[RD] The Trump Administration Wants it Both Ways with the Police

[Lexicus]

But in recognizing what foundations should be improved it's probably best not to gloss over the bodies in the mortar or who got rich off of mixing them in there, and why, and when.

I don't gloss them over. I just choose to frame them the way Lincoln did :

Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

 

[Farm Boy]

Lincoln at his most implacable. But incomplete. Let's continue where we left off.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

 

[Lexicus]

So how do we bind up the nation's wounds? I think our ideas on that are a bit different.

 

[Farm Boy]

They probably are.

I think the malice and charity bits might actually rate in front of the parts that involve how clever we are.

 

[Lexicus]

BTW that next part of the Lincoln quote was one of the best replies I've ever had to any post I've made on the internet ever so kudos.

I think the malice and charity bits might actually rate in front of the parts that involve how clever we are.

Is that how you interpret the bit I quoted?

 

[Farm Boy]

Clever = ideas.

M&C = approach.

Goal being binding the wounds the lash and the sword have wrought.

I don't deserve credit for that, but thank you, it was kind of you to say.

 

[Lexicus]

M&C = approach.

Well it might not be quite apropos depending on what you mean by that, but I will go ahead and quote another contemporary figure:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well sure. But you have to decide what you're doing. Are you trying to plough or are you trying to win the war? If you're ploughing you need an understanding with the horses, the beast is stronger than you are. That moment of clarity and righteousness may have been, but I don't want to emulate the war in the present, as your professor would have it. Even during the implacable quote, you can tell Lincoln wants to put down the sword and pick the plough back up. Fighting men leave fallow fields, full cemetaries, and empty widows and orphans.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't want to emulate the war in the present, as your professor would have it.

Hmm, emulate was a poor word choice. I guess a better word would have been invoke. How we use the past to make sense of the present. Framing the Civil War as an unmitigated tragedy, in my view, is making the wrong kind of use of it. Lincoln invoked the ideals of the Declaration, and his genius was precisely in invoking the past in order to justify what was really a quite radical shift in the US political-economic structure.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazin...-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/308831/

A lot of my thinking here is influenced a lot by this excellent piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the historiography of the Civil War.
An important part of it I think you'll like:

In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

And here is the part that I felt was most significant:

In my study of African American history, the Civil War was always something of a sideshow. Just off center stage, it could be heard dimly behind the stories of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., a shadow on the fringe. But three years ago, I picked up James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and found not a shadow, but the Big Bang that brought the ideas of the modern West to fruition. Our lofty notions of democracy, egalitarianism, and individual freedom were articulated by the Founders, but they were consecrated by the thousands of slaves fleeing to Union lines, some of them later returning to the land of their birth as nurses and soldiers. The first generation of the South’s postbellum black political leadership was largely supplied by this class.

Transfixed by the war’s central role in making democracy real, I have now morphed into a Civil War buff, that peculiar specimen who pores over the books chronicling the battles, then walks the parks where the battles were fought by soldiers, then haunts the small towns from which the soldiers hailed, many never to return.

Even during the implacable quote, you can tell Lincoln wants to put down the sword and pick the plough back up. Fighting men leave fallow fields, full cemetaries, and empty widows and orphans.

Here we wholeheartedly agree, which is all the more reason to denounce the Confederates for starting and fighting the war to preserve slavery. And all the more reason to work toward continuing to make what the war was fought for worth something.

 

[Farm Boy]

Right. So we're back to the end of page 1.

Good people and ones that should be on your side will remember the laudable things their progenitors died for. They should be allowed. They'll move on from the bad things too. They should be allowed.

 

[Farm Boy]

I'm thinking that sounded more dismissive than anything, when it really wasn't supposed to be.

I do like the quotes, they're good to rhumenate on. I'd say that first quote actually gives most of the reason for the way I respond to it. Yes, the northerners were a bunch of self-motivated profiteers. They were terribly racist. But, and the this is one huge badonkadonk: they did something right. Something redeeming, and good men died for a noble cause even as evil men on their side profited from it and sowed lasting misery from it. The North should be allowed its laudable history. It's probably about as good as we've ever gotten. But remember, the Confederates lost. Good men died, again for noble ideals, again with evil men on their side and monstrous ideals too. I think the preponderance is pretty clear myself: but as the North is culpable for its share of wrongs so too are commen men due their rights, even from the wrong side. Unbuckle the sword, hitch the plough, and melt the irons.

 

[El_Machinae]

Or leave the country. I am in favor of letting them all stay, but also of using the laws we have not the laws we want.

Sure. But I am not so sure you implicitly believe that. "Going to the immigration office" might really be the best way to do that. They need to work under the table to do your lawyer idea. They need to ... do what, I'm not sure ... to go back to their own country. But it certainly seems to involve breaking more laws to do so ...

I understand the whole mantra of "I'd prefer they enter legally." I honestly get it. But if the options available to a current undocumented person is "sneak out or get arrested", I am not so sure that the mantra is being used the way I perceive it when I am interpreting it the way I would.

 

[Lexicus]

I understand the whole mantra of "I'd prefer they enter legally."

You should read this:
https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/strangers-in-a-cruel-land

The immigration system I keep hearing about from pundits and politicians (all of whom should know better) is almost entirely unmoored from actual fact. It seems to be a chimerical pastiche of the one we had before Ellis Island closed, the one we had just before the moon landing, and some sort of rosy Tomorrowland fantasy in which visas would be awarded to the undocumented if only they would do it the right way. This is not the system I work with every day.

When a white, native-born American says, “my family came here the right way,” what the speaker almost invariably means is that one or more of his ancestors came to the United States without a visa during a time of virtually unrestricted European migration. They boarded a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, stood in line at an immigration inspection station for the better part of a day, answered a standard series of twenty-nine questions, were subjected to a medical exam, and were admitted indefinitely to the United States. That’s how my Scottish great-grandparents did it in 1916. If you were born in the United States with European ancestors, it’s probably how you came to be here too.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yeah, I get the hypocrisy. But this doesn't really change the fact that laws change over time, and that a nation has the obligation to regulate their borders. So, the statement, as it stands, is one that I understand. But I can also spot the implicit lack of actual belief in that expressed statement.

Mind, I'm not criticising the hypocrisy in my response to J, I mean, it's odious and lacks empathy. But that's about it. The criticism is that they don't believe what they're actually saying. If step one of the 'official process' that they're imagining is get arrested, then they're not being realistic with how they think the process works.

In other words, I think they words they're saying don't mean what they think they mean.

 

[Lexicus]

In other words, I think they words they're saying don't mean what they think they mean.

I'm glad we got there. Now how do you explain to them that the words actually mean something racist and ugly?

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't. I explain that the process they're imagining is not the process they're saying. And then I can go off into the land of economics, where the undocumented worker is going to be way less of a problem along all of their concerned dimensions than they think. Well, maybe not all. But many.

That way, if their implicit concern is based on race, then that becomes more and more necessary to fall back on when they defend their views.