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Grandpa's Spells wrote: There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans.

What are you talking about? Disqualifying felons from voting? Voter ID requirements? Or...?

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote: There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans.

What are you talking about? Disqualifying felons from voting? Voter ID requirements? Or...?

The strongest case you can make for that is the good ole..WOD..

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Advocating for policy in the wake of a tragedy is standard. Guns don't get an exception.

Had these killings happened on Bush's watch, you wouldn't have objected if he had said, "If just one member of this congregation had been armed, this tragedy would have been averted?"

Spells, did you answer this one?

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Those rallying around the vestiges of their defeated empire are no more threatening than the Scots waiving the St. Andrews Cross or Indians having pow wows....they are a defeated people.

you might have a difficult time selling that in charleston

wrote:"The Venerable Bogatir X"]The biggest menace to American society, especially black American society, are white, male, liberals--the angry lefty women who push them around are a distant second.

No question.

I didn't even buy this when I was more conservative, because white conservative men have been saying that since before John Wilkes Booth (who also said as much).

To levelset: I'm Pro Choice, Right to Die, Right to Marry, Anti-Death Penalty (in most cases) and feel drug laws need sweeping changes as does a lot of three strikes rules. I have also voted for Amy Klobuchar, so while I'm still cracka white, I don't think I'm getting invited to O'Reily's house for cocktails anytime soon.

There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans. The far left isn't helping things much, but the people actively trying to do harm, and who have power, generally just so happen to be white older conservative men

Please, there's a laundry list of non-conservatives who do nothing but abuse blacks by way of keeping them in the shackles of social assistance.

Watch DeBlasio turn NYC back into a shithole while you're at it.

I'm all for South Carolina banning a symbol of the Southern Democratic Political Machine from state grounds.

If people feel that a symbol represents tyranny, violence and oppression, that's good enough for me to support it being banned.

Let's start with the American flag and Christian cross and move from there.

dead man walking wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Those rallying around the vestiges of their defeated empire are no more threatening than the Scots waiving the St. Andrews Cross or Indians having pow wows....they are a defeated people.

you might have a difficult time selling that in charleston

I would think pointing out the free range, fully employed negros might be something of a irrefutable argument that the south lost, as did the scots and the American indians. They are a subjegated people and they act the part. Shitbirds are gonna shit. Getting high and mighty about a fucking piece of cloth? That's jawa behaviour right there....from both sides. Bunch of innocent people got murdered by an insane person. That's a legit issue. America wants to talk about flags? Go fuck yourself.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:

The Venerable Bogatir X wrote:The biggest menace to American society, especially black American society, are white, male, liberals--the angry lefty women who push them around are a distant second.

No question.

I didn't even buy this when I was more conservative, because white conservative men have been saying that since before John Wilkes Booth (who also said as much).

There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans. The far left isn't helping things much, but the people actively trying to do harm, and who have power, generally just so happen to be white older conservative men

Economic disenfranchisement
The welfare state is designed to keep poor people poor-- we know this because the economic cliffs for getting off are so steep.
Housing policy segregated poor blacks in declining areas when jobs were moving to the suburbs, and was designed to break up black families.

These policies weren't designed by conservatives. And don't get me started on tenure for non-university teachers...

Voting disenfranchisement
Liberals prefer to put blacks in heavily black voting districts-- conservatives redistrict based on likely voting patterns; liberals do it that way as well as by race. Ever wonder why in even strongly Democratic cities and states that blacks seldom get elected governor or mayor (except in cities with black majorities)?

nafod wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

nafod wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:People decide what to be butthurt over. That's it.

How fervently exercised over this flag were you in September of 2009, or June 2013?

I was in a southern fraternity in college, and we got shit-faced beneath the stars and bars and a portrait of Robert E Lee on many a night. The confederacy was an entire culture tilting at windmills.

But fact is they were also fighting to maintain this, of which a 1/3rd or so of the entire population of the south were slaves. I've seen higher numbers too. It's disingenuous to try to completely disconnect the stars and bars from it.

Slavery in the south (and the rest of the country when it was legal everywhere) was pretty much concentration camps minus the gas chambers. Puppy mills for humans, where the average woman had 9 kids in her life. Slave kids often entered the "labor force" at age 4. That's the reality of it right there. Pretty nasty stuff. I can get why black folks in particular might not be as enthused about the stars and bars.

Black folks not liking it is understandable. However, very few Soldiers who fought for the Confederacy were slave owners. I'm guessing that very few of those who proudly display the Stars and Bars are descended from slave owners. It's entirely possible that it means something different to them. It's also possible that those Soldiers did not volunteer to fight and often die so that others could own slaves.

Not directly, but in fact that is what they were doing.

A third of homes in the South owned slaves. Probably the rest wanted to, Americans being an upwardly mobile sort.

Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five. (A complete table on slave-owning percentages is given at the bottom of this page.)

http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm

Or the Civil War was more complicated than that. There were quite a few Union slave states (Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, maybe others) FWIW; and slavery was legal in the North longer than it was in the South. Even Plessy v. Ferguson was based on Massachusetts law.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

dead man walking wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:Those rallying around the vestiges of their defeated empire are no more threatening than the Scots waiving the St. Andrews Cross or Indians having pow wows....they are a defeated people.

you might have a difficult time selling that in charleston

I would think pointing out the free range, fully employed negros might be something of a irrefutable argument that the south lost, as did the scots and the American indians. They are a subjegated people and they act the part. Shitbirds are gonna shit. Getting high and mighty about a fucking piece of cloth? That's jawa behaviour right there....from both sides. Bunch of innocent people got murdered by an insane person. That's a legit issue. America wants to talk about flags? Go fuck yourself.

People want to feel "involved" and back a "cause". Nobody wants to consider any solution that can't be solved in 140 characters or less. If it doesn't fit on an internet meme, forget about it.

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote: There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans.

What are you talking about? Disqualifying felons from voting? Voter ID requirements? Or...?

There's a lot of it, but usually there's counter-talking points to refute the real agenda. Unless you happen to get somebody who talks to much. Here we have a guy who starts with the party line about the end of the Voter Rights Act, then admits that the actual goal is suppressing the black vote.

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/dxhtv ... g-the-vote

johno wrote:

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Advocating for policy in the wake of a tragedy is standard. Guns don't get an exception.

Had these killings happened on Bush's watch, you wouldn't have objected if he had said, "If just one member of this congregation had been armed, this tragedy would have been averted?"

Spells, did you answer this one?

No, I didn't think it was serious, but OK. We'll set aside the guns in church thing.

If one ordinary member of the group, which I think had a mean age around 60, had been armed, that one member would have been pulling their weapon from concealment and trying to quickly get accurate shots on a highly motivated guy who already had his gun out in a planned attack. That one congregation member would have almost certainly died anyway. A regular person with a gun is going to have to get very lucky.

To have a chance, you'd probably want at least three armed members, or one member who'd had at a minimum a weekend training course that involves lots of shooting and who practiced regularly since then. And then you'd hope they weren't the first people shot.

If that's the real answer, that the answer to mass shootings relies on lots of armed people sticking together, or having people who do more training than the overwhelming number of actual gun owners, I think that's a losing argument. Most Americans don't want to carry guns, but don't care if others want to do so safely. If you tell them that the answer to these events is that people who don't want to carry a gun probably should, and should train and practice regularly, that argument is going to lose very badly. It's not a serious argument, which is why nobody with power is making it.

Some of the longest lines on Election Day occur at polling places in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. A new report says that’s not a coincidence.

In the three states with the longest lines in 2012, precincts in minority neighborhoods were systematically deprived of the resources they needed to make voting operate smoothly — specifically, voting machines and poll workers, according to the report by the Brennan Center for Justice. The report’s data show the growing need for federal supervision of voting rights, though ensuring supervision is harder than ever since the Supreme Court removed the teeth from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last year.

The report looked at Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, where many voters waited for hours to cast a vote in the 2012 presidential election. In all three, minority precincts were more likely to have had long lines. In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of black registered voters, on average, than the rest of the state.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/opini ... laces.html

But why is the black vote being suppressed? For presidential elections-- Maryland and SC are not competitive, but Florida is. Is the suppression happening primarily for the purpose of influencing primaries (which would most likely be suppression by Democrats), for general elections (which would most likely be suppression by Republicans), or for elections with multiple candidates (which could be suppression by either)?

Turdacious wrote:

nafod wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

nafod wrote:

Blaidd Drwg wrote:People decide what to be butthurt over. That's it.

How fervently exercised over this flag were you in September of 2009, or June 2013?

I was in a southern fraternity in college, and we got shit-faced beneath the stars and bars and a portrait of Robert E Lee on many a night. The confederacy was an entire culture tilting at windmills.

But fact is they were also fighting to maintain this, of which a 1/3rd or so of the entire population of the south were slaves. I've seen higher numbers too. It's disingenuous to try to completely disconnect the stars and bars from it.

Slavery in the south (and the rest of the country when it was legal everywhere) was pretty much concentration camps minus the gas chambers. Puppy mills for humans, where the average woman had 9 kids in her life. Slave kids often entered the "labor force" at age 4. That's the reality of it right there. Pretty nasty stuff. I can get why black folks in particular might not be as enthused about the stars and bars.

Black folks not liking it is understandable. However, very few Soldiers who fought for the Confederacy were slave owners. I'm guessing that very few of those who proudly display the Stars and Bars are descended from slave owners. It's entirely possible that it means something different to them. It's also possible that those Soldiers did not volunteer to fight and often die so that others could own slaves.

Not directly, but in fact that is what they were doing.

A third of homes in the South owned slaves. Probably the rest wanted to, Americans being an upwardly mobile sort.

Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five. (A complete table on slave-owning percentages is given at the bottom of this page.)

http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm

Or the Civil War was more complicated than that. There were quite a few Union slave states (Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, maybe others) FWIW; and slavery was legal in the North longer than it was in the South. Even Plessy v. Ferguson was based on Massachusetts law.

It was complicated, yes, but slavery was the underlying engine of the dispute. Lincoln nails it in his 2nd Inaugural, which I think is the best speech ever written. Better than the Gettysburg Address.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

nafod wrote:

Turdacious wrote:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.

http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

Would the Union slave states joined or stayed with the Union if Lincoln had made ending slavery the reason for the war? Ignoring tariffs as a cause of the war is another common mistake. There's also the slave tax component.

Any way you look at it, it ignores the critical point-- what does the Confederate flag mean to those who display it? Do they display it because they support discrimination against blacks, or because it means something else to them? I don't display the Stars and Bars (never have, never will), but I don't pretend to speak for those who do.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:

The Venerable Bogatir X wrote:The biggest menace to American society, especially black American society, are white, male, liberals--the angry lefty women who push them around are a distant second.

No question.

I didn't even buy this when I was more conservative, because white conservative men have been saying that since before John Wilkes Booth (who also said as much).

There are still today politicians attempting to disenfranchise black Americans. The far left isn't helping things much, but the people actively trying to do harm, and who have power, generally just so happen to be white older conservative men

It's very interesting that you would call John Wilkes Booth a conservative. He was a renowned actor in a family of actors, not a traditionally conservative profession. He was supportive of rebellion against the United States, and he assassinated a President of the United States. These are not the the tracks of a conservative.

Have you bought into the conservative = racist meme?

Speaking of lefty leaders attacking white males and their troublesome prideful ways, we have a convenient recent example from Boston University

Incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies, Saida Grundy tweeted a slew of tweets over several months blasting white males which have drawn criticism on social media, Fox News reported Saturday.

“White masculinity isn’t a problem for America’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for America’s colleges,” Ms. Grundy tweeted in March.

Also note that prof Grundy remains happily employed at BU. A white professor substituting the word black for white would have been run out of the university quicker than a Democrat Chicago politician could cast a vote for his dead neighbors.

Prof. Grundy and your conflating white conservatives as being cut from the same cloth as John Wilkes Booth are perfectly representative of the hostility towards non-liberal white males in the modern liberal zeitgeist.

Spells, you misunderstood my question. Let's get in the Wayback Machine and look at the first post in this thread.

johno wrote: Pres. Obama chooses to immediately use this tragedy to push European style gun control. He could have promoted national unity at the horror of this hate crime, but NO.

Divisive and despicable.

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Advocating for policy in the wake of a tragedy is standard. Guns don't get an exception.

Had these killings happened on Bush's watch, you wouldn't have objected if he had said, "If just one member of this congregation had been armed, this tragedy would have been averted?"

Although I disagree with Obama's "solution" of European style Gun Control, my objection was to his politicizing the deaths before one day had passed.

Thoughts, Spells? Would you have accepted Bush promoting a conservative agenda while the victims' bodies were still warm?





*I might address your misguided comments about the tactics of the Church shooting in another post. Short version: you're wrong.

johno wrote: *I might address your misguided comments about the tactics of the Church shooting in another post. Short version: you're wrong.

No question. Assuming Spells is correct the average age of that congregation is 60, it still means nothing other than the fact that if one or two were armed and trained, there's a damn good chance this could have come out a lot less worse. If anything, at that age you might see a slightly cooler mind in that scenario. Although a 27y/o former CPL of Marines with some house to house experience in the sandbox would easily trump that, of course.

At least the 60y/o would not be likely to shoot 'gangsta style', yo.

Apparently, there were multiple reloads during this massacre. That equals multiple opportunities to end it.
Having a firearm doesn't guarantee a good outcome, but it gives you the best chance at it.

The Venerable Bogatir X wrote: At least the 60y/o would not be likely to shoot 'gangsta style', yo.

Heh. Not this 60 y/o.

Lightning round

Donk wrote:It's very interesting that you would call John Wilkes Booth a conservative....
Have you bought into the conservative = racist meme?

Come on. Both parties have their distasteful elements. Since the Dixiecrats fell apart and the GOP adopted the Southern Strategy, the politically active racist votes Republican, the conservative party. Being "conservative" on race at any point in our history has meant supporting the status quo or rolling recent legislation back, which was generally not an awesome deal for black people.

johno wrote:Although I disagree with Obama's "solution" of European style Gun Control, my objection was to his politicizing the deaths before one day had passed.

Thoughts, Spells? Would you have accepted Bush promoting a conservative agenda while the victims' bodies were still warm?

I don't know what European style Gun Control means, or how it differs from gun control in Australia, wealthy Asian & North/South American countries, or the rest of the developed world, so if that means something specific plz explain.

I said at the time that political issues come up constantly due to the events of the day, particularly tragedies, and guns aren't going to get a pass on that. So I might object to whatever policy Obama advocates, but he hasn't advocated one that I've seen yet, though he's pointed out easy access to guns is part of the problem.

But your question involves Bush saying something Bush wouldn't say. Bush would not have said the people in church should have had guns, because that would be stupid. One Republican lawmaker has barely alluded to such a thing, declined to come out and say it when asked, and has already backtracked and apologized. It's not the GOP position.

The problem with your question is that the GOP has no policy solutions to offer on reducing mass shootings. If you ask a Republican lawmaker about what can be done, they'll talk about mental illness, or a lone madman, but that's about it. So Bush advocating for some policy in the wake of the shooting would require having a policy to advocate. The GOP doesn't have one.

It wasn't always this way, and compared to past policy the GOP has moved extremely far to the right. E.g., "There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan couldn't get elected dog catcher in a 2015 Republican district.

Grandpa's Spells wrote: Ronald Reagan couldn't get elected dog catcher in a 2015 Republican district.

Reagan would easily be elected to the same position he was in 1966 and 1970 in dozens of states.

johno wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Advocating for policy in the wake of a tragedy is standard. Guns don't get an exception.

Had these killings happened on Bush's watch, you wouldn't have objected if he had said, "If just one member of this congregation had been armed, this tragedy would have been averted?"

Bush was a good guy and would never have pushed a political agenda following any sort of tragedy, unless you want to say that the Patriot Act and invasion of Afghanistan were "political".