Confederate statues and participation trophies

To be fair, I think participation trophies are pretty silly, too.

[Scandinavia and the World by Humon]

Transcript:

(Click to open/close:) [−]

PANEL 1:

AMERICA: Everybody want participation trophies nowadays. No! You don't get a trophy for being mediocre! Only winners should be celebrated!

[SISTER AMERICA watches him, unimpressed.]

---

PANEL 2:

SISTER AMERICA: Then explain that.

[She points to a confederate statue.]

---

PANEL 3:

AMERICA: They tried really really hard, okay!?

[SISTER AMERICA still looks unimpressed.]

One of the rare times the “they did their best” argument is counterproductive.

(This post filed under proof-of-life-for-anyone-not-following-me-on-Twitter.)

Daily Links: 12/22/17 – Important First Amendment victory for Trump protestors

• Important victory for free speech: All six defendants on trial for protesting during Trump’s inauguration ^[pictured], accused of “hiding behind the First Amendment” (WTF), are acquitted on all charges. Note how the prosecution had brazenly tried to get the jury to disregard the judge’s instructions on “reasonable doubt”.
  (via ACLU | Facebook)

• Beautiful: After Tennessee lawmakers ban cities from removing Confederate statues, Memphis exploits a workaround by selling the land its statues stand on to a nonprofit, which promptly takes the statues down overnight. Expect statue supporters to sue. State Republicans are already calling for an investigation.
  (via @radleybalko & @LilianaSegura)

• Meanwhile, watch and laugh as Fox News’s professional whiner Todd Starnes utterly melts down and demands the arrest of the Memphis mayor and city council for “wag[ing] jihad on American history” and “desecrat[ing] a gravesite”. But of course, his outrage is all about the “lawlessness” of the move (which was totally legal, just sly) and has nothing to do with the monuments themselves.

• Vox examines what the final Republican Tax Scam bill includes (allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) and doesn’t (killing student loan deductions, anti-abortion language, Johnson Amendment repeal, etc.). In short, it’s slightly less pungent shit.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Finally, an ongoing Washington Post investigation reveals nearly a quarter of the 248 cops kicked off of the New Orleans police force for misconduct have been rehired elsewhere.
  (via @WesleyLowery; retweet by @KFILE)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Here’s some news: The US Right is wrong (a lot) about history

Nothing much to blog about today, so here’s the latest from my favorite video series from Cracked. It’s got history and debunkings and pointing out how terrible and dishonest the Right is, the lot presented with the frustrated exasperation that’s a hallmark of these times.

No transcript this time, sorry – I don’t have it in me to transcribe 20 minutes’ worth of explaining how half the US population is infested with know-nothing liars.

National Review: Anti-American liberals want to destroy Confederate monuments to “honor and valor”

Confederate monument torn down by protestors in Durham, NC

The National Review has published a defense of Confederate monuments and the “timeless virtues” they represent from the “extremists on both sides” and particularly the America-hating Left. The author is Arthur Herman, who describes himself in the piece as “a scholar, a historian — a Pulitzer Prize finalist historian, and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books”. In other words, he’s one of those esteemed Right-wing intellectuals. And judging by what he puts to paper here, it appears the Right’s intellectual leadership is the equivalent of Tea Partiers who’ve been taken off the street, dropped in front of a laptop and handed a thesaurus – it’s the same racist nonsense, but with a thin veneer of respectability.

It doesn’t help when he starts off saying things like …

Yet even with all these policemen in riot gear, no one could control the violence when extremists from the left and extremists from the right battled each other in the streets in Charlottesville […]

You’ll forgive me for questioning the worth of his credentials, given that his Pulitzer participation prize doesn’t preclude him from apparently missing the point that the conflict was less between typical Rightists and Leftists and rather between actual fucking Nazis and the people who oppose them. That so many “both sides” apologists (including the fucking President) try to pretend the two camps are on equal moral footing is, itself, a damning rebuke of their priorities.

Throughout his piece, Herman makes the argument that the monuments aren’t really about celebrating the Confederacy, but rather the honor and bravery of the Southern soldiers who fought for it. He even states that “they are monuments to timeless virtues, not to individuals”. Funny, I didn’t know that virtue had the face of Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis, or anyone else who fought to tear the Founding Fathers’ country apart in a bid to continue kidnapping and enslaving human beings. Sure, they didn’t turn tail the moment they faced Union forces on the field, and they may have believed they were fighting for a righteous cause, but when you consider that this cause boiled down to the right to own and dehumanize other people, all that talk about “virtues” really doesn’t mean much.

Daily Links: 07/13/17 – Jim Crow alive and well in Alabama

Donald Trump Jr.

• Jim-Crow-style voter suppression laws are alive and well in Alabama (and elsewhere).
  (via @fark)

• New York Post, long-time defender of everything Trump: “Donald Trump Jr. ^[pictured] is an idiot[.]” Bonus round: “Don Jr. is why Nigerian email scammers keep trying their luck.”

• Radley Balko explains how the NRA’s allegiance to cops and their gutless abandonment of wrongful shooting victims undermines their stance on gun rights.

• Iceberg seven times the size of New York City breaks off of Antarctica. Scientists can’t agree on whether climate change is to blame. (I’m gonna go ahead and posit that it is.)

• And finally, History Channel’s claim that Amelia Earhart was captured by Japan is further debunked: their “smoking gun” photograph was published in a travel book two years before Earhart’s disappearance.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 07/11/17 – Attempted doggycide in Minneapolis

Ciroc, injured dog

• Attempted puppycide in Minneapolis, MN, caught on video: Cops respond to false burglar alarm, don’t alert homeowners, instead scale backyard fence and shoot both their non-aggressive dogs ^[pictured]. Police chief later responds, promising to implement mandatory training for dealing with dogs.
  (via @FreeSpeechTemeber; RT by @radleybalko)

• The Daily Beast handily debunks the History Channel theory, based on a single undated photograph, that Amelia Earhart wound up imprisoned in Japan.

• Survivor of 2016 Baton Rouge, LA ambush of cops anonymously files lawsuit blaming Black Lives Matter – who had no affiliation with the shooter, condemned his actions and rejects all violence.
  (via @fark)

• 1992: Church of England allows women priests. 2014: They allow women bishops. Last week: They demand a ban on “pray the gay away” therapy. Now: Their governing body welcomes trans people. I think they’re trying to show the Catholic Church how to stay relevant.

• And finally, it’s genuinely frightening that not only is the Flat Earth movement not dying, it’s expanding around the world.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Edit (07/14/17 @ 5:52 PM ET): Typo fix (“Flat Earth moment” to “movement”).