Hahaha haughty? “The poor renter looking down on the middle class landowner.” Lol, what the fuck are you talking about.

Tell me, have you ever lived in a rural area? Or been a farmworker? Because I really honestly can’t tell if I’m dealing with city folk who equate farmer who owns land with farmer who does farm work, or if I’m dealing with middle class folk who don’t understand the privilege of owning property, even if “the bank technically owns it.”

Something tells me a house he builds is probably pretty different from a house you would build.

Brave of you to assume I could even consider building a house anywhere, much less buying one.

And yeah I really don’t give a shit about his past or education. Is Jay-z working class because he grew up in the Marcy projects? Is Richard Branson working class because he left school at 16?

Life is exponentially harder for him because he is actively striving for life improvement, not living in a tiny box & watching Netflix on the couch.

This tells me everything I need to know about you. “Average and ordinary” for you and “average and ordinary” for me mean completely different things. Have you ever talked to an actual poor person?

Okay, so what in your mind is the “prime thrust” of the song. Because to me it has a pretty clear middle class perspective

The lyrics are extremely basic and not creative in the slightest. They make gestures towards working class solidarity, but are petit bourgeois attitudes wrapped in redneck aesthetics for comfortable middle class folk. Songs like this are a dime a dozen, and I’m sure you can find another song like this, especially in country/bluegrass, without the racist undertones.

What does this even prove? If I take out a mortgage to buy a house, the bank “technically owns” my house. Does this make me not middle class?

Living in a camper…off the grid on 90 acres of land that he owns and plans to build a farmhouse and raise livestock on. Working class my ass…

yeah I agree, people have a hard time hearing any criticism of Lincoln. I wouldn’t say that he “didn’t give a shit” because he was committed to stopping it’s spread into the western territories (the position that caused secession). And he did express moral opposition to slavery. But he was a moderate and felt bound by the constitution that he couldn’t actually outlaw slavery in the south, hoping that to stop its spread west would cause a gradual end to slavery as slaveowner political power wanes.

So he’s a liberal who goes to war mostly to keep the union together, and his first thought is not really about the slaves. But he did do things, like when he issues the emancipation proclamation he ensures there is a legal argument that the slaves freed by it will remain free after the war. So it’s not like Lincoln didn’t care about the slaves. He was extremely moderate, but he did hold generally anti-slavery views.

Also it’s hard to say “the north didn’t give a shit” since abolitionism was strong in the north, John Brown was celebrated in the north. There were a lot of people who cared and were extremely opposed to slavery in the north. You have soldiers singing songs celebrating John Brown. Of course this was definitely not true of everyone lol.

So I don’t think it’s fair to just say the north was completely unconcerned with slavery, but there’s a lot of complexity there, especially with Lincoln, and ultimately at the end of the day Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery and didn’t declare war because of slavery.

yeah, and I’m asking you how those links show that masks are not the answer. They don’t even mention masks once. If you’re telling me masks are not the only answer, then I agree. But masks are part of the answer.

Yes we are concerned about stopping deaths from covid. How do we ensure that covid deaths do not happen - by stopping the spread. Again, skipping over the whole conversation about “overweight people,” I’m sure you agree it was not and was never only overweight people dying from covid. And even if it was, are you saying these people deserve to die? “Well, overweight people will die, but for everyone else it’s just the flu so we shouldn’t do anything.”

Except it was never only overweight people dying, and even those who got covid and it only presented as a “mild flu” have dealt with long post-viral illness afterwards. Some people still dealing with post-viral illness from being infected in the first wave. So you also have to decide that you’re okay with that.

I know nothing about Canada, but I don’t understand your reasoning.

The hospitals in Canada were full and fucked way before covid, so a few extra admissions completely broke their fucked up system.

Okay, so you blame masks and lockdowns for that? That’s exactly what lockdowns were supposed to mitigate - stop the spread so covid does not put more stress on an already overstressed system. We were dealing with the same thing here in the USA. So you admit covid stressed an overstressed system, but your solution is to…let covid spread more? Wouldn’t that put more stress on hospitals. Or, as you say, well it only presents a mild flu for some. Okay…then why did it put so much stress on the hospitals in 2020 if it’s not a big deal?

isolated physical tests on masks don’t represent well what happens in the real world.

Except those real world studies were all inconclusive. So we have mechanistic evidence that shows without a doubt that masks work, versus inconclusive rcts that need to be stretched by ideologues, beyond the conclusions of the authors, to maybe sort-of support that masks don’t work.

I sure as hell wasn’t hermetically sealing the masks to my face and I didn’t see anyone else doing it either.

I did not have a mask that fit my face until just before the omicron wave. This was not a failure of masks. I argued to someone here (maybe you) that any mask is better than no mask. However, yes, some masks are better than others and if you’re walking around in a loose fitting cloth mask you’re getting very little protection, especially when no one else is taking any precaution. But, at least here in the US, we were first told that masks were unnecessary, then told we should wear a cloth mask, and then finally the baggy blue surgical masks were promoted, which was better but still inadequate. I don’t know what it was like in Canada, but for us this was a failure of policy. There were contradictory statements, no real push to get people educated about masks, and of course poor masks were promoted. So you’d walk around seeing people wearing surgical masks below their nose, upside down. Then of course there was the issue where people were selling counterfeit masks, including n95s, that didn’t work, so you had people also walking around with fake masks. And of course the whole issue at the start of the pandemic where we had a shortage of PPE.

There were a whole lot of policy disasters, many of which predated covid, but to blame masks and make the charge that they don’t work because of those policy disasters makes no sense. Just in time manufacturing should never have been used to supply PPE, masks should have been promoted from the start (and “the start” should have been at least by early January, not March 15), and n95s should have been made easy to acquire with an education campaign to get people to wear them correctly. Instead we were all left on our own to try and sort through all the contradictory statements of the CDC and misinformation on the internet, fight with people at stores to even get a mask, do intensive research at home to figure out if your mask was even real, and then even once you did all that many people didn’t even understand how to wear them. When I got an n95 finally it was late 2021 and I was working in a nursery school. As kids and teachers wearing loose fitting masks that they were extremely lax with began dropping like flies, I was getting tested weekly (because I was constantly exposed) and never got covid once. Masks work.

Hey! Why don’t you go stick your dick in a meat grinder to ensure your genes don’t continue to pollute the human race!

The sad thing is you and I agree and have agreed this whole time, but because of your dumbass inability to admit you misunderstood me we’re here now. You’re a waste of space and every resource that has ever gone to sustaining your life, all the food and water and energy, it’s all been wasted. Truly sad to imagine. You are a leech upon this earth.

I’m honestly concerned for your health. You seem to lack the ability to comprehend basic written English, and nearly all of your comments are rife with word salad completely unrelated to anything I’ve written. You either have some sort of brain damage, or you’ve really misjudged your own intelligence, reading comprehension, and ability to communicate using the written word

do you have brain damage?

Most people who read my original comment seemed to have no issues with it. You however should work on your reading comprehension if you came away from it thinking that it’s justifying slavery.

Did Lincoln want to outlaw slavery? Maybe we can begin there.

I straight up don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about in the rest of this comment. Or rather, I don’t know how it’s responding in any way to my original comment.

Yes, this was literally my entire point. Did you miss this?

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.

Edit: if you need it spelled out, I am implying that this is a fallacious assumption

Edit 2: to spell it out further, I am implying this is a fallacious assumption based in part on the reason you just laid out

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.”

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?

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.