DiogenesLamp: "In fact, I’m going to just skip your messages."
Typical DiogenesLamp responses to facts, reason and truth -- buries his head in the sand, hollering loudly: "I see nothing, noooooo thing!"
Posted on 11/23/2016 6:01:04 PM PST by Loud Mime
I am studying our Civil War; anybody have any recommendations for reading?
Do you ever add anything to a discussion other than mouthing off and venting spleen?
Sure. Do you?
I am incapable of responding adequately to such witty reparte.
The federal government spent millions to subsidize New York City based and owned companies that took control of transoceanic trade.
The Ocean Steam Navigation Company, The United States Mail Steamship Company, The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and the Collins Line to name a few.
More false equivalence (aka bad analogies).
And what is false about it? Do you enjoy being preached at by Smug and arrogant Liberals telling you that you don't have the right sort of morality?
I don't know about you, but most people would grow to hate these people if they had to listen to their sneering for decades.
No Founder advocated an unlimited "right to secede" in 1776 or 1788 or later.
All believed independence could only legitimately come in two forms:
x: "Pennsylvania committed itself to the abolition of slavery in 1780."
DiogenesLamp: "But didn't actually do it until 1840.
There were still 64 slaves listed in Pennsylvania until then."
For comparison: between 1790 and 1840 the number of slaves in Virginia increased by 2/3 to 450,000 and in South Carolina by 375% to 327,000.
In Pennsylvania the number of African Americans increased by 500% to 50,000 from 1790 to 1840, but the number who remained slaves fell from 36% in 1790 to less than one tenth of one percent in 1840, none thereafter.
Finally, mentioning an old debate in passing: in the 1790s, while Philadelphia was the US capital, politicians like President Washington were forced to rotate their slaves frequently, to avoid running afoul of Pennsylvania's abolition laws.
DiogenesLamp: "Having judges impose it on the rest of the state hardly constitutes a conscious decision on the part of the people."
There is no record of serious objections to abolition in Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts census recorded only one slave from 1790 to 1830 (in 1830) and none thereafter.
Massachusetts had about 10,000 freed blacks in 1840.
x: "It wasn't clear to everyone in the Revolutionary era that independence would mean the continuation of slavery."
DiogenesLamp: "It was very clear.
In fact it was so clear, the Founders enacted a clause in the constitution that directly deals with it."
x is correct on this.
Most Founders, including Southerners like Washington, Jefferson and Madison, understood that slavery was evil and should be eventually abolished.
Northern Founders like Franklin and Adams soon began work to abolish slavery in their own states.
By the time of the Constitution in 1787, Washington himself said that if he had to chose between union and slavery, he would chose union.
But by 1787 other Southerners made clear that without slavery, there could be no Union, and so their demands were included in the new Constitution.
Still, leaders like Thomas Jefferson continued to design methods where the Federal government would purchase freedom for slaves and provide transportation back to Africa, or elsewhere.
All such plans came to nothing because slave-holders would have none of it.
Bottom line: unlike 1860 Fire Eater secessionists, our Founders in 1776 considered slavery an evil which should be eventually abolished.
DiogenesLamp: "I am presenting you with the UGLY parts of History.
You may not like them, but they are accurate."
No, ugly or not, most of what DiogenesLamp argues is pure rubbish and nonsense.
Yes if you want the facts of the matter go directly to a novelist who had last been to the U.S. almost 20 years before.
DegenerateLamp doesn’t appear to be very contented, and added up, he doesn’t appear to care for America at all. Perhaps he would be more content elsewhere...
Such an odd way of expressing, sort of suggests it's not really DiogenesLamp's history, that his own history is something very different.
DiogenesLamp to HandyDandy: "You are straining at gnats and swallowing camels in your efforts to appreciable distinction between the Founders and the Confederates, but the truth is that the Confederates had as much right as the founders to leave, you just don't like it because you wish to believe your side was right."
Total rubbish and nonsense, absolute lies, every word of it.
In fact, there are huge distinctions, huuuuuuuge.
They include the following:
DiogenesLamp to HandyDandy: "It wasn't.
It was evil, murderous, greedy and morally wrong.
Your side murdered 750,000 people to restore power to New York/Washington elite power barons, and you and the other apologists are too stupid to realize you have been nothing but useful idiots to the malignant power structure that developed as a result of this evil war."
Total rubbish & nonsense.
Complete fantasy concocted out of thin air with no serious evidence to support it.
Blaming the Union for "murdering" 750,000 people is like blaming the Western Allies in WWII for all the deaths at the hands of Axis powers -- after all: none of those millions would have died if we didn't fight them.
But that's not "reasoning", it's just insanity.
DiogenesLamp: "We are still fighting this same war between normal America and the robber baron/Washington axis of evil!
The Center of Elite Financial power is still New York, same as it was in 1861, and it still exerts its baneful influence on the Federal Power structure and US policy in general."
In fact, the Democrat Southern Slave Power ruled Washington DC from 1788 through 1861.
Republicans only took over when Southerners split their party and then left Federal Government.
But after the Civil War, Southern Democrats quickly reestablished themselves in Washington by making political alliance with their old friends in the big cities, like New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
Today the old alliance of Southern slave-holders / segregationists with Northern big city bosses is replaced by minority special interest groups supported by big city global financial interests.
Today the old Southern Democrats are pretty much gone and Dixiecrats reduced to a small fringe.
Most Southerners vote like Northerners -- suburbs, small towns & rural Republicans, big cities Democrats.
And many have forgotten their real history including, it seems, DiogenesLamp.
DiogenesLamp: "In fact, I’m going to just skip your messages."
Typical DiogenesLamp responses to facts, reason and truth -- buries his head in the sand, hollering loudly: "I see nothing, noooooo thing!"
It's hard to say what would have happened if Davis and his team had had their way, but the future for systems of bound labor wasn't bleak or questionable. Of course, from our point of view, it's absurd to think that slavery would have lasted into the 20th century, but things didn't look that way at the time.
In the late 18th century, British courts had already ruled that slaves coming to Britain would become free. Pennsylvania, as I said, had already begun the process of emancipation, as had Massachusetts. It would take much time, but it was possible to view slavery as a relic of the past that would be discarded.
Virginians were beginning to be discontented with the tobacco plantation system and the state might have outgrown slavery, if the prospects for cotton growing in new lands to the South and West hadn't emerged.
Later wars for independence in South America brought freedom for the slaves. In retrospect it's surprising that North America, so much more devoted to individual liberty and self-government didn't pave the way in regard to slavery as well.
But protecting slavery was not incidental to the Confederacy, it was their raison d'etre.
Even though slavery was constitutionally recognized, that was not enough for 1861 secessionists.
They wrote more explicit acknowledgements into their new constitution.
Most Unionists were not particularly concerned about slavery in the South, but they were vitally concerned when secessionists provoked war, started war, declared war and waged war on Unionists and Union states.
Republicans, by definition, were abolitionists and so when war-time conditions made emancipations possible, they quickly took advantage.
But the Union did not go to war at first either to destroy slavery or for economic reasons (regardless of how loudly DiogenesLamp hollers it), but rather in response to the war Jefferson Davis ordered at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.
People fight for different reasons. But it is true that the secession movement in the Deep South was motivated by a desire to preserve slavery. One doesn't have to believe that every Confederate soldier -- or even most CSA troops -- fought for that reason, to recognize what drove secession and led to war.
If members of some group are entitled to declare that they are oppressed and in justifiable revolution against their oppressors just because they feel like it, others are free to argue that from their point of view, members of the first group aren't oppressed and aren't entitled to rebel and may even be oppressors themselves -- and then where are we?
No. In disputes between people or peoples we can't just discard objective facts and values and argue that whatever one person or group thinks entitles them to whatever they want. Sure, if you live on a desert island you can do as you want, and we have a wide sphere of individual liberty, but if you're part of an ongoing partnership, you can't simply take everything that's not nailed down and skip out on your partners just because you happen to feel like it.
Yes, much of it is DiogenesLamp's own concoction, the rest standard Lost Causer mythology.
But I'll repeat, there's something odd about DiogenesLamp -- as he himself says this is not his history, it's somebody else's, and he has chosen sides for reasons which amount to nothing, don't add up and don't explain where all the nonsense comes from.
I suspect there's more, but can't imagine what it is.
It's only a mystery to DiogenesLamp because you know nothing, nothing of actual history.
You don't know, even though you've been told over and over, that slavery was a precondition for Union in 1787 and was accepted by all in 1860, in the South.
So Honest Abe was telling God's honest Truth: saving the Union was more important than abolishing slavery.
But if it happened he could do both, then that was a worthy goal, based on Republican abolitionist ideals.
I know that's what you intended to say, so I fixed it for you.
Sure, no problem, you're welcome.
No Founder ever claimed that "God and natural law" gave them the right to break free from England, "at pleasure", only from actual necessity or from mutual consent.
Since neither condition existed in 1860, secessionists declared their independence "at pleasure".
Look I am tired of this “How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin” discussion.
Please count me out!
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