"Statues dedicated to Confederate heroes were swiftly removed across Baltimore in the small hours of Wednesday morning..."

"... just days after violence broke out over the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia. Beginning soon after midnight on Wednesday, a crew, which included a large crane and a contingent of police officers, began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, tearing the monuments from their pedestals and carting them out of town." (NYT).

And there they go. Lee and Jackson sailing through air onto flatbed truck in Baltimore at 3:40 AM. An amazing sight. pic.twitter.com/4SzRYRiVOB

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) August 16, 2017

Have you ever woken up in the morning to find your city had changed during the night? There's a dystopian edge that called to mind "Dark City"...



And that old Pretenders song with the overly familiar intro, "My City Was Gone":



IN THE COMMENTS: iowan2 said:

I have seen a tag line of late, something about darkness, just can't put my finger on it,

Oh here it is. Washington Post."Democracy dies in darkness"

Prescient I guess

Matthew Sablan said:

There's a way to go about removing the monuments. Doing it with force of arms and threatening the city with violence is not the way.

And doing it under cover of darkness suggests that it's something shameful that needs to be hidden. If you can't do it proudly, by daylight, you're not ready to do it.

"They are animals. Never delude yourself for even a moment that animals exist for anything other than the support of, and use by, Humans."

"That's it. They are tools humans use. Like all tools they need to be cared for, respected, and most important, used...by humans, at their discretion. Any attempt by a person to impart human attributes on animals, signals that persons slip from reality."

Says iowan2 in the comments to the post about using cats in medical experiments.

And I say:

Ah, but you're missing something: imparting human attributes to animals and slipping from reality are also purposes we have for animals. When we make the dog our baby or whatever, we are using it. That IS the use of pets. So I think you are mostly just disapproving of one of the uses. Is fantasy wrong? Children play with dolls and imagine them to be alive. We read books and identify with the characters described in the words. We take LSD and turn the world into a surreal fantasy land. It's one of the main things people do. You can say it's bad, but it is something we do, and we do it with animals a lot of the time.