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...