SC Governor calls for removal of Confederate flag

[Channel72]

Apple is forcing you to use their service. If you use their hardware, they want it to be impossible for you to use any software that comes from anywhere except their own store. A person should not be expected to discard a multi-hundred dollar smartphone (plus whatever software they have already installed) to avoid Apple's arbitrary limitations on what media they are permitted to consume.

But Apple isn't forcing you to use their hardware. And they certainly don't have a monopoly on smartphone hardware. See, that's the problem - when you buy an Apple product you know what you're signing up for: Apple is very clear that if you use their smartphone hardware, you are limited in terms of what applications you can install. So again, the only reason this bothers you is because Apple happens to be extremely ubiquitous and successful. If I start a new company tomorrow that sells smartphone hardware, and I require my customers to use my "store" in order to install software, and furthermore I decide that any applications you download from my store cannot depict images of [whatever], you wouldn't give a shit because my new smartphone company has little or no market share. But if I were to become as successful as Apple, suddenly you would care about these restrictions. So, where do we draw the line? Should we enact some sort of legislation that says something like "if your products or services consist of more than X% of a certain market segment, you cannot restrict your customers in ways X, Y and Z?" That seems completely arbitrary. I mean, if Apple pisses you off you have many alternatives. Note that this is very different from situations where a company actively engages in practices that inhibit competition (anti-trust violations). If anything, Apple's annoying restrictions are simply a giant opening for other companies to provide a competitive advantage over Apple.

[Starglider]

Hopefully the censorship of historical content will be temporary but the cultural move away from glorification of the Confederacy will be permenant.

[Borgholio]

Hopefully the censorship of historical content will be temporary but the cultural move away from glorification of the Confederacy will be permenant.

I think that will be the end result. Just like the Nazi flag isn't flown from flagpoles anymore, it is still visible in documentaries and history books...and you can buy video games that have the swastika in it (think Wolfenstein) since that is historically correct decoration for a Nazi building. With the Confederate flag, I think a good deal of this is a knee-jerk reaction. As long as the flag stays out of government buildings and public spaces, then that's really the most important part. Going to the extent of banning apps that contain the Confederate flag is a bit overboard I think.

[Flagg]

Hopefully the censorship of historical content will be temporary but the cultural move away from glorification of the Confederacy will be permenant.

Unless it's government censorship, which it's not, then who gives a flying fuck except confederate apologists, racists, and butthurt iOS gamers (who are the only ones with valid complaints, but Apple are routinely massive shitheads about everything, so no change there)? Honestly, it's too bad the government can't relegate it to museums and historical art (which includes games, movies, TV shows, etc.).

[TheFeniX]

Because there has to be an upper limit to the degree of for-profit censorship that a corporation should be allowed to enact, just because it happens to make its money through control of key information infrastructure.

It's hard to call a retailer out for not carrying a controversial product (or any product) anymore so than neither Apple nor Wal-mart stocking a book like "Apple and Wal-Mart: Killing America." Some asshole from one of those trendy clothing stores said he wouldn't sell oversized clothes because his clothes were for "beautiful people" or something to that effect. He's not censoring anything, he's just a trendy asshole and the people who continue to patronize his stores are trendy assholes. And honestly, Wal-Mart kind of has a reputation for catering to the poor and uneducated out in hicks-ville. I can see how they'd want to distance themselves now that's become (seemingly) a liability.

Let's face it: to anyone who knows anything about it, the Rebel Flag is pretty god-damned racist. Just because the the American public education system will paint the Nazis as horrific monsters and will white-wash the "war of northern aggression" only means the Rebel Flag is a more acceptable symbol of racism than something like the swastika. I didn't even know they sold them, never actually seen one at Wal-Marts near me.

Now, as for Apple: I find a good place to draw the line at is:
1. Are they removing content people have already paid for?
2. Are they using their closed system to withhold information?

If Apple modified searches in the vein of "Apple uses slave labor" into "Apple product is best product" then we'd definitely have a case of censorship.

Apple is forcing you to use their service. If you use their hardware, they want it to be impossible for you to use any software that comes from anywhere except their own store. A person should not be expected to discard a multi-hundred dollar smartphone (plus whatever software they have already installed) to avoid Apple's arbitrary limitations on what media they are permitted to consume.

As Channel72 points out: Apple only controls their platform and whereas they have dominance, Android is a perfectly viable alternative. Hell, Windows phone is actually not-garbage. If people didn't know going in the kind of shit Apple is willing to pull, 'dems the breaks: use your next upgrade to move to an open platform.

I gave up a bunch of shit when I bailed on my Xbox and went back to PC gaming. I don't get why this is such a huge deal. Same thing when I tried out a Windows phone over my Android. The Smartphone system in particular has never been consumer friendly.

[Gandalf]

Frankly, yes. Every country in the world has probably done horrible things. If one atrocity is enough to make the country's flag unacceptable, how many countries would still have a flag?

Now, America has done way more than one. But the Confederacy does not have the varied history that America does, at least not close to the same extent, which is basically what I was saying before. America has profoundly great achievements to go with the bad, and the flag also represents them. What does the Confederacy have to compare to that?

Is that enough to make the meaning and worth of the two flags different? Debatable, but I can see how one could argue that their is a distinction.

And what's the alternative? Redesign the flag every time the country's government does something horrible?

The US is currently occupying several square million square kilometres of Native land, conveniently cleared out through ethnic cleansing frontier wars. Slavery was practised for nearly a century until the civil war effectively forced the issue. Even then, the former slaves couldn't necessarily vote for another hundred years. How many moon landings make up for that?

I'm not saying the flag should be redesigned, but if we're going down the route of what flags represent what values because of the acts of its country, I see no reason to single out one country. Then it's just a circlejerk.

Mind you, I think the entire concept of flags is preposterous and dangerous. The invite blind loyalty to a symbol rather than thinking about what its supposed to represent. But then, this entire debate is about what they represent.

That's just silly. They're a means of differentiation between states.

[Zinegata]

I never understood why the battle flag is considered the "Confederate Flag."

Because the Confederacy only existed for four years or so and the only people who cared enough to try and preserve its memory were ex-soldiers.

I think it could be that when one sees paintings of the Civil War, they tend to be of the battles, wherein the battle flag is the one on display set against the Union one. How many famous pictures are there that even feature the Confederate national flag, in a way that people might remember?

The "Confederate Flag" - which is more properly one (of the many different) battle flags of the Army of North Virginia - does not actually feature much in art or photographs from the 1860s. I've seen one photo of a supposed standard bearer (which I strongly suspect is a modern-era re-enactor and they just sepia'd it to make it look old - as the flag was too crisp), and no paintings.

Most of the battle paintings - often mistaken to be period art - were in fact painted in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by guys like Don Troiani or Keith Rocco.

Stuff that was actually painted during the Civil War or after it looks more like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winslow_H ... of_Art.jpg

Hence, if you're looking at the origins of the popularity of the "Confederate Flag", look at the period of 1950-70.

[Elheru Aran]

Hence, if you're looking at the origins of the popularity of the "Confederate Flag", look at the period of 1950-70.

As observed previously, it became a strong symbol of segregation and anti-civil rights in the South in that era. Immediately post-war, it would have been viewed (properly) as a treasonous banner and the people flying it likely arrested and tried for treason; it took about a century for those feelings to die down, although it certainly didn't stop the Southern states from quietly re-instating it where they could, like in the state flags. But the Klan tended to just represent themselves as 'American', especially in their meteoric rise in the 20s.

[Borgholio]

On the lighter side, some asshole upset with Walmart refusing to make them a Confederate flag cake tricked a naive bakery worker into making an ISIS cake, then posted it on Youtube.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /29495379/

In a now-removed YouTube video that gained almost half-a-million views in three days, a man named Chuck Netzhammer condemns Walmart for making a custom Islamic State battle flag cake for him the day after his request for a Confederate flag cake was denied.

In the video, Netzhammer of Louisiana holds up the white cake with black icing depicting an ISIL symbol and says, "That's an ISIS battle flag cake that anybody can go buy at Walmart … but you can't buy a Confederate flag toy, with, like, say, a Dukes of Hazzard car." (The Islamic State also is known as ISIL and ISIS.)

"Walmart, can you please explain why you're alienating Southern Americans with this trash that you're allowing being sold at your store while at the same point, Confederate memorabilia is not allowed?" he asks.

"Our talented bakery associates take pride in what they create for our customers. It's unfortunate one customer thought to take advantage of an associate who did not know the flag and its meaning," said John Forrest Ales, a spokesman for Walmart. "This cake should not have been made, and we apologize for the mistake."

At 10:15 p.m. ET Monday, the video was removed from YouTube with the statement, "This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content."

Last week, Walmart, along with major retailers like Amazon, Ebay and Etsy, banned the sales of items promoting the Confederate battle flag for sale from its stores and its website. The move came the same day that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for the removal of a Confederate flag from the state's Capitol grounds.

Walmart is the world's largest retailer, with nearly 11,000 stores in 28 countries.

[Rogue 9]

Except he's going on about the Slave Power's cause as a whole. Any and all of the flags they used represent that cause.

Could one then claim that the US flag* represents the genocidal westward expansion of the US?

*Whatever it may be called in the relevant era(s).

The cause of the United States is not genocide; no one sat down at the founding of this nation and said "Our primary objective in this revolution is to go murder a whole bunch of Indians!" That is indisputably true of the Confederacy and slavery, however.

Has the United States failed to live up to its founding precepts a lot of the time? Yes. Does it still do so? Yes. But we can work within the system to improve it; that is happening even now, as demonstrated by the subject of this very thread. The Confederacy couldn't - it's reason to exist was the perpetuation of chattel slavery, and it could not both improve on this issue and continue to justify its existence. And in fact it represented regression from the status quo of the founding of the Union; while most of the founding generation saw slavery as pernicious and planned to phase it out (George Washington manumitted his slaves and provided for their support and education in his will that they might find gainful employment), the leading politicians and planters of the antebellum South in the 1850s saw it as a positive good and even the manifest will of God. This does not excuse slaveholders of the 1780s, but starting a war in order to further regress from that position is absolutely inexcusable. There are lots of reasons to dislike the United States, but say what you will, it's a damned sight better than a lot of the alternatives.

Incidentally, my brother spent several months living on the Many Farms Navajo reservation in Arizona doing his student teaching a few years ago, and while he was there I asked him about this line of argument, because I was starting to see it crop up. He asked his faculty adviser at the school, who told him they see the Civil War as a white man's war and no concern of theirs, so all this high-and-mightiness for the Confederacy supposedly on behalf of the Natives is starting to sound a little stale, not to use the phrase "cultural appropriation."

[Metahive]

Bottom line, the Union flag stands for the country and its history as a whole, good and bad, while the Confederate Battle Flag, stands for the glorification of an attempt of a bunch of rich slavemongering assholes to destroy the US and create a nation based on the exploitation of minorities.

[TheHammer]

Dukes of Hazzard reportedly pulled over Confederate Flag

The network has pulled episodes of "The Dukes of Hazzard" from its schedule, a spokesperson for TV Land confirmed on Wednesday.

The network would not comment further on whether reruns of the series were pulled due to its inclusion of a 1969 Dodge Charger known as the "General Lee" which has the Confederate battle flag painted on its roof.

If the article is true, we are reaching into "fucking ridiculous" territory and I expect a backlash the other direction shortly.

[Simon_Jester]

Why does the Confederacy's short lived nature matter? Is there some sort of atrocities per year rate that needs to be achieved?

Frankly, yes. Every country in the world has probably done horrible things. If one atrocity is enough to make the country's flag unacceptable, how many countries would still have a flag?

It's like the difference between the current German flag (black-red-yellow horizontal stripes) and historical German flag (the Kaiser's Germany used black-white-red)... and the Nazi flag (black swastika in white disk on red background).

One can be sure that a number of atrocities have been committed under 'historical' German flags other than the swastika. During the period of the Second Reich- well, just ask the Khoi. Or the Belgians. And heck, aside from lacking a coat of arms the current German flag is visually very similar to the East German flag of the Cold War, which was a rather oppressive government in a lot of ways.

But the Germans of these periods were not an 'all atrocities, all the time' state. We cannot simply say "look, it's best to just forget they ever existed, except as villains-who-ought-not-be-portrayed." We cannot methodically ban all attempts to portray their legacy. Not without leaving big, conspicuously Photoshopped holes in the historical record.

Mind you, I think the entire concept of flags is preposterous and dangerous. The invite blind loyalty to a symbol rather than thinking about what its supposed to represent. But then, this entire debate is about what they represent.

Exactly what are we supposed to do, then, when there is a need to paste a label on something saying "property of this or that country?"
_______________________________

The problem is that if we say "corporations have an unlimited right not to pass on to their customers any material they deem bad, harmful, objectionable, or bad for their corporate image..." Well, as I've said, somewhere between this thing Apple's doing and the extreme limiting case, we need to draw a line.

This is just one of the awkward side effects of the free market that nobody really has a good answer for. Obviously, you wouldn't even give a shit about what Apple does if they weren't such a ubiquitous and successful company. I personally don't care about what Apple is doing in this case, but I can imagine that I might care if say, Google, decided to censor search results that contained images of the Confederate flag. Even in that case, there are other search engines out there, not to mention many other free sources of information where I can learn about the Confederacy (the library, Wikipedia, etc.). It's just that in practice, a company like Google has such enormous control over the information available to us that any censoring of their search results would have a de facto effect that is eerily close to state-sponsored censorship. Of course - again - Google is technically just another private company, and if some smaller search engine with less market share censored their results, nobody would give a shit. Clearly, it becomes very hard to fix this "problem" with legislation, as it is not as clear-cut as the sort of problems that anti-trust laws were designed to ameliorate.

Yes.

I didn't say this was a simple thing to fix.

My point is that the technology already exists to take certain categories of images, or certain phrases, and largely block them out of Internet-based discourse. And we're relying more and more heavily on the Internet. The trend is for that small oligopoly of Big Data providers to have more access and control in what people say to each other, not less of it.

So this is something I think we should be wary of, and should not get into the habit of cheering or shrugging off.

I recognize that it is a commonplace to call "slippery slope" arguments a fallacy, and that there are reasons for doing that. I am mindful of those reasons. But I think we have good cause to care and think ahead about this issue, about what kind of power we're giving private companies to shape not just what we think about day to day things, but what we can and cannot know about things.

I'd rather not end up with a variation on this happening to public awareness of historical events (or politics, or culture in general):

https://xkcd.com/743/

Or, in the extreme cartoonish limiting case:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3060

The latter case being an obviously-bad (and, again, cartoonish) example of the problem of placing control of the set of things we 'know' in the hands of private corporation(s).

Apple is forcing you to use their service. If you use their hardware, they want it to be impossible for you to use any software that comes from anywhere except their own store. A person should not be expected to discard a multi-hundred dollar smartphone (plus whatever software they have already installed) to avoid Apple's arbitrary limitations on what media they are permitted to consume.

But Apple isn't forcing you to use their hardware. And they certainly don't have a monopoly on smartphone hardware. See, that's the problem - when you buy an Apple product you know what you're signing up for: Apple is very clear that if you use their smartphone hardware, you are limited in terms of what applications you can install...

Thing is, choosing to use Apple isn't like, oh, choosing to eat at Olive Garden. Olive Garden is not only not the sole provider of restaurant food in America, it isn't even the sole provider of its type of restaurant food. And anyone can open up an Italian restaurant with relatively minimal investment barriers to entry.

Apple, by contrast, is one of only a few companies providing smartphone and tablet services. All the others are comparably big- it's not a market a newbie can break into easily.

So yes, Apple does have competitors. And yes, Apple can claim that people who buy their products "accept" that Apple will exercise power of censorship over the third-party intellectual content they access on Apple products. But none of that makes it okay for Apple to censor the content.

It's like... suppose that the Coca-Cola corporation does something questionable like put suggestibility-enhancing chemicals into Coke. Sure, it's true that "you can always buy a different brand of soda." Strictly speaking, you are not being forced to consume the mind-affecting chemicals.

But Coke is one of only two major brands on the market and the other one, Pepsi, is pretty much interchangeable with Coke. Structurally it's a similar corporation, subject to identical market pressures. As a result, anything that Coca-Cola might decide to do, Pepsi might decide to do.

The fact that there's competition would not be reassuring here, because there's no reason to assume the competitors won't just do the same thing, for equally valid reasons, just like everyone who builds automobiles agrees they're supposed to have four wheels and an engine.

So again, the only reason this bothers you is because Apple happens to be extremely ubiquitous and successful. If I start a new company tomorrow that sells smartphone hardware, and I require my customers to use my "store" in order to install software, and furthermore I decide that any applications you download from my store cannot depict images of [whatever], you wouldn't give a shit because my new smartphone company has little or no market share. But if I were to become as successful as Apple, suddenly you would care about these restrictions. So, where do we draw the line?

This is exactly the sort of thing we're supposed to have organizations like the FCC and FTC for. Because the question you're asking is, for instance, very similar to the question "what constitutes a monopoly?"

In both cases, the issue boils down to "at what point does an individual company's share of control over a particular sector of our society get so large that it's bad for society as a whole?" And the solution is to create guidelines and enforce them. Otherwise, ultimately you don't even have a free market. You just have a handful of monopolists or oligopolists using their control of 30 to 90% market share to dominate the country.

I mean, if Apple pisses you off you have many alternatives. Note that this is very different from situations where a company actively engages in practices that inhibit competition (anti-trust violations). If anything, Apple's annoying restrictions are simply a giant opening for other companies to provide a competitive advantage over Apple.

The problem is that all the other companies are subject to the same economic forces (fear of lawsuits, desire to appeal to demographics that hate the banned content).

Ever notice how the corresponding Coke and Pepsi products taste pretty much the same? Not exactly, but close? There's a reason for that- it's convergent evolution. Both companies market "root beer" and "orange soda" and "bottled water" products, and they may tinker with the details. But ultimately, they sell the products they do because of identical pressures on both companies. Neither company is suddenly going to start marketing apple-flavored soda as an alternative and scrap their root beer line.

Likewise, ever notice how McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's all have very similar menus, catalogs, and basic organization? Same thing. And you can depend on it that if it becomes cost-effective for McDonald's to use pink slime in their hamburger, Burger King and Wendy's are likely to follow suit in short order. Conversely, if one company stops using it, so will the others.

So you can't hear "McDonald's is using pink slime again!" and go "big deal, that just means customers will head over to Burger King." In practice that does not happen. What happens is that Burger King (and all McDonald's direct competitors) start doing exactly the same thing McDonald's did. They may get less bad publicity (or good publicity) for doing so, but they do it. For the same reason McDonald's did.

Likewise, if it becomes profitable for Apple to start banning portrayals of the Confederate flag from content accessed via its store, you can bet that other providers in direct competition with Apple are tempted to do the same thing. In which case competition is not the answer.

Hopefully the censorship of historical content will be temporary but the cultural move away from glorification of the Confederacy will be permenant.

I think that will be the end result. Just like the Nazi flag isn't flown from flagpoles anymore, it is still visible in documentaries and history books...and you can buy video games that have the swastika in it (think Wolfenstein) since that is historically correct decoration for a Nazi building. With the Confederate flag, I think a good deal of this is a knee-jerk reaction. As long as the flag stays out of government buildings and public spaces, then that's really the most important part. Going to the extent of banning apps that contain the Confederate flag is a bit overboard I think.

I share your hope; the problem is simply that it is only going to get easier for companies to decide "nope, this class of image, or sentence, or word, or whatever, will not be displayed on any service or device we control."

I'm not so much worried about this thing, as about this category of thing, ten or twenty years down the line, when we've all gotten accustomed to having the four or five major media providers in America all simultaneously ban "offensive" images or content every time there's a media kerfluffle about something.

[Thanas]

Except he's going on about the Slave Power's cause as a whole. Any and all of the flags they used represent that cause.

Could one then claim that the US flag* represents the genocidal westward expansion of the US?

*Whatever it may be called in the relevant era(s).

The cause of the United States is not genocide; no one sat down at the founding of this nation and said "Our primary objective in this revolution is to go murder a whole bunch of Indians!" That is indisputably true of the Confederacy and slavery, however.

It was however one of the primary causes of the revolution.

[Metahive]

If the article is true, we are reaching into "fucking ridiculous" territory and I expect a backlash the other direction shortly.

Dude, this neo-confederate "backlash" has already been going on since the Civil Rights Movement or even since the inception of the Lost Cause lie, your pick. This is the first time it's actually suffering a major setback in a long while. Did you really not notice it?

I hope it keeps up. I hope people like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee will finally find their appropriate place in american history alongside luminaries like Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr.

[Flagg]

It was however one of the primary causes of the revolution.

Good thing we have an out by adding some stars making it not the same flag. Pedantry FTW! But since I think the US flag is one of the ugliest most gaudy fucking things I've seen since Liberace's choice of performance costume, so I wouldn't mind a total redesign.

[TheHammer]

If the article is true, we are reaching into "fucking ridiculous" territory and I expect a backlash the other direction shortly.

Dude, this neo-confederate "backlash" has already been going on since the Civil Rights Movement or even since the inception of the Lost Cause lie, your pick. This is the first time it's actually suffering a major setback in a long while. Did you really not notice it?

I hope it keeps up. I hope people like Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee will finally find their appropriate place in american history alongside luminaries like Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr.

I was obviously referring to the backlash against the recent trend. I'm anti-censorship, but I've got no problem with people not wanting it flown over government institutions. That's simply common sense. Even if the south wishes to honor confederate soldiers, it can do so without the stars-n-bars.

That being said, when we've reached the point where over-reacting corporate minions are pulling TV shows because a character (and make no mistake the car is a character in this show) happens to feature the flag, we've gone into fucking ridiculous territory at which point common sense compels a line to be drawn.

[Metahive]

That being said, when we've reached the point where over-reacting corporate minions are pulling TV shows because a character (and make no mistake the car is a character in this show) happens to feature the flag, we've gone into fucking ridiculous territory at which point common sense compels a line to be drawn.

OK, argue why some corporate goons shouldn't pull a show off the air that has the main characters glorify a regime based around hate and racism? Would you think it cool if the main characters of some other show drove a car with a big fat svastika on it called the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler?
If this is where you draw the line then I think you put the line down prematurely.

[TheHammer]

That being said, when we've reached the point where over-reacting corporate minions are pulling TV shows because a character (and make no mistake the car is a character in this show) happens to feature the flag, we've gone into fucking ridiculous territory at which point common sense compels a line to be drawn.

OK, argue why some corporate goons shouldn't pull a show off the air that has the main characters glorify a regime based around hate and racism? Would you think it cool if the main characters of some other show drove a car with a big fat svastika on it called the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler?
If this is where you draw the line then I think you put the line down prematurely.

The line needs to be drawn when freedom of expression is being quashed. The show hardly glorifies any regime, its merely part of the paint scheme on the car. The confederacy is never glorified or even referenced in the show that I can recall, certainly not in any meaningful context.

Whether or not I think something is "cool" is irrelevant. I would have a problem if your hypothetical character where banned because of the swastika. In a battle between freedom of expression and political correctness, I'll side with freedom of expression every time.

[Grumman]

OK, argue why some corporate goons shouldn't pull a show off the air that has the main characters glorify a regime based around hate and racism?

Why stop there? Fullmetal Alchemist is a show where the main characters are part of a regime based around hate and racism, lead by a Fuehrer, whose military is guilty of ethnic cleansing and war crimes in a war of occupation against a racial minority. That doesn't mean it should be banned.

[Borgholio]

I don't think Dukes of Hazard glorify racism. They're just a sign of the times in which the show was produced. It's not like the boys put the flag on the GENERAL LEE with the intent of terrifying blacks.

[Elheru Aran]

OK, argue why some corporate goons shouldn't pull a show off the air that has the main characters glorify a regime based around hate and racism?

Why stop there? Fullmetal Alchemist is a show where the main characters are part of a regime based around hate and racism, lead by a Fuehrer, whose military is guilty of ethnic cleansing and war crimes in a war of occupation against a racial minority. That doesn't mean it should be banned.

The difference being that Fullmetal Alchemist, aside from some minor references that bring up a vaguely Germanic atmosphere, is more or less fully original and does not use any iconography that has real-world connotations. The Conqueror of Shamballa movie does bring up Nazis, but they are kept within their historical context and shown as losing (Beer Hall Putsch) and their racism is on display, just as the Amenestrian military's attitudes towards the Ishbalans are likewise condemned rather than being considered 'heritage'.

I do think the Dukes of Hazzard thing is a bit overboard as well. It's a show about a pair of good ol' boys up to shenanigans in a small country town, foiling the dumb sheriff and his boss whenever they can, throwing in some car-jumping every now and then, and displaying Daisy's Daisy Dukes any chance they can. The car does happen to have a Confederate flag on top and is called 'General Lee'; that's in bad taste now, I agree, but the rest of the show isn't (as far as a show from the 70s about rednecks can be anyway). TV Land is a channel that's explicitly about showing old TV shows; that's where it belongs.

IIRC (it's been a while) Bo and Luke Duke and their family were always very equal in their treatment of others. There weren't many black characters on the show, but those that did come up were never discriminated against, unless by the bad guys, who then got what they had coming by the end of the episode. The flag on the car was never mentioned-- it was only part of the decoration. If the show was made in a modern context (those bloody movies don't exist) they would probably have to scrub that part of the design.

[K. A. Pital]

Fullmetal Alchemist explicitly condemned the genocidal attitude of a European-like regime against the Middle-East modelled Ishvar, I remember that. The regime was never glorified. The main character is an atheist seeking to end religious and racial hate; his service to the regime is because he's at first unaware of what the regime does, and what it plans to do.

That said, regardless of the fact that Dukes of Hazzard is a crappy show, I don't think it should be banned.

[Flagg]

I don't think Dukes of Hazard glorify racism. They're just a sign of the times in which the show was produced. It's not like the boys put the flag on the GENERAL LEE with the intent of terrifying blacks.

What blacks? I don't ever recall seeing any...

[Elheru Aran]

I don't think Dukes of Hazard glorify racism. They're just a sign of the times in which the show was produced. It's not like the boys put the flag on the GENERAL LEE with the intent of terrifying blacks.

What blacks? I don't ever recall seeing any...

Yeah, there weren't many. A cursory Google suggests that one of the boys had a black friend who appeared in a couple of episodes (I do remember him) and in later seasons there was also a neighboring black sheriff who they rendered assistance to a few times. That's about it, though. Not impossible, but not particularly realistic either.