[dohboi]

dis apparently has better historical information than the Museum of Natural History does

[jedrider]

I'm saddened that the Dixie Chicks now want to rename themselves.

Yeah, this is all happening too suddenly for me to assess this situation, but let's face it, this extreme reaction was provoked by this systemic racism and violence that has persisted for far too long and which our current leader appears to be encouraging or abetting.

Dixie is going down again and I'm fine with all this.

[Plantagenet]

I'm saddened that the Dixie Chicks now want to rename themselves.

I'm even more saddened that they changed their name to the "Chicks."

You can't get much more sexist then a bunch of grown women who have been brain-washed into thinking of themselves just as "chicks."

I would've been more impressed if they had renamed themselves the "Badass Bitches" or the "Woken Wymen" or something like that to show they were against both racism AND sexism.

But renaming themselves the Chicks is just pathetic.


Hey----Check out that cute chick with the big butkus......

Cheers!

[JuanP]

I'm saddened that the Dixie Chicks now want to rename themselves.

I'm even more saddened that they changed their name to the "Chicks."

You can't get much more sexist then a bunch of grown women who have been brain-washed into thinking of themselves just as "chicks."

I would've been more impressed if they had renamed themselves the "Badass Bitches" or the "Woken Wymen" or something like that to show they were against both racism AND sexism.

But renaming themselves the Chicks is just pathetic.

Cheers!

The politically correct or Woke name should be "American Southern people who menstruate". The word women now includes transsexuals, too, so it would not be specific enough.

[Shaved Monkey]

Move all the racist statues to a museum
And clearly explain their past

[vtsnowedin]

Move all the racist statues to a museum
And clearly explain their past

Fine!
But the T.R statue is on the steps of the museum. Is that not close enough?

[Plantagenet]

Move all the racist statues to a museum
And clearly explain their past

Fine!
But the T.R statue is on the steps of the museum. Is that not close enough?

This isn't about racist statues. The BLM protestors and Antifa have already moved on to tearing down statues of abolitonists and union soldiers and other people who weren't confederates or racists.

The statues are just the start.


It won't be long until the mobs are burning books. Its inevitable----its what ignorant mobs do.

Cheers!

[Shaved Monkey]

Move all the racist statues to a museum
And clearly explain their past

Fine!
But the T.R statue is on the steps of the museum. Is that not close enough?

This isn't about racist statues. The BLM protestors and Antifa have already moved on to tearing down statues of abolitonists and union soldiers and other people who weren't confederates or racists.

The statues are just the start.


It won't be long until the mobs are burning books. Its inevitable----its what ignorant mobs do.

Cheers!

Which other statues ?

[Plantagenet]

Move all the racist statues to a museum
And clearly explain their past

Fine!
But the T.R statue is on the steps of the museum. Is that not close enough?

This isn't about racist statues. The BLM protestors and Antifa have already moved on to tearing down statues of abolitonists and union soldiers and other people who weren't confederates or racists.

The statues are just the start.


It won't be long until the mobs are burning books. Its inevitable----its what ignorant mobs do.

Cheers!

Which other statues ?

I'm not going to read the newspaper for you, but there have been lots of news stories for a couple of weeks now about BLM and antifa vandalizing and tearing down statues that are unrelated to their supposed cause.

I'll post a link to just one of these for you. If you want to learn more then check out the newspaper....just about every day now some mob somewhere in the US does something stupid or funny or absurd.

Which one shall it be? The statue of the abolitionist the morons in the mob tore down? The statue of the union soldier?

Oh heck...lets google up the union soldier statue that was vandalized, shall we?

Lets try the most important Union Soldier of all---President Ulysses S. Grant who as the leading Union General is single-handedly responsible for rallying the union army, defeating General Robert S. Lee and ending the rebellion of the traitorous Democrats in the Confederacy.

Here's what we will do...try putting "Grant statue torn down" into your google search engine.

BINGO! There it is, just as I told you.

ulysses-grant-statue-toppled-san-francisco

The morons in a BLM mob celebrating "Juneteenth" in San Francisco toppled a statue of President Grant---the union soldier who defeated the Confederacy.

And that proves my point. Mobs are innately stupid and mob violence is always on the verge of getting out of control and doing very stupid things, and the mobs organized by BLM are no different. IN San Francisco a BLM mob celebrating Juneteenth actually topped a statue of Ulysses Grant, the man who defeated the Confederacy and did as much to free the slaves as anyone short of Lincoln himself. There wouldn't be a "Juneteenth" if not for U.S. Grant, but no one in that mob knew enough history to understand that.


A moronic mob celebrating Juneteenth pulled down the statue of U S Grant in San Francisco.....


And then the idiots in the mob smashed the statue of the man who made Juneteenth possible.

Cheers!

[Tanada]

Statues and Limitations

Spasmodic attempts to remake the world invariably involve the throwing out of the good along with the bad. Our ongoing bout of statuary iconoclasm has proven no exception.

The list of figures whose likenesses have been defaced now includes Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Cervantes, Robert the Bruce, Voltaire, General Schuyler, the abolitionist Mathias Baldwin, and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. One can only imagine the philosophy that could draw a line around as motley a crew as that.

Of course, no such philosophy exists — and nor will it. Rather, we find ourselves in the middle stages of a cultural riot in which everything — and everyone — has become fair game. What do Cervantes and Stevie Ray Vaughan have in common? Well, that they are both made of bronze, and are thus liable to make a sickening thud when pulled by force from their pedestals. The violence, to borrow a fashionable phrase, is the point.

But it is not acceptable. Irrespective of the nature of their grievance — or of the strength of the feeling undergirding it — violent mobs can’t make decisions on behalf of everyone else. If, as is occasionally the case, it is necessary for public monuments to be altered, updated, revisited, or removed, that work must be done within the democratic process and under the rule of law. Bad taste is not an excuse for anarchy.

One of the great ironies of our present upheaval has been the tendency of its most vocal advocates to engage in precisely the type of reactionary thoughtlessness that they believe themselves to be fighting. There is a compelling case to be made against, say, the veneration of the Confederacy, but it is a case that relies for its power upon diligent differentiation. Alexander Stephens, Jefferson Davis, John Calhoun and co. were pernicious not because they lived in the past, but because their primary contribution to history was to stand in favor of human bondage and against the American creed. Had the Confederacy prevailed, its legacy would have been the rejection and nullification of Jefferson’s words, of Lincoln’s aims, and of Grant’s actions. Do those who support the targeting of Confederate statues imagine that it will be easier or more difficult to make the argument for the unique perfidy of the rebel’s cause if they are also in favor of tearing down the monuments that honor its opponents?

Alas, too many of our institutions seem to believe that the answer is “Easier.” The Pulitzer prize-winning lead essayist of the New York Times’s “1619 Project” has suggested that it would be “an honor” if all this vandalism were called “the 1619 riots,” and, separately, has expressed indifference toward the destruction of statues of Ulysses S. Grant. Given that the central premise of the 1619 Project is that the Founding was predicated upon a lie and that white supremacy has always been the nation’s animating value, this makes a perverted sort of sense, and yet we cannot help but notice how absurd it is that, by flattening American history into a single unexceptional lump, the supposedly “anti-racist” position is rendered indistinguishable from the position that was held by the Confederacy. As ever, the death of context leads inexorably to the death of understanding.

And, if left unchecked, it leads to the death of history itself. Every great figure from America’s past has been flawed in one way or another; the salient question is whether those flaws were incidental, or whether they were central, to their celebration. Thomas Jefferson is remembered primarily for setting into aspic what Abraham Lincoln described as an “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times” and what Martin Luther King described as a “promissory note.” George Washington is remembered for his role throwing off the colonial yoke and then setting an unprecedented example of republican leadership as the nation’s first president. Lincoln saved the Union and helped to bring an end to slavery; Churchill identified the Nazis as having created “a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime,” and helped rally the world to their destruction; Gandhi pioneered and practiced a form of non-violent protest that has been exported worldwide and used to remarkable effect. A full understanding of each man requires the imposition of a “but . . . ”. It does not require the wholesale destruction of his memory.

By their nature, mobs carry with them the same deficiencies as the dictator. Mobs crowd out deliberation, intimidate dissenters, coopt the silent and weak, and make a mockery of pluralism. It is almost certainly possible to remove some statues without falling down a slope so slippery that we knock all of them down along the way. But not at the moment — while the rabble is running wild.

LINK

[dohboi]

I realize this is pissing into the wind...you have all made up your minds, you have your narratives and your tribes, and you're sticking to them.

The thread is just reverting to one long 'tsk, tsk, tsk' and I'll probably leave you to your 'tsk'ing after this

While not condoning any attack on property, I do occasionally try to understand the motivations of others, whatever their political stripe.

I will start by pointing out that many hear find Democrats so hard to take because of their hypocrisy in, for example, not doing much to improve the lives of Black (or any other average Americans) even when they controlled the executive (even with a Black president!) and (however briefly) legislative branches of government.

So I would think that you should be able to understand that protesters can be just as pissed off at statues that supposedly stand for justice and doing the right thing standing in front of institutions that have not in fact been working to right age old wrongs.

That is apparently at least part of what was behind the pulling down of the "Forward" statue and the statue of an abolitionist in Madison.

I don't condone this or other cases of destruction of property. But I, for one, can understand being pissed of at perceived hypocrisy. Can't you?

(Probably not...ok go back to your 'tsk-tsk'ing you lovable old hens ! )

[rockdoc123]

Relevant more now than back then I suspect:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

George Orwell, 1984

and another of his quotes also appropriate:

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.

[asg70]

So I would think that you should be able to understand that protesters can be just as pissed off at statues that supposedly stand for justice and doing the right thing standing in front of institutions that have not in fact been working to right age old wrongs.

The problem is that social justice warrior's fixation on perfection and purity can never be satisfied. It just keeps churning until it eats its own tail (like JK Rowling, or Walter Mosley). This was mocked perfectly in a Family Guy episode (before the voice of Cleveland chose to walk away because apparently voice acting is tantamount to blackface now).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-OnIgsPnP4

[dohboi]

That's a fine thing to discuss, but this thread is supposed to be about statues of dead people (and apparently their corpses as well?? )

Why the sudden need to change the subject?

Smacks of 'whatabout-ism'

And Rowling and Mosley are doing just fine.

[Tanada]

That's a fine thing to discuss, but this thread is supposed to be about statues of dead people (and apparently their corpses as well?? )

Why the sudden need to change the subject?

Smacks of 'whatabout-ism'

And Rowling and Mosley are doing just fine.

The problem with mobs tearing down statues to protest politicians is they always have had the ability to vote those corrupt politicians out the door. Tearing down statues, good bad or neitral, is a wasted effort in achieving real lasting change in corrupt local politics.

[dohboi]

Sooo, symbols are meaningless?

Let's ask an actual historian, since every body here seems to be suddenly so concerned about history (tho I can't recall anyone loudly shouting about how the lockdowns have to end so that everyone can get back into museums to learn about history! )

As an art historian I know that destruction is the norm and preservation is the rare exception. We have as humans been making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down. There are statues from the ancient Near East of Assyrian Kings that have curses carved on them that say ‘he who knocks down my statue, let him be in pain for the rest of his life,’ that sort of thing. And so we know from those, oh, that one strategy of rebellion was knocking down a statue in 2700 B.C.

So it’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today...

The current attacks on statues are a sign that what’s in question is not just our future but our past, I think, as a nation, as a society, as a world.

These attacks show how deeply white supremacy is rooted in our national structure — that we need to question everything about the way we understand the world, even the past, in order to get to a better future.

What’s a statue?

I think a statue is a bid for immortality. It’s a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people. So that is what’s really at issue here. It’s not the statues themselves but the point of view that they represent.

And these are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/styl ... lysis.html

[Ibon]

And so castles made of sand, slip into the sea, eventually.

[dohboi]

Good one, Ibon

Thanks for reminding me of that masterful piece!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6ZvGDovjw

[Ibon]

your welcome Dohboi

[Newfie]

Many have asked why the rioters of the 1960’s burned their own neighborhoods. It is a relevant question today. But also covers the “Why dig up dead people?” Question. What problem is it solving?

The best analogy I can come up with is that of a 3 year old who has a tantrum and in his fit throws his favorite toy truck breaking it along with other nice things.

And so it goes, the unconscious collective is having a tantrum.

Nothing more, nothing less.