If you're just interested in reading about it, you would probably find this interesting:

http://president.yale.edu/sites/defa...AL_12-2-16.pdf

It's the Yale report on establishing principles on renaming (and, implicitly, naming) buildings and other campus structures. (This was in the context of their renaming Calhoun College earlier this year.)

Top points:

• There is a strong presumption against renaming existing buildings based on the values associated with their namesakes. Renaming should only happen in exceptional circumstances.
• A key question is whether the namesake's principal legacy is fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University.

There's more to it than that, but again if you're just looking for a conversation about what should be considered in naming and renaming decisions, I think this is a good start.

But, as a reminder, this stuff happens in other contexts, especially in the university setting, where naming happens all the time. Seton Hall's business school had Kozlowski Hall, but then renamed it after he was convicted of a felony. Queen's University removed David Radler's name from a wing of the business school after he pleaded guilty to mail fraud. Villanova removed John E. du Pont's name from the basketball pavilion after he was convicted of murder. You can find tons of examples, and schools often choose to retain the name even for terrible people, like the Rigas Family Theater at St. Bonaventure University. (John Rigas was convicted of fraud at Adelphia Communications.) In my own state of Ohio, OSU runs a hotel named after a convicted felon, Roger Blackwell. (This also happens to be one of the hotels that Erin Andrews sued over her stalker incident.)

But in most of these cases, we're arguably talking about naming that was made in good faith for people that were only discovered to be terrible people after the naming decision was made. That's not an argument that you can make for these confederate monuments we're talking about.

Yes, they are conservative values by definition. The Librulz should, and always should have been, rubbing the enablers of white supremacies noses into this shiz.

My mom, who went onward a few years ago, was deeply and personally offended by these "lost cause" shrines all over the country. First, of course, because she knew history, and knew they were almost all installed decades after that war as part of an extended pro-white supremacy propaganda campaign. But second, because she was deeply patriotic in the Librulz Kennedy Democrat kinda way. She despised this glorification of treason against her beloved country.

I guess I should have better taken the lesson from Flatland:

one-dimensional people have difficulty acknowledging the multi-dimensionality of others

I guess I'll be the one who has to break it to you. This "multidimensionality" of Confederate generals and the like was a con that everyone accepted because it made it possible to paper over the fact that the South's succession was built on the idea of human-people-as-property-holding aristocracy. These generals were transformed from the vanguards of a political system determined to expand and to remake the country and the Western Hemisphere into the plantation societies built on violence and oppression into complex people whose aim was noble but tragic. That allowed the South and North to reconcile the fact that they had extremely different ideas of what society should look like and settle on one were minorities were citizens but knew their place instead of being property.

What you are missing here is a time-and-place consideration.

I'll submit that this thread is a poor place to bring up the nuance between Lee -vs- Washington/whatev. Unless I am completely confused, we both agree the best thing to do with these problematic statues today is to carefully re-install them in the appropriate museum settings. But... when you start bringing up these nuances... in this particular thread... peeps spidey sense is going to start tingling that you are making a backhanded argument that these problematic statues should remain as-is.

See what I'm getting at?

the con is collapsing any figure into a singular ideal for the sake of dragging that figure around to make whatever point one wishes to bounce off of said ideal


we all you have is a plane, spin can only go in one of two directions (good and evil), but it can go in either

I believe I completely do.

I am asking people to check themselves. If they don't like how patronizing that is, guess what, they ask others to check themselves constantly.


I ask that others not read things that I don't say into what I do say. I am always happy to clarify if there is omission on my part or confusion on others'.

An idea that I've had in my head lately: The Hunger Games is based on basically a dystopian future, where after a Civil War, the victors subjugate the losers, rather than trying to reintegrate them into the broader fabric of society?

It's starting to look like a better and better idea.

Mods, I've seen a few different people suggest starting a thread on this renaming issue. I think this would be a good OP in such a thread. My only condition for using this OP is that the thread be called "The Spider J. Crab Memorial Thread on (De)Constructing and (Re)Naming Statues, Buildings, etc."

Although he's such a chum of Nigel Farage, it seems a little unlikely that Trump would ever have heard of Enoch Powell, much less Vergil's Aeneid. Where he got the 'River of Blood' idea from, since there was no such battle, nobody seems to know.

My late friend John served with 43rd Wessex Division in Operation Epsom, the First Battle of the Odon near Caen in 1944, where the river really did turn red with blood during the counter-attacks by 9th and 10th SS-Panzer Divisions on 29 June; but as rivers go, the Odon is more of a big ditch.

Nope. Lee was evil. The Confederacy was evil. The Confederate generals were evil, except for Longstreet after the war. The Southern Redemption was evil.

That's a whole third avenue of discussion.

It's also a meta-point, as in you are now chatting about how discussions are done in general... and now not chatting about anything particular regarding the events in Charlottesville, or the IRL ramifications of those events.

Second, we can't use the t-word in Alta. But, I really *feel* that the way you attempted to segue the chat ITT onto your meta-point is inappropriate. I *feel* intentionally, and off-topic, doing something you feel is annoying, isn't the *best* way to start a discussion regarding the fact that you find peeps doing that exact same something annoying.

A broader perspective on the statues

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...sponse/537285/

do it

I think I was just following you through the door you opened. Apologies if not.

I was talking about viewing the events in Charlottesville through a totally reductive lens. Nazi's view the world through a reductive lens. They refuse to appreciate nuance, context, caveat, etc. They see a black man commit a crime and they just think "yep".

The project, imo, of refuting their ideology is that of opening up their perspective to additional dimensions of experience and expectation.

I don't understand your use of the think/feel distinction. I also don't understand why you think I would presume to control the entire dialogue merely by offering my own contribution.

Please don't misinterpret me. I'm not suggesting that one should not be patronizing. Quite to the contrary, one should be receptive to any criticism and be ready to meet it head on, rather than retreat behind a wall of insulation.

I'm aware that I am tonally contemptible, but such is my curse. I could pepper my posts with more emojis, I suppose, but I think that would be even more insulting.

Do redeeming qualities get spun out of reality? Yes.

Do redeeming qualities ipso facto absolve individuals of their otherwise deplorable conduct? No.

Does the spinning of redeeming qualities undermine the redemptive value of said actual qualities? No.

No one really gives a **** whether Lee had redeeming qualities when we're talking about removing statues commemorating the confederacy. It's just trivia. That's the main reason why people suspect you're trying to backdoor your way into some kind of lost causer thing. Not that you are, but this forum is battle-hardened from years of derp.

Maybe this might help.

Nobody, or at least nobody worth taking serious, is suggesting we re-evaluate all our public art, using some new-fangled litmus test regarding "goodness" or "badness" of the IRL person depicted by such art. So... the "goodness" or "badness" of any particular IRL person depicted in any particular installation of public art isn't directly relevant to discussion.

For example: let's say a modern day neo-fascist club managed to get a statue of Pepe the Frog installed in a public space. The discussion regarding how poor Pepe got hyjacked by the alt-right wouldn't be directly relevant to that discussion, either. What would be relevant, is that it would function as pro-neo-fascist propaganda, which has -zero- place in our public spaces.

Exactly. You are not more enlightened than everyone else if you let additional trivia cloud what is otherwise a clear decision. The used car salesman isn't throwing a bunch of minutiae about the car and about financing and about gap insurance and about trade in valuation at you rapid fire to help you make a better decision.

I was not defending Lee. I do not care about him, or his statues, or the people who worship him.

My point is along the lines of what you state. Until you reach the state of utopia, there will always be unenlightened, horrible people from the past. People talk about Lee, but is he any more horrible in the context of slavery than the housewife who did nothing to stop it? Maybe there are degrees of horribleness, and Lee would rate above the housewife.....

I'm all for removal on the basis of what the statue represents (principally slavery/racism). I don't think anyone, I mean anyone, would argue that Lee's statue represents the desire to advance the position of the black man, even if that's what Lee appears to have been interested in doing (however warped his approach).

What I'm concerned about is (1) the divisiveness engendered by the unqualified vilification of Lee that goes along with removing the statue and (2) the invitation addressed to the Keepers(?) that political expedience is our only use for history - the table we set.


*Third, I am a newcomer on this board, I know. I did not take any significant strides to generate trust before launching into criticism itt, and that's a failure on my part. However, that the posters itt will presume the worst in this situation I see as a bug and not a feature of battle-hardening debate. If I can convince one person not to be so quick to judge a critical voice, all of these keystrokes will be infinitely more worthwhile.

We proly would be well suited if all this shiz was dumped off into a 'Statue "Moral Relativism" and Denial' thread.

This whole alleged line of reasoning is, of course, stupid, stupid, stupid. It's so stupid, that stupid minds could never all converge upon it like they always do. It's all astroturfed $$$$, and that fact should never be overlooked.

I disagree that removing statues entails "unqualified vilification", but I also disagree that unqualified vilification of Lee (or the confederacy in general) is a bad thing. In fact, given US history and the ongoing problem of racial inequality and discrimination, it's a pretty good thing, even though it offends some people.

I seem to recall people quoting Letter from a Birmingham Jail to you previously. This seems like another opportunity to do that.

What this thread is really about, I believe, is the intersection of protest and vigilantism.

Well... West Point probably should not have a cadet barracks named after an officer who betrayed his oath. And that place was set up in 1962, I think, which is mildly troubling.

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/2-us...7#.WZcjmLgfWCk