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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.
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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.
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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".
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.
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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 your opponents and everything they value are evil, why should you *want( to coexist with them, unless you absolutely have to?
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.
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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.
"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.
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.
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?
Queue the schisms.
Sure, but both sides of the schism are still your heirs/descendants…
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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.
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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.
Yes that was my point.
Power? No. Influence over people on the margins? You might be surprised.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Perhaps, but not down the middle. If you refuse to discriminate between gradations of grey, you cannot condemn anything.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Coercion is an excuse for doing evil, my problem is with the claim that following evil orders is worthy of praise/honorable/good.
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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?
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.
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".
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.
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?
He spoke generally, and I was responding to those claims. Such as:
I can give him this line every time the woke do something he doesn’t approve of.
strawmannish.
Well then, I'm sorry but I can't take your moral outrage seriously.
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.
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 in the context of "You should value statues of Lee because...".
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.
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.
Why? Is utilitarianism obviously wrong? Do you think morality is a solved problem?
Or am I not allowed to express moral outrage because I do not revere a wrathful god?
I ask of them only what I ask of everyone else: make sure you act morally first, and only later worry about legality, loyalty, obedience, patriotism, etc.
This is an entire sentence. It has nothing to do with statues. It is relativistic. It is either trivial: ‘there’s good and bad in everyone’. Or : It equates all inviduals, causes, and peoples as morally the same, half-good, half-evil (down the middle). I disagree strongly with that.
Red herring. Since you, FC, me and the woke, all agree that he served evil based on our, today’s, standards. We’re just haggling about honor within evil and statue moving costs etc. There is no need to dynamite our agreed-upon moral foundation with appeals to relativism and accusations of manicheism.
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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.
This is like saying you can't expect a soldier not to shoot his comrades when you order him to fire. People can follow more than one instruction at the time, they can do conditional clauses.
I don't think it's ever a good thing to frame a suspect. If necessary, they should just murder the guy off-duty, so there is no corruption of the justice system.
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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.
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.
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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.
Or your enemy runs out of scruples, of course.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In your opinion, should Japanese Americans be allowed to destroy all statues of FDR?
Yes
Fair enough.
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