For @bobknight33-
Equality - e·qual·i·ty
/əˈkwälədē/
noun
the state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.
"an organization aiming to promote racial equality"
synonyms: fairness, justness, equitability, impartiality, even-handedness, egalitarianism, equal rights, equal opportunities, nondiscrimination, justice, freedom, emancipation, coequality

It does not mean exact sameness, mirror image, clone, 50/50 split on everything, no difference, etc..... This is why it's important to know your own language, it helps you not be an imbecile.

I have read that Lee quote too. I think he meant any statues or monuments to the confederacy, but that's just my opinion.

I certainly see a distinction between imperfect but honorable men trying to do right and treasonous racists trying to found a nation rooted in the racist concept that ...."the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. "

I, for one, don't demand perfection from my heros, only honor, honesty, and empathy. Claiming other people are subhuman and naturally subordinate fails on all three counts.

I think it's important to evaluate the reasons many monuments were erected, in the case of confederate monuments it was done to oppose civil rights for non whites, install a permanent reminder of the pervasive racism the confederate was founded on, and to misrepresent history to minimize their ancestors treason.
In the case of the Lincoln emancipation monument, it was to celebrate finally officially recognizing the humanity of a large portion of the population. I would hope anyone bothered by it's depictions 1)understands the history of its creation (thanks for that) and 2)offers to replace it at their expense rather than demand its removal at taxpayer expense.

have read a number of Lee descendants were okay w/removing his statues, too. by now, i'd hope, most folks know R.E.L. said statues weren't gonna be helpful.

“I think it wiser, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

of course, he was talking about a gettysburg memorial, so maybe he was reluctant to have a memorial at the site of his gravest error.

but the issue is like most things: complicated. like the lincoln emancipation memorial. get how the couchant slave is a downer, but the fact former slaves paid for its erection, the model for the slave was t.s. eliott grandpa's gardener, a former escaped slave, and is mohammed ali's direct ancestor - is kinda cool. maybe worth having around just to explain all the details around its history.

The key point here is that the Emancipation Proclamation, although widely celebrated, had no real legal effect. It did not apply to states that had not seceded, and for states that had seceded US federal government proclamations didn't mean much. The real effect of the Emancipation Proclamation was diplomatic, it made it more difficult for European governments, particularly the UK, to support the Confederacy, as was in their economic best interest.

After the huge letdown of the first one, at least this trailer does not pretend to be about the most emancipated woman in movie history, who turns out to always need men (normal ones, without any powers) to help out AND explain the world to her.

But to quote a really funny comedy: "It's set in the eighties!" (in a disgusted sounding voice)

The unemployment numbers of 28, 29, 35, and 42% is a weird sequence. So he starts by jumping 1%, then 6%, then 7%. So if we keep the pattern going if could be: 1 6 7 13 20 33 53. It may have been 28, 29, I heard 35, maybe 42, could even be 55, even as high as 88 or *gasp* 141%.

Or it could be up by 1, then up by 5, up by 1 and then up by 5 as in: 1 6 7 12 13 18 19 24 25

But since he stopped at 42, let's get the range: 42 - 28 = 14

Since it's America and it's somewhat appropriate, in the mystical ways of presidential numerology (the only way to understand Trump), the range of 14 must be referring to the 14th Amendment.

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

Section 3.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section 4.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

That if is a mighty big if.

And the lessons you think they "need to learn" from this election are probably different from the lessons that the professional class (credit to Thomas Frank) thinks the Democrats need to learn. To them, it's not about getting a candidate that has a higher favorability rating than a meteor strike, but to find a candidate that maintains their status in society. They are the winners of "free trade" (see Rigged by Dean Baker) and globalisation, while a vast number of people have been thrown into debt peonage, wage slavery or worse.

Unless the Democratic Party emancipates itself from the donors and the professional class, I don't see them becoming a home to champions of the people. Look at how the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign to crush the Sanders candidacy -- lots of juicy bits about that in the Podesta emails. Look at Corbyn, who is basically caught up in a civil war within Labour, despite overwhelming support by the party base.

The Third Way (Social-)Democrats have bought into neoliberalism at such a fundamental level that I just cannot see anyone turning them into a vessel for social equality without getting utterly corrupted or even crushed along the way.

The lesson they learn might be to not nominate a member of a dynasty with so much baggage attached to them. Yet even that depends on them actually recognising the baggage in the first place, which they seemed unwilling to during this election cycle. Everything was brushed off.

And then you're still stuck with a representative of a system that doesn't work for a lot of people. The situation of the rust belt is not a result of anything particular to the current or previous candidates, but of the Washington Consensus and the widespread acceptance of neoliberalism as gospel.

Without major outside pressure, I don't see the party changing its ways sufficiently enough to become a representative of the people again. Maybe a Trump presidency is enough to create such movements, maybe not. Occupy was promising, yet crushed by the establishment in bipartisan consensus.

Which part offended you? Is it the "We" part? Replace "We" with "Americans" if you that makes you less offended.

Nobody's asking you for an apology, so I'm not sure what liberal guilt has to do with anything. I just stated the fact that we did a piss-poor job, societally speaking, by:

1) Enslaving people
2) Failing to rehabilitate them after emancipation

Wait what? Is it automatically ok if the skewed / whitewashed role is written into the script? You do know that this kind of skew doesn't come about by the kkk kidnapping black actors at gunpoint in the middle of filming and replacing them with white ones?

If a Japanese director were to make a movie about the civil war, but chose to make it about a Japanese fighter who comes to the US, becomes the most kickass soldier of the Union, makes personal friends with Lincoln, and convinces him to stay the course on emancipation... that would be pretty weird, even if the argument went that this was the only way a Japanese audience could identify with this obscure historic time.

To play devil's advocate, there's a reasonable argument to be made that polygamists really aren't worthy of marriage equality.

His point is absolutely valid. People are born homosexual, people choose to be polygamous. It might be that as a society we make an arbitrary decision that polygamy is not ok. Maybe future generations will decide that it is ok.

Personally, I don't give a damn what consenting adults get up to, but I think it's pretty important not to let the issue of SSM equality get sidetracked by the orthogonal issue of polygamous marriage.

If you want to campaign for polygamous marriage, go for it, but I think it's reasonable to pick your battles and in the USA, change happens slowly. It was over a century from the emancipation proclamation to the Civil Rights Act.

I'll quite happily say that SSM is a more important (but unrelated) issue than polygamous marriage.

I'm actually very liberal. So much so that I consider Democrats too conservative.

When the right wingers talk about 'the civil war not being about slavery', that's part of the rhetoric that 'the south was not racist'.

I'm not making that statement.





I am saying that :

- Both the south /and/ the north were racist.

- Neither cared about the fate of black people.

- The war started over secession (to which slavery was only a contributing factor, among many much more important [to the people in authority] factors).

- After the war was on, the north used the subject of slavery to their benefit.
A) Freeing slaves in only the rebelling states, in order to incite slave revolts and use that to military advantage. (if the northern authority wins, then the emancipation becomes southern law. If the confederate authority wins, then the emancipation is meaningless. So confederate slaves were given a personal incentive to help the northern authority win)
B) Paint the south internationally as 1 dimensional caricatures of evil (war propaganda), to cut off the south's supply of foreign made arms (because they didn't make their own).

- After the war was over, most of the slave owning states had been emancipated, and the north had claimed to be champions of liberty, so in order to save face they had to emancipate slaves in the remainder of the south (plus it was no skin off of their back, so it was easy to do).

(The southern states that had been allowed to keep their slaves could not then protest their emancipation, for they were few and weak - and would get no help from the other southern states that they themselves hadn't helped during the civil war (resentment/reciprocity)).

- When writing schoolbooks at that time, the rhetoric/propaganda was repeated, and generations of people grew up repeating it, perpetuating it for future generations (like religion).

-scheherazade

To take a less emotional counterpoint :

a) Internal attacks like this, when considering the massive population of people (1/3rd of a billion), are extremely rare. Lightning strikes compete very well with these in terms of lethality. So what exactly do you do? Turn the country inside out (do things legislatively/executively that affect everyone) because there's a chance that 1 in 300 million people will once every year or two do something like this?

Also) Southern generals fought over secession. Today, the civil war is taught as being largely over slavery - but that's heavily revisionist, since at the time of the civil war the war's implications on slavery weren't even mentioned outside of black newspapers. White people were fighting over who gets to run the south, the south, or the much richer and better politically connected north.

To illustrate, the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the states participating in the cesession, not elsewhere. The remainder were freed after the civil war. Reason dictates that it was done primarily to cause disruption in the rebelling south, and not for any particular racial sympathy. (Here's a map for those interested. States marked in blue got to keep their slaves : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emancipation_Proclamation.PNG).

In general, throughout human history, the defeated are usually historically revised to appear as bad as possible, so there are no questions about whether the right thing was done, and no sympathies linger for the defeated. So the south being turned into a ~1~dimensional~evil~enslaving~caricature~ of history is rather normal. Although, critical thinking people should probably know better than to fall for ancient propaganda.

-scheherazade

"I believe there are nuances and unknowns being ignored or unknown to ChaosEngine and yourself that is clouding both of your viewpoints here."

By the way, this opinion is again not an 'argument' much less a 'fact'.

"I must agree with you there. Compensated emancipation, if it could have been done successfully and non-violently (big if's), would be preferable in my eyes to 'war'"

And yet, this is one of Napolitano's arguments that Stewart decided to ridicule (thus inspiring my original comment). But as a 'comedian' he can get away with non-arguments and instead rely on "funny faces" and other contortions (unlike some other folks I can mention). Maybe some eye-rolling.

I honestly don't know what you're referring to with regards to 'derision,' but i don't really care. Probably best for us to drop it since it now appears that you're turning to some rather irrelevant issues. The original point about the "border states" was not how to label or refer to them, but to show that Lincoln did not 'emancipate' or invade them, thereby showing his motivations had nothing to do with freeing the slaves.

I don't know who specifically 'shot first' but this is what happened:

"Ft. Sumter was located in the middle of the harbor of Charleston, SC where the U.S. forts garrison had withdrawn to avoid incidents with local militias in the streets of the city. Unlike Buchanan who allowed commanders to relinquish possession to avoid bloodshed, Lincoln required Maj. Anderson to hold on until fired upon. Jefferson Davis ordered the surrender of the fort. Anderson gave a conditional reply which the Confederate government rejected, and Davis ordered P. G. T. Beauregard to attack the fort before a relief expedition could arrive."

The Confederacy ordered an attack on a fort in what it saw as its territory and therefore under Union occupation. The Union saw it as their fort.
Again, a survey of the opinion of people you know about who 'started it' does not the same thing as that "most reasonable people" would see it like you do.

More irrelevant splitting of hairs: in the United Sates of 2014 practically no one openly advocates institutionalized slavery or openly argue their "right" to own slaves. So for practical purposes, (almost) everyone is openly against slavery.
That, in any case, is totally irrelevant to the Jon Stewart video and so your comments are far from relevant.

"I'm not going to comment on Jon Stewarts motives or morality, they are not germane to the subject I'm discussing."
It's all well and good that you're not going to comment on Stewart's motives or morality, but most of what you constitute your "arguments" are not germane to what I'm discussing here, or to any of my original points prior to your digressions and tangential discussions about which I frankly have little interest. No offense.

I must agree with you there. Compensated emancipation, if it could have been done successfully and non-violently (big if's), would be preferable in my eyes to 'war', even though I can understand the opposition to it based on today's morality.
I believe there are nuances and unknowns being ignored or unknown to ChaosEngine and yourself that is clouding both of your viewpoints here. There's no way to know if 'paying for freedom' (the way I like to look at the idea of compensated emancipation) could have worked or the unforeseen repercussions of it, since it wasn't given a chance.
I'm not going to comment on Jon Stewarts motives or morality, they are not germane to the subject I'm discussing.