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Author | Topic: PC Gone Too Far | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NoNukes Inactive Member |
If you're going to post words beneath a request for a definition, then you need to in some way make clear you're not answering the question, else reasonable people everywhere will assume you're providing a definition. Or you need to understand that there are other ways to respond to questions other than by giving you what you want. Your request for a definition when we all agree that slavery is evil seemed, and still seems, pretty pointless to me. But your accusation that I have refused to provide a definition is just wrong. Your attempt to provide a reason why I won't provide a definition when I have already done so is completely bogus.
Except for the quibble that you can't repeat this since you've never said it before, thanks for finally offering a definition. You are mistaken, Percy. I provided a definition in a previous post to which you responded. Here is part of your response to me to the post in which I provided the exact same definition I provided here. From Message 544 Percy writes: But how are you going to reconcile your definition of evil with other people's, for example, those who believe abortion is evil, or that homosexuality is evil? Your accusation, as well as this line of questioning are off the mark. The rest of your post does not seem to provide anything new. Slavery was evil, but apparently that does not reflect badly on the folks who practiced slavery, at least if I let you tell it. Instead, somehow I am the responsible for the stigma attached to slavery while the folks who actually practiced the institution are blameless. No, Percy, the antebellum South stigmatized itself for all of time by their actions. ABE: I add here that I don't claim that anyone other than the folks who actually were involved in owning, trading, working, punishing, slaves and promulgating and defending slavery or other particular acts falls into the category of not being a worthy of a park statute. Of course such comments would not to extend to all southerners in general. However my comments would explain why I believe statues of folks like Jefferson Davis or Nathan Bedford Forest belong in museum's rather than in places of honor. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
I was speaking of your failure to provide a definition up to that point. In a subsequent paragraph you attempted a definition, your first. As I said, it admitted to the broad ambiguities. Here it is again from your Message 624: Except as I demonstrated, I had already provided a definition. Did you even look at the reference I provided? I pointed to your message posted well before message 624, which responded to my posting of a definition. Here is my a pointer to my definition from Message 533:
NN writes: I've given my rationale for considering what the South did as evil, namely that what they did inflicted pain and misery on other human beings without any decent justification. I think that serves sufficiently as a definition for my posts. You recognized that I had posted a definition in your post 544 although you did have some issues with my definition. I'll also note that from my wording in message 533, that my post was not the first one in which I offered a definition. So yeah you did see it. You've now denied at least three times that I posted such a definition despite having responded to my definition. So given that I had already provided a definition, I clearly was not stonewalling when I answered your question. In fact, I've insisted on that reasoning in various prior posts in which a definition was required. Percy on the use of the word evil.
Percy writes: I've objected to the term evil because it is subjective. It is not a timeless concept, and it can vary across time and space. My preferred term for slavery, "morally wrong," I don't make any distinction between extreme cases of being morally wrong and evil. As you yourself indicate, neither are timeless or non-objective. There is essentially no difference between the two terms. Edited by NoNukes, : Add documentation Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
But those are different discussions. We are NOT attempting to evaluate slavery here. The memorial is to the nameless dead soldiers, not to the institution of slavery. The initial topic was the single monument. The scope of the discussion has included much more than as early as a dozen or so posts into the thread. In one of Percy's subsequent posts he talked about renaming of buildings. Since then we've discussed any number of monuments including Stone Mountain, the Maryland state song, and slavery in general. ABE: So the discussion is not limited to a single memorial. With regards to the memorial which is the subject of the initial post, I don't personally the monument offensive. On the other hand, I don't have to live with the thing and I don't know and am not interested in looking up the history of the folks it does celebrate, so I'm not prepared to slam folks who want the monument moved. I do, on the other hand, find the carving on Stone Mountain, and the catering of the GA politicians to the UDC and SCV to the exclusion of all other requesting folk both offensive and disgusting. I have empathy for folks who want to move statutes of Jefferson Davis off of the campus quad, who want their state to stop flying the confederate flag, or who petition their government for renaming the FBI building. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
We are NOT attempting to evaluate slavery here. It appears to me that what is being attempted here is to not evaluate slavery too harshly. Apparently attempts that result in such evaluations, particularly if those evaluations are applied to slave owners, are considered non objective. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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It was more of an accent on this OP subject. It was very hard for Huck Finn to get there - let alone Samuel Clemens - and he wrote it beautifully. And the nerve of anyone who would suggest that if you, yourself, in that time and place, friends of Huck like Tom Sawyer, didn't have the same epiphany and are therefore EVIL boggles my mind Evil is like that. It can pervade a society and become the norm for behavior. Mind-boggling, but repeatedly demonstrated throughout history. I cannot really praise Huck Finn, a fictional character for having an epiphany; the praise is due entirely to the author who managed in nineteenth century to be well ahead of the many of his peers. If instead you were to discuss how Samuel Clements managed to see things as he did, after having been raised during the pre-civil war South, we would be confronted with a real story. Clements, through Finn, may well have been describing his own awakening. 10 Fascinating Facts About 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' | Mental Floss.
quote: That the society in the south made it nigh impossible for these kinds of realizations is damning. The images of sad slaves seem stark and persuasive to me, yet such scenes moved few "good" folks who were inured to those kinds of feelings. In fact the norm for society is that real good folks who imitated Langdon were the vile traitors and Frederick Douglas was the thief who stole value from his owner by escaping. In the end, every bit of slavery was created an operated by men who placed their own ends above the worth of the most basic needs, dreams, and destinies of an entire race of folks through deliberate actions. I suppose there are more depraved attitudes imaginable, but those I've described above are justifiable high on some lists of many folks. Nobody is born evil, yet all evil is done by men. Mind boggling indeed. ABE:Sorry. I felt that I must address this... How is Huck Finn's epiphany described by Clements?
quote: Apparently, Clements does not dither about the issue that we debate here. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Duh. Huck IS Mark Twain! Mark Twain said that no one person was Huck Finn. Huck was the combination of lots of folk that Clements encountered during his lifetime. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
orry to do this again, but I must point out that Mark Twain WAS THERE, and yes he wrote FICTION, and yes he was SELLING his words - BUT: It appears that we are in agreement other than a quibble about whether Finn was identically Mark Twain. I only posted about that issue because you raised it as a correction for me. As I mentioned in my post, Twain himself went through a transformation of sorts regarding the issue of slavery, and certainly that experience was reflected in Finn. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
No. It's because the individual soldiers are nameless that the monument is seen as symbolizing the Confederacy - and its salient feature, slavery. I suppose this might be the case for some folks, particularly in the case where the memorial is not actually a grave marker. While I am sympathetic to folks who desire to move monuments that are not really historical events, I would be inclined to argue with those folks with regard to monuments that are only tangentially Confederacy symbols. "To our confederate dead" is not clearly tangential IMO, but it is pretty close. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
.yet, this memorial to the fallen Confederate soldiers is somehow being construed, by even folks here in EvC of all places, as an evil thing and therefore should be destroyed. I can recall a single comment from a poster saying that the monument in question should be destroyed. AZPaul said something like that early on, but I have not and I don't recall ringo making such a statement either. Percy is complaining about the monument being either damaged during the move or being put away out of sight. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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If they can move it to the Cave Hill Cemetery safely, fine. Wikipedia has documented a number of changes to the status of the monument during our discussion here. The latest is that the statute stays put until a new site is chosen.
quote: Description of the monument.
quote: Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions? Scott Adams
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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Removing the statue just makes it more difficult to preserve this part of our history. Preserving part of your hallowed history does not require putting monuments in the most prominent places in town. Museums work just fine. If you need to remind folks that these statues date from 100 years ago rather than 150 years ago, you probably need a plaque for that anyway as most folks cannot tell by simply seeing the statutes. Apparently, the majority of the folks in New Orleans don't want the statutes displayed in the middle of town; the plan is to move them to a museum, something which is highly appropriate in my opinion. Undoubtedly, the full details of what folks thought at the time would be included in such a display. Also by the criteria of at least one poster, this particular moving would not be PC because it is not a tactic being employed by the minority that most be resisted at all costs. And apparently, a minority of local folks think that 'people of color' must be required to stub their toe on these things every day. Fortunately, we know that their threats and protests are just PC gone to far.
vimesey writes: a monument to the lynched/enslaved/murdered slaves/people of colour who suffered as a result of the Confederacy. Suppose that already existed. Suppose that 100 years ago, white supremacists had already erected a monument celebrating a famous lynching. Would that be enough of a reminder, so that nothing additional would be needed? We could tell 'people of color' to pretend that those statues were honoring their ancestors rather than celebrating their deaths. From the mayor of New Orleans:
quote: I'm going with the mayor on this. Put these monstrosities in a museum and take eighth-graders of every color on a tour to see them in their proper context. More from the mayor:
quote: Yeah, that's exactly how I see it. Of course, you know better than the mayor of New Orleans and its citizens what ought to be done with those local statutes. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
I agree with the sentiments but not with the solution. We're whitewashing history. Apparently, we agree that history can be preserved without these statutes being located in the center of town. Absent some story that these statues won't make it to a museum, I don't see how NO can be accused of whitewashing anything. ABE: Apparently, a number of folks have offered to place the statues in a museum or to display them outdoors. Perhaps we can put off the accusations of whitewashing as premature? Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Whatever term is used, the point is that the further these monuments are removed from the public eye the more they're out of our consciousness. The more history is forgotten the better its mistakes can be repeated. Again, we are both on record as being fine with a museum. If that is no longer your position, just say so, and I will address that. There are competing concerns here, only one of which is making sure that we don't forget about "mistakes" that were nothing of the sort. In this case, I think a museum is a great balance. There is no reason that I need to have J. Davis constantly in view every time I go downtown. My memory is better than that. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
And perhaps the public is better off when constantly faced with uncomfortable truths. You are indeed contradicting what you said. The idea that the public is better off faced with the statues directly contradicts the idea that a museum is good enough.
But out of sight, out of mind. The balance comes at a cost, and at risk of eventual consignment to storage. If balance is not a proper thing to do, then why don't we all put statues of Jefferson Davis in out backyards? Why isn't there a forum on EvC dedicated to reminding us of the lessons of the civil war? Being unbalanced also has a cost. Statues of Jefferson Davis are rallying points for neo-Confederates. They are eyesores that detract from the message New Orleans many want to present to tourists. The idea that other concerns are less important that the one you suggest is, IMO, an extreme and ridiculous position. And no, out of sight does not always mean out of mind. I haven't been near a statue or carving of Jefferson Davis in years. But I will note that there are plenty of streets named after the fellow all over the country. The idea that JD was revered by many folks is not something I am likely to forget. Edited by NoNukes, : ABE is marked. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
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NoNukes Inactive Member
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That is, how do you know that you're right that they're really trying to hide their true selves and are not being honest, and that your, far-removed, perspective is actually the correct one? I don't think there is a question regarding honesty here. I am willing to take the protests of the statue supporters at face value. But the question of whether their views are historically correct and whether the 'Lost Cause' view of the civil war is incorrect is a question that has largely been decided by academics and historians. The history that these folks revere is horrific and the culture they celebrate, barbaric and completely inseparable from the worst abuse this side of the holocaust. Even if folks are honest about celebrating only the heroic portions of that history, then celebrations are a white-wash regardless of honest intent or honorable motives. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846) History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. Thomas Jefferson Seems to me if its clear that certain things that require ancient dates couldn't possibly be true, we are on our way to throwing out all those ancient dates on the basis of the actual evidence. -- Faith Some of us are worried about just how much damage he will do in his last couple of weeks as president, to make it easier for the NY Times and Washington post to try to destroy Trump's presidency. -- marc9000
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