Links (most recent first) that caught my eye, but did not warrant full-blown blog entries ….
- Buffy Season 8, and What Makes a Series Good – I felt the same way about S8, largely because, with a comic book canvas to paint on, the writers got us away from very human (so to speak) characters and more into “WHOA! LOOK! SHE’S A GIANT NOW!” Not gimmicks, per se, but distractions.
- John Lundberg: Glenn Beck Hit by Haiku Storm – Some great haiku there.
- The Pope’s Smoking Gun : Dispatches from the Culture Wars – Smoking gun indeed — a signed letter from Cardinal Ratzinger, basically telling a US bishop that, despite his diocese’ recommendation that a priest be defrocked for his criminal conviction of lewd conduct, he should not be defrocked because it will harm the Church and its reputation. The Vatican claims it’s all out of context, but the language seems pretty darned straightforward to me. Jesus wept.
- KKK has ‘reversed declining membership’ in recent years.: Matt Corley
- Massey Mine Shut Down 61 Times in 15 Months [Dispatches from the Culture Wars] – But the coal must flow!
- 50 Movie Cars – Some fun memories here.
- They Don’t Get It – Money graf: “Now we have the governor of Mississippi rushing to the defense of the governor of Virginia’s decision to revive a celebration of the Confederacy in that state. The linked article suggests that people are upset that it’s ‘insensitive.’ My objections to the Confederacy isn’t that remembering it hurts my feelings. Rather, I have these old fashioned notions that both treason and owning people is wrong. Combining the two is really wrong. And getting sentimental about the combination is appalling. I’m happy enough to let bygones be bygones, but if elected officials from Confederate states insist on bringing up the past unpleasantness, it should be to apologize and to thank the northern states for bringing a forcible end to their peculiar institution.”
- The first photograph of a human… – Wow — that’s pretty amazing (and an example of incidental importance).
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I have a friend who is a Virginian. He asserts the argument that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states’ rights. I am beginning to think that all Southerners are brought up to believe this as firmly as they believe in God, likely to bolster their self-image. As with religion, it seems that no amount of logic can convince them that their opinion might possibly be even just a tiny bit off the mark. I think that “Stonewall” Jackson’s nickname could be accurately applied to any and all of them these days.
Despite our modern lens, the Civil War was NOT about slavery. It was about a clash of economic models. The Northern industrial model that required a relatively educated workforce and the Southern agrarian model that required a dirt poor, low cost work force to make viable, making slavery a corner stone of their economic model.
Slavery as a model was going to the way of the Dodo due to the automation coming to farming (although migrant workers are exploited similarly for those crops too sensitive for mechanical farming). The powers that be behind the Confederacy were unwilling to give up their economic power to the upstart manufacturing mogels of the North.
Slaves were not a major political issue at the time, not until the war was well under way and the aid of black soldiers in the Union army became crucial, and a slave uprising was a strategy that the Union hoped to use in the Confederacy. Specialty groups in the North certainly agitated for emancipation, but Lincoln said very little about it until the end of the war, and the Emancipation Proclomation was far more about putting a stake through the heart of Southern Agrarianism.
*gasp, pant, gasp* /endrant
I’d argue that while slavery was not the sole motivator for the Union (it certainly motivated some; Lincoln seemed personally against it but placed its importance far secondary to preserving then reuniting the Union), defense of slavery as both personal property and as the only method they saw of competing with the North (not to mention the political oomph it gave them in terms of representation and electoral clout) *was* the core motivator of the South — not slavery per se, perhaps, but slavery as the means to an end (whether that is more or less reprehensible is another subject). States rights were “merely” a means to preserving (and, in new territories, expanding) slavery, though certainly states rights had (and have) a resonance on their own.