The Confederate Flag

I bet that has impressed everyone.

My fault again...must be my unaddressed mental issues.

You really are a laughing gorilla.
And you mother wears army boots.

What kind of hand guns do you carry...let me guess..that little big one...the Judge...yes that would be it.

Alex

 

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Not here to impress anyone either.

 

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Your the one with the guns!

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If your behaviour was anywhere near normal, you wouldn't be getting the flack that you are.

Is drug taking another of your qualities? Perhaps you need to check what the German national flag really is, instead of what it was.

So was Germany after WW1
As usual you know not of which you preach.

Public approval
So the stated purpose of the military - known as the Self Defence Force (SDF) - is "to preserve Japan's peace, independence and safety".

It impressed the public in the aftermath of the March quake last year.

"I saw their trucks yesterday heading to the northeast. I wanted to scream - good luck!" one tweet from sacura_haruca said on 14 March.
"I'm on the brink of tears looking at the photos of the Self Defence Force," said another, named immoyabletype. "The non-combat army - they are super cool."

And that is the image that the Japanese government is keen to portray - a home-based army which poses no threat to anyone abroad.

But there are contradictions. The SDF - described in the constitution as "the minimum level of armed strength for self-defence necessary" - is the world's sixth-best funded army, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Its budget is capped at 1% of Japan's gross domestic product but when the country is the world's third-largest economy, this small proportion of it is still 4.6 trillion yen ($55.9bn; £35.8bn).

Its servicemen are highly trained and the hardware they use is sophisticated.
"It denies itself the most powerful weapons so it doesn't have offensive capabilities - such as ballistic missiles - but Japan's maritime SDF, for example, is one of the leading navies in the world after the US," he says.

Whether the military is battle-ready is another question. After all, since the end of World War II, no Japanese soldiers have engaged in actual combat.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<(BBC)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

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Well I must say you certainly have impressed me with your intellectual honesty rigor and that is without seeing photos of your guns.

Frankly however I would be careful with that sort of talk as although I won't let it offend me I do think others may find it offensive so much so that you could get a couple of hours ban...you really, for your sake edit it while you have the chance and avoid a penalty.
I think the rules can be brought against you.
I am starting to think you are presidential material.
Alex

 

So was the Confederacy! But that has never stopped armed thugs shooting civilians. Militarism is as American as the 4th of July, chewing gum and the periodic stock market crash.
The difference is all in how you recover from defeat.
Japan and Germany did it successfully, if perhaps not with equal grace.
The South made some feeble attempts, but always allowed the divisive, oppressive, short-sighted opportunist faction to set its social policy and orchestrate its mood.

 

I said "perhaps" and did not say I was talking about anyone in particular. Why? Are you claiming that shoe fits?
I presume that you are mentally typical and that your question of normal human behavior was rhetorical.

Oh, you mean the Democrat's KKK, Jim Crow laws, filibustering the Civil Rights Act, etc.?

 

Yes you did and thereby entirely non specific and enabling many people to wonder...you need to choose your words much more carefully.

Well sure I will get a government handout I expect .if but they won't take your word for it as in their eyes you would just be an unqualified no body whose opinion won't count.

Why would you say that?
Anyways nothing you have said upsets me so no problems unless I report you.
Alex

 

America’s default position has been that white lives matter more than anyone else’s. That legacy position came from its history with slavery. Pointing out that “black lives matter,” isn’t diminishing the value of white people, it’s really just clarifying that black lives matter, equally as much as white lives.

 

Is it? I've never lived in that America. If black lives really matter, why are they telling white people? Black people are overwhelmingly killed by other black people. Is it the responsibility of white people to better police black communities? Isn't that what people are up in arms about right now?

But you ignored my point. It doesn't matter how valid anyone thinks someone being offended is. If someone shouldn't do something simply because it offends many people, that's true for people of every color...unless you're racist.

 

The regional heritage they are celebrating was one of declaring war against their fellow Americans, prosecuting that war to the extreme - including killing their fellow Americans by the tens of thousands for years on end - and in all ways including outright murder committing treason,

all in defense of racially based slavery. A world based on industrial scale chattel slavery, in which every institution and every custom and every detail of daily life was founded in racial oppression, is the regional heritage they are proud of.

There is no other heritage available to those who fly that flag - that heritage is what that flag was invented to represent, and has represented ever since.

Another evil consequence of the endemic racism of self-identified "white" people, as manifested in the forced segregation of white-identified "black" people and the vulnerability to crime attendant on poor law enforcement in these long-maintained economic ghettos, the mental effects of lead-poisoned environments, and the siphoning of community wealth as fast as it becomes available to mitigate the effects of abuse.

Other people - meaning decent human beings, all of whom want this shit to stop - have far more than a "personal problem" with allowing free expression to violent racial bigotry and terroristic threats. They have a family problem, a community problem, a governance problem, and as we see again recently a law enforcement problem.
And the notion that this surrender must be voluntary went out the window in 1863, when the defenders of racial slavery started killing people in large numbers. The surrender of the modern heirs of that war is not expected to be voluntary - everyone from Malcolm X and James Baldwin to Martin Luther King and Ghandi knew that a generation ago.

It's not that it "must" be. It's that in the case of Confederate flag flyers it is.

There are many ignorant white racial bigots - agreed.

Not by the real life standards of right and wrong, good and bad, mentally healthy and racially bigoted. By those standards one way works, and the other way does not work.
- - - -

They are racial bigots, white supremacists who are defending the core of their identity.

It has little to do with the excitement of a war that ended more than 150 years (and several more exciting wars) ago - it has to do with the psychological effects of racial apartheid and racial terrorism and racial oppression of the black people in the US by the white people in the US during those 150 years since and continuing today.

The nobility and dignity of white male supremacy. The honor and pride available to these white men in a world run by white men.

 

The surrender was unconditional I believe... is that true?

 

If that is so, why all the re-enactment festivals, clubs, toy soldier replicas, movies and memorabilia collections? I think this is mostly childish love of uniforms, flags, trumpets, cannons and swords. The more recent wars lack the romantic element that the older, less mechanized ones, hold for their aficionadi.
My contention is: for the South, psychologically, it didn't end 150 years ago. They couldn't accept defeat then, and were pretty badly screwed-over in the reconstruction. That festering resentment is fertile ground for opportunistic politicians to cultivate division and distrust. It may never be allowed to end.

That doesn't need the battle gear - it's written in the electoral polls, police manuals, employment policies, city ordinances, bank loan approvals and university enrollment records.

Yes! I can think of few pictures more redolent of dignity and nobility than a bunch of yahoos with beer bellies and misspelled placards.

 

But when a black person kills a black person, he/she is arrested and likely convicted. The incarceration rates in the US display that fact quite well. If you’re white and shoot a black person, you’re either not arrested, or acquitted. That is what the issue is right now. It’s that when blacks kill other black people, “justice” is swift. But when white police officers kill unarmed black people or two white rednecks in the middle of GA kill an unarmed black jogger for no reason, justice often isn’t served. That is the America we both live in.

 

Charlton Heston joke.

"Hey Charlton, you want to grab a beer somewhere?"
"Ok, but first they're going to have to pry this gun from my cold, dead hands!"

 

No, many black people live in fear of other black people, and thus refuse to aid the police or testify to convict a black perpetrator of a black murder. The incarceration rates track the crime rates. What whites, other than the justified shootings of police, get away with murdering blacks? OJ was certainly acquitted of murdering a white woman. Police deal with criminals, and have killed more unarmed whites than unarmed blacks. You know, murder charges have been brought against all three in that GA incident. Maybe you should keep up with the stories you're trying to argue. You're perceptions of America are skewed.

 

And many white people live in fear of many other white people and refuse to aid the police or testify to convict a white murder. So?

More to the point and more accurately, your perceptions of yourself are even more horribly skewed.

 

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Sentence by sentence:

• Had you failed to notice it's not just black and white people taking part in the discussion, and even not just Americans?

• That's an ongoing discussion among black people.

• Fallacy, as it is observable that police are not exclusively white.

• You're being ridiculous.​

†​

We might as well note that James Lindsay went out of his way to detail a basic tactic, this time framed as advice to disrupt antiracism and diversity training°, basically by pretending to be a slow learner. He's even got a version↱ of the racism of addressing racism. As one quick summary↱ includes the explicit bit about the real goal being to waste time. In recent years, the behavior is colloquially coined sealioning.

It's not new.
____________________

Notes:

° Also, watch out for the product promotion, midthread, at 10/19.​

@christi3k. "God, what an asshole." Twitter. 17 June 2020. Twitter.com. 19 June 2020. https://bit.ly/2BkFbM6

@ConceptualJames. "And the contradictions. 'Wait, so if colorblindness means not seeing race, and that makes me racist, does seeing race make me racist? Is race supposed to matter or not matter?' Slow learner mode, activate. Make them explain it, and make it look hard to learn." Twitter. 16 June 2020. Twitter.com. 19 June 2020. https://bit.ly/3egJJlm

 

There are far darker immaturities involved in Civil War reenactments than a love of pageantry - even if that love of pageantry were the same as an excitement of war. (btw: The US Civil War did not have much pageantry, in comparison with most wars of that time in history).

Or the North.
I agree. Of course it didn't - even the formal and legal continuation of slavery's necessary racism seen in the Jim Crow laws hung on into the current generation.

They were not. They were coddled, and not only allowed but encouraged to continue screwing over black people. They defeated Reconstruction - broke it. They were never forced to accept defeat.

But it benefits from the battle gear - the nobility of being at war is good cover, when one needs to pretend to be under great threat and justified in violent response.
- - - - -

Not the crime rates - the prosecution rates.
And even that prosecution rate tracking, already a burden on black people due to their higher rate of prosecution for a given crime rate, is different for blacks than for whites - the tracking proportionality for incarceration is also much higher for blacks.

We are currently suffering riots in the streets set off by instances of whites getting away with murdering blacks. There's been a new one every few days.