Pikadon

[iceaura]

spdergoat, where were you born? Who the hell should be afraid of a free black population?

The entire white population of the Confederacy. And they were.

As spidergoat's link may not attract your attention, here is the second paragraph, the one in which the case for secession is introduced, from the official proclamation of the government of Georgia:

Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution.

Notice the role of tariffs in this justification of declared war, by a State on the Atlantic coast and heavily involved in tariff issues: all but invisible. It comes up later, among the bureaucratic details and lists of grievances.

 

[Tiassa]

Hallowed Ground

† † †

Top: Aioi Bridge, the ostensible target of the American atomic bomb attack against Hiroshima.

Bottom: The Peace Clock Tower, beside the bridge, marking humankind's baptism in nuclear fire.

 

[iceaura]

'We just didn't think, ok?' (recalled quote, close to accurate)
Richard Feynman

Another from him:

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead

 

[iceaura]

Nagasaki affects me more. Because it proves the evil was a calculated one, somehow, even if only as a cumulative effect of specialist considerations.
From "People Of The Lie"

Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent…any group will remain potentially conscienceless and evil until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behavior of the whole group – the organism – of which he or she is a part.

 

[iceaura]

The earliest use of "pikadon" for the Hiroshima bomb I can find is as what appears to have been (I can't find the original on the internet, the only translation I can find is "flash-boom" ) the first word of the first poem of 31 tanka by Shinoe Shoda, published in 1946 in the ephemeral journal Fuschicho. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinoe_Shōda
All 31 appear with many others added later, in a samizdat collection published via mimeograph in 1947 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...ok-written-behind-censors-backs/#.WOyuNBRvi14

 

[Thomas Cranmer]

shitholes like Chicongo.

This is a respectable website. Please don't make crude remarks.

 

[Dinosaur]

Slavery was not the key issue causing the civil war. It was was caused more by the differing policies/desires of an industrial north & an agricultural south.

For example: The North wanted tariffs & other protectionist methods to help their fledgling industries compete with long established European manufacturers, while the south wanted to buy manufactured goods from the cheapest source.​

 

[superstring01]

Then one wonders why in their collective articles of secession the confederate states stated slavery first and then went on to mention it 83 times. Yes, duh. It was about agriculture v. industry. State's rights and all that. But the "agricultural economy" they were defending and the states rights they were defending were the rights of giant plantations to have black slaves for as long as they liked.

 

[sculptor]

The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was an increased import tariff in the United States, adopted on March 2, 1861,
almost 6 weeks later
Ft. Sumter (a customs house that collected the tariffs) was attacked April 12–13, 1861
The emancipation proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863.

OK for almost 2 years it wasn't a war over slavery, then it was after hundreds of thousands were dead or injured.
With so many dead we needed a righteous excuse for the war(an unfair tariff just wouldn't do)
To the victor belong the spoils, including declaring what was or wasn't history
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868

The problem with buying into ridiculous propaganda, is that the uneducated who would need an excuse for antisocial behaviors have one.

 

[superstring01]

Straw man. I never said the war was over slavery. The war was to preserve the union. The south seceded because of slavery. They said as much.

 

[iceaura]

OK for almost 2 years it wasn't a war over slavery, then it was after hundreds of thousands were dead or injured.

The Confederacy of Slave States said they were seceding, and going to war to enforce that secession, to preserve chattel slavery.

The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was an increased import tariff in the United States, adopted on March 2, 1861,
almost 6 weeks later
Ft. Sumter (a customs house that collected the tariffs) was attacked April 12–13, 1861

That was after secession.

On February 28, 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican War.

Slaveowner Davis had counseled against secession, on military not moral grounds - but he had accepted the Presidency of the Slave State Confederacy by January of 1861, a month or more after Articles of Secession ( most of which which mentioned slavery prominently, and the bureaucratic details of tariff policy hardly at all ) had been formally adopted by a couple of States, with more on the way.

And it seems this is at least marginally thread relevant - the denial is similar.

 

[superstring01]

... most of which which mentioned slavery prominently ...

And that's being incredibly generous. The combined declarations accumulated 83 mentions of slavery, 5 mentions of "negro", 6 mentions of "Africa[n/s]", 6 mentions of "white", 14 mentions of "race(s)", 8 mentions of "labor" directly tied to slavery, and 2 mentions of "black" (people). That's pretty clear.

Georgia does it right out of the gate stating clearly: "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

Mississippi does it in the second paragraph: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.

-----PRO TIP: Make sure to couch the excuse in science with their "black skin" and "tropical sun" when you're trying to enslave people!

South Carolina doesn't led with it but makes up for it quickly by mentioning it 17 times. More than any other issue, filled with hilarious attempts at justifying slavery.

Texas being Texas, won't be outdone with 22 mentions. Most of them --as expected-- talking about how it is indefensible to their economy. "Human slavery: Okay as long as you super-duper need it!"

The Civil War Trust did an actual word-count / linguistic reference and came up with a break-down that you can look at!

 

[iceaura]

Mississippi does it in the second paragraph: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.

That was a fact. In 1860 the capital embodied in slaves was the largest single store of capital in the world. The slaves in the US were the largest capital investment in the US - outweighing the entire collected industrial infrastructure of the country, outweighing the capital value of all the owned land.

And Lincoln was threatening it - threatening the equivalent of what Castro did when he "nationalized" the capital investment of Cuba, on a hundred times the scale of that small island.

But the connection here, with pikadon, runs through the racial bigotry - the presumptive denial of common humanity - that maintained the society and governance necessary to support such an establishment of capitalist economics. Because the decision to introduce the Bomb - to reveal it and its nature to Japan - by actually using it without warning on two consecutive cities full of civilians, dropping it by surprise on hospitals and schools and the like, was shallowly made. And even given the arguments for Hiroshima, miserable excuses as they were (and known to be so, by several people who said as much at the time), there is still Nagasaki.