FourthBase wrote:
Oh, so only one approach "may be" helpful? And it just so happens to be your approach. Go figure.
Who needs idealistic standards, right? Fuck ideals. Fuck standards. That's your implication.
"May be" acknowledges other possibilities, by definition. The mandatory form would have been "will be."
But the bigger problem is that this...
FourthBase wrote:My approach is: Whatever Is True.
Sorry about the feelings, but they come second.
Project Willow wrote:You can't get to truth without empathy.
Second. Not absent.
...is not an idealistic standard when you're talking about something the truth of which you don't know personally and addressing someone who does.
It's just another way of saying "Sorry about your feelings, but they come second to mine."
I think that was her implication. I don't really know where you're getting the "Fuck standards" thing from.
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Happy International Workers Day, everyone.
Know how observing that on May 1 originated?
May Day parade and strikes
In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard. As the chosen date approached, U.S. labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.
I'd just like to pause to observe that by 1884, workers had been asking for an eight-hour day for a few years short of a century.
On Saturday, May 1, rallies were held throughout the United States. Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U.S. range from 300,000[18] to half a million. In New York City the number of demonstrators was estimated at 10,000 and in Detroit at 11,000. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 10,000 workers turned out. In Chicago, the movement's center, an estimated 30,000-to-40,000 workers had gone on strike and there were perhaps twice as many people out on the streets participating in various demonstrations and marches, as, for example, a march by 10,000 men employed in the Chicago lumber yards. Though participants in these outdoor events added up to 80,000, it is unclear if there was ever a single, massive march of that number down Michigan Avenue led by anarchist Albert Parsons, founder of the International Working People's Association [IWPA] and his wife Lucy and their children.
On May 3, striking workers in Chicago met near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant. Union molders at the plant had been locked out since early February and the predominantly Irish-American workers at McCormick had come under attack from Pinkerton guards during an earlier strike action in 1885. This event, along with the eight-hour militancy of McCormick workers, had gained the strikers some respect and notoriety around the city. By the time of the 1886 general strike, strikebreakers entering the McCormick plant were under protection from a garrison of 400 police officers. Although half of the replacement workers defected to the general strike on May 1, McCormick workers continued to harass strikebreakers as they crossed the picket lines.
Speaking to a rally outside the plant on May 3, August Spies advised the striking workers to "hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed." Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point had remained largely nonviolent. When the end-of-the-workday bell sounded, however, a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strikebreakers. Despite calls by Spies for the workers to remain calm, gunfire erupted as police fired on the crowd. In the end, two McCormick workers were killed (although some newspaper accounts said there were six fatalities). Spies would later testify, "I was very indignant. I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement."
Outraged by this act of police violence, local anarchists quickly printed and distributed fliers calling for a rally the following day at Haymarket Square (also called the Haymarket), which was then a bustling commercial center near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street. Printed in German and English, the fliers alleged police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice. The first batch of fliers contain the words Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force! When Spies saw the line, he said he would not speak at the rally unless the words were removed from the flier. All but a few hundred of the fliers were destroyed, and new fliers were printed without the offending words. More than 20,000 copies of the revised flier were distributed.
The rally began peacefully under a light rain on the evening of May 4. August Spies, editor of the German-language Arbeiter-Zeitung ("Workers' Times"), spoke to a crowd estimated variously between 600 and 3,000 while standing in an open wagon adjacent to the square on Des Plaines Street. A large number of on-duty police officers watched from nearby.
Paul Avrich, an historian specializing in the study of anarchism, quotes Spies as saying:
"There seems to prevail the opinion in some quarters that this meeting has been called for the purpose of inaugurating a riot, hence these warlike preparations on the part of so-called 'law and order.' However, let me tell you at the beginning that this meeting has not been called for any such purpose. The object of this meeting is to explain the general situation of the eight-hour movement and to throw light upon various incidents in connection with it."
Following Spies' speech, the crowd was addressed by Albert R. Parsons, the Alabama-born editor of the radical English-language weekly The Alarm. The crowd was so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., who had stopped by to watch, walked home early. Parsons spoke for almost an hour before standing down in favor of the last speaker of the evening, Samuel Fielden, who delivered a brief 10 minute address. A New York Times article, with the dateline May 4 and headlined "Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago ... Twelve Policemen Dead or Dying", reported that Fielden spoke for 20 minutes, alleging that his words grew "wilder and more violent as he proceeded." The article opens with: "The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago tonight and before daylight at least a dozen stalwart men will have laid down their lives as a tribute to the doctrine of Herr Johann Most." It refers to the strikers as a "mob" and uses quotation marks around the term "workingmen".
The bombing and gunfire
At about 10:30 pm, just as Fielden was finishing his speech, police arrived en masse, marching in formation towards the speakers' wagon, and ordered the rally to disperse. Their commander, Police Inspector John Bonfield, proclaimed:
I command you [addressing the speaker] in the name of the law to desist and you [addressing the crowd] to disperse.
A home-made bomb with a brittle metal casing[36] filled with dynamite and ignited by a fuse, was thrown into the path of the advancing police. Its fuse briefly sputtered, then the bomb exploded, killing policeman Mathias J. Degan with flying metal fragments and mortally wounding six other officers.
Witnesses maintain that immediately after the bomb blast there was an exchange of gunshots between police and demonstrators. According to the May 4 New York Times demonstrators began firing at the police, who then returned fire. Others, notably historian Paul Avrich, point out that accounts vary widely as to how many returned fire at the police. He maintains that the police fired on the fleeing demonstrators, reloaded and then fired again, killing four and wounding as many as 70 people. What is not disputed is that in less than five minutes the square was empty except for the casualties. Policemen then carried their wounded comrades and some wounded demonstrators into the adjacent police station. Other wounded demonstrators found aid where they could. The exact number of dead and wounded among the demonstrators is unknown.
So there you go.
FourthBase, did you ever notice how the fact that hundreds of thousands of people were organizing themselves and gathering to make reasonable demands peacefully for decades while the police shot them with complete impunity has just been retained in the historical narrative as, like, some quaint artifact of the day to the point that in the present, people -- you, for example -- feel perfectly justified in arguing that if Sacco and Vanzetti hadn't been criminal scum, the police wouldn't have been interested in them?
Your views of bomb-throwing anarchists and their activities are drawn from a record in which the newspaper of record somehow managed to overlook the rally at which the cops shot protesters and didn't feel obligated to mention that those same cops were guarding strikebreakers while leaving strikers to deal with McCormick's hired thugs as best they could, but had this to say about the bombing:
The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago tonight and before daylight at least a dozen stalwart men will have laid down their lives as a tribute to the doctrine of Herr Johann Most.
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People were tried and convicted for that one, too. Eight of them. Seven were sentenced to death. (One wasn't an immigrant, and got life.) And six were executed. (One committed suicide in prison shortly before.) Only two of the defendants were even present at the bombing, one of whom was August Spies.
There was evidence that the suicide was a bombmaker, though. And they were all anarchos, who associated with each other.
But however villainous that may or may not have been, it wasn't what they were on trial for. So unless you think it's not villainous to try, convict and execute people for crimes they didn't commit because you don't like their political views, making your views on that point the crux of your argument is not a service to zero-tolerance idealistic standards. It's the reverse.
Same for Sacco and Vanzetti.
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Honestly, if the only part of their legend that's survived is that they were tried for murder due to their association with a bunch of bomb-and-robbery-prone radicals, I think it's time to promote it from legend to myth.
I never really noticed how truly occult that part of American political history had become, I guess. How very unexceptional that Bircher article saying that the Red Scare had been relatively free of abuses of power by the state appeared to be when it first popped up on the Boston thread was kind of an eye-opener, though.
I mean, talk about things they don't want you to know.
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The Haymarket Massacre stuff is from wiki,
here.
