[Moderating]
If you want to discuss my moderation, open a thread in ATMB.
I assume this must be a joke. If you’re talking about this thread, the OP agreed with my identification (initially made by yabob. Capybaras would have been possible, but less likely to have been called “little brownish mammals bounding about nearby” or compared to gophers instead of sheep.
The people who fly the Confederate flag are the same people who say the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. In 1860 the United States had spread across to the Pacific Ocean. It had an economy that was on the verge of industrialization, and a future with almost limitless potential.
But America knew that a limitless frontier for the expansion of slavery had also been created by that very growth in the nation…if the South won the Civil War, the Old West wouldn’t be about cowboys and Indians, it would be about slave rebellions and lynchings.
I’m not sure if you’re on my side or another. But people who fly the confederate flag do so because it was specifically reinstated as a protest against desegregation. The flag had been previously canned.
OK, now I’m confused. Is the Confederate Flag associated with the Capybaras or with the Agoutis? Are we talking about the Granadine Confederation? How can a Capybara be a racist?
When I see a Confederate flag in West Virginia, I laugh at the historical ignorance that the display is showing.
They sound like people i’d never, ever want to meet !
I thought it was funny that the Whites documentary made by the same guy who made “Born into Brothels” is basically a real-life episode of Hee Haw, whereas the one produced by freakin’ Johnny Knoxville is actually a somewhat moving examination of the issues facing those people and that community.
Hmm, upon actually investigating this claim, it turns out the only reference to the Dancing Outlaw being made by the Born into Brothels guy is me saying this in another thread. It seems the guy at the video store in the town I went to college lied to me!
Agreed, but they are fun to watch at a safe distance. Unfortunately I have encountered some rednecks awfully close, but not quite as bad.
Please explain… everyone in WV was a Unionist during the war?
While it’s true that several Southern states incorporated the Confederate flag into their state flags in protest against integration, the idea that the flag had faded from Southern consciousness before Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is a myth of recent vintage.
It was also widely used in marketing imagery.
It is also a mistake to think that you know definitively why anyone given person display the flag. It has at various times been used as a symbol for the South as a region, and as a generic symbol of rebelliousness (cf. the appearances of the flag in the movie Animal House, the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard). I will grant you that in recent years, those innocuous uses have become more uncommon.
I didn’t see anything that directly supports “incorporated the Confederate flag into their state flags in protest against integration”.
Maybe in protest of reconstruction of which integration may very well have been the biggest issue.
My cite was for the fact that the Confederate flag was in use before the integration battles of the 50s and 60s. So it is wrong to suggest that the flag had faded from memory before the integration battles of the 50s came along.
However it is also true that Georgia inorporated the Confederate battle flag into its state flag in 1956, a time when the state was resisting the desegregation of the South kicked off by Brown v. Board of Education. Not a coincidence. It was symbolic defiance of the federal government.
But that is not to say that everyone who flew the flag thereafter was doing so to support segregation or to express racism. As I said before, the flag was often just a symbol of Southern pride, or a generic symbol of rebellion.
In short, it’s complicated.
Yeah, Clarksburg native Stonewall Jackson would have found such an assertion amusing. (No, wait, strike that. Stonewall Jackson didn’t seem to find much of anything amusing.)
There are thousands and thousands of people out there who admired the ability to build an ass kicking military out of nothingness in just a few short decades. There are those that believe that the corporatism of the Nazi Germany area was a good model. Many of those abhor the awful things that the Nazi’s did, and rightly so.
As the Confederate flag has been largely claimed by racists and other fine upstanding folk, both from the south and other regions, I feel about those folks largely like I would feel about someone who admired the German military flying a Nazi flag.
If I were in charge, a US naval vessel flying the CSA ensign would have gotten the captain in some severely hot water, regardless of the name. But then, I’m not in charge, dang it.
True. But the whole point of their having a separate state was so they wouldn’t have to join the Confederacy…
I suspect most people in WV who display Confederate flags are not Civil War buffs. But that may just be my prejudices about West Virginia showing. I went to Maryland, and Mr. Neville now works at Pitt, you can see where I might have picked up some anti-West Virginia prejudice.
As is your right, this being a free country and all. But this is GQ, not Great Debates, and we are discussing possible reasons for displaying a Confederate flag, not our personal reactions to it.
And a largely straw myth at that.
I have never heard of it being accepted truth among those with negative impressions of the Confederate flag, that it was defunct in the South before integration started to become a reality. It is certainly true that resistance to integration gave the flag a considerable increase in popularity, as evidenced by its incorporation into Southern state flags.
Based on my (relatively brief) residence in West Virginia, it appeared that pro-South Civil War romanticism was not common in the state, in fact even less common than in Kentucky where I lived for five years (eastern Kentucky, which has quite a bit in common with WV, was particularly non-receptive to magnolia-colored views of the wunnerful days of Southern pre-war heritage). The only sour note I can recall from West Virginia days was a letter from a Southern sympathizer published in the local paper, which stood out partly because the writer was so ill-informed about his state’s history.
Argumentum ad ingnorantium. This idea pops up all the time on these boards, including this very thread!!!
Here it is in another thread, for example.
The whole point of some… a major factor to others … totally contrary to the desires of a large segment of the population.
