paraphrasing Mr Mencken: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste or the intelligence of the American consumer. Wal-Mart seems to work very hard at proving it.
Continuing the trend of decent reporting being taken over by half-hour comedy shows. Samantha Bee (the only woman with a late night show on American TV)
It's politics, remember, so they don't tell us the whole truth. But sometimes they tell some of the truth because - surprise surprise - it's in everybody's best interest to do it, and the Politcos not only recognize that, they manage to do the right thing (surprise surprise again). This piece is chock-full of little slices of Scary-as-Fuck.
Buzzfeed, Alberto Nardelli: The current standoff is a dramatic illustration of the grave international concerns over Trump.
On one level, the officials said, he is something of a laughing stock among Europeans at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.
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Another diplomat said it had proved impossible to discuss serious international issues, such as Libya, with Trump. And seven months into his presidency, the European officials say they are still struggling to figure out who else they can engage with in the US administration.
Describing a meeting between their boss and the president as “basically useless,” they said: “He [Trump] just bombed us with questions: ‘How many people do you have? What’s your GDP? How much oil does [that country] produce? How many barrels a day? How much of it is yours?’”
“He’s not the kind of person you can have a discussion about how to deal with [Fayez] al-Sarraj [the prime minister of Libya]," the official added. "So you look for people around him, and that is where it’s a problem: The constant upheaval, it’s unclear who has influence, who is close to the president."
A number of European officials compared Trump with Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – but said the similarities end at their inappropriate jokes during meetings.
“Berlusconi wasn’t ignorant. And behind him he had officials and a whole government structure you could engage with,” one diplomat said.
The officials revealed that at international meetings, Trump has openly mocked his own aides, contradicting and arguing with them in front of other leaders. That has compounded the impression of an administration in chaos. “We can hear everything, it’s weird,” one diplomat said.
Officials also expressed concerns over the status of the State Department, and the lack of seasoned diplomats and experts within the White House. One diplomat suggested that US counterparts have privately lamented to Europeans about the number of roles in the administration that have yet to be filled resulting in a lack of clear positions on many policy areas.
“The White House lacks crucial expertise,” one said. “The State Department and others are isolated. You have the generals, the National Security Council, and then a void. There aren’t enough diplomats, experts etc. in the White House. [Secretary of state Rex] Tillerson has a small team. Does Trump listen to [James] Mattis [secretary of defence], [H.R.] McMaster [national security adviser], to the experts?”
