I am telling you that I am not dehumanizing confederates, and the fact that they are human makes it even worse. What is the nuance you think I need to avoid dehumanizing confederates?
Aaliyah1
joined 1 year ago
I am extremely confused as to what you intended to prove with those two links. Masks were not mentioned by either, the second link barely discussed Covid and seemed to focus on foreign relations, and both agreed Japan’s response was a success, which contradicts your implication that it somehow wasn’t. And the first guy says he was supportive of the government’s guidelines, which included masks. So unless there’s something else against masks that he said, I’m gonna extrapolate that he is not anti-mask.
Ok, I’m gonna just skip over the whole blaming overweight people part and ask you - do you believe overweight people are more likely to spread Covid? Because we’re discussing spread, do masks work to combat spread. Japan had lower deaths but they also had lower cases. Was it also due to overweight people that Covid cases, not deaths, were higher in the usa. And maybe a lower case load has something to do with the lower deaths in Japan, more than overweight people. Japan’s mask usage was always extremely high, even without a mandate, and remains so.
And if you want to continue the Cochrane stuff-it’s not a study. It’s a meta analysis of a bunch of studies, all of which were pretty well-known prior to the Cochrane study, and the problems with them were already recognized by those studies’ authors. So the Cochrane study just lumps a bunch of poor quality studies into one poor quality meta analysis that even the Cochrane study authors write is inconclusive and probably would not have made the splash it has if it was not done by a bunch of brownstone institute anti-maskers who decided to go on a press tour saying their study said something that it didn’t.
Not to mention we have mechanical filtration studies proving the physics of mask wearing, so unless there’s something mystical about Covid, these studies still apply.
Okay glad to see you’ve stopped trying to defend the Cochrane stuff.
Also what the fuck are you talking about? Japan was widely touted as a Covid success story. Including by conservatives who liked the fact that they never imposed a mask mandate.
The difference is one of degree. The North faced a similar dilemma of pro-slavery racism vs abolitionism a hundred years prior, but without the economic or political implications.
Granted, this early history of abolitionism in the north is not as much in my wheelhouse, but I have to doubt the charge that northern slavers so willingly gave up their slaves based on idealistic appeals of “racism is bad.” The real reason slavery did not gain as much of a foothold in the north is one of environment - the south is blessed with low, flat and extremely fertile plains, longer growing seasons and a warmer climate, which lends itself to agriculture and the large plantations so common in the south. The north is rocky, colder, and growing seasons are shorter. That’s not to say the north did not have large slaveowners, but the plantation economy of the south could never have existed in the north. What the north does have is harbors. While slavery might not have looked the same in the north, there were plenty of people involved in the slave trade in the north because of the importance of shipping to the northern economy. I don’t imagine the slaveowners and slave traders so willingly gave up the slave economy in the north, but slavery just never had the foothold in the north that it did in the south, and when the industrial economy gets going the north is just better suited for it, especially with its shipping capabilities, and many slave traders I imagine could be flexible since it wasn’t so much “slaves” they were tied to as “trade.”
The rest of this, I don’t know, I don’t understand the nuance you believe there should be with regards to the south. I’m not dehumanizing confederates, they were in fact all too human, which I believe is even scarier, that human beings are able to rationalize the subjugation of another human being, or rationalize themselves into supporting it. I understand exactly what you’re saying they wanted to maintain their lifestyles, privileges, and class position, but I take the opposite position which is they are bad people for doing so. And yeah maybe they were raised that way, propagandized that way, never had a chance to form differing opinions - I don’t care. At one point they were upholding slavery and maintaining it, and I’m not going to be gentle with them while Black people were being worked to death, killed, beaten, and kept in bondage through their actions.
On the southern side it’s really not any more complicated than being pro-slavery. Not only secession, but throughout the 19th century southern states were pushing for the continuance and expansion of slavery, and actually resisted industrial development in the south because of the threat it posed, then as you point out fought to preserve slavery. And I’d love to know the difference between fighting to keep slaves and fighting to keep an economy built on slaves, and how a southern plantation owner who owns slaves and has great sway in government (or is in government) is in any way comparable to me with no political power buying an iPhone (or other smartphone) because of the difficulty surviving in the modern world without one.
And I’m sorry, I did not realize that southerners were all given in depth lessons about bleeding Kansas and the lead up to the civil war. You must be hiding them somewhere because all I ever get from southerners is the rote memorization of basic historical facts that seem to (but don’t) contradict popular narratives of the civil war with absolutely zero historical analysis, just like the picture. I’d much rather a layperson have the northern “fairy tale” understanding of the civil war that actually gets its reasons for occurring correct, than some both sides attitude towards it. I honestly cannot believe I typed out that whole thing above and what I get in response is some sort of “nuanced” confederate apologia.
Thank you! I deal with these people in my daily life so I’m always primed for an effort post on it
So, this annoys me to no end, because the first dude is technically right, Lincoln came in to office with no intention to outlaw slavery, although he did want to keep it confined to the states it was already legal in. And what he’s actually wrong about is that Lincoln made it about slavery to get the support of the northerners - he actually made sure that it northerners believed it was about “keeping the union together.” Remember the union still had the slave states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. He wanted to keep these states in the union.
Lincoln (through Seward) stressed the anti-slavery stuff to Europeans, many of whom wanted to intervene on the side of the confederacy because that was where they got their cotton. The industrial north also was a threat to industrial Europe, but the agrarian south was a source of raw materials. But by stressing the anti-slavery stuff in Europe (and then of course the emancipation proclamation which didn’t actually outlaw slavery in the border states) he ensured Europe could not intervene on behalf of the confederacy since it would be so unpopular. So, in the states it was about the union, abroad it was about slavery.
But anyway, he’s right on a technicality that, for Lincoln, it was not really about slavery. But this does not mean the war itself was not about slavery. His conclusion rests on the assumption that in a war, two sides must be diametrically opposed to one another, so if Lincoln and the north were not fighting against slavery, therefore the south could not be fighting for slavery.
But as others have pointed out, the south explicitly says they are fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. They are worried about waning political power also - if Lincoln stopped the spread of slavery across the continent as he desired, the growth of free states would mean congress would not be as evenly split between slave and free states, opening up the possibility of legislating an end to slavery.
So the war was about slavery, and would not have occurred without slavery. Often we point to the Battle of Sumter as the beginning of the civil war, but many historians also point out the popular civil war could instead be said to begin in 1859 in Harper’s Ferry, or with Bleeding Kansas and the Pottawotamie Massacre, or maybe the caning of Charles sumner or the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, or any of the political battles that arose when the US began to expand west and the question arose “what about slavery.” All of these events are directly about slavery and it would be difficult to argue otherwise.
And also, just as a last thing “many southern generals didn’t care about slavery.” I have no idea how true that is and it doesn’t matter, because the war was not fought because of southern generals but because of politicians, southern landowners, and an economy resting on the subjugation of Black people, and that’s why they were fighting.
Except what she point out, as multiple people have, is that all the rct’s that that study look at are really only studying adherence to mask mandates, not mask themselves. They combined studies where people wore masks infrequently with ones where mask mandates were more complied with. Not to mention it ignores all mechanistic evidence, all of which points to masks working
It’s literally just the conservative thing that has been done throughout the whole pandemic, where they refuse to wear masks, and then when Covid continues to spread exponentially, they throw their arms up and go “look, masks don’t work!” I’d say it’s the lack of compliance that’s the issue
His entire train of thought is based on the idea that “Lincoln didn’t oppose slavery” which is “technically correct.” Except it leaves out all historical analysis which allows him to come to the fallacious conclusion that “the civil war wasn’t about slavery.”