1) Naw, man, that's just a statement of fact. I think everyone understands that ending slavery without the war would've been better than either of those. I'm not sure that was on the table, though, and the people who took that option away were the Southerners who seceded.

2) That's not even in the OP, though. LOL @ you. You literally skimmed Paul's post, deciding it was probably about the Civil War, and started posting Jefferson Davis' greatest hits in this thread. Just like I said. You have a script for this ****, and you're too lazy to update it when parts of it get proven ineffective.

stop here

I don't see those two secessions as morally equal.

Of course it was. It just wasn't going to be instant or obvious.

Well, they made things harder, sure. So anytime anyone makes things more difficult, anything goes to correct that?

What did Lincoln do to provoke secession? Like what could he have done to pacify the South, who was just "making things harder"?

Gubrmnt

What? I don't consider secession to be Lincoln's fault.

So after secession, what Lincoln should've done is withdrawn all of his troops from whichever parts had claimed to have seceded(a secession that was both illegal under the US Constitution and illegitimate under pretty much any reasonable theory of political morality)? Or what? Didn't he have an obligation to protect federal loyalists in Confederate territory?

Like, we all know the white supremacists who taught you literally everything you know about everything hate Lincoln. And so you hate him too.

But what did he do wrong before the war? I mean, earlier in this thread you tried to strawman me by saying "anything goes" b/c obviously I love war or whatever, but the Confederates shot at boats that were resupplying Fort Sumter. Continuing to feed your peaceful soldiers is, to most normal people, not really at the top of the "retaliation" chart.

Again, just to timeline it for you:

Various compromises by Northerners fail to mollify Southern fears that they were gonna have to stop keeping people as property so they secede
Some time passes in an uneasy peace
Southerners start shooting because the tyrant Lincoln didn't abandon Fort Sumter
LOL Sherman burns down Atlanta

pvn I have seceded from the Union and I'm taking your house with me. Any attempt to buy groceries will be seen as an act of war. I'm pretty much like Han Solo shooting Greedo, nothing I can do but start shooting if all of my demands aren't met.

is any of this in dispute?

what's your claim on my house?

now, what's south carolina's claim on, uh, south carolina?

I mean, you want to play the game where states are legitimate political entities, then here it is. You got what you wanted, enjoy the unintended consequences.

yes

Trivially, the federal government has a claim to Ft. Sumter. Lincoln was defending federal property.

So whereever there were federal troops, if rebels say that those troops are bothering them, they had to leave or it's Lincoln's fault if the rebels start shooting?

So if there are trespassers on disputed land and their boss tries to send them food so they don't starve to death, anything goes?

I like pvn's version of armed combat if that is the case.

Eminent domain, it's a bitch.

well, yeah, these are the rules you want to play by.

This is just grasping at straws. It's not like South Carolina was even making that argument.

What rules? Why am I a decisionmaker here? If I'm not an anarchist, I have to admit that all governments are equally legitimate and can't be going around claiming one is worse than another? Those are my rules? "If one government exists, all governments can claim whatever land they want and um, each claim is equally valid, except the Confederate claim which is the most valid for some ****ing reason".

Did that even make sense in your head?

You're the one who saw a thread making fun of Ron Paul as some sort of implicit defense of Lincoln and had to ride to Dixie's defense. Much like your ancestors on the banks of Charleston's harbor, you could've avoided all of this.

Dear lord Fly is owning this thread so hard. I have laughed out loud like 5x on this page alone.

What? It has nothing to do with one being better than the other.

no, because that's not what I was arguing. Not at all. It's not like south carolina could secede and take manhattan with them.

Fly,

do you consider something like, say, a federally-owned missile-testing range in the nevada desert to be "in nevada" (politically)?

No, I did. You just snipped the post. If it's not economical, only the most fanatical will enslave others.

FYP

Once again, the neo-confederates are asking us to assume their desired result at the end of the war, namely CSA independence and international recognized sovereignty, as a given and the only possible starting point before the CSA even initiated and waged their war of southern aggression.