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Comment by throw-10-8 | Hacker News Reader

Remind me again how the American slaves were freed?

Your best example of a "historically efficient way to solve political problems" is a 4 year civil war that killed more than half a million people and, after all that, still left African Americans as second-class citizens for a century after?

I wonder what an inefficient way would look like.

Neville Chamberlain is a perfect example.

Go learn how weekends were created

We can theorize about the non-violent path to emancipation, and the speedy path to legal equality.

But it's counterfactual. It took severe violence plus 100 years to get there. Plus another 60 (yikes) to get to where we are today.

That's horrible! But nothing about that reality suggests to me that there was a less-violent or speedier way to get there. Governments are made of people.

Getting there was a worthwhile goal. I don't think there's a "but at what cost?" debate here.

So it sure doesn't feel "efficient", but it might be the "most efficient possible" in the human world.

Sometimes, progress is measured by funerals.

The amount of violence to keep the slavery running was huge. You cant pretend that all that violence does not count. That being said, war was more about south wanting war/leave the union, because the north did not wanted to expand the slavery to new territories. That threated the south.

It is not like north would march in there to stop the slavery. There was an anti slavery army - John Brown with his, like, 20 or so people attacking south.

African Americans as second class citizens were in fact much better off then them being slaves.

Slavery was violence. It can't exist without considerable violence and involved violence.

So, we can say that it was violence problem that got solved by violence. Not just political problem.

If you want to go there, all governments and their laws (and thus politics) are predicated on their monopoly on violence, and civil society and the rule of law cannot exist without violence. Therefore all politics is violence and all political problems are also violence problems.

I do not want to go there. I made comment about huge amount of violence slavery in Americas required daily back then. Slavery was violence in amounts completely incomparable to what you are trying to equate with it.

Moreover, that sentiment was literally expressed by slavery opposition back then. Afaik, the sophistry about "any government is violence therefore, it is the same, que" was not all that much thing back then.

Slavery was just as much a matter of politics as it was violence. Separating the two as if to imply that violence can't or doesn't solve political problems is a specious argument. American politics has normalized a degree of violence in the last few months that would have been unthinkable, and the degree of violence doesn't change the nature of what politics is, only what it permits.

by creating new problems

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