Statue honoring Revolutionary War hero removed after nearly a century
It seems we are not allowed to revere people for their good deeds if they have any imperfections as judged by later generations. Let him who is without sin ...
A statue dedicated to Revolutionary War hero Gen. Philip Schuyler that has stood over Albany's city hall for nearly a century was removed on Saturday morning. The statue was removed because Schuyler owned slaves.
A moving crew hoisted the 9-foot-tall statue from its pedestal and loaded it onto a trailer around 8 a.m. on Saturday. The pedestal and a plaque were also removed from the site in New York state's capitol. The removal of Schuyler's statue took about three hours and reportedly cost the city $40,000.
The Gen. Philip Schuyler statue will be temporarily housed inside an undisclosed storage facility until a permanent location is determined. The city council will launch a monuments commission to decide where the statue will be relocated to.
The statue, which was originally erected in 1925, was removed because Schuyler was one of Albany's largest slave owners.
The decision to remove the statue was first announced in the summer of 2020, which was a response to the death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots that ravaged U.S. cities. Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, a Democrat, ordered the removal of the statue in June 2020. However, the removal was reportedly held up because an engineering study took years.
They don’t want you to see this … Big Tech does its best to limit what news you see. Make sure you see our stories daily — directly to your inbox.
Sheehan said, "All of that took time, it took longer than I wanted it to."
Mary Liz Stewart, the co-founder of the Underground Railroad Education Center, told WRGB, "I was glad action had been taken, I know it was pre-COVID when the issue of what to do, as we say 'what to do with Phil' actually started to percolate in the community. It was an outgrowth of what was going on in other cities around the country."
Dr. Alice Green of the Center for Law and Justice said, "The statue is a continuing reminder that we were enslaved. It's painful to have that reminder every time I go down to city hall or drive past it."
Albany county legislator Jeff Perlee argued, "This isn’t to say that Schuyler was a perfect historical figure. He owned slaves, as was the unfortunate reality of the time for many – including President Washington. It was unquestionably wrong. But nobody is calling for Washington Avenue or Washington Park in Albany to be renamed."
Schuyler served as a major general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He was also a U.S. Senator representing New York. Schuyler was the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/statue-honoring-revolutionary-war-hero-removed-after-nearly-a-century
****************************************************Why Does the Left Want No Future For Any of Us?
Policies and attitudes on the Left favor having no children or modifying existing children to be unable to breed. The question is why?
Let’s look at the accepted wisdom on the Left as it relates to having children or propagation of the human race.
*The Left supports unlimited abortion. They have no interest in time-based limits, and one British professor suggested extending the option for an abortion until after birth, where the health of the child could be examined.
*The Left supports same-sex marriage. On its own, without some adoption or surrogacy, same-sex couples cannot make offspring.
*The Left supports “transitioning,” not just in adults but also in children. Surgeries and/or chemicals to effect the supposed change from man to woman or boy to girl and vice versa will all but prevent the person in question from being able to have children.
* The Left has pushed a dire end-of-the-world climate crisis theme that has led many young couples to not want to have children, so that their offspring should not suffer in the future inferno/hell that has been promised since the days of Gore.
* The Left has not expressed any support for marriage and the traditional family. Black Lives Matter (BLM) specifically said that one of their goals was the destruction of “the nuclear family.” They kind of walked that one back but one sees lower levels of marriage and higher levels of divorce in younger generations.
* The Left, until it left women in the dust for trans guys, always supported women working and advancing professionally. In every Western country where women go for advanced education and professional fulfillment, numbers of births per woman are well under replacement levels of 2.1. Having a family was generally considered an impediment to career advancement.
Most ideological movements focus not only on the here-and-now but also plan on propagating so as to continue the program. The Nazis famously had hotels where they mated good Aryan soldiers with chosen women to make babies so as to ensure the future of the German race. But with the Left, we see that many of their policies lead individuals to either not have children, not to want to have children, or not be able to have children. The missing generations are supposed to be supplied by generally illegal immigrants. For Europe, the future workers not supplied by the locals come primarily from Turkey and the Middle East, while in the US millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico and points further south make up for the lack of American babies.
So why do Left-leaning people not want to have kids and for others not to have kids? On the one hand, their focus is on the individual—a woman’s body is her responsibility, so she alone can decide whenever she wishes to have an abortion. The same argument would be made about gay marriage and trying to push boys to be girls: this person has needs, and those needs outweigh all other considerations. But what about the future? If gay couples cannot reproduce and many women choose abortion over letting a child be born, where will we have future Americans to run the country? Apparently, that thought does not reach a level of consciousness for Democratic and left-leaning policy makers. One has to remember that the Biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply” no doubt rubs non-religious Left-leaning thinkers the wrong way. One blaspheming fellow at Davos claimed that the Creator was “dead” and now the effort was in “getting rid of the body.” Since child birth and child rearing are so closely tied with religious commandments and lifestyle, it would be no surprise that Left-focused policies would encourage not having children. Throw in many MSM articles about how much money one saves by not bringing a baby into the world or how much a carbon footprint is reduced or how much more freedom to do whatever you want there is when there are no diapers to change at 3 in the morning—and the pull of not having children becomes stronger and stronger.
In previous, more religious generations, having children was considered a sacred obligation. The expenses, worries, loss of sleep, and end of personal time, were all worth the joy of bringing a new life into the world. Most of what we as humans do is to fashion one thing into another. One can take bauxite from a mine and make it into an aluminum ingot, and from there it can become part of a plane or a window frame or beer can. On the other hand, bringing a new life into the world is the closest that we can come to being like G-d, the Creator of everything. There is no greater joy than in adding a new family member and no greater reward in watching a child grow up to become a responsible member of the society in which he or she lives. The Left does not want any of this. They support policies that all but prevent future generations from being born. “Just bring them in from other countries!” Their nihilist approach is the reason that they are insistent on access to your children—they don’t want anyone to bring more generations into this supposedly overcrowded world. The fight is not just over tax rates or mileage requirements for new cars; rather, the fight is for the future of the United States. Part of the fight is at the ballot box; the more important part is at the home—bringing up children to be able to succeed in society and bring up their own children.
***************************************
Hair Salon Fires Christian Stylist for ‘Homophobic’ Post Criticizing Disney+ on Facebook
A Virginia hair salon fired a Christian stylist over a Facebook post criticizing the streaming movie service Disney+.
“My Facebook is my page,” Sidney York, the fired stylist, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “I understand it’s a touchy subject and people may be offended over it, but it had nothing to do with my job.”
York had worked at Hair We Are in Virginia Beach since July 2021. She said she knew her colleagues likely wouldn’t appreciate her Christian views, but decided she had to speak up.
“The hair industry—the beauty industry—is a very woke industry, and I’ve kind of kept my ideas silent for a while,” she said.
On Friday, June 2, she shared on Facebook, “I can’t take this anymore, I stand with Jesus.”
York was responding to the National Geographic special “Pride from Above,” which she saw advertised on Disney+. She condemned the LGBT movement for subverting the symbol of the rainbow.
“This is MOCKERY of the covenant God made with his people—that He would not destroy the earth again by water. It’s not okay & it’s not acceptable,” she wrote. “Pride from above? Is pride claiming to be the prophet? Is Disney spelled upside down look like Jezebel (the name God calls intolerable) to you? Does the ‘+’ look like it could be an upside down cross? Should we tolerate her?”
Jane Pryor, the salon’s owner and manager, texted York on Sunday morning, writing that she was firing the stylist for “insubordination.”
“I asked you to take the post down yesterday afternoon at 3:15,” Pryor wrote. “You chose not to. You leave me no other choice but to let you go from my company immediately for insubordination.”
************************************************
The tedious obsession with compulsive praise of women -- even mediocre ones
The crowd gathered in the open-air tourist bus were overwhelmed by the massive granite wall towering over us in the Yosemite Valley. This was El Capitan, one of the most iconic and challenging rock-climbing destinations in the world, the setting for the movie Free Solo’s nail-biting documentary of Alex Honnold’s infamous climb.
The bubbly female ranger working as our tour guide had a clear agenda when it came to outlining the history of climbing this imposing rock face. Her attention was focused on a particular climber back in 1993 who became the first person to free climb the tough ‘Nose’ route of El Capitan. With great fanfare the ranger announced that climber was a woman – the well-known Californian sports climber, Lynn Hill. The ranger’s excitement at this announcement prompted cheers from the females in our midst.
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the awesome achievement of this inspiring athlete but what riled me was how little effort the ranger then made to put Lynn Hill’s historic climb into a broader context – namely the astonishing efforts of male climbers who’ve tackled the same climb since then. Like Alex Honnold who remains the only person to do the climb ‘free solo’, gripping to the face like Spiderman using none of the ropes or protective gear that assisted Hill. Honnold and Tommy Caldwell have climbed El Capitan in less than two hours – compared to the fastest woman doing a free climb up the face, Emily Harrington, who managed it in a single day.
Yes, women are doing remarkably well but their accomplishments pall compared to the very top male climbers. Remember British poet Samuel Johnson’s famous observation of Quaker women preachers in 1763: ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all.’
We are so stuck on the miracle of women partaking that woe betide anyone who points out that even when women do it well, sometimes men still do it better.
Celebratory claims about women’s achievements are becoming the only permitted public discourse, with women’s greatness constantly reinforced and emphasised. It’s utterly tedious having to put up with the constant crowing about women’s triumphs but even more maddening when bit players become the story simply because they are women.
On a previous trip to California, I was astonished when our tour of the spectacular Hearst Castle paid almost no attention to the extraordinary career of the man who made it all possible – newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Most of the gushing commentary was focused on the female architect, Julia Morgan, who was responsible for the castle design. Look at the women running the place happily boasting that Morgan’s efforts are all tourists need hear about when touring this ironic building, instead of learning about the man whose career success enabled the whole edifice to be created.
With feminists having succeeded so effectively in elevating women’s place in the world, you might have hoped there would come a time when we could afford a little perspective, acknowledgement that women are excelling whilst admitting there’s still territory where men will continue to shine. Remember six years ago when an employee was fired by Google for writing a memo asserting women are underrepresented in the technology industry because ‘preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes’?
After that kerfuffle, naturally the tech industries have been making strenuous efforts to prove him wrong by improving the female representation in their companies. Here’s the Apple boss boasting now of 35 per cent female staff across America. But what they don’t dare talk about is the fact that most of the increased female participation is in sales, admin, or HR. The engineers who actually come up with the goods that make the company so profitable are still 80 per cent nerdy young men – like my nephew.
My visit to California was to attend the wedding of this brilliant relative who spends his days working with his Silicon Valley team to invent incredible new products. Funnily enough, I heard from one of his elderly relatives at the wedding reception that he’d been part of the team who’d developed the alarm system in her Apple watch that called 911 when she had a fall, leading to the ambulance taking her to hospital.
After seeing what happened to Damore after his perfectly sound observations about why women are less likely to make it into the tech world, no one dares point out that for all the strenuous efforts to recruit more women into STEM careers using women-only scholarships and promotions, the numbers making it into the engine room of these world-leading industries have barely changed over the last decade.
It makes me wonder if all the cheering and enthusiasm for women’s achievements masks feminist disappointment in the stubbornly gendered reality – there are areas in life where mainly men remain destined to excel. We are very deliberately being taught to avoid this reality – look at the historical record is being rewritten to exalt female scientists. Naturally, no one dares voice any objection.
There was a very cheeky article published in The Spectator eight years ago entitled, There’s a good reason why there are no great female composers. The author, Damian Thompson, was responding to a push to change the music syllabus to include female composers. He dared to suggest it is important to ask how good the music of female composers is compared to that of men. Here’s a man prepared to stick his neck out, declaring the first movement of Clara Schumann’s concerto is a dud: ‘The first phase is a platitude – nothing good can come of it and nothing does,’ and her G Minor Piano Sonata is ‘embarrassingly banal’. He finds Fanny Mendelssohn’s G Minor Piano Sonata ‘bloody awful’ and describes Judith Weir’s stark scores as sounding ‘as if crucial instrumental parts have gone missing.’ (Funny how we cringe at someone having the effrontery to criticise women in this way but few people seem to mind when men’s work is savaged.)
Thompson rightly points out, ‘If there are no great women composers, that’s because creative geniuses are rare and, in the past so few women wrote music.’ But he concludes, ‘We are stuck in a situation where the barriers to women becoming composers have been removed but they’re still honoured for being women.’
That’s the real point. Must we continue to honour women composers simply for the novelty of them doing this work.
To me this is all rather close to home because my partner is a double bass player in a community orchestra and one of the many thrills in our almost decade-long relationship has been to gain a real appreciation of classical music through attending their concerts.
At least that is what used to happen. But now the wonderful classical pieces are under threat of being frozen out of the programming, to be replaced by all manner of diversity offerings including didgeridoo and smoking ceremonies. The wind section really struggled in the recent outdoor concert when trying to perform through that murky haze.
Then there are the many beaming female composers, delighting in having their undistinguished and indistinguishable pieces performed by a full orchestra. I can’t help but wonder how many in that grey-haired audience are, like me, sitting there yearning for the great music of the past that used to provide such a thrill. I’m pushing for the orchestra to put together some Dead White Male concerts – celebrating the music of the great male composers whose music has delighted audiences for century after century.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-elevation-of-women-to-male-peaks/
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment