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Why do you assume I am overlooking flaws in people associated with the Confederacy? Or for that matter, made Kings personal flaws (which we all have, anyway) the point?
On this general thread topic, I am talking ideologies and issues, not personal traits. For instance, as it is, while I certainly agree with Jefferson Davis and his political stances and visions, from everything I understand, he was not a very likeable fellow. LOL He took any disagreement personal, held useless grudges and let them get in the way of his military judgement, and had no sense of humor nor ability for amicable friendly conversation.
On the other hand, I very much disagree with Lincoln's outlook and consider him responsible for the war. However? It seems that in his personal life he was a guy with a great sense of humor and easy to shoot the s*hit with! I'd have probably rather had a pointless beer with him than Davis! LOL
See what I mean?
More on your other point later. It's lunch time and gotta get some work done! Y'all have a good one!
I'm focusing more on your disagreement with his political stances, but everyone has different priorities. I find slavery and racism more egregious than affirmative action which is not even universally seen as being a bad thing. I also know that individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution are more important than state's rights. A state does not have the right to violate someone's constitutional rights. It is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure states aren't violating constitutional rights.
The point of states having some form of autonomy is to prevent tyranny from the federal government, but the states in the past have been very tyrannical.
You're doing really good work. The Reb guy is a big SCV guy and self-acknowledged unreconstructed type guy. I will say he's one of the best at spouting this Southern/Texas revisionist stuff. Sadly, he teaches kids!
I'm focusing more on your disagreement with his political stances, but everyone has different priorities. I find slavery and racism more egregious than affirmative action which is not even universally seen as being a bad thing. I also know that individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution are more important than state's rights. A state does not have the right to violate someone's constitutional rights. It is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure states aren't violating constitutional rights.
The point of states having some form of autonomy is to prevent tyranny from the federal government, but the states in the past have been very tyrannical.
I absolutely agree with all of this! And I don't see that Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement led us into a "racial disaster" (what exactly is meant by that?). The continuing existance of a black underclass is attributable to many things, but not to the Civil Rights Movement or "what developed from it".
I sure was hoping you would show up sooner or later, stan. I am not suprised you did, cos you seem to just follow me around, but nonetheless, I am glad of it in this instance. For one thing, I must be doing something right because it irritates you to no end that another alternate opinion and viewpoint can exist. I hope I can multi-quote, because your rants, sans any facts at all, are not generally worth more than one post.
Which yes, translates into that you are not even a worthy opponent. You don't cite fact nor figures, you call names and rave. So here goes:
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Originally Posted by stan in san diego
You're doing really good work. The Reb guy is a big SCV guy and self-acknowledged unreconstructed type guy. I will say he's one of the best at spouting this Southern/Texas revisionist stuff. Sadly, he teaches kids!
I don't find it surprising that it disturbs you deeply to find that kids get the other side of the question. Your hatred of Southern history is well known, so it follows by extension you get hyper when it is presented. No problem, I undertand the mindset. Anyway, I don't teach "Civil War" history per se. In fact, in my class (which is special ed for behavior problem kids and those who need to catch up on credits to graduate...it seldom comes up).
You are right on one thing though. I AM unreconstructed...if by that one means I don't accept the northern version by rote and social osmosis.
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He always cites the North's involvement in attempts to minimize the South's role. I keep trying to find the Yankees who fired on Ft. Sumter.
LMAO (uh, this LMAO will come up quite a bit when clueless comments like this are presented). *AHEM* Try and follow carefully, if you are capable, stan: History is not an objective subject. It is biased by its very nature. Facts of history can be interpreted differently. Those seriously interested in the study of history know this. For instance as relates to the topic?:
If one believes that there was no right to secede (a position which in and of itself repudiates the basic principle of government by consent of the governed, which the country was founded on), then yes, the northern forces had every right to remain at Ft. Sumter. And that aggresive military action was justified in order to crush the South.
On the other hand, if once believes (as I do), that the Union was a voluntary compact between soveriegn states and that the overarching principle was that of government by consent of the governed? Then the Southern states had every right to peacefully withdraw from the said Union and form another nation more to their liking. It thus follows that they had every right to act in their own defense. Which further follows that the northerners were foriegn troops in Confederate territory and were subject to removal. Same as would have been British soldiers in Boston Harbor during the American Revolution after the colonies seceded (yep, seceded) and declared their own independence.
Hell, Lincoln himself later admitted he deliberately provoked the Confederacy into making a military move. Otherwise, northern public opinion would not approve of his planned invasion of the Lower South.
[/quote] Reb's main tactic is very selective quotes spun in quite an ingenuous way. He blames the whole thing on Northern slave ship owners, who apparently forced slavery on those poor, naive Southerners. [/quote]
This is truly funny. People bring up the evils of the South as if that is where it all began...and then scream "spin" or "no fair, no fair" when they are presented with concrete evidence that the slave trade itself was a purely northern commodity..and actually began on the American continent, in the North (Massachusetts), so it existed in the North before it did in the South. You make a big wave and then are suprised and can't deal with it when you get wet in turn. Funny.
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Lots of lies in there, Reb, as I've pointed out before. And it's not just different viewpoints of the same events either.
So point them out. You haven't pointed ANYTHING out. What are they (the lies)? To call them lies without providing evidence as to just why they are lies is just huffing and puffing. So go back and read the post in question (#28), and tell me what are the lies. That seems simple enough...
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I'm not one of your good guys and I generally don't respect your opinions on slavery, the War of Rebellion, etc., but no matter.
What the hell are you talking about? This (and much of that which follows) is what I mean by that your replies usually just come across and ranting and raving. What ARE my opinions on slavery? That I support it? This is not even worthy of a reply... geez.
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You're basically saying that King was courageous but led the U.S. into a racial disaster. This is a serious question. What would you have had him do differently? I worked in Dallas in 1968 and an older black man was annoyed by MLK's putting women and children out in front. He preferred Stokely Carmichael's confrontational approach. What should MLK and others done? Should economic boycott have been their main weapon? Or should they have just gone along with Plessy as some of the older folks were wont to do? We CAN have a serious discussion on this as there's lots of room for discussion.
This is another great example of what I mean by that it is impossible to carry on an intelligent and knowledgable discussion with you (and people like you).
Where in the HELL do you read that I said King should have done "something different"? That is just flat silly. On the contrary, I said I respected his approach to the problems of the time as he saw it. He organized people and organized boycotts of businesses which discriminated against blacks and eventually suceeded. He went about it in a perfectly proper and admirable way. So what is your problem with what I said?
What I DID say, and stand behind, is that his later support of federal involvement lead to some things that I believe caused some serious problems of their own. Such as forced busing, racial quotas, default assumptions of "discrimination" based on a failure of a business to hire some member of (this or that group) based on an arbitrary figure. I also asked the rhetorical question of whether or not King, had he lived, would have approved of what his initial efforts led to? I tend to think he would have, given his political persuasions. But maybe not. Regardless, it has nothing to do with that I think he was a brave man who took the right course initially.
Yes, there IS room for discussion. But first of all, you need to figure out how to do it.
TexasReb, I wonder if you don't accept the approach of trying to make academic historical studies a branch of social science? Obviously the retrospective nature of historical study makes it impossible to apply all of the methods of social sciences or to apply them fully/in the same way as is the case in the study of contemporary social phenomena, but history can't be merely a matter of subjective interpretation, surely. A post-modernist approach acknowledges, of course, that the observer can't be removed from the phenomenon under examination, so observer biases of various kinds do enter in, even with efforts to correct for these, i.e. corrective attempts may themselves involve another source of bias. Yet one has to make the effort to examine history with some effort at social and contextual analysis, else it just becomes ideology and personal preference.
As regards Northern complicity in the slave trade, we really need to realise that it was the British/British-American colonials who started the slave trade in the American context. The Constitution of 1786 abolished the foreign slave trade (not to say that some didn't continue illegally). States in which slavery was abolished represented a majority opinion opposed to slavery, but that obviously wouldn't mean that there weren't persons in those states willing to profit from the practice of human bondage.
Responding to something said earlier, I want to point out that abolitionists weren't all financially comfortable people. Here in Delaware many abolitionists were religiously motivated Quakers, some of whom suffered the punishment of the courts for their activities in the underground railroad, even to the extent of being left bankrupt as a result of court judgements.
This is all starting to get waaaaayyyyyy off topic, but...
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Originally Posted by L210
I'm focusing more on your disagreement with his political stances, but everyone has different priorities.
That is fine...but that is not the way you initially presented it. You approached from the aspect of character flaws, which had nothing to do with the original question.
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I find slavery and racism more egregious than affirmative action which is not even universally seen as being a bad thing.
In this day and age, who wouldn't consider slavery much worse than affirmative action? But did you ever think that the existence of affirmative action is responsible for at least some racial disharmony today? It can also be argued that the welfare state which stemmed from the feds taking advantage of the civil rights movement has lead to a new form of slavery.
So far as "racism" goes, as a concept, it is almost a seperate issue. That is to say, it is no longer a matter of common sense (i.e. hatred of a person based solely on skin color), but one that had become an Alice-in-Wonderland type thing, ala Humpty Dumpty. That is to say, it is increasingly used as a roadblock to rational discussion and can mean anything the user wants it to mean.
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I also know that individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution are more important than state's rights. A state does not have the right to violate someone's constitutional rights. It is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure states aren't violating constitutional rights.
This all makes a great sound byte...but is (with all due respect) a bit abbreviated. The 9th and 10th Ammendments of the Bill of Rights are considered the "States Rights" ammendments, and they speak of both state and individual rights. And the purpose was to protect bothfrom federal tyranny.
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The point of states having some form of autonomy is to prevent tyranny from the federal government, but the states in the past have been very tyrannical.
No, the point of the states having autonomy is that they were the basis of the federal government to begin with. They created the federal government, and the reason was the practical realization that, alone, none were strong enough to compete with the powers of Europe. So, they formed a Union (often called a Confederacy) which delegated only limited and specific powers to the said central government.
Any government, if out of control will by nature become tyrannical. The best way to solve and allieviate these issues is to be settled at the most local level possible. Sure, one might argue that those "problems" were NOT settled at the local level within a certain subjective time-frame. Ok, fair enough. But I challenge anybody to provide an instance where federal involvment in "solving" the problem did not involve hypocricy, a new power-hungry bureacrcy, and additional problems of its own.
If each state had control of monetary policy instead of the federal government you can be sure that most, if not all of them, would exhibit the same difficulties the federal government has. Ditto control of the military. The states may merely appear more competent in some respects than the federal government because the states simply don't have the same responsibilities under the Constitution. What is true, however, is that state governments are full of some of the most incompetent and stupid legislators, governors and government officials that anyone could possibly dream up.
I absolutely agree with all of this! And I don't see that Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement led us into a "racial disaster" (what exactly is meant by that?). The continuing existance of a black underclass is attributable to many things, but not to the Civil Rights Movement or "what developed from it".
As we have agree before, DocJ, lots of topics and issues such as this are going to be dependent upon an underlying vision. And often those underlying visions will be so at odds with one another that the two parties indeed do, in many ways, talk past each other. They will not see the same reasons for the same problems, much less agree on solutions, because they do not even see the concepts of "problems" and "solutions" in the same light! LOL
This is a topic unto itself (and I will present it at a later date, or DM you on it, as we do occasionally), but it is not surprising (and I hope it goes without saying that no offence is meant) that you would not believe that some of what has transpired from the original Civil Rights movement would be a negative in terms of race relations and results. Such only makes sense from your vision...which I respect.
Here is a good article (and associated book that I have on order, by black conservative Thomas Sowell) that gives a much better analysis of all this as relates specifically to the CRM, than I can possibly do (at least for the moment! LOL).
Capitalism Magazine - Thomas Sowell's Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality (http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/racism/353-thomas-sowell-s-civil-rights-rhetoric-or-reality.html - broken link)
The prescription of affirmative action, largely unnecessary, has only alienated the vast white majority and did nothing to close the quality-of-life gap between whites and blacks (crime, drug use, single-parent families, etc.) On the other hand, it has certainly fattened the wallets and enhanced the profiles of public figures who make a healthy living denouncing the alleged "racism" of American institutions, bullying private corporations, and winning elections. Most Americans -- white, black, Asian, and Hispanic -- suspect that these activists are wrong. Sowell's book proves this.
Better get back to work and feed the kids here! LOL Later, y'all!
TexasReb, since the supremacy clause of the US Constitution clearly makes state laws subordinate to federal law in the case of any conflict between the two, how is it that you reckon a state could withdraw unilaterally from the jurisdiction of the United States? Isn't secession just nullification - clearly unconstitutional, i.e. illegal - taken to its logical extreme? Moreover, six out of the eleven seceding states were created from federally owned territory subsequent to the original inception of the United States, so were always creatures of a pre-existant United States of America. The issue of secession is clearly one of legality, not one of philosophy; you resort repeatedly to the Lockean political philosophy stated in the Declaration of Independence, but that's not the document that is pertinent from a legal standpoint in regard to secession. Indeed, its pertinence is only tangential, in terms of being material evidence that the United States of America was, in fact, pre-existant to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, under the government of the Second Continental Congress even before it drafted the AoC. You refer to a bit of the preamble to the Declaration, but that's no legal basis; it's simply political philosophy setting a predicate for the reasons subsequently given in the document for asserting independence from the Crown-in-Parliament. The sole legal effect of the Declaration is to solemnly declare independence from Great Britain (the Three Lower Counties-upon-Delaware had already separated themselves both from the Pennsylvania executive and the British crown on June 15, 1776 by the way).
So besides the AoC having already established that the duration of the Union is perpetual, the supremacy clause of the Constitution makes it a logical and legal impossibility for a state to unilaterally withdraw from the United States. The reserved powers of the several states and people don't apply in this instance because the Constitution already enumerates the supremacy of the laws of the United States, the Constitution itself being the first and most fundamental of these.
Do you think the Founding Fathers would have willingly and knowingly created a country where absolutely noone in the future could break free of tyranny exactly like the Founding Fathers did.It seems to me that the Founding Fathers would not have forbidden what they done and risked life and limb for.
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I am not suprised you did, cos you seem to just follow me around, but nonetheless, I am glad of it in this instance. For one thing, I must be doing something right because it irritates you to no end that another alternate opinion and viewpoint can exist. I hope I can multi-quote, because your rants, sans any facts at all, are not generally worth more than one post. 
