this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1751 points (97.5% liked)
Confidently Incorrect
4046 readers
2 users here now
When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
Posting guidelines.
All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.
You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.
Rules:
• Be civil and remember the human.
• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.
• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.
• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.
• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.
• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.
• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.
• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.
Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.
This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:
- Be civil, remember the human.
- No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
- Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
- Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
- Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
- Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
- No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
- No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You really think they would have fought a war and died by the tens of thousands just because they like slavery so dang much? Because they're just that evil? They could be racist without owning slaves. Hell, they ended up doing that, for a hundred years after the Civil War. Hell, the North did that before the Civil War. Much of the North was very racist at the time, though that was in the process of changing.
The South fought to protect their slaves because their economy was built on slaves.
AND they were racist fucks.
Both can be correct.
Yes, I think the traitors who started a war to maintain slavery are evil.
Why is that a question.
What the fuck.
These people screamed at the top of their lungs that low-key 1850s racism wasn't nearly racist enough. That any black man being a citizen was a betrayal of the entire national experiment. And for some reason you're searching for excuses to say it was rational economic incentives.
Bigotry is bad... mmkay? Bigots themselves don't have to think they're evil, and twirl their moustaches, to be really fucking evil. Obvious example, Nazis. Tell me the holocaust was really about land rights and I'll tell you where to shove it.
No shit, genius, thank you for that massive contribution to the conversation
Now we've got that out of the way, want to actually talk about what I said?
Et tu?
Discuss.
Did:
The both of you are trying to rationalize the worst evils in the world, as if extraordinary bigotry isn't thoroughly sufficient.
You in particular scoff, "You really think they would have fought a war and died by the tens of thousands just because they like slavery so dang much?" Like you cannot imagine shockingly violent conflict emerging from sheer hatred. In the south. A culture stereotyped for generational blood feuds. A region that if we're brutally honest still has a problem with lynching.
All for "nuance."
Nuance you're blind to, when it's me pointing out, people make these excuses as propaganda. The other guy dying on this hill keeps ranting about Lincoln for some reason and just coincidentally drops that well okay the war was about the business of dehumanizing misery. It's just business! A perfectly reasonable dry bloodless economic incentive. Co-equal to, y'know, openly declaring black people subhuman. Both sides.
Again reaching for the hopefully obvious comparison: would you say the holocaust was about the Nazi desire to kill Jewish Germans...'s businesses? How seriously would you take someone's insistence that they're not doing apologism, when all they talk about is Japanese internment and lebensraum? "I don't know why we can't address Hitler's vile antisemitism, and his totes sincere good-faith criticism of wealthy minorities. Why can't both be true? Discuss."
Well, almost. It's a perfectly valid thing to want to acknowledge the evil of Hitler but also the oppressive economic conditions imposed on Germany after WW1. And in a broader context, the whole buildup of HOW the Nazis gained power. They weren't just a dark cloud of evil creatures who appeared stage right and seized power in Germany. The context is important, if for nothing else so we can learn from it.
Which is nowhere close to being a Nazi apologist.
No one is doing that here and now. I understand being on your guard, because yes people do that. Bigots do that. Apologists do that. I agree. And when they do that, we shouldn't get hoodwinked into discussions about nuance because they're just a cover for making their bigoted ideas sound palatable.
But that's not what's happening here. Everyone in this thread that I have seen is roundly denouncing slavery and racism. We have the freedom, now, to be able to discuss nuance without worrying about whether it will be used as a shield for bigots. We don't ALWAYS have to dismiss context and nuance - and if we do, then we won't recognize the buildup to it next time.
So would the asshole claiming "the civil war wasn't about slavery."
That's how these excuses function as propaganda. They don't come out and say "yay evil." But they're still defending evil... by degrees. The nuance of their claims is kinda fucking important.
You live on a different internet.
... reducing this to 'well you just hate nuance' is so goddamn ironic I'm not sure where to begin.
How about with you not hating nuance? Because it's kind of sounding like you do.
Maybe you just have trouble identifying real racism from discussions about racism. In that case I would suggest therapy.
Underlining an inability to identify bigotry when it's any less blatant than declaring an ethnicity subhuman, in as many words.
And turning it into personal insults about mental health. Real classy.
Again: even the obvious bigot we're all bickering about would loudly insist he's against slavery and racism. And then he'd immediately say some shit that promotes, excuses, or minimizes outright bigotry.
And you two pipe-chewing scholars would scoff, asking: what's so racist about that obvious dogwhistle? Technically that bigot's point about crime rates was factually correct! Are we not free to litigate whether those bad-faith justifications make valid claims before an insane conclusion? There's no way that's how every racist asshole launders their evil bullshit. Surely it's not exactly how they shield their views, when they can't outright say, "fuck the outgroup."
Meanwhile.
Back at the distant point:
The civil war was about slavery. For its own sake. Any human conflict is going to be more complex than a single word, but few wars have ever been clearer about their overwhelming central focus. If you say the sky is blue because of light from the sun and I add "and from the stars!," that's how uselessly tangential it is to insist "and trade."
Humans have done unimaginable evil for its own sake. Tell six generations they're the only people who count, and of course number seven's ready to end you for questioning it. You don't count. This is unmistakable and unavoidable in strongly hierarchical honor cultures. For example: the south. Seeking a calmly reasoned explanation when a senator beats someone half to death with a walking-stick leads to "4D chess" self-delusion. Like it has to be strategic.
Like systemic violence against an entire race has to make sense without bigotry, even if you fully acknowledge there is "also" bigotry.
Describing those flimsy justifications at all requires considerable context to avoid coming off as just another racist asshole.
Using those flimsy justifications like they're interchangeable for the actual fuuucking reason is inexcusable. And you lurched into this conversation specifically to excuse it. Feel free to stop.
Words in your head, maybe.
Again. Therapy.
And he would obviously be lying. Racism is fairly easy to identify. For most people. Not you, of course. You see racism behind every tree, apparently.
To make a better analogy, it's like if someone said "the sky is blue because we can only see blue light!" The answer would be "no, but there's a bit of truth there. The atmosphere scatters blue light more than other wavelengths, and human eyes are more attuned to blue than other colors". Why does this matter? Because he drew the wrong conclusion from a tidbit of accurate information.
Especially since the idiot claiming we can't see red light isn't actually part of the conversation. Nor are any other Red Lighters. We're just discussing something he said.
Are you a time traveller?
...is this "Preston Brooks" in the room with us right now?
Therapy.
The Cornerstone Speech is in black and white, in history books and this conversation. Abusive troll. Referring to it is not even a matter of your grand claims to be a nuance understander. It's basic reading comprehension. I am describing the aggressively obvious for-its-own-sake bigotry of the goddamn Confederacy - the central fucking topic of this post.
... no, that'd be running interference for morons. Insisting "he's not entirely wrong!" when the only sane aspect of someone's worldview is that the sky is blue is the biggest motte-to-bailey ratio I've ever heard.
Thank you for making crystal clear why this thread is a trainwreck. You're twisting complete nonsense claims by obvious idiot liars into an out-of-context interpretation of a few words they kinda said.
In the case of the OG Facebook dolt, he didn't say "the civil war about more than slavery," he said "the civil war WASN'T ABOUT SLAVERY, UNTIL blah blah blah." Bog-standard Lost Cause propaganda. Picking a few words from that and going yeah-but is exactly the sort of dissembling excuse that overt racists like his dumb ass will do all the fucking time.
If you can't spot the problem when third parties do it for him, you're why it's a problem.
I feel a bit sorry for you now. It's got to be difficult arguing against knowledge, because sometimes you're required to show that you're right. And that's very hard to do if you refuse to learn history for fear of it somehow corrupting you into racism.
Other subthread: 'we're not directly talking about the civil war, are we?'
This subthread: 'tut tut, disagreeing with obvious racists about the civil war.'
You are a fraud and a liar. You are not good at trolling.
Projection is a helluva drug
Also:
We are talking about the Civil War.
And you're reacting as if it just happened.
We're like 4 steps removed from the person who even said the quote in OP.
You can chill, you're not about to fight off a horde of Copperheads. This is a left-leaning internet forum. There are no Klansmen here. You're not on a crusade. Chill the fuck out. We are on the internet.
Being frothing at the mouth outraged because something happened a hundred and fifty years ago is not healthy. It's a fixation.
No, troll, I'm using it as shorthand for how fucked-up the society we're discussing was, around the time we're discussing.
It is part of a direct response to a question you asked - a question you asked as smugly as possible. Like you cannot imagine systemic violence and outright war over ideology alone, and that makes me ignorant.
We're discussing how people are lying about the war. Misleading defenses of outright lies are still basically just lies. That's why lying racists themselves will make exactly the same defenses, when pressed. They are not married to the original lies. All they care about is finding some excuse to minimize the horrific evil that you have scoffed at.
We're still directly talking about the civil war... as proven by your immediate follow-up comment, condescending like I missed the exact details I've been addressing the whole time.
All vitriol in this exchange has been about your shitty behavior. Including this: you treated contemporary reference to the south's cultural stereotypes, by name, as a sign of mental illness. Fuck right off if you think any properly enforced leftist space would tolerate that shit.
It's just exhausting how you keep saying this. No, we're not. We're trying to discuss historical facts and the glossing over of them, but you keep trying to pivot the discussion to a "racism bad, yes or no?" conversation.
Nuance is not racism. Last time I'll say it.
Declaring "the civil war wasn't about slavery," verbatim, in any context, is not nuance - it is a lie. It is an indefensible oversimplification at best, and racist garbage which you have acknowledged as racist garbage at worst.
The thread is about some asshole telling this and other lies. It is that worst-case racist garbage.
The conversation you barged into involves some dingus who was trying to eke technicalities about those lies, as if anyone involved is unfamiliar with the premise being viciously misrepresented through those lies.
Your contribution has been to escalate and deny and make this personal, while declaring that you're only carrying a torch for nuuuaaance, whilst struggling with dead simple context and being insufferably smug about how badly you missed it.
Fuck off and good riddance.
It's hard not to be insufferably smug when talking with someone who disagrees with the idea of knowledge as a concept.
'Why you hate knowledge?,' asks bad troll.
How's blocking work on lemmy?
Poorly, I think.