<p>gotta: have you watched the video?</p>
<p>Vyse: posts #75 and 76 are excellent! Well said!</p>
<p>One of the quotes talks about growing up in Lake Jackson. Ron Paul grew up in Lake Jackson. Can the Paul-iacs tell us why Ron Paul hasn’t told us who said this? We have the right to know. Maybe this guy now works for the National Standard or the New York Post or Fox News? We need to know.</p>
<p>gotta, have you watched the video?</p>
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<p>I’d like to clarify my above statement. Please do not misconstrue this as an attitude of ‘who am I to judge if someone wants to hurt another’ which it is NOT. I believe one person’s rights ends where another’s begins. I believe in nonviolence towards any being sentient enough to have a face (which includes animals and unborn babies), but the fact is that the rest of society doesn’t agree with me, so I am very limited as to how I could affect someone who chooses to harm an animal. Therefore I have no choice but to accept their actions. while working in whatever way I can to raise awareness about the cruelties committed by the meat and dairy industries. What I mean by ‘not condemn them’ is that I realize that, even though they may go to the rodeo, or have an abortion, or eat meat, all very common things, I choose to see the good in that person and I know full well that they are NOT ‘bad’ people - they just don’t see the cruelty in their actions the way I do, just as primitive people who had slaves might never have thought twice about it, just as most of the people on this forum never think twice about the hamburger they had for lunch.</p>
<p>This is NOT to put an animal on the same level of importance as a human. The degree is different, but the concept is the same. Drossel, your condemnation of an entire culture, based on a wrongdoing, would be the equivalent of vegetarians wanting everything associated with the meat industry to disappear, before they could ever see the good in people.</p>
<p>It’s unreasonable.</p>
<p>You’re the one thinking like a child here. It’s a pretty simple concept: The South needed slavery to keep their economy intact, and the North didn’t. Therefore in the South, slaveholders and those who approved of slavery’s legality outnumbered abolitionists, while in the North, abolitionists and soft abolitionists outnumbered copperheads (but it took a really long time). The deciding factor here was that slavery was no longer necessary in the North, not that it was necessary, but the North had some noble objection to it.</p>
<p>Before the North was able to shift away from an agricultural economy, even the greatest of men, George Washington, not only owned slaves, but he used an illegal rotation scheme to insure they would never be free during his lifetime.</p>
<p>And also, you’re severely misinformed if you think the South fought the Civil War only to protect slavery. Most Southerners didn’t even own slaves. A lot of young men risked their lives to protect their country, which was also in a heated battle over tariffs and states’ rights. Many simply fought in self defense of their rights and their families. Sherman purposely killed and seized property of innocent civilians. </p>
<p>The Confederate Flag flying on public property that you keep whining about is on the South Carolina CONFEDERATE SOLDIER MEMORIAL. There’s nothing wrong with the grand kids of fallen confederates establishing a memorial. Tax money is also used to pay for Malcolm X Boulevard, in memorial of a man who advocated white genocide. Suck it up.</p>
<p>And your line about spiritual destitution is a little ridiculous. You’re starting to sound like a Bible thumper. No thanks, if you’re worried about “spiritual destitution”, I hate to inform you that this country is fleeing the rule of the Fundamentalist Lobby as fast as it can.</p>
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<p>I don’t know much about history, so I can’t comment on that, but I do agree with Vyse’s overall conclusions. I think that it’s an oversimplification to think that anyone who identifies with the southern culture is a racist. Some people might just have that as part of their ancestry. There was more to the southern culture than slavery.</p>
<p>The vast majority of Northerners rejected the abolitionist position. Abolitionists were never much liked in the North. But they had the moral high ground and literate men knew it. The Mainline Protestant Christian churches would eventually take over where the Quakers had begun, pushing their members toward emancipation, first gradual and compensated, then later immediate emancipation. Even when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation he encountered withering criticism-- from Northerners.</p>
<p>It is true that the South depended on slaves more than the North did. But that was not the cause of the South’s attempt to justify slavery by redefining blacks as animals unworthy of freedom. Washington, Madison, Jefferson all had slaves, as did most of the great Founding Fathers, and yet to a man they understood blacks were humans with the right to be free. They even passed the Northwest Ordinance, prohibiting slavery’s expansion because they understood that blacks had a natural right to be free. They did this despite that they were dependent on slaves, like the South in general, for their own comfort. It is this moral compass that ultimately made these slave owners great despite their immense flaws. They pursued the Right despite being too weak of character to follow through.</p>
<p>The Southern Confederacy was quite different. Not only did it fail to pursue decency and goodness, but it literally redefined decency into evil and made evil into goodness. It declared that the Declaration of Independence was wrong, and that since America was founded on the ideals enshrined in the Declaration, America was unworthy of existence and would pass away. No knowledgeable American alive today can, by reason, honor the Confederacy because that organization literally declared that America has no right to exist. The South is worthy only of our harshest condemnation. It had no excuse for its moral debauchery.</p>
<p>On who defines war: Young grunts who die at the command of politicians fight for a variety of reasons. Most of the Americans fighting in Iraq, for example, do not have any direct reason at all to fight and die there. Some are fighting because they wish to prove themselves. Others are doing it because it beats not having a job. Still others are doing it because they want to show loyalty to America and they do not really care whether they fight in Iraq or anywhere else. Others are fighting because their fathers and grandfathers fought in the wars of their day and they wish to continue the tradition. These poor boys cannot by logic define why the war is being fought because once they sign their lives away to the military, only the military leaders – politicians – command when they fight and when they die. If we wish to see why war is being fought, we must appeal to the views of those with power to send armies into battle. In the case of iraq, we must refer to Bush. When we do this with regard to the Civil War, we must read Southern leaders. Here we find that the main reason was to protect slavery. Surely “states rights” was an issue, but in almost all cases where southern leaders mentioned this as a reason to secede and fight, they referred to states rights to make their own decisions to keep slavery.</p>
<p>A few things here on public support of Malcom X and public support of the Confederacy: 1. Malcolm advocated his initial view only because The South for so many centuries had destroyed blacks. He was simply responding to what nonwhites had suffered from whites since the very first time whites arrived on these cursed shores. 2. Unlike the South, Malcolm never assaulted whites as a legal principle, but merely stated what he thought was philosophically fair and equitable, since whites had oppressed so many people. 3. Malcolm, despite the long-term dishonorable behavior of the South, still had the decency of spirit to change his view before he was murdered. The South never had this decency and, of course, it still doesn’t.</p>
<p>The grand kids of dead confederates can memorialize those who fought to keep slavery if they wish. I have no issue with this. I merely think they should have the decency to do it with their own money. If they were people of honor, they would also understand why it is that decent men would take offense at being forced to honor the Confederacy with public funds. Had the South any honor at all, had it a generally kind spirit about it, it would not cause further ill will to the memory of its ancestors by forcing support from the people who those ancestors attempted to oppress. But of course being the old South, it will continue to behave as it always has because it takes honor to do what is good and noble.</p>
<p>Only by a re-population of the South will honor ever arrive there. And arrive there it will, as surely as the sun rises.</p>
<p>On Spiritual Sensibility and Bible Thumping: It will be obviously difficult for the South to understand this, but I suppose I should say that one need not be a Bible Thumper to have honorable spiritual sensibilities. As hard for the South to accept it, Muslims can have honorable spirits. Jews can have them. Atheists can have them. Even some Christians can have them, though of all the Bible Thumpers I have ever met, the vast majority came from the Christian South, the same religious folks whose ancestors literally started a church because they could not accept the idea of ending slavery.</p>
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<p>Most of them are not memorializing the fight for slavery - they are honoring their ancestors - their FAMILY. </p>
<p>I seem to remember some people getting offended when I inadvertently said ‘Christians did this or that’ and I qualified my statements so as not to offend.</p>
<p>May I suggest that you qualify your statements, instead of making such a blanket statement ‘The South.’ It’s just as offensive as someone saying ‘Blacks are members of gangs.’</p>
<p>lealdragon - I definitely agree. This thread has taken…several odd turns. One of them has been the creation of some collective called “The South” and the ascribing thereto of basically every negative thing one can think of as well as a temporally relaxed barrage of criticisms that simply does not stand in the face of…well…reality. My friends whiskey, tango, and foxtrot have, thus ordered, made themselves present in response to some of the condemnations hurled at a caricature of the lower of the lower 48.</p>
<p>I came into this, I believe, with serious questions about serious accusations regarding what I consider to be inexcusable comments made under the masthead of someone running for president. Little did I realize where this particular worm would turn.</p>
<p>a basic libertarian belief is that people can do what they want- and that includes discrimination</p>
<p>I don’t know, anyone against the Civil Rights Act- well, guess many people don’t realize Paul was against the very acts that gave them rights</p>
<p>Paul feels people and businesses have the right to discriminate based on color</p>
<p>On second thought, it would be more accuate to say that Drossel’s assessment of the culture of the ‘South’ needing to be eradicated would be more comparable to saying 'It’s just as offensive as someone saying ‘Blacks are members of gangs and drug addicts and must be eradicated by mixing with whites…only when there are no longer any blacks left, but the mixed brown people, can we say that the gang members are all gone.’</p>
<p>Can you see my point, Drossel? SOME present-day blacks have their faults too. SOME of them have been guilty of atrocities equal to or worse than slavery. Some have murdered others. What about those blacks who have killed white people? White people who were innocent, who never did anything to hurt blacks? How is that any different from the atrocities committed by whites against blacks?</p>
<p>It’s all the same! Violence against another is always horrible. It doesn’t matter which direction it goes in.</p>
<p>Should we say that ALL blacks must be wiped off the face of the earth, before ‘honor’ can be restored? Rap music must be abolished, fashions, hairstyles favored by black gang members must be outlawed…and only when all of them are GONE and we have left a homogenous society of mixed-race people can we say that the wrongs have been righted?</p>
<p>Please consider this analogy - I believe it is fitting. You are so locked in to your victim consciousness that you don’t seem able to see your own prejudiced statements.</p>
<p>Black people, white people, north or south…it matters not. We are all people! We are no longer locked into the primitive prejudices of our ancestors. Let it go. Rejoice that times, and people, have CHANGED. Quit clinging to what happened to OTHER people more than a century ago. Move forward. Show your children a vision of freedom, liberty, equality…a vision in which skin color does not matter at all, but all that matters is the individual spirit.</p>
<p>And that individual spirit of GOOD can be found in most of us, regardless of our skin color and who our ancestors were.</p>
<p>On The evidence of Ron Paul’s culpability for newsletter racism: The evidence that is most obvious to me is that he wrote the words. I have seen nothing so compelling that it could change this reasonable assessment. Ron Paul’s late denial concerning a newsletter that helped poison America against people like me for some ten to fourteen years, is not suitable evidence. It is just his word, his weak, late, meaningless word against the hard copy that came off of his presses.</p>
<p>On how my attitude perpetuates racism: Are you saying that my attitude is a racist attitude? I have no problem with whites or any other race. I have a problem with certain behaviors and ideas (is this not valid?), many of which are found in whites, blacks, Asians, and others. I speak here specifically of a set of behaviors that form old Southern culture, which behaviors have caused almost ALL the suffering black people endure today. Indeed, quite a lot of our problems are due to the fact that Southern culture underlies black culture. We have the defect of Southern culture in addition to the suffering and pain we have endured from slavery and Jim Crow. I do not think one could have ever planned a more brilliant way to destroy a people.</p>
<p>On The Secret: I have not seen it. I have no real need to see it because I am no longer in the South. I am personally quite fine, very happy. But the wrongs of the past still exist and I would like to see them righted. I think this cannot be done while the old South has power to command people. If I cannot speak of these behaviors as “The South”, then how might I speak of them, especially since they in part form Southern culture?</p>
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<p>Okay, well… I think you are a good soul, and that you mean well. But as long as you are in white skin, you really won’t be able to know what I am talking about here without a lot of intense thought and hard work. It is like we are living before 1492, and I am telling you the earth is not flat but spherical. You just can’t believe it because the very ground you stand on is flat.</p>
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<p>You claim your son looks white. So there it is. Your husband has encountered racism. Just ask him. It may not be as withering as the mess blacks put up with EVERY day, but he deals with it. Hispanics are catching it too.</p>
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<p>Dear friend. Try to understand that you are selling these folks something while also standing in white skin. That makes a big difference. I didn’t make this handshaking claim, but I certainly don’t gainsay it at all. This thing is so vast and complex, I do not think I have what it takes to explain it. I can ask you to imagine being a black kid and being raised up in this nonsense. It will negatively affect your thinking about yourself.</p>
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<p>Of course your experience is valid. But of course you’re white. That makes a remarkable difference, friend. It means you get to enjoy assumptions that I will never have. Your kid gets to enjoy assumptions that my kids will never have. My kids have to be much stronger than yours if they are to participate in and achieve the same things. That is just a fact of American life, and lest you accuse me of being a “victim” as you have in prior to this post, I’m fine. I am just not naive about this stuff, and I am unwilling to tell lies about it.</p>
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<p>I do wish you could understand that I have no old grudges. I have wishes and hopes for the future and see that Southern culture is not what so many claim it is. It is in fact a backward culture, an impediment to a great future. It has nothing to do with getting along with whites. Shoot, I was just marveling about it this past Thanksgiving. I think I have more white friends than black ones. In fact, I have white family members with whom I am very close and who I love dearly. We are LONG past this because those whites and I are of the same culture. We are all running the SAME communications protocol, indeed we are even running the SAME operating system! We enjoy the same books, the same music, the same foods, and share the same hopes. We are one people, and race with them is no issue. I speak here generally, with regard to our wider culture.</p>
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<p>In the face of the 1950’s Civil Rights movements very many regions in the South began to fly the Confederate Flag in-you-face style, BY OFFICIAL LAW, using public funds, on public grounds, and even putting it on their state flags. Those symbols are still there. It wasn’t about history, friend. And it still isn’t. It is about the spiritual destitution in the South, the wholesale lack of kindness and honor in the region. </p>
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<p>I will be as honest as I can. I see nothing in old Southern culture that is not clearly bested by its counterpart in Northern culture. Southern culture underlies black culture and it has wrecked black Americans to no end– I mean wrecked us. There is nothing good here, and we need to be rid of it.</p>
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<p>The people are just machines being driven by cultural software. They could be fine people were they running a new and superior system. I have nothing against the people. I am against the barbaric culture that is responsible for the unthinking Jingoism behind the their support of the Iraqi War.</p>
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<p>I have no grudge.</p>
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<p>No I do not. This point you are making here is a racist point, claiming that blacks are gangmembers. If you wish to make an accurate analogy here you should do this:</p>
<p>“Black gang culture [the analog to Southern culture] must be eradicated by being replaced by superior black professional culture, or white Northern culture. Black gang culture is BAD culture and I see nothing redeemable in it.”</p>
<p>That is what I am saying about the South. Southern culture is just one gigantic infected gang culture that for centuries ganged up against blacks.</p>
<p>How else might I get at this BAD behavior so that it does not offend you?</p>
<p>cgm: I understand how, at first glance, Ron Paul’s opposition would seem to be against progress in the area of eliminating racism. However, upon careful reading of his actual words, a different picture appears. </p>
<p>[The</a> Trouble With Forced Integration by Rep. Ron Paul](<a href=“http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html]The”>The Trouble With the '64 Civil Rights Act - LewRockwell)</p>
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<p>from [Ron</a> Paul and the Economics of Slavery by Bob Murphy](<a href=“http://www.lewrockwell.com/murphy/murphy130.html]Ron”>Ron Paul and the Economics of Slavery - LewRockwell)</p>
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<p>No, actually he hasn’t. He has a very proud spirit and really doesn’t give a damn about what people think, so if anyone ever was discriminatory towards him, he probably didn’t notice and certainly didn’t care.</p>
<p>My son looks like a mixture of white and Hispanic, actually. Light brown. It’s obvious he isn’t white, but neither does he look Hispanic. He could pass for either.</p>
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<p>Whoa, wait a minute…no way could you have thought that I was saying all blacks are gangmembers!!! I think you know that I was making an analogy and that I obviously don’t think that. I will trust that you just didn’t state your words carefully.</p>
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<p>Ah, NOW we are getting somewhere! I see the problem. It is your choice of terminology in using such a general term as ‘The South’ to be analogous to a more specific term of ‘black gangmembers.’</p>
<p>They are not equal, see? ‘The South’ is too broad and includes ALL subcultures within the larger culture of the southern geographical area. Because I live in Texas, I am included in that broad, sweeping generalization, as are all the other people living in the southern states, whether racist or not. My Mormon brother who listens to country music is included, yet he is totally NOT racist at all (as I am not).</p>
<p>Whereas, ‘black gangmembers’ is a very specific term, more equivalent to ‘neo-nazi racist extremists’ or some such other specific term. ‘The South’ is more equivalent to ‘blacks’ or ‘whites’ or ‘Christians.’</p>
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<p>I’ll bet they had some good music, and their grannies made good peach cobbler. And the women probably knew how to make very nice quilts. The teenage boys who fought in the civil war probably had some degree of virtue and courage, even though they probably did not understand why they were fighting. </p>
<p>Those are some examples of CULTURE. You keep saying the culture needs to be replaced. I disagree. What needs to be replaced, and HAS been replaced, is the barbarism of slavery. THAT is already gone! Except for a few random jerks here and there, for the most part racism is on its way out too. In another generation or 2 we’ll all be so mixed up it’ll be hard to tell who’s black or Chinese or Hispanic anyway.</p>
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<p>By not using a general term to describe a subset. By not using a geographical, cultural term to describe a behavior exhibited by SOME members of that area or culture.</p>
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<p>Those of us who have read many pages of his words and have watched many hours of his speeches see absolute, compelling evidence that they are NOT his words. They are clearly quite different in style and in character. The style, the tone, the thought process, the character…all strikingly different.</p>
<p>It would be like reading a speech written by Al Gore and being told bush wrote it. It would be quite obvious that there is no way bush could have written it.</p>
<p>Drosselmeier, there’s no comparison to be had. Black gang violence against whites is far, far, far and away more prolific than Southern white violence against blacks. I tend to side with Bill Cosby who encourages a little introspection for those angry about how they’re being treated. No race or culture is perfect. The best you can do is to judge people not by the color of the skin (or the heritage of their grand parents, or their taste in music, or their geographical proximity), but by the content of their character.</p>
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<p>This is not accurate. He feels that, in a truly free society that honors the liberty of EACH individual, attitudes would naturally improve. </p>
<p>My take on this is that, a few decades ago, minorities still were very wounded by how they had been treated. Many still are. But it’s changing. Look, we have a black running for president! So maybe the Civil Rights Act was necessary as an equalizer back then, but not anymore. Blacks and other minorities have risen up and claimed their power. Some haven’t caught on yet, but then, some whites are still living in trash and poverty, too.</p>
<p>Here is an inspiring (very short) message from a black man who believes in the ability of black people to stand up for themselves:</p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - Ron Paul Is A RACIST??](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ItmcIxe5Fs&NR=1]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ItmcIxe5Fs&NR=1)</p>
<p>Listen carefully to his words. They convey what I’ve been trying to say.</p>
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<p>Well still, whether he cared or not, he still encountered it, and it had deleterious effects upon him – whether he wants to admit it or not.</p>
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<p>And there you are.</p>
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<p>I’m sorry friend, I didn’t mean to say you really were making a racist point. I actually think you are one of the finest people here on CC. You give me a lot of comfort. What I meant to say was that the point itself, far from being analogous to my point, is racist. It focuses on the race of the people and not their culture.</p>
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<p>Well yes. I am trying to find a term that avoids the New South, people like you, Hispanics, and others who are running new and improved cultural software. I am honing in on the term “old South” hoping that it excludes you. Does that work?</p>
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<p>These are all true. But of course the best American pianists, composers, scientists, mathematicians, the best schools, etc., etc., are concentrated THICKLY in the North. The North has counterparts that are all superior to the old South. I see that black music has taken the whole world so that its essentials are found even in Southern music. But that music is so fundamentally West African in culture, with European influences that I do not think I can look at it as a direct product of the old South. It is a result of West Africans taking on old southern oppression, really. But really, what interests me are the essential behaviors that cause people to progress optimally. I do not see them in the old South to anywhere near the extent I see them elsewhere. I very much wish to see blacks escape this place, at least in our minds. It is fine to live there, I suppose, so long as we always know we are of a superior culture and we know what that culture is. I do believe this is the antidote to the harmful inward effects of racism that we need.</p>
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<p>I am not so optimistic. Not trying to rain on the parade. I think this is a little na</p>
<p>Drossel, I do not claim to understand what it’s like to be black. I have never experienced racism, but I have experienced bigotry. I was raised poor and attended a private Catholic school in which all the other students were affluent. (My parents couldn’t afford it - that’s one reason we were so poor!) For 6 years I endured the humiliation of shabby clothes, being very tiny (the only short person in the entire class), and having a schizophrenic (‘weirdo’) sister who was the talk of the town. They teased me mercilessly and I came home in tears many times. I would be sick in the mornings rather than face the cruelty at school. I was embarrassed for anyone to see my family’s house or clunky car.</p>
<p>I told this story here on cc before, and someone (you?) told me there was no comparison. That living in poverty could never be as difficult as belonging to a minority race.</p>
<p>That person seemed oh so sure of this. But how could she be so sure? There is no way to compare the suffering of a child raised in poverty (with some additional complicating factors thrown in, like being abused and witnessing abuse, and never getting any love or encouragement whatsoever) </p>
<p>…to that of a child belonging to a minority race. Sure, the minority child might have all those other factors too, maybe his parents are alcoholics or gangmembers or whatever…or maybe he gets hugs everyday. Who knows? It’s all very subjective.</p>
<p>But one thing’s for sure: Bigotry HURTS. Whether it’s based on race or economic status or whatever, it’s still suffering.</p>
<p>The degree might be different. You might be right that no way could I have ever suffered as much as you did as a child. But why are we having a contest, anyway? Why continue to dwell on what is unpleasant? The best way to right the wrongs is to move on, and better your life. As they say ‘living well is the best revenge.’</p>