Borachio
Way past lunacy
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2012
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- 26,698
TIL: Today I Learned
- Thread starter Cutlass
- Start date
- Status
Civ'ed
I ain't gotta explain a thing
TIL you can complicate absolutely everything
Real men get shot in the eyes by people wielding hunting rifles, too.
That's what she said.
Verarde
Pondering Wearing A Hat
This is one of the coolest things I've seen on the Internet so far this week. Thanks!
That concept has come in handy for some fiction I've been writing. Thanks.
Horrible as these are, I find it hard to see how they are much worse than other forms of explosives dropped from aircraft onto cities, especially sub-munitions that have a much higher chance or leaving unexploded ordinance around.
TIL about George Stinney, who was executed at 14 by electric chair after being (wrongly in all likelihood) convicted of two murders.
Given arguably far worse things happened in history I'm surprised how depressed this one death makes me. Just... Christ, how he would've felt, up against people and forces he's powerless against, all the abuse he would've endured while waiting for an agonising death... just... I have no words.
He walked to the electric chair with a Bible in hand, which he had to use as a booster seat. A booster seat.
Given arguably far worse things happened in history I'm surprised how depressed this one death makes me. Just... Christ, how he would've felt, up against people and forces he's powerless against, all the abuse he would've endured while waiting for an agonising death... just... I have no words.
He walked to the electric chair with a Bible in hand, which he had to use as a booster seat. A booster seat.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2012
- Messages
- 26,698
Even more depressing, I find, is the thought that he probably didn't expect the system to treat him any better.
Or maybe it's some kind of consolation. I can't make up my mind.
But yes, it's an unpleasant case. It probably doesn't pay to dwell on it too much.
Or maybe it's some kind of consolation. I can't make up my mind.
But yes, it's an unpleasant case. It probably doesn't pay to dwell on it too much.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
"One death is a tragedy", I guess. It's one thing to read about racism and Jim Crow in general, systematic terms, but to be confronted with a case of a liberal(ish) democratic(ish) government simply murdering a child, and doing so publicly with all the trappings of lawfulness, and everybody thinking that this is just fine... It's going to be difficult to process, even if you never had much faith in those trappings to begin with.
TIL three villages were named by sheep ("Ba").
Is our language failing us? I mean, is there any way to communicate the experience of that era in systematic terms while not sugarcoating the utter horror that George Stinney and others like him suffered?
cybrxkhan
Asian Xwedodah
I think it's just a human thing, in that it's easier to conceptualize things on a smaller scale. It's not hard to imagine and feel the immediate impact of seeing one child murdered. It's hard to do the same when its a thousand children.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I think that part of the problem might be that we tend to think of things like Jim Crow in quite impersonal terms, as an issue of education, employment, housing, and so on, in part simply because those were the sorts of issues that civil rights activists sought to address through legislation. Even lynchings tend to appear as statistics, as a number-per-year. That means we're left with a certain distance between the practice and the experience of Jim Crow, which makes cases like that of George Stinney appear incomprehensible. I think we need to be more prepared to draw out the psychology of white supremacy, try to join the dots between people thinking it was acceptable to exclude black people from a Woolworth's counter and thinking it was acceptable to murder black children. That's an alien mindset, a frankly terrifying mindset, and reading about relatively dry material such as housing segregation won't prepare you for it.
There have been admirable efforts to draw out the psychology of black people under Jim Crow, from the period itself onwards, but that's only one side of the story. Racist whites have remained something of an enigma, often a flattened caricature driven by sheer hatred, and that sort of stereotype doesn't hold up when you look at a case like that of George Stinney, where the racists have names and identities and appear to be otherwise normal, non-psychopathic people. You find yourself faced with something undeniably monstrous and undeniably human, and that's gonna mess with your head.
There have been admirable efforts to draw out the psychology of black people under Jim Crow, from the period itself onwards, but that's only one side of the story. Racist whites have remained something of an enigma, often a flattened caricature driven by sheer hatred, and that sort of stereotype doesn't hold up when you look at a case like that of George Stinney, where the racists have names and identities and appear to be otherwise normal, non-psychopathic people. You find yourself faced with something undeniably monstrous and undeniably human, and that's gonna mess with your head.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
TIL about the Ganjaweed militia. They're like the Janjaweed, but with more toking.
Gary Childress
Student for and of life
TIL: That I'm still the idiot I was yesterday. I wonder what I will learn tomorrow?
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
I am going to try to make my way to that village named "A" in Norway, when I'm there.
Gary Childress
Student for and of life
I don't know if it's me discovering I'm a bigger idiot than I thought I was the day before or if it's just the case that I really am becoming more of an idiot as time progresses?
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