RonPaul is a slavery hippy

[Watser?]

RonPaul, the old dude who is single-handedly going to restore to the US the liberty that Lincoln took away, has come up with a plan to avoid the Civil War in retrospect (actually he came up with that 5 years ago, but it was ignored by the evil lamestream media, until now). He wants to retroactively spend billions of taxpayer money to buy the slaves from the criminals who are holding them to avoid war and live in peace, man

The last time Paul ran for president, he appeared on Meet The Press in December 2007, and Tim Russert asked him point blank: "You would vote against the Civil Rights Act if, if it was today?" Paul's response: "If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property - has nothing to do with race relations."

The Civil Rights Act in Paul's mind has nothing to do with race relations, because it's got nothing to do with the Civil Rights Act in the real world. And the same is true of slavery and Civil War as well, which Russert went on to ask about next:

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the - that iron, iron fist…

Here, Ron Paul is echoing the ideology of neo-Confederates, who consider Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, and founding father of the Republican Party, to be one of history's greatest tyrants. You'd never know it from Paul, but it was the South that fired the first shots, long before Lincoln even thought of freeing the slaves. The interview continued:

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opi...446786665.html

The problem of course is that this is not exactly the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As the article continues:

Ron Paul might think that a slaveholder bailout was "a pretty reasonable approach". Others, such as myself, might think that paying freed slaves three or more generations of back wages was an even more reasonable approach. But none of that matters so far as actual history is concerned. Slavery was not "phased out" in Haiti - it was destroyed by an incredibly bloody slave revolt - the sort of thing that Paul elsewhere claims has never once occurred in human history.

In the British Empire, slavery was relatively peripheral, limited to far-off colonies. A single foot-step onto British soil meant instant freedom for any slave. Thus, politically, slavery never had the stranglehold on power it once enjoyed in the United States. From the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 onward, the British Navy helped suppress the international slave trade, capturing thousands of slave ships and freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves in the decades that followed.

Finally, a bloody slave revolt in Jamaica in 1831 brought matters to a head, resulting in the general abolition of slavery in the British Empire two years later. Yes, slaveholders were compensated for their freed slaves - more than 40,000 separate awards, representing roughly one per cent of the US slave population in 1860.

The £20 million fund was 40 per cent of the British government's total annual expenditure at the time. Thus, a similar scheme in the US - whose slavs were valued at US $75bn in 1860 - would have taken generations to pay off. Even if Southern slaveholders had been willing to take such a deal - which they most certainly weren't - it's difficult to imagine that such a prolonged slaveholder bailout would have gone anywhere near as smoothly as Ron Paul off-handedly imagines it would have. Still other countries - such as Brazil - ended slavery only after the US Civil War had shown conclusively that slavery was doomed, through civil war, if necessary.

Moreover, as the article also points out: it was the South that actually started the war. More specifically South Carolina.

Now in The Atlantic on Sunday Ta-Nehisi Coates also has an article on the subject and he is proposing 'crowdsourcing American History' to get to the bottom of this. He starts with a couple of things that are known and then asks some questions. One of the things we know:

We know that states like Mississippi and South Carolina were, in 1860, majority black and thus compensated emancipation in Hammond and Calhoun's South Carolina would not simply mean the end of this broad aristocracy, but the prospect of a free white populations outnumbered by a free black population. We can thus surmise that it is no coincidence that South Carolina inaugurated the Civil War.

Crowd-Sourcing American History - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic

[chunksmediocrites]

Ron Paul supports state's rights, NOT slavery...

ETA: I probably should have added here that this video was one mentioned by Ta-Nehisi Coates; the title put on the video (and the comments) by the YouTube poster is less informative. Coates also is mildly suspicious that the background of the giant Dixie flag may have been shooped in. Coates' article breaking down Paul's revisionist history is really good.

[Watser?]

Okay, I know you Murkins have some weird political positions and all, but is it just me or is this 'states rights' thing one of the more ridiculous ones? I mean it seems to be almost always just a way to say: 'We want to have the right to our bigotry!' It's almost always the right not to apply human rights or civil rights.

[SR71]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Okay, I know you Murkins have some weird political positions and all, but is it just me or is this 'states rights' thing one of the more ridiculous ones? I mean it seems to be almost always just a way to say: 'We want to have the right to our bigotry!' It's almost always the right not to apply human rights or civil rights.

The short version (the only one I know, so possible FACTION FAIL!!) is that the Articles of Confederation left many powers in the hands of the States, but was not working out so great. Seeing this, We adopted the Constitution, which consolidated greater powers to the Federal Government. Tards will tell you the Constitution was written to ensure power remained with the separate states, which is totally backwards of what I think I know about the subject.

[Kael]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Okay, I know you Murkins have some weird political positions and all, but is it just me or is this 'states rights' thing one of the more ridiculous ones? I mean it seems to be almost always just a way to say: 'We want to have the right to our bigotry!' It's almost always the right not to apply human rights or civil rights.

"States' Rights" is p. much the rallying cry of the bigot, yes. While there is, I think, a good and important discussion hiding under there somewhere, and some of the less dickish libertarians I've spoken with will opine that it's about localizing administration more than anything else, for the most part it is heard from groups that are in the majority at home but not in the bigger picture, and are restrained from fully excluding individuals outside their group on their home turf by federal laws. If they could get those laws out of the way, they could finally stop those dirty gays/Negroes/spics/Jews/whatever from spoiling their perfect little community, maybe giving them their own community on the other side of the tracks, literally or figuratively. When that community sucks, for reasons definitely not related to discrimination, funding, or political power, well it's obviously because they're just not good people, and see wasn't it a great idea to keep them out of the main, nice part of town. They don't care what other States or communities do, they just care about keeping things nicely homogeneous at home.

[Ensign Steve]

I do remember that when Oregon wanted to give doctors the right to prescribe fatal medication for euthanasia, it was a federal drug law that eventually shut it down. I don't remember the bigots crying out for state's rights at that time.

[Ari]

As a big supporter of State Rights this is one thing that drew me to the Libertarian party before it became obvious it was just another name for conservative racists and homophobes.

State rights allow for experimentation of laws in large areas without asking the whole country to change. Medical Marijuana is a great example, a few states took the first risk and everyone else watched to see if the state imploded. At the same time they shouldn't be the top law of the land, there is actually a use for that constitution thing (and its strange progressive Bill of something) and the federal government.

[Jerome]

So any nation that has sovereignty is just an excuse for racism. You guys are just soo silly.

[Vivisectus]

It reminds me of the dutch populist movement. The populist parties sometimes worked reasonably well on a local level, but as a national political philosophy you very quickly find out that what is most popular tends to be the most common denominator: xenophobic or just overly simplified fuckwittery.

[Watser?]

No, it's just that your god RonPaul is making excuses for racists every time he opens his mouth.

[Kyuss Apollo]

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Steve Lawrence, Luis Suárez, Tom Adeyemi, and Mark Duggan can all speak, I'm sure, to the non-existence of hatred and racism in the UK, all thanks to the government purchase of slaves from their owners back in 1833.

[ChuckF]

RONPAUL supports the purchase and sale of human beings.