Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Amarok]

Oh, absolutely. I'm not sure a 3-2 city council vote sufficiently encapsulates the will of the people of Charlottesville overall, but that's fine.

Are you espousing Trump Math?  Where 60,000,000 voters outweigh 63,000,000 voters.  Will you throw back all the 5-4 supreme court decisions which allow rich corporations to fuck over the whole country?

3 is more than 2.  Deal with it.

This

[bennyboy]

Oh, absolutely. I'm not sure a 3-2 city council vote sufficiently encapsulates the will of the people of Charlottesville overall, but that's fine.

Are you espousing Trump Math?  Where 60,000,000 voters outweigh 63,000,000 voters.  Will you throw back all the 5-4 supreme court decisions which allow rich corporations to fuck over the whole country?

3 is more than 2.  Deal with it.

I'm not a big fan of the Supreme Court in general: way too much power for appointed officials IMO, but that's not really relevant here.

Eh?  I'm responding to the comment that if the people of Charlottesville want to remove the statue, they should remove it.  The obvious next step is to determine whether that's the case.  Is it?  I still can't find poll numbers for Charlottesville itself, but here are a few more polls:

[Rev. Rye]

I suppose removing them from public property will make us feel better about ourselves, but I can't be sure if it will do much else.

I live in Columbia, SC. If you don't think removing an in-your-face symbol of oppression from the public square has enough impact on the people it's intended to intimidate to justify removing it, all I have to say is that my impression from close up is very, very different. No victim of horrendous oppression should have to waste the mental bandwidth it takes to deal with that kind of shit.

I'm sorry to have to go back into this thread, especially since I've spent a lot of time making an ass of myself here, but I have to ask: you did read the rest of that post, right? Thumpalumpacus pointed out that the continued presence of the Confederate statues undermined the ability of minorities to "buy-into" society as a whole. I agreed with the point. However, I also noted that there are also a lot of things undermining that "buy-in," including that the Republican Party does its damnedest to marginalize minorities, and, perhaps more pressingly, that the police can potentially shoot and kill them for spurious reasons, especially if they belong to a minority group; I even mentioned Min's "Fucking Cops" threads as a compilation of examples of this fact.

I even acknowledged that removing them couldn't hurt, and that at least we can have the benefit of feeling better about ourselves for removing relics of a shameful part of our past. And If a community chooses to remove them, I have no real problem. But, let's face it: in the big picture, if we did, there's still a lot of racial issues we have to reckon with; you think racist cops will think more before shooting unarmed black men? Will the Republican Party figure out that it's a shitty thing to gut laws specifically designed to help disenfranchised minorities to exercise their constitutional rights (like, say the Voting Rights Act of 1965)?

In his reply, he said the thing to understand is how insignificant those monuments really are, and he does have a point. Take them down, okay. But the prejudice that spawned them still remains, and still in a concrete form.

[Minimalist]

Are you espousing Trump Math?  Where 60,000,000 voters outweigh 63,000,000 voters.  Will you throw back all the 5-4 supreme court decisions which allow rich corporations to fuck over the whole country?

3 is more than 2.  Deal with it.

I'm not a big fan of the Supreme Court in general: way too much power for appointed officials IMO, but that's not really relevant here.

Eh?  I'm responding to the comment that if the people of Charlottesville want to remove the statue, they should remove it.  The obvious next step is to determine whether that's the case.  Is it?  I still can't find poll numbers for Charlottesville itself, but here are a few more polls:

This country has a representative democracy.  If the good citizens of Charlottesville want the statues of traitors retained they can vote out the city councilmen in the next election.  We don't do a plebiscite on every little issue.

However, I want to make this perfectly clear.  I say "DOWN WITH THE REBEL FLAG."

[Thumpalumpacus]

What percent of Charlottesville citizens are in favor of removal of the statue?  That seems like a number that should probably be known and considered.  The following shows that at least nationally [...]

I'll take "category error" for $500.

You're quoting national statistics for a local opinion. Once more, sloppy thinking.

[Rev. Rye]

What percent of Charlottesville citizens are in favor of removal of the statue?  That seems like a number that should probably be known and considered.  The following shows that at least nationally [...]

I'll take "category error" for $500.

You're quoting national statistics for a local opinion. Once more, sloppy thinking.

Yeah. It's not easy to find an actual poll strictly of Charlottesville's residents, especially one that happened before the massive riots. Eventually, I found a poll by a local Charlottesville news outlet, and, well, it's not quite what we'd like to see:

Then again, they point out that anyone around the world can vote in this poll, so it may not necessarily reflect the views of Charlottesville's residents at the time, and I do think it's possible that white supremacists might have artificially inflated their numbers. And, even if we assume it's an accurate view of Charlottesville's views at the time, given the violence that eventually happened because of the racist dickwads who used the statue as an excuse to riot and promote the ideology that made people uncomfortable about it in the first place, I suspect that the results might have changed a bit.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Anyone that wants to remove a specific statue can easily remove it.

[bennyboy]

What percent of Charlottesville citizens are in favor of removal of the statue?  That seems like a number that should probably be known and considered.  The following shows that at least nationally [...]

I'll take "category error" for $500.

You're quoting national statistics for a local opinion. Once more, sloppy thinking.

Dude, stop.

I've said I'm trying to find polls from Charlottesville, and these are the only numbers I could find so far.

It's been stated that the people of Charlottesville want the statue removed.  I'm attempting to determine whether that is, in fact, the case.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Then again, they point out that anyone around the world can vote in this poll, so it may not necessarily reflect the views of Charlottesville's residents at the time [...]

Yes, and it's exactly the same category error. If we wish to take the measure of local opinion, we'll need to access local opinion.

[bennyboy]

However, I want to make this perfectly clear.  I say "DOWN WITH THE REBEL FLAG."

How many times can a guy make the "nom nom" sound in an hour? Let's find out!

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Then again, they point out that anyone around the world can vote in this poll, so it may not necessarily reflect the views of Charlottesville's residents at the time [...]

Yes, and it's exactly the same category error. If we wish to take the measure of local opinion, we'll need to access local opinion.

One of the prevailing points of this thread has been that, my beliefs about symbolism and free speech aside, the residents of Charlottesville want the statue gone.  Are you saying that this point was made without anyone actually checking to see if that was the case?