bah
01-03-2008, 03:22 PM
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/442560-ron-paul-bridging-gap-19th-century-treason.html
"Ron Paul: Bridging the Gap to 19th Century Treason"
Some points:
The Civil War:
"Does this Paul smear game never get old?"
Apparently not, and for good reason. I was actually looking Paul over due to his take on the war-- until this current nonsense. The guy is a rightwing clown. It is my opinion that no truly freedom loving American would ever vote for him. Making the arguments he has made proves to me he does not understand humanity's natural right to live free. He will fail as a presidential candidate and it is a good thing.
"As for the Lincoln thing, I suggest you all read some actual true Lincoln scholarship rather than the b.s. the high school history textbooks are spewing. Dr. Thomas J DiLorenzo is an excellent start."
DiLorenzo is a right-winged hack, and not even a historian. The problems with his book are legion. For example, he completely overlooks the differences between American slavery and slavery of other sorts. Well, that difference is most critical to any argument about slavery dying out as it did elsewhere. Southern leaders had pressed for sometime for the ability to take slaves west and use them in mines and factories. They even advocated expanding into South America, to take over "the mud races" there and use American slaves in the land. DiLorenzo overlooks established history to make what amounts to a simpistic neo-confederate statement.
"The reality is that Lincoln is no civil rights hero at all."
Were it not for Lincoln, we would not have the 13th Amendment to our Constitution, ending slavery. Were it not for Lincoln, we would not have acquired the 14th Amendment, allowing blacks due process and equal protection under the law. Lincoln was decades ahead of his time when it comes to Civil Rights. He was several centuries ahead of the South and is still ahead of the South in many ways. He was no MLK, but MLK would have been vastly inappropriate for Lincoln's time. Lincoln was the hero of blacks for his particular day, as Jefferson was in times before. He was so far ahead of most people it is miraculous that he was ever president. Only by a near supernatural confluence of events could someone so far ahead of the public in the area of civil rights have been elected President of the United States. He may not be a hero to you and other neo-confederates, but he is quite a hero to any fair-minded American who knows history.
"He voted for the fugitive slave act, said he wanted to respect the institution of slavery, and said he'd fight the civil war even if he couldn't free a single slave."
That is because the law, hateful as it was, permitted slaves where they then existed. Lincoln's job was to defend the law, and that is what he did. He disliked slavery, but was compelled by American law to protect it where it existed. We ought not corrupt the history here simply because we wish to protect a neo-confederate agenda.
"The Emancipation Proclamation freed nobody, and the SOUTH literally freed their slaves before the Union states did."
The EP freed a vast number of blacks. But as usual, Southerners were so far behind the times they were the last to find out about it. Lincoln was a remarkable politician who deftly used the EP to destabilize the South and also keep England out of the Civil War. It was a brilliant forking move that eventually broke the South's back. It may not have had the immediate effect of freeing slaves, since the South was still spilling blood to keep blacks in bondage. But as sure as the sun rises I sit here a free man today quite in large part because of Lincoln's struggle against the South and because of his Emancipation Proclamation. I must give the man his due. He is our greatest president.
"Lincoln placed blacks in internment camps during the war that even caused pro-slavery confederate leaders like Robert E lee to complain about the inhumane conditions in these camps."
Please. When blacks got wind that the pro-freedom Union army was in the region, they ran away from slavery in droves right into the Union camps. Those camps were simply unprepared for them. Indeed, conditions were bad even before the slaves arrived, with very many people dying from infections and other problems. Bobby Lee complained about prison camps, but only because so many of his pro-slavery confederates were dying there.
"He suspended habeas corpus..."
The South did exactly the same thing. It was war, where things such as civility by definition no longer exist.
"And also, Lincoln signed off on the largest mass execution of Native Americans in recorded history. Their crime? Not leaving Minnesota when Lincoln withdrew from a treaty promising them land in Minnesota. Lincoln was a tyrant that would make even the likes of Andrew Jackson shudder."
This is very, very wrong and dishonorable. You speak of Sibley's order, I suppose. Lincoln inherited a very corrupt Dept. of Indian Affairs, a department that had harmed Indians long before Lincoln arrived. Moreover, the nation was at war with Indians in the region and Lincoln came into a situation where 303 enemy indians had been accused of atrocities against settlers in the region. I personally suspect any charge against an Indian made by whites of the time. But my personal views here are not law, and neither were Lincoln's views. Since the government in the region wanted justice against maurauding Indians, Lincoln had little choice but to accede to the wishes of the people. He resisted any execution at all for sometime, but the situation continued to worsen. Eventually, he agreed to the execution of only 39 of the worst offenders. Surely these actions were part of America's land grab away from Indians. But Bobby Lee literally took up arms and fought for the same sort of thing against Indians out west and, of course, in Mexico. It was the way of the world at the time. If by these standards Lincoln is such a tyrant, then so was nearly every white leader in America. Lincoln was far above them because at least he wished to end slavery.
"The Confederates fired on Fort Sumter because it was THEIR FORT and it had been invaded."
Ft. Sumter was a federal fort occupied initially with Federal troops, some of which were southerners. When the southerners decided to leave the union, they left Sumter, declaring that the fort no longer belonged to the Union. The remaining Federal troops defended the fort as Federal property. But they eventually ran out of supplies. When Lincoln went to resupply the fort, Southerners fired on it, beginning the Civil War.
Imagine, dear reader, you and I entering an agreement wherein we all decide to pool our resources and buy several homes together. Imagine that we later fall into a disagreement and that I decide to claim one of the homes as my own. You would think me quite insane. Only by a legal and MUTUAL agreement could the South own a Federal fort. That is just plain common sense, a thing that was in obvious short supply in the South back in 1861, and also today.
"'Civil War' is inaccurate, because it implies two entities fighting for control of one government. The reality is that the Confederacy's original plan was peaceful secession, and its backup plan was forceful secession."
There was no Southern government recognized by the mutually embraced United States Constitution. The ONLY government that legal document recognized was the government of the Union. It recognizes no unilateral right of ANY party to declare itself free of the union so that it could form a government. Indeed, the constitution even states quite clearly that no such confederation can exist.
"No matter who fired the first shot, this was Lincoln's war through and through. And he waged it to keep the country together, not to end slavery."
He wished to supply a United States fort. The South fired on that fort and paid a heavy price. The reason the South fired on the fort is because the South tried to break the agreement codified in the Constitution. Why did the South try this? Because it knew Lincoln wished to end the expansion of slavery out west. It tried to break union because of Lincoln's views on slavery. Lincoln fought to keep the union intact and also to end the expansion of slavery. He would not relent on this point. But when ending slavery altogether appeared to him useful in his primary goal of keeping the union intact, Lincoln moved swiftly to end slavery wherever the law permitted. He defended the union first and foremost, and he ended slavery - which was his desire even before the union was threatened.
"Well, we are the only major country that needed a war to free the slaves. None of the countries that did it through other means are wishing that they had instead done it by waging the bloodiest war in their country's history."
That is because, unlike every single one of the other countries exploiting black slaves, America bred slaves like cattle so that the slave population grew dramatically. Whereas other countries had to perpetually import slaves, due to their populations dying out, America bred them and grew them like animals and crops. The value of slaves was nearly an astronomical three billion dollars by the time of the war. This shows the falsehood of the claim that the Peculiar Institution was dying in America. It was not dying. It was in fact heating up and trying to spread west. Only one man in history stood against this, and oftentimes he stood alone. The man? Good Ol' Abe Lincoln.
I do not claim Lincoln was perfect. No one is. I claim we ought to give the man his due credit. Tom Jefferson was another deeply flawed individual. But the man was so far ahead of most, along with Washington, Madison and others, that I must give him his due honor. Slandering Lincoln with all these awful names is just poor form. It also betrays a massive degree of Invincible Ignorance and sheer hick stupidity.
Racial discrimination in the housing market:
"Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence - not skin color, gender, or ethnicity."
Wow. So free markets can't be racist? If all the homeowners in a district freely and independently decide that they'll only sell their homes to white people, does that mean that it's no longer a free market? What is it?
Truly unrestricted capitalism allows the people with capital at the outset of the free market to use the market to express whatever their values may be, including racist values. Even if the business owners aren't racist themselves, if the population of consumers is racist, then it's economically rational to operate your company in a racist way. If the people with capital are white, and they all decide to exclude non-whites from full participation in the market, then how exactly does the free market act to reward competency and minimize the importance of skin color?
"The point is, if the people with capital, are people, then they get sold houses."
This is as wrong as it could be, and whoever was in charge of the American history curriculum at your high school needs a serious wake-up call. "Negro" and "Mongolian" people with green money did NOT get sold houses in most neighborhoods in this country prior to a Supreme Court case called Shelley v. Kraemer -- which took away the previously existing free-market right to make racially exclusive, enforceable land contracts. They were called restrictive covenants, and they were de rigeur in this country for decades.
Even after Shelley rendered these covenants unenforceable in the courts, it was legal under federal law to choose to sell your property only to people of a certain race up until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Do you think that this law was enacted solely to stir up racial tensions or give special rights to minorities? Or are you aware that MANY landowners were openly restricting tenants and buyers based on race before this law? And that the Department of Justice is frequently in the courts enforcing the law to this day, because property owners keep breaking it?
You really, really need to read up on your history if you're going to make statements about what American market players do in the absence of civil rights enforcement. From 1776 to 1968, we ran a real-time experiment where we could observe behavior in an unregulated property market. The record trumps your theory about green being the only color that counts in a free market.
The restrictive covenant ran with the land, and it didn't have any expiration date that I am aware of.
Yes, in these particular cases one white person (out of around 50 neighborhood homeowners in the Missouri case) did try to break the covenant. You can rest assured that if the neighbors would sue to stop a third-party transaction like that, they weren't willing to sell to black buyers themselves. And that refusal was perfectly legal, even after this case, until state and federal civil rights laws banned it in the sixties. Of course, it does still go on to some degree, which is why the Justice Department has a whole arm devoted to enforcing federal fair housing laws.
If you think you're really playing in the market if only one homeowner out of fifty will entertain the idea of selling to "your kind," regardless of the color of your money...then I suspect you haven't ever bought a house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So the Ron Paul supporters are losing the debate on racism and the Civil War. It would be helpful if some people here could register on that forum and post some responses. Thanks. I am really running out of patience and time.
"Ron Paul: Bridging the Gap to 19th Century Treason"
Some points:
The Civil War:
"Does this Paul smear game never get old?"
Apparently not, and for good reason. I was actually looking Paul over due to his take on the war-- until this current nonsense. The guy is a rightwing clown. It is my opinion that no truly freedom loving American would ever vote for him. Making the arguments he has made proves to me he does not understand humanity's natural right to live free. He will fail as a presidential candidate and it is a good thing.
"As for the Lincoln thing, I suggest you all read some actual true Lincoln scholarship rather than the b.s. the high school history textbooks are spewing. Dr. Thomas J DiLorenzo is an excellent start."
DiLorenzo is a right-winged hack, and not even a historian. The problems with his book are legion. For example, he completely overlooks the differences between American slavery and slavery of other sorts. Well, that difference is most critical to any argument about slavery dying out as it did elsewhere. Southern leaders had pressed for sometime for the ability to take slaves west and use them in mines and factories. They even advocated expanding into South America, to take over "the mud races" there and use American slaves in the land. DiLorenzo overlooks established history to make what amounts to a simpistic neo-confederate statement.
"The reality is that Lincoln is no civil rights hero at all."
Were it not for Lincoln, we would not have the 13th Amendment to our Constitution, ending slavery. Were it not for Lincoln, we would not have acquired the 14th Amendment, allowing blacks due process and equal protection under the law. Lincoln was decades ahead of his time when it comes to Civil Rights. He was several centuries ahead of the South and is still ahead of the South in many ways. He was no MLK, but MLK would have been vastly inappropriate for Lincoln's time. Lincoln was the hero of blacks for his particular day, as Jefferson was in times before. He was so far ahead of most people it is miraculous that he was ever president. Only by a near supernatural confluence of events could someone so far ahead of the public in the area of civil rights have been elected President of the United States. He may not be a hero to you and other neo-confederates, but he is quite a hero to any fair-minded American who knows history.
"He voted for the fugitive slave act, said he wanted to respect the institution of slavery, and said he'd fight the civil war even if he couldn't free a single slave."
That is because the law, hateful as it was, permitted slaves where they then existed. Lincoln's job was to defend the law, and that is what he did. He disliked slavery, but was compelled by American law to protect it where it existed. We ought not corrupt the history here simply because we wish to protect a neo-confederate agenda.
"The Emancipation Proclamation freed nobody, and the SOUTH literally freed their slaves before the Union states did."
The EP freed a vast number of blacks. But as usual, Southerners were so far behind the times they were the last to find out about it. Lincoln was a remarkable politician who deftly used the EP to destabilize the South and also keep England out of the Civil War. It was a brilliant forking move that eventually broke the South's back. It may not have had the immediate effect of freeing slaves, since the South was still spilling blood to keep blacks in bondage. But as sure as the sun rises I sit here a free man today quite in large part because of Lincoln's struggle against the South and because of his Emancipation Proclamation. I must give the man his due. He is our greatest president.
"Lincoln placed blacks in internment camps during the war that even caused pro-slavery confederate leaders like Robert E lee to complain about the inhumane conditions in these camps."
Please. When blacks got wind that the pro-freedom Union army was in the region, they ran away from slavery in droves right into the Union camps. Those camps were simply unprepared for them. Indeed, conditions were bad even before the slaves arrived, with very many people dying from infections and other problems. Bobby Lee complained about prison camps, but only because so many of his pro-slavery confederates were dying there.
"He suspended habeas corpus..."
The South did exactly the same thing. It was war, where things such as civility by definition no longer exist.
"And also, Lincoln signed off on the largest mass execution of Native Americans in recorded history. Their crime? Not leaving Minnesota when Lincoln withdrew from a treaty promising them land in Minnesota. Lincoln was a tyrant that would make even the likes of Andrew Jackson shudder."
This is very, very wrong and dishonorable. You speak of Sibley's order, I suppose. Lincoln inherited a very corrupt Dept. of Indian Affairs, a department that had harmed Indians long before Lincoln arrived. Moreover, the nation was at war with Indians in the region and Lincoln came into a situation where 303 enemy indians had been accused of atrocities against settlers in the region. I personally suspect any charge against an Indian made by whites of the time. But my personal views here are not law, and neither were Lincoln's views. Since the government in the region wanted justice against maurauding Indians, Lincoln had little choice but to accede to the wishes of the people. He resisted any execution at all for sometime, but the situation continued to worsen. Eventually, he agreed to the execution of only 39 of the worst offenders. Surely these actions were part of America's land grab away from Indians. But Bobby Lee literally took up arms and fought for the same sort of thing against Indians out west and, of course, in Mexico. It was the way of the world at the time. If by these standards Lincoln is such a tyrant, then so was nearly every white leader in America. Lincoln was far above them because at least he wished to end slavery.
"The Confederates fired on Fort Sumter because it was THEIR FORT and it had been invaded."
Ft. Sumter was a federal fort occupied initially with Federal troops, some of which were southerners. When the southerners decided to leave the union, they left Sumter, declaring that the fort no longer belonged to the Union. The remaining Federal troops defended the fort as Federal property. But they eventually ran out of supplies. When Lincoln went to resupply the fort, Southerners fired on it, beginning the Civil War.
Imagine, dear reader, you and I entering an agreement wherein we all decide to pool our resources and buy several homes together. Imagine that we later fall into a disagreement and that I decide to claim one of the homes as my own. You would think me quite insane. Only by a legal and MUTUAL agreement could the South own a Federal fort. That is just plain common sense, a thing that was in obvious short supply in the South back in 1861, and also today.
"'Civil War' is inaccurate, because it implies two entities fighting for control of one government. The reality is that the Confederacy's original plan was peaceful secession, and its backup plan was forceful secession."
There was no Southern government recognized by the mutually embraced United States Constitution. The ONLY government that legal document recognized was the government of the Union. It recognizes no unilateral right of ANY party to declare itself free of the union so that it could form a government. Indeed, the constitution even states quite clearly that no such confederation can exist.
"No matter who fired the first shot, this was Lincoln's war through and through. And he waged it to keep the country together, not to end slavery."
He wished to supply a United States fort. The South fired on that fort and paid a heavy price. The reason the South fired on the fort is because the South tried to break the agreement codified in the Constitution. Why did the South try this? Because it knew Lincoln wished to end the expansion of slavery out west. It tried to break union because of Lincoln's views on slavery. Lincoln fought to keep the union intact and also to end the expansion of slavery. He would not relent on this point. But when ending slavery altogether appeared to him useful in his primary goal of keeping the union intact, Lincoln moved swiftly to end slavery wherever the law permitted. He defended the union first and foremost, and he ended slavery - which was his desire even before the union was threatened.
"Well, we are the only major country that needed a war to free the slaves. None of the countries that did it through other means are wishing that they had instead done it by waging the bloodiest war in their country's history."
That is because, unlike every single one of the other countries exploiting black slaves, America bred slaves like cattle so that the slave population grew dramatically. Whereas other countries had to perpetually import slaves, due to their populations dying out, America bred them and grew them like animals and crops. The value of slaves was nearly an astronomical three billion dollars by the time of the war. This shows the falsehood of the claim that the Peculiar Institution was dying in America. It was not dying. It was in fact heating up and trying to spread west. Only one man in history stood against this, and oftentimes he stood alone. The man? Good Ol' Abe Lincoln.
I do not claim Lincoln was perfect. No one is. I claim we ought to give the man his due credit. Tom Jefferson was another deeply flawed individual. But the man was so far ahead of most, along with Washington, Madison and others, that I must give him his due honor. Slandering Lincoln with all these awful names is just poor form. It also betrays a massive degree of Invincible Ignorance and sheer hick stupidity.
Racial discrimination in the housing market:
"Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence - not skin color, gender, or ethnicity."
Wow. So free markets can't be racist? If all the homeowners in a district freely and independently decide that they'll only sell their homes to white people, does that mean that it's no longer a free market? What is it?
Truly unrestricted capitalism allows the people with capital at the outset of the free market to use the market to express whatever their values may be, including racist values. Even if the business owners aren't racist themselves, if the population of consumers is racist, then it's economically rational to operate your company in a racist way. If the people with capital are white, and they all decide to exclude non-whites from full participation in the market, then how exactly does the free market act to reward competency and minimize the importance of skin color?
"The point is, if the people with capital, are people, then they get sold houses."
This is as wrong as it could be, and whoever was in charge of the American history curriculum at your high school needs a serious wake-up call. "Negro" and "Mongolian" people with green money did NOT get sold houses in most neighborhoods in this country prior to a Supreme Court case called Shelley v. Kraemer -- which took away the previously existing free-market right to make racially exclusive, enforceable land contracts. They were called restrictive covenants, and they were de rigeur in this country for decades.
Even after Shelley rendered these covenants unenforceable in the courts, it was legal under federal law to choose to sell your property only to people of a certain race up until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Do you think that this law was enacted solely to stir up racial tensions or give special rights to minorities? Or are you aware that MANY landowners were openly restricting tenants and buyers based on race before this law? And that the Department of Justice is frequently in the courts enforcing the law to this day, because property owners keep breaking it?
You really, really need to read up on your history if you're going to make statements about what American market players do in the absence of civil rights enforcement. From 1776 to 1968, we ran a real-time experiment where we could observe behavior in an unregulated property market. The record trumps your theory about green being the only color that counts in a free market.
The restrictive covenant ran with the land, and it didn't have any expiration date that I am aware of.
Yes, in these particular cases one white person (out of around 50 neighborhood homeowners in the Missouri case) did try to break the covenant. You can rest assured that if the neighbors would sue to stop a third-party transaction like that, they weren't willing to sell to black buyers themselves. And that refusal was perfectly legal, even after this case, until state and federal civil rights laws banned it in the sixties. Of course, it does still go on to some degree, which is why the Justice Department has a whole arm devoted to enforcing federal fair housing laws.
If you think you're really playing in the market if only one homeowner out of fifty will entertain the idea of selling to "your kind," regardless of the color of your money...then I suspect you haven't ever bought a house.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So the Ron Paul supporters are losing the debate on racism and the Civil War. It would be helpful if some people here could register on that forum and post some responses. Thanks. I am really running out of patience and time.