There’s something wrong with UNC’s business school

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a Confederate monument called “Silent Sam”. It needed to go. They needed a solution to allow “the University to focus on its core educational mission”. So they came up with an amazing plan.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of those groups that idolizes past treachery, wanted the statue. It seems to me that the obvious solution would be to simply sell it to a private organization like that so that they would haul it away and take on the guilt and obligation. The UNC Board of Governors does not think that way, and had an alternative plan.

They would pay the SCV millions of dollars to take possession of the statue that they wanted.

The state’s monuments law prevents the removal of a public statue but there is an exemption for private ownership. The SCV arranged to acquire all property rights of the monument from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). We reached an agreement with the SCV to settle the threatened litigation with the following terms:

  • The SCV owns the monument;
  • The monument will be transferred to the SCV;
  • The UNC System and the Board of Governors will fund a separate charitable trust administered by a neutral, independent trustee in the amount of $2.5 million; the funds will come from interest on the university endowment fund, not tax dollars or tuition and fees.
  • The separate charitable trust is to be used only for the preservation of the monument, as determined by the trustee; and
  • The monument cannot be located in any of the 14 counties currently containing a UNC System constituent institution.

We also agreed that the SCV would sign a separate agreement limiting its ability to display flags and banners on university campuses, in exchange for a payment of $74,999. This agreement addressed the possibility that the consent order might not be approved, in which case the SCV agreed that it would not sponsor events on any of our campuses for five years.

Wow. That’s an interesting way to get rid of something. I have an alternative: pay me half that amount, $1.25 million, to take it on. Since I am in a Yankee state, we could call it spoils of war. I’d install it in my front yard and spit on it every day as I walked to and from work, which is all it deserves.

Or it could just be melted down and recast in a more appropriate form.

Or you could do as Greg Doucette has done, and sue the SCV for $2.5 million, to be turned into a scholarship fund for African-American students.

Man. I wish I was at a university that was so rich they could afford to pay off white nationalists to protect their “educational mission”, so we could jump down their throats and instead force them to pay for, you know, education instead. UNC just has funny priorities.

This man is not a racist

You know he’s not because he says he’s not.

That’s how racism works, you know: if you think a nation founded on black slavery, and another nation that carried out brutal ethnic cleansing, are just peachy, saying the magic words “I am not a racist” absolves you of all blame. You can support policies that promote white supremacy, you can put up Nazi flags like they’re Christmas decorations, you can intentionally put up pallets painted with Confederate symbols and point them at a minority-majority school, but as long as you deny that you’re a racist, you’re safe.

For bonus points, you can get really irate if someone accuses you of being a racist as long as you insist you’re not a racist, and then you can turn it around and accuse them of being racist against white people. What’s really neat-o is that if they then say “I am not racist!” you can smirk knowingly, because you know that everyone who says that is lying.

Words are magic!

Heritage. I’ve learned to hate that word.

Here’s Nikki Haley babbling about heritage to excuse confederate-flag-waving murderers.

“Here is this guy that comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag,” she said. “And had just hijacked everything that people thought of—we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. It’s a small minority; it’s always going to be there.”

“People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage,” the ex-governor continued. “But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it. And the national media came in droves—they wanted to define what happened. They wanted it to make this about racism. They wanted to make it about gun control. They wanted to make it about the death penalty.”

Apparently, according to Haley, the media at the time wanted to make the mass slaying of nine black people—an admittedly targeted racist attack, as laid out in Roof’s manifesto—about race.

Right. The Confederate flag wasn’t a symbol of hatred until Dylan Roof picked one up. It didn’t take a mass murderer of the national media to make that flag all about racism — that’s what it has always been about.

Here’s another one. The town of Wake Forest, NC decided to cancel their annual Christmas parade. For years, various Southern heritage groups have freely marched in these parades, but this year, they got word that protesters were going to show up, so they finally noticed that some people might criticize the celebration of treachery in their family-friendly event.

“Make no mistake about it — the Town of Wake Forest is extremely sensitive to the emotion the confederate flag stirs among those on both sides of this issue,” officials wrote in the statement. “We recognize that for some the flag represents racism, hatred and bigotry, while others see it as a representation of Southern heritage protected as a matter of freedom of speech/freedom of expression.”

Saying something is your “heritage” doesn’t mean it’s worthy and good. Everyone inherits bits of their culture that are both good and bad — it is the responsibility of every generation to winnow out the bad and strive to improve the heritage they leave to their children. Just because grandpappy did it does not automatically make it a blessed action. Your grandpappy might have been an asshole.

The southern heritage is always focused on the colossal catastrophe that afflicted the region a hundred years ago: the heritage of brutal slavery, a misbegotten war to defend white people’s right to own black people, and a humiliating, crushing defeat. You’re celebrating the wrong things! Waving the Confederate flag is a declaration that you’ve learned nothing, are pining for the “good ol’ days” when you could own slave labor and treat a significant part of your population as subhuman.

For the love of god, can Southerners please find something else to be proud of? Every time you put that hateful flag on your pickup truck, you’re telling me that the only thing you can think of to demonstrate pride in your heritage is a demonstration of barbarity and hatred and ignorance.

My grandpappy was an abusive drunk who was also an army engineer who served in WWII, who aspired to be an architect and was frustrated in his dream by poverty. This behavior is like putting a crumpled beer can on a stick and wacking women with it while saying “Woo hoo, Grandpa!”. That would be neither fair to the man or a part of his life that I want to emulate. But heritage makes it all OK, I guess?

Michael Harriot has a few words about the Confederate flag.

A work of prophecy

They don’t realize it’s coming. The rich think that, because they’ve succeeded so well so far, they never need to worry that it can all come crashing down. They think we’re just talking a good game.

Rousseau’s most enduring contribution to the current revolutionary discourse, though, came via a 1789 speech. As writer Talia Lavin noted in a recent piece on the phrase’s origins, his pithy warning — “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich” — has become a rallying cry on social media and at contemporary political protests, where the people’s great and terrible anger at the economic predation of the 1% has helped propel a resurgent anti-capitalist movement. The phrase is all over Twitter, TikTok, and various other social media platforms. It has long been immortalized in song thanks to British heavy metal legends Motörhead (who provided the soundtrack for a bloody 1987 movie also named Eat the Rich about a restaurant that serves the meat of its former wealthy patrons), Swiss hard rockers Krokus, and, bizarrely, Aerosmith, whose vocalist Steven Tyler is currently estimated to be worth about $130 million. (Full disclosure: I have eat the rich tattooed on my stomach, which doubles as a tribute to Motörhead and my own political inclinations.)

I don’t think tattooing a phrase on your belly is a precursor to revolution, and I think that right now we have a complacent middle class (how else could Joe Biden be doing so well in the polls?). One real crisis is what it will take, and crises are on the way. Climate change is going to cause all kinds of disruption, the country is being managed so badly that new conflicts are going to arise, domestic unrest is going to be fomented by a militarized police and splintered right wing terrorist groups. Even minor things could be the tipping point — remember the gas shortages of the 1970s? Something like that could be the spark that wakes up a pissed-off majority.

I’m just saying the 1% need to recognize that they aren’t as well sheltered as they think they are. Buying off an election or hiring lobbyists isn’t going to turn them into good guys in the eyes of the people.

How Quillete packages itself for so-called liberals

Make no bones about it, Quillette is an outrageously racist site. Here’s an article that compiles numerous examples of its biases.

Lehmann has said she started Quillette to counter what she calls “blank slate fundamentalism,” or the proposition that educational outcomes, career success, capacity for ethics, and economic class are determined more by environmental factors than genetic ones. That is to say, she believes that social status, morality or immorality, and, yes, income itself are all genetically based.

Lehmann told Politico that Quillette’s goal is “to broaden the Overton window”—that is to say, expand the limits of acceptable discourse. She didn’t stipulate that she wants these limits broadened only to the right, but she didn’t have to. Writing in Quillette, Lehmann said the Overton window should be shifted so that people can more openly denounce “immigration,” for example by trumpeting the Muslim heritage of sex-crime suspects.

The real question, though, is why so-called liberals support the site, or even read it. The answer to that is that it exploits the same cracks that were exploited by the right wing to fracture the atheist movement: anti-feminism, anti-Islam, anti-trans bigotry. The people who are otherwise horrified by racism will cheerfully overlook the glaringly illiberal perspective of the site to join in #metoo-, Islam-, or trans-bashing.

Perhaps the most important weapon Quillette uses is applying pressure on a few specific fault lines that divide liberal audiences, such as the MeToo movement. Quillette has recruited liberal men accused of sexual harassment or assault, like Elliott, and empowered them as experts on feminism. In his first Quillette piece, Elliott blasted the desire to “believe women,” and blamed one accuser for his poor book sales and his television agent’s not returning his calls. Elliott has since written three more pieces for the magazine and become one of its strongest partisans on Twitter, joking about a “Quillette Hot American Summer” and frequently retweeting the magazine’s diatribes against feminism. “Wow, Quillette has been killing it recently,” he said in one tweet.

Despite his public defense of the magazine, Elliott told me, “People say, ‘Oh they published this or that,’ and I don’t know what they’re talking about. I don’t read most of the articles in Quillette.” Asked about the magazine’s repeated promotion of racist pseudoscience, Elliott said, “I don’t agree with that, obviously. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.… The articles you’re talking about, I haven’t read. Maybe if I read one, it would be so offensive that I would say I can’t write for them anymore.”

You can’t be a “dyed-in-the-wool liberal” if you’re willing to smear women, Muslims, and trans persons. You’re just another bigot who only likes white Christian cis men.

The history lesson we all need

You should all take a little time to read David Neiwert’s century of lynching and rioting by white people in America, because we sure as hell didn’t get any of this in our public school history classes. This is the stuff that ought to be taught in fifth grade, except that a) a lot of white parents would scream at administrators about their kids being shown a picture of Grampaw smirking in a mob that’s dismembering and burning a black man, and b) I’d be afraid that there’d be some white parents smirking now and drilling the wrong lesson into their kids.

Even now I look at my fellow white people in that photo and wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. How do you participate in such horrors and ever again claim that you are on the side of what is right?

People would be concerned at teaching such graphic horrors in our classrooms now, but look at that — they were bringing their kids to a lynching, like it was a field trip to the local textile museum.

Mayor Pete gets a bad burn

Ow. Michael Harriot responds to Buttigieg’s claim that black folk just need more inspiration to succeed.

It proves men like him are more willing to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism. Get-along moderates would rather make shit up out of whole cloth than wade into the waters of reality. Pete Buttigieg doesn’t want to change anything. He just wants to be something.

Read the whole thing. Especially you, Mr Buttigieg, and after you finish you can just go off and quietly retire from the race.

Blackberries everywhere

Growing up south of Seattle, one of the omnipresent features were the blackberries — everywhere I walked, along the roads, in abandoned fields, along the railroad tracks, there were these impenetrable walls of blackberry brambles. They were a nuisance, but it was great in August because it was like all the paths were lined with candy, you could just pluck huge quantities of fat berries while hardly trying.

But today I read about the history of blackberries in that area, and it starts out disappointing — they’re non-native, introduced by Luther Burbank — but it just keeps getting more OH NO LUTHER YOU DIDN’T.

He started selling a new book that he’d written in his catalogs, The Training of the Human Plant.

Burbank wrote that the crossing, elimination and refining of human strains would result in “an ultimate product that should be the finest race ever known.”

He considered the U.S. the perfect place to practice eugenics, because, at the turn of the century, there were immigrants coming from all over the world. He wrote:

“Look at the material on which to draw. Here is the North, powerful, virile, aggressive, blended with the luxurious, ease-loving, more impetuous South.

“The union of great native mental strength, developed or undeveloped, with bodily vigor, but with inferior mind.”

We’re going to have to pay more attention to Nick Fuentes now

It’s painful, but he really is one of the worst of these right-wing monsters. Watch this smug, slimy scumbag execute standard old holocaust denial with a smile on his face.

Ick.

And now, a word from the Illinois Patriarchy Institute

These guys are always flooding my mailbox with their hand-wringing screeds about the gays and the trans and the non-god-fearing Americans, and lately they’ve been particularly wound up. Why? Because Chick-fil-A Betrays Principles and Faithful Customers. If you can’t trust a soulless giant capitalist chicken-killing and meat-processing restaurant to bash the gays, what are you going to do?

In a stunning act of betrayal, Chick-fil-A’s charitable foundation, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, has announced it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), or Paul Anderson Youth Home (PAYH). Though Chick-fil-A has not publicly acknowledged the reason for its betrayal, everyone knows what it is. Chick-fil-A is attempting to curry favor with the “LGBTQ+” community that is shredding our social fabric. This policy shift constitutes a cowardly betrayal of Chick-fil-A’s Christian ethos and its Christian customers who have stood by Chick-fil-A through all its trials at the hands of legions of supporters of sexual deviance. #LoveofMoney

Broods of vipers identifying as apostles of justice, equality, tolerance, diversity, inclusivity, and compassion have been protesting and maligning Chick-fil-A since 2012 when Dan Truett Cathy, chairman and chief executive officer, made some public statements in an interview with the Baptist Press supporting true marriage and opposing the legal recognition of homosexual unions as marriages. After homosexuals got wind of Cathy’s theologically orthodox and unremarkable statements, some part of hell broke loose and raged against Chick-fil-A. Fortunately for Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Christians turned out en masse all across the country to show their support with their time and money for Cathy’s stand for truth.

Wow. I haven’t been called a brood of vipers in days, and usually it’s by angry atheists on an anti-SJW crusade. It’s good to see a Christian organization returning to its roots and its heritage of hatred, and the True Meaning of the words of the Bible.

They should have waited, though. Don’t you worry, Chick-fil-A still hates those non-Christian sexual deviants!

Chick-fil-A says it will now focus its charitable efforts in three areas: education, homelessness, and hunger. But when asked more specifically, it did not go so far as to say that it will no longer donate to organizations that oppose LGBTQ rights.

“No organization will be excluded from future consideration–faith-based or non-faith-based,” Chick-fil-A President and COO Tim Tassopoulos said in a statement to VICE.

See? The door is still open for a policy of bigotry. You just have to cater to their desire for dollars, as Jesus would expect you to do. This change is only motivated by money, as they see all those potential customers walking by their doors on the way to Popeye’s Chicken. That’s really all this is, a cautious ploy to expand their customer base in the face of competition.

Despite attempts to move away from politics, the company has been unable to shake its homophobic reputation. Just last month, Chick-fil-A was forced to close its very first location in the U.K. after only eight days following protests and pressure from groups promoting LGBTQ rights.

Disclosure: I can’t claim to have boycotted Chick-fil-A, because I’ve never eaten there, never been tempted even before they revealed their bigotry. And now I don’t eat there because of the vegetarian thing.

I have eaten at Popeye’s, decades ago, and it was really good. I guess if I had to break down and eat a dead bird, I’d prefer to go there anyway, no matter what openly Christian Chick-fil-A said to make amends. Although I really doubt that Popeye’s management is full of secularists and atheists.