White supremacists and counter protesters clash in Charlottesville

[henryp]

I think maybe this all stems from the need for people to feel they are doing something with their lives?  We're pretty much a drone society.  We go make our widgets get our food and then watch our tv.  If we die, it doesn't really matter too much.  The machine rolls on.  But at the same time, we're buried under platitudes from birth.  Make the most of yourself.  Be the change you want to see in the world.  And on and on...

So we've got all these unimportant people who want to believe they are important.  Well, you can't be important if you're nemesis is some hot dog guy and a statue depicting events from 150 years ago.  So people create this weird delusion, that it's not just some dipshit hotdog maker with dumb ideas.  It might just be Hitler's reincarnation...and if we don't stop him from a rally to stop taking down a statue, a rally which was unlikely to have any impact on the removal of the statue, why, what's next?  The reinstitution of slavery!?  Nazi Rule in America?  

It's all kind of silly, but people have invested so much of who they are into this stuff, that there's no turning back now.  It is people's personal identity to be the 'good guy fighting evil.'  Even if being the good guy just involves sending out a tweet, or sucker punching some dipshit, and evil is a moron who makes hot dogs for a living.

It's such trivial nonsense that has been elevated to this grand endeavor.

So saying the Nazis and KKK were bad is "silly"? Wow, damned glad the allies thought that and didn't invade Normandy. Damned glad MLK threw up his hands and said, "Fuck it, why is it my business if whites hate us?"

You still don't get it. We are not talking about say a half dozen no name assholes here, we are talking about American Nazis and KKK involved in voting and in politics and this time around they have a friend in the White House who is not being unambiguous about it. WE ALREADY HAD JIM CROW. WE ALREADY HAD SEGREGATION, WE ALREADY HAD A MAJORITY OF  KKK MEMBERS IN CONGRESS.....<------YES ASSHOLE at one time in the 1920s a majority of or congress were KKK members. If you don't think history can repeat itself, you are a fool.

And damn, again, NOBODY is talking about erasing history. Just taking the hero worship out of those monuments by moving them to museums and history books.

They're arguing over a statue.  And the side that's supposed to be a major threat, the KKK/Nazi's, with, you claim, the President of the United States, a Republican Congress, and a Republican Supreme Court in their court aren't winning.  

With the deck stacked fully in their favor, they can't win an argument over keeping a statue up.  And you're worried they're a threat to what?  It's so comically absurd, that the face of this huge existential threat to our nation worked in a hot dog shop.  AND lost his job for showing up to the rally, so I guess you're battling an unemployed hot dog maker.

Dealing with the seriously dangerous KKK/Nazi's is a job for the FBI/Police.  Escalating these situations with pansy Nazi wannabes via vigilantism is just going to get people hurt/killed to achieve a result that's already been achieved.