The Goat Pen

So Silent Sam wound up horizontal on the grass like a passed-out frat brother. What say you about that, hedge?

As I’ve grown older and matured, I’ve come to think that anything that does more than honor the dead (by only acknowledging they died) from the civil war is foolish and aggrandizes the darkest moment in our nation’s history, but I am equally terrified of mob rule. Granted, I understand that meaningful change is often painful and in the form of mass upheaval, but I wanted the statue — and others like it — to come down via a peaceful, organized, thoughtful process.

However, that seems impossible now, and it has crossed my mind that maybe I am the type of moderate Dr. King felt was the true danger to the civil rights movement.

It should've been moved long ago, and the current Chancellor, Carol Folt, indicated a few years ago that she was open to that, which prompted our right wing legislature to pass a law saying statues couldn't be removed or moved. Obviously there's a pages-long debate going on over at IC about this. On the one hand, I think that the South and slavery are easy targets virtue-signalling liberal college kids, most of whom I would bet have never done one other thing in their lives to help stop "injustice" or even just volunteer at a soup kitchen.

At the same time, I'm enough of a Noam Chomsky "America is the real terrorist" liberal to say that if confederate monuments must come down, then why not nearly every monument, building or statue in America, all of which are just glorifications of a culture of blood and tyranny that stole land by force and committed genocide on the American Indians (and killed plenty of others who got in our way). In that regard, we are no better than the nazis killing the jews and trying to annex most of Europe, but of course nobody wants to admit that. Much easier to point the finger at the South and slavery.

But at the same time, I'm getting old enough now to be annoyed by these faggoty little social justice warriors who took down Silent Sam, even if I kinda sympathize with them. I'm a monster of contradiction like that...

well its part of history

granted they fought for the right to have slaves but you have to wonder are the Robert e lee statues next? Thomas Jefforson? Andrew Jackson?

UNC has a pretty decent tradition of leftie social activism by students. I remember when I was in school, some group built a shanty town in the quad and lived there for a semester (maybe it was just a few weeks but it seemed longer) to protest apartheid. I was too busy doing blow and LSD to be much interested in them, but I couldn't help but notice them the few times I managed to make it down to campus (just think, eCat, your daughter will be able to say something like this in a few years). I wonder how those shanty town apartheid protesters feel today about the blacks murdering white farmers and taking their land in South Africa now? Sanguine, I would guess...

I know its different from Silent Sam, but my annoyance at this is regarding statues and monuments of people that have basically little to do with the Confederacy except having lived during the damn thing. And now over a century after the fact we are going to make which side you fought on in the Civil War, where hundreds of thousands of motherfuckers got killed and 10% of the entire population of the country fought in the damn thing, a permanent black eye that means you cant be acknowledged?

A&M has a statue of a former president of the college, who basically saved the place form being shut down, and was a texas governor in the 1880's, etc. But of course, suddenly there's a problem with it since he was a confederate general. Of course as far as I can tell all that basically just means (considering he was 22 years old when the war broke out) that he was some kid who already had military experience, who was actually a reasonably smart and effective person, and who just happened to actually survive to make it to the end of the damn thing). It seems to me that when you end up giving an inch on this kind of thing, a perfectly reasonable inch... suddenly you have people who are not nearly as bright, thinking they need to make their mark and make a difference and become big shots by taking an additional idiotic mile.

Honor the slave-holding treasonous cocksuckers all you want - just not on property maintained by my tax dollars. How hard is that?

bluetick wrote:Honor the slave-holding treasonous cocksuckers all you want - just not on property maintained by my tax dollars. How hard is that?

how much of your tax dollars are going to maintain statues in southern states?

the problem with all of this is that this is backlash to a white president being elected after Obama and minorities perceiving the country has taken a step back, so they are lashing out in an effort to provoke white America. The time to address this would have been during the Clinton presidency. He being a white southerner and widely popular with African Americans could have bridged the gap to where statue removal (and placed into museums honoring the confederacy) would have been acceptable.

If you have to tear down a statue by mob rule in America or remove it in the middle of the night, then how is that an honorable or justifiable approach?

hedge wrote:UNC has a pretty decent tradition of leftie social activism by students. I remember when I was in school, some group built a shanty town in the quad and lived there for a semester (maybe it was just a few weeks but it seemed longer) to protest apartheid. I was too busy doing blow and LSD to be much interested in them, but I couldn't help but notice them the few times I managed to make it down to campus (just think, eCat, your daughter will be able to say something like this in a few years). I wonder how those shanty town apartheid protesters feel today about the blacks murdering white farmers and taking their land in South Africa now? Sanguine, I would guess...

I actually talked to her about becoming an activist. I'm all for it as long as the cause is just. Just don't let other people think for you. There is no cause led by Samantha Bee or Colbert that is just. I recognize she is going to see the world differently than I do, hell I saw the world differently when I was 17 too. I just didn't have the internet to document it.

eCat wrote:

hedge wrote:UNC has a pretty decent tradition of leftie social activism by students. I remember when I was in school, some group built a shanty town in the quad and lived there for a semester (maybe it was just a few weeks but it seemed longer) to protest apartheid. I was too busy doing blow and LSD to be much interested in them, but I couldn't help but notice them the few times I managed to make it down to campus (just think, eCat, your daughter will be able to say something like this in a few years). I wonder how those shanty town apartheid protesters feel today about the blacks murdering white farmers and taking their land in South Africa now? Sanguine, I would guess...

I actually talked to her about becoming an activist. I'm all for it as long as the cause is just. Just don't let other people think for you. There is no cause led by Samantha Bee or Colbert that is just. I recognize she is going to see the world differently than I do, hell I saw the world differently when I was 17 too. I just didn't have the internet to document it.

Is she going to go through rush? The Greek scene at the major schools in the Deep South is a big part of the campus' social scene.

"I actually talked to her about becoming an activist. I'm all for it as long as the cause is just."

I wasn't talking about her being able to talk about being an activist in a few years, I was talking about her being able to talk about doing LSD and blow and not going to campus very much...

President John Tyler Has 2 Living Grandsons

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles ... -grandsons

The only reason I saw that is that some dude posted over at IC "My grandfather was in the Civil War, should I not honor him?" and I replied "Your grandfather was in the Civil War? Goddamn man, how old are you??" and then somebody posted that item about John Tyler...

Also, as far as the confederate statues go, at least in my opinion, I don't really see or feel that they "honor" the confederacy or whoever is the subject for the statue. At the time they were erected, yeah, that was probably the intention and no doubt in the hearts of some folks now, living in trailer parks and flying the stars and bars with the picture of Hank Jr.'s face in the middle, these monuments are sacred totems or some such. But I think of them as art and enjoy seeing them, such as on Monument Ave. in Richmond and all sorts of statues all over DC. Maybe some vague awareness of who these people were and an even more vague awareness of the historical events that made them statue-worthy flutters across my mind (or not) when I look at these statues, but I'm not prostrating myself in reverence before them and thinking of how honorable they were. Nothing to do with "honor" crosses my mind when I look at or think about these statues and monuments. I think of them first and foremost as art and then as history and then, well, not much else. I couldn't care less what the people who erected them over a century ago thought or felt, but that has nothing to do with what they mean to me now...

DooKSucks wrote:

eCat wrote:

hedge wrote:UNC has a pretty decent tradition of leftie social activism by students. I remember when I was in school, some group built a shanty town in the quad and lived there for a semester (maybe it was just a few weeks but it seemed longer) to protest apartheid. I was too busy doing blow and LSD to be much interested in them, but I couldn't help but notice them the few times I managed to make it down to campus (just think, eCat, your daughter will be able to say something like this in a few years). I wonder how those shanty town apartheid protesters feel today about the blacks murdering white farmers and taking their land in South Africa now? Sanguine, I would guess...

I actually talked to her about becoming an activist. I'm all for it as long as the cause is just. Just don't let other people think for you. There is no cause led by Samantha Bee or Colbert that is just. I recognize she is going to see the world differently than I do, hell I saw the world differently when I was 17 too. I just didn't have the internet to document it.

Is she going to go through rush? The Greek scene at the major schools in the Deep South is a big part of the campus' social scene.

no, but its because she is part of a research program that has its own lab, hangout area and organized activities. Greek is very big at Bama and I told her I'd support it given she has a scholarship, but the cost of greek would come out of her college fund. She decided against it - at least for now.

If she did it, she'd be an Alpha Gam or we as called them in college Alpha Grabba Donut

eCat wrote:The dirty world of hedge fund investing and corporate takeovers

long read but it kept my interest

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... y-investor

From the article:

"Some of Singer’s tactics at Elliott have also cropped up in his political life. Singer supports numerous media outlets and research institutes that disseminate his ideas. He is the chairman of the think tank Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which encourages free-market policies as a means of addressing domestic-policy issues. It hosts dozens of fellows, who write op-eds, give speeches, and publish books. Singer sits on the board of the magazine Commentary and is also a major financial backer of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online news publication edited by Matthew Continetti, the former opinion editor at The Weekly Standard.

The Beacon has a long-standing and controversial practice of paying for opposition research, as it did against Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign. Singer was a vocal opponent of Trump during the Republican primaries, and, last year, it was revealed that the Beacon had retained the firm Fusion GPS to conduct research on Trump during the early months of the campaign. By May, 2016, when it had become clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee, the Beacon told Fusion to stop its investigation. Fusion was also hired by the Democratic National Committee, and eventually compiled the Christopher Steele dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government."

bluetick wrote:Honor the slave-holding treasonous cocksuckers all you want - just not on property maintained by my tax dollars. How hard is that?

Then Washington and Jefferson were slaveholding cocksuckers too. Are you going to try and tear down their monuments on the Mall in DC? How far does this silly PC morality farce go?

They weren't treasonous, though. Oh wait, yes they were. I guess if you win it's not treason, though...

So if the Confederacy had won their independence from the Union (and we are all glad they did not), then that would have made their leaders non-traitors, and all those statues of them would then be morally justified?

They believed that, if the 13 colonies could leave Great Britain, then why can’t the southern states leave the United States? That logic was pretty compelling in 1861. The ultimate answer to that question was best answered by Michael Scott in “The Office,” when he said, “If you are a racist, we will attack you with the North.”

12 US presidents were slave holders, and a number of others who didn't own slaves would be considered white supremacists today. It was a different era with different mores.