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[Starver]

Yes. I appreciate you agreeing with me on the point I was making. Nobody (relevant to this discussion) called the working class Deplorable.


(And now what was a P.S. to the prior post that I was appending, but you obviously replied already, so extracted from that aborted edit and olaced here:)
As for smart, there was enough mud flung to stick to anything, if it wasn't that phrase that was up-converted and contrived to be against her, it would have been something else. By the same people who (if they were even bothered) would dismiss what Trump says as "he never meant that". Like apparently he never meant that Mexico would send an actual cheque to pay for the wall, that the wall was never going to be solid concrete/an actual wall, that the wall would be the entire length of the border, that the wall sections he'd been building he'd actually be building from scratch, and would be his walls rather than pre-scheduled repairs, etc, despite having plainly said these things. Oh, and all those times he's said IS is defeated by him, he meant on the way to being defeated with inout from allies and "enemies of my enemy", alike, en mass, just like he never said he would be pulling everything out of that area immediately several months ago, which would have left the more recent claims of active victory strangely hollow.

Personally I don't believe anything he says, so apparently I share a lot of ideology with a Trump supporter. Like the atheist who just believes on one less god than a theist, both not believing in the myriad of other deities and pantheons, I just don't believe all of thousands upon thousands of individual statements (I'm ambivalent about his statements about water being wet!) that even a Deplorable may be all "meh, whatever..." about if it's not their actual and current tinfoil obsession.

[Max™]

For clarity in the future if I didn't make it clear where my ire is pointed: I've got no reason to care if Joe-Bob and Billy out in Bumblefuck buy into the Lost Cause bullshit, they don't really have much reason to even question it, do they?

No, until they buy tiki torches and parade around some awful monument to hatred they don't even ping the scanner.

The fuckers who pushed this bullshit ideology, especially the ones who do so knowing it is just a means to stay on top of the heap? Fuck them with a gigantic bronze dildo made from their favorite melted down statue while it's still hot to the touch.

I'm not even interested in caring enough to get mad at all the people hit by indoctrinated racism, but I'll happily punch the throat of the shitlickers doing the indoctrination if given opportunity because fuck them for doing that to so many for any reason, hard.

[Loud Whispers]

Ayo hol up if you're gonna kill all your statues can you just ship them off to the British museum, we'll take them for free

*EDIT

Yeah, but even strategist is ...exceptionally generous, you don't wage a land war with a more populous and heavily industrial neighbor if you have any sort of strategy in mind, he may have been tactically skilled at winning battles as a field officer, but generals always fuck up bad.

This criticism is... Exceptionally anachronistic, judging a general by the standards of industrial warfare in what is not just America's first taste of industrial warfare, but the first ever case of industrial warfare. What's more, the criticism rests on the belief that this Lee boi wanted war, which is factually wrong. This Lee boi opposed secession and was offered command by Washington, he opposed on the basis that he could take no part in an invasion of his native state and resigned from the army lol

He goes back to Virginia on some country roads to see what Virginia's going to do, the Virginians vote against secession but after the crisis turns into full blown civil war, Lincoln's call to arms actually causes the Virginians to vote against the Union and secede. This is where Lee boi comes into the fold

How was he strategically? Lee boi was marginally ahead of his time. Proficient at mobile warfare, he recognised that the only way the South could win was if they knocked the Union out of the war before their materiel superiority swept away the confederates.

Once the material superiority of the Union started seriously weighing over the Confederates, the dude (an engineering officer by trade), made some good field fortifications and permanent fortifications which was an integration of modern machine-gun, artillery and repeating-rifle technologies in strategy. Not Great War trenchwarfare, but certainly a smaller image of what was to come, and certainly without it the South would've been crushed a lot sooner

Essentially without some serious, repeated, catastrophic blunders, the Confeds were buggered from the onset. Their only hope of a Franco-British intervention was delusional

As a final aside I do find something amusing in how naval warfare did not work against the rebellious colonies, but was decisive against the rebellious confederates lol interdependence is a bitch

[Dunamisdeos]

Everyone should take a moment to turn a few pages back in the thread.

Look at the kinds of conversations we were having back in late 2016.

Now look at the conversation we are having now.

Be proud of your growth.

[Trekkin]

Everyone should take a moment to turn a few pages back in the thread.

Look at the kinds of conversations we were having back in late 2016.

Now look at the conversation we are having now.

Be proud of your growth.

I have to say, I didn't expect this kind of sarcasm from you.

[Dorsidwarf]

But the thread only goes back to 2017 after the old one got shut down for rioting

[Gentlefish]

Trekkin, woah. You're being unnecessarily aggressive here.

No one here is responsible for whatever happened to you, your family, or your friends.

From what I can tell from the previous posts, people are saying it may be better to criticize actions and challenge beliefs, and not attack people directly.

Sure there's some shitheels out there that know what they're doing (Duke, Spencer, probably Shapiro) that we can freely hate. But the root cause for most of the issues in America, I believe, is an education problem.

You don't get people learning by attacking them and putting them on the defensive.

[Loud Whispers]

You don't get people learning by attacking them and putting them on the defensive.

BuT iF WE BoMB thEM EnOUGh THeY BecOME deMOCraCY

[Dunamisdeos]

Everyone should take a moment to turn a few pages back in the thread.

Look at the kinds of conversations we were having back in late 2016.

Now look at the conversation we are having now.

Be proud of your growth.

I have to say, I didn't expect this kind of sarcasm from you.

Didn't realize it didn't go back as far as I thought.

Anyway, I was referring to how everyone here was ready to literally kill and/or forcefully deport each other 3 years ago (in the previous thread) and now people are actually advocating against anger as a solution.

Dats growth.

[Doomblade187]

You don't get people learning by attacking them and putting them on the defensive.

BuT iF WE BoMB thEM EnOUGh THeY BecOME deMOCraCY

moar drone strikes is clesrly the answer.

I think a distinction is needed between those who can learn better and those who drive the wedges. The two need very different approaches.

[scriver]

I still believe anger is a solution, but then again I am a Sith Lord

[Loud Whispers]

moar drone strikes is clesrly the answer.

I think a distinction is needed between those who can learn better and those who drive the wedges. The two need very different approaches.

So you hate carpenters, sailors, cheesemongers, citrus farmers and Dutch shoe manufacturers? What wicked seditious speech, driving wedges is a time honoured tradition of mankind

[SaberToothTiger]

Blessed are the cheesemongs

[Dunamisdeos]

moar drone strikes is clesrly the answer.

I think a distinction is needed between those who can learn better and those who drive the wedges. The two need very different approaches.

So you hate carpenters, sailors, cheesemongers, citrus farmers and Dutch shoe manufacturers? What wicked seditious speech, driving wedges is a time honoured tradition of mankind

And now, the conclusion

[Trekkin]

Trekkin, woah. You're being unnecessarily aggressive here.

No one here is responsible for whatever happened to you, your family, or your friends.

From what I can tell from the previous posts, people are saying it may be better to criticize actions and challenge beliefs, and not attack people directly.

Sure there's some shitheels out there that know what they're doing (Duke, Spencer, probably Shapiro) that we can freely hate. But the root cause for most of the issues in America, I believe, is an education problem.

You don't get people learning by attacking them and putting them on the defensive.

In the vast majority of cases I'd agree with you on all points, which is actually why I have such a big problem with the minority of cases where it's not true.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In those cases, the actual shitheels (who are usually not a majority) have found ways to make collaborators out of well-meaning people who don't recognize what they're defending and will, if challenged, actively defend doing so. One of the most pernicious ways to do that is to blur the lines between people's beliefs and their identity. It's kind of an interesting coincidence that we're talking about the Civil War at the same time as I've been ranting, because that's kind of what happened to the antebellum South: slavery was such a part of their culture that even though only a minority owned slaves, even the yeomen came to think of an attack on slavery as an attack on the Southern identity writ large. Thus the mutually exclusive absolutes that made the conflict inevitable.

See, nobody almost thinks of themselves as a villain, but the great tragedy of it is that nobody has to individually for everyone to collectively countenance horrific things. When Southern good ol' boys talk about pride in their heritage, they're not actively, consciously promoting racism -- but it's not exactly hard to rally them to defend statues put up for the purpose of racial intimidation by talking about their pride. Proud Boys recruit from incels, not psychopaths. Not everyone who approved of HB2 in North Carolina hated transgender people -- but they did find the arguments of transphobes persuasive against all contrary evidence, which is how they got the bill passed in the first place and also part of what helped many of them get elected. The people who ask why there isn't a White History Month aren't all or even predominantly racist, but they'll listen to people who claim multiculturalism is a conspiracy to take down white America.

None of the above are evil by any stretch, but the identities they hold dear blind them to the kind of subtle injustices that make the big ones vastly easier to get away with. It's not their fault, but in a very important sense, they are the bigger problem -- and it's hard to make people aware enough of that to consciously fight it without making them angry, but to do nothing is to countenance it. It's an education problem, yes, but one of misinformation rather than lack of information.

So when I say that the Deep South is bigoted, I'm not talking about every Southerner or even the average Southerner. I'm talking about the default Southerner, if you will, one that learns just what "everybody knows" but doesn't say even if they don't necessarily believe it. It's that kind of systemically embedded bigotry, the kind behind naming buildings after Confederate heroes and calling black people "well spoken" and advocating for "family values" and "nuclear families" and nostalgia for a 1950s that wasn't ever as good as it seemed but was definitely white, straight, and cis, that acts as a resevoir host for the kind of bigotry that motivates people to do terrible things both individually and systemically. It wears down that little nagging sense that something's wrong when everyone around them looks and thinks like them -- and we need that sense to give context to the acute instances of injustice.

All of which is to say that I get why people don't like to hear this. I certainly didn't. "The foundations of your cultural identity have been shaped for generations to include, shield,  normalize and promulgate the kind of attitudes that get people senselessly killed for being unlike you" is a shitty thing to tell someone and a really bitter pill to swallow. It'd be insane and inhuman not to expect significant backfire effect. Unfortunately, the level of gentle that doesn't trigger that is way, way below the level of gentle that doesn't just get ignored in favor of cultural conformity. No, you don't get people learning by putting them on the defensive. You also don't get people learning about this without putting them on the defensive when they're the problem. Yes, criticizing beliefs is better than attacking people -- but there are beliefs too deeply engrained to make that distinction. In those cases, the question of how to approach this resolves to when you want to poke that hornet's nest, and there's a very real human cost to waiting.

All I want is for there to be no place where it doesn't feel shitty to make bigots more comfortable. I don't want anyone to ever feel like they're among friends so it's safe to say what they really think about group XYZ. I don't want there to be places where "those kind of people just don't go," because it's a short hop to them being hurt for going there and there's no shortage of people who are capable, in extremis, of making that hop. Unfortunately that means turning over all the rocks and watching the bigots scuttle out until there's nowhere left to hide, and some of those rocks have statues of Confederate generals on top of them.