Ninetales

0____o

DwnWthVwls

Way to take the quote out of context and ignore the rest of the discussion you decided to take part in. It was a comparison of motives, not a compliment to hitler.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

John Wilkes Booth

i honestly don't know much about columbus... i know the conquistadors weren't too nice to the natives, but wasn't columbus's basic motive just exploring looking for riches? seems like a decent motive to me. i can't hate on that. kind of like donald trump.

but saying hitler did it out of love for his people/country is questionable. the guy would cunningly play even his closest allies against each other to compete for his love/adoration/respect. if you ask me, he was motivated by megalomania more than anything else. imo the nazi party was first and foremost a hitler cult, and secondly a nationalist movement geared on building a new empire.

DwnWthVwls

This might be true, I'm sure you know more about it than I do. I'm just using my basic understanding of his actions, and random things I've read about, like his reduction of unemployment and improving the German economy (without considering all the negative impacts it had on the jews and other people that he wanted to get rid of).


All I'm saying is Columbus was as much of a genocidal maniac as Hitler, just on a smaller scale. Hitler(as delusional as he was) was fighting for the things he thought were right, where as Columbus was acting purely out of greed. Like I said both were atrocious but if you can look past the sheer number and impact of Hitler's success I think his morality is comparable to Columbus.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

Ninetales

every genocidal murderer thinks theyre doing the right thing

Xurtio

The presumption is that by banning it, you get a long term solution (with authoritative support, comes more widespread support. People that were afraid to stand up or were on the fence or were obedient citizens will now be able to). You pull the rug out from everybody all at once and you'll have unrest (I. E. Prohibition) but when it's a minority that are the issue, the demonstration of government support can bolster public support (such as in marriage equality and LGBT rights in general, where a significant portion of the population already supported it. In fact, Obama did not support marriage equality vocally until 51% of the US did and it's snowballed since then).

Anecdotally, the supreme court decision brought a lot of neutral people on my Facebook feed out to support the movement. I see a lot of my friends that were homophobic in high school being supportive now on online media. It was Alaska, a rural red state; I was raised homophobic too. Not by my parents, they were neutral, but by the rest of my redneck community.

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DwnWthVwls

What is the long term solution in your scenario? In mine I feel that educating people will slowly create future generations of more open-minded people. Banning the flag will just cause all the people who are open about their racism and bigotry to be a little less open about it, but it's not going to change the way they raise their kids. They are hate breeders, and I don't see that changing just because you take away their flag.

It worked for gay marriage because a group of people who were being persecuted gained power by acquiring equal rights. The only thing these confederate flag rednecks want is something that will never happen because society as a whole has progressed beyond slavery and racism(to an extent.. laws then compared to laws now). They have nothing to lose unless you start punishing them for being ignorant douchebags, and since we can't do that, I don't see any other option besides education.

Tbh I'm not sure I have enough faith in humanity to believe that education would ever actually work, but I think it has the greatest chance at making even a small impact. I can't get behind punishing someone for beliefs I don't agree with as long as they aren't harming anyone.

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I don't got a god complex, you got a simple god...

John Wilkes Booth

once again, the idea that banning the flag will reduce hate is laughable

literally nobody is converted to racism by the confederate flag

it's a symbol that racists rally behind... not the cause of their racism. and banning it only adds to their sense of victimhood, it doesn't make them any less likely to hate or even to use the symbol as a banner for hate.

the same way the swastika is unacceptable in mainstream society yet every stormfronter on the internet still reps it. and the neo-nazi/white nationalist movement in the united states (according to the left wing polemics, the obama administration, and FBI statistics) is a growing trend rather than something that is becoming less prevalent, despite the general mainstream trend towards multiculturalism.

Xurtio

Firstly, I make no claim that banning the flag has a net benefit result. I don't know, but a productive discussion should speak on the merits, and often casual internet discussions float freely away from relevance. I personally don't take a stance, and I think that most who do, are doing so based on ignorance, ideology, and personal preference, and then defending that point of view to the death. The reality is that it's a complex question and would require important statistical and causal relationships to be demonstrated and could very well return an answer that isn't a binary "yes" or "no".

As you said, it's a symbol that racists rally behind. Banning the flag would serve attrition purposes. It's a fight they lost, a sign their actions are not supported, even (perhaps especially) by the land's authorities. The act of banning the flag is, itself, an act of symbolism. If a bunch of white power advocates were to win under freedom of expression, it would lend credence to their cause; underlying the fact that they won a legal battle to display their symbol of racism is the implication that they are in the right as a group.

I don't think people, in general, recognize how powerful arbitrary things like symbols are (not just the flag, the flag is really just a medium anyway, it's the litigation and actions of the participating groups that is the more powerful symbol). We all have an intellectual side to us that says "oh, that shouldn't factor into any decisions, I'm a rational agent!" But humans are far from being rational agents* and symbols are very powerful to us; they're a sophisticated associative memory encoding system.

*I think attentional bias, ingroup bias, bandwagon effect, shared information bias, and moral luck are all relevant biases in this particular discussion.

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Xurtio

These approaches aren't mutually exclusive and, used together, could be synergistic. In fact, the banning of the flag would be pretty futile without a educated children that can acknowledge the events or the meaning behind them and consider them in a broader context of society. People may raise their kids that way, yes, but people don't raise their kids alone. Are you familiar with the 50-0-50 rule of developmental psychology? It appears that society raises children (parents, teachers, authors, actors, advocates, but mostly peers). Most people do stray from their parent's principles in favor of their own generation's. Rebellion is a healthy part of coming of age. Functionally, it allows organism behavior to adapt to a changing environment (in this case, the environment is society).

Of course, there are also consequences of banning the flag that you outlined. So the problem now is that we have a bunch of small competing factors - some positive, some negative - how it plays out in the large picture can only be speculated. Evidence-based speculation would be best, but we'd have to ban the flag and see how it goes and then create another universe in which we didn't ban the flag to subtract irrelevant factors that just happened to occur in the same time frame. That's basically the problem with sociology - controlled experiments of the relevant scale are impossible. So people look to their own ideologies instead of evidence.

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