Juneteenth? WTH?
I'd never heard of it until this week. And the more I look into it, the more I just say: you go ahead but leave me alone. Especially when the people pushing for this crap won't even similarly push for better Constitutional education in our grade and middle schools. We've got MUCH bigger fish to fry than making a national celebration out of a regional event like this. Unless someone wants to make a national holiday out of eating baked potatoes.
if those that claim to care about it really cared, they would not allow the slavery that still exists in
Africa and the new slavery in Libya, caused by 0bama and hillary
Why?
For one thing it ain't a national holiday but should be.
For another signs on some places of business used to say, "No Irish."
For yet another me dino be a quarter Irish born on Saint Patrick's Day on the Seventeenth-teenth!-teenth!-teenth! Day of March.
Hey, why not?
There's already a parade or two on that day.
Me know that because me saw the movie version of The Fugitive. The Fugitive tried to hide in one of those and got away!
So there ya go.
sc*mbag floyd had nothing to do with it and it shameful that POS should be part of the memorial. Union soldiers (white and black) had more to do with Juneteenth than floyd or the rest of the world.
Oh, how power corrupts.
It either celebrates
(a) a proclamation from a war criminal and tyrant that had no effect on the people it supposedly freed, ergo, it was political bullshit, or
(b) the accidental drug overdose death of a drug addicted criminal loser.
NIFOITOWTBS
Lincoln freed no one
You don't need to watch anything more than that one 8 second scene and listen to the dialogue.
It says that the character Ripley had the solution to Americans' predicament in that 8 second comment.
"DC is beyond redemption.
NIFOITOWTBS."
Though I'm not a big fan of "yet another Federal holiday," much less the inauguration of a new one that's laden with racial content as is "Juneteenth," particularly at a time when a calculated racial Balkanization is under way, a formal recognition of the abolition of slavery is nonetheless a good thing, assuming it's approached as such, not as an unjust retro-Marxian Howard Zinn attack on Americanism.
It took a few years from the 1980 publication date of Zinn's fraudulent hit piece to be adopted by the intellectual child molesters running our schools as a "history text," but a disturbing number of people have indeed been taught Zinn as a valid American history for the better part of the last thirty years. And a cursory glance at headlines over the last couple of years indicates clearly that it's had a catastrophic impact - on reason, on individualism, on Americanism - and consequentially, in exacerbating the problem of racism and racial division in America.
That must change of course, and for that change to happen is going to require political and intellectual leadership that's orders of magnitude more principled - and just more aware of strategy - than anything Donald Trump had to offer. He apparently wasn't even aware that anything untoward was present in American classrooms until a scant two months before the 2020 election, at which point he came up with a lame answer he called "Patriotic Education." And since he also dropped the ball on election reform (which should've been a Day One priority,) he got replaced by the Squatter-in-Chief in any case. (Which means that, among many other things, for a 2024 GOP Presidential candidate deep principle and the legal possibility of a two-term, eight-year tenure are a non-negotiable absolute, even if I have to vote with my pen. Again.)
So what should we be thinking about on "Juneteenth?"
The crime of slavery itself has been practiced on every continent on Earth and by virtually every ethnic group on Earth at one point or another - continuing to this day in places like the P.R.C., North Korea, the Sudan and any of the sex-slavery sewers that persist in various parts of the globe. Which means it's certainly as much an evil in China or the Sudan or ancient Rome or the Mayan and Aztec empires as anywhere else, and no less an evil in pre-Civil-War America for that distribution. But it is a significant, epochal, historic fact - evaded entirely by Zinn and his collectivist ilk - that the United States of America was the first nation on Earth to eradicate the last vestiges of slavery on explicitly moral grounds. For that fact America and its Founding ideology deserve the highest praise and respect. Thanks to Zinn it's gotten the opposite, but that's a separate subject.
In America the crime of slavery was of course primarily committed against people from Africa, and concurrent with that slavery was an attitude - which would take centuries and individualist philosophers like Locke, America's Founders and Rand to eradicate - that racial "superiority" and racial "inferiority" were somehow real and defensible. They demonstrably are not of course, but that attitude still persists in some people and perhaps always will. But America, again on explicitly meta-ethical grounds, eradicated it from all of its formal institutions. Racist people will always exist, but in America "systemic" racism is simply no longer present, except between the ears of neo-racists posing as anti-racists.
To solve any problem or eradicate any evil, Rand correctly observed that step one is identification. So what is racism?
I think most of us, when we were kids, heard from our parents the phrase that "Race is no more important than your shoe size." What Mom & Dad likely did not realize was that this statement is not just true figuratively, it's also true literally.
Race is ultimately a collection of measurements: It's an aggregate of facial features which bear superficial resemblance to similar features on others - the shape of one's eyes and nose and mouth, the curve of a jawline or cheekbone, etc. These are all geometric shapes, therefore: measurements. It's the wavelengths of visible light which are alternately absorbed or reflected by pigmentation - which, though on a nano scale, remain just: measurements.
So one's race is the direct equivalent of one's shoe size, and just as important.
Which is to say: Not very.
And to say "X race is superior to Y race" is precisely as moronic as saying "People with size 8 shoe are superior to people with size 10 shoe." Or to say "Y race is inferior to Z race" is precisely as moronic as saying "People with size 10 shoe are inferior to people with size 11 shoe."
(cont'd - )
In a socio-political context, racism is of course gutter group-think. In Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" she discussed the process of concept-formation in small children: Their first perceptions are a mass of confusing and undifferentiated data; the child quickly learns to group similar objects together (mentally rather than verbally, since he doesn't yet have language,) to make them more intelligible. For example, those things with legs and flat surfaces get grouped together as what would later be called "furniture," and those things growing out of the ground get grouped together as what would be called "plants."
The secondary step happens as the child matures: Individuation. The more subtle differences in those legged things become "chairs" vs. "tables," and finally "that particular chair" and "that particular table"; differences in the things coming out of the ground become "trees" vs. "grass" vs. "flowers," and finally "that particular tree," "that particular blade of grass" and "that particular flower."
The racial collectivist never progresses beyond the newborn child's primitive level of generalized groupings. Through either ignorance or willful evasion or both, he never advances to individuation.
A tangential point here is Rand's identification in Ethics of effort vs. anti-effort, and the truism that it is always much easier to destroy than it is to build. Perhaps the reason why racism remains as persistent a pest as socialism and every other form of collectivism, is because collectivist variants all rest on bonehead-level group-think. Taking that final step to individuation requires a conscious effort, and effort by its nature is more difficult than coasting along on the generality of: Group A vs. Group B.
Objectivism is an explicity - and strictly - individualist philosophy. Individualism is its metaphysical foundation (and epistemological, in the context of concept-formation related above.)
So if we are to properly venerate the abolition of slavery in America, it is essential that we take the opportunity to point out to others that both slavery and racism are evil precisely because they are violations of a simple but vital fact:
Human beings are individuals.
Period.
Full stop.
Everyone out of the pool.
Annd...read that first line again.
On a secondary political level, we should also take the opportunity to point out that:
- It was the Republican Party which fought for and achieved abolition - via authoring and championing to ratification the 13th Amendment which ended slavery - against the violent opposition of the Democrat Party, which struggled to keep slavery intact;
- It was the Republican Party which authored and championed to ratification the 14th Amendment, which granted immediate U.S. citizenship to former slaves - against the violent opposition of the Democrat Party;
- It was the Republican Party which authored and championed to ratification the 15th Amendment, which recognized the right of people to vote regardless of race - against the violent opposition of the Democrat Party;
- It was the Democrat Party which created the Ku Klux Klan as a kind of secret police to terrorize blacks, Jews, Catholics and anyone who supported those groups.
(So the next time you hear a Democrat trying to smear Republicans as being racist, you might want to remind them of some basic, irrefutable history.)
Individualism is the sole antidote to racism, socialism, fascism, communism, absolute democracy, mob rule, and every other form of collectivist evil.
As Objectivists we are uniquely positioned to make this argument - as loudly and on as broad a public soapbox as we have available to us.
.
Oh, I have no doubt that it is a collectivist creation, but at the same time I think that rational people - which I assume most rank-and-file Americans to be - see this as nothing more than an arbitrarily-selected date to recognize, formally, the abolition of slavery in America. Yes, the timing of its inauguration as Yet Another Federal Holiday in the thick of some of the worst racial Balkanization that America has ever experienced, is undoubtedly a calculated attempt to pile yet more weaponry atop the adaptation of race to the vestigial-Marxian activism arsenal (an excellent recent post exists at The Epoch Times on this subject, which I will link at some point.) But other than the 9.9% - umm, someone teach the 9.9% Math, please - who represent collectivist radicalism in America, I don't see anyone else thinking this is anything other than: A formal recognition of the abolition of slavery in America.
Again, barring the incredibly-unlikely eventuality of some politician who is uncommonly activist on behalf of a.) reason, b.) individualism, c.) capiitalism, d.) liberty - i.e., NotTrump - abolishing this new "holiday" before it's had time to take root as an expected thing, we should consider it to be permanent.
And to "spin" it in the only rational way it can be and ought to be spinned: As a formal recognition of the abolition of slavery in America.
A coupla days ago I made a rather lengthy post at http://MeWe.com on the subject, which I'd like to copy-paste here but which I have no idea whether it will fit the character-count limit for these posts. 'Might take two posts but I will do it, because although it covers some philosophical ground previously trodden in my posts on race and racism at Facebrag, I think it's still valuable material to ponder.
Maybe a separate post, or two, depending...
.
Might do well.