Monday, June 22, 2015

Better Late Than Never...

From Album 5
...but still long overdue. Besides not being the actual Confederate Flag -- which itself is not at all any heritage worth taking pride in -- my understanding is that the battle standard was pretty much ignored until the 1950s, when a number of Southern States adopted it as a symbol in opposition to integration. Time to get over it...and time to get over the opposition to integration, which continues to have negative consequences for us all.
Posted by Michael at 7:27 PM

2 comments:

  1. charlie ehlen9:05 PM

    At long last, some good news. South Carolina ll remove that flag from the capitol building. Well I will be nasty, sarcastic, whatever and say, what the hell took you clowns so damn long? Should have done that decades ago.
    I do not think Lincoln had the Constitutional authority to wage that war, but he did and the southern states, the Confederacy lost. I may be totally wrong, but I thought that the way this country started out, if you joined the union, the USA, if you later decided to quit, it was legal to do so. Since 1865 or there a bouts, it is NOT legal any more. Not being a Constitutional scholar, I may be wrong on the entire idea that it had been, way back, legal to quit the union/USA.
    Oh, that reminds me, our (ig)Nobel piece prizident IS or was a Constitutional scholar. Maybe he has found some obscure portion of that document that allows him to have his own personal kill list and to go over it each week with his advisors to decide who on the list gets droned/special ops dead in the coming week. Your thoughts on this?
    Glad your weekend went well. Ours did, mostly. Tropical storm Bill dumped some rain up North, Arkansas/Oklahoma, so the Red will get more water in it.
    I think that if the Red doesn't enter the Mississippi directly, it does flow in the the basin, I cannot spell Atchafalaya(sp.??)

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  2. Michael7:30 PM

    I'm not real sure either on the constitutionality of secession, at least pre-1860, but I'll take the word of Lincoln...and take his word certainly over James Buchanan, who was utterly ineffectual. Lincoln's Cooper Union address, which no, I haven't pored over but which I have skimmed, suggests perpetual union was at least the intent. And old Honest Abe, while relatively enlightened for his time, was, well, racist in his own way, more than once indicating a belief in white supremacy. Honest. Lincoln's program, if it could be called that, was an absolute limit on slavery to the States where it was already legal, and no more. Obviously, the rebellion turned this, um, accommodation into something quite different, including the Emancipation Proclamation, which was more lawyerly than scholarly. That said, and also citing Lincoln again, he admitted events controlled him...though in the end, the events turned out to make him quite appreciated by history if, well, obviously much worse for the wear and ultimately a casualty of war as well.
    But no, I'm not a scholar of the era, and I'm barely an amateur historian of the same.
    The drone stuff bothers me quite a bit. It does NOT do us any good, and about the only Constitutional argument that could be made would be some sort of Commander in Chief angle combined with Congress' gutless abrogation of war powers. I believe the whole sorry mess is political -- if he didn't do it, I would not be surprised at all if he was impeached for "failing to 'protect' the American people." Ugly...and creepy. But Pandora's box has long been opened there, and I doubt even Gerald Ford's Executive Order prohibiting assassinations ever got much traction. Hell, Carter supported the murderous government thugs in El Salvador, and Reagan expanded that to the Contras. Bill Clinton (as governor) executed Ricky Ray Rector, and later shot cruise missiles into Iraq. Welcome to the imperial presidency.

    Oh, and Tricky Dick just out and invaded Cambodia...Laos, too, if I remember.

    As I've said before, about the only thing that's kept the roof from caving in is that the US has political and military force sufficient to be a total asshole if so desired. And...to be fair, every once in a while, the US actually does the right thing, though usually for god knows what reason...to cite one example, and it's the only one I can think of offhand, we did manage to broker agreements that kind of, sort of, wound down wars in Northern Ireland and the Balkans...and I also honestly think the US wouldn't mind brokering a peace between Israel and the Arab states, though that ain't gonna happen as long as Israel fully controls the right wing and mostly controls what's considered left here...

    Well...anyway...dealt with a pretty big storm over here just a short while ago, so time to get to stuff here. Damn, one lightning bolt hit really close. Am surprised I didn't lose power, though earlier while I was at work the electricity was down for several hours.

    Take it easy.

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