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19 hours ago, scigeek101 said:

This is my opinion. What source do you want for an opinion? 

Here's a recent news article on republican support for the capitol "protests"

 

https://www.newsweek.com/45-percent-republican-voters-support-storming-capitol-1559662

Most Republicans do not support the kind of violence that happened at the Capitol. Though a troublingly high amount do according to this poll. The party is very much split along these lines. But it's not a monolith. In many ways I think Trump is using this as his own wedge to spin off his supporters from their usual Fox News consumption habits towards whatever it is he decides to do. After all if you get all your customers believing that all other sources are "Fake News" you can get them to believe anything. You are already seeing this as hard-right elements of the Republican part are abandoning Fox News for being too liberal. Instead turning to sources like News Max or World Net Daily which make Fox News look like the communist manifesto in comparison. 

 

 

You can also read this article here that touches on wedge issues and their consequences. https://www.theatlantic.com/membership/archive/2017/12/the-irresistible-effectiveness-of-wedge-politics/547946/

 

You're in Serious Discussion.  Yes, there will be opinions.  However, that only goes so far.  Certain opinions will be thrown out because they're outright harmful (these are the people that generally get themselves banned, I think you can figure out what they said).  Certain other opinions look okay at a first glance, but the logic behind them points to a harmful ideology - these also need to be vetted.  It's why I'm particularly merciless to anyone that peddles "both sides" in the wake of all that has happened in the past 15ish months.

That being said, I think Republicans need to decide whether or not splitting the vote in the short term is better than being associated with Trump in the long term.  Regardless, there's a lot of damage to undo, and the supposed "unity and healing" isn't going to happen without meaningful change from the side that instigated the mess.  Last I checked, it wasn't a Democrat that made a mess of the post office.

And, uh, can you use the little plus sign next to Quote to quote multiple people?  It's technically a rule break, but I'd rather nuke spambots than hand out the forum equivalent of a jaywalking ticket.

I'll read that article on wedge issues when my brain isn't the consistency of mush, but I'm not liking that "free article" counter.

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1 minute ago, XRay said:

You seemed to imply Bush was as bad as Trump. I disagree with that. While I do have a more favorable view of Bush than most others on this forum, I am not going to ignore his fuck ups either. Going into Iraq was stupid, but pulling out even more so as that left a power vacuum. Trump is even worse as the way he tried to pull out of the Middle East allowed Russia and Iran to step in significantly more and fill that power vacuum that we left behind.

Bush did not actually try to fellate Putin, belittle NATO, straight up abandon our allies in the Middle East, start trade wars that negatively impacted our economy, promote bigotry and hate, divide the country along partisan lines, undermined our democratic institutions, nor overtly handing out pardons like candy to his cronies.

I said overall, though I think I have shifted a bit from thinking that. I don't mean to dismiss Trump's horrible acts, though. I just disagree that he is by and far the worst president we've had. I still consider Bush to be worse, and I think Reagan is easily as bad, if not worse, if you want an example for domestic policy, for his lasting impact in addition to what he did during his term. Though there is still plenty of time for Trump to make his long term impact, and if worst comes to worst I would probably agree with you guys.

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I disagree with the notion that Trump was better than Bush in foreign affairs. Though I'll admit it's a tough question, with a lot of metrics that we'd all measure differently. Plus the fact that Trump's administration only lasted half the time means only half the opportunity to do real damage. But all world leaders were dismissive of trump, not just our allies. He made us into a joke, he left the paris climate agreement, he kidnapped immigrants and put them in cages, got into the dumbest trade war with China, turned our country into a plague-ridden mess which hurts both tourism and our migrant work force, his abuse of Ukraine earned him an impeachment, and he probably leaked an ungodly amount of classified material to his kremlin allies, knowingly or unknowingly. Last week, Pence said something along the lines of "well, at least Trump didn't get us into a war". First of all, as a rare one-term president, he had only half the opportunity to do. Second of all, you don't think he tried? In his very first year of office, he got into a dick swinging match with North Korea and making regular, public threats of nuclear war. And you could believe it too, this is the same psycopath that genuinely has no idea why we've stopped using nuclear weapons.

I know 2017 feels like a generation ago for many of us, but that was our own cuban missile crisis. And I feel like it's only been downplayed because the discrepancy in power between the US and North Korea right now is much larger than the US and Russia in 1962. Nuclear war is nuclear war. Our leaders have a duty to prevent it, not ignite it.

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5 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

Plus the fact that Trump's administration only lasted half the time means only half the opportunity to do real damage.

 

5 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

First of all, as a rare one-term president, he had only half the opportunity to do.

I can see your point here, but I think this is a bit misguided in that it reads to me that a theoretical 2 term Trump presidency would have been worse than Bush on foreign affairs. Which it very well may have been, but I don't think that should count. We are talking about what really happened here, so this isn't really relevant in my opinion.

5 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

he kidnapped immigrants and put them in cages

This is a really bizarre talking point, since Trump's immigration policy was largely a continuation and worsening of the same stuff that happened before. I dislike Trump and kids in cages, but I feel like there are much stronger things to knock him on that he uniquely did. I would have chosen leaving the Iran Nuclear Deal, which I think ties in nicely to your point about nuclear warfare.

The rest I'm not gonna address because I don't think there's much of a point going back and forth again, but I can see where you are coming from.

 

Edited by Shipnoez
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Bush made life hell in other countries.  Trump made life hell here, complete with being on the same side as a bunch of wannabe revolutionaries.  Plus, the demographic here may not remember all the crap Bush did on account of their age.

So I'd like to see a list of what W did put side-by-side by Trump's deed list.  Can you honestly tell me that they're equally bad?

EDIT: As for the wedge issues, there's this little gem:

Quote

Wedge politics involves treating Aristotle’s “Law of the Excluded Middle” as universal. If one side of an issue is right, then the other must be wrong—there is no in-between. Controversial topics like abortion, gun control, or confederate statues are polarizing, forcing people to choose a side, for or against.

I make people's heads spin with my stance on abortion, because it's not a cookie-cutter answer.  And my stance on Confederate statues is that if they're displayed, they need to have the appropriate historical context on a plaque next to it - vetted by historians, no less.  Just because something seems to be black-and-white doesn't mean that everyone will fall into those categories.  Which makes me horribly disinclined to read the article, if that's the premise it's built on.

Edited by eclipse
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1 minute ago, Shipnoez said:

 

I can see your point here, but I think this is a bit misguided in that it reads to me that a theoretical 2 term Trump presidency would have been worse than Bush on foreign affairs. Which it very well may have been, but I don't think that should count. We are talking about what really happened here, so this isn't really relevant in my opinion.

When presidents no longer have to worry about their re-election, they get emboldened to do whatever they want. You can trust that Trump's second term would be worse in every metric.

Quote

This is a really bizarre talking point, since Trump's immigration policy was largely a continuation and worsening of the same stuff that happened before. I dislike Trump and kids in cages, but I feel like there are much stronger things to knock him on that he uniquely did.

ICE. Did not. Do that. Before Trump. God I hate when people pin the kids in cages thing on Bush just because some jackass on the internet reminded them that ICE was technically created years prior.

Quote

I would have chosen leaving the Iran Nuclear Deal, which I think ties in nicely to your point about nuclear warfare.

Look I just grabbed whatever was at the top of my brain, I wasn't trying to be comprehensive in naming everything. And even if I did try, you can bet I'd miss something. These are the kinds of historical talking points that, a generation from now, high school students will be struggling to remember the details of for their in-class essays.

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13 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

When presidents no longer have to worry about their re-election, they get emboldened to do whatever they want. You can trust that Trump's second term would be worse in every metric.

I do not doubt it. But it didn't happen, so I think it's pointless to speculate.

13 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

ICE. Did not. Do that. Before Trump. God I hate when people pin the kids in cages thing on Bush just because some jackass on the internet reminded them that ICE was technically created years prior.

I partially agree with this. Like I said, Trump took what was happening before and worsened it, but I mean, like he said in the one debate, the cages were built by, well, not Bush's, but Obama's administration. I think I've made it fairly obvious I'm no supporter of Trump's, but his immigration policy was not as hugely bad compared to what came before as some think. Of course it was still far worse, but I think it was something that built off the backs of prior administration's efforts, such as bush's building a fence at the border and Obama's administration building those cages and deporting so many people.

13 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

Look I just grabbed whatever was at the top of my brain, I wasn't trying to be comprehensive in naming everything. And even if I did try, you can bet I'd miss something. These are the kinds of historical talking points that, a generation from now, high school students will be struggling to remember the details of for their in-class essays.

Yeah this was kind of rude of me to say and I apologize. And I do hope that his failures and bad deeds are taught to the future generations.

EDIT: As for what eclipse said, I think you guys have made a good argument for Trump being worse that I can't really refute. I think I just personally care more about what Bush set up to happen and his foreign intervention, since I'm supper opposed to the U.S. doing stuff like that by virtue of my political affiliation.

Double edit: I don't know if you guys have done the whole conversation about confederate statues but I mean, statues are explicitly meant to glorify people. Putting a plaque next to a big statue is not going to change the context it exists in and therefore not really gonna change what it means. I'd say even putting it in a museum is questionable, since you'd have to take really good care to display the statues with full consideration to their context. I don't really mind them being taken down and destroyed cause fuck those guys lol, but past that these are my reasons I disagree with the whole plaque thing. I think it's well-intentioned but if I came across a statue with a plaque like that, I would definitely still notice the statue more than the plaque. And if I read it, I'd think "Wait, if this guy was such a horrible person, why is there a statue of him right here?" I don't really think these statues deserve a vetted plaque anyways, cause I mean, made by racists to glorify racists, not much more.
Guess I ended up going on a bit there, sorry if you've gone over this before and I opened a can of worms.

Edited by Shipnoez
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12 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

EDIT: As for what eclipse said, I think you guys have made a good argument for Trump being worse that I can't really refute. I think I just personally care more about what Bush set up to happen and his foreign intervention, since I'm supper opposed to the U.S. doing stuff like that by virtue of my political affiliation.

Foreign policy is definitely important!  However, making sure that the US is stable enough to hold their own elections is a bit more important IMO, because if some president is screwing up foreign policy, we can use our vote as intended.  But if the political process is all screwed up, then what hope do we have of "fixing" that issue?

14 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

Double edit: I don't know if you guys have done the whole conversation about confederate statues but I mean, statues are explicitly meant to glorify people. Putting a plaque next to a big statue is not going to change the context it exists in and therefore not really gonna change what it means. I'd say even putting it in a museum is questionable, since you'd have to take really good care to display the statues with full consideration to their context. I don't really mind them being taken down and destroyed cause fuck those guys lol, but past that these are my reasons I disagree with the whole plaque thing. I think it's well-intentioned but if I came across a statue with a plaque like that, I would definitely still notice the statue more than the plaque. And if I read it, I'd think "Wait, if this guy was such a horrible person, why is there a statue of him right here?" I don't really think these statues deserve a vetted plaque anyways, cause I mean, made by racists to glorify racists, not much more.

Guess I ended up going on a bit there, sorry if you've gone over this before and I opened a can of worms.

Nah, it's fine!

I'm not in favor of destroying history - one of the most impactful places I visited was Dachau.  I'm glad that it was left up as a museum, because THAT was a learning experience!  Likewise, an unbiased description of a statue is also a history lesson (albeit less traumatic), and can say quite a bit about a community.  My state has several statues of people, and I take the time to read those inscriptions.  If I were to make a generalization based off of the inscriptions I remember, we value our past leaders and people who helped others.  Not sure how many people would stop to read, though.

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Just now, eclipse said:

I'm not in favor of destroying history - one of the most impactful places I visited was Dachau.  I'm glad that it was left up as a museum, because THAT was a learning experience!  Likewise, an unbiased description of a statue is also a history lesson (albeit less traumatic), and can say quite a bit about a community.  My state has several statues of people, and I take the time to read those inscriptions.  If I were to make a generalization based off of the inscriptions I remember, we value our past leaders and people who helped others.  Not sure how many people would stop to read, though.

I don't think we should destroy history for sure, but I think there are better ways to communicate it. You don't need statues to remain up for the history to exist. If you do, I think that's more a failure of the education system to teach people things than a virtue of statues as a medium to teach history.

The difference with Dachau is that it is in an entire area that is dedicated to being preserved as a museum to remember past atrocities. Confederate statues aren't really closed off, they're just kind of there in the middle of towns and cities and institutions. And I think your last line is pretty important. It's super hard to control how people behave in the presence of a statue, so if you put the plaque there it's kinda just there. In a museum at least you're kinda expected to read and learn, but out in public? Not so much. Like I said before, context is super important with stuff like this. This is less like Dachau and more like if you had statues of Nazi officers littered around cities of Germany. Of course it's not nearly as bad, this is an extreme analogy, but I think I got the message across.

And I think your comment on the inscriptions you've read speaks a lot to how statues are utilized. They're almost always supposed to be about people who are valued, and I think having people on the side of the Confederacy has some not great implications if this is the norm for statues.

My last point that I completely forgot to mention the first time 'round was mentioning how even Robert E. Lee didn't want these statues to be erected. I feel like if the guys the statues represent were against them, that makes a pretty good case against them staying up, doesn't it? Not really much of a point, to be honest, but I think it's interesting that they remain up despite these types of wishes.

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2 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

I don't think we should destroy history for sure, but I think there are better ways to communicate it. You don't need statues to remain up for the history to exist. If you do, I think that's more a failure of the education system to teach people things than a virtue of statues as a medium to teach history.

I'm all for a better education system, but given nonsense like the 1776 Commission, I think that education needs to reach outside of school walls.  Though I don't know how much I'd trust a state who thinks that people on the losing side of history were worthy of statues!

4 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

The difference with Dachau is that it is in an entire area that is dedicated to being preserved as a museum to remember past atrocities. Confederate statues aren't really closed off, they're just kind of there in the middle of towns and cities and institutions. And I think your last line is pretty important. It's super hard to control how people behave in the presence of a statue, so if you put the plaque there it's kinda just there. In a museum at least you're kinda expected to read and learn, but out in public? Not so much. Like I said before, context is super important with stuff like this. This is less like Dachau and more like if you had statues of Nazi officers littered around cities of Germany. Of course it's not nearly as bad, this is an extreme analogy, but I think I got the message across.

And I think your comment on the inscriptions you've read speaks a lot to how statues are utilized. They're almost always supposed to be about people who are valued, and I think having people on the side of the Confederacy has some not great implications if this is the norm for statues.

I think that analogy is appropriate (we're talking about two groups of losers who failed to hold power).  And I'd take the time to read those inscriptions, too!  But again, that's because I like to read, and seeing how people are described also tells me the general attitude of my surroundings.  Again, I see statues as a learning opportunity, not necessarily as a tacit approval of anything.  Something tells me I'm in the minority, though.

7 minutes ago, Shipnoez said:

My last point that I completely forgot to mention the first time 'round was mentioning how even Robert E. Lee didn't want these statues to be erected. I feel like if the guys the statues represent were against them, that makes a pretty good case against them staying up, doesn't it? Not really much of a point, to be honest, but I think it's interesting that they remain up despite these types of wishes.

This is a very strong argument for taking some of those statues down.  Still think Lee should have his accomplishments and failures listed somewhere a little more accessible than a history book, though!  Wrong side or not, there's lessons to be learned!  Even if the current lesson is "we worship a person's ideology, but have no respect for their wishes". . .which IMO would be an indicator that I do NOT want to live there!

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1 minute ago, eclipse said:

I'm all for a better education system, but given nonsense like the 1776 Commission, I think that education needs to reach outside of school walls. 

Hey, I mean, at least Biden disbanded that damn thing today! But yeah, I definitely agree here.

2 minutes ago, eclipse said:

Though I don't know how much I'd trust a state who thinks that people on the losing side of history were worthy of statues!

 

2 minutes ago, eclipse said:

Even if the current lesson is "we worship a person's ideology, but have no respect for their wishes". . .which IMO would be an indicator that I do NOT want to live there!

I think this is fair and what I'd also think, but keep in mind not everyone is a visitor. Even if these states are racist places, keeping the statues up would only serve to reinforce that to the people there and the people outside. Like I said, the removal definitely needs to be in conjunction with a larger push for accurate education, but removal is definitely more achievable in a shorter timeframe.

Something I mentioned a few pages back is how I don't support how it feels like Democrats are leaving red states and southern states behind, and I think this feeds into that sort of mentality, even though I know this isn't what you're trying to communicate at all! I know myself until recently I had the pretty ignorant view of southern states being racist backwater places who don't deserve attention since I grew up in a pretty liberal area, and the statues definitely contributed to my point of view.

 It's a bit hard to imagine this sort of thing, but I feel like if I grew up around Confederate statues, even with those plaques, my opinion would definitely be tinted to be more, not in favor of, but lenient, regarding their, many, many failings, because statues are very specific in their purpose.

9 minutes ago, eclipse said:

Something tells me I'm in the minority, though.

I'd be inclined to agree with you here, which is why I think that plaques are not super effective. Even if half of all people read them, that's still 50% of the population seeing the statues in their original light, lol.

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The effects of Trump's foreign policy is yet to be seen. Trump also upped drones and bombings with significantly less oversight. He emboldened China and basically fucked any chance of leverage for the TPP. He basically let China start moving in on African countries to help their infrastructure. The shattering of ties and trust is bad and we won't see the results of this near apocalyptic mess for years.

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I'm sorry if this is not the right place to ask, but I've been following this topic and the Bush vs Trump discussion is making me wonder. I've been following a bit of American politics since Obama, so don't really know a lot about Bush.

Did Bush ever discredit certain news stations like trump did? Did Bush ever dismiss science as opinion like Trump did? Did Bush ever undermine democracy like Trump did?

This is my opinion, I know, but if the answer to these questions is no, then I believe Trump to be far worse than Bush. There's no telling how Bush would have handled the pandemic, or how Trump would have handled the situation Bush was in. But what Trump did was actively poisoning the minds of his followers, both inside the USA and outside. I think that deserves to be mentioned.

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I've held off on saying this for the longest time, but as far as I'm concerned, the former president's domestic and foreign policy has been lifted directly from comedian Denis Leary's 1997 special Lock n' Load:

(if and when he becomes the President) "My domestic policy: Fuck you. My foreign policy: Fuuuuuuuuuh-huh-huuuuuck you!"

As for the question of who is categorically worse, I can say with certitude that Dubya's corruption looks more cleverly disguised than Trump's by comparison.

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3 hours ago, whase said:

Did Bush ever discredit certain news stations like trump did? Did Bush ever dismiss science as opinion like Trump did? Did Bush ever undermine democracy like Trump did?

I was young so I cannot say for certain, but I do not remember Bush or anyone talk about the news media as negatively as they did in the last four years. Everyone knew news organizations were biased, but no one accused anyone of "fake news" and "brainwashing" and crap like that.

Republicans back then was dismissive of science in regards to global warming, but not to the point of dismissing medical and other sciences. Questioning the medical community was kind of unthinkable.

In regards to undermining our democracy and institutions, the closest thing to opposing the will of the people would be Bush winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, but Bush won the popular vote the second time. Gerrymandering was also talked about from time to time, but it did not seem like a high priority to be addressed since both sides seemed to do it a lot, although Republicans were seen to depend on it more.

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I'm massively late to the statue argument, but my two cents is that the significance of many Confederate statues is the time period when they went up. From what I've read, a good number of those statues went up long after the Confederacy had imploded, as a response to the civil rights movement. Or at the very least at a time when the Confederacy was not a recent thing, in areas that have never had Confederate soldiers or hadn't even been states at the time of the Civil War.

The context to the statues is not so much about the people who are displayed on them, but the people who put them up in the first place. I think it is an interesting and sad insight into the minds of people who wanted to keep "the other" in their place and built monuments to long gone traitors who lost a war to secede, like a form of intimidation.

While I'm all for tearing down the statues, I think that if people want to keep the statues as a part of history, that's understandable too ... but Confederate statues need to be held as a history lesson on what happens when you do not properly stamp out insurrection. People continue to sympathize with it and it lives on forever, given a second wind from people who never learned to lose properly. And that is a very important lesson to be learned especially nowadays.

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14 hours ago, Glennstavos said:

Last week, Pence said something along the lines of "well, at least Trump didn't get us into a war".

A full-scale ground invasion is so very 2003. This is the modern era; we now blow up people from the skies with drones. In which Trump has increased the usage of during his term to the point where there was more in his four years than there was in eight years of Obama. Something Obama was heavily criticised was increasing the number from Bush, and Trump has substantially increased it from there.

Anyone who unironically thinks Trump is peaceful on foreign policy is not looking at the finer details very much.

(I personally think Bush is worse simply because the sheer unnecessary loss of life from initiating both Afghanistan and Iraq that we, check notes, still haven't left from - Trump had a chance to leave the regions completely after 20 years of being there: and he didn't - I don't give a fuck what he says about "troop numbers". But Bush was also seen as damaging the United States image towards the end of his presidency. Regardless, when you are being compared to Dubya, it's not a good look.)

Edited by Tryhard
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3 hours ago, Sunwoo said:

I'm massively late to the statue argument, but my two cents is that the significance of many Confederate statues is the time period when they went up. From what I've read, a good number of those statues went up long after the Confederacy had imploded, as a response to the civil rights movement. Or at the very least at a time when the Confederacy was not a recent thing, in areas that have never had Confederate soldiers or hadn't even been states at the time of the Civil War.

The context to the statues is not so much about the people who are displayed on them, but the people who put them up in the first place. I think it is an interesting and sad insight into the minds of people who wanted to keep "the other" in their place and built monuments to long gone traitors who lost a war to secede, like a form of intimidation.

While I'm all for tearing down the statues, I think that if people want to keep the statues as a part of history, that's understandable too ... but Confederate statues need to be held as a history lesson on what happens when you do not properly stamp out insurrection. People continue to sympathize with it and it lives on forever, given a second wind from people who never learned to lose properly. And that is a very important lesson to be learned especially nowadays.

I never knew that was the context behind the statues. While the figures the statues are carved to represent have historical significance, there are other ways that they can be... I want to say memorialized, but I think that word glorifies it too much. Anyway, instead of statues, we could have pictures or whatever in museums in order to remind us that, "Hey, these dudes did some hella sketchy things, don't do what they did." I'm sure that there have got to be better ways to preserve the history the figures hold better than a picture on a wall, though.

I wanna say, though, that I think U.S. schools do a decent job (at least in my experience) of informing about the Confederacy, it's significant figures, and their wrongdoings. I've gone through the Civil War at least 3 or 4 times by now through school, so I'd at least like to think that the point was driven home that they were sketchy dudes. With that said, the statues also serve as reminders of U.S. history, context or not for why they're there. It can help people that aren't entirely aware of the country's history to learn a little bit more about it, or let people already informed learn something new. There are also the reasons you gave for why they should serve as a history lesson. 

There are reasons that justify taking them down, as well as reasons justifying not to, so it's definitely a tough debate. I think that the safety and comfort of citizens should be prioritized over keeping up a hunk of rock shaped like a dude from over a century and a half ago that was meant to serve as some kind of intimidation factor, but at the same time, they're hunks of rock with historical significance that concerns both the figures they represent and the context for why they're there.

I don't mind if they stay up or not since it's not something that personally affects me either way, but it's an interesting debate nonetheless. While we don't know what awaits us ahead, the future should also be taken into consideration and what effects these statues could potentially have on the denizens to come. 

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8 minutes ago, indigoasis said:

I wanna say, though, that I think U.S. schools do a decent job (at least in my experience) of informing about the Confederacy, it's significant figures, and their wrongdoings. I've gone through the Civil War at least 3 or 4 times by now through school, so I'd at least like to think that the point was driven home that they were sketchy dudes. With that said, the statues also serve as reminders of U.S. history, context or not for why they're there. It can help people that aren't entirely aware of the country's history to learn a little bit more about it, or let people already informed learn something new. There are also the reasons you gave for why they should serve as a history lesson. 

This actually seems to depend more on who your teacher is and where you live.

While I haven't personally experienced it myself, I have definitely heard about students who did not properly learn about the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era and have a massive misunderstanding of some key components of those times. Actually, I'll just link this here because this explains it so much better than I ever could.

 

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1 minute ago, Karimlan said:

@Sunwoo: Hey, great minds think alike. I was planning to post that hours ago when you had the question about the Confederacy.

I actually remembered that John Oliver had an episode on the Confederacy and thought it'd be appropriate for this conversation. Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America, both by James Loewen, also touch upon this topic.

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8 hours ago, XRay said:

Republicans back then was dismissive of science in regards to global warming, but not to the point of dismissing medical and other sciences.

They also were anti-science when it came to teaching evolution, pushing the teaching of Intelligent Design(a superficially secular rebranding of creationism) in schools.

Bush himself may not have done certain things that Trump did, but the broader conservative movement wasn't that different. There was a lot of hostility to the press and the international community over things like the coverage of/reaction to the Iraq War.

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13 hours ago, whase said:

Did Bush ever discredit certain news stations like trump did? Did Bush ever dismiss science as opinion like Trump did? Did Bush ever undermine democracy like Trump did?

Bush didn't, but there's a reason Trump was called a "fox news president." Because that shit was churning in the background.

I mean this is from 2015 but there was large conservative media bias between the 90s and 2008 or so. Jon Stewart was considered novel during his time because he was pretty much the antithesis to that right wing media apparatus. Unfortunately, the fake news shows in his wake aren't as novel and aren't as in hostile a media environment to their opinions.

Regardless, anyone who was against Iraq or Afghanistan wars were vilified. Look at the Dixie Chicks; hell, Taylor Swift said that she didn't start doing politics publicly until basically the Roy Moore election because of how hard the Dixie Chicks were shit on for expressing anti-war sentiments.

So no, it wasn't Bush. But there was clearly a greater 'patriotism and freedom' initiative going on after the 911 attacks, and it's something we can easily look back at now as the most blatant display of jingoistic bullshit ever. Flashback to when NYT and WaPo were pro-Iraq War. I'd say Trump did a better job of preventing us from falling into authoritarianism than Bush did, by this weird ass metric of the Bush administration basically forcing us all into war.

Edited by Lord Raven
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1 minute ago, Robert Stewart said:

They also were anti-science when it came to teaching evolution, pushing the teaching of Intelligent Design(a superficially secular rebranding of creationism) in schools.

Bush himself may not have done certain things that Trump did, but the broader conservative movement wasn't that different. There was a lot of hostility to the press and the international community over things like the coverage of/reaction to the Iraq War.

Oh yeah, definitely that too. I remember teaching evolution was a hot topic when I was young (maybe it still is now, but I have not been a student in years). Other than global warming and creationism, were Republicans that hostile to science in regards to other topics? I remember there was a strong focus on education and trying to raise American student's academic performance, and other than those two issues, I do not remember Republicans as a whole being anti science on other issues. From my perspective, everyone back then were upset that our students did so poorly academically, and it seemed like everyone was on board to improve STEM education and opposition to science overall did not seem to be that deep.

I was under the impression that even Republicans as a whole did not like Bush, or were indifferent to him to the point that they did not care the media negatively covered him. My parents are Republican but they never complained about the news being biased, although they were not overtly political either so maybe they just did not pay attention or did not care people disparage Bush. Other than wanting lower taxes, they did not really seem to care about anything else. My parents are the only Republicans I have known back then though, so maybe they were not representative of Republicans nationwide as a whole.

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