The "American made" Hondas are actually kit cars whose primary engineering and most labor intensive components are produced in Japan. People that buy Hondas in America are still traitors, no matter how you rationalize it. The Big Three, for all their faults, created the American class, and also provided the manufacturing know how and expertise to win two world wars, and secure freedom for the world. The Japanese, well, were on the other side.
Furthermore, if someone dumps a gallon of motor oil in China, it will most assuredly NOT effect me on the east coast. A few dead fish in the Pacific ocean won't do a damn thing to hurt me 6000 miles. It just won't. In fact, dumping like the Exxon Valdez did absolutely nothing to hurt me. The oil is still in Alaska, perfectly distant from me in Ohio, at the time.
To say that the asian countries should be kept out of the USA. To a nation, China, Japan, S Korea, all adopt mercantile trading policies - essentially hoarding dollars the same way 18th century Britain tried to load up on gold. At the same time, they protect their own economies from foreign imports both by encouraging a nationalistic culture that rejects foreigners and foreign things, and also through a use of tariffs. The fact of the matter is, you would be extremely hard pressed to make any reasonable argument that any asian country is interested genuinely in free trade. Go ahead, name me just one. Call me a racist all you want, but the same damn US Trade Office report on Japan's own unwillingness to buy stuff is that.
Trade with asia is like a black guy trying to get a job in the old american south. No matter how he dressed, what degree he had, he was screwed because he was black. The same thing with trade with Asia. They can complain about this feature or that feature all they want to, and then perhaps even bribe some American media whores to defend their points, but the overall thrust is that no matter what the USA makes, or Europe for that matter, there will be no significant free trade between the West and Asia. It's just not going to happen.
Free traders have been predicting a leveling of trade with asia now for 40 years, and I'm sick of waiting. Kick them the fuck out!
Sorry, you can't have it. There's always going to be some set of people that don't want to live up to the same environmental standards as you. Some people might not care about a 1-million chance of getting cancer, but you might. What right do you have to hold them back, in a Democracy?
I say, keep the asians out, but let each state do its own thing. I would add though, as an aside, if a state is blocking economic development due to environmental laws, and have to come crawling to the feds for a loan (say California), then maybe they should quit trying to enjoy nature on everyone else's dime and do some work for a change.
We can only borrow so much government cheese money (stimulus) from the Chinese.
Here's the thing. If you are going to a casino to get money, you are kinda missing the point. The whole essence of the casino is sin, getting the drinks and the hookers and the whole nine yards of decadence and then a good steak, cigar, and a game of cards. That's a man's way to do things.
I mean, you could go to Disney and blow a few hundred bucks on Dumbo balloons... or you could go to Vegas, and gamble, get hammered and get laid. Hmmm, if you are going to blow money, why not blow it something cool. Believe me, once you get married, the gambling, cards, drinking are all going to go away.
The only thing that sucks about so many casinos and bars is that you can't smoke at them. What a stupid thing. A bunch of people whining about second hand smoke and then they all drive home drunk. It's just stupid. Quit being such a pussy about cancer, and smoke up.
Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package?;)
I would be arguing that left and right. Democrats would enjoy the "scientific" discovery, and Republicans would love a shot at team USA beating the Europeans. It's a good kind of competition to have. I'd write a letter to the National Review, perhaps, saying that, "I know you conservatives think blowing billions of dollars on physics, but for a billion dollars you get a good shot at making the French look pretty stupid." They'd do that in a heartbeat.
I think that the Standard Model has been so accurate that everyone sees this experiment as more of a validation. The theory predicts the Higgs lives at a certain range of energies, and from that they can look at the energies they can obtain, and figure out the probability of finding it. They make this assumption because they think the particle is already there. It might be entertaining though, if BOTH the Tevatron and the LHC do NOT find the Higgs particle. That would be the big surprise, as clearly the LHC can do it if they can get it to work, the Tevatron keeps nickel and diming its way closer.
Not directly related to your post, but probably worthwhile remembering that "diesel-electric" isn't necessarily a synonym for "obsolete
In the USA they can be seen that way largely because of Rickover's tireless efforts, but, you are right, a modern u-boat could easily do commerce denial and I question the USN's assertion that the modern diesel electric boat does not have a role in the modern Navy. For the price of one Virginia, you get 4 times as many boats with the same amount of people. You can stay submerged for up to 3 weeks without snorkeling, and overall operate for 90 days. That's more than enough time to set up an attack and hide.
I'm not saying that we should stop with the nuclear submarines. I'm saying that we should have some of these boats. Hey, if we wanted to bribe the Germans for some reason, this would be the bribe to give. I'd say at least buy one or two and learn how to build them ourselves.
I don't know if the link I supplied was "the one", but there is a pyramid out there, where the egyptians built the walls too steep, and the thing collapsed under its own weight near around the time it was built. So they adjusted tack and built them with a shallower angle.
And of course the old Russian Alfa hulls, made from titanium, were non-magnetic, and the USS Virginia class is said to have an "electromagnetic detection reduction system", which I would guess is probably a non-magnetic hull.
I'd surprised to find that they are undetectable by electric or magnetic means. I mean, can you really hide the magnetic or electric signature of a big sub?
I believe the best western subs have their hulls treated to render them invisible to magnetic anomaly detectors. I have no idea how they do this, but, as a condition of sale to some third world countries, the Germans, who make a mighty fine u-boat these days, have to sell the hulls so they can be detected electromagnetically - this is largely because the new German type 212 u-boats are so quiet that they have rendered US passive devices pretty obsolete. Yeah, the 212 is non-nuclear, but its got a diesel - fuel cell stack, air scrubbers and operate submerged for a long, long time. You can think of it as a 21st century type XXI.
Boy, IBM was cooler in the old days of the PC, but let's recall that IBM's vision for the PC was with an IBM Token Ring Lan adapter connecting to an IBM Mainframe, and the PC would run either IBM DOS or IBM CP/M, and then later, IBM OS/2. We would all e-mail each other with IBM Lotus Notes, using IBM SmartSuite for OS/2 for productivity apps.
If anyone really forced the issue of interopability in the PC space, it was Compaq first making a hardware clone, and then, Microsoft being willing to sell them their operating system. Then Microsoft went to all the hardware players and promised them a way that they could keep their products secret, but still deliver the illusion of commoditization that consumers desired. That practice is just now ending for the last holdout, graphics cards.
Then, once Microsoft got entrenched, some Finnish guy got his nuts all twisted up and said, "if those idiots can make a PC operating system, then so can I".
The rest, as we say, is a history of flamewares on slashdot.
Ya need to read your Tom Clancy. The article is wrong to talk about using SONAR. The thing in submarines is to NOT use your SONAR because it gives away your position. In World War II, the allies had no problem pinging for u-boats while submerged, but, for a submarine to ping something else is entirely a different matter. As soon as you ping, the enemy knows where you are.
So, just about all submarine driving these days is done through passive listening. You listen to the ocean to hear stuff that might be in your way. To navigate under the water, there are extensive charts of the ocean bottom coupled with inertial navigation. There's actually one US sub that rammed something underwater and was quite severely damaged, and a sailor was killed - it was going at least 30knots.
To evade detection then, submarines then must be very quiet and its that quiet that jacks up their enormous cost, even more. They have special materials in their hulls, special machinery that either runs more quietly or deadens sound, and even the propeller is shaped just so to avoid making noise as it propels the sub through the water. Remember, a few years ago, when Google's satellite view showed a US Submarine in drydock with its propeller fully visible? That was a huge, huge deal. Some say that the noise level of a Seawolf submarine is actually lower than the ambient noise of the ocean - rendering it essentially undetectable by passive listening. It's pretty reasonable to think that although older, the French and British submarines can run pretty quiet.
So, the situation is this, you have two submarines moving through the water, running quiet, and are almost indetectable, but not using any means other than listening and inertial navigation to move, and they hit each other, perhaps while engaged in some friendly war games. It's bound to happen. No two ways about it. The thing is, because they were running quiet, by definition, they weren't moving very fast, lessening the damage from collision.
That's two four year terms, not a single six year term as in the Confederacy.
originalist interpretation of the Constitution?
Scalia is an originalist of convenience and in this sense today's conservatives neglect their own judicial activism. A genuine constitutional originalist would decide that the federal government had no specific power to legislate on a number of social issues, but they don't. Indeed, there is no constitutional provision that even allows the FCC, FDA, or any number of federal agencies to actually exist, yet, conservatives routinely side with the government when it is their issues they advocate. Of course, this level of judicial activism isn't up to the same level of ridiculousness as takes place in New Jersey public schools or even Roe V Wade, but it is activism non-the-less. Social issues are the purview of the states, not the federal government.
Ah, but there is an undercurrent to tariffs as well. The reason that the south hated tarrifs was that they were a protectionist measure designed to protect the northern manufacturers from foreign competition. The south, being primarily agrarian, needed to import its manufactured goods and thus wanted them to be as inexpensive as possible and in the runup to the civil war, the best manufacturer was actually Great Britain.
But the fact of the matter is, the primary issue for the civil war was slavery. If you read the Confederate Constitution, it is actually almost a word for word copy of the Federal Constitution, but that, owning a slave is a basic civil right (unbelievable as it is), and that, they had a President with a single 6 year term, and a line item veto.
Interestingly, southern Presidents have actually proposed those two items be on our constitution.
Jimmy Carter once advocated for a single six year term but handled it so badly that the public walked away with the perception that he was trying to get another two years without having an election (untrue of course). The story of the line item veto is interesting.
For years, Republicans, sons of the south they are, argued for the line item veto, and, actually helped give it to Bill Clinton, who also a southerner, argued for it and it was the only thing in the Contract with America that he did support.
Unfortunately, a northern Republican named Rudy Guiliani sued and got the line item veto declared unconstitutional, by a Supreme Court that ruled 6-3 for the Rudy, which support included four justices appointed by conservatives and two genuine conservatives (renquist and thomas).
It's simpler than that. It's just that, between iTunes and existing radio, that's really all the content you need while you are driving. For local sports and talk you don't need internet radio. There's a few million people that have satellite for Howard Stern, but that's really the extent of it. If you are a right winger, there's some sort of talk radio on the AM band that has the celebrities you want, and for the left wing, there is NPR. For everyone else, you already get your local sports on radio, and if you want music, you can plug in your own itunes collection.
I've been kinda comparing Lincoln and Bush and of course the biggest crack against Bush is the Iraq War and with it comes the off-repeated slogan, freedom cannot be brought by the barrel of a gun. The fact is, freedom did come by the federal gun in the civil war, and, it came again during the Civil Rights Era when the US Government would send soldiers and federal agents to ensure that black children could go to the same schools as whites.
See I think Poppa Bush was the worst of the last four Presidents. Yes, he did win a bit of a victory in Desert Storm, but, in doing so he created a foreign policy nightmare that contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda (by basing US forces in Saudi Arabia). Clinton was deft enough to avoid the Saddam problem but the coalition that let him do it was breaking down by the time Bush Jr stepped in. If Bush Jr does not invade Iraq, he gets to go down in history as the President that let Saddam off of the hook and then watched as he got the bomb. I would argue that, if we were not willing to take Saddam out in 1991, then we should probably have been better off not having had Desert Storm at all. In a sense, Bush the Senior's "moderate" war only set the stage for a lot of killing to come.
The Confederacy was fighting for its existence. The Union was fighting a war of conquest. I think that's a pretty big difference.
The point is that the Civil War shows that there are some causes which justify imperialism. Invading another country because we do not like it s political system is not automatically wrong. If a people are kept in bondage, or face extermination, then, history will well judge more favorably the man who sets them free, as much as it will forget the man who ignored him.
Like it or not, the closest test we will have to the era of the Civil War is the term of George Bush. Like Lincoln, Bush essentially trumped up charges, lied, in an effort to get blanket powers to prosecute his war. Like Lincoln, Bush suspended some liberties to do so. Like Lincoln, Bush was constantly undermined by not only his political opposition but by generals who did not view the war in the same moral terms and did not genuinely want to fight it. Both were crucified in the media and both were faced with political opposition that strongly argued that the cause of freedom did not justify the war.
There are of course a lot of differences too. Lincoln was very much a hands on President, continually replacing his generals, visiting his soldiers often in the field, actively seeking out and reviewing any sort of weapon's system to help win the war. Bush did none of that, and that hands off approach by Bush tellingly betrays a lack of personal confidence masked by his Texas bluster, whereas Lincoln, although battling depression lifelong, always could trust his own instincts in times of crisis, in ways that Bush could not. And, Lincoln too, although he did not live to fufill it, had a vision for the post-war that Bush simply lacked. Lincoln fought a war not only to end slavery, but to build a new kind of united states, whereas Bush did not ever really think beyond the concept of eliminating a dictator.
he hotheads in the south who seceded before he even took the oath of office, and the even hotter heads in South Carolina who started the fighting -- those are the idiots who started the war.
My question is this: why is it treason for a state to want to secede? I mean, it's a shitty thing, but, if the elected leaders of a state wanted to secede, then wouldn't it make the USA a sort of an empire to trample that state into remaining in the union?
As far as Fort Sumter goes, Lincoln was given the choice of removing the troops and letting the South have the base. He told, rightly, the south to go pound sand and organized a relief mission of the fort and a federal blockade instead.
The fact of the matter is this, the Civil War was a blatant act of imperialism by the north, upon the south, a war that was pushed into all of its horrors by Abraham Lincoln, and he was right to do it. The great lesson of the civil war is that there are times when sovereignty must be set aside for a greater good, and that some imperialism is justifiable.
IT was right for Abraham Lincoln to destroy the South and end slavery, and, if anyone is like the Lincoln of our day, it may well be that it was right for George Bush to invade Iraq and destroy the Baath Party.
Slashdot Mirror
The "American made" Hondas are actually kit cars whose primary engineering and most labor intensive components are produced in Japan. People that buy Hondas in America are still traitors, no matter how you rationalize it. The Big Three, for all their faults, created the American class, and also provided the manufacturing know how and expertise to win two world wars, and secure freedom for the world. The Japanese, well, were on the other side.
Furthermore, if someone dumps a gallon of motor oil in China, it will most assuredly NOT effect me on the east coast. A few dead fish in the Pacific ocean won't do a damn thing to hurt me 6000 miles. It just won't. In fact, dumping like the Exxon Valdez did absolutely nothing to hurt me. The oil is still in Alaska, perfectly distant from me in Ohio, at the time.
To say that the asian countries should be kept out of the USA. To a nation, China, Japan, S Korea, all adopt mercantile trading policies - essentially hoarding dollars the same way 18th century Britain tried to load up on gold. At the same time, they protect their own economies from foreign imports both by encouraging a nationalistic culture that rejects foreigners and foreign things, and also through a use of tariffs. The fact of the matter is, you would be extremely hard pressed to make any reasonable argument that any asian country is interested genuinely in free trade. Go ahead, name me just one. Call me a racist all you want, but the same damn US Trade Office report on Japan's own unwillingness to buy stuff is that.
Trade with asia is like a black guy trying to get a job in the old american south. No matter how he dressed, what degree he had, he was screwed because he was black. The same thing with trade with Asia. They can complain about this feature or that feature all they want to, and then perhaps even bribe some American media whores to defend their points, but the overall thrust is that no matter what the USA makes, or Europe for that matter, there will be no significant free trade between the West and Asia. It's just not going to happen.
Free traders have been predicting a leveling of trade with asia now for 40 years, and I'm sick of waiting. Kick them the fuck out!
Sorry, you can't have it. There's always going to be some set of people that don't want to live up to the same environmental standards as you. Some people might not care about a 1-million chance of getting cancer, but you might. What right do you have to hold them back, in a Democracy?
I say, keep the asians out, but let each state do its own thing. I would add though, as an aside, if a state is blocking economic development due to environmental laws, and have to come crawling to the feds for a loan (say California), then maybe they should quit trying to enjoy nature on everyone else's dime and do some work for a change.
We can only borrow so much government cheese money (stimulus) from the Chinese.
Yeah, put up a website, saying, "I'm not a pedophile..."
Here's the thing. If you are going to a casino to get money, you are kinda missing the point. The whole essence of the casino is sin, getting the drinks and the hookers and the whole nine yards of decadence and then a good steak, cigar, and a game of cards. That's a man's way to do things.
I mean, you could go to Disney and blow a few hundred bucks on Dumbo balloons... or you could go to Vegas, and gamble, get hammered and get laid. Hmmm, if you are going to blow money, why not blow it something cool. Believe me, once you get married, the gambling, cards, drinking are all going to go away.
The only thing that sucks about so many casinos and bars is that you can't smoke at them. What a stupid thing. A bunch of people whining about second hand smoke and then they all drive home drunk. It's just stupid. Quit being such a pussy about cancer, and smoke up.
Maybe we can get a chunk of the gov't stimulus package? ;)
I would be arguing that left and right. Democrats would enjoy the "scientific" discovery, and Republicans would love a shot at team USA beating the Europeans. It's a good kind of competition to have. I'd write a letter to the National Review, perhaps, saying that, "I know you conservatives think blowing billions of dollars on physics, but for a billion dollars you get a good shot at making the French look pretty stupid." They'd do that in a heartbeat.
I think that the Standard Model has been so accurate that everyone sees this experiment as more of a validation. The theory predicts the Higgs lives at a certain range of energies, and from that they can look at the energies they can obtain, and figure out the probability of finding it. They make this assumption because they think the particle is already there. It might be entertaining though, if BOTH the Tevatron and the LHC do NOT find the Higgs particle. That would be the big surprise, as clearly the LHC can do it if they can get it to work, the Tevatron keeps nickel and diming its way closer.
Not directly related to your post, but probably worthwhile remembering that "diesel-electric" isn't necessarily a synonym for "obsolete
In the USA they can be seen that way largely because of Rickover's tireless efforts, but, you are right, a modern u-boat could easily do commerce denial and I question the USN's assertion that the modern diesel electric boat does not have a role in the modern Navy. For the price of one Virginia, you get 4 times as many boats with the same amount of people. You can stay submerged for up to 3 weeks without snorkeling, and overall operate for 90 days. That's more than enough time to set up an attack and hide.
I'm not saying that we should stop with the nuclear submarines. I'm saying that we should have some of these boats. Hey, if we wanted to bribe the Germans for some reason, this would be the bribe to give. I'd say at least buy one or two and learn how to build them ourselves.
I don't know if the link I supplied was "the one", but there is a pyramid out there, where the egyptians built the walls too steep, and the thing collapsed under its own weight near around the time it was built. So they adjusted tack and built them with a shallower angle.
The ancient egyptians
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdonat/2422108343/
had their engineering problems too.
As soon as we humans invented technology, we humans began screwing it up.
Such a drug could be enormously helpful for soldiers suffering from PTSD.
And countered it.
Type 206 u-boats have non-magnetic steel hulls. Pretty bad-ass, huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_206_submarine
And of course the old Russian Alfa hulls, made from titanium, were non-magnetic, and the USS Virginia class is said to have an "electromagnetic detection reduction system", which I would guess is probably a non-magnetic hull.
What about plain ole' optical sensors?
I would think that it would be too dark underwater.
I'd surprised to find that they are undetectable by electric or magnetic means. I mean, can you really hide the magnetic or electric signature of a big sub?
I believe the best western subs have their hulls treated to render them invisible to magnetic anomaly detectors. I have no idea how they do this, but, as a condition of sale to some third world countries, the Germans, who make a mighty fine u-boat these days, have to sell the hulls so they can be detected electromagnetically - this is largely because the new German type 212 u-boats are so quiet that they have rendered US passive devices pretty obsolete. Yeah, the 212 is non-nuclear, but its got a diesel - fuel cell stack, air scrubbers and operate submerged for a long, long time. You can think of it as a 21st century type XXI.
Boy, IBM was cooler in the old days of the PC, but let's recall that IBM's vision for the PC was with an IBM Token Ring Lan adapter connecting to an IBM Mainframe, and the PC would run either IBM DOS or IBM CP/M, and then later, IBM OS/2. We would all e-mail each other with IBM Lotus Notes, using IBM SmartSuite for OS/2 for productivity apps.
If anyone really forced the issue of interopability in the PC space, it was Compaq first making a hardware clone, and then, Microsoft being willing to sell them their operating system. Then Microsoft went to all the hardware players and promised them a way that they could keep their products secret, but still deliver the illusion of commoditization that consumers desired. That practice is just now ending for the last holdout, graphics cards.
Then, once Microsoft got entrenched, some Finnish guy got his nuts all twisted up and said, "if those idiots can make a PC operating system, then so can I".
The rest, as we say, is a history of flamewares on slashdot.
Ya need to read your Tom Clancy. The article is wrong to talk about using SONAR. The thing in submarines is to NOT use your SONAR because it gives away your position. In World War II, the allies had no problem pinging for u-boats while submerged, but, for a submarine to ping something else is entirely a different matter. As soon as you ping, the enemy knows where you are.
So, just about all submarine driving these days is done through passive listening. You listen to the ocean to hear stuff that might be in your way. To navigate under the water, there are extensive charts of the ocean bottom coupled with inertial navigation. There's actually one US sub that rammed something underwater and was quite severely damaged, and a sailor was killed - it was going at least 30knots.
To evade detection then, submarines then must be very quiet and its that quiet that jacks up their enormous cost, even more. They have special materials in their hulls, special machinery that either runs more quietly or deadens sound, and even the propeller is shaped just so to avoid making noise as it propels the sub through the water. Remember, a few years ago, when Google's satellite view showed a US Submarine in drydock with its propeller fully visible? That was a huge, huge deal. Some say that the noise level of a Seawolf submarine is actually lower than the ambient noise of the ocean - rendering it essentially undetectable by passive listening. It's pretty reasonable to think that although older, the French and British submarines can run pretty quiet.
So, the situation is this, you have two submarines moving through the water, running quiet, and are almost indetectable, but not using any means other than listening and inertial navigation to move, and they hit each other, perhaps while engaged in some friendly war games. It's bound to happen. No two ways about it. The thing is, because they were running quiet, by definition, they weren't moving very fast, lessening the damage from collision.
I mean, you ought to be able to just fire keyboards out of a machine for pretty cheap, I would think. why do you need people at all for this?
It is in the Constitution. It's the 22d Amendment
That's two four year terms, not a single six year term as in the Confederacy.
originalist interpretation of the Constitution?
Scalia is an originalist of convenience and in this sense today's conservatives neglect their own judicial activism. A genuine constitutional originalist would decide that the federal government had no specific power to legislate on a number of social issues, but they don't. Indeed, there is no constitutional provision that even allows the FCC, FDA, or any number of federal agencies to actually exist, yet, conservatives routinely side with the government when it is their issues they advocate. Of course, this level of judicial activism isn't up to the same level of ridiculousness as takes place in New Jersey public schools or even Roe V Wade, but it is activism non-the-less. Social issues are the purview of the states, not the federal government.
Ah, but there is an undercurrent to tariffs as well. The reason that the south hated tarrifs was that they were a protectionist measure designed to protect the northern manufacturers from foreign competition. The south, being primarily agrarian, needed to import its manufactured goods and thus wanted them to be as inexpensive as possible and in the runup to the civil war, the best manufacturer was actually Great Britain.
But the fact of the matter is, the primary issue for the civil war was slavery. If you read the Confederate Constitution, it is actually almost a word for word copy of the Federal Constitution, but that, owning a slave is a basic civil right (unbelievable as it is), and that, they had a President with a single 6 year term, and a line item veto.
Interestingly, southern Presidents have actually proposed those two items be on our constitution.
Jimmy Carter once advocated for a single six year term but handled it so badly that the public walked away with the perception that he was trying to get another two years without having an election (untrue of course). The story of the line item veto is interesting.
For years, Republicans, sons of the south they are, argued for the line item veto, and, actually helped give it to Bill Clinton, who also a southerner, argued for it and it was the only thing in the Contract with America that he did support.
Unfortunately, a northern Republican named Rudy Guiliani sued and got the line item veto declared unconstitutional, by a Supreme Court that ruled 6-3 for the Rudy, which support included four justices appointed by conservatives and two genuine conservatives (renquist and thomas).
It's simpler than that. It's just that, between iTunes and existing radio, that's really all the content you need while you are driving. For local sports and talk you don't need internet radio. There's a few million people that have satellite for Howard Stern, but that's really the extent of it. If you are a right winger, there's some sort of talk radio on the AM band that has the celebrities you want, and for the left wing, there is NPR. For everyone else, you already get your local sports on radio, and if you want music, you can plug in your own itunes collection.
I've been kinda comparing Lincoln and Bush and of course the biggest crack against Bush is the Iraq War and with it comes the off-repeated slogan, freedom cannot be brought by the barrel of a gun. The fact is, freedom did come by the federal gun in the civil war, and, it came again during the Civil Rights Era when the US Government would send soldiers and federal agents to ensure that black children could go to the same schools as whites.
Actually, Poppa Bush was not that bad
See I think Poppa Bush was the worst of the last four Presidents. Yes, he did win a bit of a victory in Desert Storm, but, in doing so he created a foreign policy nightmare that contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda (by basing US forces in Saudi Arabia). Clinton was deft enough to avoid the Saddam problem but the coalition that let him do it was breaking down by the time Bush Jr stepped in. If Bush Jr does not invade Iraq, he gets to go down in history as the President that let Saddam off of the hook and then watched as he got the bomb. I would argue that, if we were not willing to take Saddam out in 1991, then we should probably have been better off not having had Desert Storm at all. In a sense, Bush the Senior's "moderate" war only set the stage for a lot of killing to come.
The Confederacy was fighting for its existence. The Union was fighting a war of conquest. I think that's a pretty big difference.
The point is that the Civil War shows that there are some causes which justify imperialism. Invading another country because we do not like it s political system is not automatically wrong. If a people are kept in bondage, or face extermination, then, history will well judge more favorably the man who sets them free, as much as it will forget the man who ignored him.
Like it or not, the closest test we will have to the era of the Civil War is the term of George Bush. Like Lincoln, Bush essentially trumped up charges, lied, in an effort to get blanket powers to prosecute his war. Like Lincoln, Bush suspended some liberties to do so. Like Lincoln, Bush was constantly undermined by not only his political opposition but by generals who did not view the war in the same moral terms and did not genuinely want to fight it. Both were crucified in the media and both were faced with political opposition that strongly argued that the cause of freedom did not justify the war.
There are of course a lot of differences too. Lincoln was very much a hands on President, continually replacing his generals, visiting his soldiers often in the field, actively seeking out and reviewing any sort of weapon's system to help win the war. Bush did none of that, and that hands off approach by Bush tellingly betrays a lack of personal confidence masked by his Texas bluster, whereas Lincoln, although battling depression lifelong, always could trust his own instincts in times of crisis, in ways that Bush could not. And, Lincoln too, although he did not live to fufill it, had a vision for the post-war that Bush simply lacked. Lincoln fought a war not only to end slavery, but to build a new kind of united states, whereas Bush did not ever really think beyond the concept of eliminating a dictator.
he hotheads in the south who seceded before he even took the oath of office, and the even hotter heads in South Carolina who started the fighting -- those are the idiots who started the war.
My question is this: why is it treason for a state to want to secede? I mean, it's a shitty thing, but, if the elected leaders of a state wanted to secede, then wouldn't it make the USA a sort of an empire to trample that state into remaining in the union?
As far as Fort Sumter goes, Lincoln was given the choice of removing the troops and letting the South have the base. He told, rightly, the south to go pound sand and organized a relief mission of the fort and a federal blockade instead.
The fact of the matter is this, the Civil War was a blatant act of imperialism by the north, upon the south, a war that was pushed into all of its horrors by Abraham Lincoln, and he was right to do it. The great lesson of the civil war is that there are times when sovereignty must be set aside for a greater good, and that some imperialism is justifiable.
IT was right for Abraham Lincoln to destroy the South and end slavery, and, if anyone is like the Lincoln of our day, it may well be that it was right for George Bush to invade Iraq and destroy the Baath Party.