• fsxylo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      6 days ago

      State’s rights to force the northern states to return runaway slaves. Can’t forget that part.

      • EleventhHour@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        6 days ago

        “How dare you disrespect our sovereignty by exercising your own! And during a Civil War that we started over this very issue, no less!”

        This country has been half dogshit-brained fuckbag since the first European “explorer” landed here. And while I’m sure, like any society, Native Americans had their share of colorful characters, we’ll hardly hear of them due to the whole cultural erasure which followed the landing of the aforementioned European “explorers”.

        “What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.”

        — Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 days ago

      Which we still have, but limited to prisons.

      California just voted down getting rid of it at the state level.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          5 days ago

          It is, but what makes it absolutely mind numbingly fucked is that NOBODY opposed the measure. Every single other measure on the ballot had someone in opposition, sometimes literally just a person was named not an organization, but no one opposed this. Not the warden’s, not the guards, not police, not even the ultraconservative mayors in the central valley! How TF does a common sense measure fail to pass with NO OPPOSITION‽‽‽

  • lath@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    6 days ago

    I too watched a documentary on the US civil war. I learned it was about power, greed and fear. The southerners had complete control over their slaves and losing them meant becoming completely dependant on northern machinery. They likened this to becoming slaves themselves, which was obviously horrifying considering their own behaviour in this regard. So war was their only option, not only to maintain and then grow their properties, but also to destroy or take over the northern industrial capabilities.

    Sounds evil, which it was, but at the same time it was a matter of survival, as proven after the war when many plantations and businesses using the former slaves collapsed.

    The war happened because the southerners had nothing to lose and everything to gain from it. Or at least, that’s how the documentary portrayed it.

    • PugJesus@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      Sounds evil, which it was, but at the same time it was a matter of survival, as proven after the war when many plantations and businesses using the former slaves collapsed.

      Yes, but not because they became enslaved to northern machinery. Because the slaves left, having been treated horribly, and the post-war planter aristocracy was incapable of luring any but the most desperate back since the aristocracy was darkly hilariously (in the sense of “the sheer gall of asking someone to come back and work for peanuts or goodwill after enslaving them”) and gruesomely unwilling to pay their former slaves a fair wage, even as their plantations were overgrown and their properties rotted, unmaintained.

      Turns out that when almost half of your labor force up and leaves because you’ve been a piece of shit, and you’re unwilling to stop being a piece of shit even to lure them back, the economy slumps. Who’d’ve thought?

      The materialist analysis is really lacking on the Civil War. It really was a war of ideas. People, including demographics on a large-scale, do not always act rationally, but according to the values set by their societies.