The Real problem with cancel culture

[viper37]

It is interesting with the confederacy that so many of the arguments focus on "secession bad! " and "how dare they betray us!" and the like rather than the simple undemocratic nature of their secession in support of  cementing the most anti-democratic cause going.

If any American state(s) today were to have a free and fair referendum where a majority of the electorate vote for independence that should be totally kosher.
The CSA of course wasn't.

And yet, before Secession, everyone was ok with these States.  Nothing changed with the Confederacy.  Same people in power, same laws as before.  In 1860 they were democracies when they voted in the election.  By 1861 they were no longer democracies.  By 1865, they were democracies again, even though the majority of voters couldn't vote at Federal and State level.

Kinda weird, don't you think?

Slavery was all fine in 1846.  Still absolutely fine in 1848.  I mean, no American soldier who served in this war is considered today to be a white supremacist worthy of cancellation.  Nobody is proposing to cancel the memory of Winfield Scott.  Or John C. Fremont.  Though he was severly reprimanded for freeing the slaves in a war that was supposed to be about the end of slavery. 

The Mexican-American war was a pure landgrab war to extend slavery in the US.  Those who fougth there were all heroes.  Half the same dudes who fought 15 years laters were evil slavers worthy of damnatio memoriae.  Things changed so fast!

[viper37]

I don't think there is any reputable historian today who would say that the "US" was a democracy in 1776; the best that could be said was that some of colonies turned states were pretty democratic by the standards of the time.

I don't know about reputable historians, but there are a lof of historians and politicians who extoll the virtue of democracy every 4th of July.

I don't think there is any reputable historian today who would extol the democratic credentials of the Texas insurgents; the war with Mexico is generally reviewed in a negative moral light by most historians.  It was even highly controversial in its time; for example, US Grant, who fought as an officer in the war, called it in his memoirs one of the most unjust wars ever waged.

Yes. And he fought the war.  Was he a criminal like Robert E. Lee?
What was the difference between Grant fighting an unjust war for his country and a Confederate officer fighting an unjust war for his country?

When native peoples or women were voting in US federal elections is an interesting and important historical question but hardly relevant to consideration of the ACW.  There weren't large numbers of frustrated Sioux desparate to vote for Breckinridge.

It is very important when you want to redefine what constitutes a democracy in 1860-61 with 21st century eyes.
The CSA States were democratic when they voted in the Presidential election.  I don't think there were widespread calls in the North that their elections were illegitimate and martia law should be imposed on South Carolina for not letting its Black population vote.  I'm willing to be proven wrong, just point me in the right direction.
Had they not seceded, they would have continued with the exact same democracy they had for a few more decades.  How long slavery would have survived, I guess it would have disapeared a little sooner than sharecropping and other exploitative methods disapeared, when the South had enough capital to industrialize & mechanize its farming activites.  If they hadn't wasted their money in war and hadn't been utterly destroyed, things might have evolded faster, as it did elsewhere. 

I mean, no one seriously lamented the end of slavery in Canada, yet many English Canadians had developped large estates in Ontario and Nova Scotia. By the time slavery was abolished, slaveowners were compensated and had 4 years to free their slaves.  Seems to have worked well.  Racial riots had been confined to Nova Scotia shortly after a Loyalist influx, I'm not aware of significan racial clash in the 19th century of Blacks vs Whites.  No reason this model couldn't have been exported elsewhere.

Of course, today, people find it outrageous that slave owners were compensated and not the slaves themselves.  21st century mentality projected into the past, and all that.

[grumbler]

50%+1 is used for all kinds of decisions.  Legalize drugs? 50%+1.  Criminilize/legalize abortion?  50%+1.  Permit felons to vote or not?  50%+1.  Remove all voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Impose voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Admit a new State/Province?  50%+1.

I can only think of one case where a 50%+1 vote was used to involuntarily deprive a group of its citizenship, though, and the Nuremburg Laws shouldn't be your lodestone.

[viper37]

The Confederacy had been attacking and seizing United States property by force for months before Sumter. The idea that the United States waged war on the Confederacy unprovoked is insane and bizarre. The Secessionists were pretty intent on seizing all federal property without compensation.

Not unprovoked, they formed an army to push the Union soldiers out of their territory.
Way disproportionate to the problem, sure.
The Confederates were negotiating with Union representatives for the transfer of these forts.  It is totally false to claim they wanted it without compensation:The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents because he claimed the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign governmenthttps://archive.org/details/impendingcrisis00pott/page/n3/mode/2up
And:However, President Lincoln was determined to hold all remaining Union-occupied forts in the Confederacy: Fort Monroe in Virginia, Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson and Fort Taylor in Florida, and Fort Sumter – located at the cockpit of secession in Charleston, South Carolina.https://books.google.ca/books?id=D11iDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

The Confederacy was willing to negotiate, the US President was not.

And I am unaware of any attacks by the CSA before Fort Sumter.
Half the States seceded only after Lincoln's second call for volunteers, when it became clear he intended to retake the entire South by force.

So tell me Viper, if the only goal was to preserve the Union and nothing else why not just support slavery and its expansion and denounce the abolitionists? That would have absolutely held it all together no problem.

Tell me Valmy, if the goal was to abolish slavery from the beginning, why were Union officers who did just that were reprimanded by their government?  Like, say, Frémont?  Why condemn someone who did exactly what you wanted him to do?
Why didn't the North used free Black men in Antietam?  Why wait until 1863 to recruit Black soldiers?  Why wait for an emancipation declaration?  Why not proclaim it as soon as Lincoln was elected?  Why not as soon as the South seceded?  Why not abolish slavery in Maryland until 1865?  Why not in 1863 with the rest of the States under Union control?  Why no mixed regiments, Black and White men fighting together?  Why did Sherman considered the former slaves following him a problem?  Didn't he fight to specifically free those folks?
I'll repeat what I said multiple times already: The South fighted to protect slavery.  The North fighted to protect the Union.  And both are equally stupid and evil.
Had Lincoln proclaimed emancipation than invaded the South to free the slaves by force, I would agree with your point of view and be sympathetic to the Northern cause.  As it is, it's just a war between two belligerent with different world views that could easily have been solved diplomatically.  They went to war, it's a shame, but war happens.  There were no good guys and bad guys in the Seven Years War, as much as I hate to admit it.  It was two colonial power fighting to clear the other out of their way to establish their own domination.   Same as in 1861.

[viper37]

50%+1 is used for all kinds of decisions.  Legalize drugs? 50%+1.  Criminilize/legalize abortion?  50%+1.  Permit felons to vote or not?  50%+1.  Remove all voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Impose voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Admit a new State/Province?  50%+1.

I can only think of one case where a 50%+1 vote was used to involuntarily deprive a group of its citizenship, though, and the Nuremburg Laws shouldn't be your lodestone.

50%+1 is always the norm in democracy, except for some very specific case, generally constitutional changes that tend to deprive central governments of their power to redistribute it to its constituent parts.  No wonder such governments tried to make it extremely hard to change the law.  They knew it could threaten their central authority.

Canada was created by a 50%+1 law passed by the UK government. French speakers were denied of their rights by 50%+1.  When the decision to merger lower and upper Canada was made with the explicit goal of assimilatin French-Canadians into the superior English culture, it was 50%+1 in the UK parliament.  When the government of Canada sent the First Nations to boarding schools, it was an act of Parliament, no super majority there.  When French speakers in Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta where denied their right to public French schools, it was 50%+1.

Seems to me you must revise your history.  There's plenty of instances just in Canada where lots of people lost their rights by a 50%+1 margin in parliament.  We did not even bother with referendums.

[viper37]

There was no promise of evacuation.

Negotiators were led to believe and evacuation of the forts was coming.  No firm promises, but it was certainly hinted at.

Then Lincoln sent supplies.

How is that fair? Surely negotiations should at least have given Lincoln a few minutes or hours on the job before just declaring it all in bad faith and attacking with guns.

negotiators were given many weeks.

Really? After decades of political crisis over this issue they failed to notice it was contentious? Once the secession crisis kicked off? Both sides thought it would be a short thing.

Yes, just like the British thought the rebellion would be over as soon as their troops entered Boston, just as Santanna thought he won after destroying The Alamo.  Or like France and Germany thought WW1 would be over by Christmas.  People always seem to understimate the duration of wars, don't really understand why, even for contentious issues that lasted decades.

The goal of the abolitionists was to do that. But the Republican coalition had all kinds of shades of opposition to slavery and the one everybody agreed on was no expansion to slavery into the territories. That was the hill the Republicans chose to die on and the hill the Southern Democrats refused to accept.

For once, we are in agreement on this subject.

[The Minsky Moment]

And yet, before Secession, everyone was ok with these States.  Nothing changed with the Confederacy.  Same people in power, same laws as before.  In 1860 they were democracies when they voted in the election.  By 1861 they were no longer democracies.  By 1865, they were democracies again, even though the majority of voters couldn't vote at Federal and State level.

Kinda weird, don't you think?

Slavery was all fine in 1846.  Still absolutely fine in 1848.  I mean, no American soldier who served in this war is considered today to be a white supremacist worthy of cancellation.  Nobody is proposing to cancel the memory of Winfield Scott.  Or John C. Fremont.  Though he was severly reprimanded for freeing the slaves in a war that was supposed to be about the end of slavery. 

The Mexican-American war was a pure landgrab war to extend slavery in the US.  Those who fougth there were all heroes.  Half the same dudes who fought 15 years laters were evil slavers worthy of damnatio memoriae.  Things changed so fast!

Where do these ideas come from?  What histories are you reading?

[The Minsky Moment]

The Confederates were negotiating with Union representatives for the transfer of these forts.  It is totally false to claim they wanted it without compensation:The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States.

You realize that the implication of this claim is that the CSA representatives accepted and agreed with the concept that the forts were federal property?  Right? 

And thus the decision to fire on Ft Sumter, regardless of any imaginary trickery by that scurrilous Lincoln fellow, was . . .

[grumbler]

You realize that the implication of this claim is that the CSA representatives accepted and agreed with the concept that the forts were federal property?  Right? 

And thus the decision to fire on Ft Sumter, regardless of any imaginary trickery by that scurrilous Lincoln fellow, was . . .

"Yes, I'm pointing this gun at you, but I don't want to steal your car.  I want to buy if for a dollar.  If you don't agree... well, that's what the gun is for."

[Razgovory]

John C. Fremont was pretty anti-slavery before the Civil War...

[Syt]

Wait, do I read this correctly that viper is defending states that attempted to secede because they were worried that slavery would be banned and saw secession as the only way to preserve it? 

[Berkut]

He has no coherent argument here - he is just bouncing around from one silly thing to another because he really, really, really needs to believe that rebellion is awesome.

And btw viper, not a single southern state got 50%+1 votes for secession from the people who lives in those states. Not one.

[garbon]

50%+1 is used for all kinds of decisions.  Legalize drugs? 50%+1.  Criminilize/legalize abortion?  50%+1.  Permit felons to vote or not?  50%+1.  Remove all voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Impose voting restrictions? 50%+1.  Admit a new State/Province?  50%+1.

I can only think of one case where a 50%+1 vote was used to involuntarily deprive a group of its citizenship, though, and the Nuremburg Laws shouldn't be your lodestone.

50%+1 is always the norm in democracy, except for some very specific case, generally constitutional changes that tend to deprive central governments of their power to redistribute it to its constituent parts.  No wonder such governments tried to make it extremely hard to change the law.  They knew it could threaten their central authority.

Canada was created by a 50%+1 law passed by the UK government. French speakers were denied of their rights by 50%+1.  When the decision to merger lower and upper Canada was made with the explicit goal of assimilatin French-Canadians into the superior English culture, it was 50%+1 in the UK parliament.  When the government of Canada sent the First Nations to boarding schools, it was an act of Parliament, no super majority there.  When French speakers in Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta where denied their right to public French schools, it was 50%+1.

Seems to me you must revise your history.  There's plenty of instances just in Canada where lots of people lost their rights by a 50%+1 margin in parliament.  We did not even bother with referendums.

Not sure why we should be stuck to repeating the mistakes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[grumbler]

He has no coherent argument here - he is just bouncing around from one silly thing to another because he really, really, really needs to believe that rebellion is awesome.

And btw viper, not a single southern state got 50%+1 votes for secession from the people who lives in those states. Not one.

  First Rule of Holes applies.

[Razgovory]

He has no coherent argument here - he is just bouncing around from one silly thing to another because he really, really, really needs to believe that rebellion is awesome.

And btw viper, not a single southern state got 50%+1 votes for secession from the people who lives in those states. Not one.

  First Rule of Holes applies.

It's the first rule of holas.

Hi!