Best to recognize many in the Union were also white supremacists -- they just didn't believe in slavery.
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"Lincoln didn’t believe blacks should have the same rights as whites.
Though Lincoln argued that the founding fathers’ phrase “All men are created equal” applied to blacks and whites alike, this did not mean he thought they should have the same social and political rights. His views became clear during an 1858 series of debates with his opponent in the Illinois race for U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, who had accused him of supporting “negro equality.”
In their fourth debate, at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, Lincoln made his position clear. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he began, going on to say that he opposed blacks having the right to vote, to serve on juries, to hold office and to intermarry with whites.
What he did believe was that, like all men, blacks had the right to improve their condition in society and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. In this way they were equal to white men, and for this reason slavery was inherently unjust.
Like his views on emancipation, Lincoln’s position on social and political equality for African-Americans would evolve over the course of his presidency. In the last speech of his life, delivered on April 11, 1865, he argued for limited black suffrage, saying that any black man who had served the Union during the Civil War should have the right to vote.."
https://www.history.com/news/5-thing...d-emancipation
Beto O’Rourke crushes previous fundraising efforts, including those made by Bernie Sanders, in the first twenty-four hours.
The smear campaign being run against the guy by Sanders supporters makes a heck of a lot of sense now huh?
With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Actually, it was still progressive for the time. It is worth pointing out the stance though, to demonstrate that appeals to history are only relevant insofar as they get directly at the broader political philosophy. People will write themselves out of biases they have in their respective time periods based on what is socially respectable, or even considered to be left-leaning. But Lincoln was a leftist political figure, concerned about civil rights and liberties of all people, even if it wasn’t the most universal policy (he had early notes arguing for women’s suffrage and it is difficult to say what a lot of his truer stances were without the reality of the political moment’s body politic setting in).
With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Didn't want to diminish his progressive evolution so much as to point out that we should stay objective with regards to things like the Union's motivations during the Civil War -- a similar argument could be made regarding Obama and the issue of gay marriage in the modern era, though I doubt he sees LGBT citizens as "inferior" to any other American citizen.
The tendency for the modern Republican party (like Steve King) to openly embrace racist and homophobic philosophies is problematic, however, and my post was more to point out that a lot of "white supremacist" sentiment was there from the start -- even in Lincoln -- and never really left.
Last edited by aja_christopher; 03-18-2019 at 09:42 AM.
That’s an understandable point and I certainly don’t mean to undermine that. I do think Obama’s initial reluctance to support gay marriage is a result of similar circumstances to Lincoln’s lack of embrace for universal rights for African Americans. Obama even had writings in the ‘90s that essentially said that gay marriage should be legalized. But, because of the political environment he was in, he moderated his personal stances, even using rhetoric that was clearly strained.
With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
From columnist Will Bunch in today's Philadelphia Daily News:
In a rising tide of white nationalism, Trump’s presidency is morally unacceptable
The great writer Masha Gessen commented the other day that “[t]here is an adage of journalism that holds that every story should be written as if by a foreign correspondent.” It turns out that a New York Times reporter was taking that very advice, traveling the 128 miles from Manhattan to a strange land of exotic creatures called Old Forge, Pa., just outside of Scranton.
The natives of Old Forge were getting restless about, of all things, a special election for the Pennsylvania legislature. The Republican candidate was a citizen of that former-coal-and-former-textiles town (self-proclaimed “Pizza Capital of the World”) of 8.313 souls -- a man named Frank Scavo III, who’d generated some controversy with Facebook posts about the completely invented scandal known as (irony alert) “Pizzagate” and, more alarmingly, that Muslims are “infidels.”
The good news is that Scavo lost the election and won’t be spewing his hate in Harrisburg as an elected official. But the Times reporter, Astead W. Herndon, still thought there was a story to be told in the deepening paranoia and resentments of Scavo’s die-hard supporters in this struggling town that not only voted for President Trump in 2016 but seems all-in with what’s sometimes called “Trumpism” -- but could just as easily be called Neo-fascism -- looking ahead to the 2020 election.The Times had no idea, of course, that at almost the exact moment its Old Forge article dropped, literally halfway around the world, a 28-year-old Australian man who was much farther along on what one might call the “white identity” spectrum was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and a GoPro camera and starting to commit one of the most heinous acts of the 21st century. In normally peaceful Christchurch, New Zealand, he gunned down 50 Muslims, as young as a 3-year-old, as they prayed in their mosques -- broadcasting the carnage live on Facebook to draw attention to a lengthy manifesto of racist, white-supremacist hate.
As much as we want to not mention the killer’s name nor give any oxygen to his half-baked racist conspiracy theories and internet-friendly memes, there are many aspects about what happened in New Zealand on Friday that are way too important for the world to ignore. No discussion should come without first mentioning the humanity of 50 people that we lost -- something that the murderer and those who fail to condemn him are not capable of. You should take a moment to learn their stories, and the aspirations that were snuffed out. They will always remain in our hearts.
Beyond that, I’ve never seen an incident that managed to combine so many of our modern anxieties -- especially about the role that the internet and popular social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and niche sites like 8Chan increasingly play in spreading both bogus information and ideologies of hate, but also about race and religion, the ubiquity of guns, and a political climate that in too many nations is working to foment intolerance instead of eliminating it.
One of those nations, unfortunately, is the United States.
Avatar: Here's to the late, great Steve Dillon. Best. Punisher. Artist. EVER!
Last edited by Jack Dracula; 03-18-2019 at 10:36 AM.
The Cover Contest Weekly Winners ThreadSo much winning!!
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis
“It’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” - Captain Europe
This is probably my last post in here for a bit. But I'm with you. This thread is toxic as ****. One person, in particular, is amazingly trollish, F- that guy/gal. I've noticed how much happier I was just posting links and videos. I'm even happier not having posted in days. Gonna stretch it out to weeks and see how it goes.
#blackkidfromphilly #Phillyboyout #bernie2020 #bernietulsi2020 #berniewarren2020 #ncrepublicanscheat
And this is why Trump will win the election. The republicans are in lockstep (goose step?) behind him while democrats will be at each other’s throats until November 2020.
In 2015, in 2016, and in 2017, “Crazy Stupid Republican of the Day” published profiles of former New Jersey Congressman Scott Garrett, who since taking office in 2002, has advocated for intelligent design to be taught in public school instead of evolution, and claimed that he’s against same sex marriage because he believes children should be raised in two parent households (meaning he might not know gay adoption is a thing). Garrett voted against the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, the Voting Rights Act, and voted to shut down the federal government in 2013. He also publicly agreed with Birther conspiracy theorists that there’s something to President Obama’s birth certificate, and written letters to Obama to demand “the truth about what happened in Benghazi”. Garrett is also noteworthy in that he voted against disaster relief for both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy (the latter hit his own district, so at least there’s no double standard… he just doesn’t care at all). In January 2016, as millions of Americans continued to sign up for health insurance available through the Affordable Care Act, and the percentage of uninsured Americans was reaching appreciably lower numbers, Scott Garrett appears on Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council show, “Washington Watch”, where he claimed only “one or two” people were uninsured prior to Obamacare. The real number was, of course, 17 million people. So he was only off by about 17 million or so. In the 2016 elections, Scott Garrett was defeated by former White House speechwriter, Democrat Josh Gottheimer, and Garrett originally refused to concede the race, in spite of losing by a large margin of over 10,000 votes. His career seems to be finally over.
On this date one year ago, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” published its first profile of Gerald Greene, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives who has been hanging around that body since 1982. Yes, for 37 years this man has floated around the Georgia state capitol, with the first three decades of that run as a Democrat before he tucked his tail between his legs against the 2010 Tea Party Wave and became a Republican, content to sell out his principles over further political longevity. Since, he was allowed to run unopposed in 2012, faced only a Democrat whom he defeated with a mere 55% of the vote with Republican momentum in 2014, and in 2016, coasted to victory against a less-well funded GOP challenger in the primary.
Of course, perhaps Greene’s re-election chances took a hit for 2018 after he was shot in the leg in an armed robbery attempt in his district, where someone tried relieving Greene of several thousand dollars of storm relief donations to the Red Cross while he was reportedly at a convenience store. Sympathies turned to mockery after it was revealed that Greene was sitting with thousands of dollars in cash outside of a local adult cinema, the Foxy Lady Lounge where patrons can watch sex shows from behind glass. After initially claiming his presence at the adult cinema at the time of his shooting was a coincidence, Greene eventually admitted to being inside prior to the shooting.
Anyway, Gerald Greene, since becoming a Republican, has been supposedly championing “family values” as he votes for religious freedom legislation, and unconstitutional bills to place Ten Commandments monuments at the state capitol, and the other bit of hypocritical comedy is that the NRA give him a 93% rating, which I’m sure he feels great about with that bullet hole in his leg. We would comment more on the hypocrisy of Greene’s voting record, but he’s absent a great deal of the time, and that was before he was going to be recuperating from a gunshot wound.
Greene’s bizarre forays towards hanging out by porn stores probably are why he only narrowly won re-election in 2018. At this point, we’re wondering if this shady character manages to stick around all the way to 2022, and end up with a four decade career. Because if the scandal prior to 2018 and Blue Wave momentum didn’t end his career, we don’t know what will.
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