Trust me, it's 100% possible to be living a life in 2019, even as an American, defined by tyranny and injustice. Now, not the same level of tyranny as Black slaves, but you'll become aware people are just the same. Most dont genuinely give a shit. The ones that do cant be bothered to do anything about it. Too many will takr advantage of you. And the closest most people can get to morality is defined by social norms.
Edit: people downvote this, sadly showing this to be right. What would show this to be wrong is if someone offered help. I'm pretty sure people just want to virtue signal.
Using downvotes to validate your position is a logical fallacy. I see it often enough here that there ought to be a catchy name for it. Martyrdom Fallacy, maybe?
I kind of agree with your reply to citrablue, though - "downvote to disagree without explanation" is a really poor communication channel. "I was downvoted without comment, and now I see the error of my ways" said no one ever.
But not one person has done that.
Anyways, about the downvotes thing. While focusing too much on the downvotes thing is kind of a distraction to the main idea, I can tell you I have a reasonable load of karma here and it is easy to get by writing comments stating the obvious, or agreeing with consensus. Controversial comments or novel ideas can be of high value, but garner low or negative karma. So I dont think you're really accurate about that. Further, generalizing about internet karma points as being especially meaningful in general contexts, like you did, is already a questionable idea.
The Vice President of the Confederacy literally stood and gave a speech about why slavery was the reason they seceded from the union, but I’m not really surprised to find people who still try to distort the truth to push their views. It’s their way to virtue signal.
In fact, the main point of my post was closer to something like "people generally aren't good, but just want to virtue signal to sound good." Obviously, the fact that the south was even worse (and still even tried to justify it on moral grounds) seems to fit into that idea.
Anyways, the responses here are not giving me much faith in humanity. I'm still living with tyranny. Anyone want to step up, or just keep alternating between virtue signalling and being outraged?
Stop and frisk would not have mostly ended in New York City if people were not outraged by it. Of course ending it hasn't solved most of our problems, but it's better to have 99 problems than to have 100. Should we just sit on our hands until someone in a million years devises the utopia that is compatible with human behavior?
Should every injustice need to wait for its opportunity to be used as a pretext for power struggles in order for it to be thwarted?
What about the people living with tyranny today? Does it matter that they can ask for help and nobody cares about them. And people will even bully and criticize them? Even today? Even right here?
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.
He was a racist white supremacist conspiracy theorist. His opinions on slavery are completely unrelated to the events that transpired 30 years after his tenure.
That being said I think reparations at this point would ineffective and a politically infeasible. The money that would hypothetically be used for such a thing could be more effectively used providing services to low income areas.
Reparations today would be an entirely different topic and would probably look more like social programs that seek to repair the lasting effects of the less than ideal way those people entered the (paid) workforce 150 years ago.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casual...