wat

you want to get back to the "REAL TOPIC" which is whether borodog is a neoconfederate racist, but my posts are mudslinging? It's fine if you don't think the issue of secession on its own, divorced from any emotionally-charged slavery discussion is not interesting to you personally, btw. Different strokes, right?

I already clarified.

I doubt this holds true, as you don't have to agree with how people use their rights to defend their rights. However, I'm not interested in defending the secession, or the motivation of the South and don't know enough about the issue to have an informed opinion on what other issues lied underneath the conflict.

It seems a bit dishonest to assume that slavery would exist in perpetuity in the South and that the North would have abolished it swiftly, had secession not led to war. The war was catalytic in abolishing slavery in the US, so what would have happened without the war is hard to tell. That the South was keen on conserving slavery is obvious though, much more obvious than the North wanting to abolish it on principle.

A points a gun at B and instructs B that unless B signs a contract to become a member of Organization X, A will shoot him. Does B first need to formally withdraw from Organization X for the contract to be unenforceable?

And I already answered. It's logically impossible to secede from something you aren't part of.

Alright, reasonable question. I'm just gonna scan the last hundred or so posts in this thread.

Post #1419

Post #1365

I think in those you did not address the point at hand. Although, all curtness aside, you do an admirable job of addressing points in other posts in this thread. Though I'll try and re explain my issue since I think I have deviated from what I originally wanted to flesh out with you.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/se...rchid=10702981

That's your post history. Mostly you really seem to think it's important that there are people on mises are wrong on the issue of race. While that's all fun and good you seem to use it as a means to just wave away anything said by them. Like the article you posted earlier about scrooge where the author had written something ten years ago you considered racist so you waved off his new article. But that article had nothing to do with race, it was a pretty simple article that only argued that real life has much more complex than that of a Dickens novel.

I am only bringing all this up because I have read thousands upon thousands of your posts and race is an issue that actually interests me a lot more than trying to contextualize the civil war(fwiw all this discussion is kinda goofy if when we forget that neither side ever had even the slightest inkling that the war would last most than a couple months and that it would be anything but a monstrous victory(same sell every time imo)).

Fwiw I agree mostly with Dr. Modern on the assessment of mises. Like that scrooge article, I think it was written in a way that is more abrasive to those who are not already libertarians. It was just an article that was not meant(I hope otherwise it's kinda lol) to introduce people into libertarianism. I know boro thinks that you're just a democrat trying to smear mises(and radical libertarianism) with an unrepresentative characterization of them, and I would tend to agree with him from what I have seen. Would you be at all interested in discussing this at more length?

I think you have mentioned something in the past about someone in the lib/ac crowd having some crazy views on race...perhaps you were referring to me? If that is true I would like to point out that I think that maybe an important element to this issue. I would love for you to respond to this with some length about how you see race with regards to it's involvement in with politics in a general way. If you wanna do this here or via pm I would be very much interested.

I didn't say Boro was a neoconfederate racist, nor did I say that was the REAL TOPIC.

I cited Boro's quote because he's guilty of accusing those who defend the Civil War as just of loving war crimes and tyranny while denying the natural consequences of the same logic is that they themselves are pro-slavery.

The topic of secession is interesting, but that doesn't mean your points are any less asinine and haven't already been thoroughly refuted by DrModern 30 posts ago.

Yes, yes they did:

This, all in a discussion concerning the "necessity" of said Northern aggression.

Would you care to elaborate instead of just asserting as such. I would appreciate it.

I actually agree with this, more or less. It is very much true that the South cannot divorce itself from its opinion of slavery.

But I would think it relevant to point out that the so-called "Confederate apologists" here have not and are not defending the particular mindset of your common Southerner of the time (that of racism, bigotry, legitimacy of slavery, etc). They have simply stated that the North was not justified in their actions (whatever good may have come of it) and such. To claim that the Northern aggression is justified on the basis that slavery was eradicated is very much like saying that the US intervention in Iraqi affairs is justified because the end result may have happened to be a pro-Western, stable, democratic government (or some other such nonsense). Does that change the fact that the aggression and reaction was founded on theft, threat of violence, slavery through conscription and so on and so forth (yes, both sides engaged in such horse****)? It really comes down to "do the ends justify the means?" and "at what cost?" Sure, from a Von Clauswitzian standpoint the North did what it had to in order to win the war, but that isn't really what is being discussed, is it? It is the privilege of our particular position in history to look back at these events and judge them from a moral standpoint.

While I would personally agree with you and say it is true that the South cannot really divorce itself from the idea of slavery, I think it is very important to keep in mind the motivations of the war itself. The war in itself was absolutely NOT fought on the issue of slavery (Lincoln himself embarked on the war explicitly denying that it was a war to end slavery), but of the issue of taxation and federal vs. state power. Even Jefferson Davis believed the institution of slavery would soon die out very soon.

The whole war rested on the fact that South Carolina believed that the federal government rested on the consent of the governed (the very thing the Declaration of Independence stated). It no longer consented, so it withdrew from the Union. This set off the social powder keg.

I agree. So if the slaves didn't consent to being slaves, then they weren't actually slaves, therefore ending slavery was logically impossible, as there were no slaves, therefore slavery couldn't be the cause of the civil war.

lolz

So, DrModern,

new question. A bunch of people in Maine decide they want to have a government, but they don't like the current US federal government and would like to see Maine as a separate political entity from the USA. How can they go about making this happen?

If the answer is "they can't" I'm cool with that.

By this, I mean, I'll accept that as your answer, I'm just looking for your personal opinion on action plans and stuff.

No fair. For some reason, PVN gets to ask all the questions.

Is that one of the perks of being king?

No. You can arrive at the conclusion that civil war supporters are pro-war-crime and fail to conclude that civil war opponents are pro-slavery and be logically consistent.

"Logic is a little tweeting bird, chirping in a meadow. Logic is wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green!"
-- Spock

You are not allowed to ask that.

Faulty analogy. Slavery is not the product of consent, it is by definition a condition forced on people.

People who consented 200 or so years ago do not speak for people today.

Let's look at the bolded, because it's central to what I'm talking about.

I'm not claiming that "Confederate apologists" here share the mindset of the ante-bellum South, BUT IF you're going to bludgeon Fly et al and claim that the Civil War was unjustified because the North engaged in "theft, threat of violence, slavery through conscription and so on and so forth", then by the same token, those same Confederate apologists are saddled with the nasty and odious nature of what the South did and was trying to do.

I mean the claim from the critics of the North is that you can't divorce the Civil Wars ends (ending slavery) from the moral odiousness of the historical reality of how the war was conducted by the North and their true motivations. That's what the critics demand people acknowledge.

And frankly, I'm happy to acknowledge it personally.

But as DE said, anyone who argues that the Union should have let the CSA go their merry way is, by the exact same logic, taking a pro-slavery position.

If Confederate apologists insist on demanding that people who defend the Civil War be saddled with the North's less-than-altruistic motivations and immoral tactics because those can't be ignored, then surely those who wished the CSA was allowed to secede without molestation are forced to be saddled with the South's less-than-altruistic motivations for secession.

Nah, they could have run away. To siberia, for example.

Seriously, though, OK, if we run with this, where are you getting that the people in Maine in question have consented to government X?

OK, this is fine. Confederate apologists should get saddled with all of that. Kool?

I'm just here to disrespect Lincoln. I am not carrying any water for the CSA. Now, how are you going to handwave me away?

My neighbor stole my lawnmower. Is it OK for me to burn his house down? I never really got an answer on that. What if I sweeten the deal by mentioning that he's a real scumbag?

What? I would think you of all people would know that I don't think they did. And if they didn't, they can't and don't need to secede from anything (because they aren't a part of anything). We both know what happens if, say, they don't pay their taxes, and you know I think that's illegitimate, but this is getting back to the same stuff we usually discuss ("is the state legitimate at all?") and isn't really about secession, and certainly isn't about the Civil War.

As I demonstrated, that logic is obviously tortured and only employed by demagogues.

Anyway, don't you have more worthy things to attend to besides this mudslinging? You know, higher callings: irrelevant hot dog analogies, getting pwned by DrModern, etc.?

1) by not burning my neighbor's house down, I am taking a pro-lawnmower-theft position?

2) If we discovered that I myself steal lawnmowers on occasion (but less frequently than my neighbor) would that change anything?