Rov_Scam
1hr ago
I think Hood is underrated, but only to the extent that he was merely a bad general and not in contention for the worst the Confederacy had to offer. What frustrates me with a lot of Civil War discourse, especially online, is the same thing I mentioned earlier about judging actions with knowledge of the outcome in place. Yes, Hood's actions look bad when we know they were unsuccessful. The problem is that, at the time, it wasn't obvious that these actions were worse than any of the realistic alternatives.
To put the whole issue into proper context: In the spring and summer of 1864, the overall Confederate strategy was hold off the Union until the November elections, in the hope that war weariness would usher in a new administration with a mandate to make some kind of deal. To this end, it wasn't critical that they score any major victories, but it was critical that they prevent the Union from getting any of their own. Ever since losing Chattanooga the Joe Johnston playbook had been to stake out a defensive position, only to abandon it after getting outflanked. He'd given Davis repeated assurances that he'd hold behind this river or whatever, then not like his position and retreat. After several weeks of this Sherman is on the outskirts of Atlanta, a city the Confederacy can't afford to lose, and Johnston is talking about giving it up.
At this point Davis, who didn't like Johnston to begin with, is getting fed up and is probably getting deja vu about the Peninsula campaign, where Johnston did the same thing around Richmond, which probably would have fallen if Lee hadn't taken over and changed strategy. So Johnston gets cashiered in favor of Hood, who has a reputation for fighting and will at least make an attempt at fending off Sherman and saving Atlanta. Hood, true to his word, launched a series of ill-fated assaults against Sherman that do nothing to stave off the inevitable and only serve to inflict casualties he can't afford to lose. Buffs like to argue that Johnston would have at least kept his army intact, but an intact army is useless if it isn't going to defend anything, let alone something as critical as Atlanta. There was pressure from the president, the state legislatures, and the public to do something, and Hood at least did something. I'm not going to comment on whether what he did was ideal because I'm not an expert on battlefield tactics, but the buffs who criticize Hood aren't criticizing his execution.
So now, to get closer to answering your question, we get to the fall, after Atlanta is in Union hands and Sherman is aiming to push to Savannah. Hood didn't attempt to stop him because he knew that the endeavor was pointless. He could have slowed the march but not stopped it; he would have fallen farther and farther back, desertions and casualties increasing with every passing mile, and there would have been nothing left of his army by the time Sherman got to the ocean. Furthermore, there would have been no reason for Thomas to keep his troops in Tennessee. He could have either invaded Alabama unopposed, or joined up with Sherman to give him 120,000 men to Hood's 40,000. So Hood made the decision to move toward the Alabama line, cutting off Sherman's communications. This would purportedly compel Sherman to leave Atlanta and divide his army, sending one wing to protect the threat to Tennessee and the other to hunt down Hood, who would get the opportunity to fight the remaining forces in Georgia on the ground of his choosing.
Sherman did indeed give chase, and Hood found the area he wanted to give battle, but Sherman showed up with his entire army, which was more than Hood could handle. At this point, Hood was stuck; if he took up a position, Sherman could do the same, and hold him there while Thomas came down from Nashville to hold him while he turned toward Savannah. Or he could hold him while he sent Thomas into Alabama, before turning toward the sea and forcing Hood to give chase, which wouldn't do anything but waste Hood's time. So instead he decided to give up Georgia and head north to Kentucky, hoping he'd have better luck where he wasn't at such a numerical disadvantage. If nothing else, it would keep the Union out of Alabama.
It's worth also noting that the Confederate army was having serious problems with desertion at this point, largely driven by the hopelessness of the situation. The buffs who talk about how Johnston would have at least preserved his army don't realize that no one wants to spend weeks putting his ass on the line in rear guard actions defending land you intend on giving up in a few hours without any immediate prospects for taking the initiative. On the other hand, if you go to Tennessee where you can win a few battles and keep the Yanks out of Alabama, there's much less temptation to desert. If nothing else, it might force Sherman to pursue and backtrack out of Georgia.
For Hood's part, he was wildly overambitious, thinking he could march straight into Kentucky, replenish his army with locals, and force Sherman to abandon Georgia to keep him from crossing the Ohio or, alternatively, that he could march from there into Virginia and hit Grant in the rear, crushing his army. Fantastical, yes, but at this point in the war, the only way to keep morale up and preserve any chance of winning is to go for a knockout blow. Even defeating Schoefield would have been enough to effect a short-term reorganization of Union priorities. Again, we can argue about whether poor tactical decisions led to Hood's downfall and the destruction of The Army of Tennessee, but criticism of Hood isn't that he blundered away good opportunities; to the contrary, if anything good is said about him it's that he was a competent corps commander under Lee but was too aggressive to command an army. His actions were all failures, but it's not like there were a ton of obvious alternatives.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them.
A teacher I know says that the kids (except the really smart ones) use Chat GTP for everything and don't give the impression that they even read the output beyond a cursory look to make sure it was in the general ballpark of answering the question, so this shouldn't be too hard.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
There was a group of so-called "Cotton Whigs" who were in favor of industrializing the South, but they operated under the assumption that slave labor could be used in factories just as it could on farms. Whether they were right or wrong about this is subject to debate, but it's useful in examining the arguments you see sometimes from amateurs that had the North laid off the slavery question and focused on industrialization the institution would have died on its own. Like I said in my other comment, we know that know, but it wasn't obvious at the time, when advocates like James De Bow were talking about the ways slavery could be used in an expanded non-agricultural economy.
But altogether I think you're correct in the sense that an industrialized South doesn't view the expansion of slavery as necessary for self-preservation. I think the more interesting hypothetical is what would have happened had the South considered the slavery matter settled, whether by extension of the Missouri Compromise line, popular sovereignty, or some other mechanism.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
If you're not modifying existing plans, the architect should go through all that with you. Some architects are hacks, but those ones don't generally do custom builds. Assuming you want an architecturally correct Southern style and not some ersatz version, an architect excited to dive into the details of the exterior will be more than competent to guide you away from making the kinds of mistakes that end up in builder designed houses.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
To attempt some answers:
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It seems obvious now because we know it happened, but you have to put yourself in the position of someone who would have been observing things at the time. For most of the 1850s, things were looking pretty good for the South. There was a string of Northern presidents with Southern sympathies, who weren't about to rock the boat on the slavery question. Dred Scott happened. The Whig party collapsed. Democrats had a 2 to 1 advantage in the Senate and Congress. There were certainly huge problems, but it wasn't until the 1860 election where the Democratic party split along sectional lines and the Republicans swept the North that the writing was on the wall.
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Lee is certainly overrated. Jackson is as well; both he and Longstreet are examples of guys who maxed out their own competence. Jackson was good at semi-independent commands but didn't have the political skills to be in charge of an entire army, and didn't do well when fighting directly under Lee. Longstreet was the opposite, in that he was a good general when serving under Lee but not so good independently.
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The "rich man's war poor man's fight" thing didn't have so much to do with who was taking casualties in the army but who was fighting in the army itself. The perception arose that thousands of men who would never be able to afford a single slave were fighting to retain an institution whose primary beneficiaries were plantation owners who weren't serving and who had an inordinate amount of political power.
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There's a difference between treating your enemy with respect and going out of your way to honor him. I doubt there are any statues of Petain in France commemorating his work in WWII.
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The commanding generals in Virginia take up most of the slack for the idea that the South had better generals than the North. In my opinion the opposite is true, with the North's generals being somewhat better on the whole. In Hood's defense, he didn't really have a choice at this point, as the war in the West was already lost and he had to do something. It's like a runner at third trying to score on a sac fly to left field when the team is down 7–2 in the 8th. Bad idea overall, but sometimes you just need to get something going. As for Davis, I think he had the idea that he wasn't going to cave until he absolutely had to. Most of the Deep South and large parts of the Trans-Mississippi never came under Union occupation, and I think the idea was that he'd make them fight for every inch, because the Union couldn't really claim victory unless every state came back.
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Yup
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It's easily the best single-volume work about the Civil War ever written, and it's required reading for anyone who wants to claim familiarity with the war. It's of "read this before you begin to discuss it" variety. The Great Courses series by Gary W. Gallagher covers similar ground, but in more depth, and he and McPherson seem to be like-minded about most things, so it makes an excellent supplement if you're looking to go further without risking running into a dud or something controversial.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Forget the Duolingo. It looks like most of the "teaching" this school does is plopping the kids in front of computer education modules that give them feedback on the problems. One wonders why they need "guides" who make 100k a year to not teach them. Presumably the effect of a good teacher is proportional to the amount of teaching they actually do.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
It's more that people advocating for certain rule changes often do so based on the presumption that they will only be used against other people. OP thinks that it's fine to deport native-born citizens with non-native parents, confident in the belief that he's protected. In reality, he probably can't meet the standards he imposes on other people, and even if he can, the vast majority of people can't. If we were to take this idea to its logical conclusion we'd end up with an America that looks vastly different than the one we have now. I don't think the OP sees the end result of this being that a second-generation Mexican and a naturalized Bangladeshi have a much easier road ahead than someone whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Well, you should be concerned, at least theoretically, because I can all but guarantee you can't do this. The only chance I'd give you of actually being able to is if your parents are relatively recent immigrants who naturalized before you were born, and you have access to their naturalization papers. Otherwise it's damn near impossible. I did a fair amount of genealogical work when I was in oil and gas and simply proving a bloodline back 100 years can take a significant amount of work, and that's including unofficial sources like obituaries and affidavits. In particular, anyone whose ancestors came here before about 1890 you can forget about entirely, as vital records simply weren't kept before then and estate records didn't normally include a list of all the heirs. And this work didn't even get into naturalization records, which are filed with the District Court where the person was naturalized, which, good luck that they were properly archived. So I guess you'd agree then that we should establish a system where the most recent immigrants and their descendants are the most likely to be allowed to stay and the people whose families have been here the longest are the most likely to be given the boot?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Great! Let's start with an easy question: Who was the most recent immigrant in your lineage? You don't have to give a name, just tell me their relation to you, the date they immigrated here, the date they naturalized, and the birthdate of the descendant through whom you're claiming citizenship.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I'm not sure what you're failing to understand. If your great-grandfather immigrated here in 1910, had your grandmother in 1925, and naturalized in 1930, he couldn't have possibly passed his citizenship to your grandmother because he had no citizenship to pass. And since your grandmother isn't a citizen in this scenario, neither is your mother, and neither are you. What's the problem here?
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.
At least you assume so. Unless you can prove that their parents had the power to transfer citizenship, I'm just going to assume you aren't, and that goes all the way back up the chain. You'd better hope that a sufficient number of immigrants in that chain were either here before 1789 or naturalized before they had your ancestors, or else they couldn't have transmitted citizenship to their children and I'd prefer you'd be deported to South Sudan or some other country that will take anyone. At that point you can get in the back of the line behind all the other South Sudanese who want to live in the US (Good luck!).
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Fistful of Dollars is the weakest entry in the trilogy, and Red Harvest is an overrated novel that I quit reading as soon as I figured out where it was going. I haven't seen Yojimbo, but I have no interest in watching it if it's just another "guy plays two gangs off of one another for personal reasons with a big showdown at the end* film. I mean, seriously, you don't need to be a clairvoyant to see how obvious these plotlines are and how at a certain point you're just waiting for the whole thing to play out.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I don't think there is an intended recourse. I think the court was uncomfortable with the idea that some judge in Kansas City whom nobody has ever heard of could issue a national injunction preventing the president from exercising power anywhere, and they just ran with it. There was some suggestion that class actions should be used instead, but class actions are notoriously difficult due to class certification problems, and it seemed like the court was recommending class actions precisely because of these problems.
If I were litigating these matters, I'd take a "flood the zone" approach that would call into relief the practical problems of prohibiting national injunctions. It's just as easy for me to file a suit with 100 plaintiffs as it is one with 1 plaintiff, so I'd file suits with hundreds of named plaintiffs in friendly jurisdictions. I'd amend these suits regularly, as more plaintiffs came forward. Do this in enough districts and the multidistrict litigation panel will get involved and consolidate all the pending suits to one district for pretrial matters. If this happens, I then start filing suits in the unfriendly districts, which will immediately get stayed for enforcement under the standing order from the MDL judge.
If the cases aren't referred to MDL, which is a possibility if I'm only filing one case per district, it isn't necessarily a loss, because now I have 94 cases running in parallel. If more than one attorney takes this strategy, then it complicates things further. You could end up with hundreds of suits running in parallel, with hundreds of plaintiffs each, creating one massive headache for the government that will take forever to sort out and make the administration expend resources that it wouldn't have to if it were just one case in one district.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
Um, I dunno, suspect's blood found at the crime scene. Victim's blood found on the suspect's clothes, or in his apartment. I could go on but I don't have a decade to list all the scenarios where DNA evidence could be relevant in a murder case.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I understand what you're saying, but you're imposing a standard on the court that simply doesn't exist. He was involuntarily committed in 1983. He's presumed unfit to own firearms. You may have a disagreement about the process that was in place before 1987, but that's not what's at issue here. The guy isn't arguing that the record should be expunged because his original commitment was invalid, it's unlikely that he would be able to prove that it was invalid due to the passage of time, and the only way such an argument would work would be in the context of a ruling that all involuntary commitments prior to 1987 are presumptively invalid on procedural grounds. But again, that's not the issue here, and the court isn't going to relitigate this on its own.
Operating from that presumption, it's T.B.'s burden to prove that he qualifies for expungement, not the court's burden to prove that he doesn't. So, yeah, the court could have subpeonaed any number of different things, but they didn't, because they're under no obligation to prove that this guy is unfit to own weapons. That's already been established, insofar as the law is concerned, and if he wants the expungement, he has to provide the evidence himself. And what evidence did he provide? His own testimony, which suffered a debilitating lack of credibility, and a note from a psychiatrist which he admitted was obtained under false pretenses. The only thing we're left with that doesn't implicate T.B's lack of credibility is his lack of criminal record, which is persuasive but not dispositive. There's no provision of New Jersey law stating that the court has to grant an expungement just because someone hasn't committed any crimes for a period of time.
There's no legal issue here. All we have is you disagreeing with the factual findings of a judge who met the guy and reviewed the entire record, which, fine, you're entitled to your opinion. But it's no different than people who disagree with a jury verdict based on news reports they saw on TV. It's a factual issue, not a legal one, and no appeals court is going to overturn a finding of fact unless the evidence is so overwhelming that the conclusion is patently unreasonable.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
this conditions the availability of a constitutional right on knowing exactly how to frame a matter for the tastes of whatever judge or judges he was unlucky enough to pick months or years before seeing the court room, having the funds to hire lawyers (and since the guy isn't pro se, instead being represented by this guy, having the funds and knowledge to hire 'competent' lawyers), having the capabilities to act well as an effective witness at trial, and come off nicely-enough presented while sitting in court for a New Jersey judge to like him, (and don't know about a community services organization offering low-cost outpatient services). Few of these matters could be verified without a time machine; none are in the public record to even make sure that the judges are properly summarizing it.
I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply. If you have suggestions on how we can idiot proof the legal system so that any moron can act pro se and get similar results to those that lawyers get now, I'm all ears, but a more realistic approach is to do more to ensure access to legal services for those who can't afford them.
As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't. It's clear from the appellate record that the guy wasn't prepped to testify, probably hadn't looked at the records he was using to make his case, and relied on the report of a regular treating psychiatrist rather than a forensic psychiatrist who would have testified in court. There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.
The main point I want to make, though, is that you're treating this as though these hearings are prerequisite to exercising one's Second Amendment rights. But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination. To the extent that he has any right to the expungement of that record, the burden of proof is on him, as the state already met theirs. The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally. The judge denying that petition isn't revoking any right, she's merely declining to reinstate a right that was already revoked in a prior proceeding.
There is no right to an expungement; it's entirely a creature of statute. New Jersey could just as easily make expungement unavailable in any circumstances, or have a process to restore some disabilities involuntary commitment results in but retain the prohibition on owning a gun, or only allow expungement in circumstances that don't apply here, and the guy would have been SOL from the start, and this case wouldn't exist, and no one would be bitching about how his rights are being violated.
This whole matter is complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with expungement and not an alternative process for restoration of gun rights. Most other states have some process for this, but an expungement is much easier to get in New Jersey than in other states, the standards are similar to those the Feds use, and it's ultimately a stronger system since an expungement's ability to remove the disability isn't reliant on whether the process is compliant with the Federal guidelines. Whether or not there's a constitutional right for there to be some mechanism to restore gun rights to those with a history of involuntary commitment is an open question. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment prohibited the permanent revocation of rights just because someone was committed at one point in his life, but it didn't elaborate with regard to what was necessary to restore those rights.
In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it". He lied to the court about the circumstances surrounding the commitment. He admitted to intentionally misrepresenting his mental health to the doctor whose opinion he was relying on. How is the court supposed to base a determination on a bare-bones statement made by a doctor whom the applicant admits didn't get an accurate assessment? The applicant's testimony lacked credibility, the doctor's report lacked credibility, so what's left? Even if you can pick your way through the weeds and offer some basis upon which she could have granted the expungement, that's a long way from saying that she made the kind of error that the appellate court would reverse, and the two Republican judges who wrote the opinion seemed to understand that.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
See my comment above, but voluntarily interacting with the mental health system isn't what gets you barred from owning a gun; it's avoiding the mental health system until things get so bad you're forced into it.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
This only applies to involuntary commitments. If you're feeling suicidal and check yourself into a mental hospital for treatment, it's not going to affect your ability to buy a gun. On the other hand, if you attempt suicide and get 302'd (in PA), it will. The way the law is set up now actually encourages people to seek voluntary treatment before it becomes enough of a problem that the state has to intervene.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
This is an object lesson in why people who think they don't need lawyers for stuff like this generally do need lawyers (unless, of course, this guy was so bad that he had a lawyer and the lawyer couldn't do anything about it). His big mistakes were:
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He tried to downplay the 1983 commitment with testimony that was contrary to the medical records. My bitch ex wife gave me some pills that made me crazy but not too crazy because the doctors quickly realized I shouldn't have been there is pretty much textbook self-serving bullshit that judges hear regularly. A lawyer would have examined him so as to frame the matter as a guy who turned to drugs to deal with the stress of a bad marriage, which caused him to do regrettable things that he doesn't entirely remember.
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He lied to the psychiatrist who examined him about why he was there because he thought he needed to to get an appointment, and then admitted his dishonesty to the court. A lawyer would have made him an appointment with a doctor who would provide the exact kind of evaluation the court looks for in cases like this.
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There were statements in the file suggesting the guy was taking psych medications that he couldn't provide an explanation for other than that he wasn't taking any psych meds. He also seemed to have a more intimate knowledge of Lifestream and the doctors that practiced there than someone whose contact with the mental health system ended 40 years prior.
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Most people who were involuntarily committed will have had continued psychiatric treatment for some time afterward and a history of how their condition progressed. When I was at the disability bureau, if I saw an involuntary commitment on someone's record and no other psych history, I'd assume they were homeless or in some other kind of situation where they were prevented from getting treatment.
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We have no idea, from reading the opinion, what this guy was actually like or how he came off in court.
In other words, the judge could tell that the guy was full of shit, and since he has the burden of proof, she wasn't going to grant the expungement. Keep in mind that the court isn't going to subpoena this guy's entire medical history, so they're only relying on what he brought with him. Given that the guy doesn't come off as trustworthy and there's reason to believe he's more familiar with certain things than he's letting on, the court might have suspected that the guy wasn't providing a complete mental health record.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
Unless you're Joe Hardy and marry 22-year-old single moms from economic backwaters.
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