RadixJournal - December 29, 2023


Facts Don't Care About Your Fetters


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

148.3146

Word count

1,232

Sentence count

76

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Alex Blumberg joins me to discuss the removal of the Confederate Flag from public display in public spaces, and why this is a good or bad thing. We also talk about why we need to get rid of Confederate statues and monuments in public places.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I talked about this a number of months ago.
00:00:02.080 I usually posted that publicly.
00:00:03.740 I mean, I kind of have a lot of ambivalence about this because, you know, I can remember that statue, the actual one, because I went to school there.
00:00:19.120 And I, you know, there was Lee Park in Dallas, Texas, where I grew up.
00:00:23.860 And my parents and grandparents have connections in Louisiana, and I can remember these, you know, major statues in New Orleans and so on.
00:00:35.200 I think some of those have been taken down as well.
00:00:37.120 There was, there was, what was the one?
00:00:39.160 I can't remember which, who it was, but he was like facing north.
00:00:42.980 So he was like still facing off against the Yankees or something.
00:00:47.000 And so I, look, I have, a lot of this did reflect power structures.
00:00:54.200 There's, there's no doubt, but then a lot of it was also a little bit whimsical and nostalgic and, and so on.
00:01:03.100 And so I, you know, it's, I think everyone should be a little bit ambivalent about it.
00:01:09.940 There is something about the Confederate flag that is nostalgic and sentimental and even whimsical of, you know, play Freebird and, you know, the guy in the pickup truck with the Confederate flag, who's kind of a decent guy, but, you know, had some hard luck and et cetera, et cetera.
00:01:27.920 Um, and it is just this, like, also like, if I were a leftist, I would almost hate this because you're getting rid of something that is just entirely sentimental and symbolic, and you're not actually changing anything about South Carolina.
00:01:45.420 You know, nothing, you, you are not addressing poverty.
00:01:49.280 You are not addressing inequality.
00:01:50.980 You're simply being like, Ooh, the South, the old South, that was so icky.
00:01:54.860 You know, we used to like Gone with the Wind to watch that every, every year.
00:01:59.580 Oh, now we don't watch that movie anymore.
00:02:01.540 Hmm.
00:02:02.100 You know, wow.
00:02:03.100 What an amazing transformation you've undergone.
00:02:05.980 You know, it's just a joke, basically.
00:02:08.900 It's merely symbolic and, and so on.
00:02:12.140 Um, but, you know, anyway, I, I do think that there, there is a kind of like lie to those statues and I'm not against them.
00:02:22.540 And I, and I have some even personal nostalgia for them, but they, they were, they were erected, many of them, if not most all of them in the late 19th and 20th century, in fact.
00:02:36.120 And, you know, to some degree, they were part of that reconciliation process of, and, and you saw this.
00:02:44.240 I mean, I remember Dwight Eisenhower, who of course was a, you know, general at Normandy and during the world, second world war, he said, you know, the greatest general of all time, the one I would want to learn from was Robert E. Lee or something.
00:02:56.120 Which is in itself a rather, I mean, obviously he's a brilliant and fascinating guy, but it's also kind of a strange general to learn from because he presided over debacles as well as victories.
00:03:09.780 Um, he was outnumbered, but you know, it is what it is, but there was this reconciliation where, you know, Lincoln was great, but then Robert E. Lee was great and Stonewall Jackson was great.
00:03:22.580 And we just won't talk about Sumner's March because that was pretty brutal.
00:03:26.860 And we can kind of all have our heroes, but the overriding assumption was that the South won't rise again and that you, you, you're, you're allowed.
00:03:40.600 I mean, it's a very, I think an important and, and successful negotiation process, which is that you're allowed to have your heroes.
00:03:49.680 We're not going to just annihilate you, but then we all know that you're going to be under a federal structure.
00:03:57.960 So it's a, it's a, it's a bargain and it worked until it didn't.
00:04:03.840 And it becomes outmoded and it becomes a symbol of reaction and Trump and racism, uh, et cetera, et cetera.
00:04:12.480 Um, but again, like it was covering over the truth.
00:04:16.700 And I think the whole lost cause myth was covering over the truth in the truth is that the civil war was entirely about slavery period end of statement.
00:04:26.540 You can't discuss it without slavery. 0.62
00:04:29.820 It was a, a collective freak out over a precipitating cause, which was the election of Abraham Lincoln and a notion that might very well not have been based in reality that he was going to free the slaves and they were going to run rough shot over the South.
00:04:46.240 And that we need to, and that we need to get out of the system in order to maintain our peculiar institution.
00:04:54.400 And Alexander Stevens in the cornerstone of the Confederacy laid it out.
00:04:58.940 Like we, Jefferson was wrong.
00:05:01.880 We are basing a society on the notion of human inequality.
00:05:06.180 We are going to perpetuate this forever.
00:05:08.860 Like Alexander Stevens was actually honest and he was a philosopher of, of sorts, the Hegel of the South, you could even say, but like he laid it out and made things very clear.
00:05:23.060 And it was about that.
00:05:25.360 And it wasn't about individual rights or the tariff or government, or those are all dispensable causes if they're causes at all.
00:05:36.580 I think that, um, this is me being generous to her.
00:05:41.560 I think that what she was saying it to someone who doesn't know a lot, it sounds like she's saying the CSA was about freedom.
00:05:51.000 So it sounds like she's doing Confederate apologism to someone.
00:05:54.580 But in a way, she is actually rebuking, um, George Fitzhugh, who, um, published a, uh, book saying that slavery was good and should be expanded and is superior to freedom.
00:06:10.820 And he was one of the first anti-capitalist reactionaries who said that, um, it's, to free someone is one of the cruelest things you can do to send them into the world of raw competition.
00:06:27.540 And she is saying, no, capitalism is better than slavery.
00:06:32.680 American hustle culture forever.
00:06:34.820 Um, yes, that is basically what she's saying.
00:06:42.480 Every American at MLM employee.
00:06:45.520 Yeah.
00:06:48.000 Capitalism today, capitalism tomorrow, capitalism forever.
00:06:52.540 And it seemed like she was doing that and not doing a good job at it.
00:06:56.160 Yes.
00:06:59.240 We are basing our society on our peculiar institution of the multi-level marketing scheme.
00:07:08.080 It makes no sense.
00:07:10.440 It's clearly a pyramid.
00:07:12.900 However, it is our pyramid and we will fight and die for its sustenance.
00:07:22.300 Yes.
00:07:26.160 Do these, uh, statues serve as like reconciliation or are they more like quasi inclusivity in that, you know, there's like a powerful lullaby.
00:07:34.940 It lulls you to sleep.
00:07:36.780 Um, it makes you feel like you're a part of something when you're, you're kind of not really even a part of it.
00:07:41.740 Um, even if the original, it gives you a false, like, it's like a lullaby of you're a rebel, you know, you know, it, it, at the end of the day, like you're in a federal system and there, there's, there's a supremacy clause as someone mentioned earlier.
00:07:58.140 But like, you can kind of, uh, you know, after work, once you crack that beer, you can be like, you know, we have rebels down here, you know, we, we don't, uh, we're not a part of that Yankee system. 0.70
00:08:13.640 No, different down here.
00:08:15.580 You know, but it's not different.
00:08:17.500 You lost.
00:08:18.320 You lost.