Jeff Sessions: " Anglo-American heritage"

Janus58 said:
My own paternal grandfather even shortened and altered the spelling of his surname in order to make it more "anglo-american" in order to not "burden" his children with a Finnish surname
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The story of my family name actually sounds like a Norwegian joke; my paternal great-grandfather, I think it was, decided there were too many of his name in the area, decided to take a new one, and fashioned a name that sounds like he quite literally looked around at where he was standing and settled on the first thing he noticed. My favorite, though, is the punch line about how Norway is just as big as Sweden if you flatten out the mountains.

There was a time when Finns weren't even "Scandinavian" enough, and some tried to argue that they were actually Asian, and thus shouldn't be allowed to into the country under the laws of the time. My own paternal grandfather even shortened and altered the spelling of his surname in order to make it more "anglo-american" in order to not "burden" his children with a Finnish surname.
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Because a friend's mother once wrote a book with a Hungarian-Roma-American who played in a band with a feminist author's son who in turn went on to front an Irish-folk punk band from Minnesota with a habit of scoring eastern-European fiddlers, I did the worldbeat fascination bit in the Nineties that included my introduction to the idea of a white on white erasure in Norway. I'm quite certain the majority would protest that phrasing, but so it goes.

 
Vociferous said:
I've always believed that it is much more important WHAT was said than WHO said it.
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What depends on who, and whom.
You don't know what was said until you know who said it and to whom. That's just a fact.

Jeff Sessions praising the Anglo-American heritage of sheriffs to a convocation of sheriffs is issuing a threat - to them, and to every non-Anglo person in their counties.
It's the same basic threat a guy praising the good health and upbringing of one's children is issuing, when he's a mob enforcer and he wants something from you.
 
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Tiassa said:
Note how when it's time to put up some manner of substantial argument, it's also time for our neighbor to ... uh .. ¿run away?↑

It's a noise factory. A weird squeaky wheel thing conservatives have long done; just keep making noise and then point to their own noise as evidence that there is public concern. If we check the last twenty-five years of right-wing supremacist activism and advocacy, we see it over, and over, and over again. Even before that, though, it's been going on so long that courts don't buy in, i.e., bizarre anti-abortion laws, which is why conservatives want the courts. Just like FOX News justifying itself by pointing to a delusion of liberal media conspiracy: A bunch of conservatives complained, and those are the only voices that count, so therefore it is true: Listen to the noise! People are clamoring for our agenda!

He doesn't know what he's on about. He doesn't need to, insofar as the point is to simply log racist tropes for the record. Normalization is the goal.
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Like I said, poisoning the well.
iceaura said:
What depends on who, and whom.
You don't know what was said until you know who said it and to whom. That's just a fact.

Jeff Sessions praising the Anglo-American heritage of sheriffs to a convocation of sheriffs is issuing a threat - to them, and to every non-Anglo person in their counties.
It's the same basic threat a guy praising the good health and upbringing of one's children is issuing, when he's a mob enforcer and he wants something from you.
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Sounds like paranoid delusion.
 
Vociferous said:
Shouldn't need any. A statement is either true or false, no matter who says it.
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Meaning derives from context, and is independent of truth or falsehood.

Sessions was delivering a threat, much as Ronald Reagan was when he set up his campaign podium near the site of Klan murder and declared his support for "States rights".
 
iceaura said:
Meaning derives from context, and is independent of truth or falsehood.

Sessions was delivering a threat, much as Ronald Reagan was when he set up his campaign podium near the site of Klan murder and declared his support for "States rights".
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Just seems like subjective relativist paranoia.
 
pjdude1219 said:
no context
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It seems willful. As we see, for instance, in #11↑, our neighbor is either incapable of or unwilling to establish and maintain any consistent context. He notes AG Sessions on Anglo-American heritage in law enforcement, and then compares it to examples of Barack Obama discussing Anglo-American heritage in law.

Does our neighbor actually not understand the difference?

The Anglican heritage of our legal code is well-known; our nation did emerge from the British Empire. Furthermore, was it Justice Breyer who went on to describe the Bowers decision as a mistake? It seems a fair description, though neither was it the first time the Supreme Court, really, really wanting to find a way to do something, reached back to English Common Law for precedent.

Meanwhile, the Anglo-American heritage of our law enforcement tradition includes murderous supremacism.
 
Tiassa said:
It seems willful. As we see, for instance, in #11↑, our neighbor is either incapable of or unwilling to establish and maintain any consistent context. He notes AG Sessions on Anglo-American heritage in law enforcement, and then compares it to examples of Barack Obama discussing Anglo-American heritage in law.

Does our neighbor actually not understand the difference?
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Our law enforcement heritage comes from the same place as our law heritage. Hence the word "sheriff" deriving from Old English.
 
Vociferous said:
Just seems like subjective relativist paranoia.
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But not wrong;
and not nearly as empty-headed as confusing truth value with meaning.
Vociferous said:
Our law enforcement heritage comes from the same place as our law heritage.
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With the difference of having been amended to enable plantation slavery and then Jim Crow, including racial oppression and terrorism defended as Anglo-American heritage.
 
iceaura said:
But not wrong;
and not nearly as empty-headed as confusing truth value with meaning.
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No confusion. Truth value is apparent, while meaning must be assumed or inferred.
With the difference of having been amended to enable plantation slavery and then Jim Crow, including racial oppression and terrorism defended as Anglo-American heritage.
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Slavery at common law in former colonies of the British Empire developed slowly over centuries, and was characterised by inconsistent decisions and varying rationales for the treatment of slavery, the slave trade, and the rights of slaves and slave owners. Within Britain, until 1807, except for statutes facilitating and taxing the international slave trade, there was virtually no legislative intervention in relation to slaves as property, and accordingly the common law had something of a "free hand" to develop, untrammeled by the "paralysing hand of the Parliamentary draftsmen".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_at_common_law​
 
Vociferous said:
No confusion. Truth value is apparent, while meaning must be assumed or inferred.
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You confused the one for the other. The topic was meaning, you tried to talk about truth and falsehood as if it were that topic.

Meaning is often deduced, and even more often reliably understood - little in the way of assumption or inference is necessarily involved beyond a shared literacy and culture.

None of the fellow racial bigots in that audience of sheriffs failed to understand Sessions's little sermon, any more than the racial bigots flocking to Reagan's speeches failed to understand what he meant by States' Rights, welfare queens, and the like.
 
iceaura said:
Meaning is often deduced, and even more often reliably understood - little in the way of assumption or inference is necessarily involved beyond a shared literacy and culture.
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i like your comment.
it invokes quite a fascinating intrigue on the aspect of shared religous ideology as a metaphor for moral social cohesion.
if one places preclusionary value at the merit of meaning does it not detract the aspect of perception to be rendered ?
 
Vociferous said:
Our law enforcement heritage comes from the same place as our law heritage. Hence the word "sheriff" deriving from Old English.
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True. Of course, by that measure, our math comes from our Arabian heritage - which is why we use Arabic numerals. So it would be just as accurate to say that US scientists, engineers and mathematicians follow our Arab-American heritage.
 
Vociferous said:
Slavery at common law in former colonies of the British Empire developed slowly over centuries,
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In some of the American colonies, for example, it developed in the direction of racial oppression and extreme racial bigotry, including racial segregation and impoverishment enforced by terrorism.

Hence the well-known and commonly recognized "Angl0-American" heritage of Jim Crow and racially structured abuse under the law, mediated and implemented and enforced by county sheriff departments.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was named after famous defenders of that Anglo-American heritage, and well known to represent it in his own law enforcement career.
 
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