Thursday, February 28, 2013

The Superior North?


If the South was, and is, so wicked and corrupted, and if Southerners are and have always been  a bunch of scum-sucking inbred racist hicks, a region of boorish imbeciles, what does it say about the "intellectually superior" north that they couldn't make it as a nation on their own, without Dixie? 

What does it say about the "morally superior" north that they had to fight a war that killed hundreds of thousands on both sides to keep the brutish, morally inferior slavers and hick farmers in the South under their wealthy and powerful yankee thumb?

The north did not send a brutal army of invasion into the South to free slaves. That "cause" was tacked on well into the war. Read Lincoln's initial executive order calling for volunteers to make up the invasionary force; not a word, no a syllable about slavery.

At first, it was about "preserving the union."

Why was it necessary to keep the wicked Southern states in the union in order to preserve it?  Well, it wasn't. It only required ratification of the Constitution by nine states to create the federal government -- the union -- and set it in operation.  If the Southern states had been allowed to leave in peace, there would have been twenty-two (22) states left in the union -- more than twice the nine required to create it -- and they could have remained just as united as heck, if that was what they wanted.

Confederacy-bashers have told me it was necessary to keep the South as part of the USA in order to "form a more perfect union."  But wouldn't it have been a more perfect union without the "dirty South" than with it?

Let's face it. The north knew it was missing some vitally important component -- some element necessary to survive as a nation -- that it lacked and that the South possessed. That is why the South had to be violently forced to remain in the union. Even after the war, when carpetbaggers and other assorted yankees came South and robbed state treasuries blind, bought up miles of virgin timber for pennies an acre, paid wretched Southern sawmill and mining workers with "scrip" instead of real money, to keep them enslaved to the company store, instigated discriminatory railroad freight rates so it woud be prohibitively expensive for Southern companies to ship finished goods (textiles, steel) to the north -- or even to other places in the South -- so all it could ship was cheaper, raw goods (which was then turned to finished goods in northern factories, which, of course, sold them at a handsome profit)... 

It's time people realized that the north is not morally or intellectually superior to the South -- not at all.  What the north excels in is greed, hypocrisy, exploitation of others and falsification.

More Lies and Insults, Flogger Style

On Sunday, February 24 -- four days ago -- I noted the influence of group-think on flogger attitudes toward Southern heritage supporters.  Specifically, I wrote:
Corey's question to me betrays his leftist, "group-think" mentality, which attempts to categorize people, lump them together in groups, and then make everyone in the group mental clones who all think alike and believe alike. Thus, if you can find something to smear one member with, it can be applied to the group as a whole. So if you're a supporter, defender or advocate of Southern heritage, you think exactly like all the other supporters, defenders and advocates of Southern heritage.  It simply cannot be acknowledged by these floggers that a variety of thought -- and some disagreement -- exists within the Southern heritage community.
And just days afterward, two floggers -- veteran Kevin Levin and newbie Al Mackey -- make blog entries that so marvelously illustrate what I said above, it's almost like I had them made to order.

Let's start with Levin.  First, I must acknowledge that my statement above isn't entirely accurate, especially the last sentence. Oh, it can be acknowledged by floggers that some disagreement exists within the heritage community, but not realistically. When floggers blog about it, they are likely to blow it waaaay out of proportion, which is exactly what Levin has done at Civil War Memory in a post dated February 27. The title reads, "Confederate Heritage Advocates Devour Their Own."

Devour their own? A bit melodramatic, don't you think? Or, as my daddy used to say, in imitation of his mountaineer forebears, "That's high meller drammer."

You can go read it, if you're interested in seeing the extremes he goes to in order to mischaracterize the situation. The title alone is hyperbole so extreme it qualifies more as an outright fabrication than as hyperbole.

About the situation itself, Levin makes some ass-umptions, as he is prone to do.

"No one on this page seems to know why the Covington (Tenn.) chapter of the SCV chose to remove the battle flag from the cemetery in favor of a First National Flag and as far as I can tell no one has bothered to ask," he sez. 

Well, maybe you have to look farther than a thread on a Facebook page, Levin. Not every action or aspect of a situation gets posted about and commented on, ya know?  (Shades of Brooks Simpson, who thinks if he doesn't know about it -- particularly if nobody has posted about it on his blog's comment threads -- it never happened.)

I wonder if floggers like Levin and Simpson really believe that what they know about any given subject is the sum-total of knowledge about it...  I dunno, folks, but that seems to me to be skirting very close to megalomania...

In this case, in the very post that started the thread, Billy Bearden wrote that SCV officer Wallace "removed the Battleflag from the pole flying over the graves of Confederate Veterans and replaced it with a 1st National because he didn't want to offend anyone..." Billy ends the comment by noting that "no one had complained" about being offended by the battle flag. 

Do you suppose Kevin was so obsessed with finding something in the thread that he could bellyache about on his blog that he completely missed the fact that, yes, Billy reported exactly why Wallace replaced the battle flag?

Levin then takes a couple of guesses about the motives of those who replaced the battle flag, ending with, "Ultimately, what is more important, debating the divisive history of the flag or sharing the stories of the men the SCV are committed to honoring and a time when that project is under assault?"

First, why should discussions of the flag's history be prioritized out of the debate? It's under attack, Mr. Levin. That necessitates a defense. We know you'd like the defense to end, and the flag removers to win, but -- surprise! --  Southern heritage advocates don't see that issue the way you do.

Besides, the same people who want to eradicate displays of the flag also wish to eradicate all positive commemorations of Confederate soldiers -- and perhaps all memory of them -- from the cultural landscape and from American memory. Defending the flag is itself a defense of the men who fought beneath it.

Kevin then mentions, "What I find fascinating, however, is just the sheer nastiness of the comments that follow as well as the ones that didn’t make it into the pic." I'll deal with that later in this post, although I can tell you right now, for sheer nastiness, nothing in that entire Facebook thread even comes close to the toxic slime about Southern Heritage folks you find in comment threads by floggers and their followers.

Levin ends with this sentence, which he no doubt thinks is a fitting stinger to wrap up with: "Billy Bearden is fond of pointing to the NAACP as the most significant threat to Confederate heritage.  It’s clear to me that the problem is much closer to home."

What's clear to Kevin, though, is probably more a product of his imagination and wishful thinking and than it is reality.

The second flogger post I want to discuss was made by Al Mackey, with the title, "They Only Love Their Ancestors Who Fought For Slavery." This is apparently a reference to, or follow up of, an earlier Mackey post dated February 15 and titled, "Do They Love Their Ancestors Or Not?" which I will deal with in a separate blog post.

What I want to note is how marvelously Mackey illustrates my point: "Thus, if you can find something to smear one member with, it can be applied to the group as a whole."  Note that in Mackey's blog title, the"They" (plural) he mentions is actually one (that's one, (1), o-n-e) individual.  Mackey sez, "Here we have an instance of an individual who 'loathes' one of his ancestors who fought against treason."

Actually, the individual mentions nothing about loathing an ancestor "who fought against treason." In fact, he explains that in fighting against the Confederacy, this ancestor was committing treason, not fighting against it.  So basically, Mackey is lying.

But let's get to that "sheer nastiness" part.

In my February 24th post already mention, I also wrote that "...disparaging the intelligence of people they disagree with is a front-line attack of the flogger mentality." And I listed some of the choice name-calling and intelligence insulting that flows so easily from the keyboards of these haters.  Here are some new ones, from these two new articles under discussion:

Levin: Once in a while he [Bearden] offers something worthy of reflection, but this clearly represents a walk off the deep end.

Mackey: If this clown didn’t have an IQ less than the outside air temperature ...and ... he can spout such moronic idiocy ...

Mackey is actually the one walking off the deep end, going beyond the usual odious insults to this individual's intelligence, and accusing him -- out of the clear blue -- of supporting terrorism:  "He probably cheers for the Taliban, too.  I wonder if he was one of those who were dancing in the street on 9/11." 

And I wonder who he's talking about. I don't remember reports of anyone in the USA dancing in the streets on 9/11.  There were some reports of Palestinians celebrating the attacks, but the claim is disputed.  So who is Mackey hallucinating about, just so he can insult someone he disagrees with?

We see the mentality of the floggers clearly in posts like this. They think it's good and right to lie about people's intelligence just because those people see the civil war differently than they do; and its okay to lie about the same people and imply that they support terrorists jihadists, for the same reason.

They tell these lies about people they don't know.  All they know of these folks is what they find in a handful of sentences on the Internet -- and they have to LIE about that. 

I have speculated before on the cause of such hatred exhibited by floggers and their comment thread followers, so I'll forego that this time.  I will only observe ... these are not nice people, folks. They're liars and mini-totalitarians...  You have to hope they confine their hatred to discussions of the civil war, and never get any real power over other people...

Sunday, February 24, 2013

What's Behind Flogger Name-calling

Because I posted about Al Mackey's flogger practice of name calling that denigrates people's intelligence, Corey Meyer sends me this comment, "So Connie do you agree the (sic) Hitler and Lincoln a (sic) virtually the same as the secessionist claimed and that Lincoln did not extend liberties to certain people?"

Although I posted an answer in the comments, responding to that question is worth a blog post all its own.

First, what difference does it make whether I agree or disagree? That doesn't change the facts of what I wrote about Mackey and the floggers -  that disparaging the intelligence of people they disagree with is a front-line attack of the flogger mentality.

It doesn't change the fact that they throw around terms like "lunacy" and "clown" and "idiots" -- or, in the case of Eric Wittenberg and his sycophants, "galactically stupid" and "troglodytes" and "knuckle-draggers." And we can't forget Brooks D. Simpson and the Crossroads crew -- "rampant idiocy" and "ignorant morons" and "cretins" -- and that's just a tiny sampling.

Corey's question to me betrays his leftist, "group-think" mentality, which attempts to categorize people, lump them together in groups, and then make everyone in the group mental clones who all think alike and believe alike. Thus, if you can find something to smear one member with, it can be applied to the group as a whole. So if you're a supporter, defender or advocate of Southern heritage, you think exactly like all the other supporters, defenders and advocates of Southern heritage.  It simply cannot be acknowledged by these floggers that a variety of thought -- and some disagreement -- exists within the Southern heritage community.

The same assumptions are evident in Brooks Simpson's attempt to smear groups like the Southern Heritage Preservation group, with the statements of one or two members, and then to expand the smear to all Southern heritage advocates.  He occasionally attempts to create negative significance of the fact that someone in the group didn't make a comment -- and then attributes the "ominousness" of the silence to the whole group, and from them to the whole Southern heritage community.

Andy Hall's take is a bit different. He apparently thinks you're a fake Southern heritage advocate unless you think and believe exactly like "real Confederates." Although when he quotes a "real Confederate" he doesn't say how he knows everyone in the Confederacy held the identical thought or belief.  At least, I've never encountered such substantiation from him.

You see, leftism despises individuality and it shows up all kinds of ways. Among these floggers it is an intolerance for anyone who arrived at their views of history in any way but the accepted one -- that is, via the teachings of professional educators who all churn out classrooms full of mental clones...

In a broader application, you see it in Obama's and the feds' eyeing -- drooling over -- private pensions. They'd like nothing more than for the feds to sieze this enormous pool of money... Why? To help the totally-broke and deeply-in-debt federal government? That may be the excuse, but what lies behind it is the leftist/progressive/socialist mentality that cannot stand the idea that people are individuals rather than undifferentiated unit of the hive -- and they especially can't stand for the individual to OWN something, like a private pension, that not everyone has.  In the most extreme view, socialists believe no individual should own anything. The state should own everything, and administer it for everyone else.

But back to the floggers. Apparently the only thing they love more than portraying people they disagree with as morons is portraying them as ... you guessed it ... racists. This is why Brooks D. Simpson attempts to associate me with Brad Griffin (Hunter Wallace) and why he puts the false idea that if you haven't denied something on his blog then you support it. That is the reason for Corey posting about it time and again at his blog, such as his recent post about modern Southern Nationalists (which really has nothing to do with his purported interest, the civil war).

The obsession with racism and with denigrating people's intelligence clearly (to borrow a Levin/Hallism) demonstrates that their interest in the "civil war" is to use it as a tool for evilizing or stupidizing people they don't like.

Agree? Or Disagree?


Massive Cognitive Dissonance of the Floggers

(Well. of one of them anyway...)

Rookie Flogger Al Mackey is ketchin' on to what it takes to be a flogger in good standing, real fast. Disparage the intelligence of people you disagree with.  Throw around terms like "lunacy" and "clown" and "idiots".  Real intellectual, ain't it?

He used these words to describe a video on the Daily Show Website here ...

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-february-21-2013/tyranny---texas?xrs=playershare_twitter

... and asks, "...I really wonder if these folks are serious or if they’re intentionally part of the gag."

Gag? What's completely lost on Mackey is that the Daily Show is leftist comedy -- that is, leftist hatred with an overlay of ridicule that passes for comedy in the leftist mentality. Stewart and the producers of that show craft it to ridicule people they politically and culturally disagree with, and look down on. I can't believe Mackey doesn't know this.

But then, this is the guy who "covered" Julia Ward Howe's hoop-skirted rear end after her admission that she and her fellow abolitionists wanted to "blow up the union" by explaining that what she really wanted was for the pieces of the union, after the great kablooie, to reassemble themselves exactly as before -- but minus slavery...

Once again, we see the massive cognitive dissonance of anti-Confederate floggers....

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Repurposing the Soldier's Home in Virginia?

I received this disturbing information via messenger from Bobby Edwards.
Connie, I spent an hour or so on the phone with our Lee-Jackson Camp SCV Commander yesterday, and he has alerted me of a problem that I know is coming - the Remodeling of the Soldiers' Home for business use by the VMFA instead of Historical use by the Commonwealth of Va. The appropriation for two and 1/2 million has been included in a House and Senate version, and will go to the Governor's office for his review and possible amendments.

We failed to get the legislators to make the grounds a historic landmark, and now the Governor is the one who may have some impact. Although he did not issue a Confederate History month in April, the possibility that he may still name the Soldiers' Home building a Historic attraction and use it in the Commonwealth's promotional efforts to draw visitors in the remaining Sesquicentennial. I am trying to form at a minimum - a letter writing campaign to the Governor for him to treat the Soldiers' Home, with the proper historiography that it deserves. Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

It's a shame that Richmond fails to promote or advantage themselves of their rich history, and especially since the history of the Soldiers' Home is also the history of many Union Veterans, who contributed so freely to make the Soldiers' Home possible, and met the Confederates on the grounds to bind up the wounds of the Country. Ours is a compelling story of reunification that needs to be told to the Country. We are a National Story.

By identifying the grounds as "National Reunification" - the Confederate Battle Flag, and the current American Flag could be included in a display of flags at the Soldiers' Home - And, as a Welcome Center telling our story would be a powerful story for Virginia.

Bobby Edwards
Lt. Commander, Lee-Jackson Camp No. 1
 Let's all join the letter campaign to Governor Bob McDonnell.  A contact form can be found on the Governor's official website, here: http://www.governor.virginia.gov/AboutTheGovernor/contactGovernor.cfm

You can also mail him via the US Postal Service at this address, or call/fax his office at the following numbers:
Mailing Address:
Office of the Governor
Patrick Henry Building, 3rd Floor
1111 East Broad Street
Richmond, Virginia 23219
view directions to the office...
Phone Numbers:
Office: (804) 786-2211
Fax: (804) 371-6351
TTY/TDD (For the deaf or hard-of-hearing):
1-800-828-1120, or 711

We know the VMFA (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) is not friendly to Confederate heritage. If left in their hands, the Soldier's Home will be stripped of its history and who knows what purpose they'll put it to.  

Sunday, February 17, 2013

When Is Reviewing an Unread Book Okay?

When it's done by somebody who criticizes others for doing exactly the same thing he's doing.
"... it is amusing that the author of this blog entry admits he hasn’t read the book …  and I think you can judge for yourself someone who assesses a book he hasn’t even read."  ~Brooks D. Simpson, Crossroads Blog, February 17, 2013
Judge for myself? You bet I can...

I note the following "assessments" made by Brooks Simpson about my books (and, not incidentally, about me), which "he hasn't even read...."
*Observing the color of the cast of characters in Connie’s writing (which she admitted, because I haven’t read what she’s written … I’ve just read what she writes about what she has written) is just that: an observation. That you may take it as a criticism is your business. However, it is a bit of a stretch to say one is writing “pro-southern” literature if the South one imagines lacks people of color.
(Note: Not a good idea to judge a book by its cover or your own bigotry.
Men as victims, falsely accused. Evil feminists. In Chastain’s fictional world, women are the protagonists, men simply objects upon which women project much (good or evil). And there’s a strong sexual undercurrent in them, sometimes veering toward the strange, as in the oft-promised Sweet Southern Boys.
(Note: in Southern Man, Troy Stevenson -- a man, a real man, not a formulaic romance hero -- is the protagonist, the male lead, the real hero, the focus, the central element and the story's raison d'etre, from Prologue to Epilogue...)
No wonder your “books” have not captured the imagination of the Southern heritage folks. They’re simply not very good.
As for your writings... Perhaps you aren’t able to keep track of your ceaseless efforts to self-promote your self-published novels, which tend toward the trashy.
....it appears that Ms. Chastain is not above showing us that she’s quite familiar with some sexually suggestive sites (which may explain some of the passages in her publications).
Apparently segregation (or outright exclusion) reigns supreme in her fictional world, too....
*(Read more about the deceit-creep of his "observations" about my characters, here: The Anti-Racist Smear MentalityI've also blogged about his  "assessments" of my books, which he hasn't read, here: Bigotry Against White Southerners On Display.)

It's interesting that people who have read my books do very different "assessments" of them. Of course, the readers of my novels tend to be Christians, or people whose worldview has been shaped by Christianity. I suspect -- no, I'm convinced -- that makes a world of difference...

Although there are only a few reviews of my books posted at Amazon.com, none of them are negative or overly critical.  I've also been contacted directly by people who've read my books, and who had very positive things to say about them.

Simpson's implication that sexually suggestive websites have influenced my stories, and his statement that my novels "tend to be trashy" makes me wonder if he considers sex to be dirty or trashy. Of course, it can be --  but that doesn't mean any novel with sexual themes is trashy.

Among other things, Southern Man is an indictment of the sexual revolution, a fictional look at the destructiveness it rained down on individuals and the culture. Another theme of the story is how sexual fidelity strengthens and sweetens marriage.

As for trashy -- yes, a false accusation can trash a man's reputation ... and, in fact, his whole life -- but I don't think that what Simpson meant. One wonders if he rooted for Mike Nifong, or if he agrees with feminist Catherine Comins, who argued (in Time Magazine in 2001) that men who are unjustly accused can sometimes gain from the experience.
"They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions."
Bizarre reasoning, isn't it? I mean, if men can "gain" from the hell of false accusation which initiates a process of self-exploration, maybe the entire male sex would benefit from being dragged through the false-accusation nightmare. Why go through the trouble of other methods of self-exploration -- keeping a journal, assessing your strengths and weaknesses, learning new skills, developing others?  Just get yourself falsely accused of rape or sexual harassment and reach new heights of spiritual awareness and human potential...

But if this bizarre method is actually beneficial, who is to say rape isn't an experience a woman can sometimes gain from?
Yes, they have a lot of pain, but is it pain they should necessarily be spared, if, ideally, it starts a process of self-exploration? 'Did I bring this on myself? Did I ask for it? Or is it simple get-evenism?' Those are good questions.
For the irony impaired, the comment above is irony. Before you start moon-baying, teeth-gnashing, throwing ashes on your head and screeching to every one that Connie Chastain says women can benefit from being raped, look up irony at Dictionary.com   That is the difference between my statement and Comin's. Mine is irony, hers is not.

In any case, over the upcoming days and weeks, I'll be blogging at 180 Degrees True South (which is undergoing a gradual revamping) about the "trashiness" of my novels -- for those who are interested in the truth....
________________________
Comp image copyright by F1 Online.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Monday, February 11, 2013

I Reckon Liars -- At Both Extremes -- Just Gotta Lie

Despite my requests that he stop posting about me and linking to Backsass on his odious blog, Brad Griffin has done it again. This time, he has assigned a completely false motive to my comments on the League FB page, and used that as an excuse and a jumping off place to post a rant about subjects dear to whatever passes for a heart with him, but that have nothing to do with me or my comments on the FB thread.

I have to wonder why he needs me as an excuse to rant and rave about black folks. And I again have to wonder why my presence on a little niche blog is so important to him that he has to post repeatedly about me...  It might be interesting to know what he gets out of it ... but that would require thinking about him a whole lot more than I want to do.

Griffin, please. LEAVE ME ALONE.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Cookin' the Books on Slave Ownership

A couple of years ago, I put on Facebook a question about the number of  slave owners in the South in the mid-19th century. I had found online several genealogy sites with this information: "The last U.S. census slave schedules were enumerated by County in 1860 and included 393,975 named persons holding 3,950,546 unnamed slaves, or an average of about ten slaves per holder."  It was the same word for word on each site, and appeared to be a copy-paste.

According to THIS TABLE, in 1860, the free population of the Southern states (those that would form the Confederacy) totaled 5,447,220 -- meaning that the number of slave holders would make up about 13 - 14 percent of the population. I noted that critics of the South frequently waved away the number of slave owners -- people who actually held title to slaves -- and focused instead of slave holding families.

If memory serves, I linked to this page  http://www.civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm and asked fellow Facebookers if they knew how the slave holding family figures were calculated.

Out of the blue, I got a private message from James Epperson, the owner of that site: 
Ms. Chastain, if you go to the website in question, click on a year (say, 1860), you will get a list of hot links for variables, one of which is "slaveholders," and this is how I arrived at my figures. I no longer see an obvious way to look at individual states, but I assure you that option existed when I constructed the table.
I asked how the number of slave holding families was calculated, and he replied,  
Each slaveholder in the census is assumed to represent his own family. Some of these would be individuals, some would be extended families (patriarch/ matriarch, children and spouses, etc.), some would be nuclear families. I don't see a problem with this.
Me:
It seems to me that a figure of 26% looks much more weighty and impressive than 13.8% -- particularly to people who won't take the time to discern the difference in what the two figures represent. The term "slave holding families" could be construed by some to mean all members of the family were slaveholders; to such people, that means 26% of the Southern population, not 13.8%, owned slaves. I think it gives a false impression.
Him:
 The point of the exercise is to discern how many people were affected by or benefitting (sic) from or exposed to slavery. It would be more than the individuals who legally owned the slaves---it would include their wives and children. I am not the originator of this, it is the standard metric used by historians.
Ah, yes.  Historians.

So people who didn't own slaves can be considered the same as if they did -- and thus swell the number of Southern white slave owners (or, at least, appear to swell them).

Aside from having a problem with counting family members as slave owners who likely were not, I have a real problem with the point of the exercise being to find out how many people were affected by or benefiting from or exposed to slavery -- but ignoring a great many people who fit that criteria.

If that's the point, "slave holders" would include nearly everyone in the New England maritime industry, whose ships carried cargoes, and whose crews were paid to carry cargoes,  of slave-grown cotton to markets in Europe. It would include New England's textile mill owners and workers who milled Southern, slave-grown cotton   It would include northern bankers and their employees, which financed the purchase of slaves and plantations. It would include northern insurance companies that made profits insuring slaves....

They were all affected by, benefited from and were (indirectly) exposed to slavery. If the point of the exercise is to discern how many people benefited from slavery, why is the benefit to these northerners ignored? 

We know why, don't we? Because acknowledging it would be of absolutely no use in demonizing white Southerners. 

_________________________________
Illustrations by C. Ward

What'sa Matter? Cat Got Your Tongue?

When is racism a good and positive thing?

When it is leftist racism against whites.

Over the past decade or so, proSoutherners have increased their attention to the increasing phenomena of racism against white Southerners, and the cleansing of Southern culture, particularly of its Confederate history.

A decade ago, proSoutherners warned the rest of the country that they were not immune to, nor protected from, the same sort of criticism.  We have since seen displaying the U.S. flag attacked at American schools, the playing of the national anthem outlawed, and other manifestations of the same

Michael Cushman at the Southern Nationalist Network and other proSoutherners have begun to call attention to not only anti-white, anti-Southern racism, but to the genocidal component of that racism -- the efforts to replace white Southerners themselves with a different demographic.

We see this happening in other parts of the country -- California, particularly -- and in the country as a whole. The objections of white people to the process of being replaced is, of course, labeled racism by the usual suspects on the left.

Interestingly, though, floggers and their followers, who do so love to evilize white Southerners, have been strangely silent on the demographic replacement -- a form of genocide -- of said white Southerners.

What'sa matter, y'all?  Cat got y'all's tongue?

______________________________
Image: Composited with photos from Dreamstime.com and the public domain.

We Didn't Start the Fire

**UPDATE**  **UPDATE**  **UPDATE**  **UPDATE** 

Brad Griffin's methodology for lying (not unlike Brooks Simpson's) is on display at his blog. After I specifically requested, twice, that Griffin not post about me on his blog, or link to Backsass, he insists on doing so. One wonders why he thinks my little blog is worthy of that sort of attack and promotion. I suspect he is still PO'd  -- and continuing to throw a really long tantrum -- because I wouldn't approve his membership request in one of my Facebook groups. In his own way, he's as small and petty as Simpson.  Both Griffin and the floggers are self-appointed thought cops who believe everyone should be bullied into seeing things their way.

In any case, in a comment following his latest post about me, he writes,
Before she was banned from the LoS Facebook group, Chastain went into a long rant about “shacks and hovels” in Fort Deposit in Lowndes County that haven’t existed in decades. The brain tend to ossify once it reaches a certain age.

That deliberately doesn't tell you what my purpose was in bringing up those past living conditions in that place, although I made it clear in my Facebook comment. Anybody with average reading comprehension skills could understand my purpose, and how my questions about the subject related to the future.  So the comment pasted above is deliberate deceitfulness on Griffin's part; and his comments in the thread that resulted from my question were chock full of the same kind of lies. The brain of habitual liars renders them unwilling to distinguish truth from falsehood, so that nothing they say can be trusted.

**END OF UPDATE**  

Brad "Hunter Wallace" Griffin says, 
"The Rainbow Confederates who “strongly disagree” with “official government segregation or any other kind of oppression” are responsible for creating the cultural conditions that empowered the blacks who have since gratefully returned the favor by using their political power to displace Whites in literally every major Southern metro area (most spectacularly in Memphis and Birmingham) and to attack Confederate symbolism from one end of the South to the other."
That, of course, is not true. First, there's no such thing as Rainbow Confederates and second, the cultural conditions that empowered blacks to attack Confederate symbolism were not created by disagreeing with official government oppression.

If Griffin's very simplistic view of causes and effects ("Baby Boomers done it!") is very widespread among Millennials, that means they are far less capable of preserving Southern heritage than the Baby Boomers he decries. In fact,he is so obsessed with one thing -- it apparently defines the whole world and all of existence for him --  he seems absolutely clueless about what heritage preservation (and restoration) will require. Fortunately, I don't think his myopic and clueless views are all that prevalent among Generation Y, so there's hope yet.

I have requested a second time that he refrain from linking to my blog or mentioning me in his blog. I don't expect he will honor my request. I know better than to expect dishonorable people to behave honorably....  Regardless, I don't have time to mess with him anymore. I'm busy.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Comment-Bot Anger Is So Delicious!

 **UPDATE TWO **  **UPDATE TWO**  **UPDATE TWO** 
  
Rob "Tu Quoque" Bakur has chimed in at Crossroads with, 
 "it’s funny. She’s using “Discover the Networks.org,” a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center as proof of the alleged “damage” to blacks that integration wrought. This is an organization/person that Hunter Wallace is also familiar with. http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2009/12/05/my-awakening/
Wouldn't you just love to know the reasoning behind Rob's thinking that this is funny? Presumably, this is a lame attempt to follow the SPLC's tired and mendacious "links and ties" method of smearing people by association. But it takes a leap of logic light-years in length to create some sort of association between two individuals just because they happen to visit and reference the same website.

It also requires tunnel vision; it requires NOT noticing that Horowitz's website is very well-known and draws many visitors; I wonder if Bakur also finds it "funny" that the leftwingers at Media Matters are familiar with (obsessed with, atcually) Horowitz's Discover the Networks and Freedom Center. 

In case he's tempted to try linking-and-tying me to Media Matters simply because we're both familiar with Horowitz's database -- which makes as much sense as linking-and-tying me to Griffin for the same reason --  let me head that off here and now. I ain't no "progressive," Rob, and I'm a counter-jihadist, bigtime. I have no sympathy with, and no ties to, Media Matters or any other group or individual who sucks up to leftism and/or radical Islam. Capisce?

Folks, here is yet another example of these people's willingness to assassinate their own brains in order to make (or attempt to make) someone they don't like look bad. Bizarre, isn't it?

**UPDATE**  **UPDATE**  **UPDATE**

Ah, Simpson, the humor in my blog posts is not unintentional. Perhaps it seems that way to you sensahuma-impaired folks...  But not all of it is humorous. I think it's appalling that you'd characterize the references to the tragically damaging circumstances found in the black community (as a result of leftist influence on civil rights and the war on poverty) to be unintentionally funny. Interesting that you'd give us this glimpse of a side of yourself you haven't revealed before....

I recently commented to Corey Meyer,
 "With us it's not history, it's heritage? With you and your fellow floggers, it's not history, either -- it's a craving to insult and hurt people ... an unquenchable thirst to denigrate others ... an insatiable hunger for the put-down. It's about alleviating your doubts about your own questionable beliefs by lying about others. It's about inflating your own questionable and sagging moral authority by fabricating somebody "worse" than you are. Hardly anything you write is about history....."
The Crossroads comment thread I'm chronicling here is a marvelous example of the thirst to denigrate, the hunger for the put down. Don't go looking for history there, folks. That is the last thing on their minds.

James Epperson answered Simpson's question, "Guess who said this?" with "I’m thinking Connie or Eddie Inman"

Simpson's reply: "Mr. Inman’s very good at cherry-picking, cutting, and pasting, often in highly selective ways, but when left to his own devices, he’s not nearly that articulate."

An unquenchable thirst to denigrate, an insatiable hunger for the put down... and not a syllable of "history " to be found. Why does Simpson hate Mr. Inman? Simply because the latter views history and the war differently? Oh, that's a great reason.

Earlier, Simpson posted, 
"Over at Occidental Dissent, Hunter Wallace admits that the author of the quote in question might just be coming around to his view of the world after all. Of course, I believe that was always the case, and the only reason the author’s hiding her true sentiments (and not very well) is because she needs to sell a few books." 
Certain folks rarely ever say, state, or write anything, in Simpson's view. They "admit". Sometimes they "freely admit." This is manipulative terminology designed to convey the idea that the "admitter" has been hiding, obfuscating, perhaps even lying  And when Simpson uses that term, you can pretty much count on it that he's fixing to let rip a lie that will rattle the windows. Only it's his lie, not the "admitter's".  This time, he actually issues the disclaimer "I believe" before lying but that amounts to very little in the way of keister-covering.

I'm not "coming around" to Brad Griffin's world view. Far from it. So either Simpson is lying, or else he is woefully lacking in cognition and gumption. I don't like to comment on the intelligence (or lack thereof) displayed by critics and fault-finders like Simpson -- it's too much like what they do. Still, when people write things like Simpson does, you have to at least consider it sometimes. How can a person of reasonable intelligence NOT see the difference between what Griffin writes and what I write?  Between OD and Backsass?

Regarding his claim that my "true sentiments" are the same as Brad Griffin's world view, I have to repeat what I've said about Simpson before: You'd have to be incredibly stupid or maliciously dishonest to come to that conclusion -- and while I may wonder whether the perfesser's book learning has somehow atrophied his common sense, I don't think he's incredibly stupid.  That leaves --  yep -- maliciously dishonest."

**END OF UPDATE**
___________________________________________


The oh-so-focused-on-civil-war-history comment-thread bots at Simpson's Crossroads are throwing hissy fits because of this passage in my most recent Clowns and Jokers post, which Simpson (because HE is also soooo devoted to history) posted on his blog:
... I strongly disagree with the notion of official government segregation or any other kind of oppression, of blacks (or anyone else) in an independent South.

But because I believe government forced segregation/oppression was/is/would be wrong does not mean I approve of the the civil rights movement as it was orchestrated by leftist leaders and culture changers. Because not only was its purpose to tear down the existing culture, which was perceived as the white man's world -- it was also horribly damaging for blacks. 
True to his history of deviousness, he purposely left out this link, which starkly documents the horrible damage::

LEFT'S WAR ON MINORITIES, THE POOR, & WORKING AMERICANS

Of course, there's no guarantee that he or his myrmidons would follow the link if he'd posted it -- and certainly they would not do their own investigation to see if their concept of the overwhelmingly good effects of the civil rights/war on poverty era is accurate.

Mark Somebody offers an unnecessary translation of my comment, as if there's something about it requiring translation.  There isn't of course. My meaning is perfectly clear. The purpose of Mark's "translation," then, is to (a) lie about what I said by putting his false meaning on it or (b) show his own prejudice when he interprets something written by someone he doesn't like.

Then we have this from R.E. Watson, showing his veneration for history:
Yup, that was Connie ! I did make the mistake of reading several of the entries and can only conclude that she is out of her ever luvin mind ! Maybe a day job would help. That would give her something to do besides writing nonsensical blog posts before they send her back to the institution for the night. It’s a good thing she uses a keyboard. A person can hurt themselves with sharp objects like pens and pencils.
Here's another "translation" from another history-lover -- Will Hickox -- who, like Mark, rejects what I actually said in favor of his own lies about it:
“Sure, the government (not white society) was a little rough on our blacks, but why did those pinko agitators have to stir ‘em up and make ‘em demand rights? Clearly, we knew what was good for our blacks better than they knew themselves.” White Southern paternalism is alive, if not well.
Then we have cc2001 weighing in -- you know, the one who extolls geriatric ex-Nazi soldiers.  She (presumably she's a she) says,
"By coincidence I watched The Loving Story on HBO OnDemand last night. It only took 9 years from the time they were dragged from their bed in the middle of the night and thrown into jail for their case to be resolved by the US Supreme Court. My state of VA fought them tooth and nail. Ms Chastain may feel “culture changers” have gone too far. But that the Lovings right to be wed was actually questioned in the radical 60′s astounded me. Maybe leftists wouldn’t get all the attention for social issues if we average folks stepped up to the plate more often."
How marvelously narrowly focused cc2001 is.  Stack the Lovings' story up against the 78% out-of-wedlock birth rate for the black community and all it entails. Children from single parent homes are among the most at-risk demographic in the former United States and the reason is well known.  But who cares about the lives of hopelessness and horror millions of kids must endure, compared to being able to marry whoever you want! This, in an era when about 70% of black mothers exhibit astounding indifference to marriage by remaining unmarried to any of the fathers of their children...

As William Raspberry noted eight years ago (and Daniel Patrick Moynihan several decades ago):
"Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing its children (boys especially, but increasingly girls as well) to school failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, and to an intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle. The culprit, the ministers (led by the Rev. Eugene Rivers III of Boston, president of the Seymour Institute) agreed, is the decline of marriage." Raspberry continues, "When Moynihan issued his controversial study, roughly a quarter of black babies were born out of wedlock; moreover, it was largely a low-income phenomenon. The proportion now tops two-thirds, with little prospect of significant decline, and has moved up the socioeconomic scale." 
Read more here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/24/AR2005072401115.html

This means is that the enormous increase in fatherless black families are a civil rights/war on poverty era phenomenon.

It is astounding to me that people sooo focused on the "split up" of black families by slavery turn a completely blind eye and a callous disregard to the disintegration of the black family the last half of the 20th century in the former USA, and the almost total nonexistence of fathers in black households, since the civil rights/war on poverty era began....

Moving along, somebody named Rob Wick notes,
"it was also horribly damaging for blacks.”

As opposed to lynching and murder. You fully expect her to say “I’m not prejudiced. Some of my best friends are…”
Lynching and murder, huh?  As Walter Williams has noted,
"According to a Tuskegee Institute study, between the years 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites. Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94 percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks..."

http://cnsnews.com/blog/walter-e-williams/should-black-people-tolerate
What that means is that a little better than every six months or so, the number of blacks murdered by blacks equals the number of white on black lynchings that took place over almost ninety years.... Are these black victims of blacks any less dead than those 3,446 lynching victims? Do you suppose at their funerals, their family members can take comfort in knowing they were shot by blacks instead of being lynched by whites?

I don't expect any of Simpson's comment bots to read Victims of the Left: Black Americans.
The Table of Cntents will give you a clue why:

1) How the Left Created Black Victimology and Black Rejection of American Values
2) Affirmative Action: How the Left Has Harmed Blacks through the Bigotry of Low Expectations
3) How the Left Consigns Blacks to Substandard Education
4) How the War on Poverty Devastated the Black Community
5) How the Failed Crusade of “Sex Education” Harmed the Black Community
6) The Crime Wave that Has Decimated Black America
7) How Blacks Have Been Victimized by Leftist Policies Concerning AIDS
8) How the Left Demands Black Conformity of Thought
9) Notes

These are things that haters of whites (especially haters of white Southerners) simply don't want to know....  It's a lot more fun to put down people who are simply telling the truth in order to give yourself the fake warm fuzzies of fake moral superiority, and thus not have to face your own shortcomings, or those of your ideology, mindset and worldview....

Viewing the whole of something just isn't their way. If it's something they don't like, they see only the negatives (i.e., Forrest, the Confederacy, Southern heritage, Virginia flaggers, white Southerners, etc).  If it's something they do like, they see only the positives and screen out the negatives. This is why they gloss over the north's armpit deep involvement in slavery, even after abolition in the northern states, and why they refuse to see the negative impact of civil rights/war on poverty, etc., on blacks. The politically correct lure of showcasing whitey's evil is just too mesmerizing to resist....

______________________
Photo by imagerymajestic via freedigitalphotos.net

Friday, February 8, 2013

How the PC-bound Mind Works...

Kevin Levin writes, 
"... it [a possible KKK rally protesting Memphis park re-naming] will present something of a conundrum for Southern heritage advocates who believe that Forrest’s significance to American history can and ought to be understood independently of his role as a wealthy slave trader, commanding general at Fort Pillow and early organizer of the Klan."
What hooey. What utter shuck.

That statement gives us a clear, stark look at two things.  First, the academic mindset revealed by scholarly writing so ably described by Rudolph Flesch in How to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively. And, second, how a mindset bound by the chains of political correctness works.

There is absolutely nothing the KKK does that should present a conundrum for Southern heritage advocates. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But perhaps Levin doesn't really mean conundrum (i.e., riddle, puzzle). Judging by the rest of his post, perhaps what he means is that the KKK rally, if it occurs, could be something of a sticky wicket -- i.e., an embarrassing or tricky situation -- for Southern heritage advocates.

Of course, it isn't that, either.  Southern heritage is not responsible for what the KKK does, and what the KKK does in no way reflects upon Southern heritage. What we have here is yet another flogger attempt to evilize heritage advocates by association -- by implying there's some sort of similarity or association between Southern heritage and the KKK.

I have not run across any Southern heritage claims that Forrest's "significance to American history can and ought to be understood independently of his role as a wealthy slave trader, commanding general at Fort Pillow and early organizer of the Klan--" That is yet another flogger mis-portrayal.  (They get tiresome after a while, don't they?)

The Southern heritage claims I'm familiar with are those that say Forrest's positive contributions should not be ignored, suppressed or lied about -- and the aspects of his life presented as reprehensible by the ususal-suspect critics should be presented much more truthfully.

Where Forrest is concerned, floggers need to stop presenting the worst as the whole, which is one of their primary approaches to anything Southern and Confederate -- including Forrest. Yes, whether a slave trader was compassionate or cruel is significant. Extremely so. Just as it is significant whether any person, whoever they are, whatever they do, is compassionate or cruel.

No, Forrest did not order a massacre at Fort Pillow, and no, a massacre did not occur there.  No, there's no historical documentation that Forrest was an early organizer of the Klan or that his involvement with it was significant -- that he was anything but a figurehead, basically. 

Floggers and other who wish to perpetrate the notion that  Forrest's KKK involvement was monumentally significant are notoriously short on primary historic documentation for it.  At least, they seem extremely reluctant to put it online. Several months ago, in my online quest for information about what Forrest actually did as KKK "leader" netted almost zero information from these anti-heritage folks. Here's kinda how it went:

"What, exactly, was Forrest's involvement with the KKK? What did he do?  What were his deeds/activities?"

"Well, duh! He was the freakin' Grand Wizard!"

"Okay.  What did a Grand Wizard do?  What were his deeds/activities?"

"Can't you READ?  He LED the Klan!"

"And what was involved in leading the KKK?  What ACTIVITIES did he engage in?"

I did manage to find online a couple of quotes from KKK members back then.  James R. Crowe stated, "After the order grew to large numbers we found it necessary to have someone of large experience to command. We chose General Forrest.”  That doesn't sound like he was an "early organizer." It sounds like the KKK was already organized and had grown and needed someone to command it. But that doesn't tell us much about what I'm asking. What Crowe actually tells is what the group did (chose Forrest) -- not what Forrest did after he was chosen. 

Another member of the Klan, an anonymous member (or, at least, not identified online), wrote, "N. B. Forrest of Confederate fame was at our head, and was known as the Grand Wizard. I heard him make a speech in one of our Dens.” 

AT LAST, we have an ACTIVITY on the part of Forrest as Grand Wizard!

He gave a speech.

HE GAVE A SPEECH!


Alas, in the online passage where I found that, there's no mention of what else he did as Grand Wizard.  Not even a hint what the speech was about. Was it, "Treasurer says half of you fellers are behind on your dues. Pay 'em tonight or you're outta here. How do you expect an organization to run without money?"  Or maybe, "Somebody needs to take responsibility for cleaning up before meetings... this place is a mess..." Or maybe, "Everybody circulate the June bake sale sign-up sheet to your wives between now and next month's meeting..."

Pardon my levity, but sometimes Levin does that to me (as do Simpson, Hall, et. al.) 

But back to conundrums and Southern heritage and KKK rallies. Hoping to achieve the same goal does not require aligning oneself with others who have the same goal. I believe pornography should be discouraged, but that doesn't mean I align myself with man-hating feminists who believe pornography should be discouraged.

It is the mind conditioned by PC group-think that attempts to lump together hugely disparate people and/or groups based on one or two similarities....

And don't you love Levin's assumption that "the rest of the country" stands with Memphis on the name change?  There are likely huge numbers of people in the "rest of the country" who (1) don't know who Forrest was, (2) don't know there was a park named for him in Memphis (3) don't know where Memphis is and (4) couldn't find Tennessee on an unlabeled map (or even a labeled one) if you offered 'em money to....

Think I'm joking?  Fewer than 50 percent of those polled in this survey could identify the U.S. states of New York or Ohio on a map. http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1068259.html

We're living in an era when people are "educated" by TV -- and you have Mika Brzezinski picking  Lincoln as her favorite Founding Father. No joke. And you have fewer than half of the college graduates surveyed who could identify George Washington as the general at Yorktown when asked to choose from among him, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee and William T. Sherman.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/10/study-rates-colleges-base_n_1954987.html
 
It looks like history teachers have evidently failed, and failed bigtime, and floggers don't begin to take up the slack. Providing information about history isn't their purpose, anyway. Their purpose is to use a semblance of history to demonize and marginalize people and groups they think are deserving of demonization and marginalization.

Levin ends with this choice tidbit -- "The Klan intends to celebrate its heritage and it is going to be a tough sell to argue that they don’t have history on their side."

So is it suddenly heritage, not history?  Or is it history, not heritage?  Ought to clear that up, Levin, before taking Southern heritage advocates to task over it again....

Oh, Crap. Not Again....

So I'm checking my visitor log today and I see hits to my Memphis post from both Crossroads and Occidental Dissent. 

I don't like visiting Occidental Dissent, and almost never do.  I always feel like I need a shower afterward. However, if Brad "Hunter Wallace/Fade The Butcher/Prozium/Feyd Harkonnen/NjEcTiOn" Griffin is linking to my blog, I want to know what he's saying about me, so I had to hold my nose and stop by.

I found this in his post on the Memphis park name changes:
Having went (sic) out in search of reaction from the Rainbows, I see that even Connie Chastain is starting to realize that these people are anti-Southern and anti-White and that the “Civil Rights Movement” was about “tearing down the white man’s world.” Perhaps this episode will stimulate racial and ethnic consciousness among SCV types?
Well, I've never NOT known that for some people, the the civil rights movement was an opportunity to do what they'd always wanted -- to get rid of what was already there and replace it with something else. The difference between Brad Griffin/Hunter Wallace and myself -- well, one of the differences -- is who we identify as "these people/some people."

For him, they're black people.  For me, they're leftist leaders and culture changers -- people who either helped to create or used the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay movement, the anti-war left, the radical environmentalists, in the war against the existing culture -- such people as Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and his terrorist bunch, the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School, (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, among others), Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, Susan Sontag and countless others.

Wallace/Griffin believes I'm only just now "starting to realize" certain realities about the left because he believed his own lies about me that he has espoused on his blog, Facebook and who knows where else.

He calls me a "Rainbow Confederate" because I strongly disagree with the notion of official government segregation or any other kind of oppression, of blacks (or anyone else) in an independent South.

But because I believe government forced segregation/oppression was/is/would be wrong does not mean I approve of the the civil rights movement as it was orchestrated by leftist leaders and culture changers. Because not only was its purpose to tear down the existing culture, which was perceived as the white man's world -- it was also horribly damaging for blacks.

You can read about the untold damage the left has done to the black community here: LEFT'S WAR ON MINORITIES, THE POOR, & WORKING AMERICANS

Griffin, please, don't link to my blog anymore. I don't suppose you'll honor that request, but I had to make it.

As for Simpson, I don't believe for a New York minute that he believes the lies he tells about me. He knows he's lying and he does it anyway. Here's a sampler from his blog:
Some people are all about heritage, which, as Connie freely admits, she shapes to serve her own personal agenda.

Rather, as she now freely admits, for her it’s a process of picking and choosing what one wants to “honor” ...

Connie freely admits that she could care less about [historical accuracy].

The only “color” in Connie's rainbow is white.

Now continue your stalking (which you admit doing on your blog).

Apparently segregation (or outright exclusion) reigns supreme in her fictional world, too.

Connie speculates about other people because she would like to distract us from her lily-white world 

... she’s a deeply troubled woman who is quite fixated on certain issues and people.
When Simpson writes that somebody "freely admits" something, don't be surprised if a lie follows.  Sentences he begins with "After all..." or "In other words..." are also likely to be, or contain, lies. I have never admitted, freely or otherwise, what he claims I've admitted. These are baldfaced (no pun intended) lies. Anybody is welcomed to try to find such admissions, but I'll tell you right now, you won't find them, because they don't exist, and never have.

Of course, to put it it all in perspective -- it is no doubt best to be caught between these two extremist liars -- I sure wouldn't want to be on the same side with either one of them.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

More on Memphis

--Levin On Memphis--

Kevin Levin writes about Lee Millar re: the Memphis situation:  
It comes down to this: Southern heritage advocates are their own worst enemies.  We can see this clearly at work in last night’s decision on the part of the Memphis City Council to change the names of three parks named in honor of the Confederacy.  Forrest Park is at center stage.  In an interview with a local news reporter, Lee Millar of the Sons of Confederate Veterans had this to say in defense of Forrest:
Forrest was known as a very humane slave trader…. He never split families.
That, my friends, is a morally bankrupt position.  What I find truly startling, however, is that anyone would go ahead and actually make this point on television for public consumption.  Millar certainly deserves some kind of award.  At least H.K. Edgerton decided to leave the costume at home.  Their only hope last night was that the state government would step in with legislation that would make it illegal to change the names of parks named after military leaders.  You gotta love the irony in that.  :-)
Regardless of whether they like it or not, it’s time for Confederate heritage advocates to adopt a new strategy.  No one should have been surprised by the council’s decision, least of all the SCV.  They should have from the beginning jumped on board with a name change that added Ida B. Wells to the park.  Now they stand to lose Forrest completely from the landscape.
And when you say idiotic things about “human slave traders” you deserve to lose it all.
No,  that is NOT what it "comes down to."  And what people "deserve" is not Levin's judgment to make. At best, it is his opinion, and there are lots of people with other opinions about it. But that is how these floggers showcase themselves -- as the arbiters of Southern heritage. They. Are. Not.

Who is surprised by the city council's decision? As I've noted before, this campaign to cleanse the landscape of reminders of the Confederacy has been underway for over a decade. We know about it, Levin, probably better than  you do. We know.
 
Levin's entire post -- his entire approach -- is infused with odious arrogance, just as all the floggers' posts and approaches are. Whether they like it or not, it's time for floggers to can the arrogance, admit that their opinions are just opinions, and to acknowledge that other people's different opinions are just as valid as theirs.

The Flogger Approach:
 Southern Slavery = the Worst Evil In Human History

Here's the flogger approach: In the politically correct former USA, it is implied that the most evil thing that ever happened in human history was Southern slavery -- particularly during the four years the Confederacy existed. School children are indoctrinated with this view. The indoctrination continues in college. It is presented by government, business and industry, Hollywood and the rest of the popular culture, and flogger blogs. Only the Nazi holocaust is allowed to compete with "Confederate slavery" as humankind's worst evil.

The highly duped are all, like, "Yeah, yeah!" in their enthusiasm for that view. But they are likely leftist innocents who don't realize the scope or depth of human evil and the horrors and misery it has caused throughout history (because a lot of it was the result of leftist governments, and that's not acknowledged by the left).

There are things going on right now around the world -- and things that happened throughout the 20th Century -- that makes Southern slavery look like peace, light and goodness by comparison. Some of them are perpetrated by the US government -- an entity whose level of corruption and evil could not begin to even remotely be approached by the Confederate government or its citizens. But this must never, ever be acknowledged by floggers.

There is a picture you sometimes see online of a
man being tortured -- strapped down, sur-
rounded by his tormenters, screaming in agony. It is absolutely haunting in its horror. Not long ago, I saw it wrongly identified as Ambassador Chris Stevens being tortured by Libyans or Al Qaeda or somebody. In fact, it is a photo of torture during Argentina's "Dirty War" from 1976 to 1983 by that country's military dic-
tatorship against suspected political opponents
-- torture that was assisted by the CIA.

Apparently, the US government has never objected much to the torture of its enemies, as Confederate POWs in yankee hell-hole prison camps knew all too well.  The victims in Argentina were identified as enemies, too -- "left-wingers," "communists" -- although it's likely that most were innocent citizens. I abhor communism,  but that doesn't mean I approve of torturing communists -- or anyone else.

Others of us who know about Stalin's purges, the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, Mao's millions of dead, and on and on and on -- well, I won't say we're jaded, exactly. But we know that the presentation of Southern slavery as mankind's most awful sin simply isn't true....

But you will never see floggers acknowledge this kind of evil and horror because it would take something away from their depiction of Confederate slavery as humanity's worst sin (and Southern slaveholders as humanity's worst sinners)...  Perhaps the excuse is that these other examples of evil and horror aren't civil-war related -- but that's why flogger blogs are "memory" and "era" and "other stuff" blogs, so floggers will have a much broader choice of historic material with which to evilize those they wish to evlize, rather than limit themselves to the civil war. And the only folks they wish to evilize are white Southerners, past and present.

We see through the transparent attempts to palm off that meme onto us -- and we see through the transparent people trying to do it....  
 
--Mackey on Memphis--
Oh, Gee, What a Surprise–Not
The Gift That Keeps On Giving is predictably upset about the Memphis City Council’s move to change the names of three parks.  Story here.
There’s nothing worthy of note there, but there is in the nature of some of the reactions–at least this one.
What makes this worthy of note is the link at the posting.  So far I’ve seen no one there protest it.  It’s a link to a site called “Southern Nationalist Network."
Let’s take a look at some items in the article.
“It should be noted that Memphis’s population is now 62% Black and less than 30% White.”  –  Why should we note that?
It always amazes me how willing floggers are to assassinate their own brains -- to play dumb -- in order to portray somebody else "racist." Why should we note that? Well, duh, Mackey. Because politicians in this country, from border to border and coast to coast, at all levels, are eaten up with obsession about race, racial demographics, racial issues, racial concerns, and how they may be exploited politically ... didn't you pay any attention to the recent presidential campaign and election?  Racial minority groups are voting blocs to these leeches -- someone to appease with legislation in exchange for votes, election and/or re-election.
“'New South’ democracy and equality mean that Southern heroes are cast aside while people (such as those who staff the local government) with no regard for the historic Southern identity and culture of the city are allowed to push their anti-Southern and anti-White agenda.” — So then anyone who isn’t a confederate can’t possibly be a “southern hero,” and anyone who’s not white is by definition “anti-South.”  I guess to these folks there can’t be any southerners who are of any race but Caucasians.  Interesting.
I don't always agree with Michael Cushman at the Southern Nationalist Network, and we've had some public disagreements on Facebook. But that doesn't mean I approve of lying about him and what he writes. Ah, nothing in that statement logically leads to your conclusion, Mackey.

Southern heroes who happen to be Confederates are the ones being cast aside by people with an anti-Southern and anti-White agenda. (You will find far fewer Southern heroes of other types -- authors, actors, musical artists, sports stars, etc., -- who are cast aside, particularly when they are leftist suck-ups and demonstrate their own brand of anti-Southern and anti-white attitudes.) Nor is "anti-South" by definition anyone who is not white, and I've never seen Michael, or anyone else, claim that. A lot of white people are anti-South. A lot of white people are anti-White, as well. You are the one defining people's race by their behavior -- not Michael.
Let’s take a look at a couple comments from the loyal readers at the site.
GregFannin-SCV on February 5, 2013 at 9:16 pm
With a large dusky population, what would one expect!
Again, that statement alludes to politicians appeasing racial groups in exchange for being elected, which is what happened in Memphis. BTW, Mackey, "dusky" means "having dark skin, swarthy," a description of African Americans. If it's that word, dusky, bothers you, just apply the term used by indicted-on-21-federal-charges, dusky, swarthy. former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's description of the Crescent City --"Chocolate City"--  to Memphis.  There, there.  All better now?
Jim on February 5, 2013 at 9:22 pm
No doubt with White, Northern Trendy-Lefties egging them on in the background. Too many Southerners ignore this fact. There’s nearly always a Yankee at the bottom of it.
At least one other member of TGTKOG gave the posting a “Like.”
Hmmm.  Why would anyone think neoconfederates are racists?

Why would anyone think that?  Perhaps because they're bigots, like you? So it is considered racist to note the racial politics, the racial political pandering, the racial political appeasement practiced by politicians from one end of the country to the other, but it's not racist for the politicians to do their racial pandering? It's only racist to notice and mention that they're doing it?

Again, as I have written before,
"The obsession to smear others -- particularly with society's witch-hunt issues, of which "racism" is a major one these days -- is sometimes an indicator of a person's feelings of uncertainty about their own morality."
And,
"It's about alleviating your doubts about your own questionable beliefs by lying about others. It's about inflating your own questionable and sagging moral authority by fabricating somebody "worse" than you are."
That is the floggers' MO -- over, under, sideways, down ... backward, forward, square and round.....


_______________________
Image credit: Photo of torture victim in Argentina's Dirty War found numerous places online, unattributed. Mugshots of Levin & Mackey, various internet sites/blogs.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

What's Goin' On ... In Memphis

(Post and comment edited from Facebook)   When the civil rights movement was just getting underway, people said blacks in America just wanted to take their rightful place in society and culture, to take a place at the table that they'd always been denied. Because Americans are basically a fair-minded people, the country agreed that black folks (and women and other minorities) had been denied and it was time to include them.

(The "massive resistance" to desegregation during this period that you sometimes hear about from flogger types and others appears massive when it's the only thing in their camera frame. In most schools, in most counties and municipalities in the South, there was minor to zero resistance and trouble from white students and their parents. You didn't see this on TV at the time, or see it repeated over and over to this day, a la Little Rock, because it is of limited to no use in demonizing white Southerners.)

Well, we saw almost immediately that it wasn't really about adding a leaf to make more room at the table, and pulling up another chair and adding some new dishes to the existing menu. For leftist leaders and culture changers, the civil rights movement was an opportunity to do what they'd always wanted -- to get rid of what was already there and replace it with something else. Not just the food, but the china and silverware ... and the people. They hated what was already there, and the people who had put it there. For them, it was about force... about using the power of government and the courts and the media to force people already at the table get up, give up their chair and their meal...

What's going on in Memphis is NOT about honoring Ida B. Wells -- they could name a new park for her; a new school, a new street, a new anything, if honoring her was the genuine motivation. But it isn't. Getting rid of Nathan Bedford Forrest is the genuine motivation.

In the early 2000s, the campaign to eradicate the Confederate battle flag from public property (starting in South Carolina) included the rhetoric, "We don't care what you do on private property; it is the putting the flag on public property that we object to." So, down the flag came from state houses and other public buildings and from historic flag displays like the one in my town. And up it went on private property.

Well, just listen to the teeth-gnashing and the howls and screeches of protest when large Confederate flags go up on private property beside interstate highways in the South. Look at the treatment that Annie Caddell in S.C. got for putting up a flag **in her own yard.** "We don't care what you do on private property," was obviously yet another Big Lie.

But the privatization of very visible Confederate commemoration has to be done --  massively. If the park is renamed in Memphis, a very large, visible and beautiful new park must be created on private property to honor Forrest. His remains should be moved there and given a magnificent memorial.

And then, Memphis needs to be put under a microscope and monitored constantly, to see how changing the name of the park  "improves" the "quality of life" in that city.

Very, very visible positive reminders of the Confederacy -- and many more of them - must be maintained on private property to counter and neutralize, as much as possible, the ongoing efforts to dishonor and remove reminders of it from publicly owned places. The effort to erase all reminders of the Confederacy from the national consciousness, and all artifacts of it from the Southern landscape must not be allowed to succeed.

See a Facebook responder's comment below videos.

Memphis, Tennessee Elvis Presley
Walking In Memphis Marc Cohn

Communists founded and ran (and still run) the so-called civil rights movement. They did it because they knew that the black community was a perfect lever to "divide and conquer" in this country.

Now, having said that, I believe we must recognize that there was plenty wrong prior to the movement and that if good men of all colors could have come together and worked to do the right thing, the commies never would have had their opportunity -- but we didn't and they did.

Again, having said that, the time has come to stop the eternal effort to use the past as a means of a minority (not just in race but in political ideology) to destroy the rights of the majority (and not just in race). Yes, things were wrong and yes, we failed to act to make them right thus giving an opportunity to our enemies -- who, by the way, are as much an enemy of the black man -- to create what we now have in this country, rule by political correctness. But, sadly, it would seem as if the commies have won. 
So it would appear.

After World War II, when victorious GIs returned home, using technology, methods and inventions developed during the war, they built a new peacetime prosperity for the common folk never before seen in history. They built entire neighborhoods in the suburbs filled with little ranch houses with backyard barbecues and two car garages (with two cars in them) and network of streets and roads connecting them to suburban shopping centers and jobs in the cities. The San Fernando Valley epitomizes that culture.

But there were people who hated the prosperity and optimism of the era and began the job of tearing it down. They would love nothing more than to see the San Fernando Valley and its mirrors across the country turn into third world hell holes. In no small part due to their efforts, the Fabulous Fifties gave way to the Sick Sixties, and the country's and culture's decline has been steady ever since.  The civil rights movement was right in the middle of the decline because, as we now know, a great many blacks have not benefited from that effort, because it was as much about tearing down the "white man's world" as it was about elevating blacks. Ditto the feminism movement, which was less about helping and protecting women and more about hating and getting even with men.

The logical conclusion of the civil rights movement sits in the White House in Washington, D.C.  Barack Hussein Obama's economic jihad on the U.S. economy will finish off the country...  But nobody is going to like what results, not even the people who think that's what they want.  We'll all feel the regret GloZell felt after Obama's first election -- but for very different reasons.

Goodbye, Memphis. Goodbye, America.


___________________________
Image Credits: Columbia and Pensacola photos by C. Ward. Forrest Memorial photo by Thomas R. Machnitzki, Creative Common License. Confederate Flag in Tampa  photo found online unattributed.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Tiptoeing Through the Floggosphere (and Facebook)

**UPDATE**   **UPDATE**  **UPDATE**  

Some lover of history over at Simpson's Love-History Crossroads blog, leaves this comment, showing his great expertise in history, and his love of it: 

R E Watson
A classic Connie quote: “I dunno, Corey. I don’t know any Southern heritage nuts.” Quite a statement coming from the head pecan !

 **END OF UPDATE** 
 _____________________________________________

I wasn't born a Redneck, but I like to think I've evolved into one. ~Carter Lewis via Facebook.
   

Look who's cheering the death of an ex-Navy Seal -- it ain't "neo-Confederates."   Waiting for great gusts of indignation from the floggosphere blasting toward these left-lib tweeters.  If it doesn't come, we'll know that "cheering the death of US soldiers" doesn't really bother them -- that it's a fabrication, an excuse to bloviate their hatred of Southern heritage.

 

When confronted with the self-proclaimed declaration of Julia Ward Howe that she and her fellow aboes wanted to "blow up the union" Al Mackey explained that what she really wanted was for the "pieces" of the union blown to smithereens to somehow fall back to together and reassemble themselves exactly as before, but minus slavery. (Smirk.) 
He didn't say how he knew that. He cited none of her writings. I told him there's nothing to that effect in the chapter of A Trip to Cuba where she declared it in writing. Maybe he held a seance and she told him?  Maybe he consulted a crystal ball?  Or perhaps he threw some chicken bones, or called Miss Cleo....
In any case, has ANYbody ever seen ANYthing blown to bits behave that way?  Every piece of debris, every splinter, every particle of dust ... just ... float back together and reassemble themselves exactly as before, but with some undesirable component missing? What a way to remodel and modernize your home, huh?  Just blow the sucker up and watch it reassemble itself minus the 1950s knotty pine paneling and asbestos floor tile in the family room...  Talk about a new twist on flippin' a house...
 
Over the past few days, I've tiptoed through the Floggosphere to sample the devotion to history and historical accuracy held by the Flogging Bloggers and their comment-thread followers.  Here are just a few comments demonstrating their great knowledge of and devotion to accurate and truthful civil war history:
These people at “the gift” take the phrase “dumber than dirt” to new heights!
The rampant idiocy here is beyond comprehension :-(
Connie loves heritage and fiction. Indeed, she can’t tell them apart.
Does he wear his dime-store Confederate uniform to work? Does he take it off when he showers?

Connie finds actual history a bit too challenging, which is why she prefers fiction.
Your assumption that she knows Mitchell’s book is a work of fiction might be a bit optimistic.

Well this war dog feels like cocking a leg and letting fly in their direction.

Connie speculates about other people because she would like to distract us from her lily-white world …

… but at the moment she’s red-faced with rage as she sputters away on her blog. And that’s where I think we should leave her.
And last but not least, look at how Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history at Arizona State University, emphasizes accurate history AND demonstrates his veneration of it:
Let’s just say that I understand from various folks that she’s [Connie] deeply troubled woman who is quite fixated on certain issues and people.




  _____________________________
Images: Tile paneling and Howe images from the public domain. Other graphics by C. Ward