The book was excellent. I highly recommend it. The story telling was epic and totally surprised me. The author did Abe no disrespect with this at all. He really blended Abe's actual life and the vampire storyline brilliantly.
__________________ Duct tape is like the Force: it has a light side, a dark side, and holds the whole world together.
Agreed. The book was excellent and not at all what I expected. While the trailer looks like an over the top popcorn action flick, you really must read the book.
Holy shit, this actually looks kinda awesome. I remember watching some early on previews and was not interested at all, but now I'm looking forward to it. Timur is decent director as well, I actually enjoyed Wanted and saw it several times.
Given your political views, I would of taken you to be Lincoln hater.
How so? Because he stopped the south from seceding from the union?
The south wanted to secede so they could keep doing an evil thing, keep violating the rights of people. Lincoln stopped their aggression against blacks by force. That was a righteous thing to do.
Any society which is aggressing against its own people no longer has legitimacy and can be morally invaded by anyone in order to stop that aggression and establish justice.
Lincoln couldn't politically come out hard against slavery, but he was staunchly anti-slavery and it was a primary motivation for the war. And I think he did a good thing.
The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Lincoln was quoted as saying if he could of won the war without freeing the slaves, he would have. Slavery ended because of the industrial revolution (free market solution!), nothing else. Lincoln simply seized an opportunity during this transition into the industrial era to considerably increase his own power and the power of the federal government while starting the downward spiral of state rights.
The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Lincoln was quoted as saying if he could of won the war without freeing the slaves, he would have.
That was a politic statement, not the truth. The republican party had been started explicitly to end slavery, and he was their first president. Read Lincoln in context, and consider what he faced politically. He couldn't come out and state directly that it was about slavery because he would've lost some of the states bordering the south, it was a dicey thing to say. So he lied. Now go back and look at how very anti-slavery he was. He was rabidly anti-slavery. I look at his statement here that you quote as similar in nature to Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" statement.
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Originally Posted by inscribed
Slavery ended because of the industrial revolution (free market solution!), nothing else.
Going back to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself, slavery had been an issue from the beginning. You're wrong that it's pure about the industrial revolution. The north did not rely on slaves even pre-ind-rev. The puritans were strongly anti-slave long before ind-rev, and brought those moral considerations to America, hundreds of years before ind-rev.
Quote:
Originally Posted by inscribed
Lincoln simply seized an opportunity during this transition into the industrial era to considerably increase his own power and the power of the federal government while starting the downward spiral of state rights.
That spiral began with the passing of the Constitution and the tossing out of the Articles of Confederation. That question was lost at that point.
Anyway, it's something much more radical than state's rights that will fix this situation.
That was a politic statement, not the truth. The republican party had been started explicitly to end slavery, and he was their first president. Read Lincoln in context, and consider what he faced politically. He couldn't come out and state directly that it was about slavery because he would've lost some of the states bordering the south, it was a dicey thing to say. So he lied.
Really true or just "Anenome true"? Does anyone have any cites for ANY of these quotes or "feelings"?
I'm sure there must be some biography of Lincoln somewhere that will prove this one way or another?
Lincoln used the issue of the union as an end run around others in government who would've countered a political attempt to actually legally end slavery, such as by writing it into the emancipation proclamation. He was politically sneaky, but his goal was clearly the end of slavery, as was the entire party he was a part of.
A small selection:
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Since the 1960s, it has been fashionable in some quarters to take cheap shots at Lincoln, asking such questions as “Why didn’t he free all the slaves?” “Why did he wait so long?” “How come the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t just come right out and say that slavery was wrong?”
People who indulge themselves in this kind of self-righteous carping act as if Lincoln was someone who could do whatever he damn well pleased, without regard to the law, the Congress, or the Supreme Court. They might as well criticize him for not discovering a cure for cancer.
Fortunately, there is an excellent new book, titled “Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation” by Professor Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College, that sets Lincoln in the context of the world in which he lived.
Once you understand the constraints of that world, and how little room for maneuver Lincoln had, you realize what courage and brilliance it took for him to free the slaves.
Just one fact should give pause to Lincoln’s critics today:
When Lincoln sat down to write the Emancipation Proclamation, the Supreme Court was still headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, saying a black man had no rights which a white man needed to respect.
This was a Supreme Court that would not have hesitated to declare the freeing of slaves unconstitutional — and Lincoln knew it. The Dred Scott decision was not yet a decade old at the time.
There would have been no point in issuing an Emancipation Proclamation that didn’t actually emancipate anybody. Ringing rhetoric about the wrongness of slavery would not have gotten the Emancipation Proclamation past Taney and his Supreme Court.
Since Lincoln’s purpose was to free millions of human beings, not leave some rhetoric to be preserved in the anthologies, he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in dry legalistic terms that disappointed thoughtless critics in his time and ours, but got it past the Supreme Court.
Nothing in the Constitution gave a President the authority to free slaves. The only thing Lincoln could use to make his actions legal was his authority as commander-in-chief in wartime. But that meant that he could only free the slaves in territory controlled by enemy forces.
I have lots of room to criticize Lincoln on other grounds--he was pro protectionist-tariffs, pro tax and spend, etc. But I will never knock him for the awesome job he did fixing the central flaw of America from the beginning--the acceptance of slavery. Finally, a country predicated on individual freedom lived up to its rhetoric. He did a great thing.
