Maybe They'll Name a School "Ho Chi Minh Junior High"

A Virginia school board voted Friday to restore the names of Confederate military leaders to a high school and an elementary school, four years after the names were removed amid nationwide protests calling for a reckoning over racial injustice.

In a reversal experts believe was the first of its kind, Shenandoah County’s school board voted 5-1 to rename Mountain View High School as Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary as Ashby Lee Elementary.

At least Ho Chi Minh wasn't fighting to enslave Americans, which those two honorees were.

I guess those morons would have no issues with Norwich, CT renaming a school after Benedict Arnold, since he was from there.

The South is awfully proud of having fought for the right of rich white Southerners to own Black people.

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Plus Fragile White People.

You might recall when the TOFF claimed that he was mentally sharp because he could remember and repeat those words.

But he doesn't remember who he ran against in 2016 and he's worried that President Biden might get us into World War II.

The second point is understandable, in that the TOFF is an admirer of Hitler and probably doesn't want to get in a war with him.

Shifting gears, how is it intellectually honest to teach the history of this country in a way that won't offend Southern conservatives? How do you teach about slavery? Do you, as Texas tried to do, pretend that the slaves were "economic migrants"? How do you teach about the Civil Rights Movement? Do you pretend that the Bloody Sunday police riot at the Edmund Pettis Bridge during the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965 was a state police baton-training exercise? Do you pretend that the Tulsa Massacre was impromptu urban renewal?

Well, that's probably what they try to do. Since 1866, they've been trying to rewrite history to pretend that the Civil War was about anything and everything else except slavery. Which is horseshit.

Can you imagine teaching the history of the first half of the 20th Century in Europe in a way that doesn't make Germans uncomfortable? Or teaching about the breakup of Yugoslavia in a way that doesn't discomfort Serbians?

Honest discussions of history is about confronting and dealing with the past, not trying to whitewash it. But whitewashing the past, if not outright burying it, is what white conservatism is all about.

The past is not over. History is how we got to where we are, now. Knowing history gives us a chance of not doing the same stupid shit, over and over.

Censoring the Truth; Fla Ed

This is how textbook publishers are responding to fascist DeSantis’s war on history. They are erasing the truth.

Scary scary stuff. Look at the part they took out.

Original vs. Florida compliant pic.twitter.com/HO9yY7VHjH

— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) March 17, 2023

Erasing the issue of race makes Rosa Parks look like a crotchety woman, not a woman who was protesting segregation.

But this is what a certain set of conservatives want to have happen. They can't handle the truth about racism, slavery, Jim Crow and all of the rest of the grim tales of this country's past. You can bet that they would love to tell their kids that the Indians peacefully sold their land to the white Europeans after most of the Indians were killed off by smallpox. Texas wanted their school textbooks to refer to slaves as economic migrants until there was a hoopla about that. You can bet your ass that they buy the Dixie revisionist horseshit that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. To hear them tell it, the slaves were happy because they got free passage to the New World, they didn't have to decide what to do, what to wear, where to live, whom to mate with and they cheerfully sung hymns while rhythmically ratting their chains.

Nashville International Airport Sucks, and So Does Southwest Airlines

A Fcontinuation, of sorts, of this post.

I believe that it was thoroughly unreasonable of the Nashville Airport cops and SWA to insist that passengers whse flights were canceled leave the secure area.

This is why:

I've been in a few airports in my time. They all have one thing in common: Most of the retail operations, restaurants, bars, clothing, toiletries, books, pillows, travel blankets, etc., are in the secure areas of the airports. They are the places that stranded travelers need. The non-secure side, where the baggage check and baggage claim areas are, may have something along the nature of a row of vening machines to a coffee shop, primarily to sell to people who are waiting for incoming passengers. The operations in the non-secure side have very little of what a stranded traveler may need.

Pushing the stranded travelers out of the secure area was a rank display of inhospitability and a demonstrantion of uncaring, if not inhumanity.

Which may be typical of Nashville. I don't know, I've never been there and I'm less likely to.

(So much for that fabled Southern hopsitality.)

How the Germans Do It

Unlike the Republicans, who cannot accept teaching the bad shit that makes up part of this country's history, the Germans do teach their kids about their bad shit, as the Rude Pundit discussed.

If the Germans taught the Holocause the way Texas tried to teach slavery, the Germans would have referred to Auschwitz as a center for hospice care.

Conservatives Embody Cancel Culture and Snowflakeism

The conservative outcry towards Critical Race Theory shows that they embody the very thing they decry: Censoring viewpoints that make them uncomfortable.

What are they so afraid of? That their kids will learn that their grandparents threw rocks at school kids and school buses during integration? That their great-grandparents attended lynchings?

Tab-Clearing

The speculation will be rampant on who is to blame for the outcome in the Virginia gubernatorial race. My take is as follows:

1. Terry McAuliffe.  He was running to be governor again.  He didn't make the case that he was better than another GOP political neophyte.
2. Joe Biden.  He's not exactly gotten people excited and he's not delivered on his big plans.
3. Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema.  For their personal reasons, which border on megalomania, they've been happy to help sink Biden's agenda.  With friends like the Gang of Two, who needs enemies?  During a war, both of them would be on the Bayonet the Enemy Wounded detail, because nobody would trust them with a loaded firearm.
4. Good old Lee Atwater Southern Strategy racism.  The whole crap about critical race theory is just that.  Critical race theory isn't being taught in elementary or high schools, but that doesn't stop Republicans from doing a Willie Horton on the Democrats.  
5. The economy.  There's often not much a sitting president can do about that, but that's the way it goes.

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I'm not paying much attention to the arguments today in NYSRPA v. Bruen. The fact of the matter is that most states are now "shall issue", with more and more not requiring permits, and the fear of blood running in the streets that has been bruited about since Florida began the modern concealed-carry movement 30+ years ago has not happened. It won't be that big of a stretch to require that the handful of states still operating on "may issue" or "no issue" change.

But I expect that the Supremes will issue an order saying that the named plaintiffs will get their permits and then have some mealy-mouthed dicta about how it applies to the rest of us. Splitting the baby is what they do.

Besides that, if the justices take a hard-right turn on this issue, they will give lots of oxygen to the argument that they really are partisan hacks and that they need to be curbed. Expect that they're well aware of that risk.

The Court is going to do what it can to preserve their own power. Which is probably why the Texan abortion law will be struck down. The Supreme Court has had the final say over the law for over 200 years, they aren't going to let some pissants in Texas change that, regardless of how much they might like the underlying subject of the law.
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For all the ink, both virtual and real, being spilled on the climate summit, my belief is that humanity has missed that bus. The Chinese and the Russians have been having hissy fits because other countries aren't being nice to them, so skipping the climate summit was a case of "so there, nyaahh". China thinks that they can pollute more because reasons.

Here's the thing: They live on the same planet that we do. China's not going to be immune from the effects of climate change because Chairman Xi issues some sort of directive on it, or bans discussion of it. Mother Nature will not be denied or be ignored. The world has been lackadaisical, to say the least, at addressing climate change. This is not a new problem by any stretch of the imagination.

But the nations of the world have ignored it. Some of it has been a race to the bottom, as nobody wants to be the first one to have to spend the money to transform their economies away from emitting carbon and methane emissions while nobody else does. Some of it has been wishful thinking (see Trump; Donald) in that those people think that if they can pretend it's not happening, then it won't happen.

In the 1980s, corrcective action would have been painful, sure, but compared to where we are now, it would have been relatively easy. Now it won't be. If we're going to mitigate the effects of climate change, then brisk and radical action is necessary on a global scale.

But it's not going to happen.

Here is my prediction: For as long as humanity exists, those generations who were in power between 1980 and 2030 will be reviled. Conservatives and capitalists, in particular, will be blamed for being those who did what they could to ensure that nobody did anything meaningful to avoid the catastrophe. The planet will warm, the biosphere is being decimated and whether or not we as a species can survive is arguable.

We are well and truly screwed. If you have small children or grandchildren, you can comfort yourselves when you go to sleep with the knowledge that their lives are going to be far shittier and harder than ours have been. Because we could have done something and we didn't.

Sleep tight.

The Illegitimate Father of the United States of America

On this day, 261 years ago, George William Frederick ascended to the British throne, becoming King George the Third. In an country that was a constitutional monarchy, he insisted on acting as much as an absolute ruler as he possibly could.

It was his obstinancy, at every step in the way, that led to both the American Revolution and the defeat of the British Empire in the war. Up until the 1760s, England had let its American colonies run their own affairs, taxing their own citizens for internal reasons. Trade was made beneficial to the Empire by tariffs and shipping controls. But that wasn't good enough for King George, he insisted on the right to tax the colonists directly. Tariffs were imposed, not for regulating trade, but as naked taxation. As the disputes with the colonies intensified, King George supported measures to arrest people and try them in either Admiralty courts (denying the defendants the right to a jury) or to transport them to England for trial/conviction.

Once the war began, the King threw up every obstacle he could to reaching a conclusion other than on the battlefield. When his government recognized the futiity of continuing the war after the defeat at Yorktown and the prime minister (Lord North) sought to step down before losing a no-confidence vote, the King told Lord North that he'd abdicate and leave the country before conceding the loss of the American colonies. North had to politely point out to the King that England was not an absolute monarchy, that while the monarch reigned, he didn't rule, and he should shut the fuck up and read the writing on the wall.

Without King George, it's certainly plausible that the American colonies would have continued to govern themselves and grown towards becoming a British dominion. In that regard, it's also plausible that California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico would have remained part of Mexico and that much of what is now known as the upper Midwest would have stayed as Canadian territory.

It took another war to drive the point home to the British that the United States was an independent nation. By the time that the second war rolled around, though, the King was insane.

It would be over another century after that before the Department of War ceased having current war plans against the British and the British stopped planning for war with the U.S. The British government flirted with the idea of intervening in the American Civil War, but thought better of it.[1] While the Brits did allow the Confederacy to build warships in English shipyards, that bit of meddling cost them the equivalent of a over a third of a billion dollars in today's money in order to settle claims against the Empire.
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[1] For one thing, the British people had turned against slavery. Intervening on the side of a nation whose sole reason for existence was to protect chattel slavery would have been a very hard sell.
(Yes, I know, Southern Apologists keep trying to rewrite history and claim that the Civil War was a "noble cause" and that the war was not about slavery. They are full of shit.)

Operation Distraction

White House chief of staff John Kelly spoke to the "good" and "not so good" parts of US history on Monday, speaking highly of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and attributing the origin of the American Civil War to a "lack of an ability to compromise."
...
He continued: "But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War. And men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had to make their stand," Kelly added, not making any mention of slavery -- a major facet of the Southern economy and a key benchmark that separated northern and southern states when they chose sides in the Civil War.

First, that's all utter horseshit. The Civil War was about the right to own people as livestock. It was about their desire to open more territory for the farming of people. That's what they declared at the time. A lot of the Confederate soldiers were drafted and both draft evasion and desertion were huge problems for the Confederacy, as a large number of their soldiers knew that they were fighting for the rights of rich people to own slaves, while the slavers exempted themselves from fighting the war. But the officers, especially the highest-ranking ones, actively committed treason. There is no intellectually honest way to gloss over the point that they were traitors who fought to preserve slavery. The "Noble Cause" bullshit was an after-the-fact rationalization to cover up the bitter truth that the Boys in Gray committed treason and fought for the right of rich white people to own black people.

Given that, as I've explained before, none of Trump's ancestors were even in this country for the Civil War, Trump's infatuation with the Confederate traitors is either naked political calculation or a manifestation of his inner nazism.

But all that overlooks the saddest thing: Donald Trump sent out his Chief of Staff, a retired four-star general, to stoke up the fires of resentment over losing the Civil War as a way to distract the news cycle, if only on Fox, from covering the fact that the walls of the Mueller investigation are closing in on his administration.

General Kelly had the reputation of being an honorable man. But Trump just sent him out to play racist troll in order to save a news cycle or two.

The bitter lesson is this: If you work for a racist and hateful boss, especially in public life, the stink of racism and hate will rub off on you.

Tear Down Those Confederate Statues. Every Motherfucking One of Them.

Statues are not put up to remember people. Statues of people are erected to honor them.

So I ask you: Why are we honoring men who turned their coats and took up arms against this country? Why do we have statues of traitors in our public places and in the halls of government buildings? Why do we continue to honor the memory of men who fought for the right of rich men to own slaves?

Funny how it's overlooked that over 100,000 white Southerners were in the Union Army. Apparently, every Southern state, other than South Carolina,[1] had at least one organized battalion (or larger) of white soldiers.

The only statue that I know of which depicts Benedict Arnold[2] is of his foot. We don't have statues of the Loyalists who fought for the British. We didn't erect a statue of Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, Lord Hee Haw or Americans who fought on the other side in any other war.

There are a lot of people that whose names are taught in schools without having a worshipful statue to gaze at: General Cornwallis. General Howe. General Gage. Col. Tarleton. Kaiser Wilhelm. General Ludendorff. General Goering. Adolf Hitler. Vladimir Lenin. Josef Stalin. Mao Zedong. Ho Chi Minh. William Tweed.

We can remember the generals who fought for the Confederacy and slavery. But we sure as shit don't have to honor them.

Tear them all down.
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[1] State Motto: "The Birthplace of Treason."
[2] And there is, as far as I know, no statue of Abigail Dolbeare Hinman, who tried to shoot Arnold in New London during his raid there in 1781. Her musket misfired.

The Classic Political Career Path for Bigots In Alabama

Running for Senate:

Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's entry into the U.S. Senate race adds another layer of drama to what's already expected to be a rollicking special election to fill the seat previously held by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The fiery Republican jurist's stands against gay marriage and for a courthouse display of the Ten Commandments have earned him the nickname the "Ayatollah of Alabama" from the Southern Poverty Law Center - and legions of loyal followers across the country. Moore announced his candidacy among the swelling GOP field Wednesday in what is expected to be a cutthroat primary.

Moore has taken the rather strange position that removing racist language for the Alabama Constitution is racist. Which was bullshit. The reason was more likely if the sheet-wearing crowd ever got Federal law changed somehow, than Alabama would be ready to go in reapplying Jim Crow. Which he likely would be all in favor of doing.

Moore's view also is that non-Abrahamic religions aren't "real religions", so they fall outside of the First Amendment.

Did Somebody Kill Some Human Vermin?

A Missouri KKK leader has disappeared under somewhat suspicious circumstances. As noted in that article, the articles in the local paper where he lived made no mention of his Klan membership.

Odds are that it's some sort of garden-variety criminal fuckery or a family beef. The neo-nazis probably feel that the Feds have backed off, what with the Trump Administration citing fictional Islamic terrorist attacks (Atlanta and Bowling Green) while ignoring those committed by right-wing terrorists (Quebec, Charleston, Kansas City, and Colorado Springs).

Also, this explains why you won't see tears from me.

UPDATE: His body has been found.

UPDATE II: He was shot in the head.

UPDATE III: His family allegedly whacked him.

Free State of Jones

Free State of Jones is a movie that came out last Friday (June 24th). Based on the box office so far, I expect it'll disappear from the theaters in short order.

It has some fairly horrific battle scenes in it, including a man who appeared to have taken a small cannon ball to the face. The hospital scenes are not for the squeamish.

There is one shot of the interior of a mansion in which one can see a round thermostat. But I digress.

I wouldn't expect it to receive wide play in the South, for the tale that the move tells is far different from the "Noble Cause" bullshit that is the duty legend in Dixie.

The story of Newton Knight is very much in opposition to the encrusted mythology of the South, especially the fact that Knight had far more support from the local community than modern folk in the area would care to admit.

Smooth Move, Guys

The Citadel said on Thursday that it was investigating the events behind images on Facebook that showed seven cadets at the Charleston, S.C., military college with white pillowcases on their heads, evoking a likeness to the Ku Klux Klan.

Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa, the president of the Citadel, said in a statement that he found the posting “offensive and disturbing.”

What self-absorbed idiot child thought that this was a good idea?

How to Win Friends & Influence People; Dixie Edition

A Mississippi man allegedly bombed a Walmart storefront Sunday, days after threatening the retailer for no longer selling Confederate flags.

If the Asshole had yelled something along the lines of "Aloha Snackbar" instead of posting crap about the Confederate flag, there are cable channels that would have been on this story for weeks.

Presumably, because the alleged perp was an old white guy, the word "terrorism" isn't mentioned.

What the Civil War Was About

Slavery. There was no other cause worth the fight.

All of the other excuses and justifications for the war, offered by the Confederates and the neo-Confederates, ever since 1866, are little more than a tissue of lies to cover over that they, their fathers and their ancestors fought to preserve, and expand, slavery. For the planters in the deep South wanted nothing more than to reopen the Middle Passage. In a dispute between the slaveowners, the ones further to the north were happy with the importation ban, as they made money from breeding slaves.

Some folks maintain that the CSA was anti-slavery, as the CSA did not legalize the importation of slaves. That's pretty much a false claim, as the CSA ban on the slave trade was a fig leaf to entice the British into either recognizing the CSA or, at least, not hindering them. The Brits allowed arms to be exported to the CSA and CSA raiders to be constructed and refit in British ports. A legal slave trade was anathema to the British, who had spent decades and much treasure in trying to stop it. Adopting a pro-slave trade law would have brought the British into active support of the Union.

But I digress.

The Civil War was about slavery. Arguments to the contrary are nothing more than revisionism, and pernicious revisionism, at that.

(H/T)

South Carolina: Maybe It's Done

The Confederate flag, a symbol of racism for many in the United States and of Southern heritage for others, is set to be removed from South Carolina's state Capitol grounds on Thursday after lawmakers sealed its fate in a late-night session.

The bill to remove the flag, which dates back to the 1861-65 American Civil War, would transfer it to the "relic room" at a military museum in the state capital, Columbia, as soon as midday Thursday.

It passed a third and final vote in the House of Representatives shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday by a hefty margin of 94-20, after 13 hours of at times rancorous debate and stiff opposition from a group of conservative white Republicans.

As many commentators have pointed out, the "Confederate Flag" was never the flag of the Confederacy. It was an army battle flag and one that, not long after the war was done, was appropriated by racists and killers. The article noted that South Carolina (among other Southern states), only began flying it as a "fuck you" to those pushing for civil rights and voting rights for all.

What gets me, though, was this line:

[South Carolina] House members who supported the flag denied its association with slavery, repeatedly referred to the need to show respect for their ancestors who fought for the state and the Confederacy on the losing side of the Civil War.

"I have wept over this thing. I have bathed this thing in prayer," said Eric Bedingfield, a white Republican flag defender. "You can't erase history."

No, but you also don't flaunt it. We all know that millions of German soldiers were killed during the Second World War. We all know for whom they fought, to whom they swore allegiance. But if the German swastika flag flew over their cemeteries, everyone (other than the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists) would regard that as being both insane and offensive.

And so it is here.

The New Flag for South Carolina

I humbly propose a new flag for South Carolina:

Credit: Amhrandorcha

You should click on it, hit the "+" and take a close look at the revised state seal. Frickin' genius.

This is a week late. The email that sent this to me got lumped in with a bunch of other crap, I almost missed it. My apologies to the creator of the flag for that.

Yeah, The Flag of Treason's Coming Down

It's not helping the cause of the "but it was a Noble Cause"[1] people when these folks show up in support:

The Ku Klux Klan has been approved to hold a protest rally at the [South Carolina} Statehouse next month against removing the Confederate battle flag, with the group calling accused mass murderer Dylann Roof a “young warrior.”

It'd probably be only more toxic if a bunch of Nazis showed up. Not that there's been much difference between the two groups.[2]

Maybe less if Mel Gibson showed up. But not by much.
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[1] To fight to keep slaves.
[2] Other than who they hate.

Where is LTCOL James Chambers Street?

He was a prominent Loyalist during the Revolutionary War. There were others.

We don't make a habit of naming streets or towns in this country after defeated enemies, traitors or, for that matter, victorious ones.