USA Politics

Bingo. The issues mentioned are being overshadowed by existence of Nazi Americans willing to kill for their cause. Whether all these issues have root in cause-to-conseqeunce chain may be put aside for now. It is quite possible, and statistically even probable, to have a harmless racist bigot. When you have them harmless, then you can systematically try to work the problem, via education and openness, setting a better example and stuff like that. When they start harming people you need to fight them, lock them, or kill them like the shit they are. American prison system heavily favours punishment over rehabilitation. Apply it here too.

LC, Confederacy was evil? Maybe. But not that more evil than a bunch of states/kingdoms in Europe at the time. I don't see people from 19th century as enlightened. I don't see Yankees as enlightened. They had a different class setup than the south. May I remind you of work ethics in Victorian era? Or serfdom, even. The only difference between them and colonial slavery was the fact that British, French, and later proper new-coined Americans actually stole people from Africa. In other terms, you'd really need to compare individual examples to see who was better off. While feudal lords had some commitments to their serfs, it was never a 'right' in its own.

It was a shitty state, as 99% of states that have ever existed on this planet. From our position, we couldn't even fathom how our lives would look like 200 years ago. It is this narrative of South being the ultimate evil that is counterproductive in my opinion.
 
Perun said:
It's about Trump neglecting to care when people in his country kill each other, and about people loving him for it.
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I don't think there's any discussion on that issue here because we're all in agreement that Trump is incredibly wrong - and that the blame for murder and domestic terror attacks lies solely on the side of the "alt-right". I don't believe anyone on this forum (with one possible exception) believes in any equivalency between the two participating demonstration groups, and I think that the inability of many Republicans to denounce Trump's bull is sickening.

There is an area of discussion regarding other parts of what's happened, and it's natural to seek that out, because those aspects will remain flashpoints for a long, long time, whether or not Donald J. Trump is President of the USA.

Zare said:
It is this narrative of South being the ultimate evil that is counterproductive in my opinion.
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Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I disagree. I mean, I agree that there's a big difference between, say, the Union of 1864 and today in terms of worker's rights, child labour, all the valid points you make etc etc, that's simply fact. But by 1860 the global trend was moving against organized slavery; the USA was one of the last holdouts in the Americas. The Confederacy was formed as a direct reaction to the advancement of emancipation; a reactionary nation for the purpose of maintaining what was considered, at the time, a general evil. It's like saying "Yes, things were shit in Russia in 1925, so the Five Year Plan wasn't really any worse". Yes, things were shit in the USA in 1860, but the Confederacy was designed to make things much worse for a disenfranchised populace.

But it's not just that - it's the entire Lost Cause movement that shapes it. If the commemoration of the Confederacy was only about the state that existed from 1861-1865, then I could really see ok, it's just some statues, move on. The commemoration of the Confederacy was, however, part of a plot to distance the historical record from reality and to deify a false notion of the leaders and motives. It was the foundation for the Jim Crow state, which undermined the concepts of Reconstruction and led to significant evils being spread through the South. They're part of a lie, just as big a lie as Nazi ideology in the 1940s and pro-white ideology in 1970 South Africa.
 
Hmm. History revisionism OK. I didn't think about that. It's a valid issue and happening at multiple places in the world.

But foundation for the Jim Crow state...so you blame Austria and Bavaria for the Nazis? Look, those laws were enforced from Mexican to Canadian border, not only for blacks but for anyone that United States deems unfit. It wasn't Alabama Dixie that implemented anti-Japanese laws in California, it was Beach Bob, a person from a so called forward-thinking society. SJWs are only the other side of the bigot coin that is the US. A lot of people there have problems with who other people are. And what people are. Racially pure system is the same bullshit as a racially balanced system that SJWs want - both of them are based on birthright and not meritocracy. I want to hire 10 people. Nazis say to me that they must be white, SJWs say to me three white, three black, three asians and a tranny. Well, fuck you both.
 
Zare said:
Look, those laws were enforced from Mexican to Canadian border, not only for blacks but for anyone that United States deems unfit.
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You're conflating quite a few different sets of laws. It's correct to point out that the USA had several sets of racist laws that oppressed various peoples - blacks, Asians, indigenous peoples. It's not correct to conflate them in one big pot, as each comes from different eras and were propped up in different methods. In other words, like with most of these issues, it's more complex than that. When we talk about the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, we have to link that to the Jim Crow, anti-black state that was propped up upon those pillars. Discussing the deification of figures like Custer, for example, would involve a more thorough talk about crimes against Native Americans. Certainly, I agree these are all symptoms of the greater pro-white biases that existed throughout the entire nation (indeed, the continent, it would be in poor taste to exclude my own country's race-based crimes), but they have different degrees and underlying causes. The Lost Cause is a movement that still seeks to suggest the CSA was heroic and noble, and purposefully obfuscates the reasons that rebellion was raised. None of the other racial-repression movements of the 19th century have that level of revisionism around them - the other major ones have been directly confronted by majority-white America and accepted as national sins (the degree to which this has occurred is certainly arguable, but there have been major overtures to the survivors of Japanese-American internment camps, for example).

Zare said:
I want to hire 10 people. Nazis say to me that they must be white, SJWs say to me three white, three black, three asians
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I think you're understating the actual goals of programs like Affirmative Action, which is to counter equality of circumstance. If we lived in a world where people actually hired freely without regard to things like race, sex, and gender, then I'd agree completely. But we don't, and there's 50 years of social research that confirms this, even into the modern era. Take a certain property developer in the USA in the 1970s and 80s - this person had an informal system of marking tenancy applications "C" for colored, so that he could turn them down. Spoiler alert - this developer is now President.
 
I am fully aware of what Lost Cause stands for. There is a joint mindset there. Americans were extreme and still are, across the political spectrum. The spectrum is missing the red part, however. They've done everything legal and illegal to crush it at infancy. See, that's where the sex issues come from. Did you ever wonder why gender inequality isn't such a topic in post-communist or communist states? US hasn't confronted the inequality situation 70 years ago with a shotgun, it shunned it, threw it under the rug. Since 1990s attention has been given but it has been deemed just an issue, not a cancer that it is. If it hasn't been knocked out then with a shotgun, now it requires a carpet bombing. Not going to happen, majority of the people there see it either as "an issue", or "a non-issue". Not enough priority.
 
It's official. Great news, he was possibly the worst member of the Trump cabinet.

Edit: It's also assumed that Bannon is one of the major White House leakers, not to mention having a large public platform with Breitbart. He's known to have a penchant for revenge so it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Double edit: https://twitter.com/gabrielsherman/status/898594013409882112
 
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I had to see what that word means, and then I giggled.

Edit : also from Reddit, US general says attacking Japan means attacking the US

You provide anime, we provide protection
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Bannon fired too. Month of the long knives, this August. Noone, not even Trump himself, knows who is next to go. But we know that it won't be long.
 
Foro did link that just a few posts ago. Did Trump summon him to the Oval Office, and just as Bannon entered the room, the President made a 180 degree chair turn, pointing finger at his general direction, "you're fired!"...we'll never know :D
 
Before the events of the past two weeks, the Trump White House had denied widespread reports that it was in "chaos" -- but there's no denying it now. What a mess. One of Trump's biggest selling points during the campaign was that he was a great executive who would surround himself with "great people." Whoops.

Re Charlottesville, even if Trump were correct that there was violence on both sides -- and it appears that he was correct about that -- that is, as I said, beside the point. The violence perpetrated by at least one white supremacist was far worse, resulting in murder. But even if that had not happened, it's still not that hard to pick the obvious good guys in this clash: On the one hand, you have anti-fascists. OK, that's good, we're all anti-fascist. On the other hand, you have neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Um. Duh.
 
Cornfed Hick said:
But even if that had not happened, it's still not that hard to pick the obvious good guys in this clash: On the one hand, you have anti-fascists. OK, that's good, we're all anti-fascist. On the other hand, you have neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Um. Duh.
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Yep. There's clearly a difference between good intentions gone slightly overboard and downright evil intentions.
 
The Flash said:
Yep. There's clearly a difference between good intentions gone slightly overboard and downright evil intentions.
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To be honest, I think anti-fascist groups both in the US and elsewhere contain a mix of very different people. All from peaceful people who want to speak out against racism, to outright hooligans who use neo-nazis and others as a target for their urge to get caught up in fights. That being said, this is nothing specific for "Antifa" groups. Any sufficiently large group of protesters will attract hooligans.

But of course, there's also an important difference. The KKK, white supremacy groups and neo-nazis have both hooligans and an evil agenda. Their agenda is to oppress those who are different, and that can never be right.

If there were people among the "Unite the Right" protesters in Charlottesville who were only concerned about Southern heritage, or history in general, being wiped out - they should still have walked away the minute KKK and nazi flags showed up.

And of course, the White House has very much underplayed the fact that one was killed and several injured. That wasn't due to "many sides". That's terrorism in its purest form: To use violence, even murder, in order to threaten political opponents to silence.
 
Yeah, but... FREEEDOOOOM! I believe the U.S government took their inspiration from Mel Gibson... at least according to Wikipedia.
 
I'm cautious about hate speech rules. I'm not personally averse to the concept, and I truly believe the best way to defeat such a poor idea is to engage it appropriately. But I also can see the call for them...eh.
 
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