This has always been “who we are” despite what Michelle Obama says.
Then people reply about “what about the other 60%”. If you have 10 friends and ask them what they want to eat for dinner and 6 say let’s get Mexican and the other 4 say let’s kill Bob and eat him. You still need to be concerned about your friend group.
The Somalis basically have this system, which has been more successful than their geographic attempts at democracy, where you can essentially go under an entirely different legal system even in the exact same geographic spot by accepting a sponsor of another tribe, or possibly by marrying ('xeer'), or if you so choose you can secede from the whole thing and make your own tribe and take the risks that come with that.
Damning secession because it's not perfect cuz muh Confederacy is just intellectually dishonest. No political system is perfect, having the option is better than nothing. I have never implied that the right of secession should stop at the size of a slave state and the slaves could not themselves secede which they have in fact successfully done.
You did say that the secession of the South mitigated tyranny of the majority, when in fact it did the exact opposite.
If you want to say that it usually does this, that would be one thing, but you put it as a universal and chose the worst example for it.
I said secession mitigates tyranny of the majority.
I don't think you understand what mitigate means. It doesn't mean the risk is eliminated. Quite often a mitigation effort will do the opposite (i.e. vaccines mitigate risk of death but some patient has allergic reaction to vaccine and patient dies).
Arguably had black people been able to secede from the union AND the confederacy they might have been better off, but of course, both the union and the confederates would likely have attacked them in that case, because it's not as if white people didn't want to tyrannize blacks even in the north, they just didn't do it with the mechanism of slavery (arguably because slavery was just becoming bad economics in the industrial north and attacking slavery was more of a way to get one up on the south than to help black people that hardly had the rights of whites in the North).
>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.
Now, it would've been a lot nicer if they didn't start a war over it, but slavery was done for one way or another and everyone knew it.
I mean, in an alternate universe where the modern cloture rule existed and somehow at least one extra free state was admitted while the South was not paying attention to block it, sure, that’s almost plausible, but...
They progressively outlawed slavery over the course of 1870 through 1890 without a civil war. The US probably could've done just about the same over a shorter period (because the US was richer and could have paid its way through a lot of the opposition faced in Brazil).
Brazil had the same Constitution, Senate Rules, and balance of power between slave and free states as the pre-Civil War USA?
And I never said I was better. I nearly added a “and this isn’t exclusive to one side” addendum to my comment, but decided that would just derail my point. Maybe I should have.
Exactly. The boomers thought they were making the world a better place with their 1960s environmentalism regulation and zoning. Turns out they mostly just teed up a housing crisis 50yr later.
The clean water act literally outlaws cheap density via stormwater rules. Even if zoning permitted you can't just build an apartment building right up to your setback minimums like you could in the old days (without spending hundreds of thousands to possibly to comply).
>You are no better, my friend.
I resent them for their choices and their dishonesty. Things they chose to be and could change if they were open to discussion in good faith - which they refuse.
They resent me and millions of others for my skin color or my sexual orientation or where I was born. Things I never chose and can't change.
Please argue in good faith.
Did you miss the current administration's pushback against DEI for being "discriminatory towards white cisgender males"?
Both sides can not, in my view, argue both things: the right as we see it in America wants to oppress people based on immutable values such as race and gender.
The left wants people to acknowledge that “hey maybe it’s ok if everything doesn’t cater to one specific archetype of a person” - no reasonable person on the left wants to punish or oppress anyone for being a “white cisgender male”.
There’s this idea I’ve held onto that seems very apt: when a group that was being oppressed is given the same rights as their oppressors, their oppressors feel as though something is being taken from them.
There is a alot of performative contradiction being performed here, there's an evokation of post-structuralist assumptions when you critique the particularist structure of modern society that favours certain archetypes based on certain assumptions, but then your later statement about oppressors and oppressed itself is projecting a new framing that is prone to it's own dubious assumptions and favours certain archetypes (the oppressed). There isn't much actual concrete grounding of ethical values here, and that's ironically reflected in the fact that most people do have different opinions on the matter.
But that's not a contradiction that progressivism can escape, because to provide a strong grounding to say "Racism is bad", you need to evoke from a universalist framework, one that empiricism or liberalism previously provided. But it is precisely the perceived arrogance to declare your values as universal when they emerged particularly from the West that is what is being critiqued in critical theory as Systemic Racism. Power + Prejudice.
Well, the Left and Right does draw alot from the identity politics promulgated from the Nazi Philosopher Carl Schmitt. Did you know that he supported the Nazis from the basis of pluralism, that he was terrified of the rise of universalist, homogenous world state?