Posted on 08/29/2004 6:17:59 PM PDT by Hank Kerchief
Yes, that's the point. We are *now* more free because we can legally buy, sell, own, and trade gold today compared to all of the above being illegal 70 years ago.
That's the point of debate: that we are more free today than back then. Gold being illegal back then but legal today is a specific case in point of that fact.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
So aren't they more free today?!
You keep trying to claim that we are less free today than back then. I don't see your case. Blacks won't agree with you (see above). Women won't agree with you, either.
People who drink alcohol won't agree with you. Gun owners won't agree with you. People who own gold won't agree with you. People who use the Internet won't agree with you, either. You couldn't even legally trade stocks over the Internet as recently as 10 years ago.
So we are *clearly* more free today than then.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
And now Blacks vote nationwide.
Ergo, we are now more free than back when Blacks only voted in pockets of the country.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
The point is that we are *more* free today than back then.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
...And now they don't. Ergo, we are now more free than back when Blacks couldn't attend the University of Alabama (with Democratic Governor Wallace standing in the doorway to stop them).
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
Now that point I'll grant you!
However, we are more free today than we were living under the BS laws of the 1930's on. We've repealed substantial infringements upon our liberty, especially for Blacks and women.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
ROFL!
B4Ranch chided me over this one. One person did get it right though.
No, it was specifically Constitutional because we passed an Amendment to our Constitution to ban alcohol.
Circular argument. There is no delegated power in our Constitution, -- to any level of our governments, -- to allow such infringements on our rights to life, liberty, or property.
The prohibitionists simply declared that a majority could so 'rule', and the courts went along with the charade of an amendment that was repugnant to one of the basic principles of our Constitution.
Moreover, not only did you get the Constitutional aspect wrong, but you missed the point that we are *more* free today than back then when alcohol was banned.
That's not a 'point', its your very odd opinion. The america of 1918 was a very free republic, -- for most of its citizens. Anyone that reads even grade school history of the era can tell you that.
That's the point of debate: that we are more free today than back then. Alcohol being illegal back then but legal today is a specific case in point of that fact.
Booze prohibition was a stake in the heart of the Republic. -- Why are you defending its ~repeal~ as a great blow for liberty?
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires.
Another great blow for liberty. Expiration of an infringement.
-- Mind boggling myopia.
We've repealed substantial infringements upon our liberty, especially for Blacks and women.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, holding those thousands of unrepealed 'laws' infringing on all the rest of our liberties, hack..
That's incorrect at *every* level. Women, 51% (that's more than half for the mathematically challenged among us) of our population in 1918, were *denied* the right to vote in America.
Women didn't win the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920.
Readers of gradeschool history of that era can confirm the same, contrary to your bizarre assertation.
Blacks and women were hardly "more free" in 1918 as you claim.
We are all more free today than back then, as example after example that I keep citing confirms.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
That's sheer denial, and it's entirely in error. Passing an Amendment to the Constitution is *entirely* Constitutional.
Your arguments to the contrary are silly, at best.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
I'm defending nothing. What I'm doing is correctly pointing out that we are *MORE FREE* today with alcohol once again legal than back in the 1920's when it was illegal.
Once again, we are *MORE FREE* today than back then.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
It beats the alternative (i.e. no expiration) and it further confirms my point that we are more free *after* the AWB expires than when it was law.
More free today than back then; a recurring point that I seem to need to keep making to you with tangible example after example...
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
That's absurd. The point that I'm making is that we are *more* free today than back then. Women voting. Blacks voting. CCW. Legal alcohol. Desegregation. Owning gold. Using the Internet for profit.
The point that I'm *not* making is your straw man above, that somehow we are totally free.
Is this difference so difficult to comprehend? The difference between being *more* free from that of being completely free?
We are more free today than back when women and Blacks couldn't vote or compete for the job of their choice (especially in the military). There was a time when Separate but "Equal" tried to rule our land, complete with shoddy schools for Blacks and distinct baseball leagues for pros of various ethnicity.
That's gone. Ergo, we are *more* free today than back then.
There is a theme here. I will continue to pound upon this theme until it becomes obvious to you (usually identified by name-calling or flight from the thread for contrived "reasons").
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
"Stop the lies about slavery with researched facts!" Read them slowly so you will fully understand the media hype we have endured!
My close Black friends were very interested in these truths because they could now tell the truth to their friends using facts to back them up about just how incorrect the media hype has been. These men aren't saviors of the NAACP permanent victim policy. They have killed a lot myths in their own families with these items much to the disappointed of some in their local communities.
Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219
Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners.
-"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90
Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378
"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'
Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html
I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.
Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.
Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:
"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.
"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.
"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.
"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html
Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html
"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson
There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.
Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.
Richard Rollins
After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.
That's a bit off topic.
Nonetheless, we are all *more* free without slavery today than back then when we had it.
Such a concept is supposed to be axiomatic; that I have to continually explain it makes me further question our educational system.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
Dream on hack.
The only "tangible examples' you've made, -- make my point. Our Constitution is constantly being violated..
Once in a while we repeal a violation. -- 'Big deal', as our basic freedoms slip away at an ever increasing pace.
We had no federal gun laws at ALL, before 1933. This is a fact you cannot deny.
Now we have thousands. You are cheering that one set of them is expiring. -- Get a grip.
The point that I'm *not* making is your straw man above, that somehow we are totally free.
I said we were 'totally free', just above? How weird. You're dreaming.
Is this difference so difficult to comprehend? The difference between being *more* free from that of being completely free?
We were completly free of federal gun laws prior to 1933. True? We arent any more. True? -- Ergo, we are not "more" free in our RKBA's. -- Correct?
We are more free today than back when women and Blacks couldn't vote or compete for the job of their choice (especially in the military). There was a time when Separate but "Equal" tried to rule our land, complete with shoddy schools for Blacks and distinct baseball leagues for pros of various ethnicity. That's gone. Ergo, we are *more* free today than back then.
Nope, not in the overall view. Some of our basic rights are being regulated to death. -- IE, our RKBA's.
There is a theme here. I will continue to pound upon this theme until it becomes obvious to you (usually identified by name-calling or flight from the thread for contrived "reasons").
Please continue. It's amusing to see you are arguing against your own best interest.
>>That's a bit off topic.<<
Since when are facts off topic? We have been discussing the freedoms that Blacks have gained. Is it upsetting to you that many slave owners were Black themselves or that the numbers were not as great as the media hyped?
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