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Adrian Hester

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Everything posted by Adrian Hester

  1. I've found that for history the best way to proceed, at least for me, is to find a good survey history, one hopes not so dry and boring as to turn you off the subject entirely, and to combine it with books on narrower periods and topics, especially ones that go into the historiography of the subject--how we know what we know, who offered certain interpretations and why, how our knowledge of the period has changed, and what gaps in the evidence remain. At the same time you want to find a good sourcebook in original documents. For example, let's say you wanted to study American history of the colonial and revolutionary periods. You'll want a good general survey of American history to give you a basic timeline of important events and then a good book about each of the three regions. For instance, for New England you might want to start with Ranlet's Enemies of the Bay Colony: Puritan Massachussetts and Its Foes, which was written to give a survey of Massachussetts history up to King Philip's War without showing undue sympathy to the Puritans, which important earlier historians of New England (Perry Miller, Alden Vaughan) were wont to do; you'd also, of course, want to read their broader or more groundbreaking works too eventually, such as Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675. Similarly, you'd want to get a copy of John Boles' The South Through Time: A History of an American Region, which is an excellent book, I might add. (For the Middle Colonies I don't know the history books so well at all.) And so on; try to get a good grasp of the course of events in the period and a feel for how the different economies and societies in the various regions worked, what opportunities they gave or closed off, and how that went in hand with the governments of the colonies, and follow up your interests. At the same time you'd want to find a good book or two about politics and political theory in the colonies--there are quite a few, of course, but a good place to start is Donald Lutz' Origins of American Constitutionalism, which is a short, lucid introduction to the subject. (It's best read with his collection of colonial charters and other documents, The Colonial Origins of the American Constitution.) Not to mention some of the major modern works--Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is still quite good; also one to read eventually is J.R. Pole's Political Representation in England and the Birth of the American Republic (very long but very good on comparing the English and American experiences in representative political systems), and then R.R. Palmer's The Age of the Democratic Revolution is an interesting comparative study of the period; Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution is also worth reading to see how ideas of social hierarchy and equality changed over time in the colonies and early republic. Those are just off the top of my head; someone who's studied the period thoroughly (not me) would probably have other equally good suggestions, if not better. The problem, of course, is knowing where to go to find the good books in the first place (since that's much more fruitful than working critically through bad books), and there you have to ask, read reviews, and sometimes just give it a try. (Though for American and European history, Liberty Fund is usually a good starting point.)
  2. Do you mean Writing and Thinking, or did I miss this book on the website?
  3. "Nunch"? Is that short for a bunch of nuns? Well, convents are sort of a joint-ownership venture. I guess.
  4. First, there were two different beams involved simultaneously in the experiment at 90 degrees to each other on a platform that could be rotated to any desired orientation. Second, this experiment was performed in 1879, long before Einstein explained the results with special relativity; it was the most precise way of determining whether there was an ether wind. There's a good overview of the experiment here.
  5. I'd go (a somewhat qualified) further--not just playful but making connections between disparate things like metaphor in poetry. For instance, three striking metaphors that could make for interesting surrealist paintings: "The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on..." (Shelley, Mont Blanc) "And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess, As thick and numberless As the gay motes that people the Sun Beams..." (Milton, Il Penseroso) "When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73) I tend to judge surrealist painting that I like by the quality of any metaphor it embodies (much surrealist painting leaves me cold because it either makes no comprehensible metaphor or its metaphor is repugnant); on that score and for that reason I quite like Mr. Kush.
  6. No, that's not quite how I disagree with you. If you want to give him a "legacy," it would be both--in a long historical view both were significant. For that, keep reading to the end. Did he actually actively support it, or did he merely accede to it? West Virginia seceded from lower Virginia on its own by convening a congress of a sort to arrange a vote whether to allow those counties to go their own way, and of course the congress was hardly representative of the entire commonwealth; the vote was heavily in favor of separation but even at the time was viewed as having borderline legality at best--but really, if Virginia could vote to secede from the Union, then by the very same reasoning West Virginia had the right to secede from Virginia, though that's not exactly what they did. (Here's the timeline, since it's not widely discussed. Virginia voted to secede from the Union on 17 Apr 1861 when Lincoln called up troops after the bombing of Fort Sumter. The congressmen from the 25 northwestern counties then assembled on 23 April and voted for each county in the northwest to send five representatives to meet on 13 May. After Virginia voted for secession on 23 May, the northwesterners met on 11 June, on 17 June declared all state offices void, and on the 20th appointed an interim governor and called for new elections to fill the vacant posts on the grounds that the acts in Richmond were null and void. This rival government claiming to represent the will of the entire population of Virginia called itself the Restored State of Virginia and voted on 24 Oct 1861 to approve statehood for the counties of West Virginia, which then petitioned the US Congress for admission, which was heatedly debated until an enabling act was approved on 31 Dec 1862, which Lincoln approved on condition the abolition of slavery be written into the new state constitution.) There's a good article on the legality (or, more likely, illegality) of the secession of West Virginia here; my timeline is condensed from that site. Two quotes from this article are well worth quoting. First, Thaddeus Stevens: "We may admit West Virginia as a new state, not by virtue of any provision of the constitution, but under an absolute power which the laws of war give us. I shall vote for this bill upon that theory, for I will not stultify myself by supposing that we have any warrant in the constitution for this processing." Second, Abraham Lincoln: "We can scarcely dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle, much less can we afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field. Her brave and good men regard her admission into the union as a matter of life and death. They have been true to the union under many severe trials. The division of a state is dreaded as a precedent but a measure expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace...It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the constitution and secession in favor of the constitution. I believe the admission of West Virginia into the union is expedient." What is important to keep in mind, however, is that in the one case in which I know Lincoln did have a good deal of influence over a proposed secession, that of East Tennessee, he urged the loyalists not to secede from the rebellious state. (In fact, I've put this point in a separate paragraph to keep it from getting lost in the details above it.) On this particular point, I have to say it's not probative. With independence they could have chosen whatever they would on the question of slavery, but as part of a restored union it was clear they would lose both independence and the right to own slaves. Mind you, I'm not saying there weren't some Confederate leaders willing to recruit slaves into the army and end slavery if that would secure Southern independence. There were--Jefferson Davis himself came to hold these views by the end of the war (or something like them; it's been a while since I read it so I don't remember the details, but if you're curious about the CSA simply as a nation, Clement Eaton's A History of the Southern Confederacy (1965) is very good and goes into this issue at least a bit, and there's at least one later book on the history of the CSA distinct from the war effort that I have seen but not read). A number of Southern leaders saw the CSA as a distinct nation with its own culture, ethos, and political ideals (including but not necessarily founded upon slavery--many pro-slavery thinkers wholeheartedly disagreed) that would have been (and indeed, the last were) destroyed by surrender to the Union. They might not have existed as a majority (if there was a majority, it was probably a majority fighting for home and hearth and a native culture that included slavery but extended far beyond it), but one should keep in mind they did exist. And that is what you have to keep in mind when you discuss whether union or abolition was more fundamental in the North, or states' rights or slavery in the South. Many, perhaps most, on each side viewed their respective pair as a whole--union assuring freedom for all, states' rights assuring freedom for all (white) Americans, particularly property rights (including property rights in slaves). This includes many political leaders on each side. Some leaders considered--and more importantly, under the force of daily events came to see clearly and forthrightly--one or the other as more important and more fundamental, and followed the working out of the logic of competing and colluding ideas, if you will. My view of Lincoln is that his views changed in that very way; he ran in 1860 to preserve the Union and prevent the spread of slavery, which he perhaps saw as a co-equal whole, but came to see complete abolition as the only fully moral justification for the slaughter of the war and the preservation of the Union, and the acceptance of free blacks (and all blacks as forever free) as basic citizens of a sort (if not yet prepared for full citizenship) of the only land they and their ancestors had known for at least 50 years and often much longer than that (rather than as aliens to be shunted off to Liberia on a government-paid ticket). His view of the positive powers of the state was rather more inclusive than the positive powers enumerated in the Constitution allowed and in this regard certain of his policies were the culmination of decades of pro-statist thought. (Similarly, some Southern leaders seem to have came to see the freedom espoused by the Southern cause as extending to all Southerners reardless of color.) And this is why Lincoln has a dual legacy--his administrations put paid to the earlier arguments over states' rights and federal power and swept aside the old views of politics and constitutional law to usher in a new era of centralization, state co-ordination, state monopoly, patronage, and the wrangling of power blocs and factions. Both abolition (and the demise of the old system in whose terms it was debated) and centralization (and the new system of the federal octopus in whose terms most everything has been debated ever since) are Lincoln's legacy. Choosing only one or the other or reducing one to the other distorts the past and oversimplifies history.
  7. It's a typical creationist chestnut that's been disproved many times. The basic problems with the creationists' calculation are (1) they are based on assuming certain building blocks of modern life must arise randomly, whereas the modern biochemistry would have evolved from a much simpler starting point, and (2) when creationists go on and estimate the amount of time necessary for such life to evolve, they implicitly assume sequential random trials, but in reality you'd have a vast number of simultaneous trials going on each second. There are other serious problems, of course, but those give you a good idea of the (quite typical) evasive non-seriousness of the figures. There's a good discussion of such arguments here.
  8. Well, it was a formalism for representing antiparticles in Feynmann graphs that no doubt made calculations easier; that doesn't mean Feynmann proposed it as an actual theory.
  9. I looked for them but not too assiduously and couldn't find them. They're in one of the threads over on the Speichers' forum, I think. (Or else here somewhere. I don't think it would have been any other place.) No worry--I just assumed you were summarizing Harriman's arguments and I was just responding to them as you presented them; I haven't read it (heard it?) myself.
  10. I hadn't seen either of the films in years, so I reread the story and watched the movies again before replying. By 1950s "creature feature" standards, yes. It was produced by Howard Hawkes and it's suspected (from his being everywhere on the set every day) that he actually directed it but gave the credit to Christian Nyby (either to give him a good start in the industry or else not to be associated with a science fiction flick). As a result, the dialogue was quite easy on the ears. The Thing was a much less threatening creature in the 1951 film than in the story or the 1982 film; rather than a threat to the very foundations of individual identity, it was a blood-drinking marauder from space. (Played by James Arness in not his most difficult role--he had to bellow a lot and stand menacingly in doorways.) This drained a good deal of the tension from the story, so to make a good movie they added a conflict between the scientists and the military that was fairly routine--the impersonal demand for knowledge versus the protection of humanity, yadda yadda yadda. A mischievous comparison that occurred to me at the end is that it was just a souped-up Attack of the Crab Monsters. (Not really, but there were some similarities--but The Thing from Another World was a much better movie.) Also, it was the movie that ended with those famous words, "Watch the Skies!" The Campbell story is available on a website devoted to the Carpenter movie. The 1982 movie stayed much closer to the original story and focused on one of its best and most memorable features, the reactions and relationships among the men as they realize some of the crew are no longer human but seem like it in every respect. In fact, the movie even used characters from the story (a dozen out of the just over three dozen men in the station in the original), names and jobs mostly the same, and I agree about Kurt Russell--he matched the character of McReady (a significant name!) and even what I remember of the description of his looks quite well. The exposition was quite different, but the main differences are exactly what you'd expect in changing a well-constructed story into a well-constructed movie: The major difference overall is that the story is a much more optimistic piece of work; it combines the tension in the movie with the solution of a well-worked-out SF puzzle. (I'll add that the movie keeping the same characters made me notice a plot hole the second time around I missed the first time: )
  11. No, I agree, and agree further that in some (most? perhaps, even probably) such cases he did so against the Constitution. But I do not think that the criticisms I have read in this thread of the Emancipation Proclamation and other measures concerning slavery are examples pertinent to the point--there he showed quite delicate care for contemporary constitutional law; on the question of slavery he sought a permanent just solution in accordance with constitutional principles that would not be easily overturned by the judiciary. (On matters like the suspension of habeas corpus while Congress was in session, the most likely explanation I've read for his actions is that he thought they were military necessities that he undertook despite knowing they'd be overturned after the end of the war, at which point they would no longer be military necessities. The abolition of slavery, on the other hand, he did not want overturned later in court; it was far more significant than a matter of military necessity, though he saw it as a very useful military policy as well. As for [at best] dubiously constitutional measures the Republicans in Congress passed during his administration that he signed into law, I see no reason not to slam him hard for those, even if I don't know whether he actually worked for them through his influence in the Republican party. Perhaps they were necessary tit-for-tat to secure further liberty for slaves, but if so, nonetheless in those cases he still is partly responsible for what was enacted.)
  12. However, I do think an interesting question this brings up is, are there any differences in circumstances in which (1) a state's secession from a federal union and (2) revolt by citizens of a federal union are just or not? That is, a state may secede but its citizens may not rebel, or vice versa. An obvious difference in circumstances is that if a state is tyrannical in a non-tyannical federal union, and similarly if it is tyrannical in a different way, then private rebellion would be just but secession most likely not (since secession would leave the state with its tyrannical powers intact but no higher power, however tyrannical in a different way, to rein in that tyranny...though I suppose there are special circumstances in which secession could conceivably destabilize tyrannical institutions in a state; in general, however, I'd say no). So, are there any cases in which a state would be justified in secession but its citizens would not be justified in rebellion? I'd say that if you exclude any sort of interest of groups of its citizens that cannot be reduced to the individual rights of each member of that group, then no. (And certainly questions of tariff policy as they were conducted in the era of sectionally-influenced Whig-Democrat party politics would count as arguments over interest reducing to whose benefit unjust restrictions of trade were to be based on.) And for me that is the basic issue in justifying secession.
  13. Here's a tutorial in plasma physics, the first plasma physics tutorial I found, second paragraph--basic stuff anyone doing plasma physics knows from very early on: "Above a temperature of about 100,000K most matter exists in an ionized state. For this reason the plasma state is frequently called the fourth state of matter. That is, if one adds heat to a solid one obtains a liquid, add heat to a liquid and one obtains a gas, add sufficient heat to a gas and the atoms themselves become ionized and one obtains a plasma. Such high temperatures are, however, not necessary, for a plasma to exist. Provided there is a mechanism for ionizing the gas and the density is sufficiently low for recombination to be slow, a plasma can exist at relatively low temperatures. This is frequently the case in laboratory produced plasmas and, indeed, in the Earth's own ionosphere--an example of a plasma produced by photoionization of the tenous outer layers of the atmosphere." (My emphasis in italics.) http://www.hmo.ac.za/old_site/Space_Physics/tut/tut.html This is basic stuff. There's no need to supply a journal reference--it's included in the textbooks and tutorials. It's a shame you're not familiar with it.
  14. In fact, Einstein started with Maxwell's equations and showed that combined with certain experimental facts they yielded the Lorentz transformation equations that imply that c is constant in all inertial reference frames. Not really. The simplest statement that permits special relativity to be derived, and one of the results that automatically follows in any equivalent system regardless of your starting point, is that c is constant in all inertial reference frames. This is true regardless of the starting point (Maxwell's equations or the relativistic transformation of momentum, the latter being a much less natural place to start--indeed, it seems to me like something you'd start with only if you knew the final result and wanted a different derivation that revealed something more clearly about mechanics), and whether you start with it to derive your equations (the usual method in introducing special relativity to students, since it makes for by far the most natural and philosophically basic introduction to problems of simultaneity) or derive it in turn from a different starting point (as in fact Einstein did from Maxwell's equations), it is still an ineluctable consequence of special relativity. But relativistic momentum implies time dilation and length contraction and vice versa in the same way that 1+1=2 implies 5+7=12 and vice versa, or that the various statements of Newtonian mechanics imply each other. The very fact that time dilation, length contraction, and relativistic momentum occur together like that supports another consequence of the same equations, the constancy of c. It would only be if they didn't co-occur that you'd have something to write home (or a physics journal) about. I thought Speicher was sharply critical of Harriman's comments on relativity theory. I mean really critical.
  15. It is crankery. I responded to some of it when it was first posted--I didn't even go into the relativity and quantum theory he was trying to vanquish but restricted myself to the appalling errors in classical mechanics and, ironically, electro-magnetism. The response was underwhelming. Most of the points were just ignored. I remember somewhat substantive responses on only two matters. One, comets, was of such minor, secondary importance that even if this plasma theory were correct in that case it would say nothing at all about any of the other issues in cosmology and astrophysics that the fellow is on about. As for the other, the fellow dismissed a well-known phenomenon (plasmas created by ionization at high temperatures due to high-energy atomic collisions stripping electrons from neutral atoms) with an argument, or rather a one-liner, from assumed authority that I suspect the authority, Hannes Alfven, would have been appalled to have been associated with. In other words, not even worth responding to further.
  16. I just finished responding to this at some length and lost the entire posting. I'll try not to make this new response as short as that computer glitch made my temper, and I'll spare you the Primal Scream Therapy that it provoked. You're welcome. Now, I agree, and I'll add that this is a much more interesting question too. Two separate questions. I'm sure we agree on the second one. I seem to remember early on someone pointing out that the Union was a joint compact entered into freely by all the states, and therefore it could not rightfully be abrogated one-sidedly by one set of states against the wishes of the other states. However, that might have been in a different thread. Moreover, there might be more to the issue than that. I once read the argument that the claim that the states retained their sovereignty in the Union at best applied only to the 13 original states that ratified the Constitution; the other states were admitted through a process that explicitly recognized national sovereignty, as declared in the preambles and such to the state constitutions; and that several of the original 13 states had adopted new constitutions in the meantime that also affirmed national sovereignty. However, I haven't followed up on this and can't comment on it further. Now, I think we all would agree that if the federal government becomes tyrannical (say by establishing thorough-going censorship and political imprisonment), then states that seceded against such tyranny would be acting perfectly justly. But that was not the case with the South. What grounds should be justifiable for dissolving a federal union? Thwarting the "interests" of a state or region?--and if so, then how do those interests differ from the individual rights of the people living in the seceding states, and most basically, why should they be recognized legally if they are not reducible to people's individual rights? Would secession have been any better if it had been over tariff policy (as during the Nullification Crisis), especially since all parties accepted the authority of Congress to levy tariffs but only disagreed on the rates? In any case, I'll remind you that that was not the original cause of the Civil War in the first place. The federal government owned a lot of property in the southern states maintained partly by taxes from the northern states--not just public property that Objectivists would object to, such as customs houses and post offices, but also court houses and especially military installations. What should be done about that property? Lincoln took the quite justifiable position that as Commander in Chief it was his responsibility not to allow national military property to be seized without legislative action by Congress. There was a great deal of northern sentiment to allow the southern states to go their own way, but that did not extend to allowing them to seize federal property by force--that is precisely what happened with the attack on Fort Sumter, which showed that the southern leaders simply scorned any compromise with the North. The South started hostilities and gave Lincoln all the pretext he needed to declare them rebels. (One might say that Lincoln had the politial savvy to maneuver the South into starting the war, but he only maneuvered them in a direction they were prefectly happy to go.) I won't repeat my comments above. However, I think it a very bad idea to tie in such questions too much with southern secession, which was not undertaken on grounds of individual rights but essentially of sectional interests that violated individual rights, if even that. (The rights of whites, too--the prohibition on pro-abolitionist debate, for example, in southern states, which violated the right to free speech.) What threat did Lincoln pose to slavery? Directly, very little. The Dredd Scott decision had given the South all it insisted on--the federal government had no say in the spread of slavery, no black slave or free could ever be a citizen of the US, and all slaves were private property, the right to which was given full protection by the government. What could Lincoln have done legally? He could have permitted the US Post to carry abolitionist tracts into the South, he could have allowed local officials not to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, he could have rallied the Republicans to overturn the gag rule, and so on--small irritations around the edges of the institution. But symbolically Lincoln's election was very threatening--it showed that the total victory the pro-slavery party thought it had been handed in 1857 was very unpopular in the North and the issue was not settled at all. And so they repudiated a fully legal election because they did not like the result. This is a very different basis for secession than protecting individuals from federal tyranny, hence a very poor starting point for the general question of just bases for dissolving a federal union.
  17. You thoroughly misunderstand the wording there; there was no "100 day moratorium on slavery." Rather, the preliminary Proclamation (22 September 1862) stated that Lincoln would officially announce which states were still in rebellion against the Union 100 days later. The second Proclamation (1 January 1863, 100 days later) quoted the earlier Proclamation and proceeded to name the areas officially in rebellion against the Union: "Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln,...do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States..." Insert the phrase "which has been..." before the bold-faced portion and it should be clear. You're really grasping at straws here. It was an executive order, not a law of Congress, and it therefore dealt strictly with matters under executive jurisdiction as stated in the Constitution. The Second Confiscation Act (July 1862) gave Lincoln authority to deal with all captured rebel property as he saw fit (which in general had been dealt with earlier by the generals on the scene in accordance with the international law of the time), which is what he saw as giving him the express authority to free captured slaves of rebel southerners in the Emancipation Proclamation. "Rebellion" was the whole context of the Proclamation, and the Proclamation freed all slaves within this context. Faulting Lincoln for not overstepping his authority by freeing all slaves everywhere in the United States is as short-sighted and nonsensical as calling Truman a hypocrite because he integrated only the armed forces, not all of American society, by presidential decree. No, it could not have been issued for all states because the Dredd Scott decision was still law of the land (or rather, those portions of the decision that had not already been rendered void by legislative action, such as outlawing slavery in the territories and emancipating slaves in Washington DC). In particular, the decision stated forthrightly that slaves, being private property, could not be taken from their owners without due process of law. And yet you have not shown that that would have been the only way of giving a moral justification for freeing the slaves. Indeed, you have implicitly argued that a presidential decree (that is, an executive proclamation) for all of the United States would also have given it moral justification--however, that would have been unconstitutional. Apparently because the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in accordance with constitutional principles of executive authority, it was immoral (or at least amoral). Why? Because it did not end slavery all at one blow? Recognition of slavery had been built into the Constitution, however surreptitiously, and was well-established in American law for almost ninety years; Lincoln could not overturn this overnight, yet he did manage to get slavery outlawed in four years. This took unremitting effort and unwavering moral clarity--and this you pick at with poorly-digested misreadings of the documents in question to find something, anything, to throw at Lincoln because you are opposed to certain other of his actions. You're contradicting yourself here badly. First you write, "politically, after the EP, it would have been impossible to maintain slavery." Then obviously the Emancipation Proclamation did have an important moral effect, at the very least by making the abolition of slavery an official war goal of the North. But then you write, "morality is not retroactive." Setting aside the point that this is for the most part a sonorous nothing (how can you make morality "retroactive" anyway?), I assume you mean that Lincoln should not be praised for the ultimate consequences of actions that at the exact moment in time they were undertaken had no effect. That's nonsense, utter and complete. You're saying that only actions that actually bear fruit at the precise moment they are undertaken can have moral value, and can only have the moral value that they possess right at that particular moment in time, but any future effects of the act, even if they are planned for and obtained in accordance with the principles stated in or underlying the act, do not. You've effectively severed morality from human judgment and planned action! You'll do anything to bash Lincoln, won't you? No, you're left seeming to smear Lincoln with any mud you fancy you can dig up because he was not 100% perfect. Except that that's not what you're doing. You're attacking anything Lincoln did in any sphere of government. I've already shown you don't even understand what that 100-day period meant, and it's clear to me that you don't know what the political realities of the day actually were, including the basic constitutional law of the time. Lincoln did worry that after the war was over, the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a war order would not prevent slavery being re-established in the South. This is why in 1864 he campaigned to abolish slavery with a constitutional amendment, not even merely federal law that could be overturned later. The political reality of the time is that the executive branch did not have law-making authority, and Lincoln fully accepted the fact that slavery, having been fully established in American law by the Dredd Scott decision, could only be abolished by legislative action, most securely by constitutional amendment. (Certainly not by decision of the Supreme Court--Taney was still Chief Justice, after all.) He could not abolish slavery by himself, only Congress could do that, and part of the history of his administrations is his unrelenting efforts to end slavery once and for all in the United States and the slow process by which he managed to get Congress to fall in with this goal over four long years.
  18. It was an atomic clock (or, rather, four of them in the original experiment), not a mechanical clock--it measures time essentially by counting atomic vibrations, not clicks of a hand.
  19. That's what you get for not saying really basic things that take 200 years to bring to a close.
  20. And I find it utterly appalling the great lengths to which you have gone to avoid defending your insulting charge that everyone who disagrees with you about Lincoln is willfully evading his supposedly obvious hypocrisy. You have consistently refused to back up your charge that Lincoln's emancipation policy was hypocritical, and you have studiously squirmed your way out of responding to the well-known historical facts that knock that charge into a cocked hat. Now you're accusing me of willfully evading his supposedly immoral behavior precisely when the issue is whether it was immoral or not--could Lincoln have done more, and was he remiss in what he did to the point of immorality? That is, if he fell short of what was possible to him at all, were they failures of knowledge or moral failings? Note that you have nowhere presented an argument that his behavior was immoral, it's just a conclusion you're smuggling in. Nor have you responded to any of the questions I asked you in the preceding post, such as what Lincoln should have done differently that would hae had a reasonable chance of success. Your behavior is below contempt--you refuse to argue for your position, you merely insult anyone who disagrees with you as an apologist for hypocrisy, immorality, and statism. That's shameful. Here I'll respond to this revised version of your posting. No, use your own words. You've accused me and several others of willful evasion of the facts and of apologizing for blatantly immoral behavior. Put up or shut up--tell us exactly why we are wrong or apologize. In any case, I'm leaving the discussion; it's not particularly fruitful and I see no further point to it.
  21. You haven't addressed any of my points; instead you're changing your claims without acknowledgement. Here is my basic argument: "Lincoln had the authority to free captured slaves of rebels; he did not have the authority to free the slaves in the northern states--only the state and national legislatures had such authority." Brass tacks here: "Too many posters here are trying to give Lincoln a free pass on his hypocritical stance on slaves in the North, etc." is quite insulting since you're claiming that the people who disagree with you are willfully blind to obvious facts and thus willfully evade his obvious hypocrisy. That's a very serious charge that I will not let you wiggle out of. Either prove that I'm wrong about his legal authority or else retract your claim that Lincoln was a hypocrite and that I'm giving him a "free pass" on his hypocrisy. "Mixed bag" is not equal to "hypocrite." At best you've simply shown that he believed in white supremacy, as did most other white Americans, including many abolitionists. Nonetheless, he did not believe this gave whites the right to own black slaves--quite the contrary, he helped end slavery. Okay, tell us what you would have done differently in his shoes so that we can see what a hypocritical fool he was. He could have tried a lot more, perhaps, but that doesn't mean he'd have had any success. Given his times, he probably advanced abolition about as fast as it could have gone through. I think he did about as well as he could have. Even if you're right about that and I'm wrong, it just means he wasn't thorough enough, not that his policies were hypocritical--he favored emancipation (in fact, he publicly supported compensated emancipation in the 1840s) and worked for it as president. In what way was that a betrayal of his stated principles? Yes, I'm quite familiar with the quote. You should think about it some more though--despite believing blacks were inferior to whites, he nonetheless argued they should be free, a goal he cared enough to work towards throughout his political career to the extent he thought he had the authority. Perhaps he went about this goal wrongly and could have done more or pushed it through sooner, but there's no trace of hypocrisy there.
  22. You haven't said the least little thing calling into question any of the points I made; all you are doing is repeating your zealous opinions, nothing more. Here's a reality check for you: Lincoln had the authority to free captured slaves of rebels; he did not have the authority to free the slaves in the northern states--only the state and national legislatures had such authority. The example of compensated emancipation in Delaware shows quite well that Lincoln was no hypocrite--he did what he could to free the slaves in the North, but this was back in the day before the executive branch had amassed all the powers it has today, and by which standard you seem implicitly to be judging him (ironically indeed, since that's precisely why you attack him as a big government statist in the first place), but since the Delaware legislature would not have gone along with his plans he had to back down. (You might consider too the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 that ended slavery in the District of Columbia and the 1862 legislation ending slavery in the territories--Lincoln supported these, but again they could only be undertaken by legislative action. You also might want to take into account Lincoln's efforts in 1862 to introduce into Congress an act of compensated emancipation for all the north, for which his efforts in Delaware were a trial effort. There was a lot of debate over that proposal and a lot of attacks on Lincoln's person in the Northern press by both sides, pro and con. His efforts might have been futile, but they certainly put the lie to your unsupported charge that Lincoln's stand was hypocritical.) I mean, sheesh, the actual history is glaring right in front of you now--set aside your zealous and historically ill-informed opinions and get a handle on the facts!
  23. Ah yes, that hoary old chestnut, completely ignoring the political realities of the time. First of all, slavery was still constitutional in states allowing it after the southern slave states seceded, and freeing the slaves in the border states would have been legally speaking an unconstitutional seizure of property--but the property of rebels was forfeit once it was captured. For example, Lincoln had pushed hard in 1862 for a program of compensated emancipation in Delaware, which had fewer than 1800 slaves at the time, and even there there was so much resistance that the Republicans decided not to put the measure up to a vote in the state legislature. Lincoln accepted the fact that the ultimate disposition of slavery would have to be by legislative enactment, not executive order, and it could only be prohibited in loyal states by the legislature (either state or national--in most of the border states and in Tennessee the slaves were freed through state acts; the slaves in Kentucky were freed by the 13th Amendment.) On the other hand, the Emancipation Proclamation did free all slaves in territories captured by Union armies after it was issued as well as all slaves who had escaped behind Union lines, which meant most of the slaves eventually were freed by it, since the disposition of captured rebel property was his prerogative as Commander in Chief. The Proclamation did not free the slaves in parts of the South that had already been captured because of the prohibition on ex post facto law. To answer your question then, easy: Lincoln took what actions he could that were in accordance with the Constitution and recognized rights of property, however wrong they might have been in the case of slavery, to free those slaves he actually had constituted authority to free. Any moral judgment of Lincoln that ignores this fact is nugatory. More generally, it always amuses me when Lincoln-bashers argue essentially that Lincoln was immoral because he violated the Constitution in the case of habeas corpus and more generally helped establish statism, but was also immoral in the case of slavery because he did not violate the Constitution or ride roughshod over legality.
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