Silent Sam Is Next, Of Course

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   Exactly no surprise whatsoever there.
   Fortunately, there are legal checks on this sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, the mayor of Chapel Hill is pretending that this is a safety issue.
   I still don't know exactly what to think about the general issue. But I have to say I'm not wild about shrieking mobs tearing down statues. I've always been puzzled about what to think about Silent Sam, and was also puzzled that more people weren't puzzled.
   I'm largely with this guy;

At one point, UNC senior Darin Beech shouted “Fascists tear down statues and burn books” to a crowd gathered in front of the Confederate statue.
Beech said he thought taking Silent Sam down feels ridiculous, particularly given what he saw as an intention to honor fallen soldiers.
“Nobody cared about this two months ago, and now everybody wants to destroy all these statues and monuments,” Beech said.

Not maybe so much the first point, but the latter two points. I'm skeptical about going from everything's peachy to kill it with fire or you're a Nazi in the space of a few months. Silent Sam was a puzzling thing twenty years ago, and it's a puzzling thing now. I'm not inveterately against moving it...but I'm against doing anything until this spasm of madness passes.