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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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