What does the Confederate flag mean?

Also, the Nazi flag is not similarly banned.
This has been my complaint about the whole situation. It seems hypocritical to ban one flag that offends people due to racist connotation but not other flags. That right there is racism, just applied to flags.

--Patrick
 
Meh. We've tried to legislate problems away by banning or removing the words for them for years. Doesn't work. Making the "existence minimum" (the bare minimum our government will give you no matter what) a "living payment" didn't change anything about the situation of our poor. Saying we couldn't use "immigrants" but had to use "allochtones"...."no wait, scrap "allochtones" and say "person of recent foreign descent" didn't change anything about racism towards people with another color. Don't say "handicapped", say "disabled". Don't say "disabled", say "differently able". Don't say....It's ridiculous.

There are times when a word has only negative meaning - nigger, kike, etc. There's a difference, though. One's an insult, the other's a descriptor that slowly got more and more baggage added to it.

Should you proudly display the confederate flag? Or the nazi flag? Or the German Reich flag, or half a dozen others like them? No. Should you be allowed to display them? To use them, appropriately, in context? Obviously. Stupid bans are stupid. Or did anyone think Wolfenstein wasn't about fighting nazis?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
This has been my complaint about the whole situation. It seems hypocritical to ban one flag that offends people due to racist connotation but not other flags. That right there is racism, just applied to flags.

--Patrick
And even if they did open that pandora's box, there'll always be another flag, and then another, and then another that offends somebody. Hell, seems like half the stupid, butthurt, smelly, above-ground-sewer world finds the American flag offensive.

But I guess when the torches and pitchforks come out, it's not smart to be the voice of reason unless you fancy getting trampled to death. Just gotta go with the flow.
 
Hell, seems like half the stupid, butthurt, smelly, above-ground-sewer world finds the American flag offensive.
I was actually going to mention this too - plenty of people feel offended by the US flag, and the Belgian one, and half a dozen others? Whose feelings are we allowed to hurt and whose won't we?
 
We've definitely crossed into "stupid" territory now.

Apple has banned all depictions of the confederate flag from its app store. No big deal, right?

Except there are no exceptions for historical accuracy, not even about apps or games explicitly about/depicting the Civil War.

http://techraptor.net/content/apple-bans-confederate-flag

Tim Cook's tweet about it being to "honor the lives and families of the SC victims" by "eradicating racism and removing the symbols that feed it" show how intellectually vapid he is - and hypocritical, given that iTunes still carries movies with the flag in it, like Gettysburg. Also, the Nazi flag is not similarly banned.

Also I'd just like to comment about about the likelihood of the kind of people that have pictures of Chairman Mao or Che Guevara on their walls being the loudest about speaking up about how unacceptable it is to display confederate symbolism.

Yep, and so it begins.
 
Yes, but they're not ceasing to stock it due to lack of demand, they're ceasing to stock it because they don't want to deal with the accompanying hullaballoo. Confederate flags aren't being treated like Meth, they're just being treated like Pauly Shore movies.

--Patrick
 
Yes, but they're not ceasing to stock it due to lack of demand, they're ceasing to stock it because they don't want to deal with the accompanying hullaballoo. Confederate flags aren't being treated like Meth, they're just being treated like Pauly Shore movies.

--Patrick
A sanction implies punishment, though (and of whom?) They are just choosing to not carry an unpopular item.
 
This has been my complaint about the whole situation. It seems hypocritical to ban one flag that offends people due to racist connotation but not other flags. That right there is racism, just applied to flags.

--Patrick

Nazi flag is illegal in Germany and France though...
 

figmentPez

Staff member
Anyone know how the Rising Sun flag is treated in Japan? I've seen buzz lately about trying to get westerners to stop using it.
 
Anyone know how the Rising Sun flag is treated in Japan? I've seen buzz lately about trying to get westerners to stop using it.
Best I can find is that it's still used some in Japan (even though it's no longer the national flag) and that it also has begun to get co-opted by some extreme right-wing groups. So that's probably where the scuttlebutt is coming from.
 
Nazi flag is illegal in Germany and France though...
Speaking for Germany, the biggest problem we still have is with the Swastika flags. 'Softer' versions of Nazi flags are still not banned per se, which I personally think is stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskriegsflagge
So you can still fly the Nazi war flag, but not the state flag. In my opinion all flags with the black, white and red imaginery should be made illegal. But then the Neonazis would just create their own version of a flag to rally in their stupidism and hate, and more legal battles would have to be fought.
 
Nazi flag is illegal in Germany and France though...
My complaint is the inconsistency with which the various bans/sanctions are applied, especially when the reasoning behind it SEEMS to be less one of "we regret propagating a symbol of hatred and oppression" and more one of "we were worried we would lose sales if we did not do this."

--Patrick
 
My complaint is the inconsistency with which the various bans/sanctions are applied, especially when the reasoning behind it SEEMS to be less one of "we regret propagating a symbol of hatred and oppression" and more one of "we were worried we would lose sales if we did not do this."

--Patrick

Well just to be clear, the only "ban" was to remove the flag from government places. It doesn't belong there. Government place gets an American flag. What other country flies a full mast flag at a government building without the main flag anywhere in proximity. State flags are always flown lower right next to or below the American flag. The South Carolina Confederate one was by itself in a courtyard.

All other "bans" apply to vendors that don't want to associate with it. That's what everyone's bitching over. It's not illegal to fly the Confederate flag; doing so is just a proclamation of being a stupid, inbred hick.
 
Meh. We've tried to legislate problems away by banning or removing the words for them for years. Doesn't work. Making the "existence minimum" (the bare minimum our government will give you no matter what) a "living payment" didn't change anything about the situation of our poor. Saying we couldn't use "immigrants" but had to use "allochtones"...."no wait, scrap "allochtones" and say "person of recent foreign descent" didn't change anything about racism towards people with another color. Don't say "handicapped", say "disabled". Don't say "disabled", say "differently able". Don't say....It's ridiculous.

There are times when a word has only negative meaning - African American, kike, etc. There's a difference, though. One's an insult, the other's a descriptor that slowly got more and more baggage added to it.

Should you proudly display the confederate flag? Or the nazi flag? Or the German Reich flag, or half a dozen others like them? No. Should you be allowed to display them? To use them, appropriately, in context? Obviously. Stupid bans are stupid. Or did anyone think Wolfenstein wasn't about fighting nazis?
I hope that the auto filter changed that, or do you really think that African American is a racial slur?
 
I hope that the auto filter changed that, or do you really think that African American is a racial slur?
The filter. Which I find a bit problematic - African American is a small subset of all people with a melanin handicap :troll: (sorry, sorry....Whatever you deem the correct way of referencing someone with a skin color darker than a certain tint). Most are, after all, just plain African, or African European, or Indian, or a host of other possibilities. Admittedly, I wouldn't normally use the filtered word and I can't really see the point of it, but having it be replaced by something that's unequivocally not the smae has always irked me.
 
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