Jump to content

U.S. Politics: Hairpiece In the Middle East Part 2


Recommended Posts

5 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Eh, you can't sanitize history. While those statues may not be "innocent remembrances" history is rarely benign. Pretending it never happened is ignorance, and I think tearing down these monuments is akin to pretending it never happened.

you keep saying this, and honestly i don't get how you arrive at that conclusion. like, you even say it yourself -- these are monuments, not records

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, commiedore said:

you keep saying this, and honestly i don't get how you arrive at that conclusion. like, you even say it yourself -- these are monuments, not records

Okay, that's fair, you're right on that point. The record certainly still exists. I just think that at best, this is a waste of our time. At worst, it is the destruction in some cases of some very impressive pieces of art. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, commiedore said:

at worst, sounds a hell of a lot like appeasement to me but ymmv i guess

Eh, if you were talking about not pushing back to a proposed new statue of some controversial figure, then I'd agree. When you're talking about taking down monuments that have stood for 100 years plus, I don't see how you can classify that as appeasement.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

30 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Okay, that's fair, you're right on that point. The record certainly still exists. I just think that at best, this is a waste of our time. At worst, it is the destruction in some cases of some very impressive pieces of art. 

I think you should try and put yourself in the shoes of a black person with a young child who is asking, "why is there a statue celebrating a man who fought for slavery?" and how said person would have to answer the question. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think you should try and put yourself in the shoes of a black person with a young child who is asking, "why is there a statue celebrating a man who fought for slavery?" and how said person would have to answer the question. 

Yeah, I understand the sentiment, I just think it's misguided. Often times, history is not pretty. It's often an unpleasant reminder of our darker past.   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

France has a very good health care as well as excellent maternity leave and childcare.  And it is hugely less expensive than the mess that is health care in the US.  For a single example, a very good friend had a quadruple bypass -- his out of pocket expense was the equivalent of $3000.  That was it.  This included a long stay in the hospital., the surgery, the drugs -- everything.  $3000.  Compare that with what it would have cost him in the US -- even if he'd had Blue Cross Blue Shield.  He did the math.  He'd have been liable for at least $100,000 in the US.  Would the French really vote to have this gone?  Not to mention their incredible paid vacation leave of at minimum 5 weeks a year -- this doesn't include the holidays, btw.

 

 

 

I'm not a 'climate scientist' but I have done several projects for my job related to shoreline change and have a lot of experience with various remote sensing devices that can be channeled toward the monitoring of climate change.  Anyway, when Macron made his speech a couple of weeks ago, I thought... damn, if he's serious there are certainly worse fates in life than moving to France.  Mentioned it to my girlfriend and she's ready to start packing.  :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

17 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I think you should try and put yourself in the shoes of a black person with a young child who is asking, "why is there a statue celebrating a man who fought for slavery?" and how said person would have to answer the question. 

How is that any different than telling the story of the civil war?  Are we going to rewrite the history books so that Robert E. Lee wasn't a hero to the South?  We can start with Robert E. Lee statues, but once it gets going it will always end with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, unless somebody thinks Jefferson would have fought against VA.  It would seem to be much better that rather than erase history to simply put up some new monuments that are more reflective of current belief systems.  Losers of war changing the narrative to make themselves feel better isn't something novel about the Civil War South....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Yeah, I understand the sentiment, I just think it's misguided. Often times, history is not pretty. It's often an unpleasant reminder of our darker past.   

But removing the statues isn't about trying to white wash history. It's simply a signal that these figures are no longer going to be celebrated by the state. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

But removing the statues isn't about trying to white wash history. It's simply a signal that these figures are no longer going to be celebrated by the state. 

To me, this goes a step beyond that. "No longer being celebrated by the state" would be we are no longer going to name libraries or freeway interchanges or public institutions after these figure. Actively seeking to tear down existing monuments is a whole nother deal, methinks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

How is that any different than telling the story of the civil war?  Are we going to rewrite the history books so that Robert E. Lee wasn't a hero to the South white supremacists?  We can start with Robert E. Lee statues, but once it gets going it will always end with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, unless somebody thinks Jefferson would have fought against VA.  It would seem to be much better that rather than erase history to simply put up some new monuments that are more reflective of current belief systems.  Losers of war changing the narrative to make themselves feel better isn't something novel about the Civil War South....

Fixed. Yes, we should have history books that show REL was a hero to southern white supremacists and an enemy to the United States.

There are "losers of war" and "losers of a war seeking to keep 13% of the population in slavery".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess people are wanting to rehash the Civil War in this thread for some reason, but the arguments for removing statues of people are no different from those of removing treasonous flags from state legislature grounds. We did the latter without any issues, so I'm sure we'll get over the removal of these statues as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

No one in the U.S. who has health insurance either through their employer or Medicare, or even Medicaid is going to be on the hook for $100K out of pocket expenses.  That is just incorrect.  

This is not remotely true, and has only been true in fairly recent times (namely, after the ACA was passed). Employer healthcare has tons of examples where people were not covered after they hit lifetime limits, or were covered only to a certain point, or were simply denied their coverage entirely. 

Personally, had I been at Amazon instead of Microsoft and my son had had cancer, he would have been cut off 1 month before his final chemo treatments. He would currently owe about $350,000, and it would continue to grow for the remainder of his life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, on the statue thing: do what we've done elsewhere, which is move the statues to private art places or places that have no real association with the statue's history. Seattle has an awesome statue of Lenin sitting in the middle of a weird place in the city, as an example. 

But otherwise no, @Manhole Eunuchsbane's argument is bullshit. These aren't just art pieces that have stood for 100 years - these are state-sponsored celebrations of slavery. One of the best ways to make sure that those who consider the Confederacy heroic to get outmoded is to stop telling them that these things are heroic, and having a bunch of statues everywhere of them kind of indicates that. There's a reason that all the Hitler statues got torn down and instead there are memorials in Germany - because they aren't whitewashing history, they're owning up to it, but they're also not pushing a narrative that these things are good any more. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Also, on the statue thing: do what we've done elsewhere, which is move the statues to private art places or places that have no real association with the statue's history. Seattle has an awesome statue of Lenin sitting in the middle of a weird place in the city, as an example. 

But otherwise no, @Manhole Eunuchsbane's argument is bullshit. These aren't just art pieces that have stood for 100 years - these are state-sponsored celebrations of slavery. One of the best ways to make sure that those who consider the Confederacy heroic to get outmoded is to stop telling them that these things are heroic, and having a bunch of statues everywhere of them kind of indicates that. There's a reason that all the Hitler statues got torn down and instead there are memorials in Germany - because they aren't whitewashing history, they're owning up to it, but they're also not pushing a narrative that these things are good any more. 

I think that first bit is a good compromise. I would not argue against that tact at all.

I never said that these were just pieces of art. I suggested that they were (on top of everything else) pieces of art.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I must say I'm confused about claims that taking down these monuments are attempts to whitewash history. Isn't that what these statues were in the first place? Removing them is in fact getting rid of that whitewashing. And they aren't even being destroyed, even though there would be plenty of justification to do so, they may very well end up as exhibits in a museum. Which would be IMO the best place for these types of things. Preferably one about attempts to whitewash history.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also - one of the strongest experiences I had was going to the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. That museum showed some of the resistance and the people fighting against the Nazis - my favorite was the preserved baby stroller with a secret gun compartment - but what it mostly focused on was showing how almost everyone was complicit. It attempted to show how you might be complicit - how you could just give in to things by ignoring things or not speaking up, and it in no way attempted to hide its history. It had tons of propaganda pieces - posters, speeches, videos, etc. 

That's where these statues belong - in a museum showcasing how fucking bigoted the US was, and how horrible that life was.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, House Balstroko said:

The problem with that logic is that it's very simplistic. Yes, Le Pen and Wilders ended up ultimately losing in the final election, but both parties got further then they have before. 

 

No. Wilders got less votes and a smaller percentage of the vote than in 2010 (in Dutch wiki), which was the election that got him a supporting role of a very rare minority government. And his party has never reached the high water mark of the populist and anti-foreigner predecessor that was the LPF (the movement of the murdered Pim Fortuyn).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...