Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Yes, I absolutely realize some people fly it b/c racism or whatever other dumb reasons. I don't agree with the intention at all in those cases. Yet I would still defend their right to free speech b/c being able to say and do dumb things is to me a big part of why this country is great.

The best example I've ever seen (and haven't been able to find in the last 2 years) was a video of a bunch of veterans who had just got back, including 1 who was in a wheelchair IIRC due to injuries. First one was a black guy holding a sign saying "I defended your right to call me *insert racial slurs here". Next one was a white guy holding the same sign but with different slurs. Next was a Hispanic guy. A gay guy. There were different religions, and so on so forth for whatever people get insulted for being.

With that being said, this may just be the people I've met and got to know, but surprisingly many people who had confederate stuff had it b/c they loved their history and heritage (just as some people I've met in New England do too but in diff ways), both the good and the bad. They were also very not racist which I admit surprised me (a few even tried to give me confederate flag stuff despite it being super obvious I do not fit the mold) and went on to complain about how the flag is misused, misunderstood, etc. Could have been lying to me, but it was something I had heard enough times I doubt this... even heard it from a few black people who said the flag, while not nice etc, was misunderstood. EDIT: Sounds like I may have met uninformed people then...

Anyways, enough of a tangent. Point is, Free Speech and freedom Number 1.

 

Not necessary. I also lived in the south (SC) for awhile and evidence of slavery and civil war history was everywhere.

 

Learn from Europe. Even during the age of Feudalism there were forms of bonded labour and slavery justified by Christian rule.

How so?: well heathens shall burn in hell, thus let them work to death; this happened at the Christian European side and the Ottoman side and the slave trade around the Mediterranean was very profitable. (Add the sentiment that heathens were basically lesser people, thus closer to animals and you look at them like work animals. That is the Old Testament at work, right there, crude but some people find superiority in their religion.)

Add to that the upper social classes (nobles & knights) would treat many people below them as servants or worse. Only after the cities acquired their rights (birth of citizenship) and started fighting back in the late Medieval times (1200-1600) that the nobles in particular had to watch out. Piss off too many cities, tax them and burden them too much well prepare for war. Mind you war was costly (and city militias were not too shabby, they could fight well).

Fast forward to the 1500s and the 1600s. Europeans discover overseas territories with natural resources and want to profit from the production and trade of those natural resources. Well sending people all the time is expensive, take over the territory and force your new servants to do the work. Those locals die, get some African workers in, give them no rights and make it impossible for them to unite. Job done, worked a treat until there were so many slaves and those slaves started uniting.

Do you know when the slave revolts worked? When the slaves united, that is the secret.

Christianity and Rome played a bigger part than you think. Their silence is an invisibility cloak that hides unmeasurable wealth accumulated over the ages.

So yeah, learn from Europe. Or you can join those "I take responsibility" clowns.

P.S. Even the Industrial Revolution would not have wiped out slavery. When the decolonisation process in Europe (1950s) was in full swing some Europeans were still longing for "the good old days", also in the Netherlands. I am sometimes disgusted by my own country. Racism still lingers here, my grudge will never subside.

 

My dad was from North Carolina and my mom was first generation German American and I grew up in Pasadena, CA. My first exposure to discrimination was strange and happened when I was 8 or 9 years old. I had a friend in the neighborhood that I played with all the time. One day, we were watching something on TV and heritages came up. He told me he was Jewish and I told him that I was half German and half English. I don't think either one of us thought much about that as we played for hours after that. The next day, I knocked on his door and his mother told me that her son could no longer play with me. I wasn't given a reason. My mom called her up and was told that my German heritage was a problem. It didn't matter that both of my German grandparents came to the U.S. in the 1920's or that my grandfather's company made weapon parts for the U.S. government during WWII. Just being half German was enough. I didn't understand it all that well back then, but I sure as hell knew I didn't like how it felt.

To make sense of the Confederate statues and The Army of Northern Virgina battle flag (incorrectly called "the Confederate Flag") issues, and understand why those statues and flag are and should be offensive to the Black population, you need to know some history.

The statues issue really should be a no brainer. White southerners erected these statues to glorify the "heroes" of "The War of Northern Aggression". Why is that an issue? Well, first and foremost, the Civil War came about after Lincoln was elected because the South feared the expansion slavery would be stopped and there would be a strong push to end it entirely. They seceded from the Union for this very reason. Lincoln was not going to allow the Southern States to secede and that is why the Civil War started. Ex Confederate states glorifying the heroes of the Civil War is tantamount to glorifying the institution of slavery. After all, slavery is what they were fighting to maintain and even expand. You glorify people only if you think what they did was important, right, and just. I can't think of a way a black could see a statue honoring a Confederate General as anything but offensive.

The so called Confederate Flag is equally easy to find offensive. Why? The Army of Northern Virgina battle flag is the basis for what is called "Confederate Flag" today. In rectangular from, it looks like Army of Tennessee’s flag or the Confederate naval jack. Anyway, after the Civil War ended, none of the Confederate flags were regularly displayed. They were used by various Confederate heritage organizations but in a controlled way. The Confederate Flag wasn't flown in yards or displayed by the general southern population or used to show "Southern Pride". However, in 1948 it was used as a symbol of protest by the "Dixiecrat" arm of the Democrat Party to rally against the civil rights platform and for Jim Crow segregation all the way to the 60's and 70's. This time period is when it became popular to display the "Confederate Flag". How could any black person look at the Confederate Flag and think anything other than a sign of hate for the back people.

 

People tend to mention capitalism over and over again with regards to slavery, well context is lacking there.

Eddy Izzard said it best: "Do you have a flag?" Europe fucked up a lot...

 

Didn't watch the video, but people who criticize EU are barely capable understanding what it is. I think some of the voting systems isnt that good where 1 country can veto decision. Some of these system might need redesignin imo.Let the law specialist and other smartpants deal with it. I dont care about flags unless they represent something significant. EU flag reprecents cooperation?

Whether UK is better off without EU only time will tell. Good luck anyhow.

 

In the video the quote concerns Europe in the colonial and imperial era. Planting flags and claiming whatever it is as yours was a bad European habit.

Europe is complicated, it will always be. Once you accept that you start to understand that it is just a bunch of neighbours trying to get along, even when there are still many issues. It is best to leave it at that.

 

P.s I was told that the main EU legistlation is written in 10 ca 500 page books (you can correct me on that). I dont have a clue if there are big problems there besides some issues like I mentioned. This amount of information makes sense because 500 million people live inside the thing called EU.

 

Please do, if only to take some time off from the heavy stuff with laughing about the heavy stuff. Eddy Izzard is truly brilliant. And very funny.

I didn't listen in history class at school. I recall that that the subject for the British exam that was then called O-level, was Social and Domestic History of 19th C. or maybe it was 18th-19th. Or similar. Even the title bored me to death. What I didn't know (or care about at the time) was that it was the story of the modern world that I was going to live in, and the story of another round of theft and slavery. Industrial revolution? Fine. Except people didn't really want to go and work for peanuts in horrible dangerous factories and starve to death if they lost their jobs.

I filled in the gaps from novels and friends who had listened. Enclosures: the landlords stole the common land from the people, before which the people had been able to do their bit of farming and rearing animals. The stole it by voting that they could. It sounds like an Eddy Izzard joke, and it probably is.

Those who had the most land had the most votes. Those who owned no land, but farmed common land, had no votes. We've come to take your land away, because we voted that we could.

Landlords got all the land, factories got the workers. Nobody got happy except the rich who got richer. Apparently serfs worked far fewer hours a day than we do.

 

The heavy stuff gets boring too. I don't have the time and energy for that.

Id rather watch some interestin webinars or watch good comedy.

History is intresting too.


Music seems to be related to energy levels etc. Whatever I feel like listening to. I like to tune into local radio stations but the mainstream stuff gets boring too. Sometimes this a good fix. I am going to be quite busy in the coming years and I am going to bring the music with me on that ride. Off on a tangent again but it is what it is. Showing gratitude for what you have is important.

Heavy music? I don't take pleasure in seeing people go through some hard stuff(lyrics imply difficult "stuff") and pain but the instrumental parts on many records are amazing. So are the vocals when they complete a masterpiece of different sounds.

 

I think the problem is the precedent of allowing mobs to destroy property. That is lawlessness. What do we do when people start tearing down statues we like? Do we selectively enforce laws based on the perceived popularity of mob causes? That doesn't sound like it will end well.

 

Makes sense. I am not whining about anything. This is the key here. Whining resolves nothing, you become a client for the downfall or the problem. There is some RL logic to the Buddhism teachings. There are no problems when you aren't "buying or selling."

Like, do you wan't to focus on problems you can't fix or focus on things you can fix. In the first case it might add to your thinking and broaden your understanding of things but in the long term might become just unnecessary mental load. A waste of resources.

 

^ Just looked him up. Sounds like he was a military genius and unfortunately also a vile racist and even worse, actually went on and made part of his money actually doing bad things based upon said bad beliefs (trading people) rather than just having said bad beliefs (which lets admit, we are probably all wrong about something or another somewhere). Supposedly tried to atone and bury it all later in life - who knows if he really did.

As for taking his statue and bust down - I should clarify - I personally would want to take it down (along with many other items of the era), but also go a step further and put these things in a museum as a cautionary tale, kind of like how you can visit Auschwitz as a sort of museum today. End of the day, it's just an object, by itself it's nothing really, to me it's only what we choose to do with it and what meaning we assign to it - just like I don't think any informed or sane person goes to Auschwitz today to glorify the holocaust although had the nazis won, I'm 90+% sure this would have happened. Or like the people I mention above - if they weren't all lying to me, then the value they assigned to their confederate stuff was a different value than that of racism, etc. I only brought this stuff up above to kind of make this point along with a point about free speech rights - not that I personally like confederate statues or whatever.

However, beyond the personal side of it, if the city and it's citizens choose to keep the bust for the wrong reasons, as much as I would personally disagree, I'm not going to stop them from their right to free speech or believing what they want while living in not Nashville. Whether all the citizens of the city are properly represented by this vote or not (I'm sure many are not regardless of race) - that's an endless debate about form of representative government, minority vs majority rights, etc. If Nashville were to suffer boycotts or something else non-violent because of this though - well that's the consequence of free speech.

 

I disagree in concept and at a personal level (ex Stalin statue coming down was great), but you bring up a valid point.

 

Sure, just today the statue of Ulisses Grant, and few days ago the statue of Lincoln went down. Both well know Confederate bastards?!. You do not know who will destroy the statues and what statues will be destroyed once the process starts. George Washington, I am sure he looks very good on Twitter, I did not know he was a cop.

 

I have no problem with destroying old statues and monuments. However there should be a legal process for getting that done, not simply a mob.

To take an extreme example, what happens if the KKK destroys an MLK Jr statue now? How can we prosecute them when we don't prosecute the current movement for taking down various statues? To take a less extreme example, what happens if the Jefferson memorial is destroyed because Jefferson held slaves?

Do we want to set the precedent of selective prosecution of destruction of public property?

 

Personally, I don't give a f**k if the statues stay up or not. It's not like anyone protesting had a choice in the creation of the historical/political symbolism of "their nation".

Is it the best way? I dunno. How do you expect the start of a mostly peaceful anti-racist protest movement to make a targeted change regarding the systemic racism of the global economy? At least when they f**k up a statue they've got a tiny bit of a voice. The institutions they need to thwart and attack to start combating these issues comprehensively and at scale do not even have to pretend to care about anything but shareholder interest unless it's good marketing.

Maybe they need to be less civil. Obviously burning more shit works.

 

You're missing the point. Are you OK with other groups you don't support destroying monuments and statues that you do support?