THE PSYCHOLOGIST : DeSantis Stands Up for Statues

DeSantis Stands Up for Statues — And History

As values change, it is reasonable to expect leading lights of the past to be less respected. But decisons to remove momuments should be made by community consensus, not the hatreds of some minority

Good for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The move to take down Confederate monuments was trying to infect Florida, and there is now a move in the state legislature to put an end to this madness. The governor has had the sense to stand up and say taking down these statues ain’t going to happen on his watch.

As reported in Florida Politics, DeSantis said:

I’m 100 percent against removing the monuments. I think it’s just gone too far…. I have not seen the legislation, but I’ve been very clear ever since I’ve been Governor, I do not support taking down monuments in this state.

Florida Politics reported:

The Governor said calls for the removal of “some Civil War general or whatever” have evolved into other forms of historical erasure, such as “taking down Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt and (Abraham) Lincoln, taking (George) Washington’s name off schools.”

“I think it’s totally appropriate for the Legislature to say we’re going to stop the madness,” DeSantis said.

He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.

“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.

“You’re already up to, like, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, you’re going to go on and on there because … if you’re going to apply some type of hyperwoke 21st century test to pass people, you going to run into turbulence with MLK Jr., you’re going to run into turbulence with a lot of people.”

The governor went on to discuss the recent renaming of U.S. Army military bases, focusing on what is now “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina. It was originally named Fort Bragg, after Civil War Confederate General Braxton Bragg.

Said DeSantis:

Here’s what I said with respect to Fort Bragg is, that’s an iconic base in this country. I didn’t even know it was a Civil War general…. I don’t think most people knew it was a Civil War general. You just know you’ve been to Bragg, right? And they’re changing it for political correctness reasons. And so I don’t believe in doing it for political correctness reasons and that’s just kind of how we’re going to roll on it. And here’s the thing, you know, you learn from history, you don’t erase the history.

Bingo. The governor gets it. The move to take down Confederate statues is, among other things, decidedly about erasing history.

It is a serious fact of history that in the Left’s desire to erase Confederate history they are, not so coincidentally, trying to erase the hard fact that the Democratic Party was founded by slave owners, not to mention the fact that the party was run by die-hard segregationists following the Civil War. Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, were not standing up for slavery and segregation.

The Florida Politics columnist A.G. Gancarski, taking note of DeSantis’ position, added:

He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.

Bingo again.

The idea of renaming Jacksonville, Florida, because it is named for the slave-owning Andrew Jackson raises another, similar question outside of Florida.

History records that New York is named for one James Stuart, the Duke of York who later became King James II. Before taking the throne, the duke was the governor of the Royal Trading Company — and the largest commodity the Royal Trading Company traded was, yes indeed, African slaves. Which is to say, New York is named for a major slave trader.

Thus the obvious question for all those tearing down statues of Confederates. Will they now be demanding that New York — New York City, New York State, and everything else bearing the slave-trading Duke of York’s name — be renamed?

Noticeably, there is silence on this.

In the current case, the statue issue is in Gov. DeSantis’ hands, and he has decidedly stood up for not hiding the facts of history by tearing down statues or renaming a major Florida city. In this case, statues that remind of the ties between slave owners and the creation and running of the Democratic Party.

https://spectator.org/desantis-stands-up-for-statues-and-history/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

DeSantis Stands Up for Statues — And History

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