This thread started with you calling honorable though flawed men (just like you: honorable yet flawed) traitors who escaped justice.

Your rationale, namely, that because they supposedly had designs on expanding its territory and sanctioned slavery, the South was thereby a rogue state comprised entirely of traitors and egregious sinners can just as easily be turned against the United States and its secesson from Britain. The colonists and Founders were advocates of slavery. They (as often as not), in their “Manifest Destiny” of grand designs on territorial conquest, slaughtered many thousands of my ancestors. They illegally seceded from their sovereign kingdom and parliament, to which they had pledged themselves as subjects. So, if anyone deserves the criticism, I’d say it’s “your team.” They spawned what you criticize in such rancorous fashion, seems to me.

Should I share previous correspondence clearly stating my “positions on the South and Slavery”?

Who, exactly, do you think I am?

V., V., V. Many of your previous comments have been deleted or I would be happy to share them with you again. Your positions on the South and Slavery are available in other sources I choose to not make public. So be careful before you state that my statements are “snap, ill-informed, hyperbolic judgmental statements.”

But yes, apology retracted. And, finally, I am done with you. Good riddance.

I have not said slavery was “not sinful.” I said that various authorities saw fit to remain prudentially silent as to its morality. This is not the same as calling it moral or adiaphora.

I have never argued that it was “excusable;” rather, I made a comparison between the effects of slavery and the effects of gun violence directly related to your ridiculous assertion that I have no value for the life of my fellow man. A comparison which happened to point out that a good came out of a bad. And a good proportionally much greater than any I can think of stemming from wanton mayhem.

I have argued various things about the South, but among them has not been a defense of chattel slavery. I have vigorously argued against your lines of “reasoning” for prosecuting a horrific war against the South, where ending slavery never was one of the stated goals until long after the hostilities were in full swing. That you want to pretend that this was the only or even the primary reason for the “Civil War” is beyond naive and inexcusable.

You called me “scary” after feigning incredulity when you presumed (incorrectly) that I was asking you for a moral argument against slavery. I had not asked for that, as I went on to point out. Just like I’m pointing out your other errors now. You didn’t come right out and call me a racist, that’s true. But that was a rather pregnant term to leave hanging like that, don’t you think?

To tie the threads together, I made a reductio ad absurdam argument using your logic and labeling you as an anti-Asian (and anti-Eurasian) bigot. I suppose I could have coyly called you “scary” instead. Needless to say, I don’t really believe you’re a racist. I have my doubts whether you thought or think of me in like fashion. Even after your now-retracted apology.

NEVER did I call you a racist. If the shoe fits, wear it but I did not put it on you.

Second, I understand “Raca.” The closest in translation as I have learned is “to spit upon.” But that was years ago in philosophy classes I am removed from. Maybe the translation is wrong. Any way, as I said, I prefered to use more modern insults.

Third, you have insulted and cursed, many times, myself and others dating from the inception of this site. But that i neither here nor there to my fourth point.

Fourth, and most importantly, I let you get to me. I have always taken great pride in not allowing that to happen in political/philosophical discussions. As a result, I did cuse you and for that you have my apology. It was unfair no matter what transpired before it.