It is sad to see the right’s conflation of a focus on the evil of slavery with hate for America. When I read about these great figures like Douglass and Lincoln I feel more patriotic, not less.
Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative. The enforcement of absolute purity, a power play.
I grew up in GA. The Confederate battle flag was for many people a symbol of regional pride, and even a sort of “fuck you” to non-southerners who looked down their noses at the south. If you didn’t grow up in the south, you have no idea about the pervasiveness of snotty attitudes and rank ignorance on the part of non-southerners.
I suppose many cultures feature this sort of regional bigotry, like the way Londoners think of Yorkshire people, or how people in Milan think of people from southern Italy.
An ignorant bigot from outside the south—a very intelligent one, perhaps a writer for The New Yorker. e.g.—sees a Confederate battle flag on display in a southerner’s yard, and assumes its meaning is white supremacy or even pro-slavery, when it’s nothing of the sort.
I mean my counter argument to that is that as a thing slavery should be condemned, but also that the South itself should be allowed to keep its heroes and iconography instead of binding it to slavery. I think the civil war was TO preserve slavery, but my answer to that is also “so what?” Slavery was thought to be the entire thing that the South’s economy hanged on, its reliance on it fueled by hundreds of years of propaganda partially started BY the Founding Fathers. It leads to a bizarre moral relativism where there is no sympathy to the fact that perhaps the South isn’t Literally The Third Reich for perpetuating a terrible thing and instead that it should be treated as a dark time in the history of America, but one that is no more or less detestable as every other part of a country’s history. Many people celebrate Guy Fawkes and the IRA and Churchill and Castro and Zulu and Caesar despite them all being terrible people, I think the fact that slavery is looked down on as such a terrible thing to have done hundreds of years ago is exclusively a white, liberal, western thing. Slavery is still bad, but it’s been treated on the level of the Holocaust I feel is always been weird to me because as opposed to the fact the Holocaust was an outlier of its time culturally the idea of ending slavery is still a radical position and only the modern first world really balks at slavery as it does today. One testimony of a guy who kept slaves and didnt particularly care when they got fried I’d say is actually proof of my point rather than a refutation, because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens and slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of. Our disgust with slavery is due to us evolving to have values of decency, democracy and fairness, but we still dont go around fighting wars to end slavery in the congo. It seems like a unique pretension that we westerners cant be caught doing something that makes us seem like the guys we bought our slaves off of, unless it’s kids in china in which case we sweep that under the rug
I”m starting to worry that I might be beyond tedious at this point, but note that I am matching your anti-racist zeal tit for tat. So forgive me, as I forgive you… (My comments are for others primarily anyway.)
As a hardcore libertarian, like you, I hate chud socialism, populism, etc. But your transformation from Hoste to Hanania has resulted in an overcorrection to the point that you are just a dogmatic anti-racist bigot. It may startle you to be called a bigot but it’s probably because bigotry is now associated exclusively with racism. But I literally mean you are intolerant of racialists. In a sense, you are like some of those ex-communists from the 50s whose anti-communist zeal got the better of them (the difference being that anti-communism was/is correct).
Your transformation seems to have a personal component, i.e., the idea of being stuck in Jordan/Palestine as a 130+ with all those horrible genotypes horrifies you (as it should), so it results in a great deal of empathy for non-white high-IQ people stuck in sh*tholes around the world. This makes sense and is applaudable, but it overlooks that preferring your own kind is not immoral and your anti-racist zeal prevents you from even mustering an argument against it (other than “skin color is superficial..”) In other words, racism is not the gotcha you think it is; it’s just a stick to beat people with like a Protestant preacher railing against imaginary sins. (On a daily basis, it seems!)
Your pro-immigrant arguments are rock solid as far as they go except for the glaring fact that you ignore that alien phenotypes are externalities for many people. But your anti-racism forces you to ignore these costs. That’s PC anti-economics. You would never let a leftist get away with this!
So, how do we internalize these externalities? Property rights. But that’s exactly when you become a socialist—you won’t acknowledge that the natives own the streets/roads. If you have to embrace socialism to defeat anti-racism, you might not be the defender of property rights you think you are. Instead, you are, apparently, a “liberal” who thinks that property rights are defeasible for the purpose of “higher ends”. That’s how we got DEI, etc.
I say ditch the unfalsifiable anti-racist moralizing and go full bore for freedom of association and property rights. You will still get plenty of immigration (in some areas) and hopefully deflate the chud socialists.
Alexander Stephens, as well as many other slave holding southern elite, were southern unionists, who wanted to remain in the U.S. believing correctly that slavery would be more easily preserved. Nevertheless they ultimately affirmed state loyalty when their respective states seceded.
It is sad to see the right’s conflation of a focus on the evil of slavery with hate for America. When I read about these great figures like Douglass and Lincoln I feel more patriotic, not less.
Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative. The enforcement of absolute purity, a power play.
I grew up in GA. The Confederate battle flag was for many people a symbol of regional pride, and even a sort of “fuck you” to non-southerners who looked down their noses at the south. If you didn’t grow up in the south, you have no idea about the pervasiveness of snotty attitudes and rank ignorance on the part of non-southerners.
I suppose many cultures feature this sort of regional bigotry, like the way Londoners think of Yorkshire people, or how people in Milan think of people from southern Italy.
An ignorant bigot from outside the south—a very intelligent one, perhaps a writer for The New Yorker. e.g.—sees a Confederate battle flag on display in a southerner’s yard, and assumes its meaning is white supremacy or even pro-slavery, when it’s nothing of the sort.
"Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative."
Of course, monuments and symbols are inherently 'performative.' We can choose whether to performatively support slavery or condemn it.
And it seems to me the best way to fight regional bigotry would be to not make people whose most important belief was slavery is good your heroes.
I mean my counter argument to that is that as a thing slavery should be condemned, but also that the South itself should be allowed to keep its heroes and iconography instead of binding it to slavery. I think the civil war was TO preserve slavery, but my answer to that is also “so what?” Slavery was thought to be the entire thing that the South’s economy hanged on, its reliance on it fueled by hundreds of years of propaganda partially started BY the Founding Fathers. It leads to a bizarre moral relativism where there is no sympathy to the fact that perhaps the South isn’t Literally The Third Reich for perpetuating a terrible thing and instead that it should be treated as a dark time in the history of America, but one that is no more or less detestable as every other part of a country’s history. Many people celebrate Guy Fawkes and the IRA and Churchill and Castro and Zulu and Caesar despite them all being terrible people, I think the fact that slavery is looked down on as such a terrible thing to have done hundreds of years ago is exclusively a white, liberal, western thing. Slavery is still bad, but it’s been treated on the level of the Holocaust I feel is always been weird to me because as opposed to the fact the Holocaust was an outlier of its time culturally the idea of ending slavery is still a radical position and only the modern first world really balks at slavery as it does today. One testimony of a guy who kept slaves and didnt particularly care when they got fried I’d say is actually proof of my point rather than a refutation, because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens and slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of. Our disgust with slavery is due to us evolving to have values of decency, democracy and fairness, but we still dont go around fighting wars to end slavery in the congo. It seems like a unique pretension that we westerners cant be caught doing something that makes us seem like the guys we bought our slaves off of, unless it’s kids in china in which case we sweep that under the rug
I”m starting to worry that I might be beyond tedious at this point, but note that I am matching your anti-racist zeal tit for tat. So forgive me, as I forgive you… (My comments are for others primarily anyway.)
As a hardcore libertarian, like you, I hate chud socialism, populism, etc. But your transformation from Hoste to Hanania has resulted in an overcorrection to the point that you are just a dogmatic anti-racist bigot. It may startle you to be called a bigot but it’s probably because bigotry is now associated exclusively with racism. But I literally mean you are intolerant of racialists. In a sense, you are like some of those ex-communists from the 50s whose anti-communist zeal got the better of them (the difference being that anti-communism was/is correct).
Your transformation seems to have a personal component, i.e., the idea of being stuck in Jordan/Palestine as a 130+ with all those horrible genotypes horrifies you (as it should), so it results in a great deal of empathy for non-white high-IQ people stuck in sh*tholes around the world. This makes sense and is applaudable, but it overlooks that preferring your own kind is not immoral and your anti-racist zeal prevents you from even mustering an argument against it (other than “skin color is superficial..”) In other words, racism is not the gotcha you think it is; it’s just a stick to beat people with like a Protestant preacher railing against imaginary sins. (On a daily basis, it seems!)
Your pro-immigrant arguments are rock solid as far as they go except for the glaring fact that you ignore that alien phenotypes are externalities for many people. But your anti-racism forces you to ignore these costs. That’s PC anti-economics. You would never let a leftist get away with this!
So, how do we internalize these externalities? Property rights. But that’s exactly when you become a socialist—you won’t acknowledge that the natives own the streets/roads. If you have to embrace socialism to defeat anti-racism, you might not be the defender of property rights you think you are. Instead, you are, apparently, a “liberal” who thinks that property rights are defeasible for the purpose of “higher ends”. That’s how we got DEI, etc.
I say ditch the unfalsifiable anti-racist moralizing and go full bore for freedom of association and property rights. You will still get plenty of immigration (in some areas) and hopefully deflate the chud socialists.
Alexander Stephens, as well as many other slave holding southern elite, were southern unionists, who wanted to remain in the U.S. believing correctly that slavery would be more easily preserved. Nevertheless they ultimately affirmed state loyalty when their respective states seceded.
Frederick Douglass was a half caste.