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How did you achieve such a poor understanding of the Southern pride mindset when you apparently grew up in it? "A traitor against one's own self and sense of right and wrong?" That's the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from a dyed in the wool Yankee - or an Aussie or a European even - zero understanding of the culture and philosophies involved. How did your Kingstown family manage to teach you the confederates were the good guys without ever teaching you why they thought themselves the good guys?
Generally when people explain precisely what they meant by a term, continuing to behave like they meant your outrageously uncharitable interpretation just proves you are being dishonest. Same goes for pretending you don't understand analogies that have been fully explained.
This is making the mistake of conflating being a Southerner with being a certain type of right winger who likes the Confederacy and sympathizes with their motivations. One can understand and have believed in an ideology yet later come to disagree with it and have disdain for the figures that ideology (quite literally) puts on a pedestal. So it goes for myself and Confederate whitewashing apologetics. Reverend Father Uncle Ruckus notwithstanding, black Southerners have never been fond of revering the Confederacy yet this does not make them Yankees, Australians or Europeans.
I take southern pride in Mark Twain, Tennesse Williams, bluegrass, marksmanship, barbecue, country music*, Mardi Gras, rock n roll, southern gothic, moonshining, NASA, Harper Lee, unrestrictive gun and knife laws, certain SEC football teams, Cajun and South Florida cooking & culture, MLK, Cormac McCarthy, Florida spring break, Sgt York, Claire Chennault and more great artists, political figures and athletes than can be named. I do not take pride in a couple generals who fought a short-lived secession war to continue slavery, or in their present day fan club.
As stated before, choosing to do something one knows is wrong plus killing tons of people in the process is what I consider to make one a failure of a human being. The abdication of responsibility when one knows better combined with mass carnage. Trying to ask me to categorize randos who did or didn't get vaccinated into that mold isn't going to work. They do not even come close to the category of "failure of a human being" in my mind. It's like asking me to pick which counts as a kidnapper, the guy who illegally downloads movies or the guy who pays for Netflix.
*With the exception of certain trends out of Nashville whose best remedy is measured in megatons.
After conceding that the Year Zero mindset label applied to MadMonzer and I was a reference to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, what more is there to debate about it? I was pissed, that's not going to change, it can be continually relitigated without changing my negative reaction to being given that label one iota or you can just drop it and move on.
Yeah, I will move on to conversations with honest interlocutors. Or at least ones that aren't still trying to twist my arguments after I've called them out about it. For the record though judging randos is the entire point of the covid analogy, your inability to do it - especially once you were told how it works - strengthens my argument more than any engagement would have.
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