Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[littlefallsmets]

I am about as anti Confederate flag as anyone can be, to be honest. It strikes me sort of like walking around in an SS uniform except that, y'know, there were never actually empowered Nazis here whereas, like, the Confederates ran half our country on the premise of racial superiority.

However.

What's worse than the Confederate flag is... people with a Confederate flag hanging outside their goddamn house in... central New York. Like Little Falls or Herkimer or St. Johnsville or something.

I just want to be all such as "I cannot explain how many levels this is wrong."

I want to play it as though we are comparing two slightly different pictures in the Sunday comics so as to assist a fox dressed up like Sherlock Holmes.

"Okay, first of all, Mr. Kaminski, you are Polish Catholic and Italian Catholic. The people behind the Confederacy would have hated you more than an escaped slave because at least an escaped slave worships the same Protestant God. Secondly, you are in Ilion, all right? Remember the one time you drove eight hours to go to Hershey Park? The closest the South got to here is like two hours south of THAT. Thirdly, YOUR FAMILY GOT HERE IN THE 1890s DECADES AFTER THE CIVIL WAR. Fourth, and I cannot stress this enough, YOU ARE WEARING A DONOVAN MACNABB JERSEY! If that flag had succeeded, the dude whose shirt you are wearing would be considered property like a chair or a cat. Do I need to go on?"

I... like... I at least get some dude in Georgia flying that flag. I don't agree with it but I at least get it.

But man. The saddest thing.

[pmcd9]

Another southerner here saying that the Confederate flag ain't fuck*ng cool.  I don't think it's really possible in this day and age to not know that the Conferate flag is a totally racist symbol.  So If you are into the Confederate flag it can basically mean only one of two things.  You are either straight up racist (fuck off and die asshole) or a dum-dum with their head buried waaaaay up their ass.  I'd say the latter is unlikely, but the dude is dating a woman that doesn't understand sarcasm who wants to be a cartoonist.  So I guess it's possible.

[oball]

Not to derail this thread even further, but if the CSA was still around today, do you think they would still have slaves, or would they have emancipated them by now due to international and internal pressures?

[KeithHernandez]

relevant: no one displayed the confederate flag (which is not actually the flag of the Confederate States, but in fact the Battle Flag) until the 60s. The Civil War was not going on in the 60s. There was not a big revival of interest in heritage of the 60s (that I know of.)
Something else relevant was going on in the 60s, though.

Not to go on an even further tangent, but, and this is very important here, you should put the 19 in front of those 60s.  It could have been another 60's (18- civil war).


Overall though, great point.

Another southerner here saying that the Confederate flag ain't fuck*ng cool.  I don't think it's really possible in this day and age to not know that the Conferate flag is a totally racist symbol.  So If you are into the Confederate flag it can basically mean only one of two things.  You are either straight up racist (fuck off and die asshole) or a dum-dum with their head buried waaaaay up their ass.  I'd say the latter is unlikely, but the dude is dating a woman that doesn't understand sarcasm who wants to be a cartoonist.  So I guess it's possible.

Isn't this the post I usually make?

Not to derail this thread even further, but if the CSA was still around today, do you think they would still have slaves, or would they have emancipated them by now due to international and internal pressures?

That is a weird question.  I don't think they would still have slaves, but who knows.  There are certainly some people that claim to still want them I guess, but, well just wow.


Another semi relevant thing that I have posted in the past:  My teachers always got into this big deal about how slavery wasn't the cause of the civil war and that instead it was economy, social, and states rights issues.  I argued that these all came back to slavery.  I don't know where this is going anymore, but was anybody else taught this?  this is wrong, right?

[theinevitable]

my teacher, if I recall correctly, said that there were a variety of issues going into the war. But that the main one was basically that the southern states felt "ganged up on". Basically, the typical southerner wasn't incredibly "holy shit, I love slavery! I will fight to the death to defend it!" However, when the Yankees started telling them what to do... well... things got ugly.

I might be remembering this really incorrectly, though. I seem to recall kids in the class arguing with him, and him being basically all "I have a degree in American History, the fact that your dad says the Yankees "attacked us" does not mean shit."

My birthday is the anniversary of the beating of Charles Sumner in the senate. My mom asked if they could induce birth a few days early so that I could be born on the anniversary of this great event.

...not really.

[KeithHernandez]

Basically, the typical southerner wasn't incredibly "holy shit, I love slavery! I will fight to the death to defend it!" However, when the Yankees started telling them what to do... well... things got ugly.

See what I am saying is that the Yankees were saying that they could not have more slave states, or at least not more than there were free, etc.

I am not saying this is right, though, I am just wondering.

[V-Adore]

The question of "if the CSA had survived to the modern day, would it still have slavery legalized?" is an interesting one. The issue is that, basically, the reason that slavery was considered so indispensable to the South was that their farming systems required immense amounts of labor, and thus an immense labor pool that was cheap enough to still allow for profits. If you assume that agricultural development in this alternate universe followed the same course as it has in the real world, eventually the labor-intensiveness would abate, and slavery would no longer be an economic necessity. On the other hand, it not being necessary wouldn't mean it wouldn't remain in force...

The thing that really torques me about the Confederate flag -- and, to be honest, a whole lot of Southern-focused historical revisionism in this vein -- is that it's widely popularized by the lower classes, the same people who have suffered because of the South's massively ingrained economic inequality, and focuses so much on plantation glamour and the happy slave and other ways of romanticizing their own suffering. Yes, this is a natural human urge, but at the same time I want to take the whole thing by its metaphorical shoulders and shake it: "the 'Southern heritage' you're glorifying is that of inequality and oppression -- not just of African-Americans, but of poor whites! Of you, and your parents, and their parents, as far back as it goes! The plantations you fantasize about were built not just on the bonecrushing labor of the slaves, but on your ancestors' own spirit-destroying poverty! The 'states' rights' you wax poetic about were the rights of the states and their rich to grind your ancestors under their heel, and it was your ancestors' sons and brothers and fathers who died in droves for it! Don't glorify the plantation owners' cause -- they never gave a tin shit about yours!"

... I'll get my coat.

[KeithHernandez]

Yes, I have written multiple things about how the people who basically led a slaves life in terms of luxuries and work load helped to keep themselves there because of their feelings on African Americans.  That is not that uncommon as far as history goes though, sadly, and it could be argued that it is still happening (not the African American thing, but various reasons; there are always new reasons).

Such is the human condition.  I think Jough said it best in another thread:  Fuck Pride.  Pride in their race is what fucked these people over.

[Doc]

I have very little american history so I say this with no authority:
I could completely believe that the Slave stuff was just one of a variety of issues, and certainly not the 'real' issue (see war in iraq: and Freedom or WMDs vs. geopolitical power and assured energy supplies) but it was latched onto during the phase that Inev refers to when this sort of nonsense became popular again.
I wonder how messed up our worldviews become because parents give children simple explanations that they carry with them their whole lives and never bother to question.

[KeithHernandez]

What I am trying to say is that we learned like five main reasons, I don't remember them all anymore, but two of them were states rights and economy differences.  Well, it was states rights to own slaves and the economies were different because one had to industrialize, while the other relied on large numbers of slaves.  In this situation, slavery is still the issue.

I am trying to say that maybe this is revisionist history to make it seem less bad for us Southerners, which I guess I am.  I mean, I like certain aspects of the south, but besides geography I would probably not consider myself a Southerner.

[wombat]

Yeah, um, Philippe. I am glad to see Philippe.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Clue Hat, AZ.  Hells yes.

[AugustWest]

The five year old otter doesn't like hard core cusses.

[RMJ12345]

I'd say the latter is unlikely, but the dude is dating a woman that doesn't understand sarcasm who wants to be a cartoonist.  So I guess it's possible.

....Okay. Had something up here earlier about how offended I was by that, but I'd rather not go down that road. Just. Okay.

I have already said clearly that I'm not into Confederate flags. My boyfriend isn't really, either. I wouldn't have them in my home, no matter how far South I am or how Southern my partner was, but I'm not going to go into someone else's home where I am a guest and judge them for a couple of things with flags on them. It's none of my business, and I'm not going to judge. I'm pretty committed to postmodernism and the idea that everything is up to interpretation. I don't think that my boyfriend's family is particularly virulently racist (they are generally liberal in their political views), so I'm just going to guess that they are aware of the interpretation of the flag as a racist symbol, and do not agree.

I don't really have complicated views on the flag: I don't like it, I interpret it as racism, but I try to understand other interpretations and not jump to conclusions about people. I do not have a monopoly on truth. If Jason's family were flying it high, I would probably feel differently, but they're not. They have a folded-up flag that's apparently from the Civil War and a mug and a shot glass with flags on them. In the scheme of thing, I don't automatically assume that they are horrifically racist and not something I want to be associated with. I disagree with their interpretation and conclude that yes, they are probably a little bit racist, but so am I, probably.

Now I'm going down to Asheville. I'll count the flags I see along the way.

[V-Adore]

Also, does anyone else think that Miracle Slice, TN needs a fantastic pizza parlor?