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Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Columbia Bugle
Jack Posobiec
Jack again
Maarblek
BlueandGray1864
Spencer Klavan
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
GigaThaad
Elon Musk
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
I can't imagine why African Americans occasionally feel unwelcome in the country of their birth.
They feel unwelcome in the country of their birth because they are, collectively speaking, an underclass with significantly worse outcomes by every single measure we have available, and by some important measures their position is getting significantly worse over time. Murder rates, for instance.
Destroying this statue is not going to change that one iota. what it is going to do is cement just a little more firmly the idea that racism is the cause of all Black America's ills, a completely unsupportable claim whose promotion has all but precluded a positive resolution to any of Black America's problems.
This conversation is about a statue, because no one wants to talk about how Blue Tribe lying to the black community for decades has resulted in a couple thousand extra dead black people per year for the last three years and likely for the next decade or more, as a consequence of the largest increase in the violent crime rate ever recorded. When all the statues are gone, the crime and dysfunction will remain, and the social cohesion needed to actually engage the problem productively will be absent because it was all burned on blame-the-outgroup purity spirals like this one.
Destroying this statue improves nothing, achieves nothing, accomplishes nothing. It burns social cohesion for no benefit, locks us further into a fundamentally adversarial view of our history, feeds a culture of grievance that can never, ever be satisfied. It's shortsighted and stupid and suicidal, but what else is new?
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They feel unwelcome in the country of their birth because they are a different people and they don't have a nation for themselves.
Yet, Tajiks in Uzbekistan feel themselves totally welcome in a nation made up by the Russians (Uzbeks aren't themselves even Uzbeks). Countless minorities feel welcome in America from Sicilians, to Lebanese, to Irish, and so on. Why not blacks?
I don't know why not. Not really, not fully. I'm more talking about recognizing the world as it is more than explaining why the world is as it is.
So I guess the question for you is - what constitutes 'a different people'?
You could go for a race- or biology-based definition, or even just an appearance-based definition. African-Americans are a different people in a way that excludes them from the American polity because they have dark skin or African heritage, whereas, say, Italians are not. Personally I think this argument would be weak; you have to start making some really arbitrary distinctions around different populations, particularly if you start considering East Asians or Middle Easterners or Indians, all of whom seem to have been included in America much more successfully.
Probably a more fruitful approach would be to emphasise culture? You could argue that African-Americans, and specifically legacy African-Americans (so e.g. a first-generation immigrant from Ghana or Nigeria is not included) have, for contingent historical reasons, formed their own insular culture separate from and perhaps hostile to the wider American culture? Put this way the solution is not to get rid of all black people but rather to encourage the dismantling of this culture and the rehabilitation of African-Americans into a more positive culture - think of the conclusions of the Moynihan Report, and a strain of conservative activism around this area ever since.
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