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Destroying the statue was teabagging the outgroup plain and simple. The moderate voice in every statue controversy has consistently said something to the effect of "move them to a museum" which is what happened here. What this event (moving to a museum and then destroying it) shows is that there is no quarter to moderates in the culture war. It's very much in line with the friend-enemy distinction principle.
As a southerner who was on team "move them to a museum", I'm genuinely disgusted.
Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing? Drop the moral relativism: some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
What exactly do you mean by "moderates" here? Not hating a person who rebelled to support slavery isn't what I would call "moderate".
It's against the rules.
The question was fine, but the actual tea-bagging--
--is not.
Huh, I'm pretty sure I've seen much harsher language against "the woke" or whatever around here. You're really going to play into this what I though was a strawman where you can insult wokeism but need to be careful how you talk about literal confederate slaveowners?
As usual: other people's bad behavior doesn't excuse your own. If you see something you think violates the rules, report it. I'm not going to claim we catch every violation--far from it! But if the whole substance of a comment is "nah, $OUTGROUP deserves utter scorn," that's just not contributing anything of value to any conversation anywhere. It's pure noise, no signal. And that's without addressing the suspicious move where you substituted "people who prefer not to have Confederate statues destroyed" with "people who rebelled to support slavery" as the outgroup being discussed--maybe that was just an innocent mistake on your part, but even assuming this is so, your comment brings no light.
No. It continues to be basically everyone's favorite complaint about moderation here, though--"the mods are definitely thumbing the scales for my opponents!" But no--you're just the one breaking the rules, this time.
I'm sorry, what? The discussion was about gleefully melting down a statue of a person who led a rebellion to supported slavery. The "outgroup" (well, their values are so opposed to anything commonly held in the modern US that outgroup seems like the wrong term here) that's scorned by this action is the people who rebelled to support slavery.
Part of the bizarreness of this entire discussion is all the posters (including you!) making claims along the lines of "no, I can read your mind, you're really trying to teabag modern southerners"---there's a pretty big difference between "haha, we destroyed this statue of a horrible person" and "haha, we destroyed this statue even though other people didn't want destroyed, stick it to those other people". I assure you that most people happy about the melting down are happy for the first reason, not the overly complicated second.
No--that's the claim that was being made. So your response made the conversation proceed roughly in this way:
Except that the word used for the bracketed terms was "outgroup" both times. You did not respond to what was being said; you substituted the argument for your own straw version. I thought it would be easier to just point out that making the point you've made here (two different outgroups are under discussion, maybe it's good to be iconoclastic about one of them) was fine, but actually calling names was not. When you then strawmanned my mod message, too, I got a bit more detailed.
You're certainly allowed to believe that. But you can't assume it in the middle of a conversation with people who disagree, are you certainly can't do so as an excuse to nakedly assert that "some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically 'teabagging' them is great." That's too much heat for the amount of actual light you brought to the discussion.
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I mean, this particular group may well deserve tea-bagging*--just remember not to do that here, because we have the very specific rule about outgroups here; and it doesn't matter how good or bad a group is or isn't, that rule has everything to do with us and what kind of website we want to be.
.* And any particular member of this group who may want and consent to tea-bagging is welcome to DM me, because I happen to be into that.
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I thikn the moderate here is someone who wanted the statue moved to a museum.
IMHO, the Charlottesville controversy itself and the national politics surrounding it were enough to make the statue of historical significance, aside from it's object level of depiction of Lee. It should have been preserved in a museum for that reason alone, as an artifact of the Charlottesville event, rather than as a memorial of the civil war. Destroying it seems stupid on that front. That statue is a culturally signficiant artifact of 2017 politics.
Like if someone used a civil war era gun to kill the pope, the gun would take on more significance as the pope killer, than as a civil war relic. Then if someone came and melted it down because of it's racist ties to American slavery, I'd be flabberghasted at the missed point.
Yeah. Kind of facetiously: what if the gun had been used to kill a cardinal instead of the Pope?
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Why should I even accept the premise that hereditarian, anti-egalitarian rule is uniquely bad and horrific?
You don't have to, but "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" is a core part of the American civic religion, as is the absence of a hereditary nobility. So not accepting the premise is un-American. Indeed, it is so un-American that it led otherwise honourable gentlemen like Robert E Lee into committing treason against America.
We can argue about the wisdom of forming a more-or-less official Committee on Un-American Activities to punish people who engage in legal but un-American political activity with public humiliation, disemployment etc. (I for one think it is a very, very, bad idea). But the idea definitely isn't new.
Do the people who decided on and supported the removal and destruction of Lee's statue adhere to something called the "American civic religion" as a supreme ideal?
Because I'm very sure they don't. In fact, pretty much the opposite of true.
Did the US exist under an un-American premise from her founding until 1865? Because that's what this entire argument entails. Which is rather nonsensical.
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Sure, but then we do the same thing to muslims, blacks and latinos, because their societies/cultures too don't live up to or run directly counter to whatever values we presently hold to be very important. Come on, let's go burn the quran, let's ban black cultural icons, let's forbid the use of Spanish! We have a superior society to offer, so down with the barbarian cultures!
I'm being somewhat inflammatory here, sorry. But really, I do think you're taking the easy route by heaping searing condemnation on a culture of the past that cannot fight back, while cultures in the present that should run afoul of the same metrics get much more lenient treatment simply by virtue of being able to resist, or, more cynically, because this isn't about standards but simply about whose holy cows get butchered today. Someone here recently quoted Chesterton on Tradition; I guess my point is similar.
Also, to be fair, I am not American, so feel free to ignore me on this subject.
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If the worm were to turn and you were to find yourself at the mercy of your opponents, who would you rather it be someone like you who asks "Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular tokenliberal is a bad thing?" or someone like this...
If there were such people to choose, I would choose them.
I just think they don't, have never, and will never exist on the RIGHT right. The best we can get is center right statist neocons; anyone who has strong opinions about Lee in statue form I would wager will never not employ the boot when given the opportunity.
That being the case, it is more important that they never get the chance than trying to compromise in some way.
It would be sick as hell if the liberal political tendency was wrong about that, but given the tenor of discussion here, with the smartest and most moderate RIGHT right population I've seen, I really don't think it is.
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I’d rather they pick the moral side to begin with, instead of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men for the sake of their ‘honor’, and then be honorable. With gentlemen like these, you don't need scoundrels.
Spoken like an ideal Cheka or Gestapo recruit.
I would argue that the socialist propensity for this sort of thinking is the main reason the Soviet Union and Germany went down the paths they did in the first half of the 20th century.
It doesn't matter if I'm a horrible person so long as I'm on the right side is an ok thought in theory but in practice it means your side is more likely to end up as "the baddies" because it's full of horrible people like you.
Let's not do this please.
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Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Complete misunderstanding of my point: It doesn’t matter if I’m a decent person as long as I serve an evil cause.
You might need to hurry up, because there's not a lot of them left, but talk to anyone who lived on territories that over the course of the years were occupied by Germans as well as Russians, and ask them their relative opinion of the Wehrmacht vs. the Red Army.
You're the one misunderstanding him. The point is that people like you are known to turn non-evil causes into evil ones.
Well who doesn’t love the germans. Those slavs could have taken solace in the fact that they would have starved to death in a very orderly manner.
Which causes, slavery, nazism? Anyway, we are not even disagreeing on the sides here.
Obedience, a sense of duty, loyalty, professionalism, those things are not good in a vaccuum. When they are present in people who serve evil, they become evil. They make things worse. It is morally blind to evaluate Lee’s qualities as if he had served the good. Had he been a cowardly, dumb, lazy drunkard, thousands of lives would have been saved. His honor has been a net negative for humanity. He failed morally as very few people fail. A mean-spirited, sadistic soldier in his army only has a small fraction of the blood on Lee's hands, he's an angel compared to Lee.
It’s like Scott’s ‘asymmetric weapons’ concept. Obedience, or, say, loyalty to your home community, helps both Hitler and Roosevelt, it’s a symmetric weapon. Otoh, disobedience, ie, asking the question ‘am I really doing the right thing here, should I give my loyalty to this guy?” is asymmetric, it is more likely to help the good guy and harm the bad guy.
Who's opinion do you think I'm asking you to ask for, if not Slavs'?
Nazism seems to fit nicely into the "would not have happened were it not for people deeply convinced they're on the Right Side Of History" template.
A quick glance at the modern progressive movement says otherwise.
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Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.
I don’t get what you’re saying here. They weren’t so bad, compared to some hypothetical regime that would commit a genocide of equal proportion, but would purposefully, systematically torture people before killing them… is that your point?
I don’t think a bullet to the neck under stalin or getting stabbed under pol pot was worse. They didn't go out of their way to make undesirable units suffer either.
Have you ever read Eichmann in Jerusalem or Scott’s review of it? Both speak to this point.
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Yep. I mean, say the Catholic church thought I was a heretic or something. Or some bush war where half the point of the army is that it's where you stuff your psychopaths so they do something useful. And I think that's mostly attributable to the professionalism of the German army. Sure, they served an evil regime - granted! But I think you're just underestimating how much farther an army can fall, and how much more personal suffering it can cause if it has lower standards.
My point is - there is still a point to praising honor and professionalism in the army of Sauron. I would absolutely honor the righteous Orc who ran a tight ship and whose men only ate alive a small fraction of his POWs. - In war, you may die either way, but you can still have a preference whether to die with your limbs attached and your rectum intact. Everybody wants to act like their enemies are the absolute worst, the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth - and they are almost universally wrong, and simply have never seen real scum in their lives. The lowest of humanity is very, very low.
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Primarily, because demonstrating naked, gloating contempt for your neighbours is corrosive to the social contract and provokes retaliation. In particular:
Everything that raises the temperature of the culture war from any side gets it that much closer to boiling over. Deciding to remove these statues provoked the Charlottesville rally, which provoked substantial institutional reactions, and so on and so on. Every escalation, and the retaliation for it, get you that much closer to the point of no return when people's decisions flip over en-masse to "this social contract is unconscionable; it's worth the transition cost of starting over". We're horrifyingly close to it now; if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump again and he is removed from the ballot that's probably enough to tear the Union. And to be clear, this would suck massively for all sides.
Even discarding civil war, the wheel turns. SJ may feel invincible due to demographic trends, but that's far from the whole story. Black swans happen, and city-slickers have more fragile lives than country bumpkins if there's a pandemic or a nuclear war. And if the Republicans do wind up with total power over you... well, you have a degree of control over how merciful they feel. Even from where I sit I'd prefer to avoid another White Terror; surely you don't want one either?
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Because those aren't what's being teabagged. It's modern day 'racist southerners', similar deplorables, and fellow travelers that are the true target, and the banishment (now celebrated destruction) of Confederate iconography is a good proxy for that. It is a flex not just over southern pride, regional history, and heretofore popular mythology, but also over anyone that doesn't like to see current progressives' thoughtless pursuit of cleansing art and media rewarded.
I have no ties to or love for anything Confederate. It's not in my family tree and I was bred Blue tribe enough to reflexively mock the whole modern shtick of it. Do you think I object to the statues' removal because Lee is a super cool dude and slavery was no big deal, or what?
I think that it might be good to remove the statues to some kind of monument park or something like that: would we build statues of General Howe in our public squares? Of Nazi leaders? What about Soviet ones? These men committed high treason against the Union and in my view were handled very leniently; the traditional penalty for high treason is death. If they're still going to be sitting out there, I think they need some additional context...plaques or something...stating that these individuals were revered by the society that erected them but in the fullness of time, we have realized that these individuals were gentlemanly, polite slaveowning traitors.
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Because many of us have found the hard way that the outgroup being teabagged by this is marked not by neoconfederatism but rather people who speak a bit slower than those on TV. Why do you suppose that so many people learn to disguise their natural southern accent at work? Hell, speaking with a country new england accent got me many of the same accusations.
Classism, probably.
Nothing more shameful than looking and sounding poor, except for looking and sounding poor and being white.
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I assure you that this will be followed by another act of teabagging, namely that some bougie black avantgarde artist will be paid big bucks by the city to use the melted-down iron to construct some hideous-looking crappy statue of some mythologized slave rebellion leader or some other black "hero".
Eh, if they replaced Robert E Lee with John Brown that would generate so much public seethe you'd be able to say the change was a work of performance art!
I feel bad for the man himself, everything I've read about him seems to suggest he was a very respectable, highly principled, honourable human being. Shame he was born in the American south. Had he be born in the north the war may well have ended earlier with a lot fewer Union deaths.
Yeah, fair enough. Or maybe put up a statue of John Brown alongside Lee or something. A statue of John Brown represents this: the valorization of a man who attempted to overthrow an unjust system by force.
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Eh. Modern historiography that is less triumphal and heroic puts almost all the blame for southern success on early northern incompetence and sheer bad luck with who went where.
Eg, Lee could have been replaced by any number of Dudes in the south, as long as the Cav turned coat whichever guy the pick still gets his early licks until the north relearns how to do horsey shit.
Actually, Lee probably lost the war for the south even faster than it would have gone otherwise by trying to repeat his early Dramatic Battle successes well after the North got some real killers in charge that stopped walking into bad situations.
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Have you now learned not to compromise in turn, or is this still your position?
Well, fundamentally, I don't see why a community shouldn't be able to vote to remove a statue. I certainly hope one day we have the option to remove through civil means all of the stupid murals and art of a lefty bent in my city. This has just illustrated for the hundred thousandth time that "not an inch" is the only reasonable policy toward activists.
Again, this isn't about removing the statue.
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You’re forgetting the other moderate position, “smelt him into cannons.” I guess the idea was something museum/battle memorial worthy, but not honoring the guy in particular? It strikes me as a bit odd, so I’m not surprised it didn’t satisfy either side.
These "moderate" positions are all an illusion based on continual resetting of the Overton Window. That the utterly ludicrous "melt him down out of sheer spite" position became one legitimate wing while "do nothing and don't celebrate him too much" was the other creates the false impression that melt him down and turn him into cannons is a conciliatory gesture. That conciliatory position is still a triumphalist celebration of destroying Confederate heritage, just without quite as much overt ugliness.
In the spirit of framing our own positions as moderate, my position is the true moderate position, which was the "do nothing and don't celebrate him too much", not like the extremist position that the statues should be gilded and used as the centerpiece for a new Confederacy Day on December 20, where all Southerners gather around and chant, "Glory to our martyrs". That would be extreme, as where I am a moderate.
The problem is that the implicit point of public monuments is to celebrate historic figures. The fact that Lee is well-known is purely due to his decision to take up arms against the United States; the same can be said of almost every other Confederate. And it's not appropriate to celebrate those who opposed us in war. In other words, Lee's stature as a war hero is comparable to that of someone like General Howe or Santa Ana or Erwin Rommel. There may be statues of the former two in the United States, but if there are I guarantee they're somewhere like a battlefield where the context is clear and they generally build statues of every prominent person who fought there. But I doubt anyone would advocate for putting them in a position of honor such as a town square, and if you built one on your own property people would be right to suspect your motives.
Add to that the fact that they weren't seceding because of tax policy or some other anodyne complaint but to preserve an institution that's now globally recognized as a reprehensible denial of the most basic human freedoms, in a country whose founding principles were explicitly meant to advance those freedoms, however imperfect the execution was in its infancy. I don't see any situation where you can have a statue of a person whose entire professional career was at least implicitly dedicated to such an institution on the courthouse lawn or the park in the center of town and excuse it by saying that you don't celebrate it too much.
There are many examples in the world of veneration of an "honored enemy". Turkey hosts thousands of descendants of failed invaders every year at Gallipoli. 'Celebration' isn't the correct term to be used. Respect for a worthy adversary who believed in their cause is more appropriate.
I have no problem with respect. But I don't think anyone would argue that the South's erection of statues in prominent places was merely out of sober respect for an enemy. Are there any other of America's war foes who you feel we should be "respecting" at that kind of clip?
https://www.nps.gov/places/loyalist-monument.htm
https://mobridge.org/sitting-bull-monument
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None of our other war foes were also Americans. None of our other war foes went on to be Americans, and to serve America to the best of their ability by accepting and trying to live by an honorable peace.
The white South didn't accept their defeat and try to live an honourable peace. They launched an insurgency (the 1st Klan), and when that failed they waited out the presence of federal troops in the South and then staged a series of coups against the Reconstruction-era State governments (elected by multi-racial electorates) in order to introduce Jim Crow. The North, to their shame, tolerated this due to exhaustion during the Gilded Age, and enthusiastically embraced it due to political corruption in the New Deal era.
Jim Crow was a dishonourable peace, and the Civil Rights movement was right to seek to overturn it.
And yet we are still Americans no matter how much you hate it. Maybe the only solution is for the sainted North to secede from this blighted land?
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The political issue with leaving the statue standing is that statues need regular cleaning and maintenance. The next thing you know, outraged leftists are posting photos all over social media of maintenance workers, many of them blacks, cleaning the feet of Lee and his horse under the instructions of the city government. That wouldn't go over too well.
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