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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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It sounds like you just hate the South and hate Southerners. Your contempt is clouding your judgment and betrays your calls to vengeance for what they are. I do, actually. I find southern identity and culture alternately shallow or ridiculous or gross, but my complaints are separate from that. I would grit my teeth and bear the culture I dislike if the rest of my complaining was addressed, even if it meant my leftist politics were defeated more often.

The north had it's own set of piccadillies and fucked up bullshit, but the south was uniquely bad at elite generation outside of specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers). It's why they lost the war even when the majority of the professional military class defected; why the north had time to spin up an entire new military and MIC after dumpstering two or three armies one after another.

It's not even that the south was poor, the south had tons of money at the begging of the war. It's that the south was committed to a form of social organization that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

Stop, your tyranny is showing. No, it really isn't. The war started at all because the south decided it had the right and privilege to dictate the laws of the rest of the union; and there was no allowance to succession in the constitution. If the south had the juice to win the war they would have established that right, but they didn't and it wasn't. Your revisionist take ignores the massive concession made to the south up to the very line of "we get everything we want, and you get nothing you want"; and just kinda avoids thinking of the moral crime of chattel slavery. If you want to defend the peculiar institution be my guest but don't just pretend it wasn't there.

Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow Yes, the US would defeat the 12 million man soviet army, the most powerful in the world at the time, in a land war in russia. Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid; which is why nobody of substance gave it any thought at the time. The winning move was to clearly wait, build up a stock of a-bombs, and dictate terms from a place strength. The fact the Soviets got them from us torpedoed this, but the alternative plan was even more impossible.

Your quote formatting is messed up, you need an empty line between the quote and your response.

specific, narrow fields (cavalry and cavalry officers)

You mean warriors and soldiers? You mean the people who conquered the continent, defeated the Spanish empire, and were the majority responsible for the expansion of the very territory that they were then denied access to?

The best statesmen in the country came from two places: Virginia and Massachusetts. The first president not from one of these two places was from Carolina. I think the south was worth considerably more to the American elite than simply cavalry.

that had become outdated decades before they decided to have a war over it.

They did not decide to have a war. They decided to secede. Abraham Lincoln and the New England puritans who backed him decided to turn a secession crisis into a war. It truly was the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States, but as Richmond never deigned to assert control of Washington, I don't think it can be called a civil war.

Be serious, my dude. We would have gotten BTFO because the idea was clearly stupid;

Indeed, Hitler had just failed at this very objective with a much larger army, far better supply lines and a much less prepared enemy a few short years ago. Why would the USA think it could do any better?

Hitler wasn’t facing an enemy that he supplied with materiel and had just lost 10 million people?

Presumably, strategic bombing including with nukes. London-Moscow is around the same distance as the Enola Gay flew AIUI.

Not saying it would have been easy, but it's plausible that the WAllies could have done it.

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