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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1644 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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One thing I don't understand is that, at some point not too long ago, Confederate apologia was relatively common in the North. I mean, for Pete's sake, a Canadian band wrote a sympathetic song about the South, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Now the common take is that the south was evil, no good, they sucked in every way, etc... The Dixie Chicks are just the Chicks. Lady Antebellum is Lady A.

What changed?

Its not what we would normally expect. In the 1920s I would expect the antebellum South to be the outgroup. In the 2020s, they are the fargroup. You would typically expect hatred to lessen as the conflict becomes a distant memory. Instead, it has increased.

Regardless, I thank God for the defiant oppostionalism of the Borderers. They guard my right flank. Without them, the leftist hate mob would be after me.

I think it was Dylan Roof shooting up a black church while wearing Confederate and Rhodesian flag patches. It was pretty soon after that, that Amazon and such stopped selling Confederate flag merchandise, and streets and schools started getting renamed.

Literally who?

I don't doubt the chronology, but the stage has to be set ideologically. The spark didn't really cause the fire, it was inevitable with enough dry timber. If Dylan Roof, who I honestly don't remember, had never existed do you think that the schools wouldn't have been renamed? Of course they would have. And if a Dylan Roof didn't exist it would have been necessary to invent him. Like we have now with the lynching hoaxes.

The civil war wasn’t really about slavery- I mean sûre, slavery is how I’d explain it to children, it was the proximal issue, so it’s not totally unfair to call it that. The civil war was about whether southern elites should have a veto over US policy on the whole. This is, in the minds of liberals(and perhaps nowhere else), a live issue again. You should just read liberal propaganda and connect the threads.

What changed?

A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).

There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.

Reconciliation between the North and the memory of Dixie was a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the country, so naturally it ratchets back up with the culture war (the 1920s culture war was along different lines, like prohibition, that didn't match to North/South, but nowadays the South, as well as anywhere up North that would fly the flag, is Deplorable country).

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