Octopus Overlords

YellowKing wrote: Tue May 24, 2022 9:38 pm Ugh on "Fort Liberty." Sounds like a MAGA-compound.

dbt1949 wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 3:16 am Why couldn't they have named one Fort Dave? Is it too much to ask?

$iljanus wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 12:40 pm Or Fort Knight...

Jaymann wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 7:25 pmFort Ran.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 8:25 pm

Jaymann wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 7:25 pmFort Ran.

The spot where the city of Dallas removed the Confederate memorial in Pioneer Park played host briefly to a new statue this week before it too was taken down.

On Monday, a passerby spotted a human-like figure standing right where the memorial vanished last year. Closer inspection revealed the new artwork to be a strange one. It had the body of a human and the face of a creature out of a Lovecraft novel. It wore a dress, and through a tear in the sleeve you could see suction cups on its body.

In its hand was a dollar coin. Around its head, a halo. And then there was the platform below its feet, a pedestal made of what looked like animal skulls and bones.
...
The statue looked a whole lot like another unauthorized piece of art that showed up nearby two years ago. In 2019, a sculpture of another Cthulhu-like figure appeared near the Convention Center DART station. The anonymous artist called it a cephalopod, making creatures like squid and octopi its in-laws. The city removed it, saying it was a safety hazard.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Thu Dec 29, 2022 10:36 am The plaque is excellent.

The Cockrell statue's plaque included a few additional features -- including a misspelling of Dallas as "D'llas" beneath the city logo in its bottom corner, and a series of Cistercian monk numerals representing a Google Voice phone number that plays a cryptic and vague recording when dialed.

In October of 2019, a similar statue -- also apparently made by the same Solomon artist -- was mysteriously installed along a stretch of road beneath the convention center. That piece, which was removed almost as quickly as it appeared, claimed that City of Dallas founder John Neely Bryan was part cephalopod. (More intrigue followed.)

The 2019 statue depicting Bryan boasted a similarly worded (and often misspelled) plaque about his life, and also claimed Dallas was a "shared delusion." 

Upon its removal, the Bryan statue was taken into storage by the City of Dallas' Office of Arts and Culture.

The Cockrell statue faced a similarly fast removal because, as the security guards who surrounded it in the morning noted, its arrival was "unauthorized." 

By early Monday evening, the statue -- which had been screwed into the concrete beneath it -- had been pulled from the site.

Isgrimnur wrote: Wed Jul 17, 2019 12:53 pm War is Boring

The Navy operates one ship, a guided-missile cruiser named the USS Chancellorsville, commissioned in 1989 in honor of the Civil War battle that occurred in Virginia. Some historians consider the battle a major Confederate victory, according to an August 2017 Congressional Research Service report on military installations with Confederate names.

The Navy has renamed a warship in honor of a Black sailor and statesman who had been born into slavery, as part of the US military’s ongoing effort to remove names that commemorate the Confederacy.

The guided missile destroyer USS Chancellorsville, which was named after a Confederate victory in the Civil War, was renamed the USS Robert Smalls, the Navy announced Monday in a news release.

Born in South Carolina in 1839, Smalls was conscripted into the Confederate military during the Civil War, serving on the steamer Planter at Charleston. On May 13, 1862, Smalls piloted the ship out of the Charleston harbor with his family, other slaves, and military cargo, turning the ship over to the US Navy. He ultimately rose to become captain of the Planter.

As an advocate for African Americans, Smalls led one of the first public boycotts of segregated transportation. After the Civil War, Smalls was appointed a brigadier general of the South Carolina militia and served in the South Carolina Legislature. He went on to serve five terms as a member of the US House of Representatives.

Isgrimnur wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 6:35 pm Thank God for Mississippi

Kraken wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 10:00 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 6:35 pm Thank God for Mississippi

Interesting. I know MS is the worst state by most objective measures, but I've never heard that refrain.

SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.

So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.

But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.

The foundry workers poured the crucible into custom-made iron molds, which are meant to leave the Swords Into Plowshares logo etched onto the ingots.

The furnace was hot enough that it should have easily turned the bronze into liquid. But the molten metal got thick and clumpy unusually fast, and the workers wondered whether there was something else — maybe some tin or lead? — corrupting the century-old material.

The metal had been cast while Charlottesville and the South were ruled by segregation and dedicated days after the Ku Klux Klan marched through town. Philanthropist Paul G. McIntire, whose prosperous enslaver father had been financially crippled by the Civil War, commissioned and donated the monument to the city.

“This metal has a lot of bad juju stuck in it,” the foundry owner said, studying the lumpy bronze. “It’s cursed.”

After the molds cooled, the foundry workers flipped them onto a pool of sand and banged on them so the ingots would fall out. They were streaked in different shades of brown, some of the engravings a little hard to see.

To Schmidt, it did not seem to particularly matter. The ingots were something to work with — something that took up a different kind of space in the world — and could allow them to imagine what form the metal might take on next.

This was merely the “end of the middle.” They had already faced lawsuits and protests, fought neo-Nazis and monument defenders, fended off attacks and worked in secret to get the bronze to this state. Now came the very public process of taking something ugly and making something beautiful: picking an artist, meeting with residents and imagining what might happen next.

“This is a relief,” she sighed. “This feels good to have material created. … It’s got to go forward.”

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:01 pm dark periods of our own history shouldn't be venerated, but they shouldn't be hidden, either

LordMortis wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:16 pm

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:01 pm dark periods of our own history shouldn't be venerated, but they shouldn't be hidden, either

Not just our history but all of history. I don't know enough about the statue to have an opinion on whether it had history on its side to preserve it.

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 2:38 pm FORT EISENHOWER, Ga. — When this installation’s former namesake [Gordon] invaded Maryland, the U.S. Army shot him five times.

LawBeefaroni wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 2:52 pm

Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 2:38 pm FORT EISENHOWER, Ga. — When this installation’s former namesake [Gordon] invaded Maryland, the U.S. Army shot him five times.

How do we even know who he is? He has been erased!

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:01 pm In general I'd be against melting it down (dark periods of our own history shouldn't be venerated, but they shouldn't be hidden, either.) But this particular statue, given the events surrounding it? Melt away.

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 4:19 pm Stop with your CTRL-Fing.

Holman wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 4:20 pm

Blackhawk wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 12:01 pm In general I'd be against melting it down (dark periods of our own history shouldn't be venerated, but they shouldn't be hidden, either.) But this particular statue, given the events surrounding it? Melt away.

FWIW, most of the Confederate statues dotting the South were put up during early-20thC Jim Crow as a Fuck You to local blacks.

They were generally mass-produced and cheap, which is why there are so many of them (and why they are hollow metal rather than carved stone). Every shitty little Dixie town could have their own racist shrine.

Holman wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 4:45 pm Meanwhile, on Twitter (in response to melting slaver statues):

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/171 ... 93982?s=20