Posted on 07/08/2020 5:13:41 AM PDT by billorites
Every cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time.
Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment.
edit...
The counterrevolution will be easy to spot. Suddenly a left-wing institution will refuse to change its name. Gone with the Wind will insidiously reappear on the schedule of TBN classic movies. Statue topplers all of a sudden will be scouted out and arrested and have felonies on their record — and no one will complain.
NFL’s attendance will crater. Biden will begin cataloguing both good and bad statues, and correct and incorrect name changing, and by October he will be saying, “One the one hand . . . on the other hand . . ”
Segregation will doom this revolution. It is the worst poison in a multiracial society. Yet it is the signature issue of Black Lives Matter — everything from separate safe spaces and theme houses based on skin color in universities to specials fees and rules for non-blacks. The popular forces of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage will not be harnessed by racial-separatist czars, asking for DNA pedigrees as they sleuth for microaggressions and implicit biases.
The BLM problem is that never in history has a radical cultural revolution at its outset declared itself both race-based and yet predicated on a small minority of the population, whose strategy was to shame and debase the majority that was sympathetic to the idea of relegating race to insignificance. 225
If sowing the wind has been getting ugly, reaping the whirlwind will be more so.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Or "George Kirby", or "Floyd Taylor", or "George Taylor"...
Any ol’ dead black guy in JUST the right circumstances will do...
Media and Democratic support for the Black Lives Matter movement is premised on its utility in energizing Black voters and providing a harvest of Black votes like that of the Obama years. If BLM fails in that, its lack of value will lead to it being deprived of cash and media attention.
Good article as far as he goes.
I believe we have to get rid of the notion that slavery, especially Southern slavery, is the worst of all possible human conditions. Aristotle didn’t seem to think so. And I would much rather have been Thomas Jefferson’s slave than a coal miner in west Virginia (or my great-grandmother in Berlin in the closer to the present 1940).
The notion that slavery is the worst of all possible conditions arose from the fact that the North had to come up with a reason to justify what was done to the South. I say this as someone who has never lived south of Long Island, NY. I’ve just gone beyond the history I was taught in high school.
ML/NJ
If slaves were at the mercy of their masters why were life insurance policies on slaves common?
Duh.
For the same reason you have insurance on you house. It's value is more than you care to lose. But if you set fire to your house, you wouldn't be able to be able to collect on your policy and you wouldn't be able to collect if on your slave if it could be shown that your care/treatment of him was what led to his death.
You are aware that Southern slaves were cared for when they were young, and when they were old, aren't you? They were paid, and they had Sundays off. Or did Harriet Beacher Stowe leave that out of her advocacy novel? I forget. (It's been a long time since I read it.)
ML/NJ
150 years ago, if you worked an Irish or Polish or Chinese or Italian laborer to the point they could no longer work, no big deal; there’d be plenty more fresh off the boat tomorrow, eager to take their place.
If you worked a slave to the point they could no longer work, you were out a considerable capital investment.
My son, back in junior high had to write an “argumentative” paper. He figured the hardest one to write would be to show that slavery in America was good.
That was one of his points. The importation of slaves was outlawed at some point, so it was in the slave-owner’s best interests to keep the slaves alive, let them have their own social networks and churches, and to let them have families.
He got an “A+” on the paper. (in a VERY liberal part of the country!)
It was tragic how many slaves died in the Caribbean and S. America during the same time period.
VDH puts his finger on it here. That Constitution the Left reviles is the same document that keeps them "safe" from the possibility of a Pinochet arising who will ignore epithets being screamed as he drops the screamers out of the helicopter, or "revolutionies" being stacked like cordwood from a population that has finally run out of patience/tolerance for the insanity.
Draw a number line and imagine that it represents what most people referred to as AD (Anno Domini) and BC (Before Christ) but some now refer to as CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era)
Two rays extending laterally from a common point of origin, one to the right, one to the left. Hashmarks are added and labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 to the right and -1, -2, -3, and -4 to the left, etc.
It quickly appears obvious: There IS NOT and NEVER WAS a YEAR ZERO. Year 1 AD extends from the origin one unit to the right. Year 1 BC extends from the origin one unit to the left. And so on.
Think about it. It makes no sense for there to have been a year that was both an AD year and a BC year, or a year that stood on its own as being neither an AD year nor a BC year. Every year in time falls neatly into one or the other category, AD or BC.
And before anyone asks, yes, this is something that has been sticking in my craw.
Among the things that this exercise of drawing a simple number line can show, to even the least mathematically inclined person willing to take a little bit of time and exercise a modicum of thought, is the following: The nineteenth century ended at midnight on December 30, 1900 (an event understantably trumpeted by the New York Times in its edition of January 1, 1901 which contained many pages of retrospective stories/articles about the nineteenth century just ended and many prospective stories/articles about what might transpire in the twentieth century that had just begun), and the twentieth century ended at midnight on January 1, 2001 (an event that inexplicably passed entirely unnoticed by the now math-incompetent New York Times, as the content of its edition of January 1, 2001 edition clearly reveals, since it contained absolutely no retrospective or prospective articles/stories commemorating the massively important transition, not only between separate centuries, but between the second and third millenia!).
And yes, it’s official: Prince and his admirers jumped the gun and partied exactly one year too early. (But admittedly, it was fun.)
Oops. That is, rather, “...at midnight on December 31, 1900...”. (”Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. February has 28 alone, And all the rest have 31.”) Okay—mnemonicization complete! :-)
“... except for Leap Years, when February has 29”.
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