Words of Wisdom (for ALL of us)Follow

I call bullsh*t. If slavery was on the decline in the south, it was only because of increasing restrictions coming from Northern States where Abolitionist movements gained some traction.

I mean, Jim Crowe laws and lynchings were plentiful in the 60s. I don't think alot of people then would have been against slavery.

Meh, probably not. Equal rights and slavery aren't the same thing. The industrial revolution likely would have made slavery in the sense that it was practiced in the South useless and expensive. You largely have the functional equivalent of this, now, with prison labor. It couldn't possibly generate enough revenue to be self sufficient without tax dollars. The reality is that it's very likely the South would have voluntarily abolished slavery eventually, probably a few decades later than the end of the war.

That aside, while slavery was an issue in the war, it probably wasn't really the driving one. There had to be a reckoning between the power of individual states relative to the federal government, and people would have died over it with no extraneous issues to noble up the winning side after they made the conscious decision to fight a war of attrition with no regard to how many people were killed on either side in the name of victory.

Bah humbug!

You know who abolished slavery while it was still lucrative, and forced others to do the same?

Yeah, that's right, the British Empire, paragon of morality.

I did have to kinda sneak up on it...

I think Varus has some very bizarre rationales for his positions, and frankly takes a ton of positions I don't agree with. However, just because someone has wrong reasons for saying something, or just expresses them poorly does not automatically make the actual statement wrong. It just means that person didn't do a good job of defending or expressing that statement.


We tend to see a lot of "Find the person with the worst argument, attack him and declare whatever position he holds to be wrong/debunked/whatever" in our political discussions. A weak argument does not mean that a statement made is false, but it is often assumed to be the case. I tend to prefer to look at the statement or claim on its own merits and not worry that much about who said it, or whether their reasons for saying it make sense.


If someone says "Since dogs are mammals that means that it should be legal to carry a concealed weapon at all times", regardless of how ridiculous the reasoning is, it does not mean that the first statement is incorrect (or even that the gun control issue is wrong either for that matter).

To be fair, this is widespread in almost all forms of debate regardless of who you are or what you're talking about. People simply come up with counters to the easy arguments sooner, and present them as soon as possible.

As a remedy I try to clearly delineate which argument is aimed at whom, instead of assuming that my opponents form some kind of anti-me club.

Shit, looks like I posted on the wrong account. Sorry guys, won't happen again.

Always take out the healers first.

It's still worth mentioning that one of the flagship "states issues" at the time was the right to own other people as slaves. People tend to say "It wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights" as if the two were exclusive. It wasn't by astounding coincidence that the states suddenly interested in their individual rights were located south of the Mason-Dixon line.

(I'm sure Smash is aware of this but I was reading something else where people were debating how, although 'slavery' is a simplistic answer to the cause of the Civil War, it seems to be slowly revised into purely 'States Rights' as though people don't want to admit that -- geographically speaking -- half of the country was in fact deeply into the whole "owning other people as property" thing.)