Slavery is way way way way worse than a statue, agreed.
The appropriate response to slavery can be violence, even mass violence, even lethal mass violence, even a march through the South where you burn shit down to demoralize the army fighting to maintain slavery.
The appropriate response to a statue is to tear it down without hurting anyone.
Slavery is way way way worse than a statue. Sherman’s March is way way way worse than tearing down a statue.
Remember how I said that a moment’s thought would show you how silly that is? Have you tried?
The voter suppression isn’t theoretical. It’s proven in court. You’re like saying, “Ignore what your eyes tell you, obviously nobody built a dam across that river, because it’s flowing harder today than it did last year.” If I see a dam, and I know the water is flowing harder today than it did last year, I have to conclude that another factor has also changed. Maybe it’s been raining a lot more this year?
We know voter suppression has occurred. That’s not in doubt. We know precisely how it was managed, and we know it was deliberate. Look it up. If votes have increased (which you still haven’t cited), maybe that means more African Americans are motivated to vote, despite suppression; maybe more AAs have moved to NC; maybe countervailing organizations are driving voters to the polls.
Your uncited stats are meaningless.
For fuck’s sake it is incredibly difficult for some people to wrap their heads around the idea that process isn’t everything, innit? I baked a cake in the oven, does that mean it’d be okay to stick a kitten in the oven too?
No, you don’t get to tear down the MLK statue, for much the same reason you don’t get to stick the kitten in the oven: because that’s a shitty thing to do.
And I swear I’ll scream if you ask me who decides what a shitty thing to do is, as though it hasn’t been answered a million times by people who aren’t moral relativists.
There were some contemporaries at the time that felt differently. Seemed they even put up a might bit of a fight about it.
As the statue was put up with the intent of it standing for subjugation of a population, it’s not all that that unrelated to the institution of slavery.
And, unlike the civil war, tearing down this symbol celebrating bigotry did not result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of our countrymen.
That’s nice, and if it were really that hard to remember how horribly we treated people in the past, then we may need the reminders residing in a museum, but tearing down monuments put up for the purpose of glorifying that past is not destroying history.
And white supremacists killed, raped, enslaved and tortured black people, because it was their ideology. Then they put up statues celebrating that ideology. We are not talking about artifacts from the dawn of human civilization whose origins are lost to the mists of time. We are talking about people who put these up for the purpose of reminding black fold to know their place. We know this. We have their written records of why they did it, their speeches when it was dedicated.
The slavery and oppression that these statues that you defend celebrated denied more than a bit of fair consideration of viewpoints.
That’s obviously not true. Many regions eliminated slavery within legal processes. Now I am not saying you should never wage war or rebel. I am saying that a statue in the modern US, regardless of it being of the devil himself is not a sufficient moral injustice to trigger extra-legal remedies.
Who cares? I didn’t say what they will do. I said what they should do. Someones going to end up getting shot when they try this on private property and the state shouldn’t be implicitly encouraging lawlessness.
Slavery is still legal and constitutional. That said, the non punishment form of slavery is one of those circumstances that trump law. If you are arguing from the axiom that each human has intrinsic natural rights that is. Which is an axiom I accept.
Is it regressive because it enacted legislation you disagree with? Is the whole US regressive and undemocratic because we have a republic and a supreme court?
The public process is changing the state legislature. That is a public process. It might move slower than you in particular would wish but it’s a far better process than whatever process LHoD is afraid to speak of because he wasn’t addressed with the appropriate obsequiousness.
Already discussed, and by LHOD too. End gerrymandering and minority voter suppression. You support democracy, don’t you, even if you don’t like the result, right?
Each of those things can be debated separately and their answers need not persuade us about the particulars of this case. But feel free to open a thread about any or all of those if you wish to debate them.
I asked a simple question in a later post: Did MLK ever participate in or condone the destruction of property? I honestly don’t know, but I’m not aware of him having done so. If he did, please cite it. Yes, King advocated breaking laws. You general have to do that when you are practicing Civil Disobedience. But you don’t have to destroy property.
If you want to argue that King’s methods are outdated, go ahead. But that will be a tough argument to make as you’d have to show that conditions now are worse than they were during King’s time. The idea that laws are harder to change now than they were in the 1950s is not a credible idea.
It began in 1812 when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts. One of the new districts looked like a salamander. Gerrymander is a portmanteau of Gerry and salamander. Interestingly this was to benefit the Democratic-Republican Party which later split to become the parties we have today.
I mean, sure. His views seem incredibly obvious to me, but I get that they don’t seem so clear to you. So I Googled “Martin Luther King Property,” and here’s the first result.
Seems a tough call on this one inasmuch I do not think he exhorted his people to violence but he courted violence.
King invited violence knowing the pictures of it would aid his cause. As such he purposely arranged situations where violence was likely to ensue (usually against the protestors) such as Bull Connor sicking attack dogs on protestors.
Not really. Yes there was the 3/5th compromise, and a ban on importing slaves after 1808. So, it was mentioned, but unlike the various CSA Constitutions, there was nothing implicitly making it Constitutional. Congress could have banned slavery by a simple bill, not a amendment.
First off, did they do something honorable that I missed?
Second, you and I both know that your claim is completely untrue. The purpose of this, and the other confederate statues put up in that era, was to honor white supremacy.