The Right Side of the News

Alex Jones? The Pizzagate guy? The "Sandy Hook was a false flag operation guy"? Surely free speech doesn't mean that people should be allowed to spread lies and dangerous "theories" with complete impunity.In fact, in holding people like Jones accountable for their baseless lies, private entities like Twitter are exercising their "free speech rights."If you own a business and have a bulletin board where the public can post notices and meetings, surely you retain the right to exercise some control over what can be posted on it.

For me, this has the same moral implications as "civil disobedience". Whenever someone is in a position where you have to make a decision to go along with something you find unethical or immoral, work within proper channels against the unethical, or violate accepted standards or the law to oppose the immoral, a person is going to make a personal judgment based on their beliefs.In the end, all the person can do is make the best decision they can while trying to be aware of the "unintended" consequences, including the possibility that they may be wrong and that they will not escape legal consequences or the judgment of history.

Funny enough, that's pretty much what I think...every time I read what Trump and his spokespersons are saying right now.

Me, I haven't really watch or listened to any news broadcast in years.This has to do less with content itself and more that I usually find it frustratingly empty of any depth.Plus, I'm much better and comprehending and retaining information from print sources than broadcast sources.

Or worse, a smidgen more ethical than Trump allows for his minions.Edited by Chiroptera, : Added more to the quote to provide better context.

Me, I'm getting the impression that some people are talking about slavery as if it were some abstract ideal and forgetting that it means "owning human beings and treating them like property".

This sounds a lot like that post-modernist, cultural and moral relativism that some on Right tend to criticize.Be that as it may, in my opinion even by the standards at the time, when most of the rest of the world was abolishing slavery and the fairly robust debate about the evils of slavery in this country, us Southerners couldn't possibly be ignorant as to the arguments against slavery.In fact, considering that at the time of the founding of this nation, there was widespread belief - even among white Southerners - that slavery was an obvious violation of the principals upon which the Republic was founded and that a means had to be found to end it. By the time of the Civil War, the South had gone backwards on the question.While I understand the principal of judging people based on "their time and culture", I believe that antebellum Southerners fail even this standard.

From the Guardian: Virginia judge rules confederate statues are war monuments and can't be removed

Well, aside from the historical fact that "suddenly ending slavery" was a minority position - and a very unpopular one at that, even in the North - I'm kind of curious:What problems would have resulted from human beings no longer being property that would have justified continuing to deny a large number of human beings basic human dignity?

At least Washington and Jefferson understood that slavery was wrong and a blatant contradiction of the (small r) republican ideals they worked for. Washington, in fact, did free his slaves - albeit after his death - and Jefferson supported forbidding slavery in the territories... and I'll remind the viewing audience that forbidding slavery in the territories was one of the issues that so enraged the Southern successionists.I would say that Washington and Jefferson did much to establish the very republican (small r) principles under which slavery was eventually abolished.

The evidence is that Clinton won the popular vote. The only way that could be possible is if the millions of illegals hiding in the National Parks came out to vote while giving kids ebola in transgender bathrooms,

Or Hungary! Hungary added a 'Slave Law' to Meet Labor Shortages. It’s Not Working So Well.Edited by Chiroptera, : Added quote from Percy's post.

So far, here's what I've gotten out of this thread:

• In the aftermath of a violent confrontation at a protest rally, when Trump was talking about "fine people on both sides", he wasn't actually referring to the actual white supremists who were at the rally and were the topic of the conversation - he went off topic and started talking about people with a fetish for uniformed men made of marble.
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• Competent generals should always be honored, no matter how heinous the cause for which they devote their talents.
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• Raising people from a status of being property to being human beings with civil rights causes problems. These problems are bad enough they justify going to war.
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• Many people in the antebellum Northern US didn't like slavery, This was unprovoked aggression that justified going to war.
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• Mid-nineteenth century white Southern Americans who were angry that many Northerners were opposed to treating human beings as property.
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  Early twenty-first century American conservatives who are angry that some cities require Federal immigration officials to carry out their duties without the assistance of local law enforcement.
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  These two things are so similar that understanding one helps to understand the other.
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• This similar thing seems to be: white people get really, really angry when non-white people vote.
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• Jesus taught that his followers should be nice to people. If those people are Christians. Jesus thinks everyone else can just suck it.

That's what I like about EvC: I sure do learn a lot!

Yeah, I came to that conclusion last night when I checked in.A few days ago, you mentioned that expecting coherence from Marc's posts was expecting too much. Well, if you reread them with the assumption that Marc believes slavery was a perfectly legitimate institution and that Southern secession was a reasonable response to Northern hostility to it, then suddenly there's a lot of coherence in Marc's posts. Factually and historically inaccurate, but there is a certain coherence.Which is unfortunate; I fear that means there is so little common ground that any kind of understanding maybe impossible.Edited by Admin, : Fix homonym mistake: "succession" => "secession"

It's pretty much standard history. Just about any history of slavery in the US will mention that despite the how unpopular slavery was in the North, very few people advocated abolition in the states where it existed.Most of the popular political activism consisted of opposing the Fugitive Slave Act and trying to prohibit slavery in the territories. Added by edit:I should clarify here: where Northerners did support emancipation, it was mostly in the context of gradual emancipation with compensation to the slave owners and with the cooperation of the Southern states themselves. The hardcore Abolitionist movement was minority position.- What is also well documented is that both of these things happened after seccession, and so aren't really indicative of the popularity of abolition at the time of Lincoln's election.The Emancipation Proclamation itself supports this. As a result of Southern secession in spite of all the compromises the Northern politicians were making, Northerners were becoming even more hostile to it. Furthermore, Union soldiers were writing home about the horrible conditions they were finding when the were occupying Southern territory.But still, Lincoln had to be careful. He was aware that the Republicans would lose a lot of support if it seemed like the War became a war about slavery, as well as a concern that he not overstep his Constitutional authority. For that reason, Lincoln was very careful to craft the Proclamation as a wartime measure under his authority as commander-in-chief against the portions of the Confederacy not yet under Union control (and therefore still in a state of belligerency).And the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified after the War, when the political environment was very, very different.- I don't see how blacks couldn't support themselves when they were already supporting entire white families.But seriously, the belief that blacks can't support themselves seems pretty damn racist.- Yeah, I'm sure some slave owners were kind to their slaves just as some dog owners are kind to their dogs. But black people are not dogs, so that's not all that relevant,What is relevant that denying any human being their dignity as a free and equal human being is prima facie cruel. You cannot have slavery that is not cruel.- As one source put it: Yeah, and there were Jews who supported Nazis. What of it?At any rate, every source I looked at indicated that these black Confederates deserted to the Union side whenever they had a chance and explained how they really weren't given much of a choice in the matter.Edited by Chiroptera, : No reason given.