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To: GOPcapitalist
No. Nobody else has heard of him either.

If you have to dredge up some obscure 100-years-dead abolitionist philosophe to cover up your own political boneheadedness ... but never mind.
91 posted on 09/01/2003 4:50:30 PM PDT by Ronly Bonly Jones
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To: Ronly Bonly Jones
No. Nobody else has heard of him either.

The willingness with which you persist in advertising your own ignorance never ceases to amaze and amuse me. Do a quick search on google or some other search engine for the name "Lysander Spooner." In addition to finding plenty of biographies and the sort on him you will get somewhere around 8 to 10 thousand hits. There aren't very many people named "Lysander Spooner" so you can be assured that practically all of them refer to him.

In the event that you are too lazy to complete even that task here is the pertinent information on him. In 1845 Lysander Spooner published a book entitled "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery." The book almost immediately revolutionized abolitionism in a new direction and between then and 1860 was one of the primary texts of the movement. Within 2 years it had been formally adopted into the platform of the abolitionist Liberty Party. Throughout the 1850's it was hotly debated on the floor of the US Congress. By 1852 Frederick Douglass had adopted its argument as the basis for his anti-slavery message and endorsed it in his famous "Fourth of July" speech.

In modern times Spooner is discussed in practically all the standard histories of abolitionism and appears in academic publications on political theory. You'll also probably see his name at least mentioned in the standard 8th grade US history classroom textbook under abolitionists. As another indicator of his role, a multi-volume set entitled the "Collected Works of Lysander Spooner" was published in the mid 1970's and may be found in practically any good research library (hint: you have to be pretty important or famous to get your collected works published. The only people they do this to are prominent polticians, authors, and philosophers).

That you do not know all of these facts about him is, I suppose, tolerable in the sense that not everybody knows the realm of philosophy inside and out. But that you have never even heard of his name until now is a tragedy of our education system and an indicator of your ignorance on both the civil war era and of American history in general.

Put differently, before you shoot your mouth off with accusations and attacks upon other persons (i.e. calling them fools, among other things) you should first make sure you know what you are talking about. By your own admission and demonstration it is clear that, at least as far as the civil war is concerned, you do not.

95 posted on 09/01/2003 5:57:52 PM PDT by GOPcapitalist
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To: Ronly Bonly Jones
I've heard of Spooner. He is an obscure 19th century American weirdo dredged up usually by hard core libertarians. These hard core libs overlap with revisionist neorebs--they share common hatreds (The USA, The Constitution, the rule of law) and common heroes (Jefferson, Calhoun, Henry). Therefore it is not surprising to find Spooner mentioned on this thread. If I recall correctly, Spooner was a radical Northeastern brahmin, the type of dude who would have made John Muir seem normal. For GOP Capitalist to quote him, it's like a conservative quoting Alan Deschowitz and saying "see, this is one of your guys, he's waaay out there and even he says such and such. Which is all well and good, except that you would have to know more about Spooner, and the historical context, to have any chance of properly interpreting the information. And since neorebs are no less prone than any other fringe group to mislead and publish things out of context, you simply can't know what you are looking at.
100 posted on 09/01/2003 7:31:04 PM PDT by Huck
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