Obvious troll is obvious.
Posted on 10/14/2007 7:14:10 AM PDT by proudofthesouth
I'm curious as to what FReepers have to say on this topic. Did our (America) go downhill with the start of Abraham Lincoln being elected and the South loosing the Civil War?
Perhaps so, but pertinent to the discussion here, it was Arabs who rounded up Africans (with the help of other Africans) and sold them to the English and Dutch as slaves.
Accepting that the African slave trade contributed to the demise of the Republic as it was originally intended, then it follows that the very people who would destroy us now set us on the course that made it possible for the likes of FDR, LBJ, WJC and HRC to ascend to power.
It is further very ironic to me that the descendants of those slaves would now embrace Islam, the very culture that enslaved them in the first place!
Anyway, a fun and lively discussion with no end in sight.
What?
If the South had not lost there would be no America.
Get it?
For now. My point was that the continuing usurpation of power in DC is moving post haste to eliminate that liberty and I would say, having been there, that we enjoy considerably less freedom now than we did in the 50's!
That is true. The only problem being that he shredded the Constitution in order to do so.
Absolutely true!
Were these men who had just recently freed themselves from an all powerful central government going to turn around and create a new central government with the power to determine for itself the limits of it's power?
I think not!
Well, I wasn’t there in the ‘50s, but I’m inclined to doubt it. Perhaps it’s my Gen X view, but the 50’s strike me as a rigid highly controled era. Everything from comic books to movies was tightly controled by governmental agencies.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Women were not chattel during the age of chivalry. That's just Gloria Steinem-type feminist propaganda. It's been repeated so often over the past forty years that people now believe it.
You may be correct that non-artistocratic women of the time saw little of the chivalry common to the higher classes, but that's because their men weren't exactly in a position to offer it. Those men were poor and had to spend all day plowing the fields, fighting in wars, and doing other unpleasant tasks.
We never think about that, of course, and the reason we don't think about it is because men generally care more about women as a group than vice-versa. There's probably a biological reason for that: Because women give birth, an individual woman's life is more important than an individual man's life. Because of that, both men and women tend to think in terms of women's interests. In a political sense, men don't have any unique interests that are contrary to those of women.
This is why "women's issues" become very important when women have the vote, while no one even conceives of the idea that men have any particular gender-based interests, let alone panders to them. Go to any big ticket college in America and you'll find no shortage of feminist professors howling that women were "chattel" and whining that women have been historically expected to do most of the housework, child rearing, and cooking. But try as you might you won't find men whining that for the past several thousand years they had to go off to fight wars (while women didn't), or had to plow fields (while women didn't), or had to lug massive stones up the sides of pyramids (while women didn't), etcetera.
Men simply take their obligations in stride. We'd laugh at a group of men who began demanding that the government take their unique gender interests seriously, but women are praised for making precisely such demands. Not every woman behaves that way, but enough do that it skews politics sharply leftward when they get the vote.
Think of it this way: Women on average live a few years longer than men. That's one of those little factoids we all are aware of, and men simply accept it. I'm perfectly happy if the ladies live longer than I do. But imagine if the reverse were true and men lived, let's say, five years and eight months longer on average than women. We'd never hear the end of it. The term "life expectancy gap" would be emblazoned into our political lexicon as surely as terms like "wage gap" and "gender gap". Congress would be spending gadzillions of dollars on research to try to close the gap. Every little problem that bothers women more than men would be blamed for the gap. Feminists and Democrat politicians would walk around wearing buttons with the phrase "five years, eight months" printed on them to constantly remind everyone in the universe of this horror that afflicts women.
This all stems from the fact that men desire to protect women and children, while women desire to protect themselves and children. That's a natural and good thing, but it becomes distorted when the state replaces men as the natural provider and protector for women (and children). And, while the final results are admittedly still outstanding, it looks as if giving women the vote results in women making an unending series of demands on the state that will ultimately lead to totalitarianism.
Men have obligations that women simply do not and should not have. It's our obligation to defend the country during wartime, for example. Giving women the vote is a problematic issue because it diverts attention from our obligations, which are necessary for society's long term survival, toward goodies that are beneficial to women in the short term. This is why countries such as Sweden, which are obsessed with political equality between the sexes, become passive nanny states unable to even think about defending themselves. Wars are yucky and ugly and violent, and they kill women and children sometimes. So they're dangerous and we should stop fighting them and spend the defense budget instead on....you guessed it.... women and children. That's the rationale that begins to form. And over time men start shirking their responsibilities to women and children. After all, women and children are being taken care of by the state, so what good are women to them anymore, other than as sexual playthings? The concept of family begins to die.
? What do you mean?
Nope. The life of the common woman of the time was to go from her father's house to her husband's house. At no time did she have any great say in her own affairs. Chattel is a very accurate word for this type of arrangment.
You may be correct that non-artistocratic women of the time saw little of the chivalry common to the higher classes, but that's because their men weren't exactly in a position to offer it. Those men were poor and had to spend all day plowing the fields, fighting in wars, and doing other unpleasant tasks
Absolutely correct. However my point remains. We get our overly romantic view of the age from the depictions of the life of the aristocracy. The knight and his lady were as far removed from the common tennent farmer as Donald Trump and his $42m ballroom is to me.
We never think about that, of course, and the reason we don't think about it is because men generally care more about women as a group than vice-versa.
I'm not sure that I buy that at all. However, not being a woman, I can't say for certain how much women care about the welfare of men.
This all stems from the fact that men desire to protect women and children, while women desire to protect themselves and children.
Now I'm sure I'm not buying it. My wife is fiercely protective, of me especially. I don't believe that is uncommon.
So if there's an intruder in your house, you and your wife will flip a coin to decide which of you goes to confront him?
Name a female politician who has made a name for herself by promoting "men's issues".
Of course I'm going to confront him. However, chances are poor that she'd remain in the bedroom hoping I'd be ok. That's just not the way she operates. She'd have my back the whole way.
Name a female politician who has made a name for herself by promoting "men's issues".
There are no men's issues. Truth to tell, there are no women's issues anymore. It's an anachronism from a time where there were genuine equality issues.
In what way?
Actually the War of Southern Rebellion WAS about slavery. The Southern states seceded because of what they saw as a threat to their institution of slavery. They initiated the war by bombarding Sumter. And they lost. That's it in a nutshell, and I don't understand why so many Southerners have a problem grasping that.
Two questions. If the South was paying 80 percent of the tariff then once they seceded it should stand to reason that U.S. tariff revenue should have dried up to nothing, or at least only 20% of the pre-rebellion total of $50 million or so. Wouldn't you agree? Yet within 3 years Lincoln was reporting tariff revenues of over $100 million in his annual message to Congress, or more than 10 times what you say the North contributed in 1860. How was that possible? How could the Union, in time of war, increase tariff income by a factor of 10 without Southern exports to pay the bills? Can you explain that?
Second question. If most of the revenue was being spent in the North can you detail what that revenue was being spent on and how much of it, in round dollars, we're talking about?
You will have to take up your question with the person who made the claim. Based on the two sources I cited, plus the other material I have read, whatever the exact amount, the tariff was high enough to be considered an outrage.
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Second question. If most of the revenue was being spent in the North can you detail what that revenue was being spent on...
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It has been my experience that when people attempt to refute something by demanding details that nobody can provide (or at least cannot provide without a lot of work for which they will not be reimbursed), they are not really interested in the answer even if it were eventually available.
“We are going to make tax slaves out of you,” Lincoln was effectively saying, “and if you resist, there will be an invasion.”
Exactly how was Lincoln going to collect taxes on states that had already left the Union? Why was the south threatened by laws passed by a government they no longer claimed to owe allegiance to?
At the time, Taussig says, the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80 percent of the tariff, while complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North. The South was being plundered by the tax system and wanted no more of it.
You are absolutely correct that this was a common belief in the South at the time, but a belief being popular does not necessarily make it true.
The opinion arose because of a confusion between the concepts of revenues from import tariffs and of balance of trade. The USA's #1 export was cotton, and so the South believed that since the export of cotton "paid for" the imports that were being taxed, they wre themselves paying all the import tariffs. In actual fact, a southern plantation owner who purchased a machine paid no more taxation on it than an Iowa farmer did.
The great majority of northerners were still farmers, as were southerners, so if agriculture was being looted, northern farmers were being looted every bit as much. While the North had much more business and industry than the South, the fact that his neighbors made money be screwing over agriculture could have been little consolation to a northern farmer.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E06EEDD1338EE3BBC4F52DFB766838A679FDE&oref=slogin
The belief that the North was exploiting the South was aggravated by the fact the southern plantation owners were just about always in debt. However, this was generally due to the uncertainties of any economic system that produces almost exclusively raw products. Such markets have wild price swings. In addition, southern plantations were generally poorly run from a management and economy standpoint. It was beneath the dignity of a southern gentleman to "pinch pennies."
You are aware, I hope, that the entire federal budget of 1860 was $60M? Assuming the South was indeed "paying 80%," which is ludicrous, then per capita southern cost was about$4.25.
Since the entire "overhead cost" of a government, postal system and military would be born by the southern states, it is silly to think that the South could have financed its own government for less than it contributed to the US government, even without war. In 1860 both northerners and southerners were among the lowest taxed peoples in history, something between 1 and 2% of GDP, if I remember correctly.
You do realize that your "tariffs as the cause of the war" means that the South started a war that killed 640,000 men over a remarkably small amount of money? Somehow that seems worse to me than fighting to defend their way of life.
Nice thought, but not true. While some of the slaves who reached the European stations on the Guinea Coast may originally have been enslaved by Arab Muslims, they were with rare exceptions not sold to Europeans by Muslims, as rich, powerful pagan black middleman kingdoms controlled the coast and kept the Arabs and Muslims in the Sahara and Sahel away from the Europeans in their ships.
Until the mid 19th century incredible death rates from tropical diseases kept Europeans and to a lesser extent Arabs from being able to penetrate into these areas.
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