Christ, dude. Like octopus, you gotta do better if you want responses. I’m done with you in this thread as well.
Good. Your responses are unnecessarily antagonistic, often avoid direct responses to uncomfortable questions, and add little to the debate.
Well, that’d be a pretty weird matter to weigh in on.
Why? If the people really wanted it down, don’t you think that there’d be some sort of vote on it? True, a couple years ago, NC passed a bill preventing such action, but the town had 50 years to do it in, and they could, even today, pass a protest vote.
Charlottesville ain’t in NC, is my point.
I misread the wiki article, thanks for the correction. However,the town of Chapel Hill, is, but in any case, no lawmaking body has voted to remove it. Nor have they even petitioned the state Historical comm to remove it. In other words, show that "the people’ wanted it removed.
Sorry, I should have been more clear: that view is in some sense officially our national consensus, being as how we’ve got constitutional amendments and civil rights legislation and widespread recognition of the term “racist” as insulting, etc. I didn’t mean to suggest that it’s an actual consensus view in the sense that all Americans individually endorse it.
The point is that in this case the only reason to call what’s going on “mass murder” is a specific religious or other supernatural belief. It’s like when certain Hindu communities in south India (or PETA activists elsewhere) destroy slaughterhouses because they feel that animal slaughter is morally equivalent to murder. The evil that they are trying to stamp out exists only in their idiosyncratic faith-based conviction.
At the risk of further hijacking this discussion down the abortion-debate track, I’ll ask: such as?
True, but see my response to ElvisL1ves above. It may not be shared by all of us, but it is arguably in some sense officially representative of us as a national entity, in a way that belief in immediate full fetal personhood is not.
https://www.secularprolife.org/abortion
Again, I don’t find these arguments persuasive, but it’s very possible to be opposed to legal abortion without belief in a supernatural entity. (Similarly, there’s a very strong philosophical, secular case for animal rights–see the book The Case for Animal Rights)
I just don’t accept that, since in this case the polling on this specific issue shows that our national consensus isn’t close to being there.
In any case, doing the right thing does not, I believe, depend on a national consensus. Walk away from Omelas.
I want to pull at this bit. Is this a bright line for you–that you’re only in favor of breaking laws in the context of a revolution, and then only in the context of a revolution you personally favor?
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, and I may be misunderstanding your argument, given how little coffee I’ve had this morning.
Bricker, care to respond to this?
I’m not claiming that full-fetal-personhood claims necessarily require belief in a supernatural entity, just that they depend on some sort of faith-based position that is arbitrarily assigned the status of supernatural absolute truth. AFAICT from your link, this “secular pro-life” endorsement of full fetal personhood is no exception.
But as the abortion topic is still somewhat of a digression from the subject of your thread, I’ll shut up about it now.
If the voters decide so, yes, and if the courts don’t decide otherwise. Democracy is a good thing, but it sometimes produces results we don’t like. We all have to choose when to fight violently against the results of democracy.
Personally, I think there are more constructive ways to protest such statues than to bypass the democratic process and take matters into one’s own hands. If Martin Luther King, Jr were alive today, would he condone this action? I don’t think so. Was it you who asked earlier which side you thought someone was on. I’m on the side that I think MLK would have been on.
I’m not so sure. Based on his writings (such as “a riot is the language of the unheard”), I think MLK Jr. would have been fine with direct action like this, as long as no one was hurt. If he would have blamed anyone, it would have been state and local officials.
Wasn’t the statue put up to commemorate and memorialize someone who cast aside the rule of law and used violence to support a political position?
Then a bunch of people cast aside the rule of law and tore down the statue. It seems to me that those people who tore it down learned the lesson the statue was intended to teach. Kind of a win-win there. We should probably put up a statue commemorating those who tore it down.
What was the lesson? Two wrongs do make a right?
Was he ever involved in property destruction? There were (are) an awful lot of Confederate Statues. Did he ever participate in or advocate they be torn down in this manner?
Is that just another strained attempt at bothsidesism?
Assumes facts not in evidence.
At any rate, we have a system for dealing with this. Put the vandals on trial in front of a jury of their peers. If the jury wants to convict them, they will. Then the judge can pronounce the sentence, publicly, so all the people of his/her community know the judge’s position on this. Then the government can break open their coffers, design and replace this monument with an identical one, celebrating the soldiers who fought in the War of Northern Aggression.
All of the “I’m not a racist” Republicans should go ahead and do the “right” thing, to put everything back the way it was and punish these awful criminals. Put your names on it, sign on the bottom line that you want THAT statue back up, and want to punish those who took it down. Own it.
Yes. ** Bill Door’**s post was a strained attempt at bothsiderism.
No, but there was no movement to take down the statues at the time. I’m trying to extrapolate how he would feel based on his words and writings. He certainly advocated and defended civil disobedience and violating the law under some circumstances.
Based on his writings, I’m not sure if early MLK Jr. would have supported this, but I think late MLK Jr., who had grown more cynical and less optimistic about the reach of nonviolent protesting (and more and more critical of white moderates), would have applauded it.
The lesson the statue teaches is that the rule of law doesn’t matter. That’s why they erected a statue honoring a traitorous murderer. It’s a little disingenuous to go around whinging when people not only learn the lesson but act upon it.