site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28316 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Take 2.

I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.

The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.

Columbia Bugle

Disgusting. Why not give the Lee statue to a museum? Because people might enjoy visiting it, or one day decide to restore it. This is a reminder that the Left wont stop after displacing historic American heroes. They want to deface, destroy and replace them with their own ridiculous idols.

Jack Posobiec

Columbus is next. Followed by Teddy. Then Jefferson. Then George Washington

Jack again

Glenn Youngkin let them do this. His AG too

Never forget it. These squishes aren't built for this fight

Maarblek

people with no heroes and no accomplishments doing the only thing they know: crying to the courts to allow them to turn beautiful things that other people made into garbage

BlueandGray1864

"We'll put them in museums", it was always a lie. The destruction of historical artifacts has begun. Shame on anyone who supports this.

God Bless Robert E. Lee

Spencer Klavan

“How delightful it was to smash to pieces those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to cut them ferociously with our axes, as if blood and pain would follow our blows”

Pliny on the destruction of Domitian's statues. The relish and vindictiveness in this process isn't an accident: it's a symbol and an effigy, an expression of violent hatred.

That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:

It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one.

Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.

So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?

And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?

ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:

GigaThaad

Literally my ancestor. We carry the Lee name as a first/middle in my family

While I didn't need a directly insulting gesture to tell me that my kind is hated and many seek our extinction (the implicit cues were strong enough) I appreciate this image making it absolutely clear.

Elon Musk

They absolutely want your extinction

Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.

I'd like to ask you (and anyone else who cares to answer) a few questions about Robert E Lee and the civil war in general. And none of these are intended to be gotcha questions. I'd just like to know and engage with what you (and others) think. What do you believe to have been the primary cause of the civil war? What is the legacy of the confederacy? What is important to learn/remember about Lee and the confederacy? What do you know about Lee's personal beliefs regarding the institution of slavery?

It's often best to build a reputation in a community before asking questions like this, because saying "not a gotcha, honest" is the third fastest way to make people suspect it's a gotcha (the first two will shock totally own you!)

Short of having an established reputation, I just figured I'd try and be candid about my intention behind asking these questions. I guess it might have been naive of me to expect that the folks here would believe me but as a bit of a longtime lurker of this community I had some hope that people would at least engage on some level with these questions.

I'm just reminded of how the Finnish Civil War is treated in Finland. The Finnish Civil War was an acrimonious conflict with consequences that reverbate to this day; I've met people still in the present day who basically define their political alignment through what side their great-granddad fought in.

Still, the society's grand narrative since WW2 has been reconciliation, with Winter War holding a particular mythological position as the war were the "sons of the Reds and the Whites fought side by side", and the welfare state has also been seen as the fulfillment of Red goals of social equality for the working class. The reconciliation also meant that, for instance, while there had only been markers and statues commemorating the White victory everywhere, it was also now OK to commemorate Red soldiers with graves and markers; during May Days left-wing orgs still ritualistically hold events at those graves.

However, I don't think anyone has ever proposed that reconciliation meant commemorating Red generals! Granted, they were, to put it mildly, not particularly militarily impressive figures, but I don't think there are any memorials for them anywhere. If someone even proposd to put one up, well - I'd guess they'd be seen as the deepest, dankest Stalinist in existence, the sort of a guy who goes through his daily life wearing a Soviet uniform and an ushanka.

OTOH, there are memorials to CGE Mannerheim, who led the white forces, in all of the major cities. During some statues fracas in the US a left-wing youth organization propsoed moving them to museum, this proposal was widely condemned by basically all of the other major political forces, and was then immediately shelved. Then again, Mannerheim also led the Finnish forces in WW2.

One thing I've never quite caught on is how may memorials to Northern generals there even are in the US, since all the culture war about Confederate statues gives the impression that the entire South (and some other states besides) is downright peppered with them, that there are memorials to Northern generals only comes up when someone poses a "They'll come after Grant next!" hypothetical, and I haven't seen basically any mentions of notable Black Civil War era figures getting memorialized, apart from maybe Harriet Tubman?

In the end, putting up a statue to some guy is basically equivalent to putting up a sign saying "This guy is a great guy! Everyone should emulate him and be like him!" and if the society has decided that he's actually not a great guy, it would seem as natural to put the statue away as it would be to put such a sign away, though it would indeed be more prudent to put it in a museum than destroy it entirely.

One thing I've never quite caught on is how may memorials to Northern generals there even are in the US, since all the culture war about Confederate statues gives the impression that the entire South (and some other states besides) is downright peppered with them, that there are memorials to Northern generals only comes up when someone poses a "They'll come after Grant next!" hypothetical, and I haven't seen basically any mentions of notable Black Civil War era figures getting memorialized, apart from maybe Harriet Tubman?

There are fewer actual statues of Confederate generals than the media would have you believe, and fewer statues of union generals than that. However confederate/union cemeteries marked with the appropriate symbols are commonplace and while these gravesites are not usually well maintained, it is frequently obvious that they were intended to be burial grounds for war heroes. A major confound is that I live in Texas, which was the main recruiting ground for the confederate shock troops, and thus had a high percentage of confederate war dead. It seems like there is no appetite for destroying these cemeteries- in at least some cases due to superstitious terror of the ghosts(the general pattern in Texas is for older areas of the city- those which have confederate graves because of when they were built- to be full of poor and often superstitious people because the houses are smaller), but more often due to apathy.

There are additionally lots of elementary schools which were at one point named after confederate generals or politicians, but which are now named after "literally who?" figures(and usually these aren't particularly woke figures, they're a school district administrator who contributed a notably large amount of well-credentialed stupidity to the district which is responsible for the school). Street names, particularly Jackson st, exist fairly commonly but it's actually a lot of work to change a street name so it's easier for everyone to just ignore it was named after Stonewall Jackson. Hood county(named after the general who took over command of the confederate shock corps when Stonewall Jackson was killed) is a regular source of controversy but will not be changed any time soon and anyways the proposed name changes are to be named after random and not very notable blacks.

By the way, can someone make an argument for this being anything other than a deliberate provocation? A few people mentioned how if you wanted to get rid of the statue, you could have done it in other ways, like moving it to a museum or selling to a willing buyer. Removing it in secret, but hiring professional photographers / cameramen to spam the internets with hires images of the statue being melted down strikes me as a psyop.

If you do get banned, it will probably be for constantly deleting your posts. Stop doing it, it's really obnoxious.

Culture war stories involving the legacy of the Confederacy--and Confederate heroes like Lee in particular--are always troubling to me, in part perhaps because, as a Southerner, I don't know myself what to make of that legacy. The existence of the whole Confederate movement is so inextricably bound up with the crime of slavery that celebrating the heroes of the movement seems, on its face, indefensible. I am probably more "woke" than the average Mottizen when it comes to American race issues; I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation (although neither explanation is fully satisfactory). I would find it shocking if the current problems with American black culture weren't primarily due to the uniquely extreme oppression blacks faced for so many generations. We can debate whether or not the South would have abandoned slavery on its own initiative without it being forced to do so by the Union's victory in the Civil War, but I don't see how one could deny that the intent of the founders of the Confederacy was to preserve slavery in perpetuity (mostly for the benefit of wealthy plantation owners, rather than working white Southerners). When people, on the Motte or elsewhere, castigate the Confederates as racist losers who picked a stupid fight in furtherance of an execrable cause, I can't find a good reason for disagreeing with them.

And yet I do disagree with them--I do admire Lee, and for some reason I'm proud of the South and of the Confederacy. I can't explain it rationally. I like that, despite being ill-equipped and outnumbered 2-1, the South held out for over four years in a hot war with a technologically superior foe. I'm glad we didn't just roll over to the North's demands, but made the Yankees fight for it. I even take a perverse and morbid pride in the fact we killed more of them than they killed of us.

What's even more confusing is that, for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it seemed like it was fine to like the Confederacy. Pop-culture protagonists in books, movies, TV shows, comic strips, etc., could be Confederate soldiers or open Confederate sympathizers and still be beloved by post-war Americans, North and South. American society didn't seem interested in condemning pro-Confederate Southerners as "traitors" or excoriating them as "racists"--even though the charges were as just then as they are now. I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture. At best, people on both sides seemed willing to put the dark past behind them and settle into a mutual civility. At worst, it seemed like non-Southerners viewed Southern pride and loyalty to the rebel cause as a sort of quaint, harmless expression of regional patriotism.

The vitriol towards Confederates I see in stories like this and in some of the comments here seems new. I can't say that those commenters are wrong--I share their reasons for disliking the Confederacy, although something (maybe just the loyalty of my Southern blood) prevents me from reacting with the same level of antipathy. I just wonder what happened to the truce that seemed to have once reigned in this particular culture war.

10 to 1 it's bog standard internet polarization. It's probably unfair but I find that it's easy enough to attaint anyone who is a 'fan' of the confederacy as a dumbdumb (bad values (meaning values I don't like(This is fair because it's me))) .

Basically, I've had to talk with more people than I expected who have all sorts of opinions about the "war of northern aggression" and related subjects who A: Don't know who the fuck anyone but Lee is (Bedford? Stuart? Can you eat them?) and have ahistorical views about the war and, B: Also have some opinions about the blacks that I find slightly distasteful AND C: Are fucking stupid Low iq mouthbreathers.

This is almost certainly a sorting mechanism thing, but anyone online is going to run in to enough loud morons they disagree with to tar any ideology they like with any size brush.

I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation

I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.

Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.

At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.

I have my own hypothesis which is that the way that we’re trying to solve the race problems tends to make the racial disparities worse.

Taking Affirmative Action as an example. Well, there are two problems here that actually hurt the black community. First, it essentially creates a siphon of any marginally talented black person. If he’s smart enough to get through school and hard working enough to hold down a decent job, he leaves the inner city ghetto. Furthermore, almost none of the money he makes goes back into that community unless he makes a special effort. On top of that, the profits of his labor go, again, outside of this community. This creates an effective brain drain for the community. The people with the smarts and work ethic get sucked out to greener pastures. I5 also removes their positive example in that community. No one living in a community like that knows anyone who made a good life for himself by study and work — those people are in the suburbs. What’s left behind are the thieves or drug runners who make good money, or the wage slaves that struggle to feed and clothe their families.

The other part is that there aren’t a lot of black owned businesses. Part of this is simply the modern economy in which large companies can so easily leverage economies of scale that it’s hard to get a new business started. Part of it is the difficulty especially for the relatively poor to get loans to start businesses. Part of it is that people living there don’t have the skills. But the reason that black owned local businesses are important is that locally owned businesses are one of the few ways for any community to get money into the community and to stay in the community once it gets there. Immigrants use this to great effect. They open an ethnic restaurant hire local immigrants to do the work, feed a bunch of yuppies, then the immigrants use their wages in the local ethnic shops, as do immigrants who don’t work in the community. In other words, money comes in and stays in. This creates a wealth base, and as they pay taxes they’re more respectable to local government. They’re setting an example of hard work and study that kids can see paying off.

You're leaving out the "it's the culture" explanation a typical red triber would point out to anyone he wasn't worried about offending.

Sure but that only gets us as far as the question 'whence culture'? There are obviously right-valence answers to this question which are the most prominent, but there are also progressive answers a la Ogbu, that African-American culture, if it has 'problems', is the product of their 'caste-like minority' status.

It seems to me that today’s lack of racism could have some explanatory power. One hundred years ago, the smartest, hardest working, and most well-adjusted blacks were not allowed to join the dominant white society, instead becoming businessmen and leaders within their own parallel communities. They preached and modeled the sort of virtuous living that leads to better life outcomes—get an education, get and stay married, hold down a steady job, etc. Then once racial barriers were dismantled in the 1950s–60s, the most educated and high-performing blacks integrated into white society a la Cliff Huxtable, inadvertently leading their former communities to become dysfunctional, crime-ridden ghettos. It’s similar to the brain drain that’s happening in rural America and to the emigration conundrum facing many third world counties. The most capable leave, and the ones left behind aren’t the sort who make functional communities.

I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture.

To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.

Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.

Show me a single black person alive who suffered as a result of American slavery?

If you want there to be a race war you can just say so. Otherwise i point you towards Morgan Freemans line to Denzel in Glory "that kid youre complaing about having to dig a grave for died for you.

In other words how many have to die for before justice is served?

What you grew up with was the fruit of the Reconciliation Movement after the civil war. This social contract was purposely torn up in 2016 by progressives butt hurt about Trump. I'm trying to find them now, but I was awash in editorials talking about how reconciliation was a mistake, and the boot should have been on Southern White's neck forever more to make them learn their place.

I would suggest 2016 was less the cause and more the 'masks off' moment.

Hanging around various fan forums in the early 2000s, one common thread I saw pop up time and time again was the typical 'Whatif' of 'What would you have done differently in the treatment of the South post civil-war' and the thread wouldn't even get past the first page before the notion of 'Kill them all' would get thrown out.

Ground-level liberal/progressives have had a common genocidal fantasy toward Southerners for a very long time, with very little if no pushback against it.

I think you might be mixing up your timeline. Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner (2014), Freddie Gray (2015 - Ferguson riots attached), Philando Castile (2015) and other moments like Kaepernick (2015) and the Charleston church shooting (2015) ALL predate Trump. The racial unrest wasn’t invented by progressives. It was already there.

The double impact of the video of George Floyd (2020) and Trump’s own, self inflicted “both sides” response to the Charlottesville protester killings (2017) has far more to do with it than some progressive scheme to make Trump look bad. In particular that 2017 event was tied to Confederate backlash… which even extended to efforts within Southern states to remove Confederate flags. Mississippi removed their own flag in 2020. Even South Carolina stopped displaying it. While there was certainly national pressure to do so, it wasn’t progressive-exclusive.

And speaking in terms of the historiography, it’s also a big mistake to say that the sentiment was new. Many historians have long felt that Reconciliation was a bit too lenient. Since about the 60s I would say, reaching stronger mainstream around the 80s. Many blamed civil rights “taking too long” and Jim Crow type discrimination and political repression “lasting too long” on Reconstruction. Perhaps out of political convenience (easier to blame the past), but again, this wasn’t something new in response to Trump.

I think everything you described especially Floyd were part of the old pact on race. Disparate impacts were ignored and the right went with an idea that the failure of the black community was bad culture versus lower IQ and higher rates of criminality.

Before Trump George Floyd would have just been a drug addict overdosing. The revitalization of it was progressives.

You might be right about me being off slightly. Key events I remember were all from 2015. Stuff like Apple censoring conflict simulators that contained the confederate flag. Dukes of Hazzard being memory holed also occurred in 2015. Amazon removing confederate flag merch also happened in 2015.

We can debate whether or not the South would have abandoned slavery on its own initiative without it being forced to do so by the Union's victory in the Civil War

I think it's pretty clear they would have, and that the Civil War was more about Federal control over the states than it was about slavery. I judge this based on how other countries prohibited slavery, specifically England. I don't think they would have continued slavery indefinitely any more than Brazil did.

but I don't see how one could deny that the intent of the founders of the Confederacy was to preserve slavery in perpetuity

Their intent was to withdraw from an agreement that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following. The basis of this refusal was of course slavery, but it could have been something else. I think you should read the declarations of secession. I did, and while slavery is right up and down all of the documents, it's revealing how many different complaints they had, and how reasonable those complaints are. These independents states agreed to combine to form a union for mutual prosperity, and the conditions of that union had been trampled for decades because one side was unwilling to abide by the agreement they had made.

What's even more confusing is that, for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it seemed like it was fine to like the Confederacy.

The vitriol towards Confederates I see in stories like this and in some of the comments here seems new. I can't say that those commenters are wrong--I share their reasons for disliking the Confederacy, although something (maybe just the loyalty of my Southern blood) prevents me from reacting with the same level of antipathy. I just wonder what happened to the truce that seemed to have once reigned in this particular culture war.

What happened was Obama, and then Trump. And it's not about the Confederacy, it never really was and never really will be. It's about me, and white people like me, here and today. The one single person whose actions were most responsible for this statue being melted down is Donald Trump. When he won in 2016, half the country declared war on the basket of deplorables, and sought to tear down their statues and destroy their culture. Literal culture war. The statue was melted this week because Trump won in 2016. It was melted to show whites that this country doesn't want them, it doesn't want their history, it wants to rewrite the history of their nation to exclude them.

I didn't even vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I can tell when people hate me and want me, my parents, my brothers, and my children dead and gone from this world. I can tell when they take symbolic actions, and I can interpret the symbolism. Now I wish I did.

I think you should read the declarations of secession.

Mississippi's makes it as clear as possible that all other issues were sideshows in comparison to the conflict over slavery.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.

Hard to get more explicit than that.

Their intent was to withdraw from an agreement that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following. The basis of this refusal was of course slavery, but it could have been something else. I think you should read the declarations of secession. I did, and while slavery is right up and down all of the documents, it's revealing how many different complaints they had, and how reasonable those complaints are.

Can you cite a few? There were some complaints about tariffs and such (the agricultural South had different financial interests than the industrial North), but for over fifty years leading up to the Civil War, almost all political conflict between the North and the South was very explicitly about slavery. Every presidential candidate (whatever his personal feelings) had to primarily calibrate his position on slavery in order to win enough votes from the South. Every new acquisition by the US became an (often violent) battle over whether it would allow slavery. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, these were bitter attempts to reconcile states over slavery. You sort of brush past the fact that "slavery is right up and down all of the documents" - yes, it was, because that was the issue. The "agreements that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following" were all about slavery.

All other disputes between the North and South - economic, cultural, whatever else you're thinking of - were comparatively minor and would never have led to a secession. The Civil War was about slavery.

All emphasis mine.

The very first paragraph from South Carolina.

The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal Government, and its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States, fully justified this State in then withdrawing from the Federal Union; but in deference to the opinions and wishes of the other slaveholding States, she forbore at that time to exercise this right. Since that time, these encroachments have continued to increase, and further forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

Further reading, though I'm tempted to just copy the whole thing

In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

It's not slavery, it's about reneging on the deal you previously made. None of the slave states would have joined the union in the first place without the concessions they received, concessions intended to prevent the North from controlling the South. Those concessions were systematically undermined and ignored for decades until finally it was obvious that the North never intended to perform on the duties it committed to, and never intended to respect the limits of the federal government.

South Carolina did not agree to be ruled by New York, South Carolina agreed to form a Union with New York under the condition that New York is obligated to return slaves to South Carolina. If New York doesn't want to do that, it's up to them to dissolve the Union, but instead they simply ignored the constitution and the agreement they had made with the free and independent states of the South in order to impose their rule.

I'm tired of people lying about it. The South was right to secede, and they have every justification to do so. They stuck a deal which was ignored and undermined for 80 years, until finally they had had enough and left.

And then Lincoln conquered them and forged the American Empire, and now we don't hear about the Free and Independent State of South Carolina, or These United States.

The Civil War was about federal conquest of the continent.

From Texas:

The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States.

By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.

The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refuse reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.

...

The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation.

...

For these and other reasons, solemnly asserting that the federal constitution has been violated and virtually abrogated by the several States named, seeing that the federal government is now passing under the control of our enemies to be diverted from the exalted objects of its creation to those of oppression and wrong, and realizing that our own State can no longer look for protection, but to God and her own sons-- We the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America and the people thereof and confidently appeal to the intelligence and patriotism of the freemen of Texas to ratify the same at the ballot box, on the 23rd day of the present month.

Those concessions were systematically undermined and ignored for decades

By other states - not the federal government. As recently as 1859 the year before Lincoln's election, the supreme court ruled in Ableman v Booth that state "personal liberty" laws didn't supercede the Fugitive Slave Act.

The irony is that framing the civil war as a matter of states rights isn't wrong...but it was over northern states asserting their rights to reject constitutional but morally unjust laws.

For an extra dose of irony, South Carolina nearly seceded during the 1830's...because they felt that states should have the right to nullify federal laws they found unconstitutional. And when the federal government capitulated, but reasserted that they could use military force to make states comply, South Carolina symbolically nullified that!

The secessionist states wanted a federal government that would force states to follow laws they found morally abhorrent - yet only for specific laws that would benefit the South.

the Civil War was more about Federal control over the states than it was about slavery.

I don't buy it. The only reason the southern states feared federal control was because they feared it would be used to end slavery.

basis of this refusal was of course slavery, but it could have been something else.

Could I ask what that something else could possibly be? It would have to be an extreme wedge issue that the seceding states considered an existential risk to their continued way of life.

In an alternate timeline where the southern states remained in the union but abolished slavery, the only thing I could think of would be the enfranchisement of former slaves.

I am curious and confused why you have lumped “white people” in with Confederate history. Surely most white people in America were not Southern rebels, and there’s more to that culture than Robert E Lee? I realize that as a Southerner yourself it feels a bit more personal but… again, I really feel the Confederate issue doesn’t generalize. And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history. Not only do many texts outright lie about the causes of the Civil War, the South may have claimed that slavery would die out, but their actual actions reveal an active attempt at spreading it. A lot of these “reasonable complaints” just boil down to economic issues, made worse because the South didn’t want to take steps to rebalance their economy away from slavery. And they certainly didn’t want to treat Black people like the humans they are. That’s not something you can just glaze over.

They don’t just attack confederate symbols. Last time I checked Christopher Columbus was cancelled too. They pull his statues down which do have significant to my people.

I think his post was a little hyperbolic but it’s also sort of true.

And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history.

Ah, yes. This old canard.

Sorry, but I had to take 400-level history courses on Southern history before the notion that 'Well, the Civil War may have had other factors beyond slavery that caused it' even got brought up.

I'll believe my own eyes and experience, thanks.

which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners

I'm trying to be charitable here, so can you explain what you mean by liquidated? The phrasing here seems to imply you think Americans are being deliberately killed/destroyed/geocide-ed in order to make room for foreigners or immigrants and I'm just not aware of any evidence of that. If you're referring to falling birth rates, well, it isn't the foreigners' fault that Americans aren't having enough unprotected sex.

EDIT: Typo

What would qualify as evidence to you? The regular psy-ops trying to suppress white fertility? What about the federal government air dropping dysfunctional aliens with an incompatible culture that displace and destroy the natives? What about naked discrimination in hiring whites? What about teaching hatred of whites at every major university? What about extirpating whites from all their popular culture? What about the enormous disproportionate crime rates, with whites being the victims of black crime at several multiples per capita as black are of whites?

All I hear, over and over and over again justify the Hamas rape, murder and kidnapping spree is the Jewish "illegal settlements" encroaching on Palestinian land caused this, and people ignoring their plight gave them no other choice. However here at home, "no person is illegal". Either both are genocides, or neither is.

Uh, where did Hamas come into this? I made no mention of Hamas, Israel, or any of that in my comment. The fuck are you on about?

I think it's supposed to be pointing out how the same people who think it's justifiable or understandable for Palestinians to rape and murder people encroaching on their land also think that even the feeblest response from (white) Americans to the invasion of their land/replacement of their culture by immigrants or activist minorities is racist and morally unjustifiable.

I suppose the left would say that most black Americans have been in the US longer than most white ones.

which would be a funny parallel with the jews and the kingdom of Judea before the Romans did shenanigans in the region.

seems to imply you think Americans are being deliberately killed/destroyed/geocide-ed in order to make room for foreigners or immigrants and I'm just not aware of any evidence of that

You haven't been watching demographic ratios, fertility rates, or any of the other things that could count? Demographics

If you're referring to falling birth rates, well, it isn't the foreigner's fault that Americans' aren't having enough unprotected sex.

No, I suppose it's not their fault, but they're the ones I want kicked out of my country, so they're the ones who will suffer for it regardless. So it goes.

Have you read or heard of Left Behind in Rosedale? It's not intended to be, but it's a very good chronicle of the ethnic cleansing of whites in the post-civil rights act America. That's not birth rates, it's rape and murder and racially motivated predation of primarily older whites by younger black men.

If you're unaware, it's because you're not paying attention to the kind of people who have been telling you about it.

No, I suppose it's not their fault, but they're the ones I want kicked out of my country, so they're the ones who will suffer for it regardless. So it goes.

Given some of the statements you've made in this discussion, the US is very clearly not "your country". It's a cliche, but being part of the US is defined by ideals, not descent---this is taught in elementary school civics. You clearly do not fit these ideals.

I hate to dogpile this, but to echo the other replies with a twist, I would say that your statement would be true if this was still the 90's/early-to-mid 2000's. 90's civics with their colorblind idealism, however, are dead and rotting.

When kids turn 18 we don't check if they agree with our ideals and send them to Canada if they don't

Kicking someone out from where they grew up is a pretty extreme action. They will however be thought of as "unamerican" and deal with serious social consequences if those contrary ideals become widely known---the same way someone might be ostracized within but not exiled from of a stereotypical close-knit small town.

The difference in the US is that this ostracism doesn't happen based on just descent.

It's a cliche, but being part of the US is defined by ideals, not descent

Well that's rather beside the point, since they don't represent the ideals of America either.

being part of the US is defined by ideals, not descent---this is taught in elementary school civics

Yeah, since 1960. It is not original, it's a deliberate propaganda effort, one that I've chosen to reject. I do not believe that America is a nation of ideals, or of immigrants. I think those are lies meant to manipulate me and people like me, and they've mostly worked very well. However, they are lies that I reject.

However, they are lies that I reject

It's what the majority of people in the country agree upon. What does it even mean to call something like this a lie? That it's different from what it used to be in the past? The culture that dominates now is superior practically and morally for reasons that have been written about a lot here.

It's what the majority of people in the country agree upon.

And what is that?

Prior to 2015 same-sex marriage was illegal on the federal level, after that it was legal. Did same-sex marriage supporters become Americans in 2015 after decades of "America not being their country" and did same-sex marriage opponents stop being American after 2015?

Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022, did believers in federally-protected abortion stop being American while Roe opponents suddenly gained a new-found American identity?

I'm not talking about tense culture-war issues---I'm talking about more basic and universal points like the egalitarianism in "judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin", the idea that ambition is good, some notion of the idea behind meritocracy (even though the actual word might be corrupted) etc. Regardless of extreme voices amplified on the internet, 80-90% of Americans would strongly agree with these ideals, even if they might hide it behind some torturous word games (e.g. most advocates of something like affirmative action do so because they think that it's the best way to actually achieve colorblind egalitarianism).

@freemcflurry

I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.

"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"

How is purging American cities of an entire generation of white people anything but liquidation? Especially when you're lied to and told it's white flight and not ethnic cleaning.

"Liquidation" usually involves wholesale killing. I agree that what was called "white flight" was mostly ethnic cleansing. Philly War Zone, discussed a few years ago on one of the predecessors of this place goes into it also, and growing up I heard similar stories about Baltimore.

Yeah, I used liquidation because they're melting metal into liquid, and I genuinely believe that whites are being ethnically cleansed as much as is possible. It's not possible to completely eliminate whites, but the salami is being sliced every day, every year. It's wordplay.

Can you elaborate on this? What does "foreigner" mean here such that black people are foreigners but whites aren't? There have been black people here approximately as long as white people.

It's part of a broader movement to find excuses to destroy the monuments of the population that existed prior to the 1965 immigration act. Black people are just being used as the excuse here.

which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

They would've replaced the statue with a Mexican dude if they wanted striking symbolism. Ironically, the only black people immigrating to the US are South Indians.

Come on. It's pretty clear that black people are perceived as the anti-white canceler by the culture war generals involved here. Take for example the frequency of blacks in UK advertisement despite being only 4% of the UK population (though 2.9% mixed/multiple ethnicity).

And why shouldn't they? Black admixture is the most dramatic to "white" populations. Black people fit the profile of sentimentality for globalist multiculturalism/immigration the most. When future mass migration happens, if it does, it will predominantly come from Africa which is one of the only places in the world still rapidly growing in population.

Ironically, the only black people immigrating to the US are South Indians.

It looks like about 120,000 people per year are granted permanent residence from Jamaica, Haiti, and "other Africa," which seems to be mostly subSaharan Africa. Compared with 50-69K from all of India.

Indians have the huge H1B to permanent residency bottleneck because of the national quota, don’t they? Link: https://www.boundless.com/blog/indians-face-134-year-wait-employment-based-green-card/

Sure, but that really isn't the point. The point is that the OP is incorrect in stating that few real black people immigrate to the US (as anyone who has visited certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn can attest).

As an aside, employment-based green cards are a distinct minority of those issued each year. Though there is also a substantial backlog on family-based greencards for certain countries, including India.

The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

Black Americans are, well, American. It's not a symbol of Americans being replaced by foreigners, at all.

Look, there are legitimate criticisms of this- it'll probably get replaced with something incredibly stupid that's supposedly a tribute to black people, negrolatry is seemingly now a legitimate actual thing, anti-White ideologies like to use anti-confederacy(and as sympathetic as I am to the south, the confederacy is factually very easy to criticize) as a motte, etc, etc. But African Americans are not foreigners. You don't have to like blacks(and while I try to treat them well, on a personal level I don't) to acknowledge that their families have been here longer than the median White American's.

Black Americans are, well, American. It's not a symbol of Americans being replaced by foreigners, at all.

Kind of. They are Black Americans, with a society and culture distinct and separate. A kind of parallel society, and one that seems antagonistic to the other Americans. Similar to South Africa, really.

They aren't kind of Americans. They simply are Americans. I'm not eager to get into what defines who is and isn't an American, but it seems pretty clear to me that anyone who's family has been living in the United States for ~2 hundred years (or potentially even longer) is an American with no caveats. Additionally, I don't know if I agree with your framing as African American culture as being separate from the broader culture of the United States. It may be distinct but it certainly is not separate. It certainly isn't comparable to the situation in South Africa where there is a unique African culture and identity that was not shaped by European influences. African American culture in the United States is inextricably entwined with what you might call American culture and it has unquestionably shaped (and been shaped by) the broader culture in the United States.

This. This comment right here.

People on the Motte make a lot of fun, often correctly, of the newest crop of social historians and academics and a lot of the crap they produce. But this comment demonstrates in my eyes quite convincingly that they have something of value buried there.

It’s a classic example of “othering”. American is literally by definition not something you can split up. It refers to nationality, not any sort of subgroup. It refers to a broad group political construct of humans. And deliberately sectioning it off for no good reason only plays into the hands of bad actors. And historically, it’s downright ignorant. America does have a large history of immigration that is literally inseparable from its current makeup.

American is literally by definition not something you can split up. It refers to nationality, not any sort of subgroup. It refers to a broad group political construct of humans.

Source? I disagree, "American" is at least as much cultural as it is political. It's why grinding down immigrant (and native) enclaves was seen as a worthwhile project, why public schools were so massively popular, and why Hollywood was so inmportant both domestically and abroad in shaping what America is. Baseball, Coca-Cola, and apple pie are not political projects, and I absolutely reject any attempt to define them out of any importance to the concept of "America." I'd like to believe that only ivory tower academics could be so disconnected from society that they believe that the only thing American about America is writings on dusty papers.

Mostly agree. And I think most of Maga agrees.

Even for the leftist colonizer camp - black people were forced to America so not colonizers. And don’t have a connection to their homeland. Maga types would think blocking immigration helps black labor.

The only differences that come up would be on the issue of dealing with black criminality with the left. So let us jail the 1-2% of the black population that is a serious problem.

I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.

The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.

You would probably feel the same way, I think, if you were part of a racial minority living in a country where the racial majority had enslaved your ancestors 150 years ago.

Of course, if you want you are free to take a position of political selfishness and just say "screw them, I only care about white people" or "I only care about descendants of the English" or "I only care about my own friends and family", or whatever level you want to take it to.

Political selfishness is of course immoral by any standard definition of morality but it at least has the benefit that unlike every single political ideology, it is internally consistent.

Of course, don't expect people who are not part of your in-group as you define it to back you up if you are honest to them about your political selfishness.

I missed this comment when it was posted. I looked at the replies, and there's a very obvious problem with your statement that seemingly nobody addressed so far, namely that it's overwhelmingly white liberals, not black people, who campaigned and protested to have the statue removed, who vandalized it and generated publicity for the cause, and eventually succeeded in completing the official removal. To the extent that blacks were involved in the entire process, they did so as hangers-on and enablers of said whites, and were at least underrepresented in the entire thing. This is my observation, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't know how to quantify it, but these guys don't look very white. The rest of the photos in this NPR piece highlight a variety of esteemed people of color clarifying their disdain for Lee and police, who are evidently connected in their minds.

Thanks for the link. It seems to show one of the BLM rallies regarding George Floyd's death, with an anti-police message in particular, with Lee's statue being of secondary importance. I have no doubt that many of such protests happened there, as the park around the statue is a convenient and symbolic location for something like that. But this was in 2020, and the public campaign to have the statue removed was in full swing by 2016. Who came up with the idea? Who organized the campaign, wrote articles and petitions etc.? I'm very sure it was mainly white liberals.

The entire fervor for removing Confederate statues, flags, and other icons is one that has been revived within the last decade. And no, linking to some historical griping about it at any point in the last century prior to the 2010s doesn't mean anything. Their removal wasn't some natural conclusion long in the making after distance from the Civil War. It was an opportunity seized during a time when the country was already tilted sideways with Trump and BLM - a time when emotions were constantly overriding everybody's mental buffers. The Confederacy and its legacy were retrofit as the cause and explanation for modern day racial ills, and made a convenient target to destroy in a flex of political power.

Ten years prior you would see the flag on the car in the Dukes of Hazzard remake, and the film even has the playful cognizance to joke about what that means today. Since then, we have awoken to its evil power and must take drastic steps to not just hide it away in a dark vault, but destroy it behind people's backs? I don't believe it, and I would need a lot more than "it makes black people feel bad" (a point of merit) to be at ease with this given I don't trust or agree with any of their other newfound heuristics or behaviors.

I mean, I agree with you it feels a bit like a scapegoat, politically low hanging fruit — but the arguments in favor of Confederate fetishization being a thing of actual harm rather than a cute Southern quirk I think actually do have some internal merit. That’s why it happened so quickly. I think we shouldn’t be so quick to write the whole thing off as a naked power play rather than a sincere effort to right a wrong, long ignored.

The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.

I don't buy this. I'm not going to go to Italy and demand that the Arch of Titus be destroyed as an affront to the Jews. Past a certain amount of time, these monuments are historical and should stay. It's been over fifty years since the civil rights era when black people had enough political power that they could reasonably make a move to destroy monuments to their oppressors. At this point any monuments that are left should be off limits.

I get where you are coming from, but the difference between 2000 years and 150 years is significant. I doubt that more than a tiny handful of black people 2000 years from now will care at all about statues of Confederate figures, if there are even still any around by then. Not that I think most black people even today care much about them, but I think 2000 years vs 150 years is part of the difference between "only a tiny handful care" and "maybe 5% or 10% of the population care".

I get where you are coming from, but the difference between 2000 years and 150 years is significant. I doubt that more than a tiny handful of black people 2000 years from now will care at all about statues of Confederate figures, if there are even still any around by then. Not that I think most black people even today care much about them, but I think 2000 years vs 150 years is part of the difference between "only a tiny handful care" and "maybe 5% or 10% of the population care".

It isn't even 150 years. The Southern resistance to the Civil Rights movement made heavy use of Confederate imagery, including the Battle Flag, and a second round of monument-building. You can argue when that resistance ceased to matter (the last unrepentant segregationist in Congress was Trent Lott who retired in 2007), but certainly within living memory. In so far as white supremacist dead-enders are a thing, they of course still use the Battle Flag for the same purpose.

If Italian anti-Semites started conducting pogroms while waving Arch of Titus flags and Mossad responded by blowing the arch up, I think a lot of pro-Israel motteposters would be sympathetic.

This can read as "when you have power, immediately destroy everything your opponents value or they'll start arguing for some arbitrary statute of limitations".

That would be a foolish way to read it.

You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace. You should value the idea that there is a limit to warfare and strife, that the sword can be sheathed, that people who have fought to the death can reconcile, that bloody civil war can in fact end. It can do this because the people fighting it did not perceive the conflict to be existential, and so at some point they were willing to stop. That is a rare and profoundly valuable virtue, and one that people should not treat with disdain.

You should value the idea of leaders who conduct themselves honorably, even for an evil cause. You should value this because no cause, no nation, no people, not even individuals are ever truly virtuous, as the line of good and evil runs through every human heart. You should value this because people following orders, even bad ones, and obeying what they see as honor and duty, even if woefully misguided, is what makes conflict survivable for a civilization. Fools mock the idea of "just following orders" because they've forgotten what it looks like when generals or the armies they lead don't. Fools mock the the idea of "honor" and "duty" as applied to those they see as villains, because they are stupid enough to believe that morality is a solved problem and that one can simply "do the right thing". Having a historical understanding that amounts to a Saturday morning cartoon, they presume that the moral equilibrium they have received from their present environment via an entirely passive osmosis is obviously and eternally correct.

If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way. If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential. It seems to me that most people advocating this sort of conflict have no conception of the horror they are asking for.

If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way.

If your opponents and everything they value are evil, why should you *want( to coexist with them, unless you absolutely have to?

If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential.

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

Nobody starts a war unless they are confident they can win. Yet, many lose. Humans are irrationally self-confident and overoptimistic. As the infamous Konkvistador said: "War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war proceeds uncertainty collapses."

Perhaps a perfectly rational being could take into account the meta-uncertainty, and only go to war when they were a thousand times sure they could win. But for mere humans, a willingness to coexist acts as a deontology to prevent you from making that kind of costly mistake.

If your opponents and everything they value are evil, why should you want to coexist with them, unless you absolutely have to?

You wouldn't. You're describing at how someone arrives at the mindset I'm describing. But of course, no large-scale, long-term stable collection of humans is actually evil in this sense, and those who come closest are notable by their commitment to the idea that large numbers of their neighbors are irredeemably evil.

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

"I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

History is littered with societies thinking themselves invincible, only to be destroyed in conflict. Sometimes the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, but sometimes the strong break their teeth on the "weak" they attempt to victimize.

History is littered with societies thinking themselves invincible, only to be destroyed in conflict

Except, you can't be destroyed in conflict if there's nobody outside your group to be in conflict with. If you conquer and force to submit and fully assimilate to your group and its ways, or else destroy, the whole rest of humanity, then the entire future of humanity belongs to your group.

Sometimes the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must

I think that not only are we here, but that in this case, "the strong" are indeed so powerful that they have better than even odds of pulling off the above-described world-domination. Again, if you subjugate and exterminate everybody until your group is the only one left, literally the whole of humanity, how is that not a "stable win"? And if you (IME correctly) assess that the odds are good that you can pull it off, then why not?

your group is the only one left, literally the whole of humanity, how is that not a "stable win"?

Queue the schisms.

More comments

If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way. I

So I think this is true. But some elements of what your opponents value have to be up as fair game. If we invade Germany and then as soon as we leave they go right back to building their military and killing Jews and invading Poland, then we haven't really won anything.

If you want your opponent to respect your loss but not wipe you out, you have to respect their victory and give up whatever the inciting issue was. Otherwise they haven't really won and you haven't really lost and you'll go round in circles again soon enough. So it isn't a victory merely a pause in the fighting.

KMC says the South lost the war but won the culture war, they got to venerate their heroes and push Jim Crow and other issues into the rebuilt Union. He doesn't accept the loss of the value that black people are not equal Americans. He wants to keep it. Given that, the culture war at least is not over. Essentially his claim is that re-absorbing the South was a poison pill. That slipped the values they were fighting for back into America at large even though they lost the war.

Given that why shouldn't his symbols be valid targets in the culture war? He hasn't surrendered. He still wants his values to triumph. But that means his values, his symbols, his beliefs have to be valid targets for his opponents still. So they aren't shooting him, they are tearing down his symbols. The war rages on in a new sphere. But it still does rage.

Your points are valid once the war is over and one side actually capitulates.

If your argument is that @KMC's position is incoherent because his premises invalidate the logic by which he claims support for his preferred outcome, I think you are straightforwardly correct. The problem, from my perspective, is that KMC is a white supremacist whose chosen narrative contains considerable dishonesty, and granting his premises without critique advances his cause at the expense of the vast majority of non-white-supremacists. I think people should not do that.

I think if you can invalidate someone's argument, even when you are granting their premises to be true, that is a pretty strong rebuttal of their position. Now I also don't believe many of his premises are true, but some of those are very "squishy" in that it's like poking holes in jelly, you get sticky fingers and the pile just oozes over the holes anyway.

Defining what it means to win the culture war, or whether or not the South was a poison pill or whether black people "should" be seen as 2nd class from the inception of the US despite the "All men are created equal" rhetoric is a large in scope argument which often relies on subjective opinions of morality and who did what in history which takes a lot of time to deconstruct.

Your points are valid once the war is over and one side actually capitulates.

Ah! It is ok to purge an entire movement from public space and from history, unless said movement capitulates, which is defined as there not being any weirdos on obscure forums, who could be interpreted as promoting the movement's worst excesses. I will save your post, and keep it in mind for the future.

We're all obscure weirdos here fella, so if thats a defence of his post it also applies to mine. I have no power over those choosing to destroy statues.

We're all obscure weirdos here fella

Yes that was my point.

I have no power over those choosing to destroy statues.

Power? No. Influence over people on the margins? You might be surprised.

Given that why shouldn't his symbols be valid targets in the culture war? He hasn't surrendered. He still wants his values to triumph.

Then why didn't they tear down the statues 50 years ago?

Tearing down the statues is not being done to hurt actual racists and white supremacists, or they would have been torn down 50 years ago. The fact that they are tearing them down now is evidence that they're not fighting back against the side that lost, but rather against their outgroup, who they can associate with the side that lost even when that's not actually true.

The south is not very likely to reinstate slavery or Jim Crow, however. Yankee values won about race and racism and the south surrendered, it just chose to venerate confederate generals who weren’t happy about losing.

This is some bullshit relativism. There is no honor in serving an evil cause. Although I suppose one can avoid heaping evil upon evil. It is really a perversion of honor and duty to use them for evil. Moral judgment applies to the master and falls on the servants, the tools by themselves have no moral valence.

People who just follow orders mistakenly think they can abdicate their moral responsibility. In voluntarily surrendering their humanity to act like a “good” cog, they ironically ensure that the machine’s work is the only true measure of their morality.

You should value this because no cause, no nation, no people, not even individuals are ever truly virtuous, as the line of good and evil runs through every human heart.

Perhaps, but not down the middle. If you refuse to discriminate between gradations of grey, you cannot condemn anything.

There is no honor in serving an evil cause.

As if you get to define both honor and evil in order to serve your own purpose. If you don't think Lee was honorable, then your definition of honor is so selective as to be meaningless, and I suspect it really just boils to people you agree with. The same could be said of evil.

In voluntarily surrendering their humanity to act like a “good” cog, they ironically ensure that the machine’s work is the only true measure of their morality.

If there's anyone who is going around dehumanizing it's you. There are many reasons why someone would follow orders beyond voluntarily surrendering their humanity. The most obvious one being fear of punishment or reprisal, and it's so obvious I wonder how you could have omitted it from your perspective.

then your definition of honor is so selective as to be meaningless, and I suspect it really just boils to people you agree with

If the goodness of a cause is too subjective to judge people from, what makes honor any better a standard? The concept of honor also varies quite a lot from time to time and from place to place -- it's not like one can't construct a coherent definition of honor that does not include Lee's conduct.

As if you get to define both honor and evil in order to serve your own purpose.

I was disputing FC’s point that we should value leaders who conduct themselves “honorably”, even for an evil cause. If you want to make the case that the confederacy was not evil, that’s a different argument (and one I am less interested in).

There’s a semi-famous 18th century german general whose epitaph reads “Wählte Ungnade, wo Gehorsam keine Ehre brach’(‘Chose disgrace, when obedience brought no honor’. ) They aren’t the same thing.

There are many reasons why someone would follow orders beyond voluntarily surrendering their humanity. The most obvious one being fear of punishment or reprisal, and it's so obvious I wonder how you could have omitted it from your perspective.

Coercion is an excuse for doing evil, my problem is with the claim that following evil orders is worthy of praise/honorable/good.

This is some bullshit relativism. There is no honor in serving an evil cause. Although I suppose one can avoid heaping evil upon evil. It is really a perversion of honor and duty to use them for evil. Moral judgment applies to the master and falls on the servants, the tools by themselves have no moral valence.

May I ask what your moral framework is based on? Are you religious? Deontological at least? Or is all this moral condemnation cast in the name of unmaximized utilons?

People who just follow orders mistakenly think they can abdicate their moral responsibility.

That's the basic argument against "just following orders" that he directly addressed. He wasn't talking about how it absolves anyone of moral responsibility, he was saying you might want to think twice before you wish for armies that don't follow orders.

Perhaps, but not down the middle. If you refuse to discriminate between gradations of grey, you cannot condemn anything.

Saying "we shouldn't purge the world of statues of honorable men fighting for the wrong cause" is not "refusing to discriminate between shades of grey".

May I ask what your moral framework is based on?

Mostly utilitarian, but golden rule with some bells and whistles also works. As in: Do I want people to behave honorably when serving an evil master that is harming me and others? No, I want them to be as dishonorable as possible, and stab the guy in the back.

He wasn't talking about how it absolves anyone of moral responsibility, he was saying you might want to think twice before you wish for armies that don't follow orders.

I don’t see the argument. How would the world have been worse off if Lee, and the rest of the confederacy, had decided that their cause and this war was a stupid, disgraceful affair?

Saying "we shouldn't purge the world of statues of honorable men fighting for the wrong cause" is not "refusing to discriminate between shades of grey".

He spoke generally, and I was responding to those claims. Such as:

one can[not] simply "do the right thing"

I can give him this line every time the woke do something he doesn’t approve of.

‘they see morality as a solved problem’ and ‘[as] obviously and eternally correct ‘

strawmannish.

Mostly utilitarian

Well then, I'm sorry but I can't take your moral outrage seriously.

As in: Do I want people to behave honorably when serving an evil master that is harming me and others? No, I want them to be as dishonorable as possible, and stab the guy in the back.

People serving an evil master behaving as dishonorable as possible will only rarely mean that they stab your enemy in the back and immediately surrender to you.

I don’t see the argument. How would the world have been worse off if Lee, and the rest of the confederacy, had decided that their cause and this war was a stupid, disgraceful affair?

Armies not following orders don't do whatever the hell you want them to do, they do whatever the hell they want to do.

He spoke generally, and I was responding to those claims. Such as:

He spoke in the context of "You should value statues of Lee because...".

I can give him this line every time the woke do something he doesn’t approve of.

You could, if his argument is that no one should argue that the cause the Confederacy was fighting for was wrong, not that it's valid for southerners to keep some statues of Lee around.

strawmannish.

No it's not. I don't know what they teach nowadays, but when I was growing up it was a pretty standard "Lesson One" from historians, that you shouldn't judge the past by today's standards, and it's pretty clear to me that this is what's happening here.

Either way I fail to see how this has anything to do with your "Perhaps, but not down the middle. If you refuse to discriminate between gradations of grey, you cannot condemn anything" argument.

More comments

How would the world have been worse off if Lee, and the rest of the confederacy, had decided that their cause and this war was a stupid, disgraceful affair?

You're asking the question "what if this one specific army didn't follow orders in this one specific way". A general principle of "armies don't need to follow orders" won't result in that specific situation and nothing else.

It's like saying "what if the police didn't obey the law... in this one situation where it happened to be a good thing to frame a suspect". You can't have police who will only frame one single guilty suspect. You can only have police who mistreat suspects in general.

More comments

You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace. You should value the idea that there is a limit to warfare and strife, that the sword can be sheathed, that people who have fought to the death can reconcile, that bloody civil war can in fact end. It can do this because the people fighting it did not perceive the conflict to be existential, and so at some point they were willing to stop. That is a rare and profoundly valuable virtue, and one that people should not treat with disdain.

Why? It seems clear the idea is not true -- both the woke and the Palestinians vs. Israelis demonstrate this. If when I'm in power I treat my defeated enemies magnanimously, and when they're in power they crush me under their boot indefinitely, then their victories will be lasting and permanent and mine will be precarious and fleeting.

If you cannot make peace with an enemy, you had better win. If you cannot make peace with any enemy, if every conflict you engage in inevitably becomes existential, if the mere fact that the other side is willing to fight you means they must be exterminated, you are already doomed.

If you cannot make peace with any enemy, if every conflict you engage in inevitably becomes existential, if the mere fact that the other side is willing to fight you means they must be exterminated, you are already doomed.

Only if you eventually lose. If every conflict you engage in inevitably becomes existential, but you win them all, eventually you exterminate everyone else, and the whole world is yours.

If you cannot make peace with an enemy, you had better win.

If you can't make peace with an enemy, but your enemy has scruples, you don't need to win. If you lose he'll leave you alone to try again. If you lose that, he'll leave you alone for a third try. Repeat until you eventually win.

Repeat until you eventually win.

Or your enemy runs out of scruples, of course.

I'd also want destruction to be off limits so long as there's anyone willing to move the monument to private property, but surely such removal should be an allowable option when it's practical. "Must we commemorate X in the public square just because our great-great-grandparents wanted to?" seems like a reasonable proposition to vote "no" to.

If for some reason we can add monuments but not remove them, though, might I suggest a design for a new line of Anti-Abduction monuments? They'll each be basically a stereotypical barred jail cell, symbolizing the ironic fate that should await those who hold innocent people against their will - and the best part is that, since the design is hollow, it can be erected without using too much space by placing it around other monuments!

In the same vein - Given that Confederates were enacting the inherent right of an armed people to seek justice against an oppressive government, we could add the symbol of people's justice (i.e. a noose) to the statues? Given that Confederates were resisting Northern tyranny in the name of God-ordained right, could we perhaps add a symbol of divine justice as well, in the form of brimstone candles around the base of the statue?

There is something a pretty about a defaced statue. I much prefer that than having it be taken down. I can imagine many artistic ways of 'tastefully defacing' a statue than crudely spraying red paint on.

A statue that's taken down erases history. A defaced statue keeps all the layers of social change intact. If that's too much to ask, then I'd be all for relocating these statues to a civil war museum that accurately portrays these complex figures for who they were, without glorifying them. And please, do not replace it with George Floyd. Black people deserve better immortalized figures.

I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them

I'm sure there's somebody around Charlottesville who would love to have a Robert E. Lee statue in his backyard?

There were many, but the city council chose to give it to hateful blacks running a museum who wanted it destroyed, and so it was.

Nothing wrong happened to black Americans. Let’s think about the stats America imported something like 400k black slaves. Today we have 47.2 million black Americans. The richest black people in the world are American.

It’s literally one of the most successful ethnic communities in the entire world.

Anyone in Africa who had a choice between getting enslaved or not for the long turn evolutionary success of his gene pool would choose enslavement.

Nothing wrong happened to black Americans.

Do you mean this distributively (slavery involved no wrong actions against black Americans) or collectively (as a class, black Americans were benefited by slavery)?

Fair critique

Nothing wrong happened to black Americans

Typical motte and bailey. Sentence that by most people would be interpreted as "nothing wrong happened to individual black Americans" but if called out you can insist that you just mean that "in general, blacks as a group are doing better than they were 400 years ago".

I've read some of your other posts and based on that I am guessing that probably when you are in an objective sort of mood, you're not stupid enough to actually believe "nothing wrong happened to black Americans".

If the same thing had happened to your ethnic group that happened to the enslaved Africans, there is approximately a 99.99999999% chance that you would not be writing something like what you wrote about blacks about your own ethnic group on an alternate history version of The Motte.

Fair critique. Honestly just wanted to play the other side especially when you said Japanese could legitimately tear down FDR statues.

Had a drink or two last night and and I do lose some nuance then. Sure I can’t say nothing wrong happened. But there’s also obviously something that was going on in America that slavery wasn’t that bad. I guess I don’t like agreeing with the left that America is some rotten and evil place and the worst thing America did created a thriving community.

100% guarantee if it happened to my people I would take the same view. I’m autistic enough and lacking in social desirability bias to get there.

Also I don’t think comparing to Latvians or Poles with Russian figures is fair. They suffered genocide which American slavery didn’t. And there’s no argument those communities are better off. Even cultural genocide didn’t happen as during the institution of slavery and after they ended up creating a globally recognized culture. One could argue the second most globally influential culture behind the broader American culture.

As an occasional drunk-poster myself, I can sympathize. I usually lose a lot of nuance when I'm drunk.

Regarding the Latvian/Pole comparison, the thing is yes they suffered genocide to some degree, but I doubt that the number of people who were killed by the USSR's political repressions in those places is statistically very different as a percentage from the number of blacks who died in various ways as a result of slavery (overworked, killed while trying to escape, etc.).

The USSR also did not destroy Latvian and Polish culture any more significantly than American slavery destroyed the culture of the slaves, when you look at it from the slaves' perspective. Yes, the practice of slavery did not destroy the African cultures that the slaves were originally from, but from the perspective of the enslaved subset, it was a near-total cultural erasure.

As brutal as the USSR was, it is not like pre-USSR Latvian and Polish cultures got destroyed.

Black American culture is thriving in many ways, and is certainly globally recognized, but I think this is because black Americans' most popular cultural products, such as athletic performance and music, are ones in which black Americans as a group are just better at creating really popular things than Poles and Latvians are, and also have the benefit of using English, one of the world's most widely known languages, and having access to the US' pop media marketing and distribution machine, the strongest in world history. Sure, there is no globally famous Polish version of Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan, but I don't think this is caused by what the USSR did to Poland.

but if called out you can insist that you just mean that "in general, blacks as a group are doing better than they were 400 years ago".

Not just 400 years ago. Better than they would have, if Europeans never interacted with them.

Not that I agree with him, but I'm not a consequentialist / utilitarian.

Make sure to remember that when a custodian AI provides you with your cattle cage and reassures you that your gene pool will live on for millennia, in identical cages.

I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.

The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.

In your opinion, should Japanese Americans be allowed to destroy all statues of FDR?

Yes

Fair enough.

I have to assume you mean this WaPo article.

If so, I guess I’d better head off any misunderstandings. There’s really no sense in getting heated over this long-dead loser. Even in its current state, this statue holds together better than the Lost Cause mythos. It’s more defensible than the Confederacy, too. I think Lee’s just getting caught up with what Sherman did to Georgia.

Also, it looks like the detractors are doing this legally. I don’t see why you should get the final say over whether Lee’s body parts get to remain in a Union.

  • -11

Also, it looks like the detractors are doing this legally. I don’t see why you should get the final say over whether Lee’s body parts get to remain in a Union.

I never raised any legal argument. I don't care if it's legal or not. What I care about is the symbolism, and the meaning of tearing down statues now, in the last ten years, or really just since 2017, and destroying them today. I thought I was pretty clear about that.

You were clear.

I mentioned that it was legal as a contrast with other statue-toppling protests. An amateur demolition mob is a form of heckler’s veto, which I dislike. Thing is, I don’t want to give your viewpoint a special veto, either. Someone downthread mentioned the lack of a statu(t)e of limitations. There’s no principled reason why the existence of this, or any, particular statue must be protected.

It is a difference of opinion. You don’t like what the demolition represents. Others do. I’m content to resolve this conflict just as we do most others: with due process.

Even in its current state, this statue holds together better than the Lost Cause mythos. It’s more defensible than the Confederacy, too.

I don't know. Personally, I consider myself a rather patriotic American, and I have no particular sadness that it remains a single country, and no particular fondness for the idea of the Confederacy. In general, I'm of the opinion that while political division is sometimes necessary, union is preferable because we really are stronger together when we peacefully work out our differences.

That said, I find it amusing at a principled level that modern neoliberalism doesn't seem to have met a separatist group it doesn't like: see the cause of Scottish secession, 20th century ex-colonial independence movements, and more recent splits like Kosovo and South Sudan, or even supporting an independent Ukraine against Russia. There's a lot of political momentum behind the idea of self determination -- as long as you're not from Virginia or Georgia: American jurisdiction is indivisible for any reason. One could point to slavery as the key point of contention, but that rule isn't exactly applied consistently: France's interests in North Africa were originally justified as ending the Barbary slave trade, and ongoing human trafficking in the region to this day apparently doesn't justify external political control (which I personally agree with!).

Under my principles, I'd rather maintain the US as it is, but I think one can make a reasonable argument about "Biden's 120,000 active-duty troops at Fort Benning Moore occupying Georgia" that comes across a reasonable fraction as convincing as the Chinese in Tibet, US troops in Afghanistan, or any number of similar cases that the world seems to agree are morally-questionable "occupation".

That said, I find it amusing at a principled level that modern neoliberalism doesn't seem to have met a separatist group it doesn't like

No, that's not really true. Secessions are very rare, compared to how many secessionist movements there are; as a rule, the acceptance of a secession requires the acceptance of the country which the original seceeding country originally belonged to, and as one might imagine this doesn't happen that often. Somaliland hasn't been granted independence even though it has in practice functioned as a country for decades and is commonly seen as vastly more functional than Somalia. Why? Because Somalia hasn't granted it independence.

Yes, there's a counterargument - Kosovo - but it's the expection, not the rule, and the Western acceptance of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence (which most countries of the world haven't accepted) was predicated on the idea that Serbia had been ready to implement an actual genocide there. The ex-colonial countries and South Sudan were different, since their independence was granted by the country's original owner, and Ukraine is not even in the same category, since the country it seceeded from - Soviet Union - doesn't even exist. (The idea of Ukraine as some sort of a secessionist entity from Russia requires one to purchase into Russian nationalist narratives generally.)

Here's how EU - certainly an organization that could be seen as one of the main pillars of modern neoliberalism - reacted to the vote of independence in Catalonia.

Scottish secession

British 'neoliberals', however you want to define them, mostly don't like Scottish independence. Blair, Cameron etc., but broadly there is no decisive left-right political valence to it. Unionists run the gamut of the British and Scottish political spectrum, from Andrew Neil to Brown to George Galloway.

One could point to slavery as the key point of contention, but that rule isn't exactly applied consistently:

The point isn't just the South wasn't entitled self-determination because of slavery - it's that there was nothing to secession except slavery. There was no other real grievance or basis for 'national feeling' than that institution.

Georgia

They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.

Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them.

The faithless conduct of our adversaries is not confined to such acts as might aggrandize themselves or their section of the Union. They are content if they can only injure us. The Constitution declares that persons charged with crimes in one State and fleeing to another shall be delivered up on the demand of the executive authority of the State from which they may flee, to be tried in the jurisdiction where the crime was committed. It would appear difficult to employ language freer from ambiguity, yet for above twenty years the non-slave-holding States generally have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property. Our confederates, with punic faith, shield and give sanctuary to all criminals who seek to deprive us of this property or who use it to destroy us. This clause of the Constitution has no other sanction than their good faith; that is withheld from us; we are remediless in the Union; out of it we are remitted to the laws of nations.

A similar provision of the Constitution requires them to surrender fugitives from labor. This provision and the one last referred to were our main inducements for confederating with the Northern States. Without them it is historically true that we would have rejected the Constitution. In the fourth year of the Republic Congress passed a law to give full vigor and efficiency to this important provision. This act depended to a considerable degree upon the local magistrates in the several States for its efficiency. The non-slave-holding States generally repealed all laws intended to aid the execution of that act, and imposed penalties upon those citizens whose loyalty to the Constitution and their oaths might induce them to discharge their duty. Congress then passed the act of 1850, providing for the complete execution of this duty by Federal officers. This law, which their own bad faith rendered absolutely indispensible for the protection of constitutional rights, was instantly met with ferocious revilings and all conceivable modes of hostility.

The South seceded because they were tired of the North ignoring all of their agreements and reneging on their established constitution. Yes, the North defected due to slavery, and the South seceded due to that defection. There were also free trade vs protectionist arguments raised where the North was being subsidized while the South was left to fend for itself, on the federal governments dime.

The South seceded because they were tired of the North ignoring all of their agreements and reneging on their established constitution. Yes, the North defected due to slavery, and the South seceded due to that defection. There were also free trade vs protectionist arguments raised where the North was being subsidized while the South was left to fend for itself, on the federal governments dime.

It's interesting how you frame this. You really want to deny that the South seceded over slavery, but rather, it was because the North was being ungentlemanly in not upholding their agreements. Even if we accept that latter claim (which is not really true, North and South both tried to scuttle previous agreements whenever they had the leverage to do so), it is still the South seceding over slavery. The agreements they most objected to being violated were agreements about allowing slavery in new territories, agreements that would have increased the abolitionist vote, agreements about literally suppressing abolitionist speech, and agreements about returning fugitive slaves. "The North defected on the slavery issue and the South seceded because of that" is just a clever way to rephrase "The South seceded over slavery."

North was being ungentlemanly

I would say dishonest, violent, radical, unconstitutional, and illegal rather than ungentlemanly.

it is still the South seceding over slavery

It is the South withdrawing her consent to the Union, and each of her Free and Independent Sovereign States deciding to discard one Union and to form another. And the reason was not because of slavery, but because of federalism and the threat to that status as Free and Independent Sovereign States. Sure enough, after the Civil War, nobody really considered any of the states either free or independent or sovereign, so I'd say they had the right outlook, correctly predicted what their opponents wanted, and correctly resisted it when it became obvious that conflict could not be avoided.

I would say dishonest, violent, radical, unconstitutional, and illegal rather than ungentlemanly.

Well, you can say that, but given that the South literally wanted it to be a capital crime to advocate for abolitionism, I do not believe that they really had much regard for Constitutionality. As for "violence," there was a contemporaneous cartoon about that.

It is the South withdrawing her consent to the Union, and each of her Free and Independent Sovereign States deciding to discard one Union and to form another.

I understand you want "Should states have the right to secede?" to be completely orthogonal to "Should states have the right to maintain slavery?" but every objection to federalism and "sovereignty" was about slavery. In the abstract, sure, there are many interesting arguments to be had about whether the Constitution itself was a betrayal of the original Articles of Confederation. But while I used to buy "states rights" as a legitimate (if misguided) defense for the South, once you start reading history, you realize that the only states rights they really cared enough about to secede over were slavery. Note that one of their core objections was that Northern states would not enforce laws like the Fugitive Slave Act within Northern territories.

you realize that the only states rights they really cared enough about to secede over were slavery

Which is why they didn't agree to the Constitution until they had assurances that it was under their control. I view that they are right in that assessment, you seem to think that they should have just rolled over and quit.

Note that one of their core objections was that Northern states would not enforce laws like the Fugitive Slave Act within Northern territories.

If Massachusetts didn't want to return fugitive slaves, they shouldn't have agreed to the Constitution that requires that of them.

Article IV

Section 2

The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Making Abolition punishable by death is just as unconstitutional as refusing to return fugitive slaves, by the words of the one and only constitution. Only one side was able to impose their unconstitutional vision on the other.

More comments

North ignoring all of their agreements

This is just credulously swallowing Southern propaganda whole, on several counts. Apart from the trivial point of 'ignoring their agreements about what' (i.e. slavery), there are several things to say here. Firstly, as Potter the 'compromise' of 1850 was never really so - it was in fact an armistice, with both sides ready to press an advantage if they felt they had it. Nothing wrong with this, it's just politics, but the point is both sides acted fairly similarly. If we want to talk about ignoring agreements, what about Dred Scott, which Southerners were only too happy to celebrate, or the attempts to advance the Lecompton constitution, the latter of which made a mockery of democracy and any pretence at popular sovereignty.

The fact is that the highest priority of most of the South - or the planter elite that dominated politics at any rate - was the continuation of slavery, and 'constitutional' government important mostly insofar as it protected that institution.

There are so many relevant quotes here, but perhaps John W. Overall summed up the Southern mindset best.

"The people of the South," says a contemporary, "are not fighting for slavery, but for independence."

Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new fangled heresy---a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland.

Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the ground work.

France's interests in North Africa were originally justified as ending the Barbary slave trade,

I understand that the early US made military efforts against this as well, if I'm not mistaken.

It was a major pain for European states, and already Charles V tried to put an end to it in in 1535.

I'm upset that there haven't been more movies made about it. America's second major war was against Muslims to stop slavery... of white Americans. There's was a lot to expore and comment on post-9/11 and post BLM.

The destruction of civil war statues is symbolic of a culture war the American right lost 150 years ago. More damning is their failure, again and again, to not lose culture wars five, ten, twenty, fifty years ago. As someone said here last time this topic came up, this is like complaining about the destruction of statues of some long dead king, whose values were eradicated, whose mission was abandoned, whose faith disintegrated, whose identity has vanished. Whatever old Dixie was, whatever it meant, it’s gone.

The statues are the last thing to go, after everything else. If they are anything, they’re only coffee and petit fours after an entire meal of cultural destruction and defeat. If you’re complaining about statues, you lost the battle aeons ago.

This statue was erected in the 20th century. They were winning the culture war at that time.

They lost the conventional war 150 years ago, not the culture war.

The statues are the last thing to go, after everything else.

The statues being destroyed precedes the people the statues represent being destroyed.

people the statues represent

Confederates?

Americans.

I feel it would be a strange choice to represent Americans as a whole by a man who fought in a war specifically to not be American. (Assuming by "America" you refer to the United States of America and not to the American continent as a whole, but in the latter case I don't see how you can't consider Hispanics to be not American too). I'll admit I'm not American in either sense, so there might well be a third interpretation I haven't thought of yet.

Well, he was Virginian, not American, but the statue was built fifty years after his death, by Americans who had chosen him to represent them.

Well it sounds like they want to replace it with a statue of a different American, so I guess it's a wash.

Did I miss something?

Just what you wrote:

slated to be replaced with some statue for black people

This statue was erected in the 20th century. They were winning the culture war at that time.

The Union states allowed the South to put up some Lee statues and teach the lost cause as a consolation prize in the early 20th century for being politically, culturally and economically fucked by Yankees, and this counts as winning the culture war?

What counts as winning the culture war is resisting then ending Reconstruction within 12 years of the end of the lost conventional war.

The confederates lost the conventional war and won the culture war.

In the end slavery ended, reconstruction ended, segregation ended, the south was forcibly integrated by the federal government with minimal resistance, and Southerners today are among the most patriotic good little Americans with the Stars and Stripes flying behind their picket fences. So again, what culture war did they really win?

The one that allowed them to raise all the statues, name all the bases, and revere their own figures, probably. And that forcible integration went both ways. Where did Jim Crow come from if not from the culture of the South? The war they lost wasn't 150 years ago, it was 50 years ago. You're off by a full century, at least.

Is there any point in the 150 years since the end of the Civil War where, looking at the United States, Confederates would have more positive opinions of how things went culturally than the Yankees? The tasteful statues dedicated to them aside.

Even people who publicly fly the Stars and Bars mostly do it to piss off their domestic opponents, not because of any real ideological affinity to Confederates. It's almost certainly positively correlated with flying the same Star Spangled Banner that killed a quarter million Confederates.

The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.

I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.

They feel unwelcome in the country of their birth because they are, collectively speaking, an underclass with significantly worse outcomes by every single measure we have available, and by some important measures their position is getting significantly worse over time. Murder rates, for instance.

Destroying this statue is not going to change that one iota. what it is going to do is cement just a little more firmly the idea that racism is the cause of all Black America's ills, a completely unsupportable claim whose promotion has all but precluded a positive resolution to any of Black America's problems.

This conversation is about a statue, because no one wants to talk about how Blue Tribe lying to the black community for decades has resulted in a couple thousand extra dead black people per year for the last three years and likely for the next decade or more, as a consequence of the largest increase in the violent crime rate ever recorded. When all the statues are gone, the crime and dysfunction will remain, and the social cohesion needed to actually engage the problem productively will be absent because it was all burned on blame-the-outgroup purity spirals like this one.

Destroying this statue improves nothing, achieves nothing, accomplishes nothing. It burns social cohesion for no benefit, locks us further into a fundamentally adversarial view of our history, feeds a culture of grievance that can never, ever be satisfied. It's shortsighted and stupid and suicidal, but what else is new?

They feel unwelcome in the country of their birth because they are a different people and they don't have a nation for themselves.

Yet, Tajiks in Uzbekistan feel themselves totally welcome in a nation made up by the Russians (Uzbeks aren't themselves even Uzbeks). Countless minorities feel welcome in America from Sicilians, to Lebanese, to Irish, and so on. Why not blacks?

I don't know why not. Not really, not fully. I'm more talking about recognizing the world as it is more than explaining why the world is as it is.

So I guess the question for you is - what constitutes 'a different people'?

You could go for a race- or biology-based definition, or even just an appearance-based definition. African-Americans are a different people in a way that excludes them from the American polity because they have dark skin or African heritage, whereas, say, Italians are not. Personally I think this argument would be weak; you have to start making some really arbitrary distinctions around different populations, particularly if you start considering East Asians or Middle Easterners or Indians, all of whom seem to have been included in America much more successfully.

Probably a more fruitful approach would be to emphasise culture? You could argue that African-Americans, and specifically legacy African-Americans (so e.g. a first-generation immigrant from Ghana or Nigeria is not included) have, for contingent historical reasons, formed their own insular culture separate from and perhaps hostile to the wider American culture? Put this way the solution is not to get rid of all black people but rather to encourage the dismantling of this culture and the rehabilitation of African-Americans into a more positive culture - think of the conclusions of the Moynihan Report, and a strain of conservative activism around this area ever since.

Lee fought against America and the statue was put up 60 years after the end of the civil war.

Also very confusing to me how you see Robert E Lee as an American but a statue for “black people” is for foreigners? Calling this a step to genocide is baffling beyond belief.

I don't consider blacks and Americans to be the same thing. Americans are a distinct ethnic people. Hyphenated Americans are not Americans, that's why they carry the hyphen as a mark of distinction. If they considered themselves American, they wouldn't call themselves African Americans, and if they considered themselves to be part of the same nation, they wouldn't have their own black national anthem. They are a separate people.

However, they are not foreigners. The foreigners are the hispanics, africans, and asians pouring over our Southern border.

I hope this helps you understand.

If they considered themselves American, they wouldn't call themselves African Americans

What about Virginians who called themselves Virginians? And actively fought to secede from America? Did they "consider themselves American"?

I'm not intending to derail the point you're making in this larger thread, but I come to you with open curiosity.

I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is black. My mother's side of the family has been in the US since the 1700s, her genealogy contains Revolutionary and Civil War veterans. As descendants of American slaves in Alabama, presumably my father's side of the family has been in the US since some date before it became illegal to import new slaves (1808 officially, though illegal smuggling continued into the 1840s and 50s).

When forms ask me for race information, I select "black", "multiple races", or some combination of those depending on what the form allows, but in general, I do consider myself "black" and I don't consider myself "white". If it's relevant to you, I have the complexion of a Lenny Kravitz or Barack Obama. That I don't consider myself "white" was not a choice I made and imposed on myself - I've never heard a definition of "white" that doesn't exclude me. Generally, my experience is that other people tell you what racial category or categories you belong to, and you say "okay, thanks".

I grew up around black and white (and biracial) kids. The neighborhood I grew up in was mixed, the public schools I went to were mixed, and the social circles I keep in my adulthood are not self-segregated by race. None of the black Americans I have ever known, even the ones at the radical ends of the political spectrum, have given me the impression that in their day to day life they think of themselves as part of a separate, distinct black 'nation' in the way you describe. Maybe this was more broadly true in, say, the late 19th and early 20th century? I don't want to imply the perspective doesn't exist period, just that I don't think it is a predictive way to model the modal black American experience and viewpoint.

I have always primarily considered myself an American. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean -- 'human' comes strictly before 'American', but you know what I mean.)

Would you say that's factually wrong? (And does this hold true for my descendants? Would the race of my kids' mother dictate what their fate as potential unqualified Americans would be - does it change if my lineage bends toward 'whiter', toward 'blacker', or becomes further diluted by another race?)

Would the answer change based on whether I did or didn't think of myself as "black" or "African-American"? Is it more about self-identification than about actual ancestry? Do I have to "choose a side" so to speak? Can I choose?

Again, it isn't my intention to derail here, and I hope I haven't pulled too far off the topic of Civil War statues (I think opposing Confederate public monuments is not morally imperative, but not morally damning - my perspective on that isn't very interesting). This is just the first time I've come across this particular viewpoint re: black Americans not being full Americans.

Btw, I have no idea what the black national anthem is.

EDIT: Oh, Lift Every Voice and Sing? Well, I won't lie, I know the song and I've always thought it was beautiful. We sung it in our (mixed) elementary school choir in the early 1990s. I knew it was a black Christian hymn written in the early 1900s about liberation from slavery, and that it was a go-to hymn during the Civil Rights era. It looks like the NAACP said it was the 'black national anthem' in 1919. That's news to me, but okay.

This is a good post with good points and I want to respond with honesty.

I am making a distinction in the words I choose to use in order to say something about myself, and to claim some piece of territory for those I consider close or like to me. I do this in response to what I see as encroachment by people unlike me. Naturally this brings the question of what is like to me, and what is unlike to me, and that is not an easy question for me to answer.

I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is black. My mother's side of the family has been in the US since the 1700s, her genealogy contains Revolutionary and Civil War veterans.

I'd like to parallel this sentence for effect and reciprocation.

I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is white. My patrilineal lines on both sides have been in the US since the 1700s, but there are white immigrant wives up both sides of the line, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Catholics, too.

When forms ask me for race information, I select "black", "multiple races", or some combination of those depending on what the form allows, but in general, I do consider myself "black" and I don't consider myself "white". If it's relevant to you, I have the complexion of a Lenny Kravitz or Barack Obama. That I don't consider myself "white" was not a choice I made and imposed on myself - I've never heard a definition of "white" that doesn't exclude me. Generally, my experience is that other people tell you what racial category or categories you belong to, and you say "okay, thanks".

The bold part is the second-most important piece of information I'm using to determine how you or I can identify like. You don't consider yourself to be the same race as the woman who gave birth to you, which is baffling to me. I understand it, I suppose, in the regular way that something odd you've lived with your whole life is normal while still remaining odd. To contrast you to Barack Obama: you both have white American mothers. Both of them are what I would consider American in the same way that much but not all of my ancestry was. Your father I would consider African American, while Barack's is not American in any way but rather foreign. I would consider you both Mulatto, were that word not considered in poor taste.

Which brings me along nicely to your last point. In your experience people tell you what race you are and you say OK. In my experience what I'm expected to call people changes frequently. I've gone through several iterations of the euphemism treadmill in just my lifetime, and I can see how it worked in the past.

I have, throughout my life, always primarily considered myself an American.

Me too, I just didn't consider my race to be American my whole life. That came much more recently.

I am curious about your perspective on whether I should, or even can, say or believe that I am simply an American.

Unequivocally yes. Your parents, grandparents, and so on were all born here, going back centuries, though not millennia. You're more American than I am, as I have so many white immigrants marrying in to the Native American stock. I should lampshade the know-nothings, as it was that movement that inspired my reconsideration of what I could consider myself. I'm making American distinct from African American, which are both distinct from Indian (not to be confused with Bharat), and the three of which I consider the three groups who can be considered native to this continent.

Would the race of my kids' mother dictate what their fate as potential unqualified Americans would be - does it change if my lineage bends toward 'whiter', toward 'blacker', or becomes further diluted by another race?)

It would depend on the trichotomy I outlined. I don't think anyone whose ancestors weren't on this continent before it stretched from sea to shining sea can claim to be American. If you marry a French woman, then your children will be less American than you, even if they are Whiter. If you marry a Swede, you will have Swedish children, half American.

Would the answer change based on whether I did or didn't think of myself as "black" or "African-American"? Is it more about self-identification than about actual ancestry? Do I have to "pick a side" so to speak? Can I pick the 'American' side in that hypothetical?

Yes, unequivocally. If you specifically think that you do not share your race with your mother, then I am not going to argue with you. If you want to lay claim to her heritage, you need to lay claim to her heritage. And yes again, picking a side is critical, which is why I'm trying to choose my own, and I'm doing it in response to what I see as blacks, mostly, but increasingly other minorities in America, choosing a side that doesn't include me, and doesn't include your mother, and doesn't include Robert Lee. Self-identification is a necessary condition,

I hope I haven't pulled the thread too far off the topic of Civil War statues.

Not at all, it's not about the statue and it never was. It's about the people.

As for the postscript, the Black National Anthem is not something I had ever heard of either, and it wasn't the NAACP that brought it to my attention, and nothing in 1919 matters to the discussion. It was the NFL that did that. They had the National Anthem sung at the beginning of each week 1 game as usual, but then followed it with the Black National Anthem. It had a real impact on me, because it laid bare in the starkest terms that the anthem protests of the last eight years started. These people who protest really do not feel represented by the anthem. They felt it so strongly that they got another anthem to be played in sequence, as if it were the Canadian anthem when the Blue Jays visit, or the national anthems are played at the Olympics.

(First of all, thank you for the informative and honest reply - and I apologize for my relentless edit-preening of my own posts - luckily I'm pretty sure I didn't add or remove anything of substance while you were replying, just streamlining phrasing and other minor choices.)

The bold part is the second-most important piece of information I'm using to determine how you or I can identify like. You don't consider yourself to be the same race as the woman who gave birth to you, which is baffling to me. I understand it, I suppose, in the regular way that something odd you've lived with your whole life is normal while still remaining odd.

This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.

The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.

My impression is that claiming whiteness for myself would be widely seen as not only incorrect, but essentially fraudulent - whiteness, as it exists in the American perspective, is about not being mixed-race. It's what I understand the point of whiteness to be. I don't mean to point this out in a way that implies that it's unjust or that I feel that I deserve entry into whiteness and that it is being denied to me - it is what it is, value-neutral.

I concede that I might be wrong about this, and that say, Barack Obama could've been welcomed with open arms into the 'white' (or 'American') racial ingroup had he simply chosen to, but I am skeptical.

(Maybe one difference between the traditional 'white' ethnic group and your 'American' ethnic group is that biracial people can opt-in to the latter and not the former.)

Neither of my parents ever explicitly called me anything but "mixed" -- that was the terminology of the day, I think "biracial" has superseded it, I don't really know or keep up either. Neither side of the family ever called me white, but interestingly, neither side of the family ever called me black, either. That I picked up afterward, from friends (white and black and otherwise) calling me black, then later sampling the broader world for clues about what I ought to call myself. It always boiled down to "If you're half black, you're black. And, if you're half black, you're not white."

So, I don't know on this point. Like I said, in a vacuum, I agree with you that it should be equally appropriate for me to claim the race of either or both of my parents.

Which brings me along nicely to your last point. In your experience people tell you what race you are and you say OK. In my experience what I'm expected to call people changes frequently. I've gone through several iterations of the euphemism treadmill in just my lifetime, and I can see how it worked in the past.

Yeah I'm more or less with you on this one, although I also think the treadmill is inevitable. I can't tell you the last time I heard someone unironically call themselves "African-American" in a casual context. To me it sounds impersonally clinical and weird, like when someone says "females" instead of "women" in a casual conversation.

But I'm on the back end of the treadmill, too. "People of color" has always been a very clunky phrase to me, and makes me feel bad for how disorienting it must be for people who had to unlearn "colored people" within their own lifetimes. Plus it's too broad, since it just means "not white people" it implies a coalition or community that doesn't exist for any practical purpose. I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color), which I don't see having a lot of mileage outside of identity activist spaces, but hey, I've been wrong before.

In actual American black communities, people don't say "people of color" unless they're specifically doing race identity coalition activism, which they ... usually aren't. And anecdotally, the very small number of people I've ever heard say "BIPOC" out loud have been white terminally online leftists. We're ... safe from that one I think, fingers crossed. My condolences to all the Latinxs out there.

The good news I bring is that it's fine to say 'black', it's fine to say 'black' if you're white, it's way simpler than anything else, it seems pretty stable as an identifier, and it's what the vast majority of black people in the US talk about and think of themselves as.

Personally I think 'mulatto' should be allowed back and should bring fun hyperspecific terms like 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' back along with it, but I don't control these things.

Yes, unequivocally. If you specifically think that you do not share your race with your mother, then I am not going to argue with you. If you want to lay claim to her heritage, you need to lay claim to her heritage. And yes again, picking a side is critical, which is why I'm trying to choose my own, and I'm doing it in response to what I see as blacks, mostly, but increasingly other minorities in America, choosing a side that doesn't include me, and doesn't include your mother, and doesn't include Robert Lee. Self-identification is a necessary condition

I'll give it to you that your perspective is self-consistent from where I'm standing. I think it's an unusual method of identitycraft, but I understand where you're coming from and why you want to do it and see it come into being. I was thinking at first, is there any particular reason you don't think of your new ingroup as "White American" or "Anglo-American" (vs. just "American") if American blacks and indians both have comparable and non-exclusive claims of ethnic primacy on the American continent? But I am assuming "American" in this sense has to do with the specific founding stock of the American colonial project and specifically its state system and cultural institutions, and has nothing at all to do with people who are white or European who weren't part of the country at the time of its founding or soon after. I can also see why there is not really an intuitive term for that.

Your position made a lot more sense to me once I understood that you are defining the bounds of a new ethnic group based on ancestral proximity to a particular series of people and events at a particular place at a particular time in history, and are not defining terms of entry into an existing political or cultural class, or defining what US citizenship should mean (at least not inherently, I'm sure you separately have a perspective about that).

From that perspective I understand completely why Robert E. Lee is within the bounds of that group - his ancestors were part of the founding settler stock of the United States, and that's what it means to be within the bounds of the group. (I don't actually specifically know anything about Robert E. Lee's genealogy but I assume you know this to be the case.)

I think your project is understandable and worthwhile, and I don't know how I would solve your terminology problem (what I see as a terminology problem) any better.

Btw, I read about the NFL anthem thing while looking into the matter to reply to your post, and I'm as disappointed as you are in that use of it, and I also believe it signals the thing you think it signals. I don't think the people who agitated for that to happen are as representative of the views of the average black person in America as they believe they are, and I think the distinction is important, but there's no way around conceding that that contingent does exist and they are apparently making things like that happen.

I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color)

I've always thought that BIPOC meant only Black and Indigenous people of color, excluding Asians and White Hispanics by omission.

The bold part is the second-most important piece of information I'm using to determine how you or I can identify like. You don't consider yourself to be the same race as the woman who gave birth to you, which is baffling to me. I understand it, I suppose, in the regular way that something odd you've lived with your whole life is normal while still remaining odd.

This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.

The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.

I hate everything about this. I truly do. I sincerely wish you felt all the benefits of whiteness as defined by activist were available to you. The rugged individualism, the family structure, the emphasis on the scientific method, the work ethic, the future orientation, the system of justice, the written tradition. I'm even increasingly coming around to Christianity not being half bad. It's at least better than the hellscape my edgy atheist leanings have ushered in.

I loathe beyond words I can speak here how seemingly all pro-social behavior has become coded "white". Where as antisocial behavior, either be implication, or occasionally explicitly, has been coded "black". And naturally, white is bad and black is good. And I sincerely wish we didn't live in a world where you felt your birthright to a pro-social society was denied you. I swear, in the 90's, it didn't used to be this way. At least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

I don't know if it makes you feel better or not, but my life is very much a product of, and continues to be oriented around, the same rugged individualism, family structure (to some extent), emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, written tradition, etc that you are pointing toward here. Those are strong values that I hold and respect, and I am grateful to those before me who established them.

(I'm not a Christian in any real sense but I share both your edgy atheist history and your coming-around to view it as a net positive.)

This does not really factor into the equation for me in terms of my racial identity.

There have been people in my life who have told me that I "act white" in a pejorative way because of how I speak or write or what kinds of things I like or don't like, especially other young people growing up, but I never really gave that too much weight, and those people were few and far between. I always wrote it off as inconsequential.

It's unfortunate that it seems like there is in fact a growing current of thought that really does seem to resent and push back against those values as inherently suspect and unwanted. I think it's a real problem and I worry that a lot of young people are growing up right now being told that it's racist for people to want you to do well on standardized tests or to ask you to be polite. That was not happening while I was growing up at all, it would've been borderline if not completely offensive, but I think it's clear that the kind of kids who would've told me I "acted white" pejoratively have in fact not grown up to be inconsequential at all and apparently have captured the messaging of institutions like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

But this type of mentality is not what I mean when I say that the world has made it clear to me that 'white' is not a word that's accurate for me to use about myself. My impression of what whiteness means as a racial identity, and what the boundaries of it are, mostly come from people who assign a positive or neutral value to whiteness.

The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)

To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I suspect I would if I had two white parents or two black parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the values I (or the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) might associate with whiteness.

The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)

To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I would if I had two white parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the positive, neutral or negative values I can associate with white societies and cultures.

I want to be absolutely clear. I do not consider those values "white", but I was pointing out the framing activist use. I hate everything about it. I hate how much it increasingly dominates the terms of the argument, and even institutional policy. And I hate how it confuses what exactly you mean when you say you identify as "black" despite having a "white" mother.

I don't even consider those prosocial values inherently western. At least most of them, save Christianity. Asian cultures and Indian culture has a lot of the same values, with many of the same, and a few unique, foibles that we in the west have towards them as well. Nobody is perfect, but at least these cultures appear to acknowledge there are prosocial and antisocial behaviors, and you should encourage prosocial behavior. It's hard to say the same about the current state of the art crop of racial activist.

I'm glad to you hear you are older and haven't been sucked into the self inflicted systemic dysfunction of the modern "black" identifying community.

More comments

I always thought of identity as mostly imposed anyway. You don’t really get to pick. What my race, class, religion (unless I specifically rejected it and make a declaration of it) and social class are not things that one chooses for oneself but things that through interactions with society you’re taught. Especially if you’re visually distinct, as minority groups tend to be, the wider society doesn’t exactly let you ignore it. A black person is black no matter what because we’ve somehow decided that black and Hispanic and Native and Indian ancestry makes you not white.

I’m not personally in favor of Bipoc simply because it sort of implies that every person of color has an identical experience— that the Chinese students in California have the same experience as the Latino in Arizona, the Native in Wyoming, or the black in Chicago. It’s a political term, more or less, much like LGBT is; meant to unite the people in those groups into a polity for the purpose of gaining power and rights in American electoral politics. But I think for me at least in nonpolitical conversation, it’s much more useful to consider the needs of any groups individually, and to consider the person you’re talking about as a specific type of bipoc within the whole.

we’ve somehow decided that black and Hispanic and Native and Indian ancestry makes you not white.

Currently we've decided that Hispanic ancestry is orthogonal to white ... and for that matter I'm not sure we demand an ancestry component to that ethnicity. Many people with 75% native Mesoamerican ancestry are still universally accepted as part of an ethnicity named after the Hispania region of Europe, on the basis that the assimilation into the culture descended from that region is more important than the genes from that region. If someone with 100% native ancestry is equally assimilated and self-identifies as Hispanic, would anyone really argue it?

This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.

@KMC did indeed come in hot, but to be fair, when confronted with someone who didn't just slot into his preconceived idea of black people, he cooled off and engaged civilly and a good conversation followed. That is the purpose of the Motte: mission accomplished. You seem like you are just trying to go back and reignite things.

genocide

The word is so overused (mostly, it must be said, by the left) that I now treat it as a fnord. I realise I managed to read the OP without noticing it, and had to go back to check that it was there after reading your post.

FWIW, my own opinion is that melting down the statue is a good start, but I would prefer if it was publically blown up on the 4th July with red, white and blue pyrotechnics while a military band played Battle Hymn of the Republic. But I'm not American, so it doesn't matter.

He admittedly could have done better, but you're probably being just as if not more inflammatory with your description. KMC managed to find his footing and have a civil and productive conversation, you seem to be determine to derail it again.

More comments

It may be worth noting that when the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro/black national anthem,” the US didn’t even have an official national anthem yet, as the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially adopted until 1931. Since the US didn’t have a national anthem, it probably didn’t seem as anti-American to adopt a second, racial national anthem as it would today. That said, I still find it incredibly distasteful and divisive whenever I hear anyone refer to it as that today.

Yeah, learning about modern BLM type activists leaning into it was a little disheartening, even if not surprising. I think the song is worse off for the association. The circumstances that the hymn was written in were specific, but the lyrics themselves aren't. The imagery is of the liberation of the biblical Israelites from bondage in Egypt, like a lot of early black American spiritual music and poetry was.

The families of African Americans have been here for longer than the families of most White Americans, and negrolatrous elite grifters don't have majority support among the African American population.

As I've said before: Americans are a collection of ethnic groups. The majority are White, but on cultural, linguistic, and religious lines some of these ethnic groups(notably Southern Whites) are closer to African Americans than they are to other Whites. There is no way to exclude blacks(all of them) from an "American" ethnicity that encompasses the majority of the White population except racism. And I say that believing that 99.998% of AADOS culture which isn't shared with Southern Whites(and plenty that is) is some combination of stupid and destructive, that HBD is largely true, and that individual level racism is entirely fair if not prosocial.

The majority are White

I am not the same as a Brit, or an Aussie, or a Frank or a Kraut or a Russkie. That is my problem with "White," there are distinctions, the main one called Atlantic, and the biggest one called Pacific. This is a different land, and while I don't believe in magic dirt, the kind of people who left Europe made themselves distinct from those who didn't, and the ones who landed in different places are themselves different from one another.

I copped to being a know-nothing, so I guess I should be calling myself a Native American.

They don't call themselves African-Americans. I've known a lot of black people and most of them prefer to simply be called black, and I've never heard an IRL black person use the term "African-American". If they "don't have a home for themselves" it's only because people you evidently considered heroes fought tooth and nail to make sure they didn't.

Even with your explanation it still seems preposterous to say African-Americans aren't real Americans.

Does realness require being happy about it? Are Irish Americans no longer Americans if American culture takes a turn they find hideous and they start feeling proud of identifying as Irish-American?

Shibboleths abounds.

IMO, as a child of immigrants, I think most people take the awesomeness of America for granted. To apply your standards, I could determine most white Americans who have ancestors born here going back hundreds of years aren't real Americans because of how much they whine and complain about capitalism and consumerism or whatever.

Ignoring the racism it’s interesting you consider literal traitors to America to be worthy of statues. Lee didn’t “consider himself to be apart of the same nation” if you recall a rather significant event in his history.

"We'll put them in museums", it was always a lie. The destruction of historical artifacts has begun. Shame on anyone who supports this.

That's the one that hurts me the most. They always lie.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: He's right again

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats