The Southern Swastika

Mocking the left's stupidity is my contribution.

When were you planning to start doing that?

All I know is that when I hear the phrase "Space Western," the first thing I think of is the 100 years war.

They don't want to get rid of them. They want them moved to private property and no longer associated with their state government buildings.

Fair enough...as long as they start with this abomination. The Sons of the Confederacy hate it at least as much as the NAACP does.

WTF? The way that picture was taken his saddle is positioned just right to make it look like he's wearing a dress! Besides that it looks like a staue of a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show advertisement or something. It's no Stone Mountain Georgia epic icon that's for sure.

The national cathedral in Washington D.C. says they will be removing stained glass windows featuring the Confederate flag and say they want to hold a contest to see what should replace them. The windows in question were put in in 1953 using donations from the daughters of the confederacy and the KKK.

The cathedral says they will arrange a location where the racist windows from the early 1950's can still be viewed.

Probably "Damn, Dayton finally went off the deep end.".

That should be one entertaining contest! The comments about it alone will be comedy gold. But I'm sure it will get more traction than the Fort Bragg dumbfuck that wanted people to come up with a new name for the installation. They yanked that shit down immediately when The Army said to pound sand - we aren't going to rename shit.

Seriously, you will always have racist nutbags. But they are no match for Charleston SC who refuse to give in to terror or hate.

How so? What about them was different from any other survivors of a lost cause and a devastating defeat?

1. Pretty much all of the anachronisms are contemporaries of 19th Century America.
2. as are many of the dialects and colloquialisms.
3. The above mentioned "We will rise again" quote.

What else is there....Oh!

4. Joss Whedon says so.

Jonah Goldberg in the Wisconsin State Journal

There are few subjects that ignite more casual, uninformed bigotry and condescension from elites in this nation than Dixie. “Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky wrote last year.

How then to explain the tens of thousands of South Carolinians, white and black, marching in unity across the Ravenel Bridge on Sunday night? Did the city bus in decent Northerners?

The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins glibly asserts that “the Confederate battle flag is an American swastika, the relic of traitors and totalitarians, symbol of a brutal regime, not a republic.”

If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?

A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly 4 in 10 blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?

It’s a sure bet that some of the white South Carolinians marching across that bridge and attending services at Emanuel AME Church also support keeping the flag. That doesn’t mean they’re right, but they surely aren’t the American SS of Jenkins’ imagination either.

Blogger Glenn Reynolds noted that when the South was solidly Democratic, we got “Gone With the Wind” nostalgia. Now that it is profoundly less racist, but also less useful to Democrats, it’s the enemy of all that is decent and good.​

Several worlds declare independence from the central government and then band together in a confederation of independent worlds with the aim of resisting the central government. Hardly unique in earth history, true, but certainly not a coincidence given the "wild west" theme of the show and the issues of the "golden age" of the American West in the decades following the Civil War.

There were also hints that the Alliance really were the "good guys." We just see them unfavorably because the story is told from the point of view of the loser, the resentful former Confederate who not only lost but fled west when he saw how horrific reconstruction was. Can you imagine the Empire or Federation releasing the crew in Safe? What about in Bushwhacked where they were caught red handed?

The first two can be interpreted as a demonstration that the show is a Western. The third might just as easily be taken from dozens of other sources, including Shakespeare. The 4th, well, okay, if he says so, but he certainly didn't bake it in very hard, and as Liet pointed out, the fact that he confused an historic novel for the real thing leads me to question how well he knows the supposed source material to begin with.

Okay. You win.

Joss has always admitted a love for the style and manner and other superficial aspects of the Antebellum period. But it is just that: superficial. Nothing more than window dressing that contrasts nicely with blasters and spaceships.

The central and the rim worlds clearly both consider themselves colonies, with the outer worlds just more sparsely populated and a bit younger. The societies and governments aren't radically different from each other; it was clearly a civil war, not a colony breaking off into independence.

Yeah that Jonah Goldberg article was good. My prime example? ATLANTA - the hub of The South (all roads/air travel corridors) lead to Atlanta. It will never, ever, ever become another Detroit. I hate the traffic, but many people seem to tnjoy living and working/visiting there. Best airport I've ever encountered hands down. Yes a lot of people (white and black) are leaving The North in droves. For those of you who have lived in both regions, you know good and well once white people get above the Mason Dixon line they don't sprout halos.

Neal Stevenson (Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, etc) argues that Westerns have died out as a major literary genre, noting that you used to be able to go into any book store and they'd have a prominent Western section, whereas now you have to search pretty hard to find some. Television used to have Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, F Troop, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Big Valley, Maverick, Roy Rogers, and countless others. Hell Aside from Hell On Wheels on AMC and Deadwood on HBO (which ran for two seasons), the last I can recall is Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman which went off the air in 1998.

So how do you slip a Western into the lineup? Add spaceships.

ETA: And a common theme of Westerns is that many of the characters are former Confederates.

Once again, I'd like to say that I have seen far, far more Confederate Battle Flags flying in rural upstate New York and in New Hampshire than I have ever seen in rural Alabama.

I thought Mascone was the mayor and Harvey Milk was the county supervisor (or whatever) who was actually a hero to the gay community.

That makes sense since the stereotypical western/gunfighter era was very short lived - pretty much 1865-1895.
The Wild Bunch is great - they are pretty much the last of their kind at the end of the "wild" era being overtaken by the modern age.

If I liked Firefly, but its main character was a Confederate, I'd feel ever so guilty.

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-bombs-radicalisation-frankie-boyle?CMP=fb_gu

Frankie Boyle nails it.

Except for all the bits about building the country on a giant Indian burial mound (Europe has a hundred times as many bodies buried there), slave reparations instead of billing Rome for sacking Europe (repeatedly), etc.

Also, very few problems can't be solved by sufficient application of Mk-83 bombs.

Mk-84s are bigger.

Cognitive dissonance can be a real bitch sometimes.

NO! I hated loading Mk-83 bombs when I was in the Air Force in RAF Lakenheath U.K. (roll tide!) on the F-111's.See bomb family pic. That is an insane amount of weight to have at head-level. Like that Million Ways To Die In The West movie with the ice - "that went south so quickly!" Or even muscling them around on the trailers & strapping them to the lift truck, they are a pain in the ass. And when you do the test to see if you locked it into the rack all the way? Pucker factor 10 baby !When we had those on the FRAG (laundry list of what to load that day) we knew we were in for some hard dangerous work. Now the M-82 500 pound bomb (2nd pic) was no problem really, and still packed a serious punch. If you are a bad guy.....those scratches will not buff out. Whoops, sorry for talking shop. That Boyle guy did bring up some valid points.