Facing end of the month deadlines; here’s some stuff to read —
“Why Sherman Was Right to Burn Atlanta.” Although I disagree with the War Nerd that Crazy Bill was the war’s greatest general, he was right about the message Sherman was trying to send the South. We may need to re-send it one of these days …
Pigs on a plane? — And the moral is, if you need an “emotional support animal” while you travel, I suggest something small and easily portable, like a hamster. And I suspect this guy needed a lot more than an emotional support animal.
Paul Krugman — Why Republicans are pro-pollution.
I used to raise hogs. I’d wean them before they reached 20 lbs. At 75 lbs it would be about two months old.
Sherman’s and Grant’s mistake was in listening to the better angels of Lincolns nature.
After burning the South, they should have hung every treasonous Secesh traitor, and salted the soil.
But, then again, both Sherman and Grant had friends in the Confederate Army who’d gone to West Point with them, so they probably had a soft spot for some of those Reb’s.
Btw – sending the South an updated message will be complicated, because that’s where many of our military training facilities and bases are located.
And, of course, they’re almost all named after the treasonous traitorous Secesh Reb Generals.
Maybe, if we get a Democratic President with sizeable Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, we can go to rename all of those Southern bases after the victorious Northern Generals.
Say goodbye to Fort Bragg, and say hello to Fort Sherman – whose army actually was in that area at the end of the Civil War.
Adios Fort Hood, and greet Fort Grant.
Etc.
Imaging how much something like that will piss-off the South!
They may even start a new hot Civil War to replace the Cold Civil War they’ve been fighting for 150 years.
I enjoyed the Sherman piece, I had no idea of his position vis a vis the South, and how he tried to talk sense into them before the fight began.
I posted a link some months ago that argued that the war never really ended, and in fact, the South won. The fighting and bloodshed ended at Appomattox, but the Southern planter mindset is alive and well in the Republican party. Economically the South has finally arisen victoriously over the North. The same people who decry Sherman’s burning of Atlanta, are the ones cackling over the North’s demise in Detroit.
I love his rhetoric of the tenth-generation sulkers. Do the arithmetic: 150 years divided by 10 generations gives a generation time of 15 years. I hope this insult to Southern womanhood (and to the predilections of Sothern manhood) is duly noted and resented.
I don’t know, Krugman really only explains why the 1% are pro-pollution. That doesn’t fully explain why belligerent anti-environmentalism has become such an important port of the conservative ideology.
I found an interesting article here that talks about a couple of theories of why people reject climate science. It makes sense that the energy lobby would put out all this anti-environmentalist propaganda, but it has to tap into something else if it’s going to catch on the way it has with the Republican base.
“When he was scolded—by people who were in the habit of whipping slaves half to death for trivial lapses—for his severity toward the (white, landowning) people of Atlanta,..’
This calls to mind those among us, who trivialize and dismiss an avoidable killing by police, and become outraged when property rights are violated.
Once one side has made it clear that property is more important to them than human life, it seems logical to “hit them where it hurts.”
@Stephen, it’s all about jobs, and how “elitists” use tiny, “inconsequential” creatures like the snail darter to deprive people of jobs. And unfortunately, there is a long track record of people using this kind of legal attack to halt job-creating developments of various kinds. It’s very easy for wingnuts to create a portrait of “environmental extremists” who care more about creatures nobody will see (nevermind how important they may be to the ecology), than they do about human livelihoods.
And then you get the bona fide eco-terrorists who actually destroy property and give the whole environmental movement a bad name.
What’s interesting is that this argument resonates much less with poor people living in big cities stuck next to pollution sources. After hearing wingnuts going after “enviro wackos” successfully, for years, using the jobs argument, it was refreshing to see a Latina state legislator, Hilda Solis, win, based on protecting her constituents in east Los Angeles from noxious pollution sources. The health of their kids is more important to them than the cries about “jobs” coming from wingnuts.
And so with this resentment against environmentalists, established over several decades, it’s not hard to get the base to disbelieve in climate change, especially when they personally see no tangible impacts on their lives, yet, and they very much suspect that anything done in the name of addressing climage change will mean government meddling in the mighty job creation engine.
I have yet to read the links, still stuck on the comfort hamster idea. I’m thinking tribbles.
My friend’s shit-poo bit me today in my right flip off finger, I’ve worse wounds in my eye.
I have a brother who is a teabagger – I won’t ever speak to him again unless it is to warn him that should fortune give him the opportunity to attend my funeral – don’t. My son has been instructed to have him removed. I’m not capable of the hypocrisy to attend his. This split is strictly about ‘politics’ – when you come right down to it, he wants what he wants – the only way he will accept rule by the majority is if the majority will always and only give him what his far right ideology tells him is ‘American’.
There’s only one period of American history when this level of estrangement was common – the Civil War. The concentration of resistance to the federal government is regional, but the new Civil War won’t be fought for land or over secession. The Old South saw wealth as the product of cheap labor – and any limitations on slavery as a threat to a dynasty. The New Aristocrat sees the power of federalism as a threat. The EPA, Department of Education and the IRS are the targets.
The war is upon us already.
Doug, I really don’t worry about a new civil war. Radical conservatives, with the possible exception of back country rustics, couldn’t do much more than nourish that fantasy.the attack on the KKK by anonymous shows what is possible. Credit cards, bank accounts, etc can all be shut down without much trouble. Everything would have to go underground and a new system of barter established. It would implode.
Chief, you’re a better man than I am, hogs can be downright dangerous, especially when they are as big as a volkswagen.
Regarding the new civil war, I guess you could look at the last 150 years as one of the longest “stay behind” operations in history, or maybe that is just the nature of civil wars, the embers stay hot for a long, long time. But, it seems there is a lot of effort put into stirring up the ashes these days.
There are definitely a lot of scary creatures among the neo-Confederate ranks, but, I think a lot of right wingers are saddled with a heavy dose of magical thinking. The open carry enthusiasts seem to believe that they will live out some storyboard from an old Marvel comic with them stepping up to dispatch the bad guy and save the innocent without the complications of the real world. The “stay behind” Confederates envision those moments before Pickett’s Charge, when victory was still, theoretically, possible. They never seem to imagine that some of the bullets will be flying in their direction.
There was an account in Howard Zinn’s “Peoples’ History” where the KKK was terrorizing a group of black men, riding on horseback around the house where the men were gathered, and firing rifles into it. On this one occasion, the black men happened to have some rifles of their own. As soon as they returned fire, the terrorist bullies beat a hasty retreat.
This maybe wishful thinking on my part. Unfortunately, a deluded goofball with a gun is as dangerous as “a monkey with a razor blade,” in the words of Hugo Chavez.
I’m involved in a lengthy and frustrating debate on the TOCWOC blog with the author of the column the War Nerd is eviscerating. I’m thinking of posting the link to the War Nerd as my final comment.