monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

You're welcome, my friend.



It doesn't fit their agenda at all, does it?

In Australia, our indigenous people were classed as fauna until 1967, and miner Lang Hangcock spoke about poisoning waterholes on national television, to rid land of people so his machines could move in.

Just for reference sake...



I didn't. I saw the one upon which Blickers was basing his argument and in that video, tiki-boys, not KKK, were chanting "You will not replace us..." I don't have a problem believing the KKK demonstrators were, subsequently, more specific with their bigotry, but if Blickers meant to use that parade to support his contention, he should have.



Anyone who actually read what I wrote will know that I made essentially the same point and that regardless of what the tiki-boys might argue (assuming they did at all), they knew full well the background of the phrase "Blood and Soil"



Not sure why glitterbag felt the need to reiterate my point, but it's empowering to know she agrees with me.



Almost cause for a second nomination for blatham's coveted NSS Award (Maybe instead, the lesser No Kidding Dick Tracy Award.)

It's nice that we don't have any such pig-headed people participating in this forum. If anyone attending the rally, (not as a tiki-boy or KKK), who, upon learning the origins of Blood and Soil and the anti-Semitic theme of the chanters embraced them or simply shrugged it off, I would consider them disqualified from being one of the possibly good people in attendance.

We have been arguing over hypothetical people that, at this point, none of us can prove were or were not in attendance. It might be an easier task to identify one of these folks than to try and prove a negative, but as I have never asserted anything more than good people could have been there, I don't feel compelled to mount an investigation to locate one. I gave some thought to whether or not it might have behooved Trump to identify at least one person to whom he could point in order to back up his assertion, but concluded that it might have helped him a bit but only to the extent that it temporarily diverted the hounds from his heels. It would, however, have been personally disastrous for anyone he brought to the attention of the MSM and the public.

It's clear, from the discussion in the A2K microcosm, that those who identify with the Resistance would never accept the possibility that any of those Trump named might be considered good, and each of them would be subjected, at a minimum, to the intense scrutiny of the MSM which would have the finding of proof that they were actually bad people as its main goal. Even the most self-righteous social justice warrior would have reason to quiver and wither under that fierce gaze.

Of course, that wouldn't be all the named good people would have to endure. We can safely assume that they would be flooded with insulting and even threatening phone calls, email and whatever other means furious loons could employ to harass them. Causing trouble with their employers and even vandalism or physical attacks would not, at all, be outside of the realm of possibility, and I can imagine comments being made in this forum rationalizing the consequences of hate speech. I'm sure there are just as many furious right-wing loons, as there are of the left-wing variety seething and firing off death wishes and threats to whoever triggers their rage, but there is an especially sad irony present when people who so loudly condemn hatred, employ it so forcefully.




This could have been directed at me or the general "you." Either way, it is, of course, true but at the same time stunningly facile.

I really don't know what is meant by institutionalized bigot phrase. Is there an official federal agency somewhere in DC where racist slogans are certified?

In any case, the notion that "Blood and Soil" is a phrase that any American who in 10th Grade paused in their memorization of dates and paid attention to their World History teacher would know is pretty silly. What's even sillier though is getting a scolding about history from someone who only a week ago revealed that she a) didn't know that James Clapper had lied to Congress and seemed to be under the impression that no US Intel Official had ever done so b) Believed Oliver North was pardoned for criminal involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, instead of having his conviction overturned and all charges dismissed by an Appeals court, c) Didn't know who Linda Sarsour was and d) Didn't know about American leftists being long time apologists for Stalin.

Now to be fair, none of the matters addressed in the discussion created significant historical crossroads and the individuals involved are hardly household names who historians will be writing about a century or more from now, but they are far more current, and far less obscure to most Americans than a German slogan developed in the 1800's as an expression of the romantic idealization of Teutonic peasantry in a uniquely German melange of nationalism, stock breeding, and pagan mysticism. It's generally a good rule of thumb to be sure you're not standing on a rotten platform when indulging in condescension, Some people though never seem to learn from even painful lessons.

(Of course, the Nazi's had to take something cool, and deprave it with their twisted darkness; emphasizing racial purity and superiority and casting Jews and intellectuals as the Metropolitan antithesis of the idealized Volksdeutsche of the sacred countryside. They were always pulling such ****, just look what they did to Norse mythology, rocketry, and military chic. Damn Nazis.Where's Lt. Aldo Raine when you need him?)

Yeah, dirt-stupid, totally clueless, and lobotomized good people could have been in attendance...

Sounds like you were front and centre, olly.

I was there with you the whole time, budy, holding your hand, making sure you were taking your medication, stopping you from offering sexual gratification to them Nazi boys... Don't you remember?

Stop vilifying the Nazis, Finn. There are good people among them.

<smirk>

On Fox, Brian Kilmeade asks Interior secretary if in 100 years people will try to take down 9/11 memorial like with confederate statues

It does not fit the agenda of a certain "politically correct" crowd to look at the entire picture of what happened to aboriginal Americans. They just want to rant about genocide and make a blanket condemnation. Generally, that condemnation is leveled at contemporary Americans, without regard to when they or their ancestors arrived in this country. Furthermore, there is a disgusting irony and hypocrisy to see this sort of drivel from an Australian. Almost from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, some segments of the European Australian population murdered aboriginals, and that dramatically increased with the arrival of non-convict settlers. In Van Diemen's Land they succeeded in completely exterminating the aboriginal population in an intended campaign of extermination. The brutality toward convicts there, and the extermination of the aboriginals explains whey the name of the island was changed to Tasmania--but acknowledging that doesn't fit the agenda of trolls from down under.

Additionally, the majority of thumb suckers at this site and elsewhere on-line don't acknowledge the brutality of aboriginal Americans toward one another, and toward the European settlers, nor do they acknowledge the interplay of tribal politics (because the English and French were just as tribal as the aborigines). It's just too easy to be sanctimonious and scream out a shrill condemnation of all contemporary Americans, and go on one's holier-than-thou way. Of course, being pig-ignorant is a sine qua non of the entire phony righteous indignation routine.

Of the tens of millions, not simply millions, of aboriginal Americans who died after the arrival of Europeans, the overwhelming majority--modern scholars generally put the figure at 90%--died of diseases for which they had no immunities. These were chiefly smallpox and malaria, brought by the Spanish (unintentionally, certainly, as those diseases killed them, too). When Pizarro "conquered" the northwest coast of South America, two critical factors allowed a pathetically small band of Spaniards to prevail--a recent smallpox epidemic and politics, in the form of a civil war among the Amerindians which took place just before his arrival. The third killer, and a constant for centuries, was influenza. Europeans brought swine and domestic fowl with them, and they also brought a weak immunity. Smallpox, malaria and influenza carried off quite a few of them, too. In 1614, John Smith from the Jamestown colony sailed along the coast of what was later to be called New England, and noted a terrible epidemic among the tribes (some, but not all of them) which was probably influenza, as Smith's crew did not suffer from the contagion. European fishermen had come to the northeast coast of North America for centuries to fish for cod and to hunt the whale, and they routine established summer camps on the shore to smoke fish and set up salt pans to salt down the catch. There are records of this back to the early 15th century (and they were probably there before that), centuries before the first, small successful settlements of English-speakers on the North American continent. They brought at least influenza and perhaps smallpox, well before English settlement.

The first attempt at an English settlement at Roanoke Island in 1584 ended with the unexplained disappearance of the colonizers, some time before 1590. Some scholars (by no means all or even a majority) think they were taken in by tribes on the mainland. The first successful attempt was at Jamestown in 1607. About 80% of the original settlers were dead within two years, from a combination of disease and malnutrition. The region had been suffering from drought for a generation before the arrival of the largely incompetent settlers, and their presence was justifiably resented by the local tribes. There were sporadic and unsuccessful attacks on the stockade at Jamestown, and when a new settlement was made at Martin's Hundred in 1620, the tribesmen attacked and nearly wiped out the settlers in 1621. Obviously, relations were going from bad to worse.

When the English landed at what they called Plymouth in 1620, they found the evidence of the epidemic that Smith recorded in 1614. They were ill-prepared as well, and of the roughly 130 passengers and crew of Mayflower, only 53 survived the winter of 1620-21. Malnutrition and scurvy were the likely causes, just as they had carried off so many of the would-be French settlers during Cartier's voyages in the 1530s in what we now call Canada. Influenza was the culprit for centuries to come as the European brought swine and chickens with them. To suggest that this was a part of some nefarious and over-arching program of genocide is as stupid as is the phony righteous indignation of hypocritical Australians and sanctimonious and smug Americans, who I guess get a pass on the collective guilt because of their holier-than-thou bloviation.

I could go on for pages about Amerindians slaughtering one another, such as the Iroquois attempt to exterminate the tribes of the Great Lakes region in the 17th century, which accounted for tens of thousands, and maybe well over 100,000 deaths. So it must be OK for them to kill one another, but not OK for Europeans to do so. I am making no attempt to whitewash what European settlers did--I am also not so ignorant as to fail to notice what the Amerindians did to one another and to the Europeans. There is a patronizing aspect to all of this, too, as though the Amerindians were peaceful happy innocents, who were incapable of defending themselves. The notion that disease was a weapon of the colonizers is also idiotic, given how many of them it killed.

Snood was right, slavery is the original sin of the United States. (In case you've forgotten the point of departure of the trolls in this issue.)

Let me try to phrase the debate another way. (iffy thing) The people who organized the event billed it not just as a protest against removing the confederate statue, but as a "unite the right" which means all the groups, such as KKK and white nationalist and Nazis to come to unite as one. If you come to an event in support billed as uniting those groups, then it means you support those groups ideals and beliefs. As such some of them might be "good people" but they believe in racist and hateful ideals.

Links embedded at Daily Dot The story is Huffpost, but I find their website quirky to cut and paste.

Perhaps Trump being willing to sign the aide package/debt ceiling is understandable now.

That's not too far afield from removal of Civil War statues.

The Iraq War is considered by a vocal group to be an atrocity against the Middle Eastern people. Some here believe it was nothing more than an international mugging. One argument follows the craven use of young men and women, mostly from poor families, used as cannon fodder to enrich Dick Cheney and his ilk. People here called for the prosecution of the responsible president and his administration.

Why you single-minded establishment types try to act like it's unreasonable to extend public sentiment from one unpopular war to another is your way of trying to, once again, control the narrative. You know it weakens your monolithic argument when removal of additional monuments and censure of additional histories is thrown up on the public chopping block. The 'slippery slope'.

It is a fact that people have called for removal of several founding fathers' statues and likenesses. I'm pretty sure someone here has scoffed at that possibility, though it has happened.

Now, someone scoffs at the possibility that, one day, a group may see 911 remembrances as offensive and call for their removal. If our country is here long enough, it will happen. There's probably a pretty tidy group now who feels this way, but hasn't found their voice.

Columbus Day is morphing into Indigenous People's Day.

Founding fathers are being attacked for slave-holding, and efforts have been discussed sporadically over decades to address their sins by removing statues.

Scoff if you like; Kilmeade, dumb as he is, is correct.

Wow.

"Native Americans were a blood-thirsty lot, so it wasn't so bad to kill them. Plus, a lot of the killing was unintentional communication of illness, so the rest of it (oddly absent from my pontificating) wasn't so bad. Anyway, this pesky diversion (brought up by a goddam Australian) distracts from what I command you to think."

Setanta

You give new heights to the definition of asshole. I have already pointed out that I'm not whitewashing the actions of the Europeans, and yes, the Amerindians were often a bloodthirsty lot. I didn't comment on your stupidity, which is predictable and pedestrian. My remarks were a response to the love fest between Sturgis and Builder, which ought to have been obvious to anyone not looking for a casus belli. Go feel sorry for yourself is you want, I would not be at all surprised at that.

WSJ

Moves such as this follow a pattern begun in the seventies (see Pierson and Hacker's Winner-Take-All Politics) of institutionalization of advantages for right wing interests while at the same time establishing the reverse for liberal groups and interests (eg voter suppression laws, "right to work" laws).

Read this entire piece and just try to find any attempt by the writer (or his editors) to differentiate one group from the other on the precise subject addressed. Politico

Straightforward and clear. No matter. People like Finn will still miss it, because they quite simply need to.

Absolutely

I have made this point directly to him multiple times, and he simply refuses to respond.

Also, this idea that people like him are pushing, that people didn't know they were going to be at a torch march with a bunch of Nazis and white supremacists, didn't understand what was going on there, and that there really COULD be some 'good people' there who were just confused or something, is the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard. Do you honestly think that anyone showed up and didn't know what the **** was going on immediately? Pull the other one. Watch the VICE documentary on it and then say with a straight face that anyone at the torch rally didn't know they were marching with Nazi-wannabes.

Cycloptichorn

This is not something to even consider joking about. By doing so, you reveal the low level of your being.

Correct? He asked a question.

Why are people so concerned with what might happen to monuments a hundred years from now???