Protesters topple Silent Sam Confederate statue at UNC

Discussion in 'Latest US & World News' started by APACHERAT, Aug 21, 2018.

  1. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, absolutely. Did you ever follow the late Dennis Dutton's Bad Writing Contest? (That's where I came across Ms Butler.) And the sad thing is that naive kids like ... okay, no names ... can't tell the difference between this garbage, and something that is difficult, but with real content -- and the latter doesn't have to be in the real sciences: Kant, or Wittgenstein, or Marx are not always the easiest of reads, but there is something there and it's worth the effort. And I suppose you know about the PostModernism Generator? It's great fun. (College kids: don't waste time writing essays for your PoMo profs -- just log in to the PostModernism Generator and you've got an instant essay! Don't like it? Just keep hitting the refresh button until it comes up with something acceptable!. )

    I used to subscribe to Columbia's Teachers College Record ...and still subscribe to several Mathematics Education journals ... and some of the 'papers' submitted and published in them would make you weep.
     
  2. LangleyMan

    LangleyMan Well-Known Member

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    The solution is to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, not rant about the most efficient way of delivering them.
    We have to cut the horsepower and size of vehcles, reduce commutes, greatly increase the use of nuclear energy, cut the size of houses, and on and on. We need to build a political consensus and that means the greatest sacrifices will be made by "haves." There's much more that has to be done with developing countries. But that's another matter.
     
  3. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    The Confederacy was a traitorous group devoted primarily to preserving slavery, but destruction of property isn't the way to go. There's plenty of headway being made through legal routes.
     
  4. Pycckia

    Pycckia Well-Known Member

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    The people who understand her are all humbugs, too. I know. I used to write dissertations for those people.

    ---------------

    There is a very real crisis in academia today in the social sciences. It is called the irreproducibility crisis.

    "
    The “reproducibility crisis” is the name given to the situation that a large percentage, somewhere between 65% and 90%, of the academic literature is not reproducible. What this means is that if you take the methods of a given paper, and perform those methods in your own lab, between 65% and 90% of the time you won’t get the same findings.

    The history of the reproducibility crisis is that in 2011, Glenn Begley, who ran the oncology division at Amgen, decided to try to reproduce 53 foundational papers in oncology. He was unable to reproduce 47 of them, which is 89%. Bayer, another pharmaceutical company, reported in the same year that it was unable to reproduce 65% of the papers in its sample of the biomedical literature. Reproducibility has also recently been found to be an issue in psychology and computer science."


    https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/...s-affecting-scientific-research/#4c7ebab93dad


    When posters here say "studies show" there is a good chance they don't show anything of the sort.
     
  5. Ndividual

    Ndividual Well-Known Member

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    As W.C. Fields used to say "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
     
  6. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, I've been following this, with a certain amount of schadenfreude. It's sort of parallel to the production of nonsense in the humanties, where, as some physicist said of another's idea... I think it was Enrico Fermi -- "it's not even wrong".

    I first become aware of this when John Ioannidis published "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" a few years ago.

    Then, as you say, it turns out that a lot of famous 'experiments' in psychology which have given us wonderful dinner-party anecdotes , actually cannot be replicated. Every once in a while some lefty academic does a study on 17 undergraduates and announces that conservatives are not only stupider than liberals, and of course more likely to be Authoritarian Personalities, but we also are more prone to fear novel experiences, due to a shrunken, or is it enlarged, anterior cingulate cortex or something. (What ... biology might influence behavior ... but that's .... that's ... Nazi-ism!)

    I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know about the same disease infecting computer science, which is my own field. (Is it in 'Human-Computer Interaction' or in real sub-disciplines of the subject? How the hell can you get biased results when trying to work out the average Order-N complexity of shell-sort?) Could we call this phenomenon... errrr.... "Academic Fake News"?

    Then you get the clueless young kids saying "It's wrong to tie skin color to IQ" and it makes you want to bang your head on the table.
     
  7. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    When I was a young radical, I read fellow-Texan and radical leftwing sociologist C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination, written in the late 1950s. In there, he does a nice job of taking down academic sociology jargon. He translates some of Talcott Parsons' The Social System (I think it was) into plain English, and shows that the ideas expressed in it in hard-to-penetrate jargon are just common sense. [That was my response as a young radical ... I might have a different assessment of Parsons' work now, but I've not studied it.]

    I think there is a phrase, 'physics envy', to describe social scientists' yearning to be able to have the academic cachet of 'hard' disciplines like physics. And I've heard physicists taunt historians by pointing out that if all the historians on campus vanished, and the physicists had to teach their first-year courses, they could do it, given a few months to prepare -- but not the other way around. Male egos battling it out.)

    There are some good social scientists. I like Robert Putnam, and Roland Fryer because they ask the right questions. And of course there are a lot of good economists, because it's the discipline closest to empirical reality. (Fryer is actually an economist but in that area of economics that overlaps into explaining human behavior.)
     
  8. Pycckia

    Pycckia Well-Known Member

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    Thank you for the PoMo generator. I had seen the PoMo title generator but not one which could compose a whole paper. I am afraid it will put many of my colleagues in the term paper writing business on the unemployment line.

    Your mention of physics envy reminds me of a quip by the late Richard Mitchell who noted that sometimes a social scientist will mistakenly attend a physics seminar and he feels like a touch football player who has mistakenly wandered into the locker room of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

    I think you might like Richard Mitchell and some fan has put much of his writing on line. Here is a sample:

    https://sourcetext.com/grammarian-tgoa-index/
     
  9. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Whoa. Yes, yes, yes -- the late Mr Mitchell has got it. (And I see he devered from orthodoxy in other areas as well.)

    In the UK we've got something similar to Charter Schools in the US, and for the same reason, called 'Academies'. They're not really much different from state schools (I've done volunteer math teaching in a couple of local ones). But we've also a few schools which are really different -- or which are allowed to be -- called "Free Schools".. About eight years ago a teacher in one of these crappy state schools gave a talk at the Tory party conference ... here's the Wiki description of what happened :

    She's a very strong lady. She went on to start a Free School, which is run along the lines she thinks schools need to be, called "Michaela". Old-fashioned curriculum, old-fashioned discipline. The Left went nuts over it, and did everything they could to sabotage it when it started a few years ago, pressuring parents not to send their children there, even picketting it. (I've often heard conservatives speculate that rich liberals want there to be a lawn-mowing and toilet-cleaning class, and so they are happy with junk state schools, but that sounds too much to me like the Marxist idea about the bourgeoisie encouraging unemployment in order to keep wages low. But it's not inconsistent with the evidence.)

    Here's their website: Michaela School. Here's a report on it by an independent education advisor. And another one by a different fellow.

    Here's the lady who started it.
    [​IMG]

    And here are some of the kids (about half the school do not have English as a first language, and a fifth of them are on 'free school meals', which means they are from pretty poor homes).

    [​IMG]


    What really gets me is this: the Old Left, from which I came (ideologically) wanted to build a new world. We didn't want to wreck society, we wanted to take it over, and make the good things in it available to everyone. We wanted ALL schools to be like the private schools the rich sent their children too.

    So here is a school which is taking kids from disadvantaged backgrounds -- and we've got the same drugs-and-gangs culture here among our non-white youth that the US does, minus the guns (usually) -- and it's giving them an education that they could never get in the local state schools. It's NOT a question of learning the difference between a sine and a cosine, but of learning 'bourgeois values'. They don't talk back to their teachers, they pay attention in class, they learn to act like ladies and gentlemen at the dinner table. AND they learn factual knowledge, not nebulous '21st Century Skills'.

    And the hard Left -- almost all white in the UK -- absolutely hate it! I cannot understand it. It's almost like they want the children of the poor to remain poor and unemployable. I suppose they think that a kid who tells the teacher to 'eff off' is a kind of proto-revolutionary. He's not -- he's actually raw material for the lumpen proletariat, the first pool of recruitment for fascism. (See Marx on the 'mass base' of Napoleon III, in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) Genuine revolutionary leaders have, in fact, often had very good educations. (Lenin got a gold medal for his academic achievements.) The leftwing miners' leader Arthur Scargill noted that his Communist father read a book a week. The so-called 'Left' today -- the 'hard', 'far' Left -- are a mutation. Actually, I'd like to drop them all down in revolutionary Petrograd in 1918 where they would soon to put to useful work ......
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
  10. APACHERAT

    APACHERAT Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Vietnamese commies were honoring a former enemy at a war memorial in Hanoi over the weekend.
    [​IMG]
    People are laying flowers and American flags for John McCain at the site of his Vietnam War plane crash in Hanoi




      • After hearing the news of US Sen. John McCain's death Saturday, people in Hanoi, Vietnam have paid their respects by visiting the memorial at the site of his crash during the Vietnam War in the capital city.
    [​IMG]

    Communist Vietnam also honors its heros like "Hanoi" Jane Fonda and John Kerry.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
    Photograph of John Kerry meeting with Comrade Do Muoi, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Photo is displayed in the War Remnants Museum (formerly the "War Crimes Museum") in Saigon.


    [​IMG]

    Photograph of Nguyen Thi Dinh and Jane Fonda displayed in the Women's Museum, Saigon, May 28, 2004.


    [​IMG]

    Wall of the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, June 2, 2004. Detail of left wall on corner in Photo #6 above, diagonally across from the Kerry / Do Muoi photo. Black and white photo at left shows war protestor David Miller publicly burning his draft call-up notice in 1965, an action which inspired other similar protests in the American anti-war movement.
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
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  11. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    • Whoa. What class those people have.

      I have believed for a long time that the capture of the Asian anti-colonialist movement by Moscow was not inevitable. If Woodrow Wilson had been willing to meet with the young Ho Chi Minh, and then if the US had adopted a (discreet) anti-colonialist foreign policy -- admittedly difficult, given that we were beginning to behave like the Europeans in the Philippines, but not impossible -- who knows what might have developed? We had huge credit with young Asian anti-colonialists, including in China. More about that here. At the worst, we could have had some Asian Titos, but, as we've seen, Communism runs directly against the grain of Asian industriousness and family-orientation. So who knows what might have been possible?
     
  12. Plus Ultra

    Plus Ultra Well-Known Member

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    This is what you claim that stature is dedicated to, others differ.

    In my view the US Civil War was over the right to secede, and there is evidence this was the case. No nation has ever constituted itself with a built-in right for any part of it to secede, this is contrary to the creation of a nation, but the US was a newly created nation and unusually created, there are valid reasons to surmise the various states could secede. Every state has its own complete government and exercises jurisdiction over the entire field of government activity within its territory. There have been plenty of Supreme Court decisions carefully parsing the interactions between separate States and the Federal government; printing money, relations with foreign countries, military deployment, preemption of Federal law, reciprocity among different States in recognizing each others' laws... so the issue has been debated a lot.

    The South was concerned over the rise of the more industrialized North along the eastern seaboard, the establishment of the US capitol in the South was intended to assuage concerns powerful mercantile interests would dominate national government to the detriment of the much more agricultural South, complicated mathematical arrangements to include blacks in the census allocating representatives in Congress were enacted to accommodate Southern concerns. People populating large Eastern coastal cities resented the role of Southerners, they were better educated, more diverse and sophisticated, they had no use for slaves and found the practice morally repugnant. The divergence was evident and grew with time. New States admitted to the Union had the option of adopting slavery and some did. Abolitionists ran the Underground Railroad and Southerners formed raiding parties to capture fleeing slaves freed in the North, there were legal battles over this too.

    The US reached the point where Southerners did no feel themselves adequately considered in the Federal government and thus sought to secede. Foreign powers intervened and then the Federal government had to go to war, but it was a war over secession, not slavery. No doubt slavery was essential for the plantation economy in the South, and clearly this could not be accommodated since it actually is morally repugnant, but one simply cannot win over a society arguing their way of life is morally repugnant.
     
  13. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    No slavery in the South, no slavery in the North, = no Southern secession.
    Slavery in the North, slavery in the South, = no Southern secession.

    No slavery in the North, slavery in the South, = Southern secession. (Despite Lincoln's politic words.) They seceded in order to retain slavery.

    The South didn't retain slavery, in order that it could secede.
    It seceded, in order that it could retain slavery.

    QED: it was was a war 'over' slavery, not secession.

    We could have a long and mystifying discussion about causation in history, the
    chain of apparent accidents that precedes a certain event. Smith goes out to
    buy a packet of cigarettes and is fatally hit by a car. Did his smoking habit 'cause' his death?

    Was it the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, or the final cause?. Lots of fuel for obfuscation.

    But this case is clear cut.

    Defenders of the South like the line 'Oh, slavery ... that had nothing to do with it ... that was just
    a coincidence, like having a lot of magnolia trees', because now they are ashamed of slavery. Or
    those who are not, at least realize the rest of the world condemns it.

    But it's a lawyer's argument: "Murder? But your Honor, my client has often fired his gun. He's
    well-known at the local shooting range. On this occasion, it just happened, by accident, by tragic
    unlucky chance, that the victim was standing where my client happened to aim his weapon.
    It's about the victim's carelessness, not murder."
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
  14. Plus Ultra

    Plus Ultra Well-Known Member

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    I think the South's claim of secession is based on still controversial divergences regarding State's Rights. I believe sovereign States freely entered into a federation to improve their international power for the benefit of their citizens and that when any of those States find the advantages of federal advocacy on their behalf in international relations is not as advantageous as their own advocacy could be, the value of their federation comes into question.
     
  15. Ndividual

    Ndividual Well-Known Member

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    And Truman too, but the U.S. was more concerned about France, leaving Ho Chi Minh to seek help elsewhere to drive the French out of Vietnam.
     
  16. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes. By then our choices were narrowed, as Ho and Mao were already communists, and their movements had achieved hegemony among anti-colonialists in their respective countries. And they would have had to contend with Moscow-loyalists within their parties. But Tito succeeded, and perhaps we could have pulled them out of the Soviet orbit.

    I don't know enough about Vietnamese communism to be sure, but after 1928 (when the Russians gave the Chinese very bad advice re. the Nationalists, that got a lot of communists killed), the Chinese never trusted the Russians. I believe Mao and Chou En Lai wanted to come to Washington right after WWII ended to talk, but were brushed off. (I recall reading that in Barbara Tuchman's book on Joe Stillwell.)

    I also recall reading that the French government effectively blackmailed Washington into supporting them in Vietnam, effectively saying, 'If you don't help us keep our colonies, we'll stop resisting the Communists at home.' However, I'd like to see some hard evidence of that before believing it.
     
  17. Ndividual

    Ndividual Well-Known Member

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    My understanding is that we remained 'sort of neutral' allowing France to lose in Vietnam on their own, but back then both Democrats AND Republicans were anti-communist which resulted in our becoming involved initially non-militarily, and later militarily.
    But this has nothing to do with the threads topic, and only interests me as I live in South East Asia, with friends and relatives here who were on opposing sides during that period and lost friends and/or family members as a result, my wife having lost an older brother as a result of American bombing.
     
  18. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Whoa.

    Here's what I found out about our role:
    [ SOURCE ]
     
  19. Ndividual

    Ndividual Well-Known Member

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    In any event the U.S. didn't help the Vietnamese eject the French leaving them to seek help elsewhere.
    But I don't think what happened in Vietnam has/had anything to do with what happened to silent sam, did it?
     
  20. Junkieturtle

    Junkieturtle Well-Known Member Donor

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    I agree these statues need to be removed from public grounds, but I don't agree with vandalizing or destroying them. Move them somewhere else, unless nobody else is willing to take them, which I would be highly surprised if that was the case.
     
  21. Doug1943

    Doug1943 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Nah, these threads wander all over the place ... a thread is more like people meeting around the water-cooler at the office. (Or should I say political obsessives meeting around the water cooler?) Shouldn't be that way, but it is. I personally only get annoyed when you get a long content-free exchange of personal insults, but I understand there's a company working on a piece of software that will recognize these time-wasting exchanges and automatically delete them.
     
  22. Junkieturtle

    Junkieturtle Well-Known Member Donor

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    We can't learn it now. Without the statue, Silent Sam's history has been effectively erased because now there's no other way to know he even existed.

    That's why I've converted my hard drive to a statue file system. There's simply no other way to store and preserve information.
     
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  23. Ndividual

    Ndividual Well-Known Member

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    Yes, I've noticed that too.
     

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