Tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s nomination to US presidency (Chicago, 5/18/1860). This is the greatest American president at the watershed moment in nation’s history. So the Tribune celebrates this proudest moment, with poorly contained admiration to the savviness of our politicians:
…Lincoln supporters poured into Chicago, courtesy of special cheap rail fares engineered by Lincoln’s men. Counterfeit convention tickets were printed on local presses and handed out to Lincoln boosters. Lincoln’s men also forged signatures for special Seward cheering-section tickets and recruited “idlers, who for a modest fee or just for fun, agreed to be at the Wigwam [Convention Centre] before the Seward men. When the latter appeared, they were refused admittance because their places had been taken by the holders of fake tickets.”
…Medill gerrymandered the Seward-voting New York delegates into a far corner of the convention floor, where they couldn’t easily be heard — remember, there were no microphones in 1860. One account admiringly reported that “Lincoln’s organizers had recruited 1,000 of the loudest shouters in the state” to drown out the competition. When Lincoln’s nomination was seconded, “the uproar was beyond description. Imagine all the hogs ever slaughtered in Cincinnati giving their death squeals together, a score of big steam whistles going and you conceive something of the same nature.”
…Seward led on the first ballot that day, but fell short of enough votes to clinch the nomination. On the second, Lincoln gained votes. On the third, Lincoln needed just 1 1/2 votes to win. That’s when Medill raced over to the Ohio delegation, which had been supporting favorite son Salmon P. Chase. “If you can throw the Ohio delegation to Lincoln, Chase can have anything he wants,” Medill promised delegation leader David Cartter, without authority to actually deliver anything. Cartter climbed onto his seat and declared the switch of four votes to Lincoln. (Chase did eventually become Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury.)
…A cannon boomed from the roof — signaling the choice of Lincoln — and Chicago celebrated. “Stout men wept like children,” the Tribune reported.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-lincoln-20100514,0,1136086.story?page=2
The most reassuring thing about our local politics is constancy… Regardless of the end, the means are always exactly the same.
shkrobius 
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
Not Obama yet?
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Traitor!
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
Not Obama yet?
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Traitor!
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
Traitor!
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Not Obama yet?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
Not Obama yet?
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Traitor!
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
Not Obama yet?
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Traitor!
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Traitor!
Traitor!
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Not Obama yet?
Not Obama yet?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
I thought it was Washington who was the greatest American president. What makes him less great than any other, than Lincoln or someone else?
cema, this is Land of Lincoln. You must be kiddin’ about a bunch of Easterners telling us who is the greatest president of them all!
Not Obama yet?
Not yet. Imagine, I even did not observe “stout men weeping like children” when O. was elected.
Traitor!
Nope. Stoutness in man has been prohibited by the “full physical equality of persons” ordinance.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
The more I learn about Lincoln as he actually was, the more sinister he appears. He’s quite the predecessor to FDR, except that FDR killed less Americans.
Well, he presided over a civil war, people get killed in wars. But yeah, he became a martyr for many a historian.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
The more I learn about that war, the more doubts I have about its legitimacy and necessity. Imagine what the founding fathers would have had to say about it. Of course, I have doubts about the legitimacy of their war, too.
The Founding Fathers were at each others throats even without the pretext of war. The confrontation was unavoidable, but it did not have to become the war of attrition. They’ve completely lost it, in my opinion. The savagery was unbelievable.
I tend to agree with Mencius Moldbug. The American Civil War was the third act of a three-part Revolution, starting with Cromwell and with Washington in the middle. He who says “a” must say “b” and all that. We start with True Believers like Paine and Cromwell, and we’re bound to end up with lickspittle propagandists like Dewey. Still, I wonder how the founding fathers would have viewed the shrapnelling and bayonnetting of their grandchildren by each other to prevent some of them from leaving a union. The ghosts of the Loyalists who had fled to Canada must have had themselves a grim chuckle at that one. And the narrative of the victors, which has become today’s mainstream narrative, is just unbelievably hypocritical. Faced with the necessity of explaining why fighting to leave one union was brave and admirable, while the same attempt 80 years later was despicable, they say that it was for black people’s right to “root, hog or die,” as Lincoln said they should, and then enjoy sharecropping and Cabrini Green. Magnificent.
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
Yes, that’s the party line. However, the South obviously had a different view of Fort Sumter, which was not in Massachussetts or Indiana after all. If you still think that attacking Fort Sumter was unjustifiable, then what was Concord and Lexington, or Bunker Hill?
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
Why did the colonists have military stocks? Why did the North not withdraw their forces from the South if they did not want to fight and were just going to let the South secede? Why would the South want to go to war against a numerically and industrially superior North, if they could just secede peacefully?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
Not less. Fewer. Americans are individuals, not a goo.
Thnx, perfesser, but accrdng too teh dictionarus, ppl have bin using “less” in teh same sens as I has usd it for liek 1000 yrs.
Of the two, Seward was a greater man; a very remarkable man indeed. I like how Wiki puts it: Why Lincoln won the nomination has been subject of much debate. His expressed views on slavery were seen as more moderate than those of rivals Seward and Chase. Some feel that Seward lost more than Lincoln won, including Seward himself. Others attribute it to luck, and the fact that the convention was held in Lincoln’s home state. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin believes the real reason was Lincoln’s skill as a politician. etc. etc.
A great historical puzzle indeed.
Good doctors
Here is a piece of americana for you: during the Prohibition, one method of getting booze legally was to go to a doctor and get a prescription for “medicinal whisky.” Naturally, the list of maladies requiring administration of whiskey rapidly included every known disease; the only problem was paying for a visit, the health reform not being in the cards yet. At some point the feds set a limit for the amount of liquor that could be prescribed to a patient per visit. Immediately the AMA stood as one man defending patient’s rights: acting on the expressed principle that no law can establish a scientific fact, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association voted today to prepare for submission to Congress a bill designed to remove present legal restrictions on the amount of whisky a physician may prescribe for his patients. The vote was unanimous and declared it the feeling of the organization that “legislative bodies composed of laymen should not enact restrictive laws regulating the administration of any therapeutic agent by physicians legally qualified to practice medicine.” (1927)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1655505/pdf/calwestmed00210-0040b.pdf
Re: Good doctors
Cool 🙂 Will translate.
Re: Good doctors
Excellent! Somewhat like to what happens in California with medical marijuana.
Re: Good doctors
Before you get all happy about the doctors fighting an oppressive govt’s meddling, please keep in mind that this is exactly the thinking of today’s CRU scientocracy-“why should those ignorant laypeople dictate public policy?”
1) Lincoln was quite reluctant to fight the South, he’d rather just let them go;
2) The South was arrogant and though they would get away with attacking the Federal army even after they have de-facto become a separate state (The Confederation);
3) There’s nothing hypocritical in fighting a war when you’re attacked.
Now, tell me it wasn’t so.
So, the Confederates started the American Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter, whereas the British started the American Revolutionary war by attacking military stocks of the colonists in Lexington and Concord.
The North didn’t want to fight the South over secession OR slaves (but at the same time they did respond to an attack on Fort Sumter).
The British Empire, on the other hand, DID want to fight the colonists over their secession (or treason, as they saw it).
Something like that, right?
1) Why would the colonists NOT have military stocks? Yes, they have openly declared they wanted to secede. The Empire responded with an attack.
2) Maybe the North wanted to keep the forts? You want to tell me this alone justifies the attack?
3) AFAIK the South had already de-facto seceded by then. And attacking somebody while being numerically and industrially is a sign of stupidity and arrogance in my book.
Re: Good doctors
Nope. Those doctors objected to laypeople intervening not in “public policy” but in absolutely private decisions that concerned only the patient.
Re: Good doctors
Prohibition was public policy, decided and enacted by a democratically elected government; not coincidentally, it was stoopid. Its stupidity had no bearing on its legitimacy, and what those doctors did was to misuse their medical authority to subvert it, for a price. They had no legal right to do this, neither being responsible for making the law or enforcing it; furthermore, we know for sure what they probably knew which is that they were using their medical authority to push bullshit medicine. Does anybody really need a quart of whiskey a day for health reasons?
I am personally for total legalization of all drugs, including opiates, but look down on those doctors currently making money dispersing Oxycodone to junkies, and don’t see how this is any different.
1. I don’t know why the citizens of a country would not be allowed to form their own militias, stock up on weapons, destroy the legitimate rule of law by driving off it’s representatives, etc. Seems perfectly normal to me. I just called Muqtada Al Sadr, and he concurs.
2. If you let somebody secede, this implies withdrawing your forces from their land. See the withdrawal of the members of the Warsaw Pact, and the subsequent pullout of Soviet forces. If you keep your garrisons there, this is a sign that you do not intend to recognize their secession and are determined to use force to prevent it, and so there’s a war; see the collapse of Yugoslavia for an example, especially Slovenia.
3. As you can see, the North was not about to let them secede. Attacking a superior enemy is sometimes the only way to get what you want. If what the South wanted was illegitimate then so was the American Revolution. If it was legitimate, then the North was in the wrong.
Re: Good doctors
Well, I look down on people who use Oxycodone to get high, but I do not look down on those who drink wiskey. Consequently, I do not look down on those who tend the bar.
And, in both cases, no matter how I look at them, I recognize that it is their God-given right to do things to themselves. I consider government intervention to be an usurpation of power and violation of that right.
Re: Good doctors
I think that at least an order of magnitude more people die from drinking yearly than die from Oxycodone abuse. Regardless, a doctor’s job is not to “tend the bar.”
The problem with “God-given rights” is that the giver seldom appears to verify whether a right indeed comes from him or not. In our society, where there are dozens of strains of Protestantism alone, including the Church of the Kreator, not to mention the Hindus, Sikhs, atheists and voodooists, who decides whether a right is God-given or not?
Re: Good doctors
This country was founded, – in a most direct meaning of the word, – on the principle, that nobody but the person himself has the right to his life, thoughts and fruits of his labor.
I happen to agree with those.
For me, the question is not being decided. It was.
Re: Good doctors
Any question that gets decided by force is always subject to being redecided, and you’ll notice that the Founding Fathers did not decide this question through a transatlantic philosophical debate where they convinced anybody whose opinion mattered, but through the use of force, betrayal of their country, cleansing of the Tory opposition and the aid of France. Anyway, you did not address the question. Since in our society “progress” is constant and the demographics everchanging, who decides which rights are eternally God-given at any given moment? Ruth Bader-Ginsburg? O? Nancy Pelosi? Carlyle’s problem of the ship trying to navigate around Cape Horn by polling the crew, with the captain getting the same vote as the cook, applies.
Any government must sustain itself either through external or internal predation, so there go the fruits of your labor. Any right to life subject to revocation by the government is not absolute. Any government based on popular consent has an incentive to meddle with the thoughts of its people, which really isn’t that hard, since half of them have below-average IQs, and the other half overestimate their intelligence and are vulnerable to flattery. So, the whole thing is based on softheade thinking. No wonder we’re on our fourth regime since the FFs kicked out the original management!
Re: Good doctors
I do not plan on redeciding the question whether I am a free man, or a slave.
I think I got my answer, than you very much.
Re: Good doctors
Freedom is a matter of degrees, which are decided by whom exactly?
For instance, you can buy land, but the real deed is always held by the government, and they can take it through eminent domain at any time. What is the principal difference between the way that you own your house and the way a slave owned a cabin, aside from less lawyers?
Re: Good doctors
That’s right. Interestingly, there was another approach to get booze apart form the doctors. The same act did not limit the supply of sacramental wine provided that one can prove to be a leader of the congregation. Naturally, it was difficult for the Christians, because the priests and ministers are ordained, so it was not too easy to pose as the “leader of the congregation.” But since rabbis are not ordained, all that was required to obtain sacramental wine was a letter from the congegation telling that you are their rabbi. Once this letter was obtained, there was a steady suuply of 10 G /year/ person for the Sabbath, the rabbi ordering it for the entire congregation. They say that between 1919 and 1925 the demand for sacramental wine increased by 800,000 gallons, most of it ordered by the rabbis! The consumption of wine had doubled during the Prohibition.
…There was no official way to determine who was a rabbi. So people who claimed to be rabbis would get a license to distribute to congregations that didn’t even exist. On the other side of that, one congregation in Los Angeles went from 180 families to 1,000 families within the very first 12 months of Prohibition. You joined a congregation; you got your wine from your rabbi. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126613316
Okrent says that most of the “rabbis” applying for the distribution licenses during the Prohibition had Irish family names. It is quite a book, I think you might enjoy reading it
Re: Good doctors
Land ownership is not on the same level as me owning my person.
Land is, in some sense, a common resource of humanity, and concept of ownership is just something useful to maximize benefits for everyone. Avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
My life is not a common resource. It is just mine.
Re: Good doctors
I never thought I’d hear you of all people advocating the theory that a man’s house is on some level a common resource. The thought of the government averting the tragedy of the commons by taking your house away from you to build a road is also quite novel.
It seems to me that you’re reducing freedom to some ephemeral and infinitely malleable essence, but if we keep going this way, we’ll distill it of any meaning. Uncle Tom, for instance, was free to think whatever he pleased. Or, for instance, there was that guy who taught himself advanced math by spending his nights reading a textbook in a GULAG shitter (since that was the only place that a light was available.) Daytimes he spent working, obviously, but he was free to spend his nights as he pleased! Conversely, we only suspended the draft forty years ago, and the govt is still able to demand your freedom and potentially life and limb at its discretion. The Japs don’t even need to land in Seattle; all it would take would be a consensus among the DC lawyers and some softheaded third world adventure. It’s A Holiday In Cambodia! Or, more immediately, the freedom of middle-class Americans to buy a home and live with their families in large chunks of urban America, close to where they work, without worrying about being raped or murdered, has been stripped. Hence, white flight and de facto ethnic cleansing. And we’re just talking the boring old 1984-style coercion. We haven’t even gotten into the Brave New World-style soft-sell, which removes freedom through subtle manipulation.
So, you see, nothing has been permanenly settled, and freedom is not a binary state. Fish in an aquarium are free to some degree to live their lives, too.
Re: Good doctors
Land, like air, – can not be someone’s birth right. We agreed to consider it as such, and I will advocate that it is a most necessary agreement.
Now, I do not reduce freedom to anything. Freedom to me means same as to Founding Fathers, – the fact that I and I alone have the ownership of my person. This is what makes people equal. This is what means “unalienable right”. The is the truth that seemed self-evident to those who signed the Declaration.
And yes, it is a binary state. For there is a difference between “I alone own me” and “Someone else has a co-ownership of my person”. And this is the ONLY difference there is. It does not matter how many people co-own you, or how deep their co-ownership goes. Those differences are not differences in principle. Mine is.
Re: Good doctors
The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves, and I’m sure that those who didn’t believed that women were not and should not be as free as men. Either they were right, or you are right, but you can’t both be absolutely right at the same time. Even if you somehow were, the fact is that what would be self-evident to you and them is by no means assured to be self-evident to the Americans of the future, and even if it is, it’s applications won’t be. For instance, are two consenting men inalienably free to sodomize each other? The FFs wouldn’t even have entertained the question, and yet…as a result, we are back to the question of who interprets our eternal, self-evident, inalienable, God-given rights at any given moment. Populist elected politicians? DC lawyers that those politicians appoint? The Ivy League professors who taught the politicians and the lawyers 30 years ago? The whole thing is a very poorly engineered enterprise, built on sand.
I also notice you had nothing to say about the draft.
Re: Good doctors
“The Founding Fathers obviously did not share your view of inalienable rights, since a bunch of them owned slaves”
This is bad logic. By this account, if someone smokes – this means he does not think that smoking is bad for his health. Or, if someone cheats on his spouse, – this means that he thinks it is ok.
You kind of proclaim that all people must always behave in strict accordance with what they believe in. This is not what we do.
Re: Good doctors
If the surgeon general is on tv puffing on a smoke, it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal. If GW turned down the chance to be King of America, as the mainstream narrative assures us, I’m sure that he would have had the willpower to give up owning slaves if he really, truly thought it was an abomination deep down inside.
Also, let’s note that you’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road, but all of a sudden, if they forbid you to drink alcohol, that’s a violation of your inalienable rights egregious enough to make God vomit? Are you shitting me here, or what?
Re: Good doctors
” it’s safe to say that he doesn’t think that smoking is a big deal”
As I said you have a very idealistic view of human nature.
Sorry to disappoint you, but many people do things that they sincerely believe are bad for them. Just because the LIKE doing those things.
“ou’ve derailed the narrative somewhat. How is it okay for the govt to draft you, send you off to defend the US in Africa or Asia, then take your house to build a strip mall or road,”
I did not say it is ok.
Allow me to illustrate on simple example: imagine you and I hike in the Oregon and then we see a goodly gold nugget down near a stream. At this point I scream – hey, take a look at that bird in the sky, – and while you are looking up thinking what the hell was that about, – I pick up the nugget and put it in my pocket. I do not believe that you had any rights to this nugget. But it does not mean that what I did was right.
Clear?
Очень увлекательные диалоги.
Politics.
Очень увлекательные диалоги.
Politics.
Очень увлекательные диалоги.
Politics.
Очень увлекательные диалоги.
Politics.
Очень увлекательные диалоги.
Politics.
Re: Good doctors
People generally take the trouble to at least rationalize those things. But if you really want to insist that the FFs were a bunch of hypocrites who flagrantly violated the moral code that they claimed to be fighting for-go for it. The question arises of the goodness of a national set of principles that even the founders couldn’t follow, let alone their lawyerly inheritors today.
Re: Good doctors
Not all of them, but some Founders like Jefferson, – were hypocrites.
Adams, on the other hand did as he preached.
Now, about the “question” that arose, – pardon me, what exactly is the idea there? What is proposed measure of the quality of principles? “Easy to follow”?
Yeah, sure. Let’s pick a set that we can follow without sacrificing any possible pleasures!
Re: Good doctors
Not “easy to follow,” but “not based on a willful misunderstanding of human nature.” Or, maybe, “not based on purportedly self-evident truths that are really just softheaded proclamations.” Or, “resistant to the inevitable human corruption that will follow.” Or, possibly, since the whole thing wasn’t all that legitimate, maybe no matter how they rationalized usurping authority which wasn’t theirs it would have led to what followed.
Re: Good doctors
So, if we know that human being are frequently tempted by the desire to kill each other, – should we abandon principle that murder is bad? Or should we adjust it?
Re: Good doctors
We should wait until a gang of murderers murders the policeman, and then make them the Commission In Charge of Homicide Prevention. Oh, and to prevent them from abusing their power, let’s make them accountable…to themselves! And let’s have some sort of Magical Parchment deliminating their powers, with a Parchment Interpretation Commission appointed by the murderers from their own ranks. That way, if they ever feel temptation to expand their powers, they can refer to the Parchment, and say “wait, according to the interpretation of this Parchment least advantageous to us, we really shouldn’t.” Given what I know of human nature, that should work out well, and the longer it goes on, the better it should work.
Re: Good doctors
Analogy inappropriate.
Appropriate one is this: if a murderer says that murder is evil, your logic dictates that must conclude that the murder is not evil.
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks
painting source
Could you tell me the details of the expilsion painting on the fig-leaf page (the one to the left with the red-robed angel wwith the firee sword)
thanks