I feel like I see this argument (“there are other issues so we shouldn’t talk about this one at all until they are resolved”) often enough that it should have its own name. It’s clearly a fallacious argument - sort of like “why go to the moon? We have enough problems on earth!”. Does anyone know the name for this fallacy?
OK, want to help fix those bigger problems?
“Your point that the world contains multiple problems is a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.”
Fallacy of Relative Privation, or “appeal to worse problems.”
I’m liberal but there are far too many liberals running around complaining about things that very few people care about. And that stuff hurts in elections. For example Biden said "defund the police " hurt the Dems down ballot this year. Probably hurt him too in some close states. I think Obama said it too.
If few people care about the disproportionate killings of unarmed black men by police, that is a very strong condemnation of American society. We should work to change that, because I don’t want to live in a society where very few people care about murder, so long as the killer has blue clothes and the victim has black skin.
Eta: YMMV.
But if a slogan like “defund the police” hurts the Dems in elections than what good does it do? Saying don’t use that slogan in no way says you don’t want to reform the police.
“Hell, even numbers are probably triggering to someone somewhere who can find some negative association with a particular number…”
Keep the number of schools down so as mot exceed 665?
These things tend to be cultural. Germany, or more precisely the right-wing knuckleheads, have a thing about 88. Eight is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
88 is code for Heil Hitler since H is the 8th letter.
What is your point? I have no idea what you mean by “keeping the number of schools down so as not to exceed 665”. Is that a proposal someone made?
And 88 is not an evil number, but some people do use it to mean “heil Hitler”. Does Germany remove the number 88 from public discourse? If 88 branches of McDonald’s close down, will the German media cover up the story to avoid saying the number 88? If not, wtf are you talking about?
I don’t really disagree here, except that it’s not really a wide-spread thing. This is the big problem with the news story linked in the OP. It’s not “too many liberals” complaining. It’s literally 12 people on a school board committee. They spent a few hours making some criteria and then applied it to school names. They aren’t even empowered with changing names, just identifying the ones to talk about.
I honestly think more people-hours have been spent on this thread than the committee has spent on it.
There are political forces that have an incentive to spread stories like the ones in the OP. I honestly don’t know how to respond to them other than “yes, a few well-meaning individuals made a list and now we are talking about it”, along with “obviously Abraham Lincoln and George Washington were great men of American history and deserve to be taught in all of their glory and with all of their flaws”.
I’m not sure “shut up, snowflakes” is helpful. And I don’t know of any way to encourage school board committees not to create overly-stringent naming standards that ensnare famous American figures.
If only a few people care about the issue, why would they care if someone is working on their non-issue?
The only few I hear talking about the name changes are those opposed to them for who knows why. Otherwise it would probably be done without much hoopla.
It seems to me that here were way more Republicans talking about not defunding the police than Democrats arguing for such defunding.
Reminds me of how it was in the USSR when it existed. Anyone who didn’t follow the party line was excised from history. I guess that’s where SF is going with this.
Removing the name of a historical figure from a school does not remove that name from history. This is a silly argument.
So anyone who doesn’t have a school named after them is “excised from history”?
I think it is FAR more worrying that the fact that Washington was a slaveholder is excised from our history books (you know, the things we use to learn history, as opposed to school names, which are not used to learn history). It reminds me of the USSR, where you couldn’t criticize Stalin or Lenin.
George who? There was some guy who did something about America. I used to remember his name but when it was taken off the school that name now escapes me.
Also now that those statues are gone I don’t remember… was there a civil war once? So confusing.
They often (but not always) have both. PS8, in my neighborhood, is The Robert Fulton School. IS145, in the neighborhood where I grew up, is the Joseph Pulitzer School.
Stuyvesant High School moved years ago, in the early nineties. It’s not anywhere near Stuyvesant Town anymore.
So far there hasn’t been any controversy (that I’m aware of) about its name, but a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for Peter Stuyvesant shows that there’s plenty of material there, so we shall see. New York seems to be a bit more relaxed about names and statues and the like than, say, San Francisco.
The other two NYC elite high schools (elite in that there’s an entrance exam, competition is stiff, and they’re academically rigorous) are Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, so they won’t have any controversy about their names.
Correct. They were. And people are flawed. I’m not advocating we go around and having Hitler High or Mao’s Trade Academy. But, flawed individuals from the past are perfectly fine to admire and emulate for the good they did.
Genghis Khan was not a nice fellow, but I’ll still go to Genghis Grill.
And I’d be more sympathetic to a critical view of history and the idea that we need to reexamine each and every flag, statue, street name, and school building if there was an honest critique instead of this malicious sabotage of the fundamentals of western civ.
I would be decidedly unsympathetic. An inability to evaluate a person’s character from within their own historical context is indicative of either profound intellectual disability or profound intellectual laziness. Neither should be catered for.
People are critiquing slaveholding and racism. But it is interesting that you consider those “fundamentals of western civ”.
You lost me on that last bit.
Removing slavery, removing discrimination to the descendants of slaves and other issues are now fundamentals of western civilization. The malicious part was the effort to push fake history particularly from the white supremacy southerners regarding flags and statues.