So people's worth is determined primarily by what vagina they get yanked out of and not what they themselves have control over. Oh fortune, so like a moon...
pulling a trigger does not equal control? seriously? no personal responsibility for fucking killing people in the field of combat? none for joining the army? none for waking up on the day of combat, picking up your weapon, loading it, taking aim, shooting someone in the head?
moniker is this really, truly your stance? seriously?
But you aren't arguing that we should condemn killing people in a field of combat, you're saying we should condemn people who are killing in a field of combat solely because they were born on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line.
Yet you do believe it is the government's and society's role to honor atrocities. Provided those committing the atrocities were on the right side of the fight, of course.
im not actually sure what atrocities you're talking about. are you talking about misconduct? torture? i dont think any of these things should be honored. if you know about some civil war soldier who was torturing and raping or whatever, line him up. i'd have been the first on line to request his imprisonment or death or whatever punishment is appropriate.
There are numerous atrocities performed throughout the Civil War but I'll just restrict it to the one I mentioned at the start of this tangent. Sherman's March to the Sea.
Ketherial,
There may be some patronizing of soldiers going on but your ignoring the realities of war also. I don't think very many people were joining the army because they were eager to kill and be killed to preserve slavery, to say they were is disingenuous.
And more importantly, Obama has made it clear he is tired of seeing his great country so politically divided. Bringing up grudges from the past is exactly what he wants to avoid.
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Yes it was about states rights. It was about the northern states exercising their rights to not prosecute slaves in defiance of federal law. The south, in effect, wanted the federal government to strip the northern states' rights. War of northern aggression indeed.
link suggest that 83% of the non-slave population in the slave states could read.
yes, you are patronizing the soldiers and it's kind of ridiculous.
Read to what extent? Do you honestly think some farm boy in SC who grew up staring at a mule's ass all day (or a tenement kid in boston who grew up working in a cotton mill all day) actually sat around reading and had any idea about political theory or human rights or any of that?
Hell, from your own link:
Remember that literacy, in the sense that these statistics reflect, most likely refers to the people's ability to comprehend written words, not necessarily write grammatically correct sentences with proper spelling.
The people who fought in the Civil War were mostly scared teenagers who had no idea about the real reasons they were fighting against each other and did what they were told to do because if they didn't they'd either get thrown in jail or flat-out shot. This is true for both sides. Just like, you know, damn near every single war in history.
please provide evidence of your claims.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
Anyway I don't know if he's telling me the truth, but my best friend is a marine, he tells me it was made quite clear that they'd be shot if they disobeyed an order in the field. This strikes me as appalling.
Granted I understand how the whole concept of chain of command overrides any concept of free will, your officers are the ones who are supposed to know the big picture, not you. It just strikes me as bizarre and slightly surreal that an officer can shoot one or more of his guys, I mean they have guns too.
youre correct about disobeying in the field. but no one does that. im sure you can find the numbers somewhere.
I mean the thing to me that's weird is, if someone is planning on disobeying an order they find reprehensible (like murdering a bunch of children), their best bet is to shoot their CO or they get shot themselves.
that's funny because that's exactly the same thing my brother said to me.
what you are saying, in effect, is that all soldiers are victims. that is total fucking bullshit.
i went to military school. my brother is in the special forces. soldiers arent morons and they arent just "defending" their country or whatever.
you can patronize them all you want, but each soldier on the field knows exactly what he's fighting for.
You're aware that Rent is in the Army, right?
Hahaha, whoops.
At least today, though, assuming that the majority of troops are fully aware of what they're fighting for feels just a little too optimistic.
define "fully aware". like i said, i have lots of military history and experience in my family. soldiers arent idiots.
Hmm yes and I will take your vague anecdotal evidence as truth because I am a moron herpdy derp.
Seriously I could argue that for every decent troop like Rent or mcdermott there are two dozen slavering hicks who joined up to shoot brown people and I'd still be no more correct than you are right now. And at least I'd have the evidence of army recruiters generally targeting the poor and uneducated above most other demographics.
that's funny because that's exactly the same thing my brother said to me.
Wow...we cant let this issue rest after all this time?
It just blows my mind that you can't forgive people who died on the wrong side of the Civil War. Right side, Wrong side. does it really fucking matter after all this time? Learn the lesson from the war, of course, but otherwise, move the fuck on.
Oh and Rent, define evil for me?
Sorry, but it kind of pisses me off when people throw around terms like that to describe the people on the losing side of any war. So many people just doing their jobs and trying to stay alive. Nevermind that, fuck you, you're evil for all eternity.
Have some perspective. Sure, slavery is considered wrong now, but back then. It wasn't even an issue of good/evil. It was just the thing to do. How many things do we do now that are considered completely 100% acceptable by society, will be considered completely immoral 100-200 years from now.
Another thing I think is difficult for anyone in today's world to grasp is the personal difference between today's war-time and war-time in the Civil War days.
Today, we're very insulated from the chaos and damage of war.
During the Civil War, your neighbors and your relatives were being burned out and killed by the enemy.
The general idea is that even though slavery was a major cause of the civil war, and many other things, we have progressed to the point where we can seperate the soldier from the government and forgive them. We can use the distance and time to know that many soldiers (on both sides) were forced into the army. Families fought their own relatives.
To just 'erase' them and never acknowledge that these soldiers died is whitewashing and a great disservice to these people.
I can tell you right now a couple of blocks away from me there is a memorial to both german and us troops from ww2. there is quite a few people at it right now, leaving flowers and talking about peace. Whether you like it or not they were American citizens, and they are an integral part of our history, an ugly part of our history, a war fought by poor white people run by rich white people. Both sides did some pretty evil shit. The Union wasn't innocent or pure in any of this.
You do know that when they recovered the Confederate submarine Hunley they gave them a full military funeral?
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
You do acknowledge that your own link says that while most of these people could comprehend words they saw written down they couldn't write and were thus illiterate by modern standards?
The whole point in bringing the literacy issue up was to demonstrate that these people didn't fully understand everything that was going on around them. There was no internet and most of them were functionally illiterate. Whatever they knew was whatever someone told them, by word of mouth, and most of them didn't go very far from home.
Wow...we cant let this issue rest after all this time?
It just blows my mind that you can't forgive people who died on the wrong side of the Civil War. Right side, Wrong side. does it really fucking matter after all this time? Learn the lesson from the war, of course, but otherwise, move the fuck on.
Oh and Rent, define evil for me?
Sorry, but it kind of pisses me off when people throw around terms like that to describe the people on the losing side of any war. So many people just doing their jobs and trying to stay alive. Nevermind that, fuck you, you're evil for all eternity.
Have some perspective. Sure, slavery is considered wrong now, but back then. It wasn't even an issue of good/evil. It was just the thing to do. How many things do we do now that are considered completely 100% acceptable by society, will be considered completely immoral 100-200 years from now.
There are shitloads of things we do that are considered acceptable by society but are immoral right now.
Social acceptance isn't a reliable way to measure morality.
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Actually the Emancipation Proclamation was to get the big anti-slavery groups in the Northern USA on board with the war, to stir up discontent amongst slaves in the south who previously didn't think the North would free them even if the war was won and most importantly to stop Britain trying to trade and possibly even ally itself with the South against the North. You can take it as assured that if the South had issued the emancipation proclamation then today we would have a history of a civil war which was ended by massive British payments of arms and supplies to the south, and a trade blockade of the North which led to a stalemate until the north was invaded from Canada.
The UK primarily opposed the south and supported the North due to its enormous hatred of slavery at the time, in terms of its own interests seeing the USA break into separate nations would have been a huge advantage to all the European powers.
link suggest that 83% of the non-slave population in the slave states could read.
yes, you are patronizing the soldiers and it's kind of ridiculous.
Read to what extent? Do you honestly think some farm boy in SC who grew up staring at a mule's ass all day (or a tenement kid in boston who grew up working in a cotton mill all day) actually sat around reading and had any idea about political theory or human rights or any of that?
Hell, from your own link:
Remember that literacy, in the sense that these statistics reflect, most likely refers to the people's ability to comprehend written words, not necessarily write grammatically correct sentences with proper spelling.
The people who fought in the Civil War were mostly scared teenagers who had no idea about the real reasons they were fighting against each other and did what they were told to do because if they didn't they'd either get thrown in jail or flat-out shot. This is true for both sides. Just like, you know, damn near every single war in history.
please provide evidence of your claims.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
What does literacy have to do with education of philosophical arguments at the level to which we are discussing it? Not to mention that literacy is still largely dependent on reading what is available to you. The complaints we all have about how horrible the news media is today would pale in comparison to the 'news' of the 1800's.
But you aren't arguing that we should condemn killing people in a field of combat, you're saying we should condemn people who are killing in a field of combat solely because they were born on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line.
no, im saying that we shouldnt honor people for fighting on the side of slavery. i said nothing about condemning anyone.
i know it's hard not to strawman (and i doubt you meant to do it), but this has been my stance since my very first post.
There are numerous atrocities performed throughout the Civil War but I'll just restrict it to the one I mentioned at the start of this tangent. Sherman's March to the Sea.
"scorched earth" tactics dont really constitute an "atrocity" in my opinion unless there was rape, torture or wanton killing. if that did occur, i would be right on your side condemning those bastards.
Ketherial on
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RentI'm always rightFuckin' deal with itRegistered Userregular
what you are saying, in effect, is that all soldiers are victims. that is total fucking bullshit.
i went to military school. my brother is in the special forces. soldiers arent morons and they arent just "defending" their country or whatever.
you can patronize them all you want, but each soldier on the field knows exactly what he's fighting for.
You're aware that Rent is in the Army, right?
Hahaha, whoops.
At least today, though, assuming that the majority of troops are fully aware of what they're fighting for feels just a little too optimistic.
Exactly. Anecdotal experience ahoy, but even my (who I consider to be fairly well-informed on the subject) reasons for joining and fighting in Iraq change on a near-daily basis. Sometimes it's the money; others, a sense of "owing" the Army (the Army really straightened my life up and gave me a second chance); still others, I don't feel like a "real" soldier unless I have a deployment under my belt; owing my fellow soldiers rest time (why shouldn't I go? I'm young, healthy, and single. Give that five-timer some time with his family); even more so a sense of trying to effect positive chang instead of sitting on the sidelines quarterbacking how it "should" go
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Yes it was about states rights. It was about the northern states exercising their rights to not prosecute slaves in defiance of federal law. The south, in effect, wanted the federal government to strip the northern states' rights. War of northern aggression indeed.
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly.
that may have been some small part of it.
slavery played a role, to be certain, but it was really more about the south wanting to be allowed to decide what to do about slavery on their own terms, rather than being forced to accept abolition because the more populous north, who were not at all dependent on slaves, had more of a say on the federal level, and was voting against slavery.
It's really a complex pile of issues that came to a head when Lincoln was elected, and the southern states believed that he would force things on them that they did not want (which, as it turned out, they were 100% right about about.)
Ultimately, I think that slavery itself is unjustifiable, but I also think that we shouldn't minimize the states rights aspects of the war just because the "right" in question was slavery. There was more going on there than just "I want my slaves!"
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Nonsense. People like Davis and Calhoun argued for states' rights when they wanted states to allow slavery and federal rights when they wanted to prevent states from banning slavery.
Have some perspective. Sure, slavery is considered wrong now, but back then. It wasn't even an issue of good/evil. It was just the thing to do. How many things do we do now that are considered completely 100% acceptable by society, will be considered completely immoral 100-200 years from now.
If people hadn't considered slavery to be wrong and not the thing to do, there wouldn't have been a damn. Also, slavery (as it was practiced in the United States) was never considered completely acceptable by society. There were always a good number of people who said it was a moral evil.
what you are saying, in effect, is that all soldiers are victims. that is total fucking bullshit.
i went to military school. my brother is in the special forces. soldiers arent morons and they arent just "defending" their country or whatever.
you can patronize them all you want, but each soldier on the field knows exactly what he's fighting for.
You're aware that Rent is in the Army, right?
Hahaha, whoops.
At least today, though, assuming that the majority of troops are fully aware of what they're fighting for feels just a little too optimistic.
Exactly. Anecdotal experience ahoy, but even my (who I consider to be fairly well-informed on the subject) reasons for joining and fighting in Iraq change on a near-daily basis. Sometimes it's the money; others, a sense of "owing" the Army (the Army really straightened my life up and gave me a second chance); still others, I don't feel like a "real" soldier unless I have a deployment under my belt; owing my fellow soldiers rest time (why shouldn't I go? I'm young, healthy, and single. Give that five-timer some time with his family); even more so a sense of trying to effect positive chang instead of sitting on the sidelines quarterbacking how it "should" go
Excellent illustration of my point on the last page.
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Actually the Emancipation Proclamation was to get the big anti-slavery groups in the Northern USA on board with the war, to stir up discontent amongst slaves in the south who previously didn't think the North would free them even if the war was won and most importantly to stop Britain trying to trade and possibly even ally itself with the South against the North. You can take it as assured that if the South had issued the emancipation proclamation then today we would have a history of a civil war which was ended by massive British payments of arms and supplies to the south, and a trade blockade of the North which led to a stalemate until the north was invaded from Canada.
The UK primarily opposed the south and supported the North due to its enormous hatred of slavery at the time, in terms of its own interests seeing the USA break into separate nations would have been a huge advantage to all the European powers.
The Emancipation proclamation is EXACTLY what South Carolina was afraid that Lincoln would do when they seceded from the union right after he was elected.
Nothing in this war is really all that simple, but the bottom line is that there was some element of using the war to make a proclamation like this which, normally, is a little beyond the reach of the President alone.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
Ketherial,
There may be some patronizing of soldiers going on but your ignoring the realities of war also. I don't think very many people were joining the army because they were eager to kill and be killed to preserve slavery, to say they were is disingenuous.
And more importantly, Obama has made it clear he is tired of seeing his great country so politically divided. Bringing up grudges from the past is exactly what he wants to avoid.
i fully agree with you on the obama issue actually.
i dont think i was arguing that the soldiers were eager to kill in order to preserve slavery. what i am saying is that to pretend they didnt even know what they were fighting for (i.e., "they couldnt even read!", etc., etc.) is bullshit. they knew exactly why the north and the south were fighting. it's not like this was a surprise war. it's not like lincoln's election wasn't hotly contested. they were fighting to preserve their culture, which is a euphemism for slavery.
i mean, seriously, can i get a puh-fucking-lease here?
dont give me this shit about the soldiers not knowing what the issue was. that's bullshit and everyone knows it. i dont even know why people try to take that stance.
moniker's stance at least is reasonable: "they knew, but they had to do it. we should honor them for their bravery." i can understand that stance but i disagree with it.
but this whole "they didnt know what they were doing!" that's bullshit of the highest order.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
If we can celebrate the conquest of the land mass and the subsequent genocides and the rebellion against the colonizing nation and the veterans who fought in stupid ass post-World wars overseas and the horrible shit we did during the World Wars to various populations...
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Nonsense. People like Davis and Calhoun argued for states' rights when they wanted states to allow slavery and federal rights when they wanted to prevent states from banning slavery.
And when their entire state's economy is based on Slavery, what do you expect them to do?
I'm not defending the south, here. I do believe that they were fighting on the wrong side. But you are WAY oversimplifying everything. You can't just say that the whole war was about slavery and walk away. Slavery was a key motivator behind the war, but it is the things that slavery was motivating which actually cased the war.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
The Confederate constitution had three differences with the US constitution:
1) The president served for 5-year terms.
2) States could break away.
3) Slavery was a-ok.
Now which of these rights do you think they felt strongly enough about to go to war for? Hint: The right to break away is useless unless you already have a reason you feel strongly enough about to want to break away, and nobody gives a rat's ass about an extra year in the president' term.
The Civil War was about state rights, specifically the states' right to slavery. The North had banned slavery and granted freedom to those slaves that made it there, and the new states being formed west had slavery banned by default. The South's slaver lifestyle was contained and under growing outside pressure. They fought back.
Which, again, is not the story the troops got. The poor john does who filled the ranks were sold on a story or Northern aggression against the Southern way of life. Which, while technically true, omits some crucial details on which way of life specifically was being attacked (it was slavery).
Which is not to say that the North was a white knight rising in defence of Freedom. Lincoln wasn't so much against slavery as he was against black people in America. He wanted to ship them all back to Africa and have an all-white America; a position which automatically banned black slavery. Hardly the noble freedom-fighter we hear about today.
what you are saying, in effect, is that all soldiers are victims. that is total fucking bullshit.
i went to military school. my brother is in the special forces. soldiers arent morons and they arent just "defending" their country or whatever.
you can patronize them all you want, but each soldier on the field knows exactly what he's fighting for.
You're aware that Rent is in the Army, right?
Hahaha, whoops.
At least today, though, assuming that the majority of troops are fully aware of what they're fighting for feels just a little too optimistic.
define "fully aware". like i said, i have lots of military history and experience in my family. soldiers arent idiots.
Hmm yes and I will take your vague anecdotal evidence as truth because I am a moron herpdy derp.
Seriously I could argue that for every decent troop like Rent or mcdermott there are two dozen slavering hicks who joined up to shoot brown people and I'd still be no more correct than you are right now. And at least I'd have the evidence of army recruiters generally targeting the poor and uneducated above most other demographics.
i havent provided a single anecdote. nor have i even really appealed to special authority. i simply stated my background, no different from someone telling me that rent is in the military. not really sure why this is an issue for you.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
Did... did you seriously just link a book to refute something? Like... a whole fucking book? Are you kidding me?
Hey Captain Carrot, go read this whole book, then we'll talk...
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
Ketherial,
There may be some patronizing of soldiers going on but your ignoring the realities of war also. I don't think very many people were joining the army because they were eager to kill and be killed to preserve slavery, to say they were is disingenuous.
And more importantly, Obama has made it clear he is tired of seeing his great country so politically divided. Bringing up grudges from the past is exactly what he wants to avoid.
i fully agree with you on the obama issue actually.
i dont think i was arguing that the soldiers were eager to kill in order to preserve slavery. what i am saying is that to pretend they didnt even know what they were fighting for (i.e., "they couldnt even read!", etc., etc.) is bullshit. they knew exactly why the north and the south were fighting. it's not like this was a surprise war. it's not like lincoln's election wasn't hotly contested. they were fighting to preserve their culture, which is a euphemism for slavery.
i mean, seriously, can i get a puh-fucking-lease here?
dont give me this shit about the soldiers not knowing what the issue was. that's bullshit and everyone knows it. i dont even know why people try to take that stance.
moniker's stance at least is reasonable: "they knew, but they had to do it. we should honor them for their bravery." i can understand that stance but i disagree with it.
but this whole "they didnt know what they were doing!" that's bullshit of the highest order.
Literacy doesn't affect the fact that the transmission medium of the day was slow enough that the details probably never filtered into the country areas where much of the Confederacy's soldier corps came from. While I disagree that most of them were too uneducated to understand why they were fighting, I don't consider them to have been perfectly informed either. Both poles of this particular argument are equally stupid.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
The Civil War was not as simple as Slavery vs Anti-Slavery.
The South had some legitimate reasons for wanting to break away.
I think hell just froze over, because I am agreeing with Obs.
Slavery played a role, but the war was also about states rights, and the southern states feeling like they were contributing more to the nation than the smaller northern states, but that the northern states had an undue amount of control over the entire nation.
In some ways, it was Lincoln who made it more about Slavery than anything else when he took away the South's slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation as a sort of punish to them for ever trying to break away.
Nonsense. People like Davis and Calhoun argued for states' rights when they wanted states to allow slavery and federal rights when they wanted to prevent states from banning slavery.
And when their entire state's economy is based on Slavery, what do you expect them to do?
I'm not defending the south, here. I do believe that they were fighting on the wrong side. But you are WAY oversimplifying everything. You can't just say that the whole war was about slavery and walk away. Slavery was a key motivator behind the war, but it is the things that slavery was motivating which actually cased the war.
I'm not saying the whole war was about slavery, but without slavery there would not have been a war. There would have been seething regional tensions, because there always are, but they would not have boiled over into open warfare without the catalyst of slavery in the political discourse.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
Did... did you seriously just link a book to refute something? Like... a whole fucking book? Are you kidding me?
Hey Captain Carrot, go read this whole book, then we'll talk...
Hmm, when I use the link, it goes right to page 7.
starts on the cover for us
Sentry on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
wrote:
When I was a little kid, I always pretended I was the hero,' Skip said.
'Fuck yeah, me too. What little kid ever pretended to be part of the lynch-mob?'
What does literacy have to do with education of philosophical arguments at the level to which we are discussing it? Not to mention that literacy is still largely dependent on reading what is available to you. The complaints we all have about how horrible the news media is today would pale in comparison to the 'news' of the 1800's.
i was simply providing evidence against the claim that "most of them couldn't even read!", which was easily demonstrably false. to be perfectly honest, i dont think you need to be literate to know what the war was about.
Which is not to say that the North was a white knight rising in defence of Freedom. Lincoln wasn't so much against slavery as he was against black people in America. He wanted to ship them all back to Africa and have an all-white America; a position which automatically banned black slavery. Hardly the noble freedom-fighter we hear about today.
Enh. I wouldn't go so far as to say he wanted to do that, but it was an option he considered. Like most anti-slavery people, Lincoln didn't really know what the fuck to do with all the black people in the US, and I think he admitted as much.
Honestly, are people arguing that literacy = being well-informed?
For fuck's sake.
The USA in 2003 had a 99% literacy rate. How many of these people supported the war against Iraq because they were solidly certain that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? And don't think disinformation and public manipulation were invented by the Bush Administration.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
No, that search shows that a whole bunch of the free Confederate population could read. The military is not and never has been an accurate reflection of its society in terms of education and demographics. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the grunts could make their X and that was it.
Did... did you seriously just link a book to refute something? Like... a whole fucking book? Are you kidding me?
Hey Captain Carrot, go read this whole book, then we'll talk...
Hmm, when I use the link, it goes right to page 7.
starts on the cover for us
The relevant excerpt, then:
Literacy rates among soldiers varied by army. In the Union army, 90 percent of soldiers could read and write, compared to 80 percent of soldiers in the Confederate army. Still, despite the discrepancy in literacy rates between the Union and the Confederacy, Civil War soldiers on the whole were among the most literate groups of people in the world to that time.
Hmm, when I use the link, it goes right to page 7.
starts on the cover for us
In any case, apparently 80% of the Confederate Army could read. Which, of course, means that the non-officers had a lower rate than that. However, from the quotes on page 5, it appears that some of the soldiers knew what the war was about, and some of them didn't.
Posts
define "fully aware". like i said, i have lots of military history and experience in my family. soldiers arent idiots.
But you aren't arguing that we should condemn killing people in a field of combat, you're saying we should condemn people who are killing in a field of combat solely because they were born on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line.
There are numerous atrocities performed throughout the Civil War but I'll just restrict it to the one I mentioned at the start of this tangent. Sherman's March to the Sea.
There may be some patronizing of soldiers going on but your ignoring the realities of war also. I don't think very many people were joining the army because they were eager to kill and be killed to preserve slavery, to say they were is disingenuous.
And more importantly, Obama has made it clear he is tired of seeing his great country so politically divided. Bringing up grudges from the past is exactly what he wants to avoid.
Yes it was about states rights. It was about the northern states exercising their rights to not prosecute slaves in defiance of federal law. The south, in effect, wanted the federal government to strip the northern states' rights. War of northern aggression indeed.
Unless I'm remembering incorrectly.
please provide evidence of your claims.
you stated that most of the people probably couldnt read. a 3 sec google search shows that a supermajority of them could. now if you want to make more claims (i.e., more than 50% of the soldiers in the civil war were teenagers), please back it up.
i think you are making things up.
that's funny because that's exactly the same thing my brother said to me.
How much of the Union and Confederate Armies were professional soldiers?
Hmm yes and I will take your vague anecdotal evidence as truth because I am a moron herpdy derp.
Seriously I could argue that for every decent troop like Rent or mcdermott there are two dozen slavering hicks who joined up to shoot brown people and I'd still be no more correct than you are right now. And at least I'd have the evidence of army recruiters generally targeting the poor and uneducated above most other demographics.
Ahaha alright whatever you say, champ.
It just blows my mind that you can't forgive people who died on the wrong side of the Civil War. Right side, Wrong side. does it really fucking matter after all this time? Learn the lesson from the war, of course, but otherwise, move the fuck on.
Oh and Rent, define evil for me?
Sorry, but it kind of pisses me off when people throw around terms like that to describe the people on the losing side of any war. So many people just doing their jobs and trying to stay alive. Nevermind that, fuck you, you're evil for all eternity.
Have some perspective. Sure, slavery is considered wrong now, but back then. It wasn't even an issue of good/evil. It was just the thing to do. How many things do we do now that are considered completely 100% acceptable by society, will be considered completely immoral 100-200 years from now.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
Today, we're very insulated from the chaos and damage of war.
During the Civil War, your neighbors and your relatives were being burned out and killed by the enemy.
To just 'erase' them and never acknowledge that these soldiers died is whitewashing and a great disservice to these people.
I can tell you right now a couple of blocks away from me there is a memorial to both german and us troops from ww2. there is quite a few people at it right now, leaving flowers and talking about peace. Whether you like it or not they were American citizens, and they are an integral part of our history, an ugly part of our history, a war fought by poor white people run by rich white people. Both sides did some pretty evil shit. The Union wasn't innocent or pure in any of this.
You do know that when they recovered the Confederate submarine Hunley they gave them a full military funeral?
The whole point in bringing the literacy issue up was to demonstrate that these people didn't fully understand everything that was going on around them. There was no internet and most of them were functionally illiterate. Whatever they knew was whatever someone told them, by word of mouth, and most of them didn't go very far from home.
There are shitloads of things we do that are considered acceptable by society but are immoral right now.
Social acceptance isn't a reliable way to measure morality.
Actually the Emancipation Proclamation was to get the big anti-slavery groups in the Northern USA on board with the war, to stir up discontent amongst slaves in the south who previously didn't think the North would free them even if the war was won and most importantly to stop Britain trying to trade and possibly even ally itself with the South against the North. You can take it as assured that if the South had issued the emancipation proclamation then today we would have a history of a civil war which was ended by massive British payments of arms and supplies to the south, and a trade blockade of the North which led to a stalemate until the north was invaded from Canada.
The UK primarily opposed the south and supported the North due to its enormous hatred of slavery at the time, in terms of its own interests seeing the USA break into separate nations would have been a huge advantage to all the European powers.
What does literacy have to do with education of philosophical arguments at the level to which we are discussing it? Not to mention that literacy is still largely dependent on reading what is available to you. The complaints we all have about how horrible the news media is today would pale in comparison to the 'news' of the 1800's.
no, im saying that we shouldnt honor people for fighting on the side of slavery. i said nothing about condemning anyone.
i know it's hard not to strawman (and i doubt you meant to do it), but this has been my stance since my very first post.
"scorched earth" tactics dont really constitute an "atrocity" in my opinion unless there was rape, torture or wanton killing. if that did occur, i would be right on your side condemning those bastards.
Exactly. Anecdotal experience ahoy, but even my (who I consider to be fairly well-informed on the subject) reasons for joining and fighting in Iraq change on a near-daily basis. Sometimes it's the money; others, a sense of "owing" the Army (the Army really straightened my life up and gave me a second chance); still others, I don't feel like a "real" soldier unless I have a deployment under my belt; owing my fellow soldiers rest time (why shouldn't I go? I'm young, healthy, and single. Give that five-timer some time with his family); even more so a sense of trying to effect positive chang instead of sitting on the sidelines quarterbacking how it "should" go
that may have been some small part of it.
slavery played a role, to be certain, but it was really more about the south wanting to be allowed to decide what to do about slavery on their own terms, rather than being forced to accept abolition because the more populous north, who were not at all dependent on slaves, had more of a say on the federal level, and was voting against slavery.
It's really a complex pile of issues that came to a head when Lincoln was elected, and the southern states believed that he would force things on them that they did not want (which, as it turned out, they were 100% right about about.)
Ultimately, I think that slavery itself is unjustifiable, but I also think that we shouldn't minimize the states rights aspects of the war just because the "right" in question was slavery. There was more going on there than just "I want my slaves!"
Nonsense. People like Davis and Calhoun argued for states' rights when they wanted states to allow slavery and federal rights when they wanted to prevent states from banning slavery. If people hadn't considered slavery to be wrong and not the thing to do, there wouldn't have been a damn. Also, slavery (as it was practiced in the United States) was never considered completely acceptable by society. There were always a good number of people who said it was a moral evil.
Excellent illustration of my point on the last page.
Also, thanks for your service, Rent.
The Emancipation proclamation is EXACTLY what South Carolina was afraid that Lincoln would do when they seceded from the union right after he was elected.
Nothing in this war is really all that simple, but the bottom line is that there was some element of using the war to make a proclamation like this which, normally, is a little beyond the reach of the President alone.
i fully agree with you on the obama issue actually.
i dont think i was arguing that the soldiers were eager to kill in order to preserve slavery. what i am saying is that to pretend they didnt even know what they were fighting for (i.e., "they couldnt even read!", etc., etc.) is bullshit. they knew exactly why the north and the south were fighting. it's not like this was a surprise war. it's not like lincoln's election wasn't hotly contested. they were fighting to preserve their culture, which is a euphemism for slavery.
i mean, seriously, can i get a puh-fucking-lease here?
dont give me this shit about the soldiers not knowing what the issue was. that's bullshit and everyone knows it. i dont even know why people try to take that stance.
moniker's stance at least is reasonable: "they knew, but they had to do it. we should honor them for their bravery." i can understand that stance but i disagree with it.
but this whole "they didnt know what they were doing!" that's bullshit of the highest order.
I'd give up this particular track, were I you.
And when their entire state's economy is based on Slavery, what do you expect them to do?
I'm not defending the south, here. I do believe that they were fighting on the wrong side. But you are WAY oversimplifying everything. You can't just say that the whole war was about slavery and walk away. Slavery was a key motivator behind the war, but it is the things that slavery was motivating which actually cased the war.
What page? All that gives me is the book.
1) The president served for 5-year terms.
2) States could break away.
3) Slavery was a-ok.
Now which of these rights do you think they felt strongly enough about to go to war for? Hint: The right to break away is useless unless you already have a reason you feel strongly enough about to want to break away, and nobody gives a rat's ass about an extra year in the president' term.
The Civil War was about state rights, specifically the states' right to slavery. The North had banned slavery and granted freedom to those slaves that made it there, and the new states being formed west had slavery banned by default. The South's slaver lifestyle was contained and under growing outside pressure. They fought back.
Which, again, is not the story the troops got. The poor john does who filled the ranks were sold on a story or Northern aggression against the Southern way of life. Which, while technically true, omits some crucial details on which way of life specifically was being attacked (it was slavery).
Which is not to say that the North was a white knight rising in defence of Freedom. Lincoln wasn't so much against slavery as he was against black people in America. He wanted to ship them all back to Africa and have an all-white America; a position which automatically banned black slavery. Hardly the noble freedom-fighter we hear about today.
i havent provided a single anecdote. nor have i even really appealed to special authority. i simply stated my background, no different from someone telling me that rent is in the military. not really sure why this is an issue for you.
Did... did you seriously just link a book to refute something? Like... a whole fucking book? Are you kidding me?
Hey Captain Carrot, go read this whole book, then we'll talk...
Literacy doesn't affect the fact that the transmission medium of the day was slow enough that the details probably never filtered into the country areas where much of the Confederacy's soldier corps came from. While I disagree that most of them were too uneducated to understand why they were fighting, I don't consider them to have been perfectly informed either. Both poles of this particular argument are equally stupid.
Hmm, when I use the link, it goes right to page 7.
I'm not saying the whole war was about slavery, but without slavery there would not have been a war. There would have been seething regional tensions, because there always are, but they would not have boiled over into open warfare without the catalyst of slavery in the political discourse.
starts on the cover for us
i was simply providing evidence against the claim that "most of them couldn't even read!", which was easily demonstrably false. to be perfectly honest, i dont think you need to be literate to know what the war was about.
Enh. I wouldn't go so far as to say he wanted to do that, but it was an option he considered. Like most anti-slavery people, Lincoln didn't really know what the fuck to do with all the black people in the US, and I think he admitted as much.
For fuck's sake.
The USA in 2003 had a 99% literacy rate. How many of these people supported the war against Iraq because they were solidly certain that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? And don't think disinformation and public manipulation were invented by the Bush Administration.
The relevant excerpt, then: