Confederate States Of America (2005)

Yahoo Movies ^ | 12/31/04 | Me

[lentulusgracchus]

What I am saying is that the USA survived and the world is blessed by a union rather than a division. But there are those fools on both sides of the Mason Dixon that never learn the lessons of that horrific war. It has been almost 150 years since those bloody days and its time we learn from the lesson rather than rip open the scar.

Learning the lessons is precisely what the interest of some of the people on this thread is about. If you can't find it under all the rodomontade, well, that's understandable. The thread's in decay now, but there have been actual discussions on earlier threads that got pulled when people threw tantrums and called other people names.

The premise of the thread was asinine from the start. We are Americans by God, let's start acting like Americans. You can't go backward you can only go forward. I don't play what ifs, I'm Irish.

Well, which is it, Irish or American? 8^p

The point is, the person who put up the thread was engaging in a bit of discussion-bait by positing antihistorical circumstances and conspicuously wondering aloud how different things would be, if things had been different. Well, how droll, but the real discussion is whether there is something we ought to be paying attention to and learning about the Civil War era that has meaning for us in the here and now. And there is.

The problem is twofold. Southerners have generally been brought up with their own history of the Civil War, their own "civil war" flag and roster of heroes and battles, and Northerners have had theirs, and everyone has respected the truce over those old issues conjoined on us by the veterans of those battles themselves, who when they gathered together on the old battlefields, unfailingly set an example of letting bygones be bygones and of reconciling with one another. They had, after all, done their best through four years of war to kill each other, and they'd lived much the same lives while afield with the armies. The rest of society got the message, and all was peace for the most part except for scholarly quibbles over orders of battle and the occasional theorist like Otto Eisenshiml who would write a brooding book about conspiracy in Edwin Stanton's office, and he'd be generally ignored.

Then James McPherson and the faculty Marxists came along, and started doing politics as history, and jabbing fingers at the South. In the name of trying to break Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", they worked with President Bill Clinton to "contextualize" (i.e. propagandize) the Civil War for modern purposes of the American political Left: attempting to drive a wedge between the Midwestern and urban Republicans on the one hand, and the conservative Southerners on the other who have been the rock of Republican and conservative political successes since 1968, when the South put Richard Nixon in the White House, not at all coincidentally defeating an ur-liberal in the person of Hubert Humphrey.

There is more, much more, but that is the beginning of the discussion on Free Republic between the largely Jeffersonian Southerners and the adherents of Lincoln's super-Hamiltonian vision for the country that has been, besides the cause of the South's destruction, the root of "big government", entitlement government, and corporate-welfarist, superstatal policies that are being formulated now under such rubrics as NAFTA, WTO, alienation of authority and sovereignty, the Law of the Sea Treaty, "globalization", open borders, the Kyoto Accords, and political globalization. That is the other part of the problem: American empire has its fans, who like to feast on the defeat of the Jeffersonians and who have come to the boards to purge them of the Southerners, by precipitating fist fights and (they hope) getting someone on the wicked Southerners' side to say something intemperate enough that they can go to the Moderators and have the person banned, thus moving FR closer to their ideal of a Potemkin forum, a Disneyland of "respectable" National Greatness Republican (McKinleyite) opinionmaking and partisan organizing, that will showcase the policies of the Bush Administration, whatever they are, and smooth out the individualistic wrinkles left over from the old days, when Free Republic was a roiling, brawling free-for-all of individualism and untrammeled conservatism of every stripe.

The principles being argued here, when we're discussion principles and not getting involved with personalities, are highly relevant to all of the above.

[lentulusgracchus]

Among them seems to be the very same style of cyberstalking that got Cap'n Crunch admonished by the mods and exiled, which he now denies.

Wasn't it precisely the reminder of that time away from forum that caused the last thread to go "poof" at what, 1800 posts?

And the discovery that #3Fan, member in good standing of the Wlat Gang, was posting neo-Nazi material penned by the notorious, late Bertrand Comparet, that caused the Late, Great Thread to be pulled in its entirety, all 4,400 posts of it?

That was the thread to which our Capitan had posted material that had been, ummmmmm, compromised from certain Supreme Court briefs and made to do duty for the actual opinions handed down in famous cases, wasn't it?

[lentulusgracchus]

Ooops. Looks like I've done it now. And after warning you about the same thing!

[4CJ]

There is more, much more, but that is the beginning of the discussion on Free Republic between the largely Jeffersonian Southerners and the adherents of Lincoln's super-Hamiltonian vision for the country that has been, besides the cause of the South's destruction, the root of "big government", entitlement government, and corporate-welfarist, superstatal policies that are being formulated now under such rubrics as NAFTA, WTO, alienation of authority and sovereignty, the Law of the Sea Treaty, "globalization", open borders, the Kyoto Accords, and political globalization. That is the other part of the problem: American empire has its fans, who like to feast on the defeat of the Jeffersonians and who have come to the boards to purge them of the Southerners, by precipitating fist fights and (they hope) getting someone on the wicked Southerners' side to say something intemperate enough that they can go to the Moderators and have the person banned, thus moving FR closer to their ideal of a Potemkin forum, a Disneyland of "respectable" National Greatness Republican (McKinleyite) opinionmaking and partisan organizing, that will showcase the policies of the Bush Administration, whatever they are, and smooth out the individualistic wrinkles left over from the old days, when Free Republic was a roiling, brawling free-for-all of individualism and untrammeled conservatism of every stripe.

Spot on, you nailed it. With few exceptions, their adherents simply post argumentum ad hominem. Those posters are no longer worth responding to, reasoned discourse is simply lost on them.

[4CJ]

Was that when a certain poster of theirs experienced a 30 day hiatus?

[lentulusgracchus]

Was that when a certain poster of theirs experienced a 30 day hiatus?

Well, I'm sure the hiatus wasn't humiliating per se, but having it broadcase sure was. That's thread-pulling time!

[GOPcapitalist]

Was that when a certain poster of theirs experienced a 30 day hiatus?

All spent setting up a company, of course. The censure note sent to him must've been the inspiration!

[M. Espinola]

"dear m.eSPINola,"

"have you considered that you are becoming a laughingstock on FR??"

Once I spent 3 seconds considering your comment, then realized you were already the holder of the title in question :)

[M. Espinola]

Hello, Moeith, yo Larryith, and of course Shempith. (Guess which of you?) What art thou doing? Holding the final reb meeting? ;)

[GOPcapitalist]

What art thou doing? Holding the final reb meeting? ;)

Your not-so-veiled threat that you soon intend to start pounding at the abuse button with trumped up, hyperbolic, and fabrication-filled allegations against us with the specific purpose of getting this thread pulled and/or one or more of its participants admonished in a manner that has been thus far overwhelmingly frequented upon your own wretched ilk (WhiskeyPapa, #3Nazi, cvn76, Held_to_Ransom and all his aka's, and of course the existing present contingent of crass, vulgar-mouthed bilge spewers, cyberstalkers, and chronic bandwidth thiefs that is all too familiar to you in the first hand, to name a few), I'll simply sit back, crank up the the music of defiance to your jackbooted smear tactics, and in the process collectively dump a small token of it returned favors on your connection.

[M. Espinola]

Below, a small sample of some of your classic lines, to date:

"Who's your boss? Who put you up to this?", "This is libel. Who's sponsoring you?" "..you've a bloodthirstiness about you that would gag a leech.."

Anyone lurking under your bed?

[M. Espinola]

Wonderful, now you are posting huge pictures of hippie, drug 'music' posters. It fits you perfectly. Any more pictures of your 'heritage'? :)

[stainlessbanner]

Turn it up!

[stainlessbanner]

Holding the final reb meeting?

You wish, pencilpusher

[GOPcapitalist]

Wonderful, now you are posting huge pictures of hippie, drug 'music' posters. It fits you perfectly. Any more pictures of your 'heritage'? :)

Check out Espinola's latest. He thinks Lynyrd Skynyrd is "hippie drug music" and he thinks an LP cover is a poster!

Such mistakes are typically suggestive that his musical tastes are either older or newer than the aforementioned. IOW, a browse through his music collection will likely reveal either something from the repugnant range of Michael Jackson through Green Day or the world's largest collection of Perry Como.

[M. Espinola]

Okay hippie, whatever you say.

[GOPcapitalist]

Okay hippie, whatever you say.

Though your ignorance persists on public display, I sure don't see any sign of your musical tastes (or lack thereof).

[4CJ]

Turn it up!

Bump and Amen!

[lentulusgracchus]

He thinks Lynyrd Skynyrd is "hippie drug music" and he thinks an LP cover is a poster

Prob'ly thinks Mussel Shoals is a beach in California.

And that an LP is an LS-120 diskette, or an Oracle certification.

[lentulusgracchus]

I sure don't see any sign of your musical tastes (or lack thereof).

Klezmer acid ska. Or maybe Gregorian salsa bop.

Something bleeding-edge. Or at least, bleeding.

Conjunto doo-wop standards.