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Sometimes, human beings get it wrong. Sometimes, we honor those who should never have been honored.
You will notice that there is no USS Benedict Arnold. Where are the Benedict Arnold statutes? We don't erect them. West Point honors every American Revolutionary War general with a plaque, but one plaque contains only a rank and no name - Arnold was pointedly considered unworthy of being explicitly mentioned.
Sometimes, humans rectify their mistakes. That is what is being considered here.
As for the whole "Just you wait, they're going to 'erase' Washington!" silliness? Please. The Slippery Slope Fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. I mean, it's as silly as me saying "Oh, so we have to honor bad people? Just you wait, that means we'll have to honor Benedict Arnold!". Which I would never say. Because it would be as silly and nonsensical as claiming that we'll have to 'erase' Washington.
Nor, it should be noted, is this anything new. I gather the hand-wringing reactionaries are unaware of how many German names were changed during the First World War. Yet that didn't lead us down any slippery slope. In the early 1960s, the USGS scrubbed its rolls of geographic features that included in their official names a certain word beginning with an 'N'. That didn't lead us down any slippery slope.
So stop with the alarmist hysteria. Human beings are perfectly capable of judiciously choosing who should be honored and who should not be honored. The idea that it has to be honor everyone or honor no one is the sort of argument that anyone over the age of 10 should be able to see for its baselessness.
So-o, can we get back to tradition? That if we are going to honor someone by naming something after them.......they need to be DEAD first?
As much as such a move would bring a smile to the partisan in me, I remain opposed to these things. We have a complicated past in our country. People--both good and bad--helped our country be what it is today, to include segregationists helping to build the Navy, etc. We have to accept the good and the bad, IMO, while acknowledging the bad that there is. Is the next plan going to be to rename the Washington Monument because Georgia Washington owned slaves? Or do remove Washington from our currency for the same reason?
There has to be a point where we say that enough is enough, and that #cancelculture isn't healthy but merely serves to whitewash history.
Sometimes, human beings get it wrong. Sometimes, we honor those who should never have been honored.
You will notice that there is no USS Benedict Arnold. Where are the Benedict Arnold statutes? We don't erect them. West Point honors every American Revolutionary War general with a plaque, but one plaque contains only a rank and no name - Arnold was pointedly considered unworthy of being explicitly mentioned.
Sometimes, humans rectify their mistakes. That is what is being considered here.
As for the whole "Just you wait, they're going to 'erase' Washington!" silliness? Please. The Slippery Slope Fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. I mean, it's as silly as me saying "Oh, so we have to honor bad people? Just you wait, that means we'll have to honor Benedict Arnold!". Which I would never say. Because it would be as silly and nonsensical as claiming that we'll have to 'erase' Washington.
Nor, it should be noted, is this anything new. I gather the hand-wringing reactionaries are unaware of how many German names were changed during the First World War. Yet that didn't lead us down any slippery slope. In the early 1960s, the USGS scrubbed its rolls of geographic features that included in their official names a certain word beginning with an 'N'. That didn't lead us down any slippery slope.
So stop with the alarmist hysteria. Human beings are perfectly capable of judiciously choosing who should be honored and who should not be honored. The idea that it has to be honor everyone or honor no one is the sort of argument that anyone over the age of 10 should be able to see for its baselessness.
You can’t possibly know where all of this will lead to, nobody does. So for you to imply Washington is 100% safe and we are all a bunch of alarmists is just your opinion, and it very well could be wrong. In certain places in the US, things are already being renamed and statues are coming down. Surely you understand that?
I don’t care about Stennis at all, I had heard of the ship as it popped up in military news from time to time, but I never knew who the man was, didn’t even care to look him up. Now that I know who he is, I definitely don’t agree with the policies he pushed back in the day.
But Stennis isn’t the problem. The problem is that they are taking cancel culture too far and casting too great a net.
I also agree. Not to digress too much, but the Stennis situation is very similar to John Calhoun at Clemson University. Obviously, John Calhoun’s stances are problematic for a lot of people in 2021.
But if it weren’t for John Calhoun, Clemson University would not exist. So that’s a catch 22. Do you cancel the guy who was the sole reason for the University existing in the first place?
Likewise, Stennis getting a ship named after him, he must have done some great work growing the US Navy somewhere down the line. Do you celebrate the good work he did or tear him down for something unrelated?
Sometimes, human beings get it wrong. Sometimes, we honor those who should never have been honored.
You will notice that there is no USS Benedict Arnold. Where are the Benedict Arnold statutes? We don't erect them. West Point honors every American Revolutionary War general with a plaque, but one plaque contains only a rank and no name - Arnold was pointedly considered unworthy of being explicitly mentioned.
Sometimes, humans rectify their mistakes. That is what is being considered here.
As for the whole "Just you wait, they're going to 'erase' Washington!" silliness? Please. The Slippery Slope Fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. I mean, it's as silly as me saying "Oh, so we have to honor bad people? Just you wait, that means we'll have to honor Benedict Arnold!". Which I would never say. Because it would be as silly and nonsensical as claiming that we'll have to 'erase' Washington.
Nor, it should be noted, is this anything new. I gather the hand-wringing reactionaries are unaware of how many German names were changed during the First World War. Yet that didn't lead us down any slippery slope. In the early 1960s, the USGS scrubbed its rolls of geographic features that included in their official names a certain word beginning with an 'N'. That didn't lead us down any slippery slope.
So stop with the alarmist hysteria. Human beings are perfectly capable of judiciously choosing who should be honored and who should not be honored. The idea that it has to be honor everyone or honor no one is the sort of argument that anyone over the age of 10 should be able to see for its baselessness.
...........Likewise, Stennis getting a ship named after him, he must have done some great work growing the US Navy somewhere down the line. Do you celebrate the good work he did or tear him down for something unrelated?
When you find it, let us know.
Unfortunately, political figures, especially those of the current era and only recently dead or even not dead seem to have things named for them for reasons other than in the spirit of it.
Regardless of the bleating of the goats on the far left or right, the military can draw a bright line of limitation:
No military honors to anyone who has opposed the Star-Spangled Banner on the battlefield. That's a rule the DoD can make, argue for, and stick with.
Both the Army and Air Force are for closing Bragg-Pope. As far as I am concerned Fort Bragg could be named for General Matthew B Ridgeway, who was the Commander of XVIII Airborne Corps in World War II, and who became UN COMMANDER in Korea when MacArthur was relieved.
Not really. Though Democrats and Republicans have some historical throughlines to their founding as parties, they have kind of flipped.
Democrats were indeed the overtly racist, Southern party of choice. They gradually changed to representing the largely more poor South as a whole, and then rode that horse to become the sort of left party of record representing the poor and disenfranchised people in general.
Republicans started out as a big-business backed party, seeking to release a fresh source of labor for a nascent industrial revolution. In contrast to the rather conservative Democrats of the era, Republicans birthed the progressive era - look no further than Theodore Roosevelt. Big businesses loved the regulation TR inaugurated, because they had the resources necessary to not only comply with the new laws, they also salivated at the opportunity to buy out smaller operations who didn’t. Like the Democrats’ throughline of representing poorer demographics, the Republicans ended up very much beholden to business, and a much more middle- and upper-class demographic of support.
There’s no re-writing of history there - you just have to trace it back.
Clearly rewriting history on racism with the Dems - saying Byrd would be a Repub now is clearly wrong and an attempt to ignore the history. BTW - supporting business is NOT racism - do you not know the difference?
I think that is very different. He never attacked or tried to overthrow the United States. He didn’t fight to keep slavery from ending. As a matter of fact he became increasingly disturbed by the practice of slavery and spoke out against it publicly, and ended up freeing his slaves many years before the war.
Of course there is a wrong side of history. It may be a matter of perspective but there are those who were in the right side of historical events and those on the wrong side. Normally the losers of a war are perceived as being on the wrong side. Only with this idiotic worship of the Confederacy has any country honored the losers of a war.
And when someone finally digs up some dirt or perhaps finds away to make rumors stick to good ole George, he is going to #metoo-ed. No man is perfect.
We ought to tear down the whole Ivy League establishment too. Their alumni had a huge hand in the slave trade, and many other historically evil occurrences. The schools basically groomed these people and are therefore a part of that establishment. It does not matter if alumni further in the future spoke out against. There is no way to make up for all the bad stuff.
Texas Rangers were instrumental in the suppression of various indigenous peoples in Texas. I guess that organization has to go entirely. Heck, we all stole this land from the natives, lets give it back. We can all move back to Europe (well, Asia, for me).
Most of the slaves were enslaves in Africa by other Africans. They need to make amends, and pay reparations. Lets go on and on. We go all the way in or dont go at all.
Clearly rewriting history on racism with the Dems - business is NOT racism - do you not know the difference?
We were warned to not step too hard into the political part of this, as it was not posted in the P&OC section. Post # 31, page four of this thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by volosong
[mod note] This is not the forum for divisive partisan political discussion, that belongs in a different forum, (P&OC), nor political history, which also belongs in a different forum, (History). [/mod note]
So unfortunately I don’t think I can really bite on this one. While I feel like there’s relevance to discussing this further and, sure, I got a tiny bit butt-hurt about that, I also understand why it’s actually better to stand down from it on this thread.
Last edited by jcp123; 02-07-2021 at 08:35 PM..
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