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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 11:40:05 UTC
That Tea Party article is interesting ( ... )

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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 11:59:30 UTC
Also, I hate it when people bring up Gone With The Wind in these discussions.

GWTW was a romance novel. The movie was a romance movie. Romance novels and romance movies have exactly zero obligation to be even marginally historically accurate. There are a ton of romance novels set in the Middle Ages which are incredibly historically inaccurate and nobody complains about that.

And... GWTW is a romance novel from the POV of Scarlett who is a complete idiot and I don't think either the reader or viewer is supposed to trust her perception of the things that are going on.

It can be argued that we are supposed to have some confidence in the way Rhett sees things - but Rhett doesn't see things at all the way she does. Also, he's mostly just a good looking "bad boy" which is all the male lead needs to be in a romance.

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fanf August 25 2014, 13:04:50 UTC
What were the other non-slavery "states' rights" issues?

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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 13:15:54 UTC
Taxation mostly. The population of the Northern States was growing much more quickly than that of the Southern States. This led the South to worry that given electoral college math there would never be a Southern President again and that with the north having a long term stranglehold on the federal government that the southern states would be taxed into poverty ( ... )

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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 13:26:15 UTC
Which is probably what will happen now. When governors want to make a power grab "abortion bad", "unions bad", "guns good" will win a lot more people to their side than 'we want more power."

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fanf August 26 2014, 09:37:51 UTC
Ah, that makes sense, thanks. I expected there would have to be some fairly compelling economic forces behind it but didn't know enough to hazard a guess.

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bart_calendar August 26 2014, 09:43:50 UTC
It's a sticky subject because Hollywood has hammered home the incorrect idea that Lincoln launched the civil war to free the slaves, which was a tangential issue for the north at least.

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theweaselking August 25 2014, 14:12:17 UTC
There weren't any. Take a look at the articles of secession, the constitution that the Slavers adopted during The Slavers' Rebellion, and the pre-Rebellion reaction of the Slavers to the Fugitive Slave act.

The Slavers gave no shits about any "state's right" that wasn't "to own slaves". They didn't even give a shit about the right of non-slave states to not have slaves - they attempted to force slavery on those states.

The Slavers' Rebellion was about slavery and the Slavers' insistence that they must always be allowed slavery, full stop.

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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 22:56:07 UTC
Well, one of the states rights they wanted was the right to slaves, but that would have been an easier right to maintain by staying in the union (since you could make sure the Constitution wasn't amended) and Lincoln didn't care that much about freeing the slaves - other than as a political point to be made - until well into the war.

Yes, slavery was a part of the war, but it was hardly the entire point of it - in the same way that guns rights and abortion won't really be the subjects of the next civil war, just an excuse for the ongoing argument between state and federal power.

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theweaselking August 25 2014, 23:56:33 UTC
The North didn't go to war to free the slaves.

The South *did* rebel, and start the war, expressly to keep slavery.

and: The south also believed that overall that government existed to protect people with minority opinions from people with the current majority opinion.

Not exactly. The south believed, overall, that government existed to protect rich white slaveowners from everyone else. But you're right in that rich white slaveowners *were* a minority.

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bart_calendar August 26 2014, 09:44:53 UTC
Right, but the important point being that the myth that the North launched the civil war to free slaves, is just that, a myth. They wanted to keep power centralized in the presidency.

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asher63 August 25 2014, 14:22:25 UTC
As a Tea Party sympathizer myself I would say Bart has mostly nailed it here. I would add: illegal immigration, voter fraud, and Obamacare. Also the threat from Islamic militancy. (EDIT: This is meant to refer to Tea Party issues obviously, not the Confederates. Sorry the context was not clear.)

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bart_calendar August 25 2014, 22:58:27 UTC
The thing is the state vs federal power argument has been going on since the Constitution was signed. They really should have done a better job at the time of delineating the powers in a way that would not force the two sides to be constantly against each other.

I suspect that until it is decided one way or another with a new constitution we'll get the same civil war every 100 years or so and it will always seem like different issues on the surface but be the same fundamental fight.

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asher63 August 26 2014, 03:03:30 UTC
True that.

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bart_calendar August 26 2014, 03:07:00 UTC
It was a bad idea from the start. They hated the idea of kings so they created 13 mini-kings and one super-king and didn't realize the odds of that working out were about zero. (And even lower now with 50 mini-kings.)

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naath August 26 2014, 13:13:59 UTC
I really don't think that "having written it down more clearly back then" would solve anything much. Or maybe I'm just too un-American (I'm not American at all) to understand Constitution worship.

Like with the EU - there are people who think the UK's current treaty commitments to the EU (which are pretty clear, much clearer than what the US constitution says about federal powers if you actually read all the stuff) are "too much EU" and we should get ourselves out of them (including the view that we should leave the EU entirely); and there are people who think that we need more EU and should sign up to more things (for instance that we should join the Euro).

I don't think the clarity of the legislation on which integration is based is the problem. I think the problem is that people disagree on what the right level(s) to make decisions is/are. I don't think there's any way to satisfy everyone on that score.

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