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The Cult of Lincoln

Grapeshot

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Logic is not always understood by people of the Earth in their quest for truth. They illogically distort facts to fit their desired goals.

Logic would dictate that such distortion does not yield truth.
 
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Dave_pro2a

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In other threads, you've utterly failed to demonstrate that Lincoln was any more racist than any of his contemporaries. By today's standards, almost everyone in 1860s USA was racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and so. This "despite the ability to readily research Lincoln and to present facts" that should back up your claims about him being a horrible racist, if, in fact, he was.

What I do find terribly annoying, however, is when someone holds himself up as some kind of expert in real history, but lacks the ability to properly balance between two conflicting truths such as to paint complex historic figures as one-dimensional.

Charles

What I find annoying are pretentious, fake "scholars" who act all erudite while expressing clear logical contradictions. We all have our pet peeves utah.

Next time try arguing without saying something like "Of course Lincoln was a racists, because everyone back then was... but you didn't prove Lincoln was racist"

Oh I luv me some lulz
 

Dave_pro2a

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By natural law as we understand it today, any individual has a right to render aid to any other individual whose rights are being abridged.

The same right that you have to render aid to an innocent third party being dragged against her will into the bushes by a rapist, enables you to also render aid to a man held in slavery.

Similarly the same right that allows you to render aid to a man who is being robbed of his rightful property by an armed hoodlum.

By natural law, the man and woman held in slavery has every right to free himself, to request or accept aid in doing so. And every man has a natural right to render the aid necessary to effect the slave's freedom.

Perhaps, what you intended to ask about was whether the federal government had any constitutional authority to force the South to end slavery. THAT may well be a different answer, being a different question. But I think whether you intended to or not, you asked the appropriate question for this group to consider. Doubly so for those who assert a nation has no more proper powers than an individual in that nation has, or who consider the constitution itself to be racist (slavery explicitly permitted, blacks counted as 3/5ths of a person for representation purposes), anti-liberty, and statist.

The companion question to your question is, "By what right did slave owners or their government, presume to hold men in slavery? To force from them the fruit of their labors? To use women as mere objects for sexual gratification without any consent whatsoever? To buy, sell, trade, and profit in another man's life, liberty, family, blood, sweat, and work?"

I love most of Southern culture. And while there are fine aspects of New England Puritanism, in total, I find the know-it-all busybodiesm distasteful. I abhor what Reconstruction did to the South. The same men who effected that, persecuted my ancestors for their peaceful, consensual religious marriage practices. I recognize the hobson's choice the South faced with slavery by the mid 19th century.

But no thinking, rational, moral person today can justify or sugar coat slavery in the least. If every slave in the nation had actually be treated twice as well as Southern propagandists claimed they were, slavery would still have been an unspeakably horrific institution at complete odds with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. It had to come to an end.

Would that it could have done so peacefully. But it didn't. Perhaps had Lincoln lost the election. Perhaps had Southern forces not fired on Fort Sumter but instead appealed to their brothers in the North for a peaceful resolution. Perhaps....

But at the end of the day, no man, no nation, has a right to hold others in slavery.

What a shame your liberal friend and you both failed to see that with any clarity.

Charles

Your argument is a DOG.

The north failed to free the slaves held in the north, before going to war to free the slaves held in the south.

That is Baboon butt backwards, and thoroughly hypocritical. The north LOSES all appeals to starting a war with the south based on the north's Natural Rights to help (or free) slaves in the south, since the north continued sanctioning slavery in the north.

But logic, yeah, not needed in Utah's writings.
 
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Dave_pro2a

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By natural law as we understand it today, any individual has a right to render aid to any other individual whose rights are being abridged.

Charles

Yup, one ought to always judge history based on today's understanding of cultural norms.

All those Greek and Romans were gay. I mean, male on male sex was a norm then, and by today's standard that would mean they are either gay or bisexual, right?

It could not have been some third option, since we don't have that third option today, right?

You, Utah, make Spock and Grapeshot proud. Pure logic, always the smart guy.
 
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solus

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By natural law as we understand it today,

snipppp

What a shame your liberal friend and you both failed to see that with any clarity.

Charles

piper...who's natural law are you citing Islamic? Cathlotic's , Plato's, Hobb's?

who's this "WE" and whom understands which theorist today?

you continue to speak in vague and abstract generalizations like you are charlton heston handing down the tablets

pick something from wiki for goodness sake at least as a starting point but stop this generalization of theorists out of the blue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law.

and thank goodness it is your perception they failed...

ipse
 
B

Bikenut

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Originally Posted by Bikenut

J When I asked if the North had the right to force the South to stop slavery he tried to evade the question by talking about the immorality of slavery itself.

By natural law as we understand it today, any individual has a right to render aid to any other individual whose rights are being abridged.

The same right that you have to render aid to an innocent third party being dragged against her will into the bushes by a rapist, enables you to also render aid to a man held in slavery.

Similarly the same right that allows you to render aid to a man who is being robbed of his rightful property by an armed hoodlum.

By natural law, the man and woman held in slavery has every right to free himself, to request or accept aid in doing so. And every man has a natural right to render the aid necessary to effect the slave's freedom.

Perhaps, what you intended to ask about was whether the federal government had any constitutional authority to force the South to end slavery. THAT may well be a different answer, being a different question. But I think whether you intended to or not, you asked the appropriate question for this group to consider. Doubly so for those who assert a nation has no more proper powers than an individual in that nation has, or who consider the constitution itself to be racist (slavery explicitly permitted, blacks counted as 3/5ths of a person for representation purposes), anti-liberty, and statist.

The companion question to your question is, "By what right did slave owners or their government, presume to hold men in slavery? To force from them the fruit of their labors? To use women as mere objects for sexual gratification without any consent whatsoever? To buy, sell, trade, and profit in another man's life, liberty, family, blood, sweat, and work?"

I love most of Southern culture. And while there are fine aspects of New England Puritanism, in total, I find the know-it-all busybodiesm distasteful. I abhor what Reconstruction did to the South. The same men who effected that, persecuted my ancestors for their peaceful, consensual religious marriage practices. I recognize the hobson's choice the South faced with slavery by the mid 19th century.

But no thinking, rational, moral person today can justify or sugar coat slavery in the least. If every slave in the nation had actually be treated twice as well as Southern propagandists claimed they were, slavery would still have been an unspeakably horrific institution at complete odds with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. It had to come to an end.

Would that it could have done so peacefully. But it didn't. Perhaps had Lincoln lost the election. Perhaps had Southern forces not fired on Fort Sumter but instead appealed to their brothers in the North for a peaceful resolution. Perhaps....

But at the end of the day, no man, no nation, has a right to hold others in slavery.

What a shame your liberal friend and you both failed to see that with any clarity.

Charles
Says the guy who wasn't involved in the discussion between my liberal friend and I.

I find it extremely humorous that your great ego causes you to tell me what questions I intended to ask as you use an insult to point out what you decided I and my liberal friend failed to see just so you can redirect the conversation in order to toot your own arrogant know it all horn in yet another wall of text lecture.
 
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OC for ME

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As far back as 1856, Mr. Lincoln had told a Republican convention in Illinois: “We say to the southern disunionists, we won’t go out of the Union, and you shan’t.”

http://abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-secession/
lengthy read, but the singular focus of Lincoln should be evident. Unless the above is all ya need to know about Lincoln and the Southern States.

Essentially, Lincoln would not stand for the federal government to be "broken up" no matter the cost to preserve the federal government.
 

sudden valley gunner

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Besides the personal attacks and misrepresentation, some seem not to get it.

Lincoln wasn't a racist bigot who was conflicted about slavery, he was a racist bigot who was't conflicted about slavery and never moved to abolish it, except in a sham "military maneuver" which freed slaves the North had no ability to free and kept enslaved slaves they did have the power to free.

What is so horrible is that he is held up by the state propaganda machine as someone he was not. Its that simple, not his actual racism.

Take the racism/bigotry/slavery out of the issue, he remains a horrible person who destroyed the union, destroyed the constitution, created an empire, willingly abandoned the rules of civilized warfare (targeting civilians), instituted unconstitutional draft, instituted the first income tax (also unconstitutional), targeted the South with high tariffs, gave huge corporate subsidies, brought mercantilism back in a big way ( the founders fought against that), installed federal judges who ruled in his political favor, stifled free speech and dissent, created a central bank that devalued money,etc.
 

sudden valley gunner

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"Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in u2018the great emancipator' and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him" (p. 114). And "with rare exceptions, you can't believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race." Lerone Bennett Jr

How right he is. The cult like followers of Lincoln and the empire he created will treat anything bad about Lincoln as heresy.
 

Freedom1Man

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In other threads, you've utterly failed to demonstrate that Lincoln was any more racist than any of his contemporaries. By today's standards, almost everyone in 1860s USA was racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and so. This "despite the ability to readily research Lincoln and to present facts" that should back up your claims about him being a horrible racist, if, in fact, he was.

I don't much care whether someone loves Lincoln or hates him. My own feelings on him are mixed. He kept the union together which I consider a good thing. Whatever the motives of Union and Confederacy, Lincoln or Davis, at the outset, the War Between the States ultimately brought an end to legal slavery in this nation...which is an unquestionable good. On the flip side, Lincoln's tactics both in the War and on the domestic front were horrific, the shift in power to the federal government has created serious problems and eroded constitutional checks and balances, and there is no doubt the nation paid a horrible price in the war. Perhaps slavery would have ended without the war. Maybe England would have eventually granted us independence without the Revolutionary war.

What I do find terribly annoying, however, is when someone holds himself up as some kind of expert in real history, but lacks the ability to properly balance between two conflicting truths such as to paint complex historic figures as one-dimensional.

On the one hand, morality is not relative. On the other hand, all men are greatly influenced by the society in which they are born and live; to make simplistic judgments about the past based on current standards leads to a wholly warped view of history. From recent "graduates" of government run day cares (some call them high schools), such ignorance as might manifest by claiming all "Rebels" were bad people while all "Yanks" were freedom loving emancipators is sad. From someone professing to know the "real" history and who has clearly read enough outside the usual grade school curriculum to know better, it moves from sad to something more like blind religious dogma.

Charles
WW2, the Germans were not bad people. The plus side is that th r NAZI helped in medical and scientific advancements. The way they got some of the results were questionable but the end results were good. Just saying that if you have to take the good with the bad about Lincoln, then you have to do the same with Hitler. Also all the advancements from all the wars no matter the cause for the wars.

Since wars create advancements that can improve our daily lives, we should just have a good shoot it out every 20-30 years.

Sent from my SM-G386T using Tapatalk
 

Dave_pro2a

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WW2, the Germans were not bad people. The plus side is that th r NAZI helped in medical and scientific advancements. The way they got some of the results were questionable but the end results were good. Just saying that if you have to take the good with the bad about Lincoln, then you have to do the same with Hitler. Also all the advancements from all the wars no matter the cause for the wars.

Since wars create advancements that can improve our daily lives, we should just have a good shoot it out every 20-30 years.

Sent from my SM-G386T using Tapatalk

Possibly, comparing Nazi Germany to the regime of North Korea could cancel out Godwin's Law.

Both countries were run by dictators, both killed a bunch of people.... but compared to NK, Hitler did advance medicine.

Lincoln was a racist, but he did have to free the slaves to justify causing the death of almost 1 million Americans.
 

davidmcbeth

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I wonder if any members had relatives who served in the war ? I had none that I know of.

Wonder what their take on the war was....after all, they were the ones with their butts on the line.
 

sudden valley gunner

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https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html

It is exceedingly apparent that the federal government is important to some folks even back in the day...so to speak.

Nice links.

The one good thing that came out of the war was abolition of slavery. Yet I think the way it was done led to 100 plus years of oppression and blame. It was after all the norther packed courts that upheld Jim Crowe laws etc.
 

utbagpiper

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The north LOSES all appeals to starting a war with the south based on the north's Natural Rights to help (or free) slaves in the south, since the north continued sanctioning slavery in the north.

If I recall, it was Southern forces that opened fire on a Federal military installation first. Whatever one might think about slavery, rights to secession, Lincoln, or yankees, the facts are quite clear: The South started the war.

The North did not invade until after a federal installation had been fired upon. No attempt to free slaves or otherwise take private property without just compensation was undertaken until well after a federal military base had been fired upon.

I think it takes a real stretch to suggest that electing a regionally unpopular person President, or failure to abandon property, previously duly turned over to the federal government for a fort simply because the State changed its mind constitutes starting a war.

When you can get basic facts straight, we can consider moving on to higher subjects like logic.

Charles
 

utbagpiper

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Yup, one ought to always judge history based on today's understanding of cultural norms.

One problem with allowing personality conflicts to drive ever position, Dave, is you end up taking ridiculous stands.

Obviously, we cannot judge history by today's standards. At the same time, we cannot divorce ourselves from natural rights (which do not change or they are not really natural) and logic. If someone asks whether the North had a "right" to end slavery, the obvious answer is "Yes. Every man held in slavery has a right to request and accept help to free himself; And all men have a right to protect the rights of others." Natural rights do not change.

In contrast, claiming that Washington's doctors deliberately killed him because they bled him, that Touring was deliberately tortured because the English were homophobic, that Lincoln was a terrible person because he held different views toward other races than we'd consider proper today, or that Newton was a moron because he didn't understand germ theory of illnesses are all equally ludicrous claims.

Washington and Touring received best practice medical care of their day for their respective conditions. That we now consider the treatment barbaric, even know that is was ineffective and wrong, doesn't change the motives of healers doing their best with what they had. Newton was a physicist, not a physician, and nobody in his day understood micro-organisms. And Lincoln was fairly progressive for his day in condemning slavery even if he didn't go so far as to view African blacks as his complete equals.

Do try to avoid making so many posts based on personality disagreements.

Charles
 

utbagpiper

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Says the guy who wasn't involved in the discussion between my liberal friend and I.

I find it extremely humorous that your great ego causes you to tell me what questions I intended to ask as you use an insult to point out what you decided I and my liberal friend failed to see just so you can redirect the conversation in order to toot your own arrogant know it all horn in yet another wall of text lecture.

I see personality issues expressed in your post, but no real response to my main point.

Either the slaves had a right to seek their freedom, or they didn't. Which was it, in your view?

Either decent men have a right to help other innocent men secure their natural rights, or they don't. Which is it?

And if you don't want me or others to comment on your discussions with others, don't post them in a discussion forum.

Charles
 
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utbagpiper

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Besides the personal attacks and misrepresentation, some seem not to get it.

"Some" seem not to understand that repeatedly, emphatically, calling Lincoln a "racist", "bigot," or "horrible person" doesn't really provide evidence he was any of those things, except by our current standards. By those standards, nearly every man who lived before 1900 whom you look to for inspiration or who you admire qualifies as a racist, bigot, homophobe, etc. How many signers of the DoI were slave owners? How many of them considered the American Indians (those "savages" spoken of in the DoI that carries their signatures) to be equal to those of European descent?

I have not challenged assertions that Lincoln waged a war that was--at best--constitutionally suspect. I have not challenged claims that said war resulted in a massive shift in power from the States to the feds. I have not challenged assertions that slavery was not the primary motivating factor for the North when the war started (though there is pretty good evidence it was a major motivation for South Carolina in starting the war).

But just because you dislike Lincoln and his political positions doesn't make him any more racist than were many men whose political views you generally admire. It is the childish attempt to paint historic figures as one-dimensional caricature that I find distasteful from someone who claims to know the "real" history. It puts you in exactly the same camp as those who would claim that Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee are horrible people because they "fought to preserve slavery."

Charles
 
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