Freak Out Nation
A student in Arizona at Queen Creek High School wore a large Confederate flag on Wednesday at a day the school celebrated called “Redneck Day,” which prompted anger among some African-Americans and civil rights leaders because of what the flag represents and the title of the day itself, which is a stark reminder of segregation and slavery.
Steve Montoya, a prominent civil rights attorney in Phoenix said, ”Among other things, the Confederacy represents the horrible institution of slavery, and that is a direct attack on African-Americans.”
I can't wait to hear all the defenses and justifications for this abhorrent and nearly-treasonous behavior. It's bad enough to celebrate something called "Redneck Day," with it's unflattering connotations of low-educated, beer-swilling, Southerners - fans of professional wrestling who mainly live in trailer parks, but when you bring the Confederate Flag into it, you're getting into racist, anti-American territory.
What's your opinion? Is Arizona vying to retake the crown?
The origin of the term, redneck, is unclear, but it may come from striking coal miners in West Virginia--in other words, the very people you'd rise up to defend, if you weren't such a bigot.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school, my approach to school spirit days was to reject the whole foolishness as much as possible, since I had no school spirit. This adolescent may have been looking for attention, and he got it, thanks to the hand-wrining wussies and control freaks.
I'm neither defending nor attacking his action. What I do say is that the best response would have been to ignore him.
I always heard that it originally referred to the sunburn you got from working outside.
DeleteOne possible origin is that those coal miners wore red bandanas to identify themselves. Mikeb should like that one--oppressed workers rising up against their unbridled capitalist masters.
Delete. . . nearly-treasonous behavior.
ReplyDeleteOh, please--"nearly-treasonous"?
So are you claiming that the student "nearly" levied War against the United States, or that he "nearly" gave the nation's Enemies Aid and Comfort?
It's bad enough to celebrate something called "Redneck Day," with it's unflattering connotations of low-educated, beer-swilling, Southerners - fans of professional wrestling who mainly live in trailer parks . . .
And who the hell are you, of all people, to object to the injurious stereotyping of "rednecks"? You admit to repeatedly doing so, all for the noble purpose of "piss[ing] [Greg Camp] off.
Now you want to be seen as the Defender of Southern Honor?
Is this another of your "jokes"?
No joke. One who sports the Confederate Flag could be said to be giving "the nation's Enemies Aid and Comfort."
DeleteThe losers in the Civil War should be vilified for the racist slave-owning traitors they were. They shouldn't be honored in any way.
One who sports the Confederate Flag could be said to be giving "the nation's Enemies Aid and Comfort."
DeleteWhat "Enemies"? The dead-for-decades ones? I'm genuinely baffled--what the hell are you talking about?
Mikeb, it must be so sad for you that you're not in charge.
DeleteAh, yes, he's giving aid and comfort to people who have been dead for 100 years.
DeleteAs for your second statement: I thought you progressives were in favor of seeing ever side of the argument--for studying the argument, seeing the complexity rather than the over simplification, and taking more nuanced positions.
Which is what many Southerners do. We see both the good in the Confederacy and the evils such as slavery. The south had many anti-slavery people who stuck to it because there were other issues at stake, but slavery dragged the whole endeavor under.
There were noble people to honor in the south, and there were rogues to vilify (and even more rogues sprang up in the hundred years after the war). The same can be said of the Union.
And yes, in case it's not clear, I think that antebellum slavery was completely wrong and needed to be abolished, and I think that the protection of that system was the cause of divine retribution against the Confederacy.
Curious, would you feel it to be "nearly treasonous" for someone to wear a shirt that says CCCP? At least it is a more recent toppled enemy. Or how about someone who celebrates native American heritage?
DeleteOr for someone to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Or to make a black power salute? How about attending one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons?
DeleteAll I'm gonna say is that you have to love how Mike decries racism while using horrific, racist stereotypes of southerners--we must all eschew racism, unlike those horrible, degenerate crackers who drag down our nation and pollute our gene pool!
ReplyDeleteTone it down a notch, bucko, and maybe we can discuss the implications of this story.
Yeah, I'm complicated like that. Do you want to discuss the Confederate Flag now and it's implications?
DeleteWas the flag the issue here? Or was Redneck day the issue? You kinda conflated them even though they're different issues.
DeletePerson burns an American flag: It's free expression, and it's just a piece of cloth
ReplyDeleteSomeone flies the confederate flag: It's racist and nearly treason, and not just a piece of cloth
Burning any flag is an immoral desecration which although legal in some places is not nice.
DeleteHonoring the Confederate Flag is anti-American, racist and nearly-treasonous.
I'll never get tired of that "nearly-treasonous" line. You and your wacky sense of humor!
DeleteSo, Mikeb, you honor flags? Why would that be? The American flag, for example, stands for freedoms that you can't stand.
DeleteYour idea of freedom is the problem. It's based on a single-minded obsession with gun rights. It's so extreme, not nearly as much as Kurt's, but still it's so extreme that it distorts the very meaning of the word freedom.
DeleteIn the US people are no longer free to go into a movie or a shopping mall without worrying for their safety, and it's not criminals they worry about, it's you gun-rights nuts.
In the US people are no longer free to go into a movie or a shopping mall without worrying for their safety, and it's not criminals they worry about, it's you [liberty advocates].
DeleteDo you really think a significant percentage of Americans are "worrying for their safety" when they go to movies and shopping malls? Your delusions get more impressively bizarre every day.
By the way, what movie or mall shootings have been carried out by vocal gun rights advocates?
1: They're as free as they ever are or could be. There is always danger of an attack on a soft target like a mall or movie theater. When we talk about potential terrorist bombings, we say that we'll just have to learn to live with that being an unlikely but possible threat if we want to keep our free and open society. Same applies to guns. Your gun control ideas will not take away that fear from people. At MOST it might make these unlikely events slightly more unlikely.
Delete2: Hey, some insulting and slandering. It's not Criminals they fear, it's YOU! No, Mike, I'm pretty sure they fear criminals, mentally unstable people, and terrorists, not well spoken English professors who advocate for the second amendment. Please change your pants and stop the PSH.
Once again, Mikeb demonstrates that he is incapable of understanding how numbers work:
Delete100,000,000+ gun owners in this country
At least 8,000,000 who legally carry a firearm
A school and a couple of malls and a theater have incidents, out of the thousands upon thousands of each of those in this country.
People are no longer free to go spend money without worrying about one of us shooting them? It's not gun-rights advocates you need to be worried about, Mikeb. It's all the unmedicated and paranoid sheep who bleat for control.
Odd. I don't worry when I go to a movie or a shopping mall. Or a bank. Or restaurant. Or, or, or... I never have. As I go about my daily life, armed or not, I don't find myself worrying. Interestingly, virtually all of the people with whom I've discussed the subject say they don't worry either. Your apparent hatred of freedom and desperate need to be right lead you to overstate your case.
Delete"By the way, what movie or mall shootings have been carried out by vocal gun rights advocates?"
DeleteDo schools count? Cho and the Columbine HS boys. How about churches? There've been a few of them too.
Do schools count?
DeleteAs movies or shopping malls, as you specified? Um . . . no--not in English. But, I'm feeling generous (I can afford generosity here), so let's pretend you actually said "In the US people are no longer free to go into a movie or a shopping mall or a school or a church without worrying for their safety . . . "
So now, my question becomes "what movie or mall or school or church shootings have been carried out by vocal gun rights advocates?"
Your answer?
Cho and the Columbine HS boys.
Care to provide a link to any of Cho's gun rights advocacy arguments? What "gun control" laws did he ever advocate repealing (or what proposed "gun control" laws did he advocate stopping)?
And Columbine? This is just getting worse for you, Mikeb. In the immortal words of Columbine shooter Eric Harris:
"Students who bring guns to school are hardly ever detected," the researcher wrote. "This is shocking to most parents and even other students since it is just as easy to bring a loaded handgun to school as it is to bring a calculator."
...Ultimately, "a school is no place for a gun," he concluded.
The author was Columbine killer Eric Harris, who chose "Guns in Schools" for his report topic. It's not hard to see why he would favor "gun-free school zones."
Are you sure you aren't secretly on the pro-gun side, doing your best to make "gun control" advocates look even sillier than they are?
Don't you want to continue this discussion, Mikeb?
DeleteDon't you want to explain how after stating that "gun rights nuts" are making it impossible for people to go to movies and shopping malls without fear, that you could not find a single example of a gun rights advocate shooting up a theater or mall, to justify such fear?
Don't you want to explain how even after I generously allowed you to move the goalposts to suddenly include schools and churches, you had to reach back fourteen years to find two incidents? And that neither of those atrocities' perpetrators appear to have a record of gun rights advocacy? Or that in the Columbine massacre, at least one of the mass murderers was a "gun control" fanatic, who demanded that schools be self-defense-free zones?
Well, it's not that I don't want to continue the discussion, which I suppose you're insinuating, is because you're beaten me so badly. It's just that it gets a little tedious dealing with you and your way of never giving an inch and refusing to admit anything.
DeleteEvery day there are stories of previously law abiding gun owners doing bad things with guns. Many of the mass shooters were like that, up until the incident that made them famous, they were so-called law abiding gun owners.
Many of them were gun-rights advocates. This we can surmise by the obvious facts, like the weapons they owned, like the images some of them posted on the internet, and so on.
You want to go on and on about my failing to come up with even one who was an outspoken commenter on the gun blogs or who had a gun-rights Youtube channel prior to becoming a killer. Fine, call that a victory if you like. But, it's weak. It's like much of your position, trumped up bullshit, spiced with witty and catchy phraseology. It's the stuff of con artists.
Sure, the guns they own show they were gun rights people, even if they wrote hair brained manifestos that showed that they really were just crazy--even if those manifestos demanded more gun control!
DeleteSeriously, you are the one slinging the spicy bullshit. If someone misuses a gun or owns an "assault weapon" you say that automatically puts them in the same camp as Greg, Kurt, Mustang, me, et al. Hell, I won't be surprised when you post something saying that the Holocaust is our fault because it was done by people with guns, which puts them in our camp.
The underlying logic is so ridiculous that only your echoing gun control buddies think that it makes sense.
Many of them were gun-rights advocates. This we can surmise by the obvious facts, like the weapons they owned . . .
DeleteAh--I see, one can be a gun rights advocate without, you know . . . advocating for gun rights. Is that your contention? That we can "surmise" their gun rights advocacy, based on the guns they own? Multiple murderer Christopher Dorner owned a lot of guns, including "assault weapons"--would that indicate gun rights advocacy to you? If so, his "manifesto" strongly disagrees.
How about Ceasefire Illinois director, wife-beater, and alleged "illegal gun owner" Tio Hardiman--is he (somehow) a "gun rights advocate," rather than just another typical, hypocritical, violent, misogynist "gun control" advocate?
. . . like the images some of them posted on the internet, and so on.
Oh--it's images you want? Like this one of Senator Chuckie Schumer (D-NY) firing a Tec-9 "assault pistol" while grinning from ear to ear? Is he a "gun rights advocate" in your version of reality?
You know what I think? I think you've failed to find a single example of an actual gun rights advocate shooting up a movie theater or mall (later expanded to schools and churches).
Great comment, Tennessean.
Oh, and let us not forget that one of your examples, Columbine killer Eric Harris, argued a fanatically anti-gun position.
Delete"Nearly treasonous"...Is that similar to "a little pregnant"? Or perhaps you think of it as "almost breaking the law". Sort of like the corpsman who worked for me who was pulled over because the LEO, according to his own statement, thought the young man "looked like" he was about to make an illegal turn. Aside from the fact that it's very difficult to give aid and comfort to people who are dead, there's one of those pesky amendments that protects another one of those freedoms you esteem so little.
ReplyDelete