Scalia: No to secession

Desider was rejecting Scalia view that Southern secession was settled law. How does that view differ from a wingnut or White Supremacist. In presenting an argument for trial would not support come from wingnuts and White Supremacists?

It's laughable, you reject Scalia's opinion and expect Thurgood Marshall to side with you? You might have a better argument that Clarence Thomas might rule that southern secession was legal. I see your bias as making Marshall give the opinion you would want to hear. Note that scalia would be making his settled law argument in conference with Marshall (or Thomas). If you had said Thomas, I'd agree.

In referring to the wingnuts and White Supremacists, those are the main groups who would be supporting the Southern secessionist point of view.

Obey, not sure your erasure of the moral right to secession by human rights works.

In my view, both rights exist, many human rights are higher (certainly that of freedom from slavery is), and we may choose to take steps - such as making war - to support those human rights. But still, the moral right to secede stands as its own thing, and is not erased. It is entirely possible to say, "They have the right to secede, but their views of and actions on human rights are appalling and inhuman, and for that reason, I will fight them." The one set of rights does not erase the morality of another. 

Your difficulty, in posing that somehow human rights erode or erase the moral right to secede, is a simple one. Much of the history of the last few centuries (at least) is precisely a story of people grasping first that they had expanded sets of rights, pushing them through realm after realm, and only then - sometimes at gunpoint - coming to see (or accept) that others also had rights.

Rights to speech, assembly, movement, trial, vote - on and on - came about amongst smaller subsets of human beings, who were often at that very same time sinning against their brothers and sisters. What you appear to be arguing is that the failure to make the next step in widening the circle of humanity (whether to slaves, to the poor, to native peoples, to women, to immigrants, etc.) renders the expression of their other rights to be morally void. 

It pains me to say this, and I wish human life worked differently, but I don't see this. 

1. Here's an obvious, and relevant, example in the US - Native peoples. If you wish to regard "human rights" as a trump which crushes all other legal or moral rights, you pretty much cannot stand on the ground of the Americas. That is, what possible "moral ground" can the US Federal Government have in claiming it was either setting up or defending a nation on the basis of "rights," when its #1 battle against slavery over the pre-war decades concerned its spread into Western territories, lands which had been stolen or killed for, and where US policy towards Natives moved well past slavery and into extermination and was so on the outbreak of the Civil War as well as throughout its duration and past its ending.

This is no new issue, by the way - I raised it at length in the original TPM discussions - but I eventually dropped it because it seemed to cause some commenters to go berserk, saying I had libelled the beloved Union General Sh*rman (apparently, an ancestor or something.) In my view, the pre as well as post-war relationship of the Union to Native peoples is exceptionally educational, in terms of supposed claims to high moral ground, in highlighting the economic and land hunger/greed not just of the South but of the North, in showing the real racial attitudes of everyday citizens, and also in legal terms.  

In case my point is being lost here - not unusual, fortunately I have a pocketful of them - and noting that it is exceptionally instructive how Native issues are somehow kept bracketed from much of the slavery discussion - let me just say that in no way can the Union claim solid moral (or legal) ground, either in the West or even back home in the East, when it is still in the midst of exterminating entire peoples. From the letters of presidents through the actions of Congress, the words of the media and the actions of Union Generals and troops, the obliteration of the human rights of these people (who also happened to be the only plausible "owners" of these lands) leaves us in a moral quagmire where NO ONE CAN STAND ON ANYTHING.

That is, in your view, BOTH the rights to secession AND the rights to form and defend the Union would be pushed aside by the ongoing, daily-sustained, destruction of the human rights of these peoples. For those who wish to look at economic rather than legal or moral grounds, and who have enjoyed pouting and ranting from the Pure North side about how the Southern economy and their thuggish leaders depended on a slave-based economy, let me just say that the entire economy of the North depended on stolen lands and resources, on stealing more lands for farmers and forestry, and then on pasting railroads on top of those stolen lands. (Canada too - nothing clean in this game.)

So the human rights, the national rights, and the economic resources of the Native peoples were not just historically stolen as of 1860, but were an issue in everyday play between the combatants and the Natives, Native lands turned out to be a major spoil of war, and in all this, the destruction and killing were led by the very "heroes" of the Union.

This seems to me to be a real problem for the idea that somehow the morality of the human rights of the slaves erases the right of secession.

2. We see this, again and again, in the world of the past, and the world of today. Afghans who completely abuse women's rights. Do these abusers have the right to vote? They have certainly, by this point in time, been confronted with the reality of other ways of living with women, whether in the cities or by the Communists or by Westerners or through outside media etc. This is not something entirely "new" to them, though they do regard it as "outside" ways. Not all men in their community do it - just some. So.... in some moral sense, by the year 2011, we can say fairly solidly, about the majority of such men, that "They know better." 

But on your argument, any other right which they choose to exercise, and do so in part to MAINTAIN their positions of power over women, cannot be said to have any moral right. Therefore, for you, they have no moral right to vote, to make political speech, to a fair or speedy trial, to emigrate, etc. 

I cannot accept this line of argument, whereby the one right erases the others.

3. Now, what I will say is that while other (shitty, abusive, slave-owning, native-exterminating) people may have the right to speak, to assemble, to vote, to trials, to set up nations, to secede from those nations --- I still claim the moral grounds on which to condemn their actions against human rights. I may think they are using those rights for appalling and inhuman practices. In fact, this is precisely what I think in every modern election I participate in. And I don't mean this to be glib, I mean this in regard to the environment, the species involved, and the future generations of all species. I believe the future will see court cases against those who led the slaughter, I believe more and more of us are becoming morally culpable for the deaths of those in the developing world through unnatural disasters (as Stardust has noted), and yes, at some point I fully expect there to be warfare - of some sort - over these issues. 

But I still believe these pathetic, Earth-killing people have the right to vote. 

In sum, the right to secede may only rank as a 6 of Clubs in the grand moral scheme of things. And ending slavery may rank as an Ace (pick your suit.) And I may believe (in fact, I DO believe) that that Ace should have been payed against that 6. But a 6 is a 6 is a 6, and it is not a zero. It is not null and void. 

4. I'm in no way convinced of the legal issue around secession either. It's just that that's less interesting to me. I side with the North for moral reasons, and frankly, find all the legal talk to be that of petty people, of little or no soul or insight. I mean, here they are jabbering away about the legality and constitutionality of secession, as though some narrow grounds for finding it "illegal" would thus make the South wrong. Imagine that a lawyer could go through those same documents and find a legal case in support of SLAVERY. Can you imagine such a possibility? I mean, I know it taxes the mind, but what of a situation where Secession was found to be illegal, but Slavery to be... legal! 

Why... at that point, I think I'd be well within my rights to accuse all those sticking and standing on legal grounds to be... immoral, inhuman, slavery-lovers.

Obviously, as a man of manners, I won't go there. But just so's we're clear on why I prefer the moral discussion. ;-)

P.S. And how about that unwritten British Constitution? Amazing thing eh? Astonishing to me that more Americans don't know about it when they argue about the Revolution. Ah well. Ta for now, Obey. Always a pleasure.