Damnit.
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Yes. But that He-man being Prince Adam is just a malicious rumor of the mainstream liberal secular media.
Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
- Thread starter GasBandit
- Start date
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Yeah, you're right. it's probably Orko in disguise. A really good disguise.
Our system of government has more or less turned into putting insufficient bandaid over insufficient bandaid to try to fix a system so broken, but so entrenched that no one has the balls to wipe it clean and start over. I don't agree with bloody revolution like some, but when I have friends working three jobs and still need to have roommates to afford anything, it makes me mad. When my mother talks about people on welfare sitting on their ass and doing nothing while having nice things as if she wasn't the one who taught me to look at Goodwill for cheap higher end clothes, knowing that so many people of her generation and above legitimately don't see the fucking mess that tail end Gen X and Millennials are currently in when it comes to being able to afford anything, I get mad. I either have to spend 35k a year for a private school for my special needs kid, or try to make up for a horrifically underfunded special ed system on my own, and it hurts me, but it also hurts to watch the face of his special ed case worker fall when I ask about transition programs and she wants to bitch with me but can only speak in subtext because she wants to keep her job. I laughed when my family talks about Trump being awesome all through the primaries, and was sad when I realized how many of the horrible things Trump says they actually believe.
I guess I don't have a point, beyond just needing to rant about the disaster our country feels like it's becoming, regardless of how many layers of bandaids are put on it.
I guess I don't have a point, beyond just needing to rant about the disaster our country feels like it's becoming, regardless of how many layers of bandaids are put on it.
Sadly, it's not just your country. The whole world really is turning in on itself and on a slow slide downwards. Yeah, yeah, we need optimism and all that, but seriously, everything's slowly degrading; our system's failing but the very things that cause its failure are also what keep it going. It'll get worse before it gets better.
Maybe the states should consider seceding from the union.
GasBandit
Staff member
Tried that once, but the yanks got all butthurt about it and decided to break our ankles so we couldn't leave them again.
I'm actually curious how long some things will last. With Hungary's referendum being barely not binding, the EU got away lucky, but it's still problematic. Saying "no, we don't accept this piece of legislation, but otherwise we're going to stay in and accept what we want and refuse what we don't" is more dangerous than something like the UK who at least has the guts and honesty to say "we want out".
We would apologize, but you assholes were unapologetically enslaving an entire ethnic group to work in your fields.
GasBandit
Staff member
The North didn't invade the south because of slavery. The south seceded because of slavery. The north invaded a full year and a half before they declared slavery illegal. They invaded because they refused to take the economic hit of no longer having an agrarian underclass.
There are many countries where being homosexual is a death sentence. Should we invade them, too? Or is it not worth it because of economic and logistic realities?[DOUBLEPOST=1475702247,1475701817][/DOUBLEPOST]The north also tried to convince southern states not to secede by drafting a consitutional amendment that would have protected slavery as an insitution forever.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/histo...d-thirteenth-amendment-prevent-secession-1861
In the wake of the presidential election of 1860 that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House, the slaveholding states of the American South, led by South Carolina, began withdrawing from the nation. In the midst of this constitutional crisis, President James Buchanan, still in office until Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, tried to reassure the South that their slave property would remain safe, even under the incoming Republican administration. He asked Congress to draw up what he called an “explanatory amendment” to the Constitution that would explicitly recognize the right of states to sanction human bondage and allow slaveholders to retain their human property. In response, the House of Representatives established a thirty-three member committee under the leadership of Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio to prepare a draft for the President’s consideration.
Within weeks, the committee delivered the “Corwin Amendment” to the House, a document many hoped would mollify the South. This proposed Thirteenth Amendment reflected the apprehension of those who in late 1860 believed they were witnessing the dissolution of the nation. Without using the word “slavery” or “slave,” the proposed amendment would deny “to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” The amendment, officially designated Joint Resolution No. 80, passed the House of Representatives in late February by the convincing vote of more than two-thirds of the membership. It was delivered to the Senate just days before Lincoln’s inauguration and although most members of that body supported it, opponents were successful in blocking the amendment on a parliamentary technicality. Lincoln sent the amendment to the states for consideration. Only Ohio and Maryland ratified it. The copy of the amendment provided here is the one sent to Maryland for approval.
In 1865, at the end of the war, a very different constitutional amendment, bearing the same numerical designation, was proposed and finally passed; the ratified Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery throughout the United States.
The north didn't go to war to end slavery, it ended slavery to punish the south for the war.
When the ends justify the means, alot of 'good' things come from terrible intentions or actions.
Ending slavery seems like an alright ends.
It is a good thing. I don't agree with the the methods or process it took to achieve it though.
GasBandit
Staff member
Frank is clearly being deliberately obtuse. The north didn't care about slavery. It only cared about political and economic power. Slavery was not its cassus belli. That was an ex post facto justification.
If you rob someone on the street and then learn afterwards that he was a pedophile on his way to torture children, you're not a hero.
If you rob someone on the street and then learn afterwards that he was a pedophile on his way to torture children, you're not a hero.
Fair enough, but you realize in this case, the South is the pedophile?
The other side of the equation is that the economy of the South was entirely reliant of agriculture, while the North was in trade and industry - textile mills, railroads, steel mills, etc. They were starting to outstrip the economic production of the South, and as such the slave states wanted to spread it further west. However, due to earlier compromises, there was a very limited amount of territory for it to spread to. Not to mention that overgrowing cotton was slowly destroying the soil - after the war, even places that hadn't been devastated by raiders suffered poor crops. It took years for the land to recover.
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This is disingenuous. Abolitionist organizations existed in this country since it's founding, often being home to important and powerful members of Congress as well as notable members of the public, up to and including several Founding Fathers themselves. Let's not pretend that this was something done PURELY for politics; it's passage may have occurred at a political opportune time but there was a genuine will for it to happen, otherwise we never would have had stuff like the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, or the resultant the Border War in Kansas. People wanted free states as much as the South wanted slaves.
GasBandit
Staff member
Yes. I made the mugging victim in the analogy reprehensible on purpose. Slavery is bad. But those who say the north went to war with the south to stop slavery are misinformed/uninformed at best. The north went to war with the south to make them stay in the union, and up until the first shot of the war was fired, they were willing to legalize slavery to keep them.
So basically the mugger was pro-pedophilia.[DOUBLEPOST=1475709551,1475709485][/DOUBLEPOST]
Oh people wanted free states, but those who wanted to abolish slavery in the south were a minority made louder by revisionist historians trying to paint a rosy and righteous picture.
GasBandit
Staff member
What upsets me is people who pretend to righteousness. Which is how this little diversionary discussion got started.
"Maybe you guys should secede"
"Tried once, it went badly."
"Well, you WERE slavemasters."
That may have been the motivation for the secession, but it was not the justification for the war to stop that secession, nor the reason it went badly for the confederacy.
No sense of unhappiness there...
GasBandit
Staff member
No mention of slavery either.
Or did you mean I was unhappy with the "result," the result being reconstruction? Because yeah, that kind of sucked for a lot of people.
No, the reason it went badly for the Confederacy was that they didn't have a sufficient industrial base to fight a protracted war and their internal politics gave them limited means to improve the situation. For extended periods during the war, the Confederate troops were under-supplied, lacking shoes, food, and other materiel needs. It was only the gross incompetence, cowardice, or excessive caution of many Union generals that let the war last as long as it did.
GasBandit
Staff member
This is true.
Fair enough. I suppose since 99% of the time I see that argument used its by racists to pretend the civil war had 0% to do with slavery so its a bit of a gut reaction to cal it out.
GasBandit
Staff member
That's an understandable assumption, though incorrect in my case. The civil war did have "something" to do with slavery, in that its causes were rooted in the growing political imbalance between slave states and free states and the southern assumption that the election of Abraham Lincoln meant that abolition was imminent leading to its secession, but the direct cause of the civil war was the union's refusal to allow secession under any circumstances.
If it had been "The Rebellion of '62", both sides would probably have come out of it a lot better. No widespread devastation and a surviving Lincoln to moderate the treaty means no carpetbaggers during Reconstruction, and probably a much more gradual slope to abolition.
Truth be told, the First Battle of Bull Run could have been the end of the war. Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson (he earned the nickname there for holding his Virginians as a rallying point for breaking Confederates - "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!") was only grazed by musket fire; had he been more grievously wounded and removed from the field, his troops would have broken and the battle would have turned into a rout. Furthermore, while the Union troops had the natural barrier of the river to fall back behind, the Confederate troops didn't have any such luck, with no obvious defensive position for miles. Compounding that, Jefferson Davis had come from Richmond to watch the battle later in the day. Had it turned into a rout, much like the panic among the residents of Washington DC who had come to watch from the North, Davis could well have been caught up in the chaos of a retreat and captured.
With the army beaten and scattered and the President of the Confederacy captured, there would have been little point in continuing the Rebellion.
Truth be told, the First Battle of Bull Run could have been the end of the war. Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson (he earned the nickname there for holding his Virginians as a rallying point for breaking Confederates - "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!") was only grazed by musket fire; had he been more grievously wounded and removed from the field, his troops would have broken and the battle would have turned into a rout. Furthermore, while the Union troops had the natural barrier of the river to fall back behind, the Confederate troops didn't have any such luck, with no obvious defensive position for miles. Compounding that, Jefferson Davis had come from Richmond to watch the battle later in the day. Had it turned into a rout, much like the panic among the residents of Washington DC who had come to watch from the North, Davis could well have been caught up in the chaos of a retreat and captured.
With the army beaten and scattered and the President of the Confederacy captured, there would have been little point in continuing the Rebellion.
Author of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' claims American textbooks have been lying about the Civil War
The South Still Lies About the Civil War
And before you start pontificating, understand that EVERY REPUTIBLE HISTORIAN says it was about slavery. They have a mountain of evidence to back it up, whereas you have the usual bullshit printed in history textbooks from survey courses.
The South Still Lies About the Civil War
So no, you are wrong. The idea that the Civil War was about anything other than slavery is a lie Southerners told themselves to feel better, and they were so persistent over the decades that the lie spread to the North too.
And before you start pontificating, understand that EVERY REPUTIBLE HISTORIAN says it was about slavery. They have a mountain of evidence to back it up, whereas you have the usual bullshit printed in history textbooks from survey courses.
GasBandit
Staff member
I said, repeatedly, that the secession was about slavery.
The war, however, was about secession. It didn't become about slavery for another 2 years, when it became a PR coup and a way to wage further economic war. Lincoln's second inaugural address was in 1865, when the south was days from defeat. Lincoln was not an abolitionist, the emancipation proclamation didn't free all the slaves, just the ones in the rebel states, and thus emancipation was a military policy.
http://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation
It's worth mentioning that, while he did think slavery was morally wrong (and there is sufficient evidence to prove that), Lincoln was such a constitutionalist that he felt constrained on what exactly he could do about it. He wasn't about to violate the law and getting the votes to repeal it fully would be almost impossible even in the North (which still had slave states like Virginia). But once Fort Sumter was fired on, all bets were off. Hence why the Emancipation Proclamation does what it does: As commander in chief, he could decide what should be done with the property of the enemy, so it was within his war powers to emancipate the slaves in the South during the war. Again, politically expedient but also within the actual attitude of Lincoln and his powers at the time. He could free THOSE slaves legally while still preserving the rule of law.
This got him the favor of the actual abolitionists and made it possible to push toward the 13th amendment politically... something he did not live to see ratified, but WAS alive to see pass Congress. He DID sign the Joint Resolution to submit it to the states... he could have easily killed it then and there by veto. He didn't. So... even if Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, he clearly was no friend of slavery.
This got him the favor of the actual abolitionists and made it possible to push toward the 13th amendment politically... something he did not live to see ratified, but WAS alive to see pass Congress. He DID sign the Joint Resolution to submit it to the states... he could have easily killed it then and there by veto. He didn't. So... even if Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, he clearly was no friend of slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation was also a diplomatic tool against the European powers who were effectively supporting the Confederate economy. Lincoln needed a victory - even a minimal one like Antietam - to show that the Union was capable of winning the conflict, before he could make the announcement. By showing that the Union could defeat Lee's forces, and liberating the slaves in Confederate territory (in order to not lose the favor of, for example, Maryland, which was a Union slave state), Lincoln prevented England and France from officially recognizing the Confederate States of America as a legitimate nation-state, which kept them from intervening more deeply.