Sure, octopus, that’s what I’m proposing.
If you’re not gonna be serious in a thread, don’t expect to be answered seriously. Better luck next thread.
I am serious, what are you proposing then? Why is it hard to get people to commit to an answer? I’d like to know what you propose as acceptable actions when people see something they don’t like. How far can they act with no regard for the law or other people’s considerations?
I’ll commit to one. The police should enforce the law and stop being so cowardly. If people don’t like the law they should elect representatives that will change it. I think we live in a time in which the system works far more reasonably than rioting, vandalism, and vigilantism.
Society cannot continue without a widespread acceptance of the principle that the bar for the decision you describe is set extremely high.
The statue had been up for decades. Is it really true that leaving it there another year while continuing to pursue legal means was such a giant moral wrong that immediate lawless action was preferable?
And if you say, “Hell yes, that’s true,” then on what possible basis could you possibly condemn the abortion clinic vandalism except “I personally disagree with you?”
I am proposing that the next time you decide to post in a thread, you read more carefully what folks have said, and if you decide to make a guess as to what someone proposes, you not guess that they’re saying something so obviously foolish.
If you follow my proposal, you may find that I’ll respond in detail to your posts. For this thread, though, this’ll be my last response to you.
As far as “vandalism” when it comes to white supremacism, this seems demonstrably false over the last few years. Vandalism has accomplished as much or more in terms of removing or destroying white supremacist monuments as compared to working within the system.
This is a tremendous disagreement I have with you. If I thought abortion clinics were really perpetuating mass murder, of course I’d support nonviolent direct action against them, I mean, my god. It’d be like supporting nonviolent direct action against Dachau.
You’re far more concerned with the process. I’m far more concerned with the ends people are working toward through the process. Ends don’t justify any means, but they’re definitely part of the equation.
This case is far less significant than either bombings (on one side) or murder (on the other). The sin committed by the government is maintaining a monument to murderous white supremacy, which is far more trivial than maintaining a system for committing millions of murders. The sin committed by the protestors is pulling down a statue, with is far more trivial than bombing a building.
Trying to draw an analogy between the two cases is very difficult, since neither measure is analogous in its severity.
“When people see something they don’t like” is a kind of disingenuous distortion of “when people have been protesting and organizing for decades against a deliberately chosen symbol of grossly inhumane and now illegal oppression that was intended to encourage bigotry and intimidate the oppressed”.
I think civil disobedience is a complicated issue with few simple answers, but you can’t make the answers simpler by dishonestly trivializing the disobedients’ motives to nothing more than “seeing something they don’t like”.
Also, “another year”? People have been trying to get the statue removed for more than fifty years. This is a pretty perfect example of “justice delayed is justice denied.”
Enough was enough.
I think I agree with this.
If there was no realistic legal path, then perhaps.
There is none that I can think of. One of the reasons I generally doubt the seriousness of much or most anti-abortion sentiment in the US, is that the protests are mostly very mild, and the everyday acceptance (by actions, not words) of present circumstances with regards to abortion is so widespread, even among those who identify as pro-life. If I truly believed thousands of American children were being legally murdered every day/week/month, I don’t think I could live with myself unless I was literally risking life and limb to change society and save these children. Thankfully, it appears that either most pro-life people actually can live with themselves without doing this, or they don’t really consider it the same as “thousands of children being legally murdered every day/week/month”.
EDIT: LHoD made a similar argument while I was writing this, but it’s different enough that I’ll leave mine up.
Well, I can suggest one possible basis: Namely, that the only justification for the “abortion is murder” stance is a religious or similarly supernatural belief. If Catholics and others choose to believe that a blastocyst is divinely endowed with an immortal soul at the very moment of conception, or some other version of magical instant full personhood at that moment, they are free to hold that belief. But there is no objective way to impose that belief on other people who disagree with it without violating their religious freedom.
When it comes to racial oppression and apartheid, though, we as a nation supposedly have (eventually) achieved a shared corporate view on that issue, and we’re agin it.
So it could be argued that “Don’t glorify oppression of black people” represents an officially American consensus view in a way that “Don’t murder babies in abortion clinics” does not.
If it were anywhere near a consensus, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It’s heartbreakingly sad, but it’s true. The hopeful aspect of it is that the arguments for preserving the glorification of slavery are indirect and dishonest, or rationalizations based on “preserving (a false) history” - the proponents don’t dare to be honest, and maybe can’t admit even to themselves that it’s what they really mean.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with that on any front.
First, if I have to choose between violating someone’s religious freedom on the one hand, and permitting mass murder on the other hand, religious freedom is gettin violated.
Second, there are arguments (which I find imminently unpersuasive, but they exist) against legal abortion that are not premised on religious beliefs.
Third, I don’t think we’ve achieved a shared view on non-oppression. Polls generally show a small majority of Americans support maintaining Confederate monuments. I haven’t seen polls for Chapel Hill, that pat of butter in a sea of grits, that secondary state zoo, but based on growing up there and based on the protests, I think the stats would be a little different there than they are nationwide.
Fourth, I don’t think what’s right should always be put to a vote. The fact that it can’t even be resolved democratically, given our legislature’s antidemocratic voter suppression, means this question is academic; but even if we could, the right thing to do isn’t decided by majority rule.
Black vote participation went up 8% from 2004-2016 and was higher than white voter participation in both 2008 and 2012. Black voter participation in North Carolina in 2016 was higher than in the country as a whole and has been significantly higher than the rest of the country since 2004.
This is just whining because your side did not win elections.
No it isn’t.
If you want monuments to white supremacy to remain standing, then go ahead and advocate for the preservation of monuments to white supremacy. Which side are you on?
Whatever, dude. On the one hand there are your cherry-picked and uncited statistics. On the other hand is a broad pattern that’s led to outrage from judges who have studied the case.
Increased black voter participation, and voter suppression, are clearly not contradictory, as a moment’s thought will tell you.
I do not think you understand how Gerrymandering works. That’s what is happening here.
In addition, voter suppression will make those numbers smaller than they might have been.
I would also like to know what norms you believe should exist, or in the alternative what norms you contend members of society should follow.
I want all monuments to remain standing unless removed by process that is not illegal. I’m in the side of deciding which monuments stay by the same process we decide whether we can have plastic straws and whether we can break someone’s nose in response to their support of a particular sports team.
the interesting thing is the monument was not put up soon after the war, it was put up 50 years later. Why was that? The same is true for a lot of civil war monuments.
To a lesser degree, I’ve stated them here. To a greater degree–the extent to which you believe something like that the highest morality is following the law, and that any lesser morality is cannot be subjected to debate–I have no interest in rehashing that conversation, which we’ve had many times before.
If there’s a particular viewpoint here that you disagree with, something specific, please quote it, and I’ll see if I think it’s worth addressing.
Did you similarly object to Russians tearing down statues of Stalin, or East Germans taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall (which, note, is not how the Wall fell–it was way too heavy to be felled by a few sledgehammers, whose damage was primarily cosmetic)? Did you similarly object to Iraqis tearing down statues of Saddam?