This is Confederate General John Hunt Morgan. In July 2018, the Lexington (KY) city council quietly moved this statue from Main Street in front of the courthouse to here:
Facing the 929 dead US Army soldiers buried in the Lexington Cemetery.
1/23
I like to think there's some fitting historical context here. Let me explain. 2/23
"A harvest of death" was how Lt Col E. B. Whitman described his grisly and difficult work of bringing back the bodies of Union dead to reinter at then newly created national cemeteries like this one in downtown Lexington. 3/23
It took detective work to make sure Union dead were found and buried. Whitman and his team reinterred 114,560 Union soldiers into 20 national cemeteries:
Men who fought for their country, who were given proper burials and small markers to commemorate their lives. 4/23
People would send letters to Whitman to help him find the bodies of their family members and of those they served alongside. Here's one. 5/23
What would Lt Col Whitman would say about our today's discussion about Confederate statues and their lack of context with the Union dead? 6/23
Whitman would likely remind all of us of all the work it took to bury the Union dead and to ensure they got grave markers, and remind us who did much of that work... 7/23
From historian Drew Gilpin Faust: "During the War, African Americans had risked their lives burying Union soldiers and trying to preserve both their names and their graves." (This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, 2008, p 227) 9/23
The war dead "were in every byway & lane & along every road where the armies marched, & in backyards of houses where, perhaps, they'd been cared for." Whitman "would set his assistants out like a skirmish line, to [ ] walk the entire acreage of where fighting had taken place" 10
So much work to commemorate 114, 560 lives. So much of it thankless. So much of it done by newly freed African Americans. 11/23
Actually: When the reinterment program was completed in 1871, in total 303,536 Union soldiers had been buried in 74 national cemeteries, at a cost of over $4,000,000 or nearly $75 million in today's dollars. 12/23 www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americane…
THAT is some historical context.
And yet, here we are today arguing over a few Confederate memorials to whites who waged war on the United States. 13/23
Back to Confederate statues. Hunt's was erected in Lexington in 1911 on the site of the Cheapside slave market, across from public whipping post, where slaves and freed Blacks alive were whipped.
Coincidence?
14/23
Remember, Kentucky WAS NEVER IN THE CONFEDERACY.
So let me get this straight: 46 years after the end of the Civil War, the state of KY erects a monument to a general of the losing side THAT IT WAS NEVER ON? 15/23
Preserving history?
There was no historical marker for the Cheapside slave aution until 2003.
#TakeBackCheapside worked for years to get statues of Confederates off the site. Here's co-founder DeBraun Thomas after the council voted 15-0 to move the statues from downtown. 16/
I'm leaving out the story of the second statue that Lexington moved. Why? 18/23
👏BECAUSE VICE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES WHO WAGE WAR ON THEIR OWN COUNTRY DO NOT GET TO HAVE HERO'S STATUES 👏 19/23
I am not looking straight at you, traitorous John Cabell Breckinridge. I am not telling any stories about your statute today. 20/23 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._B…
There are other Confederate dead buried in the Lexington Cemetery, along with John Hunt Morgan and that traitorous VP.
But now, that statue of Hunt has to face the extraordinary tribute that a young and grieving nation made to those who fought and died for it.
21/23
Now General Hunt forever faces 926 Union soldiers in defeat.
22/23
We can have the decency to bury traitors and the treasonous.
But we sure as hell don't need to celebrate them with statues.
Hunt was put where he belong -- being faced down by hundreds in the US Army who fought him. And won.
<the end 23/23>
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A key Mu3k theory made it into the @nytimes opinion pages this week. Touted and burnished by a professor at a top university WITHOUT transparency that Musk funded him for $10 Million for the research. How? 🧵
Humanity is collapsing from population decline. Sound familiar? It's the pet theory of ultra-rich Western white guys like Musk. He funded the center run by the author of this @nytimes op-ed with a $10 million grant. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
What I find EXTRAORDINARY that this funding is not listed on website for the center, the Population Wellbeing Institute, nor did the author say in his op-ed bio that he leads PWI. But Bloomberg broke this story last month about Musk's donation to PWI. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"If you do not have symptoms, you must not seek a test, as the scientific evidence shows that the test may not be able to detect whether you have the virus."
How in hell are we going into a second wave with this as the NHS messaging?
I say this having returned from a US state (KY) with free, rapid, on demand testing. Waste a test? Nobody wants to do nasal swab tests for fun. I flew back to the UK knowing I wasn't putting my family at risk (neg.)
And now I sit in 14 days legally mandated quarantine because I actually follow the rules.
The best minds in AI ethics are not even one step removed from this mess.
The goals here were clear: preserve standardisation in unprecedented times. But public trust? Fairness? Equity? People in charge ranked those goals lower than that of standardising marks across schools. But absence of 'ground truth' here -- 2020 individual exam results --> FAIL.
We need instead to understand how these systems are rolled out in practice -- not just open the so-called black box but what's around that box: who built it, who is using it, what are they doing with it, who do they think it is for, what do people know/THINK they know about it.
Data are for 2017 and cover the whole year. Of course we've only had 6 months of Covid data in 2020 (Feb-Aug), but already it it is the third top cause of death in the US. cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr…