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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24594 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.

Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.

Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.

  • -24

South's special position as a rebellious territory

Stop, your tyranny is showing.

First, the South was not a territory, the member states of the Confederacy were themselves independent states in their own right, and were not territories of anyone or anything. You can't seem to conceive of independent states voluntarily joining a union, and then deciding to withdraw from that very same union. I would suggest starting by forgetting what you think know and relearning from original sources, instead of projecting the 21st century backwards through time.

Second, the rebellious territories are all of these United States of America. Massachusetts was perhaps the MOST rebellious territory, the most specially positioned, not anywhere in the South. They were legitimately territories of Britain, and were legitimately rebellious.

Third, there was no reason for South Carolina or Georgia to agree to form a Union with Pennsylvania or Massachusetts without the very concessions they achieved, and when those concessions were ignored and trampled on, they voluntarily left the union they had voluntarily joined.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow, but that was determined decades before because Roosevelt was a communist sympathizer whose administration was shot through with genuine communists and Soviet spies.

either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.

It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are.

It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are. I do, actually. I find southern identity and culture alternately shallow or ridiculous or gross, but my complaints are separate from that. I would grit my teeth and bear the culture I dislike if the rest of my complaining was addressed, even if it meant my leftist politics were defeated more often.

The north had it's own set of piccadillies and fucked up bullshit, but the south was uniquely bad at elite generation outside of specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers). It's why they lost the war even when the majority of the professional military class defected; why the north had time to spin up an entire new military and MIC after dumpstering two or three armies one after another.

It's not even that the south was poor, the south had tons of money at the begging of the war. It's that the south was committed to a form of social organization that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

Stop, your tyranny is showing. No, it really isn't. The war started at all because the south decided it had the right and privilege to dictate the laws of the rest of the union; and there was no allowance to succession in the constitution. If the south had the juice to win the war they would have established that right, but they didn't and it wasn't. Your revisionist take ignores the massive concession made to the south up to the very line of "we get everything we want, and you get nothing you want"; and just kinda avoids thinking of the moral crime of chattel slavery. If you want to defend the peculiar institution be my guest but don't just pretend it wasn't there.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow Yes, the US would defeat the 12 million man soviet army, the most powerful in the world at the time, in a land war in russia. Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid; which is why nobody of substance gave it any thought at the time. The winning move was to clearly wait, build up a stock of a-bombs, and dictate terms from a place strength. The fact the Soviets got them from us torpedoed this, but the alternative plan was even more impossible.

Your quote formatting is messed up, you need an empty line between the quote and your response.

specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers)

You mean warriors and soldiers? You mean the people who conquered the continent, defeated the Spanish empire, and were the majority responsible for the expansion of the very territory that they were then denied access to?

The best statesmen in the country came from two places: Virginia and Massachusetts. The first president not from one of these two places was from Carolina. I think the south was worth considerably more to the American elite than simply cavalry.

that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

They did not decide to have a war. They decided to secede. Abraham Lincoln and the New England puritans who backed him decided to turn a secession crisis into a war. It truly was the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States, but as Richmond never deigned to assert control of Washington, I don't think it can be called a civil war.

Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid;

Indeed, Hitler had just failed at this very objective with a much larger army, far better supply lines and a much less prepared enemy a few short years ago. Why would the USA think it could do any better?

Hitler wasn’t facing an enemy that he supplied with materiel and had just lost 10 million people?

Presumably, strategic bombing including with nukes. London-Moscow is around the same distance as the Enola Gay flew AIUI.

Not saying it would have been easy, but it's plausible that the WAllies could have done it.

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