To add to that, the only reason the North didn't have as many slaves as the South was because they were able to make more investments into industry-based production, effectively weening themselves off of a slave-based economy--using taxes siphoned from the more impoverished South no less. I'm not sure whether to call that an irony or an hypocrisy.

 Originally Posted By: thedoctor
I am edgy as fuck. No one is as edgy as I.


That is exactly how you sound. Even moreso than usual since you believe your opinion is the end-all-be-all of the discussion. I imagine you're the type of armchair Southern sociologist who sees the average half-dozen trucks roll by with the battle-flag on the back and, therefore, feels a need to distinguish himself as some form of "enlightened" post-civil rights movement intellectual who has a lot of "black friends" because he self-deprecatingly acknowledges past crimes of slavery and racism on a visceral level--because it's certainly not an objective one.

I'm not sure whether to call you "Iggy-lite" or to call him "Doc-extreme".

It's kind of apparent to me now exactly what you (and Iggy) were doing. In fact, I imagine it's a similar tactic you use every time you have this discussion with other people--especially if they're likely to believe that the North was in the wrong for what they did: as soon as the topic pops up, you immediately rush out the gate to rattle off the most heinous and extreme acts of violence and political/economic oppression against the South before eventually, and subtly, vectoring into an ultimate, albeit veiled, conclusion that the South was in the wrong regardless of whether or not they were wronged to begin with. Thus, you effectively disarm the person(s) with whom you're having the discussion by virtue of being the original party to bring up the crimes of the North even as you condemn the South--despite the startling juxtaposition the comparison offers. Iggy du jour.

I believe this thread is the missing link between both your characters--the one which I have long suspected to exist. It's typical fare for him to take an initially, and ostensibly, center-right stance (provided it doesn't speak to his brand of cultural "libertarianism*", in which case he'll rush out the gate with a glibly liberal response) before initiating a gradual triangulation of morality that eventually leads him down a path towards a populist position. As though he could actually convince anyone that he's anything other than a run-of-the-mill leftist partisan "historian**". By comparison, you're far more subtle and, therefore, less formulaic than he. But in this instance, in which you're most desperate to ward off any racist allusions toward your own views, the subtleties of your approach evaporate in favor of bringing your pablum of moderation to its logically extreme conclusion and go full Iggy on everyone's ass with a Trojan Horse of fair play that leads into a disproportionate condemnation of one paradigm over the other, and is thus complemented by a signal-boosting fellowship in the common locality between the two of you (i.e. "We're both from the South. Whatever we say, goes").

It's even more apparent to me that your respective approaches have become indistinguishable since you've now dropped all pretense of reasoning through the period-specific antecedents in favor of bandying about the word "slavery"--and all of the emotional baggage it entails--as a means of obfuscating the larger cultural context and issue of using war to force one's values on a society that is, for all intents and purposes, completely alien to your own. With that sort of reasoning, the North should have made it their mission to invade Cuba, Mexico, Africa, or the Middle East. I recall Iggy pulling that same brand of selective reasoning when we were discussing the Crusades, at which time he used "religion" as an emotionally-charged buzzword to identify faith as the principle conflict rather than the differing philosophies involved.

When I was still living in Texas, I would encounter a surprisingly great deal of high-handed, pretentious fuckheads like yourself that would try to take charge of the conversation using their own personal relations with the South--as well as a practiced rehash of Northern atrocities--to put to rest any dissent on the matter of Southern villainy during the Civil War on the sole virtue that they acknowledged mistreatment toward the South--and they weren't even from Austin! Never had I used the words "cunt" and "pig" so often to describe these pathetic wastes flesh whom--pitifully enough--always seemed more interested in burying the South than discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of its placement in history simply because the established narrative against it was so strong and any argument on the matter would tokenly subtract credibility from a pro-South position.

The irony behind our acrimony is that, with the exception of your denial that the larger and more prevalent Southern culture held feelings of antipathy for slavery as an enterprise (and utter contempt for it as a general practice), you and I haven't actually said anything that contradicts either one of our historical accounts. You've simply chosen to follow the path of least (political) resistance and adopt a generic conclusion that exists irrespective of the criteria. To wit, however often you choose to identify the institution of slavery as single article of a greater charter of independence--as well as an overall political mindset, which I had already acknowledged--you do not have the history to back up a domineering cultural mentality that pervaded the values of the Southern commonwealth.


*

**