If there a group of anarchic hooligans just waiting to latch on to any mass social event, from racial justice protests to football, then it in no way delegitimizes whatever cause they're attached to - so why bring it up if they're a constant?
One group stormed a federal building whilst armed (extremely not legal) and faced no consequences as POTUS called them heroes. One group took up their right to peaceful protest and faced beatings and villification from the people supposed to ensure their safety. Meanwhile on these shores one group finds itself vastly more likely than the general population to be killed by the current pandemic sweeping the world, whilst those in the halls of power flout the rules they set themselves and suffer no repercussions.
It is perfectly legal to bear firearms inside the statehouse. Not sure I follow you there, but if I do more men than women are killed by the c virus. This has always been the case, it's the privilege the kingmakers have given them.
UK National debt in 1850 £790m UK National debt in 2015 £1528bn I think the debt form the first half of the 19th Century is a bit lost in the wash there.
Well worth remembering that when Britain bought freedom for the slaves of the Empire, compensation was paid. Only it was paid to the slave owners, not the slaves. So when that infographic talks about living Britons paying up until 2015 to end the slave trade and people try to frame it as some sort of badge of honour for white people, that includes descendants of those slaves paying for the freedom of their ancestors. Yeah, I don't think that the point is that it is a massive amount of money in current terms, but it was certainly a massive amount at the time. And it all went to enrich, I mean compensate, slave owners.
To be honest I suspect most people powerful enough to have ended up with a statue over a couple of century ago back won't meet today's standards, so lets just remove all statues and rename everything. No. I'm firmly of the belief that things were far, far worse in the "(good?) old days" and modern society is a great improvement. So I'd rather see old stuff there and do more to help folk learn about the unsavoury aspects of all our pasts than whitewash the past and achieve little except jobs for folk who get on the committee for renaming and demolishing.
Quoting the tweet. So the banks (who financed the institution of slavery making a fortune on human trafficking) made even more money when they lent government the money it needed to finance its "slavery abolition act"? Great business model.
It's because black people are as sick of our system as the American blacks are of theirs. The London riots started over a shooting. However, that was just a nail in a proverbial burial box. The areas of London that were most subject to the riots were poverty stricken generally "black" areas. Peckham, Croydon, Streatham and so on. Just like in the U.S these are down trodden areas and there really isn't many ways out. Whilst there are probably lots more ways out than in poor black areas of the U.S.A it is easy to fall into the wrong crowd or gang. They live in high rise, pokey horrible flats and their outlook is grim. Over the years we have stripped these areas of their youth clubs and things to do without any money. See also - what that black woman in the video in PA is saying. At the same time like America we have created lots of millionaires, and life is now all about phones and so on. You know? material things that are waved in these kid's faces all of the time no matter where they look. Billboards, adverts, Youtube stars and so on. We have created an "underclass" (that is what I refer to it as) in the U.K who are poorer than the poor. And we do nothing to change that, apart from keeping them where they are. And the more the years roll on the worse it seems to get. So if you wanted to know the connection that is about as close as it gets. So our rioters are rioting for the same reasons those in the U.S are. Our looters are looting for the same reason, and our protesters are protesting for the same reason. Let me give you another example. Our method of tackling black on black knife crime was to search more black kids in an attempt to take their knives away. Did it work? did it f**k it just alienated them even more.
It's very much a crime to possess a weapon in our statehouse, anyway. Class B felony. If they don't either bar you entry and arrest you or shoot you for trying it. I have seen it tried. Without a badge you're not taking that gun in. I have NO idea how it happened other than sheer numbers.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2734953743414675 The video is hard to watch but yeah, the police are out of control.
What do you mean? If you want to buy a house, but you don't have enough cash to buy outright, then you take out a mortgage over a reasonably long period of time. This is the same thing: at the time, the sum of money required was so enormous (20% of the national budget per the tweet) that the government "borrowed" it over a suitably long period - the difference is that the government can take a much longer view of debt than you can with your mortgage. When you have a statue of a man who made his fortune from slave trading, and the statue has an inscription to the effect that he was an awesome person, then you can see how that might be problematic. And guess what: you can educate people as to how evil and exploitative the slave trade was (for example) without needing to retain monuments to those who benefited from it. And you know what, a lot of people crying about the removal of this statue had absolutely zero clue that it even existed before it was publicly pulled down. If this raises awareness of just how much of the UK benefited historically from the slave trade then that's a good thing - and exactly what you say you want, too.
You are saying that the 2011 rioters and the current BLM protestors are just looking for an excuse to go on the rampage. Now why would these Michigan protestors bring guns if they intended their protest to be peaceful? Or put it another way: do you claim that carrying big guns is intended as a gesture of peaceful protest?
If we took down every statue that a majority of people didn't know who the statue was of, then there'd only be statues of Jesus left in the world. Hell, I don't imagine many people know who the statue in Beacon Park in Lichfield is of without reading the inscription. Although anyone who claims history erasure by way of removing monuments to unsavoury characters probably needs a clip 'round the ear.
Yeah, that's the one. Unbelievably crass and short-sighted. There are well-meaning people who understand the problem and want change, but there's a larger contingent of armchair activists on social media who don't plan to do anything, don't plan to change anything, have no personal connection to the issue, but are just really, really angry for the next few days and want to yell at The Racists. Speaking of which, You're free to do that, but I implore you not to. It won't do any good. If you keep a racist/narrow-minded person on your Facebook, you have infinite future opportunities to change their mind. If you block them, you reduce their social media circle and increase its ratio of people who agree with them to people who disagree with them, concentrating their echo chamber. If it's worth rioting and protesting for, the cause is also worth having the occasional argument with a mistaken individual for. And if you're thinking it's impossible to change someone's mind, despairing that they're all too far gone - some aren't. You just need to find the right combination of information and ideas to persuade them. Over the past week I've completely flipped on this issue about 3 times. I changed my mind because people in this thread and on Facebook presented me with counterarguments and references. That's a pretty good point. I started out on this topic thinking "but surely the real enemy is socioeconomic inequality, not racism? Surely we need to focus on the economically deprived and how systems of inheritance and postcode lotteries permanently disadvantage whole communities, black and white?" Then someone on Facebook drew my attention to the fact that fixing either of these problems fixes the other by default, because it's just two different lenses on the same problem and the remedies are the same. If you care about entrenched poor disadvantaged white neighbourhoods, the social policies that will help those are the same ones that will fix racial inequality. I can see both sides on this one. A statue is implicitly a celebration, an honouring. But it also educates and raises awareness. If you keep the statue and add a plaque explaining the fraught history of the individual, you educate about them (to those who bother to read the plaque) but also seem to honour them (to those who just walk past it every day). If you remove the statue, you educate everyone for a week but then in a month that chapter of history is slightly less visible forever. There's no easy fix to that conundrum, and it's simplistic to pretend that either pulling the statues down, or leaving them up, is an elegant solution.
I'm pretty sure more people have been murdered and oppressed in the name of that dude than just about anyone else in the history of humanity. Just sayin'
Then do an update information board giving the context and folks might learn something. Don't chuck it in the harbour and expect someone else to pay for fishing it out.
I'd happily contribute to a crowd fund for it to be fished out and put in a museum. This should be recorded in our historical archives.
No argument there - But if it was purely on majority not knowing who the statue is of, I reckon ol' Jesus is going to be the most commonly recognised one. If we're tearing down monuments/statues based on how much of a monumental dick the namesake/likeness is of was, then yeah, there's not gonna be a whole lot of monuments/statues anywhere.
