Vilageidiotx

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Well, I still got Sahle there, and he needs to move...

...but I won't make any moves that mean anything to Armenia.

Comedy on a Thread...

The Fandom Thread (Just talk or do something?)

Woop! Medieval margin art fandom is a go!

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

I put out my post, kind of half finished because I wanted to finish the exercise and graduate OCS people in time for Istanbul, but that appears to be on hold.

I'll see y'all after 10 August. Basic training's gonna be a blast.

@TheEvanCat

Give'em hell.

share something about yourself!

I was born with an anus that is inside out.

The Confederate Flag, and Charleston

Surely it is still the same game, it is a power game where both sides were vying to keep themselves as entities independent of the others meddling; The south wanted to keep slavery against the wishes of the north, and the north wished to abolish slavery against the wishes of the south. As for the American Revolution, it was still about secession from a larger entity, where said larger entity declared it illegal. Whether it began over slavery, taxes, foreign policy or a disagreement about the colour of the sky doesn't change that it was, fundamentally, a civil war about secession. Further, as the southern economy was built so heavily on slavery, abolition would be a detriment to their economy. While barbaric, I see whether the motivations lie and where they parallel other events.

@darkwolf687

It involved secession, but that's not really what people are interested in here. I mean, it's interesting that they are flying a flag of treason, but most people are more worried about the racial connotation, and the war provides at the very least the seeds of that connotation. You can't really divorce the secession of the south from the reason they seceded. The American reason for secession wasn't inherently fucked up at its core.

My fears here are sparked by the very draconian policies apple has employed, where they have removed Civil War games from their store for "portraying and glorifying racist symbols." I don't want to see the US go down such a road, and the banning of the flag and I believe one of the previous posts mentioned the possibility of charging people for using the flag (so in essence fining them) is a step down a somewhat dangerous path.

@darkwolf687

So long as the government isn't involved at any level in banning private use, we're cherry. Apple will continue doing embarrassing shit because that's mostly what they are about, really.

The Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage in the United States!

I'd argue that the manner in which it was passed -- via the Supreme Court and not the legislature -- is ultimately detrimental to the state of democracy in the US. I mean.... what exactly does Congress exist for? All meaningful government activity in the millennium, from the war in Afghanistan to the legalization of same-sex marriage (and probably marijuana too, soon) is coming from the executive and judicial branches. Mind you -- this predates a republican majority. Everything is happening outside the legislature. What, uh...... doesn't that make us an oligarchy?

@mdk

To be fair, this isn't a new phenomena at all. They decided abortion, interracial marriage, seggregation, and even whether or not they were entitled to overrule state courts. I think, if anything, the fact that the Supreme Court is at the forefront of so many major decisions now is because the legislature has been too divisive to do much more than make political moves at each other.

The Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage in the United States!

I bet if I went on Facebook right now I'd see some angry posts from my grandparents.

@Marik

This is how I heard about the decision.

In light of recent events in the US, someone decided to make a flag that could offend everybody at once.

I'm not even offended by the content, just by how fuckin' loud it is.

The Confederate Flag, and Charleston

Well, i'm not saying martial law should be imposed or anything. Sure, they chose, but we can pass moral judgement on their choice.

Also, regarding the history of the confederacy itself, we can pass judgement about it's purpose because that was a conflict about slavery. It doesn't compare 1:1 to the American Revolution, which is difficult to frame in it's own right but can probably be simplified as "We didn't need British rule and it was in the way of things we wanted to do". The Confederacy is a whole other box of worms.

In the nineteenth century, in the United States, the entire political system became divided over slavery. It's an aspect of our culture at that time that gets into everything, really, and so it is difficult to avoid. You can imagine the economy of antebellum America to be split in two, with the north evolving into a modern industrial economy based on wage labor and the south retaining a slave based rural society with a class system almost comparable to feudalism. For the north, the south was stunted, and with the western world abandoning slavery, the South felt... cornered I suppose.

They retained their system through retaining a certain amount of political power. The government worked out a deal where there would always be an equal number of free states and slave states. This was important to my state (Missouri), as we didn't enter the union for several years because they had to find a free state to accompany us in. It also played a part in what we took from Mexico and what we didn't (there were those after the Mexican American war who wanted to annex all of Mexico, but racism and fear of breaking the slave state/free state divide made that idea unpopular).

The initial fix was to keep the divide along a specific geographical line. When, in the 1850's, the state of Kansas was allowed to chose how it would enter the union rather than forced to follow this geographical rule, they chose to be a Free State and people from my state responded by more or less invading. That was how contentious this was.

So when the Republican party was formed as an abolitionist party, and when Abraham Lincoln ran under the promise that no new slave states would enter the union, that was what caused the rebellion. Cultural differences might have lubricated it, but the cause was a fear that slave owning states would become a political minority. It's not like Scotland, who were playing the game of thrones just the same as England. And it wasn't like the American Revolution, where British rule was becoming a detriment to our economy and our ability to manage our own relations with our neighbors. The American Civil War was about the slavery question.

About the flag, I personally don't have any problem with it. My dad is a redneck who used to hang out with bikers, I grew up in rural Missouri seeing it all the time, and I get how some people legitimately see it as a symbol of southern pride. I don't think we should ever go the direction of Germany and full out ban these sorts of symbols because of their sordid history. I do think, however, that people should at least accept that the confederate flag makes some people uncomfortable, and that their reasons are completely legitimate too. It is also a symbol of white power, regardless if most people who use it agree. And because it is a symbol of white power, I think that it is in bad taste for it to fly over any state capitals.