The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(07-17-2020, 08:02 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-17-2020, 01:41 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: When law enforcement of the official kind disappears due to social breakdown, lynch 'law' emerges as a stopgap. Lynch law is infamously unjust and ineffective at anything other than punishment.

Classic X'er seems like the sort who thinks that he isn't bigoted because he watched the Cosby Show (OK, it isn't so funny once we found out what Bill Cosby is off the stage) or perhaps because he patronized an African-American woman as a prostitute. Or maybe he is like the German who knew one good Jew before 1933... with black people. 

That's cheap but then again you've always been cheap with me. Yep, when law enforcement is over whelmed or viewed as no longer valuable or no longer worth doing as a profession then laws change or simply disappear and  are replaced by lynch laws and an acceptance of settling disputes with violence which eventually becomes common and more  commonly viewed as acceptable like they were during the wild west. I doubt that you would fare very well in such an environment.

Aw, I hurt your precious ego. I hope it was on racism because that is far lower than the other accusation.

As for the Wild West -- the "Wild West" was anything but uniformly wild. The Mormon settlers of Utah had absolutely no taste for violence in their orderly communities.  That reflects their New England-New York heritage. Likewise, there is good reason for practically no violent Westerns being set in Nebraska... much as the pattern in Canada, the law came with the settlers. Settlers were quicker to build a courthouse than a saloon. Go into town and shoot your weapons off, and you get to find the inside of the hoosegow, the courthouse, and then the hoosegow again for a long term. The wildest places were mining towns like Deadwood, Dakota Territory, where a few people struck it rich, the liquor flowed about as freely as water, and personal insults were often resolved with Messrs. Colt, Smith and Wesson, Remington, etc. instead of with attorneys and judges. Next most violent were trailheads, where cowboys suddenly got paid and typically spend money like drunken sailors in the saloon and the whorehouse if some marauder didn't rob them first. Really bad was a mining town that also was a trailhead -- the aptly-named Tombstone, Arizona. 

(So why can I make this relevant to myself? I do genealogy, and a sister of a great-great grandfather was a real-life "Miss Kitty"... in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.

This fairly well explains the life of a cowboy driving the herd, except that it is sanitized for television:

Quote:Keep Rollin', Rollin', Rollin',
Though the streams are swollen,
Keep them dawwgies rollin', Rawhide!
Through rain and wind and weather,
Hell bent for leather,
Wishing my girl was by my side,
All the things I'm missin'
Good fiddles, love and kissin',
Are waiting at the end of my ride.

(OK -- I thought it was "vittles" instead of fiddles. So it's really wine, women, and song... OK,  the "wine" is whiskey and the "song" isn't Schubert Lieder or Strauss waltzes).

 Minnesota was not Wild West, and the good citizens of Northfield, Minnesota showed the James-Younger gang practically the end of the line for most of them.  

......       

I doubt that you know many black people. 

The first rule is to assume the right to equality of dignity with people of different origin until lyou see compelling, fault-worthy reason to believe otherwise. I have learned how to size people up from the content and quality of conversation, giving an allowance for age and gender. Think of the sorts of clothes that people wear,  Possessions? No. All people have differing priorities.  A semi-literate person with an expensive car impresses me (that could be a pimp or a drug pusher) less than does an intelligent person who drives an econobox vehicle (some people think that status symbols are for schmucks). In New York City, not having a car is commonplace, so that's not good for much.