The UK's Trident "debate"

Very quickly, because it is not very difficult.

The new British Labour Party leader has sparked off a row over comments that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons as Prime Minister. The row/debate is totally and utterly pointless:

The UK is in NATO; the Americans have nukes; the British wouldn't use nukes without Washington's approval; under any circumstances where a British PM might use nukes, if he didn't the Americans certainly would.

Simples. Next manufactured controversy please.

The Sneaking Regarders of Dixie

A culture that believes that it is somehow acceptable to fly the Confederate Battle Flag outside the state capitol, having been forced to take it down from atop it only a few years ago in the face of national outrage, and which only put it up there as a "fuck you" to the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 or thereabouts, is at its core a racist one. Now, that may manifest itself in the sort of "we are only remembering our war dead and the Southern way of life, not slavery" sort of cognitive dissonance you got in that sort of nonsense David French wrote in National Review Online, but that's what it is. French also completely ignores history when he gives significance to the fact that it is the Battle Flag of the Confederacy that is still flown, rather than the 'national' flag of the Confederacy. The Battle Flag was always more popular, even during the Civil War. The Confederacy had three different 'national' flags during its short existence; the first change came "on account of [the flag's] resemblance to that of the abolition despotism against which we are fighting." The replacement was the Battle Flag on a white background.

Third Flag of the Confederacy

First Flag of the Confederacy

Second Flag of the Confederacy

Flag of Georgia until 2001

Current flag of Georgia. Spot the difference.

Of course whites in the South were able to have a gentlemanly and mannerly lifestyle, because it was paid for by the enslavement of African-Americans. John C. Calhoun made it clear in his writings that slavery was not just a necessary evil, it was a positive good that reduced class distinctions among white people, as they could all unite in white supremacism and superiority over the black untermensch. It was not just the Southern economy that depended on the enslavement of blacks, so too did the entire system of "genteel" social normss. And the idea that "my ancestors didn't have slaves - they were too poor to own them" is not a convincing one either. Just because your ancestors didn't own slaves because they were too poor to buy one doesn't mean the didn't aspire to being rich enough to own slaves, and supported the continuance social and economic system that would make that possible, even to the point of committing treason against the United States.