Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Generally an unmoderated forum for discussion of pretty much any topic. The focus however, is usually politics.
Post Reply
User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

Where are the monuments honoring Timothy McVeigh and the 9/11 terrorists? "History", you know.
rstrong wrote:
Sun Jan 28, 2018 8:37 pm
... "You can celebrate your heritage by building monuments to Confederate generals in public places....
As I like to gloat about to the slaver lovers every chance I get, that will never happen again anywhere. The only open question is how rapidly we get rid of the existing ones.
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
billy.pilgrim
Admiral
Posts: 15618
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:44 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by billy.pilgrim »

Vrede too wrote:
Sun Jan 28, 2018 9:23 pm
Where are the monuments honoring Timothy McVeigh and the 9/11 terrorists? "History", you know.
rstrong wrote:
Sun Jan 28, 2018 8:37 pm
... "You can celebrate your heritage by building monuments to Confederate generals in public places....
As I like to gloat about to the slaver lovers every chance I get, that will never happen again anywhere. The only open question is how rapidly we get rid of the existing ones.

We still disagree about slavery in this country prior to the civil war. As for after that (unnecessary war), it wasn't anything but a small step in a long road to end slavery.


Wiki says,


Contemporary slavery, also known as modern slavery, refers to the institutions of slavery that continue to exist in the present day. Estimates of the number of slaves today range from around 21 million[1]–29 million[2][3][4][5] to 46 million.

That's a bunch of slaves.

As did abu ghraib and the destruction of Iraq create the unintended consequence of a forever war, our Civil War created jim crow and these blinded idiots who want to return to what was taken by force.

Trade sanctions are nearly always better than war. State sponsored slavery was dying out worldwide.

Do you really believe that the south with its cotton only economy would have continued on its merry way if no country would buy the cotton?

No war = no Generals = no statues and no Lost Cause to whine about.
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

:headscratch: I haven't defended the Civil War. With 600K dead it's obvious that everyone made poor choices. However:

The South fired the first shots.
The South did secede.
The South did fight to defend slavery.
The South lost.
The monuments honor traitors, slavers and losers, and were often erected as dishonest revisionism and/or support for Jim Crow.

So, I think one can feel exactly the same about these participation trophies even if one is not an unwavering cheerleader for the Civil War.

Nor have I claimed that the Civil War ended world slavery. It even persists in the US.
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
O Really
Admiral
Posts: 21328
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2012 3:37 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by O Really »

Practices that can be called "slavery" still persist in the US, but it's not legal and state-sanctioned.

Worldwide, the International Labor Organization (ILO), a U.N. agency focusing on labor rights, and the Walk Free Foundation, an international NGO working to end modern slavery, issued a report last year finding 25 million people in forced labor and 15 million in forced marriage. Very few, if any, of those found in the study were in a situation like the US slaves, i.e., legally owned as property, to be used, sold, or disposed of essentially like livestock.

"The report defines modern slavery as situations of exploitation that a person can't refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion or deception -- which includes forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage and human trafficking. It notes that the average length of time victims were in forced labor ranged from a few days in some forms of state-imposed forced labor, to nearly two years for forced sexual exploitation.

An estimated 4.1 million people are victims of forced labor imposed by state authorities. They include people made by their state authorities to participate in agriculture or construction work to boost economic development, young military conscripts forced to perform non-military work, and prisoners forced to work without consent at private prisons."

So compare the conditions of current slavery with being owned, along with all your family, for your entire life, and - except maybe from the perspective of the individual being enslaved - is nowhere close to the same thing.

User avatar
rstrong
Captain
Posts: 5889
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 9:32 am
Location: Winnipeg, MB

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by rstrong »

billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 8:36 am
State sponsored slavery was dying out worldwide.
It would have continued on in America for at least a couple more generations. I'm not sure I could say "Let's NOT take a stand, because eventually their grandchildren will be free. Perhaps."

In any case, it was dying out only because it was bad for those counties as a whole. In America for example where it led to high unemployment in the south, in turn leading to immigration heading for the north, in turn leading to the south losing voting power.

But even with the actual slaves aside, it was only bad for those who didn't count. It was a 1%-er issue. The 1% - wealthy land owners - owned the slaves, and they were making a fortune. Who cared about some working class schmucks being unemployed? You could blame their problems on Washington. Heck, you could get them to rally round the Confederate flag and die by the thousands to defend the very system that was keeping them down.

Sound familiar? Replace slavery with offshoring, openly fraudulent banking and other harmful practices. Harmful to the working class, harmful to the country, but still making a fortune for the 1%. And you can still rally the working class around a billionaire who will fill his cabinet with other billionaires from Wall Street banks and oil companies.

Which is why I say "perhaps" in the first paragraph.
billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 8:36 am
Do you really believe that the south with its cotton only economy would have continued on its merry way if no country would buy the cotton?
An irrelevant question, because other countries would have continued to buy cotton. In the age of sail it wasn't just a matter of national security; there was money at stake.

User avatar
billy.pilgrim
Admiral
Posts: 15618
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:44 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by billy.pilgrim »

rstrong wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 10:50 am
billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 8:36 am
State sponsored slavery was dying out worldwide.
It would have continued on in America for at least a couple more generations. I'm not sure I could say "Let's NOT take a stand, because eventually their grandchildren will be free. Perhaps."

In any case, it was dying out only because it was bad for those counties as a whole. In America for example where it led to high unemployment in the south, in turn leading to immigration heading for the north, in turn leading to the south losing voting power.

But even with the actual slaves aside, it was only bad for those who didn't count. It was a 1%-er issue. The 1% - wealthy land owners - owned the slaves, and they were making a fortune. Who cared about some working class schmucks being unemployed? You could blame their problems on Washington. Heck, you could get them to rally round the Confederate flag and die by the thousands to defend the very system that was keeping them down.

Sound familiar? Replace slavery with offshoring, openly fraudulent banking and other harmful practices. Harmful to the working class, harmful to the country, but still making a fortune for the 1%. And you can still rally the working class around a billionaire who will fill his cabinet with other billionaires from Wall Street banks and oil companies.

Which is why I say "perhaps" in the first paragraph.
billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 8:36 am
Do you really believe that the south with its cotton only economy would have continued on its merry way if no country would buy the cotton?
An irrelevant question, because other countries would have continued to buy cotton. In the age of sail it wasn't just a matter of national security; there was money at stake.
Europe would have told the slavers to eat their cotton: I'm not so sure about the northern shipping industry, you know, the same ones that transported many of the slaves.

My understanding
The US allowed slaves before the war and the war ended slavery with huge still lasting consequences.
Creating a political and an economic climate to end slavery - say along the lines of NJ would have ended slavery in 40 or 50 years without the consequences we have today.


Also, why wasn't this "worthy" war started many years earlier?
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”

User avatar
rstrong
Captain
Posts: 5889
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 9:32 am
Location: Winnipeg, MB

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by rstrong »

billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 12:09 pm
Europe would have told the slavers to eat their cotton: I'm not so sure about the northern shipping industry, you know, the same ones that transported many of the slaves.
It wasn't just the slave trade. Cotton was needed for the sails and trade goods that powered several European global political and mercantile empires. They were never going to stop buying.

The British alone were heading into an era where they were going to kill a full order of magnitude more people in India than the Nazis killed in Europe... to keep their empire running. An era where "coolie" wasn't merely a laborer from China; it was a unit of labor. With x amount of food and y amount of opium from India to keep them controlled, and shipped around the empire to build railroads and whatnot.

Any declaration of "We will not support slavery" would come with a quieter "Find a different name for it."
billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 12:09 pm
Creating a political and an economic climate to end slavery - say along the lines of NJ would have ended slavery in 40 or 50 years without the consequences we have today.
That sounds about right. But as I wrote above, I'm not sure I could say "Let's NOT take a stand, because eventually their grandchildren will be free. Perhaps."
billy.pilgrim wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 12:09 pm
Also, why wasn't this "worthy" war started many years earlier?
As I understand it, it took a while for the loss of political power (the south not gaining population through immigration, thus demanding that new states be slave states) to become apparent. Giving the southern 1%-ers an extra three fifths of a vote for each of their slaves held that off for a while.

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

Not that I care much about this hypothetical scenario, but I would guess that any serious trade sanctions would have eventually led to an embargo/blockade and thus possibly war by a slower route.

Before even getting to that point, though, what is the legal/constitutional authority for a group of states imposing sanctions on another group of states, and wouldn't the South have felt just as violated by this thus still leading to war?
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
rstrong
Captain
Posts: 5889
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 9:32 am
Location: Winnipeg, MB

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by rstrong »

Vrede too wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:53 pm
...but I would guess that any serious trade sanctions would have eventually led to an embargo/blockade and thus possibly war by a slower route.
Just so. A few countries would refuse to deal with the US, as they'd have every right to. Trying to stop the rest with a blockade is an outright act of war.

Even the US's actions regarding Cuba - sanctions against non-American companies and people for dealing with Cuba - is arguably an act of war.

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

Holocaust Denier Set for Republican Nomination in Congressional Race in Illinois

He’s a Holocaust denier, he’s a white supremacist, and he’s set to get the Republican nomination for a major congressional seat in Illinois.

Arthur Jones, a Prairie State anti-Semite who has been unsuccessfully run for office for decades, is poised to get closer than ever to office this year after emerging as the only GOP candidate for a congressional spot representing parts of Chicago and its suburbs....
:lol:

The GOP literally could have persuaded any random Repug to stand and s/he would have won the primary and saved the GOP a ton of embarrassment.
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
O Really
Admiral
Posts: 21328
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2012 3:37 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by O Really »

That's great - the guy has no chance in a district that solid blue, but is a gift to Dems nationally who can use him to beat Republicans over the head. I'm guessing the Republicans had just decided not to contest the race and didn't think about him slithering back out from his rock again. He saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. Seems the Nazi Holocaust denier anti-semite might be smarter than the Republicans.

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

Weird stuff can happen down-ticket, but it's absolutely fundamental for either party to be on top of filings through the deadline at the congressional level. Plus, it's just really bad form to let any congressional race go unopposed.

The GOP there is racist, stupid or both, there are no other options.
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
O Really
Admiral
Posts: 21328
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2012 3:37 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by O Really »

I think the IL GOP has disavowed the guy, but he still flies the big "R" flag. Sorta like the Christians and who's "real" and who isn't. If you say you are, you are. And the Repugs are stuck with him.

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

O Really wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 9:58 am
I think the IL GOP has disavowed the guy ...
True, but we can't ever know for sure that there wasn't some Repug at the district level that saw what was happening and chose to do nothing. Anyhow, I'm fine with the most likely being that the IL GOP is just that stupid.
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
rstrong
Captain
Posts: 5889
Joined: Thu Oct 25, 2012 9:32 am
Location: Winnipeg, MB

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by rstrong »

Vrede too wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 10:13 am
O Really wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 9:58 am
I think the IL GOP has disavowed the guy ...
True, but we can't ever know for sure that there wasn't some Repug at the district level that saw what was happening and chose to do nothing. Anyhow, I'm fine with the most likely being that the IL GOP is just that stupid.
The GOP has always opposed anyone associated with the Blues, so it's no surprise that they disagree with the Blues Brothers about Illinois Nazis.

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

rstrong wrote:
Mon Feb 05, 2018 10:18 am
The GOP has always opposed anyone associated with the Blues, so it's no surprise that they disagree with the Blues Brothers about Illinois Nazis.
:D



Blues Brothers Illinois Nazis
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

User avatar
O Really
Admiral
Posts: 21328
Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2012 3:37 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by O Really »

I've never spent much time around Chicago, and Illinois is a long state, but I can vouch that southern Illinois isn't much different from it's next-door or nearby neighbors of Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Trump signs and confederate battle flags are not rare.


User avatar
billy.pilgrim
Admiral
Posts: 15618
Joined: Wed Oct 10, 2012 1:44 pm

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by billy.pilgrim »


"Spencer and Peinovich wrote remarkably similar briefs, citing the same three cases and using similar expressions to describe the lawsuit against them.

Both cited “lawfare,”



It's the lawfare that did it.
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”

User avatar
Vrede too
Superstar Cultmaster
Posts: 50659
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2015 11:46 am
Location: Hendersonville, NC

Re: Guns, race, religion, terror, wingnut thread

Unread post by Vrede too »

billy.pilgrim wrote:
Fri Feb 09, 2018 9:08 am
"Spencer and Peinovich wrote remarkably similar briefs, citing the same three cases and using similar expressions to describe the lawsuit against them.

Both cited “lawfare,”

It's the lawfare that did it.
It's just awful that our legal system doesn't favor murderous white supremacists (other than police), isn't it?
Always be yourself! Unless you can be a goat, then always be a goat.
-- the interweb, paraphrased
1312. ETTD.

Post Reply