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Split Thread Tearing Down Statues Associated With Racial Injustice

sir drinks-a-lot said:
I think we should start limiting people to only being outraged about two things. Although it'd really cut down on new threads and Internet usage in general. Just pick your top two and concentrate your outrage there.
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Good idea.

What’s your second outrage going to be?
 
Several people have said we must vote these statues down, instead of pulling. We've been trying!!! Local legislators, state legislators, the mayor, and the governor have voted and assured us that those statues will come down. But! There's this old law that is preventing this. The governor especially promised that the Lee statue was first. That one will have to be taken down professionally, it's humongous and would almost certainly crush several people if taken down carelessly.
 
sir drinks-a-lot said:
Oh, c'mon. That's a ridiculous characterization of what was said.
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How so? Meadmaker explicitly said that the people the statues represent had done some good in their lives, and were not all bad. What statue-worthy good did Jefferson Davis do?

I would ask about Nathan Bedford, but a Confederate General being immortalized in such a ridiculous statue is clearly good.
 
Darat said:
I did ask for no more “I assert therefore I am right” and that is all you repeat? Do you have anything even approaching evidence?
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You have to also understand before you ask, just arrogantly assuming a high ground moral position does not advance your case a bit. Face it, there are strong reasons to think that postmodernist 'progressiveness is a bankrupt ideology, among others the term 'racist' has become so diluted, a trend which continues, that the progressive 'fight' against it resemble rather the Stalinist purges;' as Pascal Bruckner able explain [referring to the strong advent of this brand of progressivism in the 1990s]:

The word ‘racism’ has acquired a galloping obesity, swallowing up in its definition all sorts of behaviours, attitudes, and rites that had up to this point not been connected with it. Anti-racism...is a rapidly expanding market in which each group, in order to exist, has to allege that it has suffered a wound that makes it special. These are no longer associations of citizens who have joined together to combat racism; they are religious or community lobbies that invent new forms of discrimination to justify their existence and receive the maximum of publicity and reparations...A consistent anti-racist is a sleuth who discovers a new form of segregation every morning, delighted to have added this new species to the great taxonomy of progressive thought.
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The cognitive dissonance of quite many 'progressives' is troubling, on the one hand they recognize that historical personalities should be evaluated taking in account the historical context whilst on the other they give a full OK to the bands of thugs yes who vandalize the statues of those marked for elimination by the progressive dogma (and only them, in reality as someone observed almost all historical statues should be demolished in the 'linked with slavery, bigotry' approach). Reason and truth are shining largely by their absence I'm afraid. Progressivism can do better than that I'd argue.
 
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Meadmaker said:
That's hilarious.
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Did Loyalists or anyone for that matter, commission statues of Gen. Clinton, Lord North or George III to be erected in say, New York, Philly or Boston in the years and decades following the American Revolution?

Why not? Why would or should we support statues of oh say, Saddam Hussein being toppled if contemporary sculptures are so sacrosanct and apparently necessary for a proper understanding of history?

Has this this thread been Godwined yet? Because it easily could be.
 
wareyin said:
How so? Meadmaker explicitly said that the people the statues represent had done some good in their lives, and were not all bad. What statue-worthy good did Jefferson Davis do?

I would ask about Nathan Bedford, but a Confederate General being immortalized in such a ridiculous statue is clearly good.
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Meadmaker said:
In the context of this conversation, I find this kind of funny.

A lot of people whose statues have come down had done some good in their lifetimes, even if they were not consistently good.
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Emphasis added.
 
Meadmaker said:
Emphasis added.
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Ok, if you didn't mean Jefferson Davis, who did you mean? I'm pretty sure that the majority of statues that have been pulled down were of Confederates, with the handful of exceptions you've been upset about. Is the handful of exceptions the "a lot"? If so, I bet we have different understandings of "a lot."
 
JoeMorgue said:
Yes. If we don't force black people to provide us a complete breakdown of their philosophical stances on statues before the racist traitor statues come down, they'll turn into tyrants.
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The road to hell is paved with the good intentions of melodramatic, childish egos.
 
Deadie said:
Did Loyalists or anyone for that matter, commission statues of Gen. Clinton, Lord North or George III to be erected in say, New York, Philly or Boston in the years and decades following the American Revolution?
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I’ve not heard of this “American Revolution”.

Is there a statue that you can recommend so I can learn about it?
 
Deadie said:
Did Loyalists or anyone for that matter, commission statues of Gen. Clinton, Lord North or George III to be erected in say, New York, Philly or Boston in the years and decades following the American Revolution?

Why not? Why would or should we support statues of oh say, Saddam Hussein being toppled if contemporary sculptures are so sacrosanct and apparently necessary for a proper understanding of history?

Has this this thread been Godwined yet? Because it easily could be.
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Did you actually look at the sequence of messages you were responding to, or was it just a knee jerk? Sometimes the thread of conversation is hard to follow with messages all mixed together, so I'll quote the messages.



Meadmaker said:
I was explicitly talking about "disowning" history, or emulating the people in it. That's what statues are for. It's a way of us telling the next generation, "I want you to know about this." It's more than just a museum piece.
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johnny karate said:
Your notion of what statues mean and the function they serve is patently false.
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So, when I called Johnny's message "hilarious", the topic wasn't any particular statues, whether of Lord North, Saddam Hussein, or Robert E. Lee. It wasn't about a specific statue. It's about commemorative statues in general.

With that in mind, let me elaborate on why I find JK's post hilarious.

First, if what I described is not the purpose of a statue, then could anyone please describe what it might be? I'm pretty sure that's what statues are for. You could phrase it differently, but I think that's it.

On the other hand, I am open to counter suggestions, but JK didn't offer any. He just said the mine was "patently false". Classic forum speak. When you don't agree, if you say something like "patently false", it's great emphasis, but without actually contributing any thought. You could say, "I don't agree with that.", but what's the fun in that? It makes it sound like it's just someone's opinion.

But the icing on the cake to make it hilarious is that the people who are demanding the statues be removed are doing it specifically because they are serving the exact role that I am describing, but the statue-pullers think that the people that we are holding up as models for emulation are not worthy of that role. That is the entire reason that they want Robert E. Lee pulled down. Previous generations put up a statue of Lee precisely so that they could say, "This was a good man who fought for our (racist) way of life. We should remember him and emulate him!" The current generation is saying, "We don't think so. He fought to keep slaves. Let's get his statue out of there so that people don't emulate him."

So my "patently false" interpretation is exactly the justification for removing the statues.


Or....maybe not. Maybe someone else can describe the role of a statue that has nothing to do with what I said that role was, and maybe someone can describe why the statues should be removed, without saying something about the role of the statues that isn't substantially similar to what I said.



And....just as a reminder, because people sometimes forget things or leap to assumptions if they haven't read the whole thread (or even if they have). I think the vast majority of the Confederate monuments should come down.
 
wareyin said:
Ok, if you didn't mean Jefferson Davis, who did you mean? I'm pretty sure that the majority of statues that have been pulled down were of Confederates, with the handful of exceptions you've been upset about. Is the handful of exceptions the "a lot"? If so, I bet we have different understandings of "a lot."
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Here's an updated list from what I posted a few days, with just the "pull downs".

Jefferson Davis
Confederate soldier (Many instances)
Christopher Columbus
Ulysses S. Grant
George Washington
Francis Scott Key
Juan de Onate (Not quite pulled down. The attempt was interrupted when someone was shot. Removed by owners to prevent further vandalism, although other statues of him have also been vandalized)
Saint Junipero Serra
Edward Carmack (never heard of him)
Miscellaneous Confederate generals, some of which I've never heard of.
Edward Colston
Thomas Jefferson
Miguel de Cervantes.

I see a lot of non-Confederates in that list, and among the non-Confederates, I see plenty of deeds I consider Statue-worthy.

(ETA: This does not include vanalized statues, mostly spray painted, and it does not include statues removed by their owners or the appropriate civic authorities.)
 
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Meadmaker said:
Here's an updated list from what I posted a few days, with just the "pull downs".

Jefferson Davis
Confederate soldier (Many instances)
Christopher Columbus
Ulysses S. Grant
George Washington
Francis Scott Key
Juan de Onate (Not quite pulled down. The attempt was interrupted when someone was shot. Removed by owners to prevent further vandalism, although other statues of him have also been vandalized)
Saint Junipero Serra
Edward Carmack (never heard of him)
Miscellaneous Confederate generals, some of which I've never heard of.
Edward Colston
Thomas Jefferson
Miguel de Cervantes.

I see a lot of non-Confederates in that list, and among the non-Confederates, I see plenty of deeds I consider Statue-worthy.
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You gave a list of 11 named people, with an additional 2 unknown amounts of Confederates thrown in which greatly skews the numbers. One of the statues wasn't pulled down, so we're down to 10. Jefferson Davis, at the top of your list, suddenly has become not the guy you meant. Colston made his fortune selling slaves, Carmack was famous for defending the lynching of 3 black store owners. Even if we include those 2, you have a total of 9 people. An unknown number out of that 9 is your "a lot?" As I suspected, we have very different understandings of that phrase.
 
johnny karate said:
Statues are monuments to a person or event, not historical records of that person or event. We have libraries and museums for that.
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Which is why statues should not be destroyed, but relocated to museums where the proper historical context can be presented.

Also, it's worth taking note of the fact that most of the Confederate statues were erected well after the civil war. In fact, many were put up during Jim Crow.
 
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