Monday, July 13, 2015

Ave, Mike!

Another "Ave!" so soon after the previous one? Well, I just read my buddy Mike's post regarding the Confederate battle flag and free-speech issues. Mike takes a balanced, nuanced, yet passionate approach that I largely agree with. Without saying anything further, I'll invite you to go over to his blog, Naked Villainy, and read the post for yourself.


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3 comments:

The Maximum Leader said...

Thanks for your endorsement.

John from Daejeon said...

Yes, a very excellent post on free speech, but he didn't bring into the equation the handling of modern day slavery in today's world and the lack of a response of a nation once torn apart by a war nearly solely devoted to that single issue. As a teacher of so-many young children, it rankles me to no end that our current White House resident can express so much outrage over the issue of modern day slavery, especially when it involves kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed children in Africa, but he refuses to use his killer drones to actually make this world a better place by removing from existence these vile and warped, sadistic slaveholders.

Having just seen this short episode of BBC'a "Panorama," The Missing Stolen School Children, which ought to interest you from a religious standpoint, child slavery is very much on my mind. Let me know what you think of one of these girl's parents thanking their lord that their child died at such a young age (after being enslaved, raped, beaten, etc.) instead of joining some other fracked-up cult after you see that part of the episode.

Kevin Kim said...

John,

While I'm sympathetic to your concerns about global slavery, this wasn't the focus of my buddy's post. Had he suddenly started ranting about the global situation, his post would have been disjointed and unfocused. As things are, Mike's thesis and main ideas should be plain: the American Civil War was essentially about slavery; the Confederate battle flag, like it or not, connotes slavery/oppression, which means it should be kept off public property; that being said, people have a fundamental right to express themselves in private contexts in however offensive a manner they please. There's nothing in any of what Mike wrote that implies he should have widened his focus to include the international. Mike was writing about a specifically American problem.

I'll be frank with you: this is a pattern I often see in your comments. You like to bring in these irrelevancies and then tell people that they've somehow "overlooked" whatever irrelevancy you've brought up. I see this habit in the comments to my movie-review posts, in my political posts, you name it. A little more topical focus and discipline would be appreciated. Seriously, if you want to toot your own horn about your pet causes (atheism, world slavery, etc.), then please set up your own blog, which I imagine would be very interesting, and to which I would happily append relevant comments. I'm not joking, here: you do focus on some very serious and interesting topics, and I sincerely would be interested in reading a blog put out by you. In the meantime, though, I'd observe that you have a tendency to try to squeeze your agenda into my comments section, whether your agenda is a good fit or not, and that's beginning to test the limits of my patience.

So I'm going to lay down the law: if I receive another comment like this one, in the "Aha, but you failed to mention X" vein, I'm going to delete it. No hard feelings; I'm just trying to be better at policing my own comment threads. If, however, I—or someone I link to—really did legitimately fail to mention something that is very much on topic, then of course I'll publish your comment.