Jeff Sessions: " Anglo-American heritage"

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Vociferous, Feb 13, 2018.

  1. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    No, you were talking about subjective meaning alloyed by bias. I am talking about objective meaning. Since I started this topic, I'm pretty sure I know what it's about.
    I have no idea what you expect that to accomplish. You would likely call an identical post from me trolling.
    Lots of subjective interpretations here.
    Yes, it's not surprising that the area of the first civilization would be the origin for quite a lot, including the general heritage of all peoples.
    But modern math is more accurately Greco or Greco-European. I don't think there's any especially American heritage to its fundamentals.
    Greek mathematics greatly refined the methods (especially through the introduction of deductive reasoning and mathematical rigor in proofs) and expanded the subject matter of mathematics.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
    By Democrats.
    Again, by Democrats.
     
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    You did not talk about meaning at all. You talked about truth or falsity.
    You don't know what you're talking about - whether you started talking about it or not.
    Illustration:
    Of course. The racial bigots were Democrats until 1968, because Jefferson was a slaveholder and Lincoln was Republican. Now they're Republicans, because Lyndon Johnson the Democrat pushed through the Civil Rights acts and Nixon was Republican. They switched Parties. Now the "Anglo-American heritage" of racial bigotry in law enforcement by sheriffs is preserved and carried on in the Republican Party, as Jeff Sessions illustrates in appealing to it as a Republican AG.

    Your point?
     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2018
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  5. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    At least you've admitted that "the topic" wasn't meaning. But objective meaning does have truth value.
    Vacuous reply.
    LBJ was a racist and the Congressional Republicans pushed through civil rights.
    No one switched parties. As affluence grew in the south, they could afford to stop being protectionists.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The topic was meaning. You just didn't know what you were talking about.
    Backwards. The question is whether truth value establishes meaning. The answer is no.
    LBJ was racist, but he - not the Congressional Republicans - was blamed for pushing the Civil Rights legislation. That's because he did it. That's why the southern bigots joined the Republican Party.
    ? Seriously, you don't know?
    Not only the entire Democratic Party base of white bigots in the South, but a large number of their elected Congressmen, switched Parties. From Dems to Reps, from 1964 to 1980, the Solid South went Republican in national elections on the basis of appeals to white racial bigotry. It was called the "Southern Strategy", and it worked.

    That's the Anglo-American heritage of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
     
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    And that's why you can't be taken seriously. Everyone with an ounce of historical knowledge realizes you just want to smear the good name of Democrats, and it is Republicans who adopted the Southern Strategy to court the racist vote.
     
  9. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,884
    I have no idea what your post↗ was expected to accomplish. It's hard to know what to say to something so vague and unsupported and wrong. Where to start? Or does it matter at all, insofar as you'll just be off on some other string of words that might seem at first glance to be vaguely relevant.

    So, y'know, just to be clear:

    That makes no sense; they're two completely different things. Sure, those two sentences sound relevant to the subject, but they don't actually mean anything in any serious context. There is an appearance of fallacy in there, too, orbiting the word, "Hence", but it might simply be a nonsense transitional word symptomatic of the rest.

    The big challenge is figuring out what you're actually on about in order to understand what is amiss in your argument or argumentative structure. That, however, presumes you actually have an argument.

    Still, though, even if we presuppose, according to the principle of charity, that you are in fact trying to make some genuine argument, I couldn't even begin to tell you how that argument falls awry because you are pretty much incomprehensible.

    Law and law enforcement are two completely different concepts.

    When you said—

    —you presented a fallacious argument. You created the distortion itself.

    There comes a point at which the difference 'twixt Skitt and will is an academic obscurity. That is to say, there comes a point at which people no longer care why you fail.
     
  10. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    Trying to characterize what I say as other than I've told you is the epitome of a straw man.
    You can infer all the motivations to meaning you like, but that doesn't change the truth value of the actual words.
    Who is blamed has little to do with who supported it the most. LBJ would have had nothing on his desk to sign without the Republican votes in Congress.
    Do you have a list of politicians who switched sides? What about their constituents?

    Everything he mentioned was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and before the Southern Strategy.
    If you can't admit that was Democrat, you can't be taken seriously.
    Yet you still failed to refute the connection between law and law enforcement in heritage.
    A sheriff is a government official, with varying duties, existing in some countries with historical ties to England, where the office originated.
    ...
    The word sheriff is a contraction of the term "shire reeve". The term, from the Old English scīrgerefa, designated a royal official responsible for keeping the peace (a "reeve") throughout a shire or county on behalf of the king.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff
    Sheriff is responsible for keeping the peace under English common law.
    Can you even admit they share a common heritage?
    Will you now support your claim that one is not related to the other?
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Senators? The ones who voted against in '64? Joke, no doubt.

    The majority of the white voters in the former Confederate States switched Parties in national elections first - for President. They voted, for example, for Reagan - who had switched Parties as well, and campaigned by appealing to white racism.
    As far as their local politicians, they kept voting for familiar names as long as those names kept faith with their racial bigotry. Your little video is a bit out of date (WV elected a Republican Senator a couple years back now), but more significantly its central thesis is backwards: the video shows that the white bigots in the Confederacy kept voting for bigotry, and against racial equality, is all. If they got it from the Dem guy, good enough. If they didn't, they switched Parties. That's how the Republican Party got their vote in national elections, and how the Democratic Party lost ground in the old Confederacy.
    Gibberish.
    The only topic was the meaning. Not the truth value. You are still muddling them - slow learner?
    LBJ promoted and pushed the legislation, and pressured both Republicans and Democrats to support it. The Republicans did not introduce the legislation, and did not pressure LBJ - it was the other way around. Everybody knew this.
    Regardless, the result was massive white bigot recruitment into the Republican Party. And that's how we got to our present day situation, with the white racial bigots voting Republican.
    The racist behavior of US sheriffs in the old Confederacy is well known. That racist behavior is the Anglo-American heritage Sessions - who was named after famous Confederate leaders fighting for slavery - was talking about.
     
  12. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,884
    It really is difficult to refute your make-believe when there is no functional explanation of what one would be refuting. Of course, that's the point, isn't it? Just make believe and expect everyone else to scrape around for an answer.

    As near as I can figure from your lack of substantial argument, I think the proper answer is to make following point:

    • The English-derived word can attend laws derived from England or anywhere else according to their post Greco-Roman structure.

    → That is to say: The sheriff (law enforcement) is to enforce the laws contained in our law code (law).​

    When you wrote—

    —you were wrong to say he "used the same expression".

    And neither sloth nor desperate conceit will change the fact that you are wrong.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Another issue:
    You never talked about any meaning at all. You tried to deflect discussion of meaning into discussion of abstract truth value.

    And what that kind of deflection is about is clear, yes -

    but whether you are self aware enough to recognize it, i.e. whether you are deliberately attempting to deceive people about the meaning of Sessions's rhetoric, is unclear at present. So perhaps simply asking you will lead to better clarity: are you aware of the meaning of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions's reference to the specifically "Anglo-American" heritage of the role of the sheriff in America, in the context of that speech and the current political situation?
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    54,036
    No shit. Unlike you, I wasn't born yesterday. Northerners were racist, Southerners were racist, Democrats were racist, Republicans were racist, but only Democrats became the party of desegregation, and then the racists fled to the Republican Party, where they are still.
     
  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    So ... like ... time out.

    Seriously, poo flinging and whatever else you might think charming aside, you do recognize what is amiss about your response, right?
     
  16. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    If they got it from the Dem, then the Dem still represented racism after civil rights.

    1928 - Hoover won 47% of the south.
    1952 - Eisenhower won Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia.
    1956 - Eisenhower added Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia (after he supported Brown v Board and used the military to enforce school integration).
    1968 - Nixon lost the deep south.
    1976 - Jimmy Carter swept the south.
    1992 - Clinton won Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.
    1994 - Republicans finally hold a majority of southern congressional seats.
    Objective meaning has truth value. That's what makes it objective.
    Straw man. I didn't argue any of that.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    For years, sure. Especially in the Confederacy. The Republican "southern strategy" took a full generation to take hold as we see it now - Nixon's disgrace was a major setback, for one thing. And the legacy of Abe Lincoln, famous Republican, was personal - especially among people like the Sessions family in Alabama.

    The Party of Lincoln conversion to the current Party of Jefferson Davis within one generation was an amazing achievement, though. And its triumph - electing Reagan, W, and Trump; electing control of Congress - has been spectacular.
    So did Humphrey. Wallace won it - demonstrating the predominant role of racism.
    Objective meaning can have any truth value, or none at all.
    Then you were in agreement with me when I ascribed the Civil Rights legislation of Johnson's administration to Johnson, and the subsequent conversion of the Solid South to Republican Party loyalty an effect of that.

    Jeff Sessions was eyewitness. He was 15 years old and in the Boy Scouts (closely Klan associated) when the Freedom Riders bus was firebombed in Anniston, in an attempt to burn its passengers alive (the doors were blocked by the mob), and Bull Connors organized police and sheriff negligence and dereliction of duty in Birmingham (allowing the Klan 15 minutes of no law enforcement to beat the Riders, putting many in whatever hospital would treat them - some were refused medical care), and similarly in Montgomery under the police and sheriff departments of that town.

    He was 17 when the Birmingham Baptist Church with the four girl children in it was bombed - not all that far from his home, on the same river. Again - police and sheriff negligence, even complicity, with many of their officers and deputies Klan members themselves. Sessions would have known some of these sheriff's deputies personally, via the Boy Scouts, in his semi-rural home town.

    That is the Anglo-American heritage of sheriffs and law enforcement that Sessions grew up with, approved of, and joined politically - a Young Republican in college, even though his leaders like Bull Connors were Democrats. That was the transition - seeing the northern Democrats in Washington enforcing desegregation against their fellow Democrats like Connors and Wallace and Maddox, the Eagle Scouts became Republican.
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2018
  18. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I'm willing to consider the evidence. But the fact remains, the Republican Party currently represents a racist ideology. Especially under Trump.
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    I'm not sure what "after civil rights" means in that sentence - it makes no sense, basically, but he's probably talking about after 1964.
    Many Democratic politicians represented racism long after 1964 - still do, in some regions, especially locally. The organized, calculated, and successful attempt by the Republican Party to draw the white racist and fundie vote away from the Dems - the "Southern Strategy" - was implemented from the top down.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    And just in time to inform us all further regarding the Anglo-American heritage as represented by Alabama sheriffs - the sheriffs Jeff Sessions grew up with: https://articles.al.com/news/birmin...pocketed_over_7.amp?__twitter_impression=true
    A little over 40% of the 19 current inmates in sheriff Entrekin's jail are black.
    The population of the county he sheriffs is 15% black.
    After feeding these inmates, Entrekin has - left over, extra - about $5000 @ week.

    And in historical review, it was about this time 53 years ago that Democrat LBJ broke the last of the faith with the racially bigoted South, and opened the door to the Republican Southern Strategy: http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-ba...-message-to-the-congress-the-american-promise
    Jeff Sessions was a teenager, just about to join the Young Republicans, when he heard that speech.
     
    Last edited: Mar 17, 2018
  21. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    If you can't admit the shared heritage in both English common law and its enforcement, I can't really take you seriously.
    Do you really think any law and its enforcement are completely independent of each other?
    And even if you do, do you really think Anglo-American law and law enforcement developed without a common heritage?
    I really don't know how you can seriously suggest that the same heritage referred to in two different ways somehow becomes two different heritages.
    Now you can split hairs over different ways to express the same heritage, but I can't see that as anything but pedantry.
    As it seems more likely than not with you, you seem to have dropped in to complain about something those who know the context of the discussion haven't.

    A full generation? 30 years? How do you explain the change starting in 1928?
    On the day after the 1928 election Senator Borah, who had campaigned in several southern states, said he had noted a definite Republican trend in Virginia and that he believed North Carolina, owing to its industrial development, would henceforth be Republican, or at least doubtful, in national elections, and that the Republicans would have a fighting chance there even in state elections. He discounted the Republican victory in Texas as purely an anti-Smith protest. Mrs. Alvin T. Hert, of Kentucky, vice-chairman of the Republican National Committee, was more positive on the outcome of the election in the South. “The Solid South was not only broken,” she said, “it was demolished, and I believe the effects will be permanent. The last-hour Democratic attempt to hold the South in line for Smith dismally failed because the voters of the South voted their convictions rather than in accordance with traditions.” C. Bascom Slemp, Republican national committee-man from Virginia, said, November 24, 1928, that he thought the result in Virginia and other southern states was “evidence of a new birth of freedom in the South. Reduced to simple terms, it means that the South will hereafter be an open forum for political discussion.”
    http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1932091300
    Can counterfactuals be objective?
    No. But that's not mutually exclusive with:

    During Lyndon B. Johnson’s first 20 years in Congress, "he opposed every civil rights measure that came up for a vote."
    Barack Obama
    http://www.politifact.com/texas/sta...-johnson-opposed-every-civil-rights-proposal/


    The Republican Party "fought very hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill."
    Michael Steele
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...-says-gop-fought-hard-civil-rights-bills-196/
    Political expediency will often make a politicians spin on a dime.
    You seem to be conflating right with alt-right.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Of course. What are you trying to talk about?
    The topic was meaning - what Sessions meant by what he said.
    And so it was that the Republican politicians we have today embraced racism - threw their entire heritage of civil rights in the trash, and signed on with Ronald Reagan's appeal to bigots and fundies.
    He's describing the Republican Party. Label it as you choose.
    I don't bother. I just described the change between 1964 and 1994 - the interval in which the Republican Party fell victim to fascism and was converted into the Party of white bigots and fundies, which it has remained since.
     
  23. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    2,046
    Oh, I guess you're using the general meaning of "objective", instead of the academic philosophical meaning. I've been talking about the latter.
    Objectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to reality and truth, which has been variously defined by sources. Generally, objectivity means the state or quality of being true even outside a subject's individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. A proposition is generally considered objectively true (to have objective truth) when its truth conditions are met without biases caused by feelings, ideas, opinions, etc., of a sentient subject. A second, broader meaning of the term refers to the ability in any context to judge fairly, without partiality or external influence. This second meaning of objectivity is sometimes used synonymously with neutrality.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosophy)
    No, I was talking about LBJ spending 20 years in Congress fighting against civil rights and then doing a sudden 180.
    And as verified by Politifact, "The Republican Party "fought very hard in the '60s to get the civil rights bill passed, as well as the voting rights bill.""
    Reagan himself said,"I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me." And he changed parties in 1962, before the Civil Rights Act passed and while it was strongly supported by Republicans.
    No, he's describing his own partisan bias. Yours as well, it seems.
    Of course you don't bother to account for historical trends that refute your chosen narrative.
     

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