computer parts posted:

It's just funny when people criticize others for adopting an us vs them mentality and then turn around and venerate a guy who's been dead for over a century and who would probably vote for your enemies before you (even with the Confederate apologia included).

If Lee hadn't been quite so loyal to Virginia we would probably see "Good ol' Robert E Lee should have nuked the South" image macros today.

quote:

Down in North Carolina, the FBI managed to tempt another teenaged misfit into dreaming his grandiose dreams in public, and then busted him for having done so, striking another blow against ISIS here in the United States. You know Justin Nojan Sullivan was a serious threat to the homeland because they're using his middle name.

It's unclear how much of a threat Sullivan actually posed.

Apparently.

He certainly talked big, telling the undercover he might want to kill as many as 1,000 people, set off a big vehicle bomb or use chemical weapons, a criminal complaint says. He even talked about coating bullets with cyanide and robbing banks, the feds say. But he apparently wasn't on investigators' radar until April, when his father called 911 to report that he was destroying Buddha figurines and had doused their religious objects with gasoline."We are scared to leave the house," the father told the operator, according to the court documents. Sullivan could he heard in the background asking, "Why are you trying to say I'm a terrorist?"

At which point, the feds smelled an opportunity and leaped in.

Weeks later, an undercover operative made contact with Sullivan, who allegedly told him, "I liked IS from the beginning, then I started thinking about death and stuff so I became a Muslim."The FBI says Sullivan talked about buying an assault rifle from a gun show in North Carolina and shoot people last weekend "because his parents would be out of town at the time." He did not buy a rifle before he was arrested Friday but allegedly planned to purchase one at the Hickory Gun Show last weekend. The criminal complaint says Sullivan confessed to plotting an attack, telling authorities that he looked for possible targets in the online Yellow Pages and had asked the undercover agent to kill his parents.

So far, this appears to be a "threat" best confronted with some serious psychotherapy and, perhaps, the odd antidepressant or three, and not 25 years in the federal pen. My biggest fear is that some of these clever dicks in the FBI are going to work these games on the wrong person, who then goes out and actually lives out his fantasy and people wind up being dead. Of course, one state over, everybody ignored the clear signals transmitted to the world by Dylann Roof, who cannot be a terrorist because he is white, and a radical right-wing crazoid, and, especially, because he was not doing business with undercover FBI agents.

quote:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It has been quite a few years since the lost cause has appeared quite as lost as it did Tuesday. As the afternoon drew on and their retreat turned into a rout, the lingering upholders of the Confederacy watched as license plates, statues and prominently placed Confederate battle flags slipped from their reach.

“This is the beginning of communism,” said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. “The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually.”

“Our people are dying off,” he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to “keep reproducing.”

Confederate sympathizers across the country have insisted over the last few days that the racism-fueled massacre of nine black people in a Charleston church had nothing to do with their symbols, even though Dylann Roof, charged in the killings, embraced those symbols in photos and in his speech. But such arguments have had limited effect, as politicians all over the South have reacted to the shooting by welcoming the elimination of such symbols, or at least some high-profile ones, from state property.

Resistance to this push has varied, with some hard-core Confederate sympathizers who swore defiance to politicians explaining that they simply thought things were moving too quickly. Lawmakers in South Carolina who voted against opening the placement of the flag to debate said they were concerned that the flag’s rushed removal would lead to the renaming of countless streets and the destruction of Confederate monuments that are strewn across the state.

“We want to proceed and make sure that we’re doing it properly and we don’t have unintended consequences,” said State Representative Craig Gagnon, who is originally from Lowell, Mass. — with forebears who fought for the Union — but represents a conservative district. “We don’t want to just trash everything and take everything away.”

He thought a good compromise would be to replace the battle flag at the State House with another flag from the Confederacy, one that had not become so associated with contemporary racist movements. Others were not inclined to talk compromise at all.

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

Mr. Stewart was livid at the “reckless and unnecessary” statement by Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, that the Confederate battle saltire needed to be removed from the Mississippi state flag. Mr. Stewart pointed out that the state had voted by huge margins to keep the flag as it was in 2001, and that should have been that.

Here in South Carolina, members of the state division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans were not as fervent in opposition to their political representatives, but they did maintain that now was not the time to discuss moving the flag. While he insisted that hatred and racism had no place in the organization, Kenneth Thrasher, the lieutenant commander for the division, said in an interview that he could understand taking down the flag while the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator and one of the nine killed in Charleston, was lying in state.

“But to permanently decide today is a little too fast,” he said. “The flag didn’t kill anybody. It was a deranged young man who did.” Mr. Thrasher said he could be agreeable to a compromise, like allowing the flag to fly in front of the state museum.

This sentiment was not universally well received among the membership.

“He should be knocking heads together instead of just laying down and rolling over,” said Harris Dail, a member who lives in Topeka, Kan., and who accused Mr. Thrasher of having “caved in with the rest of these brainwashed people” in a comment on the division’s website.

Those who sold Confederate goods said efforts to remove the flag from stores were based on a misunderstanding of its current meaning to many Southerners. Freddie Rich, the owner of RebelStore.com from Kings Mountain, N.C., which sells Confederate flags and bumper stickers (including one that reads, “I Believe the South Was Right, and I Don’t Believe in Slavery — Then or Now”) said his customers bought Confederacy-themed merchandise as an expression of regional pride and admiration for Civil War veterans.

“There’s nothing racial about it,” he said of the flag. “This is history to us.”

Still, it was a mixed day. With Walmart and Sears ceasing to sell Confederate merchandise, Mr. Rich said his store had around a 2,000 percent increase in sales in the last 24 hours. Told that eBay had also announced a ban, he let out a whoop.

Finally, there were some who were resigned to surrender.

In Austin, Tex., a tall bearded man went into the tattoo parlor where Kelly Barr works with a request: the removal a 10-year-old tattoo of the Confederate flag.

He told Mr. Barr that he had decided to get the flag removed when he saw the pained look on a middle-age black woman at his gym on Monday.

“ ‘If South Carolina can take theirs down,’ ” Mr. Barr recalled him saying, “ ‘I can take mine down.’ ” I told him, ‘Right on.’ ”

quote:

Kentucky

Republican U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that his state of Kentucky must remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the state Capitol's rotunda. The statue stands a few paces from that of another native Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln. McConnell said Davis' only connection to Kentucky is that was born there. Davis moved to Mississippi, and Kentucky never officially joined the Confederacy. McConnell suggested a better place for the statue would be the Kentucky History Museum.

Republican Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers said Tuesday that he now favors removing the statue. The Republican nominee for governor, Matt Bevin, also agrees. Democratic nominee Jack Conway, state attorney general, said he agreed with Haley's call to remove the flag but said he would have to think about whether to remove the Davis statue.

Antti posted:

More importantly, that's not his passport. I realize almost all of his readership will have no idea what a real passport looks like since they'll never need one, but the tweet is meant to give you the idea that his passport has somehow been revoked.

I don't know exactly what it is, based on your post I imagine it's some kind of entry slip that just has similar identity information as your passport on it, but that sure as hell isn't a passport.

Neurolimal posted:

It's lovely that many of our historical figures owned slaves, and if there exists a monument celebrating Jefferson's owning of slaves and contributing to the slave economy I would be for its destruction. It's a good thing that's not what our tributes are celebrating.

Disinterested posted:

McDowell posted:

Americans shouldn't deny their history. Like I said, Jefferson Davis is a character worth remembering. Don't try to blank out history.

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” - Stephen King



War is War. War is hell. How easy it is to forget.

quote:

New York Times: “Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.”

McDowell posted:

Americans shouldn't deny their history. Like I said, Jefferson Davis is a character worth remembering. Don't try to blank out history.

richardfun posted:

A sad day for America, everybody.

Fox dumps Sarah Palin

Now who will we rely on for our irregularly scheduled word salad?

FAUXTON posted:

No monument to Hitler exists but people know plenty about the evil he committed.

Young Freud posted:

I'm proud that my state actually has this monument, considering it was a Confederate state...



It's the Treue Der Union monument, in Comfort, Texas. It's a tribute to German immigrants who resisted the Confederacy and to the 31 conscientious objectors who were killed in a massacre by James Duff's Partisan Raiders. Their bodies were subsequently thrown into the Nueces river, never to be recovered.

And yes, the flag is permanent at half-mast.

evilweasel posted:

This is sort of amazing to watch, it's 140 years of thin justifications for venerating the confederacy just collapsing overnight.

computer parts posted:

It's just funny when people criticize others for adopting an us vs them mentality and then turn around and venerate a guy who's been dead for over a century and who would probably vote for your enemies before you (even with the Confederate apologia included).

If Lee hadn't been quite so loyal to Virginia we would probably see "Good ol' Robert E Lee should have nuked the South" image macros today.

Fried Chicken posted:

See, we need more stuff like this. There were plenty of southern abolitionists who fought the system. There was a massive amount of southern militias who refused to secede and fought the confederacy. There were a ton of slaves who took up arms against their masters. There were a great many women who fought back when the confederate army came to steal supplies. Revisionists want to say that these are symbols of rebelling and rejection of authority? Well those men and women who resisted the confederacy, who opposed the institution of slavery, it's preservation and expansion, they the the ones who refused to bend or bow to the dictates of the easily influenced crowd around them. It takes immense strength of character to break away from the rest of your community and say "this is wrong". It takes immense integrity to refuse to comply with an act you feel is morally wrong. It takes incredible bravery for the margins of society to fight against an army for their rights, even more so knowing their fate will not be a quick death if they lose.

Those are the people we should be honoring. Men like Robert Smalls, not Robert Lee

Drone posted:

Didn't she launch her own channel not long ago where she spewed some kind of drunken tirade?

pugnax posted:

Cythereal posted:

Floridian here, there's a local county park built on the site of a small fort where a brigade of pro-Union Confederate rebels set up shop and overthrew Confederate authority in the area. Florida was a morass of anti-Confederate rebellion and runaway slaves during the war - and, admittedly, a few massacres of blacks.

Radbot posted:

Why do Southerners that hate everything about America (the real one, not the one represented by stars and bars) even celebrate Independence Day? The highest incidence of "murrica can do no wrong" thinking is in the place where American ideals are hated the most.

The most bizarre thing to me about white Southerners is that they're the first to schlob the knob of the US military, the thing that defeated them.

evilweasel posted:

This is sort of amazing to watch, it's 140 years of thin justifications for venerating the confederacy just collapsing overnight. The murders were a horrible crime but so many others have had no effect before.

Radbot posted:

Why do Southerners that hate everything about America (the real one, not the one represented by stars and bars) even celebrate Independence Day? The highest incidence of "murrica can do no wrong" thinking is in the place where American ideals are hated the most.

The most bizarre thing to me about white Southerners is that they're the first to schlob the knob of the US military, the thing that defeated them.

berzerker posted:

Reminder that black Southerners are Southerners too. Stop lumping an entire region into an evil Other.

SgtScruffy posted:

I feel bad for Palin. Yeah, she says some dumb stuff and has probably done some level of damage to the political system... but in reality, she was a small-town governor who was probably somewhat in over her head as goverrnor, then got rocketed to the race for the second highest office in the land simply because she was an attractive (politically and otherwise) young woman. All that stress probably caused her to hit the bottle (or whatever) pretty hard to deal, and now it's all coming crashing down.

Yeah the liberal in me has some schadenfreude, but I hope everything turns out reasonably ok for her

berzerker posted:

Reminder that black Southerners are Southerners too. Stop lumping an entire region into an evil Other.

Radbot posted:

Why do Southerners that hate everything about America (the real one, not the one represented by stars and bars) even celebrate Independence Day? The highest incidence of "murrica can do no wrong" thinking is in the place where American ideals are hated the most.

The most bizarre thing to me about white Southerners is that they're the first to schlob the knob of the US military, the thing that defeated them.

Radbot posted:

Are you aware that helping Walmart workers unionize would help infinitely more women, to an infinitely greater degree, than some milquetoast non-commitment to "have more women in our executive positions"?

Grapplejack posted:

I don't get the hard defense people will throw up for Hillary on these forums. Almost everyone in this thread is going to vote for her anyway and you're not going to convince anyone that she's "actually really good and also perfect you guys".

Fried Chicken posted:

The memorials that you are defending exist specifically to deny history. That's what the Lost Cause mythology is all about, covering up what really happened

McDowell posted:

Memorials/museums can be given additional context - the popular understanding of the Civil War absolutely needs to change. Slavery has always been unjust - but it only became economically obsolete with the advent of industrialization - where literally owning human muscle power is now clearly inferior to owning a machine that can do the same work. The ruling class in the South was so attached to this economic model they broke up the nation trying to preserve it. The fact that this caste system used childish logic based on phenotype hasn't done this country any favors.

I'm all for reminding people that the Battle Flag is a national embarrassment and talking about the Civil War as a very ugly chapter in the labor struggle - but I think a national 'debate' over street names is a distraction from wider issues. If local activists want to rename 'Nathan Bedford Forest Lane' I wish them luck - but having it dominate national politics is pure media spectacle.

Dr. VooDoo posted:

Why are we supposed to take down the confederate flag yet let the gay pride flag fly? Remember when the gay states rebelled because they wanted to keep Christians as slaves?

Oh wait that didn't happen? I guess this argument is loving stupid then and one hell of a false equivalency

richardfun posted:

What the hell? Dixiecrats are still an actual thing in 2015? How is a Democrat the only one not calling for the removal of a statue of Jefferson Davis?

LionYeti posted:

Nah still gonna be a Neo Liberal Hackjob nomatter what.

McDowell posted:

Memorials/museums can be given additional context - the popular understanding of the Civil War absolutely needs to change. Slavery has always been unjust - but it only became economically obsolete with the advent of industrialization - where literally owning human muscle power is now clearly inferior to owning a machine that can do the same work. The ruling class in the South was so attached to this economic model they broke up the nation trying to preserve it. The fact that this caste system used childish logic based on phenotype hasn't done this country any favors.

I'm all for reminding people that the Battle Flag is a national embarrassment and talking about the Civil War as a very ugly chapter in the labor struggle - but I think a national 'debate' over street names is a distraction from wider issues. If local activists want to rename 'Nathan Bedford Forest Lane' I wish them luck - but having it dominate national politics is pure media spectacle.