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  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,487
    edited June 2020
    I can't see DC becoming a state and getting two senators because, as you say, it would upset the balance too much. The Republicans wouldn't go for it.

    Could they not be represented in US Congress via provisions similar to our Speaker?

    Maybe it'd require an amendment to the Constitution.

    Edit: another option might be allowing them to vote in Virginia or Maryland
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 61,805
    Mr. Tyndall, if they weren't fundamentally stupid they wouldn't want to tear down capitalism and they wouldn't hold other such demented views.

    A more important question is about the endorsement of such idiocy by people who should know better.
  • BarnesianBarnesian Posts: 8,604
    edited June 2020
    R in London now below R in England. Both hovering just below 1.





  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    Pulpstar said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    Tricky to get a solid GOP state carving up Cali


    I bet GOP turnout is depressed in CA given how hopeless it is. Same for dems in TX.
    Texas is far from hopeless for the Democrats lol
    9/4 shot on Sportsbook.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,487
    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    There is that.

    What hasn't been the case though is the old codgers condoning it.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso

  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,563
    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    Foxy said:

    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:
    Oh dear, he's going to the rally. Father of Brexit creeping around Trump. Sad to see.
    Free virus with every ticket...
    He'll be up Trump's funicular though. Can't catch it like that. Not this one.
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,563

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It is accurate

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/protesters-topple-statues-dedicated-to-ulysses-s-grant-and-francis-scott-key
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    Mr. Tyndall, if they weren't fundamentally stupid they wouldn't want to tear down capitalism and they wouldn't hold other such demented views.

    A more important question is about the endorsement of such idiocy by people who should know better.

    The problem is that people endorse the slogan (because what's the alternative, saying that black lives don't matter?) This is then taken by a small core of activists as permission to enact the rest of their agenda, which manifests itself principally as smashing stuff up, interspersed with a bit of pseudo-Marxist sloganeering.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 27,929
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:
    Oh dear, he's going to the rally. Father of Brexit creeping around Trump. Sad to see.
    As predicted when Farage was "sacked" by LBC just in time for the US election media junket.
  • SurreySurrey Posts: 190
    edited June 2020
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso
    I've never heard of the "Green Brigade", but they don't half sound "Kitsonian".

    Meanwhile, if we're posting clips from Not the Nine O'Clock News:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJeTnLKLEI

    And as for Cervantes, wottabout Arthur Rimbaud?
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,487
    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    Appropriate for a group that are now tilting mostly at windmills.
    Not sure if it has been reported on here yet but the latest idiocy from the mindless morons is them tearing down the statue in San Francisco of Ulysses S Grant.

    That would be the Grant that led the Union forces to victory against the slave owning Confederates in the Civil War and then as President went on to lead campaigns against the Klu Klux Clan which ended up with many of them in jail and the clan broken for decades, created equal rights for African Americans to sit on Juries and serve in Federal agencies and passed a whole raft of laws to improve and protect black equality and lives.

    Why are these people so fundamentally stupid?
    They're not stupid, they're just very very badly educated at shite universities which are too scared of triggering them to give them the raw red meat of real history, and proper debate and argument

    They also spend their lives in social media bubbles, agreeing with other, a kind of auto-brainwashing. They also hype each other up, into the perfect angry mob,

    They are young Khmer Rouge cadres with smartphones and "degrees"
    The adults are just as weak.

    Someone brave, rational and determined has to have the bollocks to endure the hounds of hell and publicly criticise them, and the actions of universities, corporations and media broadcasters that acquiesce in it and demand a stop to it. They then also have to make a counter-argument as to why all these monuments and statues are important.

    A newspaper article ain't enough. They have to go on the airwaves and the streets night and day and take that case to them.

    Is there someone (ANYONE?) out there willing to do that?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,149
    edited June 2020
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso

    That's the romanticisation I was talking about. On the one hand you first point out that rebellious youth like to smash stuff up as intrinsincally fun (that is, part of the reason stupid targets are being selected is because it is not completely about actual motivations for protest), now you are defending that on the basis of something righteous. I don't think the two are connected and I think it is totally wrong to connect them - your first statement was about essentially vandalism, the second about actual protest, albeit destructive protest. The latter might well be justified in a situation of injustice not being addressed, the former isn't justifies, yet you conflate them as to idealise vandalism and so entirely undermine the righting of injustices. I think it insults people seeking justice (even if people might not agree with how they go about it) with actual vandalism without any noble motive.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    I thought Mao gave them weapons and told them to lynch his enemies?

    And then sent them off to the countryside to learn from the peasants.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    edited June 2020
    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile: - So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,139
    edited June 2020
    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    Appropriate for a group that are now tilting mostly at windmills.
    Not sure if it has been reported on here yet but the latest idiocy from the mindless morons is them tearing down the statue in San Francisco of Ulysses S Grant.

    That would be the Grant that led the Union forces to victory against the slave owning Confederates in the Civil War and then as President went on to lead campaigns against the Klu Klux Clan which ended up with many of them in jail and the clan broken for decades, created equal rights for African Americans to sit on Juries and serve in Federal agencies and passed a whole raft of laws to improve and protect black equality and lives.

    Why are these people so fundamentally stupid?
    They're not stupid, they're just very very badly educated at shite universities which are too scared of triggering them to give them the raw red meat of real history, and proper debate and argument

    They also spend their lives in social media bubbles, agreeing with other, a kind of auto-brainwashing. They also hype each other up, into the perfect angry mob,

    They are young Khmer Rouge cadres with smartphones and "degrees"
    And if the 'silent majority' in Middle America thinks they will run riot if Biden wins and cannot control them they will stroll silently into the voting booth and vote to re elect Trump.

    Much like Corbynistas here, they scare the average voter
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,149
    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile:

    So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
    Well I knew what they were about, I just didn't connect it with their name which I assumed referenced something.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    edited June 2020

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,563

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,652

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    To me, at the local partisan level, it looks like a very gradual move toward Republicans in the postwar decades. The presidential elections shift looks more sudden, but partly because Republicans won four out of five times as landslides in 1972-1988.

    The most compelling story to me is that the modernisation of the economy of the Southern states created a new economic demography more open to the Republican Party; and the move toward a (partial) federal welfare state, as well as civil rights, helped to reverse the old racial polarity by adding a cash-transfers dimension to one's vote at the federal level. Because there were always conservative Southern Democrats, the real question is why people stopped voting for them, and those seem to be the answers that make most sense.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,149
    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    Appropriate for a group that are now tilting mostly at windmills.
    Not sure if it has been reported on here yet but the latest idiocy from the mindless morons is them tearing down the statue in San Francisco of Ulysses S Grant.

    That would be the Grant that led the Union forces to victory against the slave owning Confederates in the Civil War and then as President went on to lead campaigns against the Klu Klux Clan which ended up with many of them in jail and the clan broken for decades, created equal rights for African Americans to sit on Juries and serve in Federal agencies and passed a whole raft of laws to improve and protect black equality and lives.

    Why are these people so fundamentally stupid?
    They're not stupid, they're just very very badly educated at shite universities which are too scared of triggering them to give them the raw red meat of real history, and proper debate and argument

    They also spend their lives in social media bubbles, agreeing with other, a kind of auto-brainwashing. They also hype each other up, into the perfect angry mob,

    They are young Khmer Rouge cadres with smartphones and "degrees"
    The adults are just as weak.

    Someone brave, rational and determined has to have the bollocks to endure the hounds of hell and publicly criticise them, and the actions of universities, corporations and media broadcasters that acquiesce in it and demand a stop to it. They then also have to make a counter-argument as to why all these monuments and statues are important.

    A newspaper article ain't enough. They have to go on the airwaves and the streets night and day and take that case to them.

    Is there someone (ANYONE?) out there willing to do that?
    Well, not you or me, as we are anonymous on social media!

    That's the problem, We are all too scared because you really DO risk your career, livelihood and public respect, and maybe your entire future, if you put your head above the parapet

    Look what has happened to J K Rowling. She's the most famous author in the world, a multi-billionaire, much beloved around the globe, with millions of fans (and she's centre-left!) and she comes out with fairly unremarkable arguments about trans rights and SHE is nearly cancelled.

    If they can do that to Rowling, no one is safe.

    It will take a politician with balls of hardened tungsten to turn this war around. i don't see any candidates. More likely is a backlash in ordinary public opinion, expressed by voters, sweeping away the madness. One day.
    During Keir Starmer's second term.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso

    That's the romanticisation I was talking about. On the one hand you first point out that rebellious youth like to smash stuff up as intrinsincally fun (that is, part of the reason stupid targets are being selected is because it is not completely about actual motivations for protest), now you are defending that on the basis of something righteous. I don't think the two are connected and I think it is totally wrong to connect them - your first statement was about essentially vandalism, the second about actual protest, albeit destructive protest. The latter might well be justified in a situation of injustice not being addressed, the former isn't justifies, yet you conflate them as to idealise vandalism and so entirely undermine the righting of injustices. I think it insults people seeking justice (even if people might not agree with how they go about it) with actual vandalism without any noble motive.
    When have I defended their actions? I think them bloody stupid.

    Just pointing out that rebellious youths deliberately annoying their parents generation is a long standing tradition.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    edited June 2020

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The first crack was Truman, who was shocked when he discovered the extent and impact of Jim Crow and stood in 1948 on a desegregationist platform, opposed by J Strom Thurmond as a ‘States’ Rights’ Democrat (in a very conscious echo of the Confederacy). Thurmond won four of the ex-Confederate states and polled double-digits in most of the others.

    There was a further rupture in 1968, when Democratic Governor George Wallace (Alabama) again stood on a segregationist platform in protest at Johnson and Humphrey’s Civil Rights agenda, which tipped the south away from Humphrey and possibly cost him the election (his 46 votes, plus splitting the Democratic vote in five other states, could have been crucial).

    Following this election, Nixon developed the ‘Southern Strategy’ based on law and order, tradition, religion etc (stop laughing at the back) with the aim of luring the disaffected Southern whites to himself. This bore fruit when he swept the south in 1972.

    Since then, although Carter, Clinton and Obama won odd states there, the South has been solidly Republican. Of course, demographic changes as the whites become a minority may well change it back.

    The change and how solid it has become may be an unhappy parallel for Labour as they survey their collapse in the North...
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,149
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso

    That's the romanticisation I was talking about. On the one hand you first point out that rebellious youth like to smash stuff up as intrinsincally fun (that is, part of the reason stupid targets are being selected is because it is not completely about actual motivations for protest), now you are defending that on the basis of something righteous. I don't think the two are connected and I think it is totally wrong to connect them - your first statement was about essentially vandalism, the second about actual protest, albeit destructive protest. The latter might well be justified in a situation of injustice not being addressed, the former isn't justifies, yet you conflate them as to idealise vandalism and so entirely undermine the righting of injustices. I think it insults people seeking justice (even if people might not agree with how they go about it) with actual vandalism without any noble motive.
    When have I defended their actions? I think them bloody stupid.

    Just pointing out that rebellious youths deliberately annoying their parents generation is a long standing tradition.
    I took it that way because you were responding to a comment about how their actions should not be romanticised, by quoting a romantic view . I apologise if your intent was not meant to be defending it.
  • alex_alex_ Posts: 7,518
    Well City of London residents don't get to vote for their local council...
  • logical_songlogical_song Posts: 9,914

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Kennedy/LBJ and Wallace's period, I'd guess.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    HYUFD said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    Appropriate for a group that are now tilting mostly at windmills.
    Not sure if it has been reported on here yet but the latest idiocy from the mindless morons is them tearing down the statue in San Francisco of Ulysses S Grant.

    That would be the Grant that led the Union forces to victory against the slave owning Confederates in the Civil War and then as President went on to lead campaigns against the Klu Klux Clan which ended up with many of them in jail and the clan broken for decades, created equal rights for African Americans to sit on Juries and serve in Federal agencies and passed a whole raft of laws to improve and protect black equality and lives.

    Why are these people so fundamentally stupid?
    They're not stupid, they're just very very badly educated at shite universities which are too scared of triggering them to give them the raw red meat of real history, and proper debate and argument

    They also spend their lives in social media bubbles, agreeing with other, a kind of auto-brainwashing. They also hype each other up, into the perfect angry mob,

    They are young Khmer Rouge cadres with smartphones and "degrees"
    And if the 'silent majority' in Middle America thinks they will run riot if Biden wins and cannot control them they will stroll silently into the voting booth and vote to re elect Trump.

    Much like Corbynistas here, they scare the average voter
    Quite good odds at the moment if you really believe that, though perhaps likely to get better. The recent troubles only seem to be pushing the polls one way.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    edited June 2020

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    There's an argument that it may have happened in the 1940s when President Truman desegregated the armed forces.

    Dem Strom Thurmond stood on a States' Right platform in the 1948 election and Truman really pissed off the South by espousing the end of Jim Crow.

    By 1964 Thurmond switched parties and joined the GOP.
  • SurreySurrey Posts: 190
    edited June 2020

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    George Wallace ran in the Democratic presidential primaries campaigning for segregation as late as 1972 - winning Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland, and Michigan.
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 8,163
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    Scotland has another level of stupid to add to the mix.

    These are "anti-fascist" football hooligans, the Green Brigade of Celtic fans, come to help the BLM smash monuments.


    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1274344582365544448?s=20

    Smashing stuff up, particularly the stuff that old codgers like, has always tickled the fancy of rebellious youth. It is intrinsically fun.
    Yes, but by those terms very juvenille and not to be romantisised, as many have done and are doing.
    In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, a few decades ago:

    "Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it, I want to destroy..."

    When people feel alienated and their concerns denied, it is expressed in such ways. There is only one solution:

    https://youtu.be/zhstRrZzaso

    That's the romanticisation I was talking about. On the one hand you first point out that rebellious youth like to smash stuff up as intrinsincally fun (that is, part of the reason stupid targets are being selected is because it is not completely about actual motivations for protest), now you are defending that on the basis of something righteous. I don't think the two are connected and I think it is totally wrong to connect them - your first statement was about essentially vandalism, the second about actual protest, albeit destructive protest. The latter might well be justified in a situation of injustice not being addressed, the former isn't justifies, yet you conflate them as to idealise vandalism and so entirely undermine the righting of injustices. I think it insults people seeking justice (even if people might not agree with how they go about it) with actual vandalism without any noble motive.
    When have I defended their actions? I think them bloody stupid.

    Just pointing out that rebellious youths deliberately annoying their parents generation is a long standing tradition.
    "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers"

    Socrates - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love-luxury-they-have-bad-manners-contempt#:~:text=“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners,,when elders enter the room.
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,652
    Have a look at maps of the congress elected in 1990. The Southern states are still strongholds of the Democrats here. In the following four years, many of these would flip to Republicans, and some Democrat congressmen would even cross the floor. So this is a process that is a lot more complex than, something happened one day in the 60s and that was that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/102nd_United_States_Congress
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    Surrey said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    George Wallace ran in the Democratic presidential primaries campaigning for segregation as late as 1972.
    Wallace is a fascinating character.

    He was quite liberal but turned into a bigot when he lost a primary election to a candidate who was quite strong on law and order (as a prosecutor he obtained the death penalty for a black man who stole a white woman's purse.)

    After that he said he'd never get 'out-n*ggered again' and turned into the bigot he's infamous for being.

    After Wallace was shot he recanted and made huge amends.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    edited June 2020

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Kennedy/LBJ and Wallace's period, I'd guess.
    George Wallace was a Democrat (Independent in 1968) and last won election as a Democrat in 1982 for his final term as Governor. He did court the African American vote to win that one. Quite a turnaround.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Started with the New Deal, accelerated with The Great Society, cemented with Regan and the politicial engagement of the Southern Evangelicals.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,563

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    There's an argument that it may have happened in the 1940s when President Truman desegregated the armed forces.

    Dem Strom Thurmond stood on a States' Right platform in the 1948 election and Truman really pissed off the South by espousing end of Jim Crow.

    By 1964 Thurmond switched parties and joined the GOP.
    Truman remains my all time favourite US President
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    edited June 2020
    kle4 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile:

    So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
    Well I knew what they were about, I just didn't connect it with their name which I assumed referenced something.
    Whatever. The point - your point - is what's important. There is no equivalence between the 2 sides in this conflict. The racist hooligan Right are in a different league to the antifa Left. The former are ALL gormless goons whereas only a fraction of the latter are. Anyone who cannot see or acknowledge this needs to have a stern word with themselves.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,250

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Don't get 'modern' confused with the wazzocks of woke. ;-)
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    There's an argument that it may have happened in the 1940s when President Truman desegregated the armed forces.

    Dem Strom Thurmond stood on a States' Right platform in the 1948 election and Truman really pissed off the South by espousing end of Jim Crow.

    By 1964 Thurmond switched parties and joined the GOP.
    Truman remains my all time favourite US President
    Toss up between LBJ and Bill for me.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    Alistair said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Started with the New Deal, accelerated with The Great Society, cemented with Regan and the politicial engagement of the Southern Evangelicals.
    Southern Evangelicals were the key switching demographic, and particularly strong in the Southern States, where both Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism are weak. Jimmy Carter was a Born Again Christian, and the last Democrat Presidential candidate to have credibility with them.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    ydoethur said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
    Wasn't there a theory that the likes of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens kept their true beliefs hidden and were incrementalists.

    They knew they'd never get things like the abolition of slavery done if they are also talked about equality for the races.
  • TresTres Posts: 2,702
    alex_ said:

    Well City of London residents don't get to vote for their local council...

    They do. Just a load of other folk who aren't residents get a vote as well. Including me.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,250
    Foxy said:

    Alistair said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Started with the New Deal, accelerated with The Great Society, cemented with Regan and the politicial engagement of the Southern Evangelicals.
    Southern Evangelicals were the key switching demographic, and particularly strong in the Southern States, where both Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism are weak. Jimmy Carter was a Born Again Christian, and the last Democrat Presidential candidate to have credibility with them.
    Reading Wiki. George Wallace became a Born Again in the late 70s.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    edited June 2020

    ydoethur said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
    Wasn't there a theory that the likes of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens kept their true beliefs hidden and were incrementalists.

    They knew they'd never get things like the abolition of slavery done if they are also talked about equality for the races.
    Yes there is.

    It’s bullshit.

    Lincoln believed non-whites were inferior. It’s just his modern admirers can’t get their heads round the fact that in that time you could be as racist as hell and an anti-slavery activist.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    ydoethur said:

    Yes there is.

    It’s bullshit.

    Lincoln believed non-whites were inferior. It’s just his modern admirers can’t get his head round the fact that in that time you could be as racist as hell and an anti-slavery activist.

    Hush, Lincoln and JFK were the most open minded Presidents ever, ahem.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    Ruby Bridges is only 65 years old. It is very recent.
  • EPGEPG Posts: 6,652
    As late as the 1990s, you had not only that 102nd US Congress, but also two Presidential elections in which Clinton won a half-dozen states that still seem like big aspirations to modern Democrat candidates, like Missouri, Kentucky and Louisiana. Having said all of that: They now dominate the west coast, so it's not all loss for them. Another fun fact is that Clinton is the only winner since Kennedy from outside the top ten most populous states, and no Hawai'i doesn't count.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    edited June 2020

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln supported abolition and passed the emancipification proclamation*. He did not want equal rights for African Americans and was supportive of plans to remove them to the West Indies or Africa.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-lincoln-racism-equality-oppose/

    * The proclamation only freed slaves in Confederate territory, slaves in Union states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland) and in Union occupied Confederacy such as New Orleans were not freed by the proclamation.

    Like nearly everyone else, Lincoln was a product of his times, and a deeply racist society.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    You know what feels quite recent? 1990.

    The scary thing is we're closer to 2050 than we are to 1990.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,222
    edited June 2020

    ydoethur said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
    Wasn't there a theory that the likes of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens kept their true beliefs hidden and were incrementalists.

    They knew they'd never get things like the abolition of slavery done if they are also talked about equality for the races.
    Lincoln’s views evolved considerably during the last few years of his life, but certainly in today’s terms would be ... questionable.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    Foxy said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln supported abolition and passed the emancipification proclamation*. He did not want equal rights for African Americans and was supportive of plans to remove them to the West Indies or Africa.

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-lincoln-racism-equality-oppose/

    * The proclamation only freed slaves in Confederate territory, slaves in Union states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland) and in Union occupied Confederacy such as New Orleons were not freed by the proclamation.

    Like nearly everyone else, Lincoln was a product of his times, and a deeply racist society.
    Delaware as well.

    In fact the only two states that still had slavery when the 13th Amendment came into force were Kentucky and Delaware.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,121
    edited June 2020
    [deleted: still lurking]
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,222

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant...
    We sure it wasn’t temperance extremists who toppled his statue ?

  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    edited June 2020
    Foxy said:

    Alistair said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    Started with the New Deal, accelerated with The Great Society, cemented with Regan and the politicial engagement of the Southern Evangelicals.
    Southern Evangelicals were the key switching demographic, and particularly strong in the Southern States, where both Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism are weak. Jimmy Carter was a Born Again Christian, and the last Democrat Presidential candidate to have credibility with them.
    The revisionist (and now widely accepted but wrong) take on why Southern Evangelicals got politically motivated is pinned on Roe vs Wade but contemporary documents don't support that. The Southern Baptist Council welcomed the Roe vs Wade decision. Opposing abortion was for Papists, not god fearing folk such as themselves.

    What actually activated them was the Nixon admin stripping their segregated racist colleges of charitable status. That is when Evangelicals engaged with politics in a way they hadn't before. They just wanted to be left in peace to do their segregation but the Federal Government wouldn't give them a tax break to do so. Eventually, by the end of the 70s Paul Weyrich had managed to get them outraged, and partially through reframing abortion as something black people did, not good honest white folk, he turned Abortion into a wedge issue.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,250
    eadric said:

    File under "massively awks"

    Yale University isn't just named after a slave owner, it's named after a slave TRADER, like Colston Hall (as was)

    https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1274380903926595584?s=20


    "Elihu Yale (5 April 1649 – 8 July 1721) was an American born British merchant, slave trader, President of the East India Company settlement in Fort St. George, at Madras, and a benefactor of the Collegiate School in the Colony of Connecticut, which in 1718 was renamed Yale College in his honour"


    "The records of this period mention a flourishing slave trade in Madras, a trade in which Yale participated and from which he profited. He enforced a law that at least ten slaves should be carried on every ship bound for Europe. In his capacity as judge he also on several occasions sentenced so-called "black criminals" to whipping and enslavement. When the demand began to increase rapidly, the English merchants even began to kidnap young children and deport them to distant parts of the world, very much against their will"

    "Yale was also notorious for arresting and trying Indians on his own private authority, including the hanging of a stable boy who had absconded with a Company horse"


    I genuinely don't see how Yale can keep its name, in the present climate

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Yale

    Yale University endowment: $30 billion.

    Juicy target.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    eadric said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile:

    So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
    Well I knew what they were about, I just didn't connect it with their name which I assumed referenced something.
    Whatever. The point - your point - is what's important. There is no equivalence between the 2 sides in this conflict. The racist hooligan Right are in a different league to the antifa Left. The former are ALL gormless goons whereas only a fraction of the latter are. Anyone who cannot see or acknowledge this has a big big problem and needs to have a stern word with themselves.
    Bullshit.

    The racist hooligan right and the nihilist violent left are exactly the same. Both seek only to destroy and exult in their victory, during that destruction

    To drill down, who was worse, the far right Hitler, or the far left Pol Pot?

    Hitler probably killed 25 million in his insane bid to exert racist German supremacy over Europe. But Pol Pot killed between a quarter and a third of his entire nation, for the sole reason that they might be educated, cultured, wore glasses: he saw all of human civilisation and advancement as an enemy.

    If Pol Pot had taken over the world (and the radical Maoists wanted to) would it have been a worse world than one run by Hitler? Quite possibly.

    Pol Pot killed people for having the wrong brain, Hitler killed people for having the wrong genes

    The extremes are mirror images.
    I'm talking about the 2 sides in these current street skirmishes not Hitler and Pol Pot! Let's park Hitler vs Pol Pot.

    Antifa demos have some bad people. The racist far right is ALL bad people. That's a key difference. Important to recognize this otherwise things go awry and people end up saying silly and reprehensible things.

    And we don't want that.
  • dr_spyndr_spyn Posts: 11,300
    Anglesey food processing plant - 75 positive tests.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53122894
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,250
    Alistair said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    Ruby Bridges is only 65 years old. It is very recent.
    I haven't been to look for it, but I expect there is some fascinating reflection in Letter from America, say 1950-1970.

    I have a couple of compilations of his early writing, and it is certainly interesting.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    After the way the Dildo Brothers and Lady Brady have behaved it'll be so funny if West Ham do get relegated.

    Nearly as funny as Scotland at the last Rugby world cup and the match against Japan.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 57,217
    Pulpstar said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    Tricky to get a solid GOP state carving up Cali


    That's only true if you keep the current county boundaries.

    Peter Thiel supported a proposal that would split California into three. There would be a narrow central state stretching between San Francisco-San Jose-Santa Barbara-Los Angeles, and this would be an 80% Democratic state. There would then be a Northern California rural state and a Southern California rural (plus San Diego) state, both of which would be Republican.

    It was an incredibly impressive bit of state making, putting all the lefty urban areas into a single state, while giving rural and small town California two.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,766
    Leicester mayor refuses to tear down statue of Mahatma Gandhi as BLM protesters claim non-violent former Indian leader was a 'fascist, racist, sexual predator'

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8442649/Leicester-mayor-refuses-tear-statue-Mahatma-Gandhi.html
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,378
    EPG said:

    Have a look at maps of the congress elected in 1990. The Southern states are still strongholds of the Democrats here. In the following four years, many of these would flip to Republicans, and some Democrat congressmen would even cross the floor. So this is a process that is a lot more complex than, something happened one day in the 60s and that was that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/102nd_United_States_Congress

    It took a while. The Republicans started becoming competitive in the South at Presidential level in the 1950's, but Senate and House seats were still solid for the Democrats. The Republicans broadly won the South in 1968, easily in 1972, more narrowly in 1980, and heavily in 1984 and 1988. But, it was only in 1980 that they began to win Senate seats in big numbers, and only in 1994 that they won most House seats.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,378
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
    Wasn't there a theory that the likes of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens kept their true beliefs hidden and were incrementalists.

    They knew they'd never get things like the abolition of slavery done if they are also talked about equality for the races.
    Yes there is.

    It’s bullshit.

    Lincoln believed non-whites were inferior. It’s just his modern admirers can’t get their heads round the fact that in that time you could be as racist as hell and an anti-slavery activist.
    One can be thoroughly racist and still consider enslavement to be immoral.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,766
    Trump, who has been loath to appear publicly in a mask, said he has no intention of wearing a mask at the rally.

    'I don't feel that I'm in danger,' he said. 'I've met a lot, a lot of people, and so far here I sit.'

    (Daily Mail).

  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    Coronavirus in Tulsa this week.



    Tulsa is a similar sized city as Leicester, and has a similar number of test positives, but they are definitely on the rise.

  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    kinabalu said:

    eadric said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile:

    So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
    Well I knew what they were about, I just didn't connect it with their name which I assumed referenced something.
    Whatever. The point - your point - is what's important. There is no equivalence between the 2 sides in this conflict. The racist hooligan Right are in a different league to the antifa Left. The former are ALL gormless goons whereas only a fraction of the latter are. Anyone who cannot see or acknowledge this has a big big problem and needs to have a stern word with themselves.
    Bullshit.

    The racist hooligan right and the nihilist violent left are exactly the same. Both seek only to destroy and exult in their victory, during that destruction

    To drill down, who was worse, the far right Hitler, or the far left Pol Pot?

    Hitler probably killed 25 million in his insane bid to exert racist German supremacy over Europe. But Pol Pot killed between a quarter and a third of his entire nation, for the sole reason that they might be educated, cultured, wore glasses: he saw all of human civilisation and advancement as an enemy.

    If Pol Pot had taken over the world (and the radical Maoists wanted to) would it have been a worse world than one run by Hitler? Quite possibly.

    Pol Pot killed people for having the wrong brain, Hitler killed people for having the wrong genes

    The extremes are mirror images.
    I'm talking about the 2 sides in these current street skirmishes not Hitler and Pol Pot! Let's park Hitler vs Pol Pot.

    Antifa demos have some bad people. The racist far right is ALL bad people. That's a key difference. Important to recognize this otherwise things go awry and people end up saying silly and reprehensible things.

    And we don't want that.
    I’m not at all convinced by your reasoning here. Anarchists (and these are anarchists, not anti fascists) are essentially violent criminals who deeply object to being told there are restraints on them.

    BLM may have been started with good intentions to respond to real, legitimate and urgent grievances, but it has been hijacked. If you had told me that the footage of Colston being toppled was actually footage of Nazis tearing down a statue of Marx I would have seen no particular reason to disbelieve you.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 62,766
    It seems unlikely that many of those 33,000 people who gave so generously to Black Lives Matter UK were aware that any of their cash would be spent in pursuit of those two bizarre policy goals. And surely few of the 150,000-odd Britons who took part in BLM protests in recent weeks wish to abolish capitalism and disband the police.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8441405/The-avowed-aims-British-arm-Black-Lives-Matter.html
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,421
    Sean_F said:

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    eadric said:

    ydoethur said:

    TimT said:

    Easy, create 2 new states. Give DC statehood, and split CA into two, making a new state out of the republican mountainous/rural areas. Leaves the Senate balanced as currently and gives the most under-represented state, CA, better representation in the Senate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_state)
    Surely BLM will go actually apeshit if a state is named after Jefferson?
    You could arguably dispense with the second half of that sentence to arrive at the essential truth.

    If that tweet someone re-posted on here earlier this afternoon is accurate, then some of them pulled down a statue of Grant (the vanquisher of the Confederate armies, and noted for his sympathetic policy stances towards the freed slaves as President.) That's not a rational act of political demonstration. They just want to smash stuff up.

    In another place and time they'd be packed off to the countryside for a couple of years to learn from the peasants.
    It's absolutely true. They pulled it down

    https://twitter.com/jrivanob/status/1274194145838428160?s=20


    https://twitter.com/MarcACaputo/status/1274309450598363140?s=20
    Grant apparently owned one slave for about a year in the late 1850s. The decision to consign him to the unclean of history presumably results from the fact that the poor individual concerned - who was given to Grant by his father-in-law, not deliberately bought - wasn't freed by Grant immediately.

    And thus, his central role in the destruction of slavery, the promotion of pro-black policies after the Civil War, suppression of the KKK and so on is entirely negated and rendered irrelevant.

    Have they gone after Lincoln as well yet? I'm quite certain that he at least never owned a slave, but he must've done something to upset modern sensibilities at some point?
    Lincoln’s views on race were pretty Darwinian.

    I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]---that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race
    .

    Speech in Charleston, Illinois, 1858. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:20.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
    Wasn't there a theory that the likes of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens kept their true beliefs hidden and were incrementalists.

    They knew they'd never get things like the abolition of slavery done if they are also talked about equality for the races.
    Yes there is.

    It’s bullshit.

    Lincoln believed non-whites were inferior. It’s just his modern admirers can’t get their heads round the fact that in that time you could be as racist as hell and an anti-slavery activist.
    One can be thoroughly racist and still consider enslavement to be immoral.
    Exactly. And Lincoln was.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720
    dr_spyn said:

    Anglesey food processing plant - 75 positive tests.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53122894

    Interesting rumours here that the Leicester cases are particularly in a food processing factory.
  • In principle I'd have no statues at all. I however don't support the removal of Churchill's statue for example. I do support the removal of statues of slave owners.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,482

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Harry who?
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,935
    edited June 2020

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,680
    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    Quite right. I was fine with him jacking in the Royal stuff - that's his right - but in doing so he became a mere mortal. His opinion now carries no more weight than the bloke in the launderette.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 3,060


    After that he said he'd never get 'out-n*ggered again' and turned into the bigot he's infamous for being.

    Dangerous to use that phrase...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuvLUhuo52w
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 119,675
    edited June 2020
    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    All it takes is for one new strain of Covid-19 to enter the UK based members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he's our next King.

    Edit - Or maybe a family drive around Paris.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,226
    @eadric and ilk

    Let me try a different way.

    Imagine your daughter bringing her new boyfriend to meet you. Dinner at yours. Bell goes, you buzz them in and there he is. He's wearing a tee shirt with -

    (i) hammer & sickle and "workers of the world unite!"

    (ii) a swastika and "weisser macht!"

    Which of these 2 sub optimal scenarios freaks you out the most?

    The MOST. So "both" is not an allowable answer.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,378
    ydoethur said:

    kinabalu said:

    eadric said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kle4 said:

    I feel very dumb indeed - I only just realised what antifa meant.

    :smile:

    So you probably had no clue what I meant on PT when I replied to your very important observation - that "blame on both sides does not mean EQUAL blame on both sides" - with a reference to the recent conflicts between the "Fash and the Antifa."
    Well I knew what they were about, I just didn't connect it with their name which I assumed referenced something.
    Whatever. The point - your point - is what's important. There is no equivalence between the 2 sides in this conflict. The racist hooligan Right are in a different league to the antifa Left. The former are ALL gormless goons whereas only a fraction of the latter are. Anyone who cannot see or acknowledge this has a big big problem and needs to have a stern word with themselves.
    Bullshit.

    The racist hooligan right and the nihilist violent left are exactly the same. Both seek only to destroy and exult in their victory, during that destruction

    To drill down, who was worse, the far right Hitler, or the far left Pol Pot?

    Hitler probably killed 25 million in his insane bid to exert racist German supremacy over Europe. But Pol Pot killed between a quarter and a third of his entire nation, for the sole reason that they might be educated, cultured, wore glasses: he saw all of human civilisation and advancement as an enemy.

    If Pol Pot had taken over the world (and the radical Maoists wanted to) would it have been a worse world than one run by Hitler? Quite possibly.

    Pol Pot killed people for having the wrong brain, Hitler killed people for having the wrong genes

    The extremes are mirror images.
    I'm talking about the 2 sides in these current street skirmishes not Hitler and Pol Pot! Let's park Hitler vs Pol Pot.

    Antifa demos have some bad people. The racist far right is ALL bad people. That's a key difference. Important to recognize this otherwise things go awry and people end up saying silly and reprehensible things.

    And we don't want that.
    I’m not at all convinced by your reasoning here. Anarchists (and these are anarchists, not anti fascists) are essentially violent criminals who deeply object to being told there are restraints on them.

    BLM may have been started with good intentions to respond to real, legitimate and urgent grievances, but it has been hijacked. If you had told me that the footage of Colston being toppled was actually footage of Nazis tearing down a statue of Marx I would have seen no particular reason to disbelieve you.
    The organisation in the UK is vanishing down a rabbit hole.
  • logical_songlogical_song Posts: 9,914

    Trump, who has been loath to appear publicly in a mask, said he has no intention of wearing a mask at the rally.

    'I don't feel that I'm in danger,' he said. 'I've met a lot, a lot of people, and so far here I sit.'

    (Daily Mail).

    Maybe he should talk to Boris?
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    All it takes is for one new strain of Covid-19 to enter the UK based members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he's our next King.
    If something comes along that's potent enough to wipe out everyone in line before him (including the three young children) then the few of us left alive at the end of it will have bigger problems to worry about.
  • juniusjunius Posts: 73
    OT. It's a good day. Wolves just beaten West Ham 2-0.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,935

    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    All it takes is for one new strain of Covid-19 to enter the UK based members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he's our next King.

    Edit - Or maybe a family drive around Paris.
    He didn't renounce his claims on his way out? :p
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,720

    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    All it takes is for one new strain of Covid-19 to enter the UK based members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he's our next King.

    Edit - Or maybe a family drive around Paris.
    Charles has made it through to the other side, so next but one monarch.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 59,935

    RobD said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Who cares about the opinion of a US-based socialite? :):D
    All it takes is for one new strain of Covid-19 to enter the UK based members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he's our next King.
    If something comes along that's potent enough to wipe out everyone in line before him (including the three young children) then the few of us left alive at the end of it will have bigger problems to worry about.
    I forgot that he's much lower in the line thanks to the three kids the Cambridges have.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    Foxy said:

    dr_spyn said:

    Anglesey food processing plant - 75 positive tests.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53122894

    Interesting rumours here that the Leicester cases are particularly in a food processing factory.
    Indeed. What are the mistakes that all these food businesses are making?

    There isn't a tradition of particularly enthusiastic choral singing amongst meat packing plant workers, is there?
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    edited June 2020
    kinabalu said:

    @eadric and ilk

    Let me try a different way.

    Imagine your daughter bringing her new boyfriend to meet you. Dinner at yours. Bell goes, you buzz them in and there he is. He's wearing a tee shirt with -

    (i) hammer & sickle and "workers of the world unite!"

    (ii) a swastika and "weisser macht!"

    Which of these 2 sub optimal scenarios freaks you out the most?

    The MOST. So "both" is not an allowable answer.

    Of course the answer is both. Just because a lot of lefties are gullible enough to wear the symbols of totalitarianism and think they're being cool doesn't make their participation in evil any more acceptable than the one with the swastika.

    p.s. And it's 'the more' :wink:

    Because grammar is the only acceptable form of fascism.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    MattW said:

    Alistair said:

    Fishing said:

    RobD said:

    The other relevant factor that I think helps to explain why Washington DC hasn't been considered worthy of having voting representation in Congress is that the majority of its population is Black. I believe that DC does have a member of Congress but they can't vote - when we lived there it was Eleanor Holmes Norton IIRC who was excellent. It's a fantastic city with some beautiful neighbourhoods. It's an absolute disgrace that its population is disenfranchised.

    Isn't it more to do with the fact it would add two Democratic senators to the senate rather than race?
    Unfortunately, with blacks overwhelmingly voting Democrat, you can't split the two.

    Virtually everything in America has a racial component, to an extent baffling to us, though we're starting to see glimpses of it here.
    Following the Civil War it was the Democrats who were the party of the South and strongly anti equality. The KKK was largely a Democrat organisation. At that time it was the Republicans who were the party of civil rights and equality as well as general liberalisation.

    It is an interesting question about when it all changed. Not one I know the answer to. Does anyone on here know when the transformation happened?
    The Civil Rights Act in the 1960.

    LBJ said he had cost the Democrats the South for a generation.

    A lot of hard right of the GOP are former Dems who switched sides around that time.
    Wow I hadn't realised it was that recent (relatively as I know I am showing my age here thinking the 60s is recent)
    Ruby Bridges is only 65 years old. It is very recent.
    I haven't been to look for it, but I expect there is some fascinating reflection in Letter from America, say 1950-1970.

    I have a couple of compilations of his early writing, and it is certainly interesting.
    For a look at how America has transformed over the decades I can heartily recommend Ed McBains 87th precinct books.

    Police procedurals (possibly the original police procedural) written over 49 years but always set in the 'now'. First book published in 1956, last in 2005.

    The mores and sensibilities of the characters reflect the current state of American society.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,149
    edited June 2020

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    That report is contradictory. He supports a ban, while the RFU are reviewing its use. While that presumably, possible even likely, will support a ban, he has preempted any such review, indeed signaled his support for a particular outcome thus obviating the need for a review.
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 32,563
    Sean_F said:

    Trigger warning for the snowflakes on here.

    https://twitter.com/thesundaytimes/status/1274402687438729217

    Some men will say any rubbish in order to get a f*ck.
    He has got that many friends left in this country. I am not sure he can afford to piss off the rugby crowd as well.
  • SurreySurrey Posts: 190
    Last matched prices for Republican nomination "as a result of" the convention scheduled for late August:

    Trump 1.07
    Pence 32
    Romney 110
    Haley 130
    Ryan 210
    Kasich 590
    Rice 710
    Cruz 850

    Those prices are sure to have jumped about by this time tomorrow...
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    ydoethur said:

    Appropriate for a group that are now tilting mostly at windmills.
    Not sure if it has been reported on here yet but the latest idiocy from the mindless morons is them tearing down the statue in San Francisco of Ulysses S Grant.

    That would be the Grant that led the Union forces to victory against the slave owning Confederates in the Civil War and then as President went on to lead campaigns against the Klu Klux Clan which ended up with many of them in jail and the clan broken for decades, created equal rights for African Americans to sit on Juries and serve in Federal agencies and passed a whole raft of laws to improve and protect black equality and lives.

    Why are these people so fundamentally stupid?
    Because they're no longer taught critical thinking, or even facts, but just what to think?

    Still, at least these people have revealed themselves as true miracles of medicine: ostensibly functional human beings whose IQ would be signficantly raised by a lobotomy.
This discussion has been closed.