I'm not a southerner, but I see nothing about the battle flag that is in 'bad taste.'
Side note: The author of the article, James Oberg, used to enjoy arguing on USENET threads, some of which included alt.alien.visitors...I remember some of those rhubarbs.
The following quote is from the book [Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America]. All you sons of the South should pick up a copy of it. By reading this book I learned allot about my Southern ancestors and their will to fight and die in battling oppression and tyranny.
THE NAZIFICATION OF THE CONFEDERACY
“The greatist disservice has been the attempt by revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy. Often cloaked in the argument over the public display of the Confederate battle flag, the syllogism goes something like this: Slavery was evil. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought for a system that wished to preserve it. Therefore they were evil as well, and any attempt to honor their service is a veiled effort to glorify the cause of slavery. This dishonors hundreds of thousands of men who can defend themselves only through the voices of their descendants.”
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html
In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern blacks in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as blacks appeared to be gaining power. On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first lottery of the conscription law was held. For twenty-four hours the city remained quiet. On Monday, July 13, 1863, between 6 and 7 A.M., the five days of mayhem and bloodshed that would be known as the Civil War Draft Riots began
How do you become a "former space scientist"? Is one defrocked by the Pope of the church of Our Lord of the Nebula for doubting the divinity of Copernicus? Does the Board of Registration in Orbital Mechanicans and Astrodynamics hold a hearing at which your liscense to calculate osculating elements is revoked? Just wondering?
Some people need to get a life.
As for the PC aspects, the 'ultimate liberal victimhood' has so damaged the heritage and history of this nation, it will be a miracle if history does not repeat itself. Just one more proof Ann Coulter is right.
Chains alone do not make a slave a slave. Only the lack of freedom, whether from confinement, servitude, or being browbeaten into submission can create that.
What greater tyranny than that which would suppress a heritage and the history that goes with it rather than learn about it, warts and all, and discuss it?
Instead, the PC march toward dhimmitude continues.
BTTT!
Leave it to a Russian to market something so collectible and so un-PC to an American market. I love it !
free dixie,sw
Decoration Day 2006
PC reporting is drawing my ire.
Cowing is a jerk. Virginia should kick his sorry butt North of the Mason Dixon line.
Cowing needs another attitude adjustment.