Better than Jefferson Davis?

Better than the KKK?

Conservatives? These guys may belong in some branch of the lineage of some of the conservatives today, but I don't recall that Jefferson Davis is really a conservative. Likewise, the KKK isn't descended from conservative philosophy or anything, it came from Confederate soldiers running wild after the war, then died out, then was reborn as a combo of racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism (the first lynching of the new KKK was of a Jew). Only in very recent history does this become a part of conservatism. Just because someone is repugnant doesn't lump him in with your opposition.

I'll go along if you throw in factorize.

To the extent that maybe you are saying Jefferson Davis was n businessman, whose slavery-based agribusiness has a lot in common with Leland Stanford and then on down the line, okay.

The people who became the original KKK were to Jefferson Davis' agribusiness what family farmers sucked into Iraq are to ADM and Halliburton -- cannon fodder, who didn't happen to die of being on the wrong side of a war. Most of them had never owned slaves, which cannot have been said of Davis.

I'm not excusing anybody (and don't want to, the KKK were murderers), least of all the modern conservatives that go around à la Jeff Foxworthy pretending they have something in common with rednecks, or the Southern Strategy people who control them. But remember that not everybody who disagrees is all one unity, not every antecedent to the modern red-stater was a conservative. And that many of the Democrats in Congress that passed the admirable Great Society list that Paul put up over the weekend fit the bill for such a broad-based antidromic inheritance wave.

During the campaign the President said he had a plan to end the War in Vietnam in 100 days. I wish to inform the President he has two weeks left. Democrat Strom Thurmond, U.S. Senate, 1969

(quoted from memory)

I'm not conservative, so I felt no slight. I was making a distinction a while back between Jeff Davis and the KKK and conservatives, though. Jefferson Davis was Southern Aristocracy. The original KKK were something else. The newer KKK is the Jim Crow people wrapped up in a lot of other hatreds as well. The Dixiecrats are yet another group. Modern "inheritors" from all these threads do not really belong to them, and seem to like to call themselves conservatives.

Mapping the current bunch of crazies back on to the older bunch is strange, though, since the older bunch are guilty of their own sins, but not of those who came after. It's one thing to call a skinhead a neo-Nazi, it is something quite different to call Adolf Hitler a skinhead.

Still, he does belong on the family tree, if only as the equivalent of Australopithecus.

Yes, they recruited his branch when they adopted the Southern Strategy, no denying.

Some today would say that it's utterly unfair to call the KKK "conservative." Hogwash! No conservtives of consequence opposed them, except when they provoked a backlash--most notably the Federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871--which turned them into a political liability.

Umm. Bloodlines flow down the tree, not up. This is what I meant by antidromic lineage waves. The KKK as constituted after the civil war find their best parallel in the northern generals who went west after the war and pillaged, like Custer.

It died and was reborn later as the KKK we all know up to the present. The latter day ones were the guys who's shoes people recognized.

Conservatives, as they are constituted today, don't have much in common with the original KKK no matter who failed to speak out about them. The latter day types, to some degree were spliced into the tree when they brought the Southern whites into the conservative movement. It's still antidromic to have them backInherit conservatism.

The only group I ever heard of that believes in such backward flow of sin up the family tree is the people who begin sentences with "Kungdz yue..."

Gotta run, disaster beckons.

A little thought should suffice to persuade even the most ideologically hidebound or thoroughgoingly prejudiced among us that no sentient human being is capable of being 100% wrong about anything.

Libertarian at Large

When I was in school, our entire study group got together to help one of us flunk the final exam in organic chemistry. We worked on it for quite a few hours before the exam, to the exclusion of all else.

While it might be true what you say, L@L, we left no stone unturned, and this guy was a pretty sharp chemistry student. He came damned close to proving you wrong.

Bebop-o paints in Haboken but talks of Tempe. How do you paint a dry place with a wet brush?

La pluie nous a lessivés et lavés
Et le soleil nous a séchés et noircis;
Pies, corbeaux nous ont creusé les yeux,
Et arraché la barbe et les sourcils.
Jamais un seul instant nous ne sommes assis;
De ci de là, selon que le vent tourne,
Il ne cesse de nous ballotter à son gré,
Plus becquétés d'oiseaux que dés à coudre.
Ne soyez donc de notre confrérie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

François Villon, from Ballade des Pendus (The Ballad of the Hanged)

I'm still trying to get my head around the idea that Buddha was a liberal, though. Seems to me a perfect "noble silence" question.