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.
