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		150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War ( theatlantic.com)		337
		More: Interesting, evangelical christianity, American wars, Battle of Gettysburg, Union Army, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, Na Tuk Kong, Drew Gilpin Faust

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Millennium

2013-06-20 02:30:58 PM

Uncontrolled_Jibe: The Civil War as it happened was anything but the only or best course.

I'll agree that it wasn't the only course. But whether or not it was the "best" course depends on what the goal was. Nowadays, we say that the war was fought to free the slaves from the evil rebellion. There are two goals implicit in that statement, and war was most certainly the best way to accomplish them both, at once, that quickly.

Did the North require a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" to correct the near slavery conditions existing then?

Marx himself thought that the US might be able to avoid the bloody revolutions and such that he otherwise considered inevitable, because it had never experienced feudalism.

Would you say that Apple only derives "some" benefit from having FoxConn use Chinese labor to produce their merchandise?

Not as much as FoxConn itself does.

htomc

2013-06-20 02:32:53 PM

scumshine:
/yes, I went there
//wrote a historiography a few years ago comparing German WWI and WWII memorials to Confederate monuments
///guess which group's monuments did more to convey a sense of regret and loss

Ever been to Vicksburg? The monuments erected there by the North are stunning. The South's are paltry in comparison. Same at Shiloh. I'm not sure why, the South lacked the money and organisational talent to have some decent monuments placed there? Too distracted by other pressing issues?

Go to Charleston and take the ferry to Fort Sumter sometime. There is a large monument in front of Battery Huger listing every single Union officer and soldier, including musicians, who withstood about 2 days of bombardment before surrendering the fort, and leaving on Union vessels. There are absolutely no monuments whatsoever for the Confederates who successfully held the fort from 1863 until the end of the war, despite the fort being reduced to a mound of rubble.

chuggernaught

2013-06-20 02:33:15 PM

StaleCoffee: Madbassist1: IdBeCrazyIf: badhatharry: You're right. Just trying to clear up a misconception. Many slaves stayed on to work the same plantations where they were slaves. Granted it is difficult to just pick up and leave without anything, but if slavery was the way Hollywood portrays it that would not be the case.

[img.fark.net image 500x375]

Why? Because it's the truth? What the fark is wrong with you people?

The good or bad treatment of slaves was entirely on the slave owner. I'm sure some of those folks at the very least were not cruel and evil people as depicted and were raised in an environment they were taught to be normal, but treated slaves with a modicum of respect or decency as best fit that culture. Some might have treated their slaves well simply because you get better work from a healthy worker. In some situations it would be more appealing to stay on as paid labor than it would be to strike out into a territory where the law still worked against you because of your skin color and you were more likely to be beaten or killed because you weren't even viewed as an investment. So staying on somewhere because it's familiar, your lot is slightly improved and you're significantly safer because you know the rules of the place even if you have next to no legal recourse is a much more appealing situation for anyone.

A lot of former slaves did feel that where they were was worse than a chance encounter with someone on the road that could beat or kill them with near impunity and took that chance to go out into the world. In a lot of cases it *was* that bad.

Even in cases where it was that bad, and people stayed, it was because people of any color or ethnicity tend to feel safer in familiar territory no matter how harsh or painful. You spend that much time terrified of death for running away, leaving is still a burned in terror even if someone a thousand miles away with no way to enforce your safety told you it's okay to do so.

Many slaves fled to Union lines during the war. Some slave owners felt slighted as they felt they treated their slaves well and couldn't believe well treated slaves would choose to run away. Almost like people don't like being enslaved!

Smelly Pirate Hooker

2013-06-20 03:03:47 PM

Any civil war represents a failure. But this one was necessary. We didn't have to kill over 600,000 Americans to end slavery. But the South made it necessary to do so.

Obviously, the post-war period wasn't going to make everything all better (again, largely because of the South).

I have never thought of the Civil War as glorious or noble. WTF would anyone think that? It was like lancing a giant, ugly boil. Slavery here had to end (and should have ended long before it did). But of course slaveowners and the politicians they owned weren't going to make that easy.

And then they continued virtual slavery for a hundred years afterwards. Assholes. All those dead people from the war are their fault.

Certainly, the North had plenty of racists. But racism and slavery are different. Slavery doesn't make racism OK by comparison, but it sure as hell added the profit motive, made white supremacy very lucrative for a lot of people.

StaleCoffee

2013-06-20 03:51:45 PM

Waldo Pepper: I read the book "The fall of the house of dixie" and the author writes about and quotes those from that period about how the slaves will be happy to fight for the southern cause. It is quite amazing to think just how different a world plantation life was in the south.

I don't blame the south for wanting to fight for their lifestyle but I do blame those who created the Jim Crow laws and or took advantage of those in the south during the decades after the civil war. The United States had a chance to correct a major wrong a birth defect if you will and raped the a great positive that came out of a family fight.

I realize this is a bad comparison but I'd imagine this is how the hollywood community is like. the honesty think people are happy to serve them and everyone should have time to pursue charitable causes and cook organic and so on.

You are either amazingly ignorant or a maestro troll.

Mock26

2013-06-20 03:52:26 PM

It put the South in their rightful place. For that alone it is the GREATEST WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY!

leevis

2013-06-20 03:54:33 PM

Even without the war, slavery would have ended one way or another well before the end of the century. Cheap and reliable repeating rifles were starting to come onto the market. Plenty of the abolitionist groups had deep pockets and would have started buying them and smuggling them to slaves. The south would have gotten tired of putting down uprisings and either would have just freed them or shipped them out of the country.

Mock26

2013-06-20 03:57:32 PM

South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year

Latinwolf

2013-06-20 04:05:15 PM

Waldo Pepper: Latinwolf: Waldo Pepper: Latinwolf: badhatharry: Only very rich people had slaves. Most of the people fighting and dying for the South weren't doing it for slavery.

There was also not widespread mistreatment of slaves. It was against the law. Slaves were treated like what they were. Valuable property.

So you can provide us with examples of white slave owners getting prosecuted for mistreatment of slaves?

Historian
Lawrence M. Friedman wrote: "Ten Southern codes made it a crime to mistreat a slave. ... Under the Louisiana Civil Code of 1825 (art. 192), if a master was "convicted of cruel treatment," the judge could order the sale of the mistreated slave, presumably to a better master."

I can't find any links for it but I would imagine there were some trials before the courts concerning slave mistreatment.

also this is intereting
http://slaverebellion.org/index.php?page=the-black-slave-owners

I asked for examples of white slave owners getting prosecuted, which you didn't provide. Black slave owners don't count as the laws back then, and today in many of those places, would have been applied differently. Nor does claiming that you imagine some whites were prosecuted count.

I said the black slave owners was interesting I didn't say it had anything to do with your point.

there were laws/codes on the books about owners mistreating slaves. Sorry if I am unable to find any cases using a google search I can only assume that with as backed up as the courts are they just haven't had time to upload the information.

My assumption about some whites being prosecuted is based on why put the laws/codes on the books if you don't plan on using them.

Yes because there have never been any laws that weren't enforced, guess what, if you do a good search you'll find plenty of them.

On November 23, 1739, in williamsburg, va, two white men (Charles Quin and David White) were hanged for the murder of another white man's slave. On April 21, 1775, thevirginia gazette in fredricksburg reported that a white man (William Pitman) was hanged for the murder of his own slave.

Interesting that your only examples were before the birth of this nation.

gibbon1

2013-06-20 04:05:24 PM

manimal2878: Neither of those things are saying the person is the property of the government.

If there were ever a word today that's being misused in an Orwellian sense, it's the work property.

Idea's are property.
Patents are property.
Your Gene's are someones property.
People are property.
Freedom is property.

The conservative obsession with property reminds me of Aborigine society. The rule that women need to be married. So infants, and widows have to be married off, no exceptions. Conservatives are like, everything is property, and every bit of property needs ownership, by someone. Suggest that something should be owned in common and they go batshi'it. Suggest somethings should be free and they go ape.

StaleCoffee

2013-06-20 04:23:52 PM

Waldo Pepper: StaleCoffee: Waldo Pepper: I read the book "The fall of the house of dixie" and the author writes about and quotes those from that period about how the slaves will be happy to fight for the southern cause. It is quite amazing to think just how different a world plantation life was in the south.

I don't blame the south for wanting to fight for their lifestyle but I do blame those who created the Jim Crow laws and or took advantage of those in the south during the decades after the civil war. The United States had a chance to correct a major wrong a birth defect if you will and raped the a great positive that came out of a family fight.

I realize this is a bad comparison but I'd imagine this is how the hollywood community is like. the honesty think people are happy to serve them and everyone should have time to pursue charitable causes and cook organic and so on.

You are either amazingly ignorant or a maestro troll.

why?

Because I can't tell if your efforts to paint the south as some kind of downtrodden tragedy that was fully within its own rights to behave as it did is sincere or aiming for responses.

Citing that book as some kind of support for the idea that slaves were happy to fight for the Confederacy is either blatant falsehood or sheer ignorant twaddle.

As its ranks dwindled and in a last gasp, the Confederacy, too, had a plan to recruit black soldiers. In 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved a plan to recruit free blacks and slaves into the Confederate army. Quoting Frederick Douglass, Levine calls the logic behind the idea "a species of madness."
One factor that contributed to this madness, he says, "is the drumbeat of self-hypnosis" that told Confederates that "the slaves are loyal, the slaves embrace slavery, the slaves are contented in slavery, the slaves know that black people are inferior and need white people to ... oversee their lives. ... Black people will defend the South that has been good to them. There are, of course, by [then] very many white Southerners who know this is by no means true, but enough of them do believe it so that they're willing to give this a chance."

Five minutes poking around the Internet will give you a wealth of information, including the npr article I lifted that out of.

The southern lifestyle was not what anyone was fighting for, except the poorer whites who were sold a pile of bullshiat. The secessionist states were traitors, by any measurement, including their own. It was only awe-inspiring hypocrisy that anyone had the gall to cite states rights as a reason for that war. The only states rights they were concerned with was their own, their problem was that their rights didn't universally extend into other states - who should have the same sovereignty over their own dominion as the secessionists claimed for themselves, yet here we see special pleading. No, but, it's OUR STUFF. It's OUR RULES. We want OUR THINGS to work in YOUR STATES, but not YOUR THINGS in OURS. That was the entire bottom line of the southern secessionists.

lunogled

2013-06-20 04:36:04 PM

Brazil offers a very interesting parallel example: In some ways, it is very similar to the US historically
(large decentralized country, European "colonial" elite, an early economy whose most productive part was slave-based, a "Wild West", which in Brazil's case was the North).
The biggest different, to my mind, is that there was no Civil War. Slavery ended by a combination of passive resistance, uprisings, slaves running away to the North en masse, and at the end a Royal decree opposition to which was muted because, at that point, Slavery was essentially unenforceable.

So, what are the effects on "modern" XXth century Brazil: There was no equivalent of Jim Crow.
There is plenty of subtle racial discrimination, which is really an artifact of Brazil's enormous economic inequality (worse than the US, cue the protests going on right now), but, for instance, so many intermarriages (and early acceptance of Intermarriage) that practically all Brazilians are, to some extent, mixed race.
I find it plausible that the absence of the Civil war had something to do with it.

BafflerMeal

2013-06-20 04:42:31 PM

lunogled: Brazil offers a very interesting parallel example: In some ways, it is very similar to the US historically
(large decentralized country, European "colonial" elite, an early economy whose most productive part was slave-based, a "Wild West", which in Brazil's case was the North).
The biggest different, to my mind, is that there was no Civil War. Slavery ended by a combination of passive resistance, uprisings, slaves running away to the North en masse, and at the end a Royal decree opposition to which was muted because, at that point, Slavery was essentially unenforceable.

So, what are the effects on "modern" XXth century Brazil: There was no equivalent of Jim Crow.
There is plenty of subtle racial discrimination, which is really an artifact of Brazil's enormous economic inequality (worse than the US, cue the protests going on right now), but, for instance, so many intermarriages (and early acceptance of Intermarriage) that practically all Brazilians are, to some extent, mixed race.
I find it plausible that the absence of the Civil war had something to do with it.

A good observation. Most countries in the world ending slavery without war. It's a little disingenuous to suggest that the US 'had' to have one. That just happens to be how it played out.

/tired of false dilemmas
/lazy thinking

Mock26

2013-06-20 04:49:29 PM

Interesting observation, but there were far fewer "whites" in Brazil as there were in America.

Phinn

2013-06-20 04:55:13 PM

bugontherug: You are not a slave. You are one of the most free, privileged persons ever to walk the planet.

Thanks, but I don't live according to what privileges you decide to recognize.

Also, you're the kind of guy who would tell the slaves working in the Big House to stop complaining, since they had it a lot better than the ones in the fields. It's true. They did.

Slavery has been modernized. Farmers figured out a long time ago that when you keep cattle in tight confinement and lousy conditions, they are less productive, die early, and reproduce less. Thus, free-range farming methods were developed.

The US government is a free-range tax farm. And we're the livestock.

Hey, I've got a question for you, Mr. IQ -- Do you know what (chattel, pre-free-range) slave-owners in the old South relied on to keep the slaves in line?

Other slaves. You see, slave-on-slave antagonism, particularly in the form of hostility to any other slave's assertion of increased freedom, is one of the keys to maintaining control of a subjugated population.

UNC_Samurai

2013-06-20 04:57:34 PM

DamnYankees: UNC_Samurai: //wrote a historiography a few years ago comparing German WWI and WWII memorials to Confederate monuments

I'd actually be interesting in reading that if you had it handy.

I looked on every hard and flash drive in my house, and it's nowhere to be found - it must have been on my university shared drive (which has been wiped by now).

The TL; DR was that there were distinct periods of people building monuments after each war. In all three cases, the people erecting monuments did so at a very local level, and predominantly in the hometowns. As time passed, however, southern Americans bought into the Lost Cause mythology, and made monuments that were intended to honor abstract concepts like bravery and courage that weren't really objectionable on the surface, because (as someone upthread mentioned) Union monuments were often just as elaborate. But the political messages in the Confederate monuments are stronger, such as the poses of soldiers, and the location (Confederate monuments along Seminary Ridge have a loose correlation between when they were put up and how much closer to Cemetery Ridge they were).

This contrasts with German war memorials, which almost universally use the most abstract style possible. This is partly due to aesthetic differences in the era in which they lived, and some cultural differences, but almost every single soldier you see depicted on a German war memorial is kneeling, or has his head down, and looks very somber (but even these figures look a little like stylized cartoons rather than the realistic faces we see on Confederate monuments). It's also hard to trace a full development path for First World War monuments because the Second World War interrupts the cultural path, but there's enough to work with that there are common traits in the beginning with rapidly divergent paths.

My personal conclusions from reading the sources for the historiography was that Confederate culture was allowed to retain a certain measure of absolution for what they did, and may have been fueled partly by Lincoln's desires in Reconstruction (getting back to "malice toward none"), and the process being abruptly halted by the election of 1876. Germans, meanwhile, were figuratively hit over the head with the notion they had been an unjust aggressor in both wars, and in the case of the Second World War it's fairly obvious that the Allies undertook a major effort to eradicate as much support and desire for the political ideology that drove Germany into that war (consequently, Second World War memorials are the most abstract of all, as is the case with the Laboe Memorial in Kiel).

I can't remember all of my sources, but the most important ones were:

Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South; William D. Richardson, Ron McNinch-Su, J. Michael Martinez
Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914; William Blair
Monuments To The Lost Cause: Women, Art, And The Landscapes Of Southern Memory; Cynthia Mills, Pamela H. Simpson
The Great War and Modern Memory; Paul Fussell
War and German Memory: Excavating the Significance of the Second World War in German Cultural Consciousness; K. Michael Prince
From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990; Rudy Koshar
Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe; George L. Mosse

UNC_Samurai

2013-06-20 05:00:39 PM

StaleCoffee: Waldo Pepper: StaleCoffee: Waldo Pepper: I read the book "The fall of the house of dixie" and the author writes about and quotes those from that period about how the slaves will be happy to fight for the southern cause. It is quite amazing to think just how different a world plantation life was in the south.

I don't blame the south for wanting to fight for their lifestyle but I do blame those who created the Jim Crow laws and or took advantage of those in the south during the decades after the civil war. The United States had a chance to correct a major wrong a birth defect if you will and raped the a great positive that came out of a family fight.

I realize this is a bad comparison but I'd imagine this is how the hollywood community is like. the honesty think people are happy to serve them and everyone should have time to pursue charitable causes and cook organic and so on.

You are either amazingly ignorant or a maestro troll.

why?

Because I can't tell if your efforts to paint the south as some kind of downtrodden tragedy that was fully within its own rights to behave as it did is sincere or aiming for responses.

Citing that book as some kind of support for the idea that slaves were happy to fight for the Confederacy is either blatant falsehood or sheer ignorant twaddle.

As its ranks dwindled and in a last gasp, the Confederacy, too, had a plan to recruit black soldiers. In 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved a plan to recruit free blacks and slaves into the Confederate army. Quoting Frederick Douglass, Levine calls the logic behind the idea "a species of madness."
One factor that contributed to this madness, he says, "is the drumbeat of self-hypnosis" that told Confederates that "the slaves are loyal, the slaves embrace slavery, the slaves are contented in slavery, the slaves know that black people are inferior and need white people to ... oversee their lives. ... Black people will defend the South that has been good to them. There are, of ...

By the way, a lot of Southerners decided the war was bullshiat the minute the Confederacy enacted conscription and added an exemption for men who owned more than 20 slaves. That was responsible for the sharpest increase in Confederate desertion in the entire war. That's when they realized they'd been sold a bill of goods, the infamous "rich man's war, poor man's fight".

StaleCoffee

2013-06-20 05:05:19 PM

Waldo Pepper: sorry I didn't make myself clear (just read what i wrote) when I cited the book. I was trying to reaffirm a previous post about how some in the south thought the slaves would be happy to fight for them and how they were actually shocked that the slaves fled to the Union side to be free. I was unclear.

I was also trying and it appears failing to point out how the plantation life appears much like life in Hollywood where they are in their own little world and are amazed that there is a real world out there that is vastly different from their spoiled life and no matter how happy people appear to be in working for them, almost all would rather be free or in the case of those working for the spoiled class they would rather be not have to be at their beck and call 24/7.

I don't believe I was painting a picture of the southern life being a downtrodden tragedy. I do believe they felt it was within the right to defend and protect their way of life and that it is very hard for us to understand how people viewed states rights vs national rights back them.

completely misunderstood what you were saying. I appreciate the clarification and apologize for being an ass.

it is also ridiculous for those on here to talk about how there were resources for folks back then to know slavery was wrong. Let me tell you there is no way the resources were easy to obtain. I recently moved to a small town in NC well actually 10 miles outside of town (pop 3500, where i live pop 800) after spending my life in the Washington DC suburbs and a visit to the local library is eye opening. very limited selection, still has more VHS tapes to check out then DVD's

wrt that I disagree to an extent. The people making those policies were very easily informed as to their decisions and knew full well what they were doing. Those lower classes who did not have those resources available were as manipulated into their views as others in the current era in some cases, but for the most part - like now - they simply didn't care.

Something your local library can do, like any other library, is order any materials that aren't available. There's a point at which ignorance is easily defeated by a modicum of ambition. There was no ambition to question for those folks. That those resources weren't available is not sufficient reason on its own to say people in that time couldn't know slavery was wrong.

StaleCoffee

2013-06-20 05:07:21 PM

StaleCoffee: Waldo Pepper: sorry I didn't make myself clear (just read what i wrote) when I cited the book. I was trying to reaffirm a previous post about how some in the south thought the slaves would be happy to fight for them and how they were actually shocked that the slaves fled to the Union side to be free. I was unclear.

I was also trying and it appears failing to point out how the plantation life appears much like life in Hollywood where they are in their own little world and are amazed that there is a real world out there that is vastly different from their spoiled life and no matter how happy people appear to be in working for them, almost all would rather be free or in the case of those working for the spoiled class they would rather be not have to be at their beck and call 24/7.

I don't believe I was painting a picture of the southern life being a downtrodden tragedy. I do believe they felt it was within the right to defend and protect their way of life and that it is very hard for us to understand how people viewed states rights vs national rights back them.

completely misunderstood what you were saying. I appreciate the clarification and apologize for being an ass.

it is also ridiculous for those on here to talk about how there were resources for folks back then to know slavery was wrong. Let me tell you there is no way the resources were easy to obtain. I recently moved to a small town in NC well actually 10 miles outside of town (pop 3500, where i live pop 800) after spending my life in the Washington DC suburbs and a visit to the local library is eye opening. very limited selection, still has more VHS tapes to check out then DVD's

wrt that I disagree to an extent. The people making those policies were very easily informed as to their decisions and knew full well what they were doing. Those lower classes who did not have those resources available were as manipulated into their views as others in the current era in some cases, but for the most part - like n ...

Also, I forgot to address - the way they viewed states rights is very well documented, and the southern cause for states rights was offensively weak and massively hypocritical. They did not have the right to do as they did and are appropriately labelled traitors then and now for it.

bugontherug

2013-06-20 06:26:58 PM

Phinn: bugontherug: You are not a slave. You are one of the most free, privileged persons ever to walk the planet.

Thanks, but I don't live according to what privileges you decide to recognize.

Also, you're the kind of guy who would tell the slaves working in the Big House to stop complaining, since they had it a lot better than the ones in the fields. It's true. They did.

Slavery has been modernized. Farmers figured out a long time ago that when you keep cattle in tight confinement and lousy conditions, they are less productive, die early, and reproduce less. Thus, free-range farming methods were developed.

The US government is a free-range tax farm. And we're the livestock.

Hey, I've got a question for you, Mr. IQ -- Do you know what (chattel, pre-free-range) slave-owners in the old South relied on to keep the slaves in line?

Other slaves. You see, slave-on-slave antagonism, particularly in the form of hostility to any other slave's assertion of increased freedom, is one of the keys to maintaining control of a subjugated population.

The head bashing: do you do it because it feels good? Or is it a compulsion that you've found yourself unable to overcome with effort of will, even though it hurts? I'm just trying to get a handle on this, so we can find the right course of treatment for you.

By your definition, which effectively equates slavery to "being subject to the jurisdiction of any government in human history" virtually every human living and who has lived is/was a slave.

bugontherug

2013-06-20 06:41:43 PM

Waldo Pepper: Waldo Pepper: Slavery DefinedWhile definitions differ of what constitutes slavery in contemporary society, these factors are typically present:

The victim is induced into slave-like exploitation through fraud, force or coercion;The enslaved are subject to physical abuse and/or psychological intimidation;Victims are not readily able to free themselves from their situation.
Most your definition doesn't jive with what the freedom center defines as a slave. just paying income tax may not make one a slave but I would argue that the welfare state the government has created has in sense created slaves out of many who are trapped in it.

Oh well. I have found you can find happiness in slavery.

Graphic content warning. NSFW.

Sandwyrm

2013-06-20 09:19:17 PM

One of the more frustrating signs of delusional paranoia is when the subject starts believing everyone who disagrees with him is another cog in the system.

There is much wrong with this world, much wrong with the government and humanity in general sucks. However, there is a MAJOR AND DISTINCT difference between slavery and the modern rat race.

At the end of the day, you can leave all of this behind. You might not want to accept the consequences for doing so, but it is an option. You might retort that the same could be said for slaves running away, in which case any answer I give will be useless, as you're fully convinced that you and you alone are the only bloody person in this entire god-forsaken planet who sees things the way they are.

My frustration stems from the fact that people will become so inured to this particular brand of foolishness that when a situation arises that actually does deserve people to make this absolute judgement call, they will be exhausted by years and decades of paranoid lunatics and will be unable to define the freedoms they have lost due to years of relativism and false equations. You, in your infinite wisdom, would therefore be part of this very system you claim everyone else is facilitating.

Mr. IQ

Sandwyrm

2013-06-20 10:10:34 PM

Waldo Pepper:
The only winning move...

Your Average Witty Fark User

2013-06-21 12:18:22 AM

Who gives a shiat? The South lost, they're still butthurt, fark them.

Phinn

2013-06-21 12:49:18 AM

Sandwyrm: One of the more frustrating signs of delusional paranoia is when the subject starts believing everyone who disagrees with him is another cog in the system.

One of the more frustrating aspects of asking people to GET THEIR FARKING HANDS OFF OF MY LABOR AND EARNINGS is that the retorts that ensue invariably sound like a broken record. There's "you're paranoid" and "go live by yourself/in Somalia" and "you're a purist" and not much else. Do try to be more original.

Sandwyrm: There is much wrong with this world, much wrong with the government and humanity in general sucks. However, there is a MAJOR AND DISTINCT difference between slavery and the modern rat race.

I usually think of term "the rat race" as describing an attempt to buy the crap that everyone expects you to buy, work in a job that people expect you to work in, and have hobbies people expect you to have.

None of that seems remotely relevant here, and I have no idea why you would bring it up. I'm talking about the thugs with badges who will put a gun to your head and take your money. I'm talking about the corrupt assholes who will toss your ass in a rape room they have set aside for the purpose of forcing your submission, already fully stocked with sociopaths just itching to use you as a human toilet, if you don't pay the taxes they say you "owe."

I don't see how feeling social pressure, on fear of being left out of the neighborhood barbecue, to buy a 2,000 square foot house and have 2.2 kids, and generally conform out of a lack of imagination (i.e., the "rat race") is functionally or ethically comparable to understanding the true nature of the State.

Sandwyrm: At the end of the day, you can leave all of this behind. You might not want to accept the consequences for doing so, but it is an option. You might retort that the same could be said for slaves running away, in which case any answer I give will be useless, as you're fully convinced that you and you alone are the only bloody person in this entire god-forsaken planet who sees things the way they are.

Aaaaand, we're moving on to the "Somalia" thing. Great. You officially have no rhetorical skills.

No, genius, I am not talking about living in the wilderness. I am talking about living in a society, where nice things like "commerce" and "the division of labor" come from. I am talking about being sociable (i.e., not in isolation), but living in peace and cooperation with others (i.e., not institutionalizing robbery, abductions, and the brutalization of people under the label of "government").

And no, I do not think I'm the only person who sees things for what they are. There are lots of us, just not a lot on Fark.

Sandwyrm: My frustration stems from the fact that people will become so inured to this particular brand of foolishness that when a situation arises that actually does deserve people to make this absolute judgement call, they will be exhausted by years and decades of paranoid lunatics and will be unable to define the freedoms they have lost due to years of relativism and false equations. You, in your infinite wisdom, would therefore be part of this very system you claim everyone else is facilitating.

And, we have the "absolutism" thing. Yeah, that's new -- "You're such a purist." What about chattel slavery? You're a purist about that, though, right? Rape? Are you a purist about rape?

You're the kind of guy who, in 1860, would have been right there on the front line agitating for more Slave Rights. Such a hero! Maybe you'd have fought for better working hours for the field workers. Or some pension benefits. Or sick leave! That would have made slavery far more palatable. Abolitionism was such a ... purist agenda.

My frustration stems from the fact that soft-headed idiots are so easily deceived by rhetoric and symbolism and (most of all) by simple changes in labels and terminology. When the State and the cheerleaders for the State change the label on something, people like you are suddenly unable to see the reality that's right in front of you. For example, I bet you believe in voting and democracy and all that crap. I'd wager that you sincerely believe that by being allowed to put a piece of paper in the Master's Suggestion Box once every 4 years, you actually have some appreciable quantum of genuine freedom. You honestly believe this. And because you believe it, you resent it when anyone comes along to say that, you know, just because the Massa deigns to put out a quadrennial Suggestion Box, we can't overlook the hard reality of an army of tax collectors, a combined local-county-state-federal tax confiscation rate of upwards of 50%, a central bank that feeds money to Wall Street, and a massive surveillance state that captures everyone's communications all the time (but, they say, trust us when we tell you we're not "targeting" you).

The KGB had a process for controlling populations -- they called it "demoralization." It did not mean "cause people to become apathetic." It meant "removing people's capacity for reaching obvious moral conclusions." To literally de-moral-ize people. After one generation, they said, you could train an entire population to be unable to see the reality of their condition, and they would react to governmental brutality in any way the State wanted them to react.

Sandwyrm

2013-06-21 03:35:54 AM

Phinn:
You're fighting the right battle, but you suck at finding your target. Also, had you wagered anything worthwhile, you would have lost hard, given you managed to make the wrong assumption on every count.

But please, go on thinking you know the game. We all need our delusions.

thamike

2013-06-21 05:21:32 AM

Phinn: One of the more frustrating aspects of asking people to GET THEIR FARKING HANDS OFF OF MY LABOR AND EARNINGS is that the retorts that ensue invariably sound like a broken record. There's "you're paranoid" and "go live by yourself/in Somalia" and "you're a purist" and not much else. Do try to be more original.

You hit puberty with a glancing blow?

thefonz37

2013-06-21 09:16:53 AM

Whoaahhhh...calm down there guy. Pretty sure the point of someone bringing up the "You can go live in Somalia" rhetoric is not because they honestly think you should take that as a serious suggestion, but to indicate the fact that you could pick up and go do that, if you chose to do so. Point being, that the societal conditions which you view as enslavement are actually completely optional and voluntary. It's called a social contract, not slavery.

Phinn

2013-06-21 09:33:03 AM

thefonz37: Whoaahhhh...calm down there guy. Pretty sure the point of someone bringing up the "You can go live in Somalia" rhetoric is not because they honestly think you should take that as a serious suggestion, but to indicate the fact that you could pick up and go do that, if you chose to do so. Point being, that the societal conditions which you view as enslavement are actually completely optional and voluntary. It's called a social contract, not slavery.

Yeah, changing the label = changing the reality, right? It's like the time recently when Cyprus seized a bunch of money from banks. They called it "a one-time tax on bank deposits." See? Totally not bank robbery! No, not at all. It was a one-time tax on bank deposits!

People like you believe in symbols and language more than the reality in front of your face.

Or, in the case of the "social contract," you fall prey to the reverse fallacy -- if someone convinces you to retain a label ("contract"), but apply it to something completely unlike a contract (the State), people like you will think that States are just like contracts. Except for the part where this "social contract" is imposed and enforced unilaterally, and there's nothing like consent being a consideration, and the terms of this supposed contract are never written down anywhere, and they keep changing all the time, and a breach of this contract is remedied via incarceration, and ... but, hey, sure, the State is otherwise exactly like a real contract.

Try stepping out of your label-based thinking and step into actual, functional reality.

Your comment is like saying that slaves in the South weren't really slaves because they could have killed themselves at any time, unlike cattle who don't have the ability to commit suicide, so the slaves, in effect, chose to be slaves. They consented to slavery by breathing.

See? It's easy to come up with meaningless bullshiat ethical principles, as long as you unmoor yourself from reality first.

UNC_Samurai

2013-06-21 10:00:59 AM

Phinn: See? It's easy to come up with meaningless bullshiat ethical principles, as long as you unmoor yourself from reality first.

Reading your tinfoilhattery, you have certainly proven that.

thefonz37

2013-06-21 10:04:49 AM

Phinn: thefonz37: Whoaahhhh...calm down there guy. Pretty sure the point of someone bringing up the "You can go live in Somalia" rhetoric is not because they honestly think you should take that as a serious suggestion, but to indicate the fact that you could pick up and go do that, if you chose to do so. Point being, that the societal conditions which you view as enslavement are actually completely optional and voluntary. It's called a social contract, not slavery.

Yeah, changing the label = changing the reality, right? It's like the time recently when Cyprus seized a bunch of money from banks. They called it "a one-time tax on bank deposits." See? Totally not bank robbery! No, not at all. It was a one-time tax on bank deposits!

People like you believe in symbols and language more than the reality in front of your face.

Or, in the case of the "social contract," you fall prey to the reverse fallacy -- if someone convinces you to retain a label ("contract"), but apply it to something completely unlike a contract (the State), people like you will think that States are just like contracts. Except for the part where this "social contract" is imposed and enforced unilaterally, and there's nothing like consent being a consideration, and the terms of this supposed contract are never written down anywhere, and they keep changing all the time, and a breach of this contract is remedied via incarceration, and ... but, hey, sure, the State is otherwise exactly like a real contract.

Try stepping out of your label-based thinking and step into actual, functional reality.

Your comment is like saying that slaves in the South weren't really slaves because they could have killed themselves at any time, unlike cattle who don't have the ability to commit suicide, so the slaves, in effect, chose to be slaves. They consented to slavery by breathing.

See? It's easy to come up with meaningless bullshiat ethical principles, as long as you unmoor yourself from reality first.

Wow. Seek help. I'm serious.

UNC_Samurai

2013-06-21 01:06:52 PM

vossiewulf: And none of that compares to sending long lines of riflemen across open terrain under fire from artillery and machine guns in WWI; the British Army suffered 60k casualties on the first day of the Somme. Then there's Dieppe in WWII, and the Soviets for whom the high casualty frontal assault was standard doctrine.

I disagree. Operation Uranus, the counter-attack to relieve Stalingrad, was a pincer aimed at the non-German troops flanking the 6th Army. Rather than attack through the city, they surrounded Paulus and starved him out.

At Kursk, the Soviets mounted a defense-in-depth position and allowed the Germans to initiate the offensive into the Soviet salient, before counter-attacking on the German flanks.

The Russians were just as well-versed at the operational level as the Germans - Tukhachevsky pioneered deep area operations in the late 20s/early 30s. The problem lay in Stalin's paranoia. Had officers like Tukhachevsky not been purged (and had Triandafillov not died in a plane crash), Barbarossa might have turned into a disaster.

Deep Contact

2013-06-21 01:27:59 PM

Former slaves are still waiting for their 40 acres and a mule after the war.

Two16

2013-06-21 03:36:26 PM

UNC_Samurai: DamnYankees: UNC_Samurai: //wrote a historiography a few years ago comparing German WWI and WWII memorials to Confederate monuments

I'd actually be interesting in reading that if you had it handy.

I looked on every hard and flash drive in my house, and it's nowhere to be found - it must have been on my university shared drive (which has been wiped by now).

The TL; DR was that there were distinct periods of people building monuments after each war. In all three cases, the people erecting monuments did so at a very local level, and predominantly in the hometowns. As time passed, however, southern Americans bought into the Lost Cause mythology, and made monuments that were intended to honor abstract concepts like bravery and courage that weren't really objectionable on the surface, because (as someone upthread mentioned) Union monuments were often just as elaborate. But the political messages in the Confederate monuments are stronger, such as the poses of soldiers, and the location (Confederate monuments along Seminary Ridge have a loose correlation between when they were put up and how much closer to Cemetery Ridge they were).

This contrasts with German war memorials, which almost universally use the most abstract style possible. This is partly due to aesthetic differences in the era in which they lived, and some cultural differences, but almost every single soldier you see depicted on a German war memorial is kneeling, or has his head down, and looks very somber (but even these figures look a little like stylized cartoons rather than the realistic faces we see on Confederate monuments). It's also hard to trace a full development path for First World War monuments because the Second World War interrupts the cultural path, but there's enough to work with that there are common traits in the beginning with rapidly divergent paths.

My personal conclusions from reading the sources for the historiography was that Confederate culture was allowed to retain a certain ...

Favourited

Two16

2013-06-21 03:50:41 PM

Phinn: Sandwyrm: One of the more frustrating signs of delusional paranoia is when the subject starts believing everyone who disagrees with him is another cog in the system.

One of the more frustrating aspects of asking people to GET THEIR FARKING HANDS OFF OF MY LABOR AND EARNINGS is that the retorts that ensue invariably sound like a broken record. There's "you're paranoid" and "go live by yourself/in Somalia" and "you're a purist" and not much else. Do try to be more original.

Sandwyrm: There is much wrong with this world, much wrong with the government and humanity in general sucks. However, there is a MAJOR AND DISTINCT difference between slavery and the modern rat race.

I usually think of term "the rat race" as describing an attempt to buy the crap that everyone expects you to buy, work in a job that people expect you to work in, and have hobbies people expect you to have.

None of that seems remotely relevant here, and I have no idea why you would bring it up. I'm talking about the thugs with badges who will put a gun to your head and take your money. I'm talking about the corrupt assholes who will toss your ass in a rape room they have set aside for the purpose of forcing your submission, already fully stocked with sociopaths just itching to use you as a human toilet, if you don't pay the taxes they say you "owe."

I don't see how feeling social pressure, on fear of being left out of the neighborhood barbecue, to buy a 2,000 square foot house and have 2.2 kids, and generally conform out of a lack of imagination (i.e., the "rat race") is functionally or ethically comparable to understanding the true nature of the State.

Sandwyrm: At the end of the day, you can leave all of this behind. You might not want to accept the consequences for doing so, but it is an option. You might retort that the same could be said for slaves running away, in which case any answer I give will be useless, as you're fully convinced that you and you alone are the only bloody person in ...

Ahhhh... I see, YOU'RE different... you know all of the secrets "they" don't want the sheeple to know.

Got it.

Mouser

2013-06-21 05:27:38 PM

gibbon1: manimal2878: Neither of those things are saying the person is the property of the government.

If there were ever a word today that's being misused in an Orwellian sense, it's the work property.

Idea's are property.
Patents are property.
Your Gene's are someones property.
People are property.
Freedom is property.

The conservative obsession with property reminds me of Aborigine society. The rule that women need to be married. So infants, and widows have to be married off, no exceptions. Conservatives are like, everything is property, and every bit of property needs ownership, by someone. Suggest that something should be owned in common and they go batshi'it. Suggest somethings should be free and they go ape.

The Bible teaches us that Man has dominion over the world, that we are its stewards on God's behalf. Therefore, every thing is property, to be managed either individually or collectively depending on our best judgment.

The evil of slavery wasn't in treating the African as property. The evil was in thinking the African was a thing that could be treated as property.

thamike

2013-06-21 05:51:27 PM

Phinn: See? It's easy to come up with meaningless bullshiat ethical principles, as long as you unmoor yourself from reality first.

Reality in your case being...?

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