11th July 2020, 5:16 PM
(9th July 2020, 8:24 AM)Darunia Wrote: My fellow gorons--hear me!To be fair, I never promised that I would deal in nuance. My style of debate is brutality and haymakers. But, my brutal haymaker is not a false statement. White Americans have been in control of everything, forever (certainly, up until the end of the 20th century, at the very least). And, if you were American, but not white, chances are that you have encountered significant disadvantages in one way or another, just based on that fact. Martin Luther King, Jr, was assassinated just 14 years before I was born, so that's not ancient history. I was 10, and aware, when Rodney King was beaten nearly to death by four cops who got acquitted. I was 26 when a black man became President and the entire Republican Party responded by beginning its transformation into the MAGA monster mash it is today. I really do not think this is a subject which can be legitimately debated.
First of all, what is a wypipo? I think I understand from context but I have never heard this before. Please define. Is that a slur of “why people?”
Quoth the Weltall, “There is a lot of nuance to this discussion, but your post kind of skips over all of it in favor of making simple, reductionist points.” Also quoth the Weltall, “I mean, minorities didn't use whiteface to dehumanize white people; white Americans have been in control of everything forever, and that control was really bad for everyone else.”
Quote:General! Are you not also eliminating nuance from your arguments by making clean-cut, absolutist, black and white (no pun intended) arguments and findings of morality? You make it seem as if all white people are inherently racist, and all non-white people are victims. Not that it really matters, but do you know for a fact that no minority has ever dressed as a white person to be offensive/mean-spirited, in human history? Pray tell, whence your gift of clairvoyance? Furthermore, are you saying that everyone who ever donned black face makeup was consciously out on a mission to “dehumanize” anybody? Or was it just not that big of a deal back then? If a black man said “I hate all white people” and put on faux white face paint, and mocked you and your family, would you laugh and high five him, or would you denounce him? I suspect that some of you folks far, far to the left of Goron City would congratulate him and paint murals of him on the nearest building you come across.I never said, nor do I believe, any of the things you're suggesting here.
Quote:“White Americans have been in control of everything forever, and control was really bad for everyone else.”I've lived in the south practically my entire life, so I definitely have seen things you haven't. My high school was roughly even in terms of black and white students. So, we're at a point where black kids can actually attempt to accomplish all of these things (which has only really been true for maybe the last 20% of American history), but there are a variety of ways in which it is made more difficult, where black kids have to work harder than white kids to achieve the same goals and gain the same recognition. That's the point, you see. It's not that there aren't opportunities, there is not equality of opportunity. Being born into poverty, regardless of your race, puts you at a significant disadvantage in life, and that's more likely to happen to minorities. Jeffrey is more likely to get a job than Deontae, just because Deontae sounds black. People make decisions based on things like that. I've personally been witness to it, by people who deny having a racist thought in their head. If you're black, you're more likely to be arrested and/or convicted of crimes at a higher rate than white people. The police and the justice system both disadvantage minorities.
That right? What do you suggest replace this? Nothing in the system as far as I know really prohibits or discourages anybody from serving in government, writing a book, making a movie, painting a painting... where is all this control? What "white control" here, today, in 2020, prevents a black/chinese/goron from doing whatever he wants to do in life? What prevents a black teenager from going to college and getting a good career? Is it "whitey" keeping him down? I just don't see it. I worked my way through college, working fulltime so that I paid it as I went and graduated with no debt. I didn't get a free ride. How is it diffeent from anybody else? Perhaps in some deeply southern places, Alabama or Mississippi or wherever---I live in Massachusetts... ::ahem::, I mean I live in Goron City... perhaps in those racist states, I could entertain the belief where it might be harder for a black person to get ahead---but not in the majority of the country.
Though, I believe that, ultimately, class disadvantages everyone to a large degree. Being born poor makes everything much harder for you, even if you're a straight white christian male.
Quote:No good at all came out of America between 1918-2016 Weltall? Leading the Allies through two World Wars, landing on the moon, all the art and literature that has been produced, ushering in the internet, etc.? The left selectively finds the worst in America, to help flush out your narrative that we are evil and need you to redesign the future for us… and to be sure the right does the same, skipping the bad and only finding the good… I am trying to stand in the middle and direct the traffic as these opposite forces clash. I say that NEITHER SIDE IS 100% right and America is NOT an evil country! I choose to side with whoever sees the good in my country. That always tends to be the conservatives. You never hear a liberal say anything good or positive about the United States E-V-E-R. I am wearing my conservative hat today because of that. Tomorrow I will wear my liberal hat when we rail about some other topic.I don't think America is an evil country, it is a country which has accomplished great things, and was founded on ideals which were extremely radical for their time. The problem I have is that we have never lived up to those ideals, the bigger problem I have is that the right intentionally does not live up to those ideals. Many good things have come from America. No good has ever come from the right wing of American politics. Not one, single, solitary thing, going all the way back to 1789. That is NOT to say the left is perfect and great and did everything right, that's absolutely not true. But, "all men are created equal" has not ever been a conservative ideal. Free, fair elections with full participation is still, to this day, something conservatives are absolutely against, and always have been. Women got the right to vote against the will of conservatives. Black people got civil rights against the will of southern segregationists who used all the same rhetoric today's right wingers use. The Confederacy was extreme conservatism wrought large, an attempt by a landed aristocracy to preserve things just the way they were, because they benefited totally from it being that way. Abolitionists were radical and progressive. Karl Marx was a huge fan of Abraham Lincoln!
Quote:“Also, no history ought to be forgotten, but Confederate history is shameful and the political ideology which emerged from its ruins has no redeeming qualities.”No. The Confederacy were the aggressors, they started the war, their aims were absolutely against every high ideal of America. They were trying to destroy the United States so they could create their own totalitarian slave empire, and I don't give one microscopic damn about whatever heritage that's supposed to represent.
I agree with some of this, but your discussion kind of skips over all nuance in favor of making simple, reductionist points. I agree 100% that there should be no statues that explicitly extoll slavery. But, am I wrong, in opining that perhaps, friends, not all Confederates were slave-holders, and not all of them enlisted to fight for the evil banner of slavery? Certainly, I agree, that there should be no statues to promote slavery. But not everyone who donned a gray uniform did so to rush off to die fighting in order to enslave people--just as not everybody who fought on the side of Germany in 1945 was doing so because they wanted to help Hitler kill Jews--and not every Union soldier who wore blue was on a righteous crusade to help liberate his fellow man. If someone is bombing my house, and killing my friends and family, then I don’t need any ethereal moral arguments to grab a gun and shoot the attacker dead. You burn my city, I don't care what color/race/creed you are--you're my enemy. The South was desperate and defeated after several years of war. Can you not fathom that some young Southerners, perhaps men not too different from you and me, took up arms to try to prevent Sherman’s march? If ::YOU:: had been born in 1845, and raised in the antebellum south, without the benefits of a 21st century liberal arts education, do you really think you would have the same opinions/beliefs that you hold today? Or would you probably have just gone with the flow? Or remained silent? Maybe room for some nuance here?
Germany, after 1945, aggressively scrubbed all traces of Nazism from their country, and it is illegal to fly the swastika or glorify that evil. That's what America should have done with the Confederacy. There is no value to its continued existence in the public forum in any way whatsoever.
What would I have done if I lived then? Who knows? I was totally on the other side of the political fence for many years, and I won't pretend I'm a hero or saint just because my views have shifted. I'm not out there protesting right now.
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Quote:You must admit that at least some of those confederate veterans were only defending their homeland, without any/much consideration towards obsolete, racist ideals. Some might have signed up to avenge a fallen relative who died. And yes, I think that at least SOME signed up to fight legitimately for state’s rights. Were the majority of Confederates racists? Probably, I think… certainly even? Should their collective memory entirely be shit on? Certainly not.It's not defending your homeland when you fire the first shots. So yes, shit all over that entire collective memory. I don't care what their reasons were. They fought for an evil cause, and they're all long dead, but even now, their way of thinking is a deadly toxin poisoning American politics and society. To honor anything they did in public is to endorse what they fought for, and I will not ever find that acceptable.
Quote:I propose an alternative: rather than destroying statues other people put up before you were born, statues which mean a lot to some people for their own reasons which are none of your business and need not be approved by you to be deemed legitimate, why not go BUILD your OWN new statues? It's like kids in a sandbox, fighting over whose Ninja Turtle toys they are going to use, so they keep throwing sand at each other. Go build a statue of George Floyd if you want, and leave Teddy Roosevelt alone on the steps of the history museum... self-righeous iconoclastic bastards... try BUILDING and not DESTROYING... oh, but it's just so much FUN to let loose, and burn and destroy though! Way more fun, and easier!The people living in these cities are the ones tearing down these statues, who are you to tell them they should endure their presence, especially when the entire point of them being erected was to remind black people of their place?
YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER
WE STAND AT THE DOOR
WE STAND AT THE DOOR