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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I don’t care about people. I care about friends and family and these people are neither. I care about my countrymen

I can only hope that one day you see the shortsightedness of this view. It’s also incredibly ironic that you espouse such a myopic selfishness when the very country you praise was built on (and successful because of rather than in spite of) caring about other people beyond your immediate surrounds.

Like, John Adams defended British soldiers in court despite the unpopularity of it, and the the fact they really weren’t countryman and he certainly didn’t like them, because he recognized that a right to a lawyer and a fair defense was, long-term, an important thing we want to have. It seems you have yet to learn that wisdom.

It’s also incredibly ironic that you espouse such a myopic selfishness when the very country you praise was built on (and successful because of rather than in spite of) caring about other people beyond your immediate surrounds.

Don't lie to me about my own ancestors and my own people.

The country I praise was built on and successful because of people like my borderer ancestors who cross the Appalachians to settle Tennessee. They didn't care about other people beyond their immediate surrounds, and in fact when more people came to their immediate surrounds, they left Tennessee and kept going west, beating a trail for freedom across the wilderness.

That's my country, my history, my legacy. Not some fairy tale concocted in the post-war haze of propaganda about how America is an idea or a nation of immigrants. NO. It is a nation of conquerors, of settlers, of colonists and of pilgrims who shared a language and history among themselves. Not immigrants. Not diversity. And not by defending British soldiers.

In fact, the fact that he's defending British soldiers puts a lie to what you're saying. Those people were of the same race, spoke the same language, and were as brothers or cousins. Adams defended the Brits because he identified with them, and therefore he was defending his own right to representation.

It seems you have yet to learn that wisdom.

There's no wisdom in watching your family be replaced and their lands taken and repopulated by foreigners.

Lie? Lmao. Those British soldiers from the Boston Massacre in 1770 Boston at the time were representatives of what many (of course, not all - there was already conflict between patriot and loyalist groups even within Boston) felt to be a foreign occupation force. Hundreds of soldiers, brought in from overseas and not the colonies, were stationed in Boston for the explicit purpose of making sure the tax was collected for Britain's foreign wars, that was the whole point. The soldiers were not neighbors and nor was the tax for local purposes. "Countrymen" is always a bit of a slippery term, of course, and is easily abused. Most students of history are well aware of how fierce anti-immigrant feeling was toward immigrants from Germany or Ireland, for example, in very strong language decrying how bad and evil and Catholic and hard-drinking and foreign-culture they were... and now many of those same descendants are easily considered true-blooded Americans. Weird how the categories of hate conveniently change, eh? Catholics then, Muslims now, maybe? I'm exaggerating a bit, but you're the one telling yourself a historical fairy tale. I say this as someone with probably very similar ancestry/family history (though further West).

I should also add that the country wasn't set up by people from Tennessee. It was set up and allowed/enabled to grow by the earliest patriots who came up with a system of governance based on the same principles that resulted in that defense of those soldiers, it was explicitly a governmental model that made a point to expand legal protection - but also cultural grace - to those beyond your immediate neighbors, friends, and family.

Your own native Tennessee was a particular hotbed of anti-British sentiment from its early history, especially around the 1812 war where your politicians were among the leaders of the war hawks, which is hardly the attitude of former brothers or cousins, adding additional irony. Or later on, when a lot of Irish immigrants showed up in Tennessee, making up over 8% who were explicitly foreign-born of the Memphis population at one point per this interesting longer article about the Irish in Tennessee, just as one example. Of note: while later attitudes changed (largely due to Southern hatred of Blacks being greater), and on the whole the attitudes weren't as sharply anti-Irish as elsewhere in the United States, even the mayor of Memphis used to use language like calling them a "special abomination" and the 'scum of the city slums'.

Hmm, a little uncomfortable, huh?