In general, I have a policy of avoiding commenting on nutjobs who commit heinous crimes. I don't care whether it is with bombs, as in the case of the Boston Marathon bombers, or with firearms, such as in Colorado, Connecticut or, most recently, Charleston, S.C. The left seized on three of these incidents as a means of attempting new efforts at "gun control," even though nothing they ever propose to "control" guns would have prevented the crime in question. In the Boston case, of course, the left was strangely quiet about the need to impose homemade bomb control, or pressure cooker control, or any kind of control, really. Why? I don't know. Maybe because heinous crimes that don't involve guns don't interest lefties. Or maybe because heinous crimes that arise out of Muslim religious beliefs scare the fuck out of them because those crimes don't fit the "religion of peace" narrative. You tell me.
In any event, I have so far refrained from comment on the Charleston shootings. I feel no need to criticize a clearly crazy person who decides to kill innocents solely on the basis of race. I don't think anything I could say would matter. Who's defending him? No one. No need for me to pile on.
However, I do now finally feel the need to comment on the furor around Confederate symbols that has arisen out of this hateful crime. The flag in question basically has nothing to do with what this guy did. And yet, society has gone apeshit over the whole thing in a massive exercise of groupthink. Apple has pulled all games from its app store that include the Confederate battle flag that everybody is so upset about. Orwell would be impressed. Walmart, Amazon, Sears and eBay have pulled all merchandise that features the Confederate battle flag (it is not the national flag, but hey, who cares?), including books that have the flag on the cover. Mind you, none of those outlets have pulled merchandise that features Nazi images, of Cuban flags, or Che merchandise, or multitudes of other items that might celebrate other, much more nefarious and much more modern regimes. But hey, this isn't about fighting evil, its about groupthink.
And so Confederate flags are removed from Fort Sumter, in Charleston, S.C., where the war began. They are removed from all National Park Service sites, which includes, of course, all of the battlefields of that war. The NPS, apparently, has decided to pretend that only one side fought that war, which I suppose makes it the most deadly incident of group masturbation in the history of mankind. And, of course, the so-called "debate" has expanded to include all symbols of the Confederacy, including monuments, buildings, schools and streets named after prominent Confederate figures, military bases named after Confederate generals and the like.
If you want to criminalize mentioning the losing side in this nation's divisive war from 1861 to 1865, go for it. You are a fucking idiot. It happened. People in the North and people in the South have very different views of that war. I'm not even going to get into that here. What I am commenting on is the sheer idiocy of trying to pretend it didn't happen by banning all mentions of the war. It happened. Deal with it. And if you think it is so important to ban symbols of the Confederacy because they stand for a regime that supported slavery, then get ready to ban all symbols of the United States that predate the 13th Amendment, because before that, the United States was a regime that supported slavery, too. Of course, we have people who want to do that, too. Sound crazy yet?
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