Young people these days
True, There is a clear impact.
Minnesota Police department has been dismantled as per latest reports and promising regulatory measures are being taken. While the momentum shouldnât loose pace, these acts will just serve as time wasted on unnecessary talking point which can rather be used for discussing regulations..
They dismantled the police force, but the councilors who voted for this movement have hired a personal security force at the tax payers expense⌠rich people are protected. Poor people have fun mate.
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He was anti slavery though. My exes great great grandfather was a wealthy Nigerian slave seller. He has a statue in Nigeria the whole family is proud to display. They portay it on their facebook. No one is pulling it down anytime in the next century.
Pulling down confederate statues built to wind up black people - reasonable. Pulling down Founding Fathers who had slaves = judging revolutionaries who lived by the rules of the times by todays standards and very contencious. Pulling down Lincoln monuments who freed the slaves = fucking retarded.
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I am sure the action is not purely from standpoint of making positive change and hugely influenced with political agenda but sometimes you need a short term loss for a long term change.
The change in policing can have lot of direct and indirect impacts. It would be interesting to see how positive or negative it becomes.
The relationship between cops and black community needs repairing so such changes will ideally help ease the tension and reduce needless confrontation.
This is my issue, theyre playing games with poorer communities, the rich are okay, theyâre always okay even though theyâre the ones encouraging the divide whilst the poor deal with the bullshit.
Rich people, oh I got a death threat let me hire private security.
Poor people oh my house is being robbed oh well.
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Whenever Lincoln comes up in this discussion I always feel it is worth taking into account that Lincolnâs entire political life was spent having to carefully balance his own utter abhorrence for slavery with the need to keep a badly fractured country together (even after the Southâs secession) and that involved keeping some hardcore racists onside and had he not done so the war against slavery would have collapsed.
Of more substance are his actions - legislating and acting against slavery the literal moment he thought he could get away with doing so. What his vision was for black people in America after the civil war is borderline impossible to say because he never revealed more than he had to about his aims or views because he knew the consequences for doing so at the wrong moment could be the death of those aims.
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There is a fantastic PBS series on this called (youâve guessed it) The American Civil War. Narrated by Morgan Freeman.
Netflix have taken it off recently, though. Probably to make more room for contemporary shit and films that are only 5 stars out of 10 on IMDB
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Thatâs a fascinating insight and something I never really factored in. I can only profess to being ignorant about the inner working of Lincoln so itâd be right for me to take a bit of time to read more about him and his ideals.
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Law abiding citizens in high crime/deprived areas want more and better funded police patrolling their streets.
I get if people want to âdefundâ the police in order to redistribute resources to areas which can prevent crime in the first place like mental health, education and community initiatives but you donât need to reduce police spending for that.
If you want better standards in any public service it makes more sense to increase police budgets so you can attract better applicants, purchase necessary equipment and deploy more comprehensive training programmes.
Check out the film Lincoln (2012) directed by Spielberg and staring Daniel Day Lewis. Decent place to start
Revisionist historians have actually found out that Lincoln wanted to export freed slaves back to their native countries, mainly other British colonies. Something similar to what Hitler wanted to do with the Jewish population before the war made it an impossibility. So while obviously these had two completely different outcomes itâs a little telling that he Lincoln thought along these lines and while hes often championed for the Emancipation Act it doesnât mean he had the interests of the black population at the forefront of his motivation.
Lincoln wanted the slaves freed yes, but what came after was left entirely ambiguous, the Reconstruction Era was a complete mess and it wasnât until 100 years later that black people began to actually gain the rights and liberties of a true free man or woman.
I can certainly see why Lincoln is a decisive character but then again so are all great men of history if you actually take the time to look into them. Also Iâm not saying any of this to condone tearing down the statues, I think itâs abhorrent to want to destroy your own history. I can damn well bet the majority of people at that rally have no interest in Lincoln or the history of their nation from any perspective. It was actually disgraceful that they wouldnât even let that man speak his piece about the statue whether he was telling the truth or not. At the very least they may have learnt something interesting.
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Lincoln, like a lot of other politicians at the time discussed that approach. Itâs also worth saying some black leaders at the time discussed it too. One of the reasons Reconstruction was such a mess is that while Lincoln might have known what his policy was going to be he never shared it with even his close allies like Seward. His assassination left a black hole in policy that Andrew Jackson, who was no great ally of Lincolnâs, then filled with half measures and non-commitment. He was succeeded by civil war General Ulysses Grant who in addition to being a spectacular alcoholic sought mainly to get Northern troops out of the South and his administration turned its hand to smashing Native Americans almost out of existence while doing the bare minimum to stop the South re-starting slavery under various guises.
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This is precisely why I took some time off social media recently. People arenât interested in learning about the truth they just simply want to be outraged at this point in time.
I found myself constantly correcting people and encouraging them to try and do more reading to make sure the things they were posting was accurate. I watched that video and for the life of me I cannot fathom why you wouldnât want to take the time to listen to that man.
Itâs an infuriating time to be alive because the same people screaming everybody else needs to educate themselves are the same people not willing to educate themselves.
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Truth
The sad thing about the statues of southern officers though, is that they were built so many years after the civil war ended. Many of them were raised by local politicians who where members of the clan as well. The statues and the stars and bars, blood stained banner flags etc have for many white southerners become a positive symbol of being a bit of a rebel. Also a way of honouring their familyâs history and their great great great grandfather who fought for the south. I have no doubt that the majority of the people donât see them as symbols of oppression and Iâm sure they donât defend slavery. In their eyes flags and statues are just rather innocent symbols of their states history.
This is however problematic, because by accepting these symbols they have also rewritten history. Itâs almost like the civil war is thought of as being just a tragic era where Americans fought Americans, brother against brother and the issue of slavery seems very secondary at times. Add to that the numerous movies and tv-dramas that have smoothed over the slavery issue.
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I was reading about Civil war couple of years ago from Southern point of view.
It is indeed incorrect to label the motivation of South as purely to safeguard slavery.
There were plenty of discontent between North and South in terms of regulations being passed by the North. The regulations were making livelihood difficult to Southeners and thatâs why you see such a huge push for smaller government in American society.
They suffered with the inadequacy of a single government governing a large country in an era where communication was not swift and efficient.
The seeds of separation was long sown.
Sure they were racist but economically speaking if you take away free labour, you are asking businesses to increase the cost by three folds. Southeners saw this as another attempt of North to suppress the South.
I can see why they retaliate when Confederacy is confined with just racism and ignore all the regulatory suppression North did.
I donât recommend this. I thought Lincoln (2012) was shallow and cringeworthy
The comedy of it all.
Black Lives Matter UK tweeting an anti-Semitic message and now people asking if the Premier League endorse those views.
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I think thatâs a bit harsh. Over-simplistic in some areas certainly but there are some good explorations of the history.
I particularly enjoy the scene with Lincoln explaining the emancipation proclamation and itâs various legal difficulties and the absolute need for the thirteenth amendment. I also think Daniel Day-Lewis smashed it as Lincoln and clearly must have read a lot of the accounts of Lincolnâs mannerisms and slightly weird way of talking.
Edit: This is the scene I mean, apologies that the audio sounds like it actually comes from 1865.