Cunt wrote: ↑Thu Feb 07, 2019 3:14 am
I didn't mean to miscast you. I agree, overall. I was just asking some of the questions I think are uncomfortable.
Does it need to be said, that I don't think you speculating on these questions makes you 'racist'?
I didn't read that as you trying to cast
me as a racist, but that you were stating that I had alleged/assumed Governor Northam was/is a racist -- which I hadn't.
I
do believe that people change and that the misbehaviors of youth shouldn't necessarily be held against someone. Misbehaviors of one's adulthood, or misbehaviors of youth that carry over into adulthood, are another matter entirely. I would certainly prefer the company of someone who
was a racist and learned better, to someone who still
is.
Ultimately, what's going to drive Northam from office if he
does resign is his handling of the whole matter, moreso than the incident itself. Apologizing for it, and
then disavowing it, just looks bad. Worse, it looks clumsy. I don't know his record; assuming that his record would have supported doing so, what he should have done was get together with the appropriate community leaders and apologize profusely, admit it was stupid and insensitive, and point to his record on race relations since to show that the stupid and insensitive boy grew up to be a better man. This is the route the AG took:
explain, apologize, point to his record.
Whether Northam didn't think to do that, or whether his record between then and now wouldn't allow him to do that, I don't know. And it's probably worth taking judicial notice, so to speak, of the state of race relations in Southern states in the past — and that it took until 2000 for Virginia to separate Martin Luther King Jr Day from a state holiday celebrating Robert E Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson.
Not that
only Southerners were racists, or that
no Northerners were racists, but that in the South racism and racially insensitive behavior was more overt than in the North. Applying the dictum often ascribed to the Jesuits, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," Northam was born in 1959 — what kind of race relations do you think he saw up to 1966?
The one sure thing all this is evidence for is that if nothing else, Virginia politics is fucked up.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy