Enjoy surprising people with arcane snippets from various sources.
Some decades ago there was a book published entitled, How to Lie with Statistics, presently, no doubt, someone will publish another book entitled How to Lie with Snippets
Posted on 06/04/2011 12:34:35 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As the season of presidential politics 2012 unfolds, I’m struck by similarities between today and the tumultuous period in our history that led up to the election of Abraham Lincoln and then on to the Civil War.
So much so that I’m finding it a little eerie that this year we are observing the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War.
No, I am certainly not predicting, God forbid, that today’s divisions and tensions will lead to brother taking up arms against brother.
But profound differences divide us today, as was the case in the 1850′s.
The difference in presidential approval rates between Democrats and Republicans over the course of the Obama presidency and the last few years of the Bush presidency has been in the neighborhood of 70 points. This is the most polarized the nation has been in modern times.
This deep division is driven, as was the case in the 1850′s, by fundamental differences in world-view regarding what this country is about.
Then, of course, the question was can a country “conceived in liberty’, in Lincoln’s words, tolerate slavery.
Today the question is can a country “conceived in liberty” tolerate almost half its economy consumed by government, its citizens increasingly submitting to the dictates of bureaucrats, and wanton destruction of its unborn children.
We wrestle today, as they did then, with the basic question of what defines a free society.
It’s common to hear that “democracy” is synonymous with freedom. We also commonly hear that questions regarding economic growth are separate and apart from issues tied to morality — so called “social issues.”
But Stephen Douglas, who famously debated Abraham Lincoln in 1858, argued both these points. In championing the idea of “popular sovereignty” and the Kansas Nebraska Act, he argued that it made sense for new states to determine by popular vote whether they would permit slavery.
By so doing, argued Douglas, the question of slavery would submit to what he saw as the core American institution — democracy — and, by handling the issue in this fashion, slavery could be removed as an impediment to growth of the union.
Lincoln rejected submitting slavery to the vote, arguing that there are first and inviolable principles of right and wrong on which this nation stands and which cannot be separated from any issue, including considerations of growth and expansion.
The years of the 1850′s saw the demise of a major political party — the Whigs — and the birth of another — the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party, in the election of 1860, splintered into two.
In a Gallup poll of several weeks ago, 52 percent said that neither political party adequately represents the American people and that we need a third party. Of the 52 percent, 68 percent were Independents, 52 percent Republicans, and 33 percent Democrats.
So it’s not surprising that the field of Republicans emerging as possible presidential candidates is wide, diverse, and unconventional.
But another lesson to be learned from 1860 is that conventional wisdom of establishment pundits is not necessarily reliable.
These pundits will explain why the more unconventional stated and potential candidates in the Republican field — Cain, Palin, or Bachmann — don’t have a chance and why we should expect Romney, Pawlenty, or Huntsman.
But going into the Republican Convention in Chicago in 1860, the expected candidate to grab the nomination was former governor and Senator from New York, William H. Seward.
But emerging victorious on the third ballot at the convention was a gangly country lawyer, whose only previous experience in national office was one term in the US congress, to which he was elected fourteen years earlier.
A year or two earlier, no one, except Abraham Lincoln himself, would have expected that he would become president of the United States.
Good comment. You might also have mentioned that one motivation Lincoln had for the emancipation proclamation was to keep Britain from recognizing the Confederate States as a sovereign nation. The British public was very anti-slavery.
Here you are wrong and are letting your own petty provincialism color your otherwise factual assessments.
The planter aristocracy initiated hostilities. The "rabble" as you put it only involved themselves after northern states raised armies and, in their perception, invaded and threatened their homes and families.
I know both sides very well, planters and "rabble," have them both in my ancestry. You have it precisely backwards. Maybe you merely intended to slur all southerners or something, if so, ho-hum, nothing new or original there.
I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt. At least you know the Emancipation Proclamation was a military document intended to raise a slave rebellion in Confederate states only, as it did not deign to free them elsewhere.
"Availability cascading" = ?
The author is a she...
For now, we can only ride out the usual storms, the systemic excursions, and trust that the feedback within the system will yield a positive outcome for its participants, letting a bottoms up approach stabilize and restore apparently errant gross moves, a necessary condition of any system that endures long term.
The rabble I refer to are the stinking southern aristocracy, not the poor folk who were the cannon fodder that they employed to try and defend their evil empire. Apparently the leaders were people without a conscience, without a sense of justice that would admit them as Americans supporting of the founding documents, traitors. All should have been hung, along with their spoiled families, and except for the God fearing graciousness of the northerners and in particular, Lincoln, would have been.
Man one particularly vile one here...never seen out before..calling for hanging southern slave owners and their kids
Guess they coulda started with at least half the founders...
Strange bedfellows we have on this site...there is no more common ground with them than with rabid leftists
Wadda ya think, buddy, holding other people as chattel is decent, honorable, tolerable? Goof.
Oh, yeah - and killing lots of Americans to defend this vile practice is good. You go, friend.
I think the Civil War was a complicated affair that I wish could have been avoided and that has blame to bear on both sides.
I think you however are a wolf ticket selling rude jerk of a Yankee who sees the whole tragic affair through the prism of race for personal reasons.
And that in addition to be being a bloviate unable to communicate sans preening hyperbole that you are a perfect example of precisely why my ancestors fought and fought valiently....not so much slavery but because such boorish self righteousness will never be tolerated by decent folks for long
I would take a Christian well mannered slaveowning gentleman over such a arse as one who talks trash with the hypocritical hubris you exhibit here
In other words..you are a well deserved stereotype
Would you consider people living in the former USSR slaves? Your definition surely fits them.
this nation would not be half what it is without the very contributions of all those folks you wish to have had mass murdered...women and children to...
if there were any Southern mods...and I doubt there are...your ridiculous and inflammatory musings would be stricken...but south bashing to the point of antiwhite bigotry even by proven lefties has always been more tolerated here more than I would were the headquarters in Franklin TN instead of Fresno
you write like an academician but you have demonstrated you have no credibility in reasonable discourse amongst reasonable folks..hoss
you can have last word...I know you have to
There’s a long history of conflict between coastal planter aristocracy and inland/upland yeoman farmers in the south, GregoryFul. Please don’t tell me you’re susceptible to that wholly manufactured but oddly hypnotic “slave power” nonsense that has been de rigeur in university for decades. They distrusted, even hated one another, going back to the earliest colonial times.
They wouldn’t have fallen in with one another to become “cannon fodder” as you put it, without external provocation. The dumb country bumpkin stereotype, whether employed to disparage or in a wrongheaded attempt at giving a pass, is still offensive and wrong. Those who fought, fought with honor in the sincere belief that they were defending their homes, families and States (yes, capital “S”). Those who could not get past historic animus attempted to secede from the secessionists themselves, and in the instance of West Virginia, succeeded in so doing.
It was a different time, and projecting modern sensibilities upon people dead over a century ago is going to always lead you to bizarre conclusions. Human bondage, offensive as it is to those same modern sensibilities, has been part of practically every culture on every continent for practically all of world history. Our day and age has the luxury of being free of it, despite the worst efforts of all involved back then.
It remains a rarity in the grand scheme of things, though, freedom from bondage does, and that appears to be the source of your mistaken assumptions and unfortunate biases, that human bondage has always been viewed as a hideous wrong. It hasn’t been. There are large swathes of the world today that have it.
Does that make it “right?” Not to us it doesn’t, but the applicability does seem to find an end at that point.
Nobody has ever claimed America is a "direct democracy where all 350 million people get a vote on everything". We claim America has democracy. Democracy is simply a Greek word that means "people rule". That's true in America, we the people are the ultimate source of authority and the politicians run things with the consent of the governed. America is an indirect democracy where the people rule by electing representative government. Always has been, always will be. Saying we have a form of democracy does not imply the people have absolute power, no more than saying England has a monarchy means they're saying it's an absolute monarchy where the Queen can do WHATEVER she wants. Simply having democracy by itself doesn't "cause" mob rule anymore than having a monarch by itself guarantees the King can be a tyrant and behead people at random. England in a monarchy, it's not an absolute democracy. If you claimed "England is a kingdom, NOT a monarchy" you'd be wrong.
The freepers who insist America is simply "a Republic, NOT a democracy" don't know what they're talking about. We have democracy in America, it's just not absolute. If the founders intended us to simply be "a Republic" with NO democracy, they would have set up the type of government they have in North Korea.
Enjoy surprising people with arcane snippets from various sources.
Some decades ago there was a book published entitled, How to Lie with Statistics, presently, no doubt, someone will publish another book entitled How to Lie with Snippets
Enjoy surprising people with arcane snippets from various sources.
Some decades ago there was a book published entitled, How to Lie with Statistics, presently, no doubt, someone will publish another book entitled How to Lie with Snippets
"Predictions are hard especially about the future."
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