Gentlemen, gentlemen. There is only one way to settle this. I propose a duel, with authentic cap lock muzzleloading rifles with one round each commencing at two hundred paces, and ending with a clash of fixed spike bayonets. Both parties must wear appropriate blue or grey wool uniforms, adorned with either the Union colors or the battle flag of North Virginia. May the best man win.
With all due respect, SMH, I cannot agree with you on this one.
The men who fought wearing the Grey may have been fighting on the losing side… hell, I’ll even grant that they were fighting on the wrong side, but this does not diminish them as heroes, and as such, I believe they should be so honoured.
One of my heroes growing up was John Singleton Mosby, the famed “Grey Ghost” of the Confederacy, a colonel in JEB Stuart’s cavalry, whose brilliant raids and guerrilla campaigns against the Union actually may have influenced the outcome of the Second World War. He was a great friend of George Patton (another of my heroes), and the two of them used to have mock Civil War battles on horseback at George’s family’s ranch, with George playing Robert E. Lee and Mosby playing himself. Later in life, Patton, a voracious student of military history, applied Mosby’s tactics to his own strategies, which of course proved extremely effective in North Africa, Italy and France. Mosby is a name I would be extremely disappointed to see erased from the pages of history.
Ditto for Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, John Brown Gordon, Henry Benning, and Leonidas Polk, all high-ranking Confederates who yes, may have owned slaves, yes, may have “broken” the Union, and yes, may have fought on the wrong side of history, but who nonetheless have lent their names to the military forts at which our present-day heroes learn their trade. I am myself an alumnus of Benning’s School for Boys, and I would be hard pressed to accept the proposition that my tuition there was in any way diminished by the fact that the fort was named for a judicial rubber-stamp lackey of General Lee. I imagine that a preponderance of military men and women, even those who “happen to be black”, feel the same.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
With all due respect, SMH, I cannot agree with you on this one.
The men who fought wearing the Grey may have been fighting on the losing side… hell, I’ll even grant that they were fighting on the wrong side, but this does not diminish them as heroes, and as such, I believe they should be so honoured.
One of my heroes growing up was John Singleton Mosby, the famed “Grey Ghost” of the Confederacy, a colonel in JEB Stuart’s cavalry, whose brilliant raids and guerrilla campaigns against the Union actually may have influenced the outcome of the Second World War. He was a great friend of George Patton (another of my heroes), and the two of them used to have mock Civil War battles on horseback at George’s family’s ranch, with George playing Robert E. Lee and Mosby playing himself. Later in life, Patton, a voracious student of military history, applied Mosby’s tactics to his own strategies, which of course proved extremely effective in North Africa, Italy and France. Mosby is a name I would be extremely disappointed to see erased from the pages of history.
Ditto for Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, John Brown Gordon, Henry Benning, and Leonidas Polk, all high-ranking Confederates who yes, may have owned slaves, yes, may have “broken” the Union, and yes, may have fought on the wrong side of history, but who nonetheless have lent their names to the military forts at which our present-day heroes learn their trade. I am myself an alumnus of Benning’s School for Boys, and I would be hard pressed to accept the proposition that my tuition there was in any way diminished by the fact that the fort was named for a judicial rubber-stamp lackey of General Lee. I imagine that a preponderance of military men and women, even those who “happen to be black”, feel the same.[/quote]
The respect is gratefully accepted and warmly returned.
One note of clarification: I don’t want to see any names erased from the pages of history, ever. I simply don’t want some of them celebrated with public money.
But you do raise an interesting point, and I have to say that I do not object as strongly to a military school’s bearing a Confederate name as I do to (e.g.) a public high school’s doing it. The latter, unlike the former, have no material connection with military prowess, and the figures who grant them their names are thus being celebrated in a much less professionally technical, much less specific, much wider sense. I think, given the points you’ve granted me in your post, that you know what happens when the scope is widened beyond the agnostic military professionalism of a Confederate “hero.” We arrive at causes and principles, and we must be discerning with regard to which of these we celebrate with public property and money.
Outside of the odd Klan rally and a few websites that appear each year on lists published by the SPLC, there is no dispute about whether or not the CSA’s great, existential cause is to be lauded. There is no dispute about it here on PWI (not since Conservativedog’s exit, at least). What is instead being suggested is that we can (ahistorically) disentangle CSA leaders from that cause and celebrate them for…something…so long as we all buy into the delusion that moral truths put out of mind are moral truths nullified (or, at least, temporarily disabled). In the case of a school devoted to the agnostic procedure of war-making, this may be so (though one wonders how this maxim holds up elsewhere – many of the worst things that have happened in human history have involved technically brilliant soldiership). In the case of a public high school, on the other hand…
[quote]Chushin wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
This doesn’t change the fact that certain historical figures/causes are not appropriately celebrated, today, with taxpayer property.
[/quote]
Despite the fact that many of those who are most directly actually paying the taxes think otherwise?[/quote]
Yes – Anwar Al-Awlaki Memorial High would not be more appropriate or less of a repugnant idea if many of the taxpayers who’d funded it were deluded into loving the name. The point here being that public opinion does not bear on a good argument for or against something. Questions of legality are separate from this. I am simply saying that Americans should not want to name their high schools after people who broke the United States in half for the sake of the chattelhood of black slaves, and then fought a war (against the country whose citizens’ public property we’re discussing) in resistance of reunion. Legality does come into play in the case of the legislation proposed in California, which, a lifetime ago, set off this particular leg of the discussion.
[quote]Chushin wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
This doesn’t change the fact that certain historical figures/causes are not appropriately celebrated, today, with taxpayer property.
[/quote]
Despite the fact that many of those who are most directly actually paying the taxes think otherwise?[/quote]
I was about to ask a similar question. It seems to me that there are two choices: allow the citizens of a neighborhood/city/county/state to decide what should be publicly celebrated within their jurisdiction(and yes, certainly permit the people of a jurisdiction to name “Anwar al-Awlaki High School” if that is what they want to do-I don’t really see that happening in the U.S., but I’ve been wrong before), or eliminate all publicly-funded celebrations of individuals. I’m fine with either.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I learned the difference between “you fucking retard” and “you weak and whiney cunt”. The former I can say to my friends in a discussion. The latter are fighting words.
[/quote]
Agreed. However, “coward” – which term you also used before I threw in my Chaucerian vulgarity – is indeed in the same class as the latter. So your entire argument about my having been the one to cross some sort of sacred line is, predictably, nonsense. That you allowed yourself to be thrown into such a catastrophic tantrum proves beyond the possibility of doubt that you are, indeed, a weak and whiny cunt.
As for this:
[quote]
Everyone knows that you’d have to be carried away if you and I ever met in real life and you dared to speak to me the way you have, and continue to do, in this thread.[/quote]
And this:
[quote]
I make 250K a year, asshole.[/quote]
(^ Note that when I mentioned our professions along with our personal lives, I was trying to figure out why you are so pitiably insecure as to descend into empty, high-school level whining and pants-shitting during an internet debate. I was referring not to your salary, about which I don’t give a shit [Aside: I think you’re a liar on top of everything else, so I don’t know why you’d think I’d pay attention]. I was instead referring to the possibility that yours leaves you with the needling suspicion that you’re a pussy. After all, you are keen enough on “warriors” to question whether I understand the term, and yet you aren’t one. My profession – which is not teaching – does not inspire such insecurity. Again, though, this is only a guess. Maybe you simply have an unnaturally small penis.)
And, emphatically, this:
[quote]
But God gave me two gifts: I can fuck and I can fight, and I love to do both.[/quote]
…You’re joking, right? Or did you actually hammer “God gave me two gifts: I can fuck and I can fight” into a keyboard, while also accusing someone else of being a “keyboard warrior”? Please stop: If you keep this up, people are going to start thinking that I have two accounts and am pushing one off the deep end of hilarious parody in order to grant a false-flag victory to the other. I don’t want to be suspected of such chicanery.[/quote]
I think this conversation is best picked up in person. Congratulations, you just became my new hobby. Summer (between turkey and deer season) has been traditionally a lull in hunting around here. I used to call it “ground hog season” if I felt like killing anything. But now it’s SMH season. I’ll be seeing you.
[quote]Chushin wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]Chushin wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
This doesn’t change the fact that certain historical figures/causes are not appropriately celebrated, today, with taxpayer property.
[/quote]
Despite the fact that many of those who are most directly actually paying the taxes think otherwise?[/quote]
Yes – Anwar Al-Awlaki Memorial High would not be more appropriate or less of a repugnant idea if many of the taxpayers who’d funded it were deluded into loving the name. The point here being that public opinion does not bear on a good argument for or against something. Questions of legality are separate from this. I am simply saying that Americans should not want to name their high schools after people who broke the United States in half for the sake of the chattelhood of black slaves, and then fought a war (against the country whose citizens’ public property we’re discussing) in resistance of reunion. Legality does come into play in the case of the legislation proposed in California, which, a lifetime ago, set off this particular leg of the discussion.[/quote]
I don’t get it.
I generally agree with a lot of what you’ve said here, but…
If we aren’t talking legalities, and the opinions of people who pay the taxes are not relevant, then who decides what is acceptable and what is not?
I am particularly bothered by,“…Americans should not want to name their high schools after people who broke the United States in half…” I don’t mean this to sound rude, but who are you (or anyone else) to tell Americans what they should and should not want?
If it’s not a legal argument, then, while you may disagree with their views, others are certainly entitled to value whatever they chose to value. [/quote]
I agree that they are entitled to their political views, but I, too, am entitled to my criticisms of and arguments about those views, and I think it’s worthwhile for me to express those if I can do it convincingly.
To take an example I used earlier, I think it’s truly absurd (and socially harmful) for a parent to teach his child that the human race has its origin in Xenu’s intergalactic DC-8 flight and subsequent volcano-movie party, or that black people are inherently inferior savages, or that white people are a monolithic class of privileged oppressors. I think it’s worthwhile and even necessary for me to make arguments against such absurdities…but I would never support the legal disassembly of the First Amendment and the installation, in kids’ bedrooms, of listening devices by which the government could monitor and punish bedtime stories.
This example is just illustrative, because it is in fact the case that my position overlaps with real-world legal scenarios (in California, for example, in relation to which situation my argument is essentially “this policy should be adopted because…”), but even at its most abstractly moral/ethical (i.e. at its least legal-pragmatic), what I’ve been saying in this thread is still what I consider a worthwhile communication.
In short, yes, other people are entitled to their values, but the question of which values are good (i.e. evidentially supportable, morally defensible, grounded in a realistic understanding of the world and its operation and history) and which are not is a discussion always worth having (and this is far from the first time it’s appeared on this board).
[quote]Chushin wrote:
All due respect, smh, you’re now saying things that aren’t true, and that cross even more lines.
As a friend, allow me to suggest that you stop.
[/quote]
That you’ve (presumably) read this thread, including the literally pathetic promise to stalk me (over a mutual exchange of insults on an internet message board) in his last post, and have chosen to weigh in with this ^ suggests to me that you’re real-life friends with Angry Chicken.
This isn’t accusatory – it’s simply the only explanation, given the words that are printed on these pages. In light of which I will reply only that I like you and enjoy conversing with you but, when I stop, I’ll do it not out of fear of crossing any lines (if you want to see lines crossed, read his last few posts), but because I’m bored or worried that I’m making him so unhinged as to be morally culpable in whatever idiotic thing he’s driven to do to himself.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I learned the difference between “you fucking retard” and “you weak and whiney cunt”. The former I can say to my friends in a discussion. The latter are fighting words.
[/quote]
Agreed. However, “coward” – which term you also used before I threw in my Chaucerian vulgarity – is indeed in the same class as the latter. So your entire argument about my having been the one to cross some sort of sacred line is, predictably, nonsense. That you allowed yourself to be thrown into such a catastrophic tantrum proves beyond the possibility of doubt that you are, indeed, a weak and whiny cunt.
As for this:
[quote]
Everyone knows that you’d have to be carried away if you and I ever met in real life and you dared to speak to me the way you have, and continue to do, in this thread.[/quote]
And this:
[quote]
I make 250K a year, asshole.[/quote]
(^ Note that when I mentioned our professions along with our personal lives, I was trying to figure out why you are so pitiably insecure as to descend into empty, high-school level whining and pants-shitting during an internet debate. I was referring not to your salary, about which I don’t give a shit [Aside: I think you’re a liar on top of everything else, so I don’t know why you’d think I’d pay attention]. I was instead referring to the possibility that yours leaves you with the needling suspicion that you’re a pussy. After all, you are keen enough on “warriors” to question whether I understand the term, and yet you aren’t one. My profession – which is not teaching – does not inspire such insecurity. Again, though, this is only a guess. Maybe you simply have an unnaturally small penis.)
And, emphatically, this:
[quote]
But God gave me two gifts: I can fuck and I can fight, and I love to do both.[/quote]
…You’re joking, right? Or did you actually hammer “God gave me two gifts: I can fuck and I can fight” into a keyboard, while also accusing someone else of being a “keyboard warrior”? Please stop: If you keep this up, people are going to start thinking that I have two accounts and am pushing one off the deep end of hilarious parody in order to grant a false-flag victory to the other. I don’t want to be suspected of such chicanery.[/quote]
I think this conversation is best picked up in person. Congratulations, you just became my new hobby. Summer (between turkey and deer season) has been traditionally a lull in hunting around here. I used to call it “ground hog season” if I felt like killing anything. But now it’s SMH season. I’ll be seeing you. [/quote]
Sure you will.
Like I said, we’ll meet in the field after the 9th-period bell. Just don’t let any teachers get wind of it.
(By the way, in the real world – the adult world, which is not your sympathy-inspiring fantasy world – if you were planning to chase down my personal information and stalk me [which you are not capable of doing without a court’s complicity – and this is coming from someone who gets paid to, among other things, do that kind of thing], you would not let me know ahead of time on a public forum in an unhinged message that features an implicit [and funny, in a sad-clown kind of way] death threat. I’m not saying I regret that you did it, though: You have degraded yourself that last little step by calling me [with whom you exchanged insults on the internet] your “hobby,” so that’s kind of nice.)
Solid thread- but what the fuck is a “flag”?
I don’t plan to stalk you, even if you accused me of having fake black friends.
[quote]OldOgre wrote:
I don’t plan to stalk you, even if you accused me of having fake black friends. [/quote]
Hey woah – I saw the opportunity to invoke Carlin, and I took it. I am vigorously faithful in the reality of your black friends. But I greatly appreciate the fact that you do not plan to stalk me.
Well, that escalated quickly. SMH have you given thought to which of his 2 talents he was planning on using on you?
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
Well, that escalated quickly. SMH have you given thought to which of his 2 talents he was planning on using on you?[/quote]
I’m incredibly disappointed in myself for having missed this opportunity. Like whiffing a fastball down the middle.
As for my answer, I suppose that all’s fair in love and war. If I haven’t screwed my courage to the sticking place before I’m hunted like a ground hog, perhaps it will be done for me.
What the fuck happened in here? I’m gone for a few days and I come back to the Furious Fowl threatening people over the Internet? Oh wait, that happens with semi-regularity here.
I’ll throw my two cents in, although I haven’t bothered to read about half of what’s been posted in the last several days, so I may be redundant or off the mark.
I think it’s entirely appropriate to rename things so they aren’t named after Confederate officers/soldiers. They aren’t heroes by any standard at all. Most Southerners were conscripted into armed service. However, if you were conscripted and you didn’t believe that an act of treason in furtherance of preserving slavery was worth fighting for, there was this place called “the North” to which one could travel.
It seems to me that Southerners who stayed and fought willingly were either fighting for the preservation of slavery, an act to which no heroism can be attached, or they were too cowardly to stand up for what they believed in and they decided not to flee the South. Either way, I don’t see anything heroic that is worth celebrating.
And deep down, I think most conservatives understand this perfectly well. They just don’t like having to admit that liberals aren’t wrong on EVERYTHING after all. So they try to couch their opposition to this renaming/reflagging thing in any other terms possible rather than have to actually admit that a liberal movement has some genuine merit to it.
Yeah, people don’t like the fact that shit is simply CHANGING on them, but fucking deal with it. I generally think all this racism bullshit has gone way too far and I think minorities need to shut the fuck up about white privilege and cultural appropriation (Darius Rucker is as guilty of cultural appropriation as any white). That being said, it isn’t too far of a step at all to start demanding that we stop honoring treasonous slavers and bigots. That is what the Confederacy was comprised of: treasonous, traitorous people who played the victim card fast and loose while literally caging humans.
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]OldOgre wrote:
I don’t plan to stalk you, even if you accused me of having fake black friends. [/quote]
Hey woah – I saw the opportunity to invoke Carlin, and I took it. I am vigorously faithful in the reality of your black friends. But I greatly appreciate the fact that you do not plan to stalk me.[/quote]
My avi is a selfie of me and one of my black friends greeting one another after a long time apart. I got the better of him in the ensuing arm wrestling match because his company had him pushing too many pencils.
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
That being said, it isn’t too far of a step at all to start demanding that we stop honoring treasonous slavers and bigots. That is what the Confederacy was comprised of: treasonous, traitorous people who played the victim card fast and loose while literally caging humans.[/quote]
So let me get this straight: we should stop honoring any southerner who committed treason against his government, who made his fortunes as a plantation owner owning African slaves, who believed that the black and white races could never co-exist as free and equal entities, and who waged war to prevent the abolition of the institution of slavery in America?
Well, looks like you need to change your avatar.
