Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

On 2008-05-09, Alfred Montestruc <montestruc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On May 7, 1:25 am, Aaron Denney <wno...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> On 2008-05-07, AlfredMontestruc<montest...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>> > Morally, by the principles of the enlightenment,  it is wrong for any
>> > moral-just government to oppose secession when it is the clear and
>> > explicit will of the people in the regions that wish to secede.
>>
>> And what does that have to do with the South, where only a minority of
>> the people had any voice?
>
> That is absurd.  if you are speaking of slaves they were about 1/3 the
> population, and free blacks in the north mostly had no right to vote.

Well, if you want to talk specifically about voting and slaves lack, I
could restrict to just Mississippi and South Carolina, if you like.  I'm
not saying the North was a shining beacon of Truth and Light: it doesn't
matter how the free blacks were treated there.

You're arguing the war was immoral on the basis of "no consent of the
governed".  To spell out my previous argument, I'm taking your argument
seriously, and saying none of the governments of the South were
legitimate because they didn't have the consent of some of those they
governed.  If you say they don't need the consent of everyone, then what
is the necessity for the Federal government to have consent of everyone?

I explicitly asked last time why aggregating at the state level was
ok, rather than the national level, or sub-state levels.  Perhaps you
didn't address this because you thought it ridiculous.  If it is, it is
only a reductio ad absurdum.

> If speaking of women, that was true everywhere in the USA and AFAIK
> everywhere in all democratic nations at that time.

The combination of women and slaves does indeed show that only the
minority of the population could vote.  If you take consent of the
governed seriously, rather than using it as a talking point, this is a
problem.

> Yes some unionist areas existed, especially west Virginia and eastern
> Tennessee.  So what?

So, you're saying consent really doesn't matter.  You're specially
pleading for the South.

> Every state in the south that had a referendum on secession passed it
> by a large margin.

To borrow your phrase: So what?

-- 
Aaron Denney
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