tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post3438592014839232399..comments2024-03-28T18:35:54.237+09:00Comments on BigHominid's Hairy Chasms: driving ol' Dixie downKevin Kimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01328790917314282058noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-62932109317615412502015-06-26T05:11:45.949+09:002015-06-26T05:11:45.949+09:00Malcolm,
"resonant and sad"
Well, I...Malcolm,<br /><br /><b>"resonant and sad"</b><br /><br />Well, I'll buy that it was sad.<br /><br />I also noticed that The Diplomad agrees with 1861-era Vice President Alexander Stephens that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery, <i>pace</i> that drunkard US Grant and his wily, calculating commander-in-chief, the pre-Emancipation Proclamation Abraham Lincoln.Kevin Kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01328790917314282058noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-77832917395846515182015-06-26T04:44:01.362+09:002015-06-26T04:44:01.362+09:00Kevin,
You make some good points here. Let me boi...Kevin,<br /><br />You make some good points here. Let me boil this down as much as I can: to the extent that this is a free choice made by Southerners about their own symbols and culture, then I couldn't care less about it. To the extent that it is an act of oppression, of cultural bullying by a war's victors over its losers, I object. I note that it is yet another instance of a swiftly rising trend: the suppression of speech and symbols that express any cultural or ideological motif running counter to the Left's shrinking whitelist of permissible worldviews. The arbiters of culture in politics, media and academia are doing this now with growing confidence and vehemence, and anyone who loves liberty more than seductive visions of a flattened, numbed, and ovine social 'harmony' should find it very worrisome indeed. (You can still buy <i>Nazi</i> flags on Amazon, but the CSA must go!)<br /><br />But there is no evidence that this is any sort of a free choice by the people of the South; that 40% of even <i>blacks</i> in the South have no objection to this symbol should suggest that a great majority of the general population feel the same way. As for Mitch McConnell, what he says or does means nothing; he is a dead soul who looks out for nothing beyond his own interests, and his hold on power.<br /><br />DiploMad wrote <a href="http://www.thediplomad.com/2015/06/on-rebel-flags-and-progressive-targets.html" rel="nofollow">this</a>:<br /><br /><i>BOLD PREDICTION: THE NEXT STEP WILL BE TO DEMAND THAT CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS BE DECLARED HATE SPEECH. We will see kids sent home from school for having Confederate flags on their shirts; cars with Confederate decals will be banned from certain areas; and we might see the expunging of CSA symbols from movies and books and prohibiting Confederate flags at re-enactment events, etc. History must conform to the Progressive dictate of the day.</i><br /><br />Does this seem implausible to you? You dismiss the idea of "slippery slopes", but all that your argument presents is a case against their <i>always</i> being slippery; history shows it is nevertheless the case that many a slope is indeed a buttered slide to perdition. Aggressions unresisted embolden aggressors; erosions of liberty create new baselines and dangerous precedents; and sovereign rights, when not defended, tend to vanish.<br /><br />So you are right, and I stand corrected: if this is creeping totalitarianism, then yes, I <i>should</i> have a dog in this fight, and I do. <i>"Is a sudden eruption of harmony really that scary?"</i> Yes. Yes it is.<br /><br />You are right to ask: who is Cawthon's audience? I do not think his piece was written to sell Southern culture to Northern and West-Coast liberals, who will scorn and despise it anyway; to attempt that would be, if I may use the term in its original context, a Lost Cause. It is a eulogy, a lament, not a pitch. Whether or not you think Mr. Cawthon "needed" to "scratch it out", clearly <i>he</i> thought it worth the effort. I found it resonant and sad.Malcolm Pollackhttp://malcolmpollack.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-63963986406437330952015-06-25T23:40:19.997+09:002015-06-25T23:40:19.997+09:00Hi Kevin, JK here:
Do you have any opinion on wha...Hi Kevin, JK here:<br /><br />Do you have any opinion on what Professor Hanson expresses?<br /><br />http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420142/america-one-nation-indivisible<br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-61504740053065250402015-06-25T21:14:55.631+09:002015-06-25T21:14:55.631+09:00Malcolm,
[Last comment in reply to your two comme...Malcolm,<br /><br />[Last comment in reply to your two comments!]<br /><br /><b>Why must he? "Worth saving" to whom? Leaving aside the many qualities of Southern culture that might appeal to modern liberal tastes, isn't it enough that he represents a distinctive European/American culture -- joined to the American Union at first by choice, and later by brutal, coercive force -- that simply wishes to survive, and to preserve its unique identity?</b><br /><br />Not even sure where to begin with this one. Maybe with a question in response to your question: who is Cawthon's audience? If he's preaching to the choir, writing his message for the already-convinced, then he needn't have bothered to scratch out this long, exhausting, repetitive, self-pitying screed. But if he's trying to make a case <i>to non-believers</i> for the worthiness of Southern culture, it's absolutely axiomatic that he should provide <i>evidence of worth.</i> I did finally read his article all the way to the end, and I still didn't see any Southern virtues praised, aside from a cynical remark about how Northerners might appreciate Southern food or music. This was, to my mind, a HUGE lacuna in Cawthon's article. See that? I wrote "HUGE" in all-caps. That's how huge it was.<br /><br />Sure, in the abstract, William Cawthon is beholden to no one. He doesn't need to write what I want to read; he need only write what he wants to express. But if he fails to include the basic elements of rhetoric that give rhetoric its power, then I have the right not to be convinced by what he's written. <i>Ethos, pathos,</i> and <i>logos</i> all need to be there. There's plenty of <i>pathos</i> and maybe a dollop of <i>logos</i> in Cawthon's piece, but zero <i>ethos.</i><br /><br />As for preserving the South's "unique identity," I'm still at a loss as to what this means. It's like Cawthon's lack of talk about Southern virtues worth preserving. As I quoted from Alexander Stephens's cornerstone speech, there was a time when black racial inferiority was a divinely sanctioned metaphysical certainty (Stephens goes on at great length about this in the full speech). This belief was integral to the South's unique identity. If we charitably assume that modern Southern culture's identity no longer has anything to do with this metaphysical certainty, what are we left with that's uniquely Southern? Food? Derivative of Europe. Gentility? Can also be found in the North. Charm? Ditto. Respect for elders? Same. What, then? That damn annoying country twang? I'm being a bit facetious, I realize, but I really to want to know how people are essentializing the South. It's an absolutely crucial question: <i>What is being preserved?</i>Kevin Kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01328790917314282058noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-79319470320226002202015-06-25T21:13:56.170+09:002015-06-25T21:13:56.170+09:00Malcolm,
"(Having said all of that, I think ...Malcolm,<br /><br /><b>"(Having said all of that, I think it's also important to distinguish between public use of this emblem, such as flying it on government buildings, and private display. I think, as you might imagine, that public use should be a matter for the states themselves to decide, and I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it. And of course Amazon has every right to sell, or not sell, whatever they want.)"</b><br /><br />And that seems to be what's happening. Governor Nikki Haley has taken a stand regarding displaying the Confederate flag on state-capitol grounds; I haven't heard that there's been any mass rioting in South Cackalacky to protest what she's said, so I'll tentatively assume she's got a measure of passive and maybe active support. Senator Mitch McConnell, although not a state governor, has weighed in on Kentucky. None of this is the result of a despotic command from the Obama administration (not that I think the O-Admin is incapable of despotism): these people came to their conclusions freely. Rejoice!<br /><br />You say, "I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it." Then I reply: "Cool! Just be happy, then!"<br /><br /><b>"What really gives me the creeping fantods is when everyone suddenly jumps in the same direction, all at once"</b><br /><br />Good Lord, man! You've put yourself in a position where you'll be impossible to please! Haley and McConnell are shining examples of opinions being expressed and actions being taken at the local/state level. But because they're leaping <i>in the same direction,</i> this is somehow creepy. What <i>would</i> it take to make you happy? Is a sudden eruption of harmony really that scary? These are free individuals making free decisions, not zombies.<br /><br />Side note: I'm always learning new words from you. "Fantods." Sounds like fish gonads.<br /><br />[One more comment after this.]<br /><br />Kevin Kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01328790917314282058noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-3950343108781892942015-06-25T20:39:00.505+09:002015-06-25T20:39:00.505+09:00Malcolm,
"But what I do find worrisome is th...Malcolm,<br /><br /><b>"But what I do find worrisome is the power and suddenness with which a venerated symbol, one to which millions of good Americans feel a hereditary cultural and familial attachment"</b><br /><br />To have that attachment, though, requires ignoring what the symbol means for millions of black people. Surely their opinions matter. I see that a recent survey in South Carolina finds that about 60% of black people want the Confederate flag taken down. I suspect that, were the sample size larger, the proportion would be even more skewed toward removing the flag.<br /><br />How white Southerners and black Southerners view the flag is not analogous to how people in the West and people in the East respectively view the swastika. The East/West swastika gap exists because there's little to no shared history, whereas the African slaves were right there in the States, toiling among the whites and bearing witness to the same flag, the same symbol.<br /><br /><b>"To someone like me -- and again, I have no dog in this fight -- it smacks of totalitarianism."</b><br /><br />I might be alarmed if we were talking about banishing, oh, the Pac Man logo.<br /><br />There's a temptation for people to get wild-eyed and start resorting to slippery-slope arguments. <i>My God, what'll they banish next??</i> Such arguments aren't valid, as Dr. Vallicella has repeatedly noted: they're built on a chain of <i>decisions,</i> and they're plausible only to the extent that every link of the decision-chain involves choices made only a certain way. But in reality, human freedom is a zigzaggy, unpredictable thing, so no slippery slope is an inevitability. Hence the invalidity of such arguments.<br /><br />And why <i>don't</i> you have a dog in this fight? Isn't creeping totalitarianism worrisome? I admit I'm having trouble figuring out where you're coming from and how invested you are in this discussion.<br /><br /><b>"Despite the idea that the Confederate flag is evidence of the South's lingering and malevolent racism, there's no reason to think that black people are less happy in the South: quite the contrary, in fact."</b><br /><br />Viz. that survey again (mentioned <a href="http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/209322/" rel="nofollow">here</a>). I'll also note, anecdotally (so this might not have much force behind it), that people I know who compare race relations in Washington, DC, to race relations in New York City almost unanimously say NYC is a much better, much more harmonious place to live. Echoes of Civil War bitterness live on in the DC area.<br /><br />Then again, there's that text I quoted from Wikipedia, which claims the South is more integrated than the North. Whatever "more integrated" really means.<br /><br /><b>"Imagine yourself a member of a culture that had been defeated in a devastating (and to you, entirely unjust) war. Imagine now the victors of that war moving to suppress any display of your culture's emblem. How would you react?"</b><br /><br />Like Mitch McConnell, I suspect: "Remove that statue from the Capitol grounds!"<br /><br />I think it's important to suss out what Southerners themselves are thinking and saying about this situation rather than presuming to speak for them (you might not be presuming to speak for Southerners, but your thought experiment comes dangerously close to doing just that). Prominent white Southerners of all political stripes seem to be <i>voluntarily</i> tilting in what I'd call the morally correct direction. This is a good thing! What's not to love about concerted local action? So what if streets get renamed and icons are removed and replaced? As one news article noted, this happened all over the place in Russia when the USSR collapsed—to much communist grumbling—but there have been no massive riots related to recovering past symbols.<br /><br />More in a separate comment.Kevin Kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01328790917314282058noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-49232417340732965082015-06-25T14:21:29.834+09:002015-06-25T14:21:29.834+09:00It's a shame that the U.S. is basically being ...It's a shame that the U.S. is basically being run by two states that are against states' rights (Califas and Nuevo York) while not exactly doing anything remotely in the best interests of the people of my home state of Texas or of the countless slaves across the globe in this day and age in the year 2015. Even the ex-senator from New York (how that happened is beyond me as the wife of an Arkansas governor and born in the crappy state...er...city of Chicago), and future president wannabe, allowed/allows slavery to thrive in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/nyregion/at-nail-salons-in-nyc-manicurists-are-underpaid-and-unprotected.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0" rel="nofollow">NYC and the surrounding burbs</a> while keeping mum on the subject. She definitely needs to be called out on this issue that happened (as should the President), and is still happening, on her/their watch.<br /><br />In my opinion, the reality is that flags are just rags, but being forced/born into slavery is truly abhorrent and beyond evil and desperately needs immediate action whether these slaves be 12 year-old girls stolen and forced into either b.s. religious marriages with old geezers, arraigned marriages to profit parents of unsuspecting children, or young women lured from South Korea and China to be supposed well-paid manicurists by modern day slave masters in NYC and L.A.John from Daejeonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08431973044799010218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-39483750775706271142015-06-25T09:07:20.743+09:002015-06-25T09:07:20.743+09:00One other point, Kevin.
You wrote:
"(1) he ...One other point, Kevin.<br /><br />You wrote:<br /><br />"(1) he complains about the steady loss of Southern culture but <i>provides almost no examples</i> of what elements of that culture are worth saving..."<br /><br />Why must he? "Worth saving" to whom? Leaving aside the many qualities of Southern culture that might appeal to modern liberal tastes, isn't it enough that he represents a distinctive European/American culture -- joined to the American Union at first by choice, and later by brutal, coercive force -- that simply wishes to survive, and to preserve its unique identity? Malcolm Pollackhttp://malcolmpollack.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-32356600578804183692015-06-25T07:31:25.341+09:002015-06-25T07:31:25.341+09:00Hi Kevin,
If we're quoting contemporary sourc...Hi Kevin,<br /><br />If we're quoting contemporary sources, there's this:<br /><br /><i>“The sole object of this war is to restore the Union. Should I be convinced it has any other object, or that the government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge to you on my honor as a man and a soldier, I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side.”</i><br /><br />That was Ulysses S. Grant. Whatever contemporary moral judgments of the Confederate cause might say, there was no <i>legal</i> basis for the North to go to war to abolish slavery. Curtis Yarvin argues, <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/03/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>, that the onset of hostilities after Sumter was a case of "camouflaged predation":<br /><br /><i>Perhaps it can be summarized as: "kick the dog until he bites, then shoot him." Press your target, using blows that hurt but do not draw blood, until he finally snaps and bites back. Then it's time for the Glock.</i><br /><br />I'm very much a Northern sort of guy myself, and as the immigrant son of British parents, I have no slave-holding ancestors. And I am certainly not here to make any brief for slavery. But what I do find worrisome is the power and suddenness with which a venerated symbol, one to which millions of good Americans feel a hereditary cultural and familial attachment, is being declared <i>verboten</i>; it is difficult not to see it as part of a continuing humiliation, imposed by the victors, upon the losers of a bloody civil war. To someone like me -- and again, I have no dog in this fight -- it smacks of totalitarianism. All at once you can no longer buy Confederate-flagged products on Amazon, while Mao, Stalin and Che T-shirts are still, apparently, no problem. <br /><br />Despite the idea that the Confederate flag is evidence of the South's lingering and malevolent racism, there's no reason to think that black people are less happy in the South: <a href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/01/14/5-reasons-why-black-people-may-be-happier-in-the-south/" rel="nofollow">quite the contrary</a>, in fact. So, given that this will inevitably be seen by millions throughout the South as I've described it above, what will the effect be? Imagine yourself a member of a culture that had been defeated in a devastating (and to you, entirely unjust) war. Imagine now the victors of that war moving to suppress any display of your culture's emblem. How would you react? Would it mollify and soothe you, or would it fan the flames of resentment?<br /><br />(Having said all of that, I think it's also important to distinguish between public use of this emblem, such as flying it on government buildings, and private display. I think, as you might imagine, that public use should be a matter for the states themselves to decide, and I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it. And of course Amazon has every right to sell, or not sell, whatever they want.) <br /><br />What really gives me the creeping fantods is when everyone suddenly jumps in the same direction, all at once -- and those who hesitate, or happen to think that the way <i>everybody</i> felt about it all just a moment ago is still maybe OK with them, are suddenly heretics to be scorned and disfellowshipped. And we are seeing a LOT of this, lately.Malcolm Pollackhttp://malcolmpollack.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5541500.post-22495920892747250802015-06-25T05:10:39.544+09:002015-06-25T05:10:39.544+09:00'indolent Mediterranean sun-belt siesta cultur...'indolent Mediterranean sun-belt siesta cultures' - ha! Provocative, but amusing. Roryhttp://eastedit.com.aunoreply@blogger.com