I don't reject Bowers because he's a New Dealer or a Democratic hack or a racist or a White supremacist. I don't even reject him because his book is so offensive. I reject his book because it's the work of a lazy man who doesn't bother to question or investigate but simply writes out of his own prejudices and appeals to the prejudices of others. I point out to you that he was a Rooseveltian hanger-on, because you use that style of argument, and I inform others that he had scant respect for the capacities and aspirations of African-Americans, because they tell me that's important to them, but it's the shoddy quality of the work that turns me off to him, and I've looked into his book enough to confirm that impression.
I do have to laugh at the way you separate out Southern voters for FDR from the rest and blame what happened since then on the Northerners, while absolving Southern Democrats of their responsibility. North and South, the country was in more or less the same boat in 1932 with Southerners crying out for relief and federal assistance as loudly if not more loudly than anyone else. Southern Democrats did tend to back off later, particularly when racial questions arose, but you come across sounding like a real Dixiecrat jackass when you lump the Irish and Italian Catholic voters of the cities in with liberal ideologues. "Urban Ethnic Progressives" indeed. After you get caught up on Southern history, you might put a little effort into reading up on 20th century Northern history. Am I patronizing? No, because I haven't called you "boy" or "son" yet.
What you're doing is constructing a crude schematic for making snap judgments about American history. Thus Northern Ethnics in the 1920s or 1930s have to be programmatic liberals, far more so than Southerners, because their states are now so Democrat. Thus, the backers of high tariffs in the 19th century have to be for "vast, programmatic expansions of government and infrastructure," because it fits your projection of 20th century politics back on the 19th century. The details get lost in this imposition of the scheme on the realities of the time, and you don't see how the past may differ from the present.
Your portrait of Lincoln as an abolitionist not very different from the more militant members of the movement is also worthy of comment. You don't want to be described as "pro-slavery," but you attack those in 19th century politics who weren't even modestly opposed to slavery or who weren't fully pro-slavery. The fellow who believes that eventually slavery should end some day and begins by restricting its territorial expansion is lumped in with those who favor direct action and immediate abolition. Perhaps having a conspiracy theory helps one to do that, but it looks like you deny anti-slavery Northerners any opportunity to stand their own ground, and put any opposition to slavery or its expansion beyond the pale. If you actually were proslavery or "pro-slavery-as-it-existed-in-the-Southern-states-in-19th-century-America," how would your view be any different?
You're very fond of the word "teleology." I scarcely know what you mean by it. If you're saying that it's "might makes right," I certainly don't agree with that. It's just that we disagree who and what was right during the period in question. If you're refering to some historical process, I don't think one can deny that there are such processes, though it would be foolish to claim that we could fully understand them. If you're saying that your opponents argue that consequences override moral and legal rules, I'd say first of all, that you and they don't agree about what moral and legal rules dictate in this case, and second that you are as quick to argue from consequences as anyone else. You just don't see it, because you assume that the consequences that you deplore are implicit in your principles and the consequences that others would regret are somehow apart from the moral and legal principles at issue. That's something you might want to work on.
I don't argue that the Unionists were right because they won. The degree to which they were right -- and it is a question of degree -- contributed to their victory. But it's possible that it would be more clear how right they were if they lost, and we really saw what the consequences of that defeat would have been. I suspect that for a lot of people the Confederacy was right because they lost. Because they lost, all the blame for whatever came afterwards can be heaped on the heads of their opponents. Had they won, they'd have their share of responsiblity for the continent's troubles. But in defeat they can always remain pure victims, free of blame for what would come in the future.
Maybe you can see the duplicity of your argument. If someone argues that the world is better off because the Union was preserved, you can call that, in your own way of speaking a "teleological" argument and hence an invalid one. Yet you habitually malign the Unionists because of what came afterwards, and your arguments are just as consequentialist as what you abhor. Now you can claim that you're in favor of the founders' vision, and that the consequentialist part of your argument grows out of that, but your opponents likewise consider that the founders' words and actions support their view of things. The founders foresaw all manner of problems that could assail the Republic, among them fragmentation and civil war, as well as tyranny. That's why the Framers of the Constitution were keen on union and not so wild about secession.
You take what's happened since 1860 as a proof that the founders believed in secession. Others dispute your premise, and it doesn't look like you're in any position to brand others consequentialists or "might makes right" realists. What you're trying to do is to claim for your arguments an immunity from the attacks you make on others -- to argue that you alone stand on principle, and the others are simply arguing from convenience. But that doesn't fit the actual discussion we're having. People disagree about what the founders intended and what the states could do and you can't simply assume that you have the key and damn opposing arguments as "teleology."
You seem to think that I agree with your Kimberly Smith's ideas about emotionalism in argument. And that's quite a switch, considering you brought her up in support of your views. I don't agree with her valuation. A colder, more rational style of argument is preferable. It's a mistake when countries get carried away by their emotions, and it leads to real trouble.
But I do understand where she's coming from, and how hard it is for those who feel passionately about something to adapt to the styles of argument of those who simply dismiss their concerns. I don't think that publishing slave narratives, or pointing out a wrong, or calling for a change of heart is an "incitement to violence."
And I can't help chuckling, after watching you weave all over the rhetorical road, clutching at your breast, charging conspiracy, claiming those who disagree with you want to kill you, to hear you proclaim that you "argue for rational discourse." You want to believe that your own excesses are a matter of "style," rather than of "substance," but the two can be hard to separate. How could I, after watching your performance now and in the past, be entirely condemnatory of abolitionists who may have used similar emotional arguments? How could anyone else looking on? How can you?
Your idea seems to be that a permanent "gag rule" should have been imposed preventing discussion of whatever went against Southern interests, but if someone really cared about slavery, how can one deny them the right to speak about it? You pile on the emotionalism freely and without constraint and expect your audience to condemn others for trying to raise a moral question that unavoidably touches the emotions.
At the heart of your performance seems to be "I'm right, therefore those who disagree with me are irrational or emotional or crudely materialistic and results oriented or liberal or Marxist." But it's not at all clear that you are right, and other observers will note that rational and emotional, mateialistic and idealistic, principled and results-based arguments are used by both "sides" in the debate.
I suspect many people have some sympathy for the Old South. I did when I came here. But while you guys play on that it's not what you're after. You want people to say that the secessionists, Confederates, and indeed, the proslavery faction, were right and justified in their actions, even when judged by modern standards. And that you won't get, because there's a lot that's questionable or worth condemning in the secessionist movement and the Confederacy. The most you will get is some understanding -- and not even that if you don't extend similar empathy in the opposite direction.
First, just for the sake of argument, if you are a forensic purist and shun ad hominem yourself, then why are you wasting time on bringing a charge of inconsistency, hypocrisy, and ad hominem argumentation against me? Address my arguments.
Second, we haven't discussed it much, but I distinguish between people who are e.g. Communist in their private lives but fairminded in their writing -- like children's author Arthur Ransome, who let only the faintest breath of his anti-Americanism into his books for younger readers 65 years ago, even though he was on speaking terms with the entire CPSU Central Committee and was actually married to Grigory Zinoviev's secretary. In writing a book review of his Swallowdale or Winter Holidays, I wouldn't find much of his Leninism on display, and so I shouldn't criticize him on that account, never mind that he was a lifelong Communist.
James McPherson and Eric Foner are another story, since their overarching themes are Marxist. McPherson put his Marxism into the title of Battle Cry of Freedom, which is a clear reference to emancipation: ergo, McPherson is saying just by so titling his book, that the Civil War was about ending slavery and liberating the black man from bondage and racism. Welllll, maybe not. Maybe McPherson is selling a politically operational story of top-down, vanguard-led "liberation" Communist-style instead. And that is a theme Marx himself wrote about.
McPherson's extracurriculars and his critique of America as expressed in Pacifica transcripts make his writings fair game, since all are transacted in the public arena. Of course his views would be off the table if he held them privately, and then it would be immaterial if he were a Prohibitionist or a fugitive Parchamite. But he lives his public life around his Leftism, and it has demonstrably crept into his writing. Therefore, if he and Foner are grinding a contemporary or ideological axe on the Southa, we Southerners are going to say something about it if you bring in McPherson to support an attack of your own on the legitimacy of the Southern people -- if you start quoting McPherson to play "Spot" with the South, I'm going after McPherson and you both. We are not dealing here with reason and principle, but with animus, and so your and your favorite writers' animus is fair game.
That all said, I trust Farber or Neely or McPherson to get the time of day right when Lee sent his hapless regiments up Malvern Hill. I trust them to be able to count casualties and estimate costs. But when it comes to large arguments about the validity of secession, that is another story. That crack about "usable history" is telling -- was that Rakove, or Farber? -- because it means that these historians are using history to transact contemporary politics, and so their contemporary affiliations and the identification of their grinding axes is quite germane to any discussion of their arguments.
No, I dismiss people because of the camps they're in, recognizing that those camps have modern agenda and are up to no good. These are not scholarly disagreements, they're political ones. Their charges are best met on the political level, since that is where they are coming from.
Mark Neely is a case in point: wrote two books for the purpose of exculpating Lincoln from the charges of the Southern revisionists, and then wrote another about Jefferson Davis to attach the same charges to Davis, in a massive tu quoque argument -- a recrimination. How much of Neely do I have to read, to get my mind around the fact that he's recriminating? That his point is to vindicate the Unionist POV and inculpate the Southerners and their POV?
I suppose that, to satisy you that I'm being "fair" (which I can tell you care about from your long ad hominem post about my supposed argumentation ad hominem), I should spend the next 15 years of my life toiling in the salt-pits of historiographical studies, before I open my mouth again. But I wonder, is it worth it? If I get my PhD, will x kiss and make up? Somehow I kinda don't think so.
No, I'm not going to jump through hoops for you. I'm satisfied to post up what I think, and maybe point to some good quotes from people I think knew what they were talking about, and let our lurking neighbors decide who's being real.
And when you throw out all books written in the past half-century or so by writers at major universities, you come off sounding like a yahoo, and condemn yourself to ignorance.
Well, don't you wish? And meantime, what are you going to do about the wide and deep cadre of Leftist and liberal "growers" of the Constitution, who have been tenure-tracking one another into comfy ensconcement at those universities, and shutting out differing POV's at some of them? Some universities have a rep for lacking academic freedom. Berkeley, where a couple of your sources hole up, is one of them. Indiana University was notorious in the 30's for having Reds on their faculty; so were Columbia and NYU. But I haven't noticed you worrying about impartiality from that quarter.
That's not what you told me up above.
I don't even reject him because his book is so offensive. I reject his book because it's the work of a lazy man who doesn't bother to question or investigate but simply writes out of his own prejudices and appeals to the prejudices of others.
Didn't work hard enough for you, eh? What would have been enough? What would it have taken? Wandering all over the lot and then coming down exactly where you do?
I point out to you that he was a Rooseveltian hanger-on, because you use that style of argument, and I inform others that he had scant respect for the capacities and aspirations of African-Americans, because they tell me that's important to them,
Oh, so you cop to being a Straussian, then. A manager of others, a Hamiltonian manipulator and user. Thanks for respecting us. You know, the planter class may have had a lot of objectionable characteristics, but the Straussians share the worst of them without having contributed to the growth of the country. You recriminate against the planters, for example, that they ate their bread by the sweat of their slaves' brows, and that is indeed a substantive moral complaint. But how is it better, selfishly to direct others intellectually rather than economically?
..... but it's the shoddy quality of the work that turns me off to him, and I've looked into his book enough to confirm that impression.
If he'd been less shoddy, do you think he'd have been more inclined to see things your way?
That is just your characterization of what I wrote. Cite and quote me, don't come in here pretending to review me and play "channelmaster" without citing and quoting what I've said.
No, I don't "separate out" Southern voters for FDR. I pointed out that control of the party passed to the urban ethnics and their candidates in 1928. I didn't say FDR attracted no Southern votes, or that FDR blew them off -- quite the opposite, I pointed out that he worked to keep his coalition together, but its divergent interests pulled the party apart in 1948. But you knew that I didn't say that -- and you don't care. This part of your rodomontade isn't about history at all.
...you come across sounding like a real Dixiecrat jackass.....
That's right, Luke -- release your hatred. Let it swell! -- Luke, you know it's the truth! I am yoah faaatha! LOL!
.....when you lump the Irish and Italian Catholic voters of the cities in with liberal ideologues. "Urban Ethnic Progressives" indeed.
So explain where this came from:
The covert and indirect recognition given to the cities as members of the federal system continued well into this [20th] century. Four forces were to conspire to modify the practice of American federalism, however, from about 1930 onward. First was the cash grant-in-aid which superseded the land-grant system after the substantial depletion of the public domain. The cash-grant system, though originating in the late years of the last century, came to full flower with the advent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. It has affected the latter-day practice of federalism as profoundly as any other single factor. Second was the depression.....Third was the emergence following World War II of a metro-urban society attended by problems without precedent....Fourth was the demonstrated incapacity of the states to play as effective a role in the war on urban problems.In the circumstances it is not strange that the cities sought, and where opportunity offered, embraced new arrangements. Their recourse was to appeal directly to the federal government for assistance. The narrow and crooked paths of other years were broadened.....Direct relations between Washington and the cities, long existent but as long submerged, were brought to the surface and recognized openly......The chief instrument by which this transformation was effected was the grant-in-aid.
The year 1932 constitutes a sort of geologic fault line in the development of the federal system. Prior to that year the American partnership nominally had nominally been limited to the national government and the states; afterward the cities played an increasingly active and overt role in the practice of federalisma. The most meaningful indicator of the growing urban prominence is the multiplying relations between the cities and the national government, and the most telling measure of those increasing relations is found in the growth of federal grants-in-aid direct to the cities. As late as 1932 such grants totaled no more than $10 million, virtually all of which went to the District of Columbia. Direct grant-in-aid relationships were, therefore, negligible in that year. [Table 1, showing growth to $229 million in 1936, $278 million in 1940.]....
Like federal aid in airport development, low-rent public housing originated in response to depression needs. Thus the National Industrial Recovery Act (PL 67, 73d Congress) provided for participation by the national government in "low-cost housing and slum clearance projects" as early as 1933. The Emergency Relief Appropriation Act (PL 11, 74th Congress), passed in 1935, provided $450 million for housing. By 1937, as many as 50 low-rent public projects had been approved under these early acts......
The Housing Act of 1937, as amended, provides for a nationwide program of low-rent public housing.....Low-rent housing is designed to serve the neeeds of those of low income who otherwise would not be able to afford "decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings." Clientele given special consideration are low-income veterans (and their survivors), Indians, and the elderly. Public housing likewise is designed to serve an important slum-clearance function, and in that connection to work closely with the urban renewal and redevelopment program.
-- Roscoe C. Martin, "The Expanded Partnership", in The New Urban Politics, ed. Douglas M. Fox. Goodyear Publishing, Pacific Palisades, Calif., 1972, pp. 38-51 passim.
Damn, Luke, sure sounds like urban progressives took over the Democratic Party to me!
Of course, you have another opinion?
Am I patronizing? No, because I haven't called you "boy" or "son" yet.
No, because you don't have what it takes to do that. Boy.
You still laughing?
Is that what the Straussians taught you to call other people's historical frame of reference while you're trying to get over them?
Keep trying.
Not that you'll get there, but it'll be socially useful if you remain preoccupied with trying to get over.
Where the heck did you get that? If you're going to do polemic, fella, it helps if you make sure you're zipped up before you rush out of the men's room and into the forum.
Urban ethnics who wanted city services and federal assistance were the liberals of their day. What's hard about that? Nobody seems to have trouble with that correlation except you. Ever hear of the Progressive Movement?
Thus, the backers of high tariffs in the 19th century have to be for "vast, programmatic expansions of government and infrastructure," because it fits your projection of 20th century politics back on the 19th century.
I don't do that. I bring threads of identity and "commonality" forward. The Morrill Tariff was a fairly complex scheme that would have been reviled by the Jeffersonians of an earlier and was in fact reviled by the old Jacksonians of the Civil War era. And its parentage also brought forth the corporate-welfarist railroad legislation and the distributive Homestead Act.
What is your problem? You're just throwing the kitchen sink. Take a pill. Chill.
The details get lost in this imposition of the scheme on the realities of the time, and you don't see how the past may differ from the present.
Oh, please! You're just being silly now.
Your portrait of Lincoln as an abolitionist not very different from the more militant members of the movement is also worthy of comment. You don't want to be described as "pro-slavery," but you attack those in 19th century politics who weren't even modestly opposed to slavery or who weren't fully pro-slavery. The fellow who believes that eventually slavery should end some day and begins by restricting its territorial expansion is lumped in with those who favor direct action and immediate abolition.
Yeah, well, political parties tend to do that. The Republican Party did it on purpose -- it's called "base-broadening". Or will you deny that, too?
Perhaps having a conspiracy theory helps one to do that, but it looks like you deny anti-slavery Northerners any opportunity to stand their own ground,.....
No, I don't. Representative Clement Vallandigham didn't support slavery, but he tried to stand his own ground, and look where it got him.
.... and put any opposition to slavery or its expansion beyond the pale. If you actually were proslavery or "pro-slavery-as-it-existed-in-the-Southern-states-in-19th-century-America," how would your view be any different?
Another hyperventilating attempt to hang pro-slavery views on me? This is what, the fourth time we've been around on this? You trying to use Goebbels's technique of just repeating something over and over again?
Your question is keyed to a false premise. I don't support slavery, I've told you that, and you aren't tall enough or smart enough to put hateful words like that in my mouth. So flake off.
What I do put beyond the pale is instigating open war between sister American States and killing nearly a million citizens over a political difference. And I'll repeat that one as many times as you care to hear it.
Look here: Discussion of teleology.
In argument, I use it in the sense of Aristotelian or "internal" teleology, particularly with reference to discussants' introduction of efficient causes and final causes, the latter being an end state of "no slavery, the South defeated: 'it was inevitable, self-ordaining -- and good.'" That's teleological argumentation, and logically invalid, like so many of those stockbroker's bromides-for-all-occasions, or Irish bulls, whose real function is to persuade the customer that the customer's man knows what he is doing: "Always let your profits run" but "always leave the last 10% for the other guy".
I'm not arguing a "slippery slope", I'm arguing a million dead people.
You just don't see it, because you assume that the consequences that you deplore are implicit in your principles and the consequences that others would regret are somehow apart from the moral and legal principles at issue.
Cite and post where I said that.
I will admit, several orders' of ten worth of dead people are somehow implicit in my principles. Do you care, or is it just all part of the job?
That's something you might want to work on.
Yeah, right, I'll rush right out and do that.
It's the Pottery Barn rule -- the one Colin Powell cited to President Bush, remember? Are you saying it's invalid?
No, I see that it isn't "duplicitous". It's coherent and follows the form, "the Confederacy followed form in exercising their right to quit the Union in view of irreconcilable differences over policy, and in so doing a) did so in order to preserve the vision of the Founders, b) did so to forefend becoming vassalized, and c) did so in a manner foreseen by Jefferson as one possible outcome for the future of the country, one which he hoped would not occur but, if it did, like the other Framers would not have countenanced the use of violence to preserve the Union against the wishes of its citizens.
That is a straight-line progression of thought and not in the least "duplicitous". And who the hell are you to call me "duplicitous"? Making the other poster the issue, as you have just raped 40 quadrillion electrons doing in the last five or ten posts, is deceit in debate (wanna link?), so if you want to talk about deceit, we'll have to pull down and discuss some more of your posts.
If someone argues that the world is better off because the Union was preserved, you can call that, in your own way of speaking a "teleological" argument and hence an invalid one.
No, see above. If someone argues fortunate outcomes in respect of later events, they have a point. They can't say, however, that division of the Union in 1861 would have lead inevitably to a loss of the later good outcome. You can't say, for instance, that if the South had won the Civil War (as a long-ago magazine article did), that Soviet ICBM's would eventually have been stationed in Canada. Neither can one say that other desirable outcomes, like the overthrow of the Kaiser and the failure and death of Hitler, would have gone a-glimmering. Canada is a country independent of the United States, to offer an analogy, but their troops were present on D-Day along with the rest of the Anglo-American world's, the British Empire's and those of the Free French. Yet in arguing consequences, to say that the mayhem and destruction of the Civil War was a horrible outcome, a malum horrendum that Lincoln did much to bring to the country, and too little to avert, I am pointing to a concrete fact, and not a mere warning of unacceptable consequences, which is the fallacy.
Yet you habitually malign the Unionists because of what came afterwards, and your arguments are just as consequentialist as what you abhor.
No, they aren't, as I just explained. The consequences of the Civil War were, in fact, its consequences. They are not a phantasm or a debater's bugbear.
Now you can claim that you're in favor of the founders' vision, and that the consequentialist part of your argument grows out of that, but your opponents likewise consider that the founders' words and actions support their view of things.
So? We disagree, mostly thanks to Hamilton and Lincoln, who wanted an empire. Hamilton didn't get his, but Lincoln got his, because he was the first president able to command two million bayonets.
The founders foresaw all manner of problems that could assail the Republic, among them fragmentation and civil war, as well as tyranny. That's why the Framers of the Constitution were keen on union and not so wild about secession.
But at the same time, as I just said, they equally abhorred interstate violence and considered it beyond justification by raison d'etat. Lincoln's transgression was that he disagreed with them -- and took the country to war with its own.
They were keen on union because they were concerned lest the British come back and hang them all. They were afraid of foreign-power intervention and of their own lack of numbers and lack of strength.
If they'd been confronted with the situation in 1859 and 1860, can you be so confident they'd have said the same things you would like them to? Remember, Washington was a Virginian just like Robert E. Lee.
You take what's happened since 1860 as a proof that the founders believed in secession.
Where did I do that? Quote me, and let's discuss.
Others dispute your premise, and it doesn't look like you're in any position to brand others consequentialists or "might makes right" realists.
To you, maybe -- but then, you have a huge ego that imagines it overspreads the board with masterful insight and perspicuous Uebermensch cleverness. Yeah, well, don't let your hatband give you brain damage.
And I don't call the "might makes right" crowd "realists" -- I call them a lot of other things, but not that. Sadists, bullyboys, triumphalist thugs, whatever. The boot fits.
What you're trying to do is to claim for your arguments an immunity from the attacks you make on others --
Oh, is that what it is, when someone not named x defends himself?
......to argue that you alone stand on principle, ....
Ahhhh, you got me at last. I've always wanted secretly to confess, I've been standing instead on personal dishonesty, interpersonal nastiness, sadomasochism, B&D, -- oh, wait. That's our late straight-bottom horsie-fantasist. Sorry, wrong guy.
......and the others are simply arguing from convenience.
No, they're arguing from a mixture of motives, but mostly from wanting to preserve the national illusion about Lincoln and the Civil War, and to inculpate the South for the Civil War.
But that doesn't fit the actual discussion we're having. People disagree about what the founders intended and what the states could do and you can't simply assume that you have the key and damn opposing arguments as "teleology."
No, I don't do that, either, which you would know if you'd been paying attention instead of ego-tripping. I'm accusing Hamilton, Jay, Marshall, and Lincoln of historical revisionism w/ respect to the nature of the Union. Marshall was IIRC Lincoln's main source, at one remove (via a con-law author whose name I forget, who digested Marshall), for his totally wrongo theory of the Union with its preexistent self-ordination and so on. I've occasionally argued convenience in Northern and Unionist posters: the Lincolnian theory of the Union led to the Civil War, which worked for them, so long live the Lincolnian theory of the Union, and suckers walk the field.
You seem to think that I agree with your Kimberly Smith's ideas about emotionalism in argument.
And that's quite a switch, considering you brought her up in support of your views. I don't agree with her valuation. A colder, more rational style of argument is preferable. It's a mistake when countries get carried away by their emotions, and it leads to real trouble.
I agree, and I guess I really did misunderstand something you posted -- I thought you placed a positive value on Abolitionist brio. I disagreed with her positive valuation of political violence, which seemed to assume that outcomes would always be congenial to the national purposes as she construes them -- teleology again -- which she wouldn't do if she were a European, I think, or a Southerner.
Her value to me was in documenting the style and, frankly, the irresponsibility of what passed for Abolitionist discourse, which was so vitriolic, and deliberately so, that it eclipsed the Southern abolition societies. Who the hell did they think they were talking to? Their dog?
I don't think that publishing slave narratives, or pointing out a wrong, or calling for a change of heart is an "incitement to violence."
Depends how you do it. Publishing the slave narratives per se didn't contribute to the rupture, but praising John Brown and sending him money definitely did. With the slave narratives, one could argue representative sampling (which would probably show a vast majority of slaves preferring to be free, all else being equal or anywhere near it), and certainly Frederick Douglass colored his advocacy (which he later amended, after the war), but the argument wasn't the same thing as the propaganda, the latter being what led to war, IMHO.
Refresh my memory. Cite, please.
..... to hear you proclaim that you "argue for rational discourse."
Yup, even when we don't get it. You don't think I'm stupid enough to treat a weaselling post respectfully, or its perpetrator as an absent-minded but well-meaning interlocutor?
You want to believe that your own excesses.....
Show me one, don't just characterize.
...... are a matter of "style," rather than of "substance," but the two can be hard to separate.
I prefer a conversational style, but if someone is trying to be a pimp, I'll handle that, too.
How could I, after watching your performance now and in the past, be entirely condemnatory of abolitionists who may have used similar emotional arguments? How could anyone else looking on? How can you?
Look at the original posts, and see who is having us on. Ain't me.
Your idea seems to be that a permanent "gag rule" should have been imposed preventing discussion of whatever went against Southern interests
That is so silly, that now I know you're just backing up the truck.
.....but if someone really cared about slavery, how can one deny them the right to speak about it? You pile on the emotionalism freely and without constraint and expect your audience to condemn others for trying to raise a moral question that unavoidably touches the emotions.
When they're justifying a hecatomb of dead people, of course I'm going to pull the plugs out. That "ha-ha your Johnny Rebs died like flies" stuff deserves no quarter.
But it's not at all clear that you are right, and other observers will note that rational and emotional, materialistic and idealistic, principled and results-based arguments are used by both "sides" in the debate.
So? As long as we keep arguing original intent and people's rights, I've no worries about where we come out.
Your side persists in whitewashing Lincoln's rewriting the Constitution, in blood, according to his own lights. Or will you deny that he did just that? What will it take for your side to realize they're all still up to their eyes in an institutionalized Stockholm syndrome?
You want people to say that the secessionists, Confederates, and indeed, the proslavery faction, were right and justified in their actions,
Yes, they were.
..... even when judged by modern standards.
No! Man, will you guys keep the past in the past and the present in the present? There you go again, accusing us of being slavers-manque' and planter wannabe's. Get this: I don't know anyone who wants to own a slave. Okay? Those are the modern standards. People who are intent on projecting modern standards into the past in order to play "Blemish" are doing mischief.
That's what the modern left is doing -- bracketing modern Southerners who wouldn't own a slave if they had the chance with Southerners who did, for polemical (lying) effect. It's about politics today, not history, and yet the Straussians go on and on about defending Lincoln, when it was the Marxists who started the fight. I wish you Straussians would buy a clue!
-- and not even that if you don't extend similar empathy in the opposite direction.
I don't see a lot of "empathy" coming from your side.....lots of appeals to force, lots of appeals to other things. No matter.