Randomly clicked to page 31 of that thread. Whoa.

He thinks some pretty interesting things about the Civil War. It looks like his entrance starts around here:

"Sorry you disagree" lol

This thread needed a slavery derail that is also topical FFS

In a discussion where Tom argues that the Union should've merely let the Confederacy leave with whatever property they wanted because violence never changes anything, and I pointed out that we went from 4M slaves to zero slaves, and Case Closed said that the lives of the former slaves were "much better" after emancipation:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=2238
The bolded sentence there is referring to THE ABOLITION OF CHATTEL SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES.

Later he argued that claiming slaves were "0% free" was inaccurate because "many slaves had privileges".

When he got called out in this thread, it wasn't some ****ing roundabout way of connecting Tom's weirdo bitcoin evangelism to Bundy by way of their common libertarianism, it was because Tom Collins believes EXACTLY the same repulsive horse**** about slavery that Cliven Bundy does.

This is and will always be the greatest 2p2 politics forum thread

It is funny to see just how identical Bundy and TC are on those talking points. Is there some kind of Civil War for Racist Dummies book that they both read?

The thread is huge and I think I read it all a couple years back in ~4 days in my spare time but it is definitely worth a skim. That thread was a real turning point in this forum's history.

Someone with loads of spare time should make an index of it so those who never saw it could skip to the relevant/good parts

Pretty please

Heh, that thread is reminder of how terrible this forum was before the tragic death of ACism.

I know this is decidedly not funny subject matter, but this post has me laughing hysterically.

Cloven Bundy (interesting auto-correct - do we have proof he isn't the devil?) wouldn't have been able to own cattle and thus rack up a million bones in debt to the Government... if he were a slave.

Perhaps Bundy too would be better of as a slave?

Just asking questions.

Since I had alot of posts ITT, it went something like this...

Normal people: it's a little weird you guys are like really into defending the Confederacy, there are no other oppressed people in the world, now or historically? You guys should consider different tactics, it's shameful.
Confederate apologists: what are you guys even talking about, the Confederacy, was that a thing? I don't remember.
Normal people: Alot of you used to you know, cite Rothbard and used to have Rothbard avatars on your 2p2 profile, didn't you remember he was this huge Confederate apologist? Alot of you used to write long tomes about how awesome and necessary the Confederate cause was.
Confederate apologists: Confeder...Rothbard? Who's that?
Normal people: Remember your avatars? Cheering on Borodog copy and pasting long Rothbard passages? Well there's Rockwell too, Thomas DiLorenzo, Ron Paul, a bunch of other huge creeps that you guys all cite all the time defending your ideology that are also into Confederate apologia, that's like the same phenomenon.
Confederate apologists: We'll have to look into that...
Normal people: Well, OK, but anyway, a good idea would be to stop talking about the Civil War, most normal people don't find it this great moral conundrum and didn't think the South was on the moral side of it...
Confederate apologists: But the North invaded!
Normal people: Yeah but the South had slaves, slavery of black people is bad, slavery was a huge blight on America, it's an unqualified good to have it ended.
Confederate apologists: suspension of habeus corpus!
Normal people: Yeah but the South had slaves, slavery of black people is bad, slavery was a huge blight on America, it's an unqualified good to have it ended.
Confederate apologists: So many people died! For what?!
Normal people: Yeah but the South had slaves, slavery of black people is bad, slavery was a huge blight on America, it's an unqualified good to have it ended.
Confederate apologists: Lincoln could have bought the slaves and ended everything peacefully?
Normal people: That economically doesn't make sense since each slave will cost more and more to buy out, it's also a pretty hugely morally repugnant thing to bail out slaveowners with money for their chattel, also probably not, all the contemporary accounts of Confederates indicate they were willing to die to preserve the right to enslaving people, we even know that was probably true because like literally hundreds of thousands of southerners died to preserve the right to enslaving people
Confederate apologists: Slavery was just about to run its natural course and end without bloodshed before the north started firing.
Normal people: orlyowl.jpg --> pilesofdeadconfederatesoldiers.jpg
Confederate apologists: Are we even sure slavery is bad?
Normal people: Yes.
Confederate apologists: It's kind of like giving black people free food via food stamps. The real slaveholders are people who support welfare.
Normal people: lolno
Confederate apologists: The North didn't like black people either!
Normal people: OK? They weren't actually enslaving them.
Confederate apologists: But black people still have pretty bad lives!
Normal people: Mostly because alot of racists still exist, notably many of them are into Confederate nostalgia, anyway, that doesn't justify anything the Confederacy did or you defending them.
Confederate apologists: Lincoln was the real racist!
Normal people: What does that have to do with you defending the Confederacy?
Confederate apologists: Lincoln was not the hero you make him out to be.
Normal people: What does that have to do with you defending the Confederacy?
Confederate apologists: Lincoln sold poison milk to school children!
Normal people: What does that have to do with you defending the Confederacy?
Confederate apologists: The Civil War didn't even have anything to do with slavery! It was about Lincoln wanting POWER because the federal government is evil!
Normal people: Why did Jefferson Davis write that the Civil War had everything to do with slavery? Why is the Confederate Constitution littered with these really strong defenses of the right to own slaves?
Confederate apologists: General Lee like even once wrote a letter casting doubt about the institution of slavery.
Normal people: What does that have to do with you defending the Confederacy?
Confederate apologists: You're forgetting the importance of the 1857 Georgia Tariff Cotton Refudiation Act that was actually the powder keg for Northern Aggression, not slavery, which was always completely incidental to everything.
Normal people: I don't think any of that actually sounds correct but what does that have to do with you defending the Confederacy? You couldn't find some other band of separatists to support except the racist slave holding ones?
Confederate apologists: The important thing is keeping power local! That's what we support!
Normal people: So that power can be used to enslave people?
Confederate apologists: The important thing is local people control everything, not some distant federal government.
Normal people: So that power can be used to enslave people?
Confederate apologists: Why do you even keep talking about slavery and the South? None of us have ever even known anything about the Civil War ever.
Normal people: What about Rothbard, he wrote this huge disgusting thing about how awesome Dixie was and he's like central to your ideology?
Confederate apologists: Who's Rothbard?

...rinse, repeat forever.

DVaut, I'm a heterosexual male but will you still have my children?

lol mpethy.bridge chimed in towards the end of that thread, god he is such a bad poster

Sounds like a great time to just keep pretending your opponents are somebody else. Don't have to deal with them if you can just keep copy/pasting something somebody else said years ago and pretend it's exactly what they think. If you're a Republican, you're John McCain and if you're a Democrat you're Maxine Waters, easy game.

It's not surprising to see stuff like If the forum had a logo it would be

lol Happy_Fish. NO WAY could I possibly find a recent post of TomCollins apologizing for slavery. NO CHANCE. That's why we all have to live in the past.

yikes

wow that post

I'm more mocking the fact that you seem to think it's impressive to be "better" than people on the board while mocking instead of actually discussing things with them. The hilarity from you guys declaring some sort of "victory" in the bitcoin thread vs. TC is a perfect example.

No actual discussion of slavery, the Confederacy, federalism, or modern American right-wing libertarianism actually happened in that thread, just 20k posts of 'no actual discussing things with them.'

The plight of the modern Confederate sympathist on the internet: will no one give them the forum to actually discuss things with them, or will it just devolve into constant mocking? Sad, really. When will the Confederacy get a fair shake in this country?

I mean it's great to dissect an 8-month old post with no context and laugh, but it's not like if you read the thread TC is waving the flag for slavery.

I feel pretty confident and comfortable saying I'm a better person than TC given that post that Wookie just quoted.

I'm sure that it did, but if I spent every post mocking you for your "views" about something because I got your "position" from somebody else, you can see how it doesn't advance discourse.

Like it's fun to point and laugh because "lol racist libertarians" and everything, but it's pretty clear to me that Gary Johnson would be far far far far far better for blacks in the country than another D or R who keeps locking them up.

I guess this forum is just like politics in general. As long as you can be (or pretend to be) just a LITTLE better than your "political opponents" then that's good enough. You can just spend all your time mocking and pointing and ignore the fact your team isn't doing a very good job at what we hired them to do.

Do you want a round of applause or a sticker or something? I'm sure you've said things in your life much worse than what was quoted. You just don't have somebody following along behind you waiting to tell everybody you meet what it was. Regardless, being "better" than a guy on the internet isn't the goal.

Happy_Fish- Wait. So when you say "pretending your opponents are someone else", unpacking that, by "someone else" you mean "actually the same person", right? We're guilt by association fallacy smearing TomCollins with the things TomCollins wrote.

We are mocking Bundy for his views, which we learned about from listening to him talk. We're mocking Collins for his views, which we learned about because HE WROTE THEM DOWN AND SHOWED US THEM.

Instead of, discussing... what?