Pixel Scroll 6/23/16 Where The Scrolls Have No Name

(1) THE LEMONADE IS READY. Rachel Swirsky’s Patreon donors are enjoying the squozen fruits of victory.

One of those donors tells me the story has two Chapter Fives.

(2) AXANAR TEASERS. Space.com ran an exclusive story,  “Trailer for ‘Star Trek: Axanar’ Unveiled Amid Lawsuit”, about the filmmaker’s unexpected decision:

A second teaser trailer for a fan-made “Star Trek” movie was released this week, despite an ongoing lawsuit over the film.

The new teaser trailer for “Star Trek: Axanar” was released by the filmmakers yesterday (June 22). Called “Honor Through Victory,” the trailer shows Klingon ships flying through a planetary ring system and features an intense voice-over that sounds like a prebattle pep talk. This is the second of three teaser trailers set to be released this week. The first, titled “Stands United,” also appeared online yesterday. The “Honor Through Victory” teaser trailer was shared exclusively with Space.com.

 

(3) VINTAGE TV. Echo Ishii is tracking down antique sf shows in “SF Obscure: The wishlist Roundup” for Smart Girls Love Sci-Fi Romance.

Since it’s summer once again, it’s time  to I hunt down the really obscure classics or try to sample B/C list  shows and see how many episodes I can survive. This time around I decided to make a list of those shows which I have not seen, but added to my wishlist. Most are only on limited DVD runs.  Based on cloudy memories jarred by  the vast world of YouTube, I  tracked down a stray episodes, or a set of clips, or an old commercial to remind me of their existence. Here are a select few.

The post discusses Mercy Point, Birds of Prey, Starhunter, and Space Rangers.

(4) JIM CARREY TURNS TO HORROR. Variety reports “Jim Carrey, Eli Roth Team on Horror Film ‘Aleister Arcane’”.

Jim Carrey will star in and executive produce while Eli Roth directs the long-in-development horror movie “Aleister Arcane” for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.

“Aleister Aracane,” written by Steven Niles, was first published in 2004 by IDW Comics. Jon Croker will adapt for the screen.

Mandeville Films’ David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman will produce along with Michael Aguilar.

The story centers on a group of children who befriend a bitter old man ruined and shunned by their parents. After his death, only they have the power to thwart the curse he has laid upon their town.

(5) TODAY IN HISTORY

Logans Run

  • June 23, 1976 Logan’s Run (the movie) was released.
  • June 23, 1989 — Tim Burton’s noir spin on the well-known story of the DC Comics hero Batman is released in theaters.
  • June 23, 2016 – Today is National Pink Flamingo Day.

(6) FIRST PAST THE POST. Rachel Neumeier tells how she surprised herself in “Hugo Voting: at last, the novels”:

Okay, now, listen. I went in knowing, just *knowing* that I was either going to put Ancillary Mercy or Uprooted in the top spot, the other one second. I hadn’t read the other three nominees at the time. I was happy to try The Fifth Season, unhappy about being forced to try Seveneves, and okay if not enthusiastic with trying The Aeronaut’s Windlass.

That’s how I started out.

I have seldom been more surprised in my life as to find myself putting Seveneves in the top spot….

I guess I’d better read it after all. 😉

(7) PUPPY CHOW. Lisa Goldstein continues her reviews of Hugo nominated work with “Short Story: ‘If You Were an Award, My Love’”. About the review she promises: “It’s a bit intemperate.”

“If You Were an Award, My Love” is not so much a story as a group of schoolkids drawing dirty pictures in their textbooks and snickering.

(8) JUSTICE IS NOT BLIND. Joe Sherry continues his series at Nerds of a Feather with “Reading the Hugos: Short Story”, in which No Award does not finish last….

While I am clearly not blind to the controversy surrounding this year’s Hugo Awards (nor is The G, for that matter), I have mostly chosen to cover each category on the relative subjective merits of the nominated works. I understand that this is something that not everyone can or will choose to do, but it is the way that I have elected to engage with the Hugo Awards. While the result of the Hugo Awards short list is not significantly different in regards to the Rabid Puppies straight up dominating most of the categories / finalists with their slate, the difference is that this year they have selected to bulk nominate a group that includes more works that might have otherwise had a reasonable chance of making the ballot and also that meets my subjective definition of “quality”. That slate from the Rabid Puppies also includes a number of works that come across as little more than an extended middle finger to the people who care about the Hugo Awards. Feel free to argue with any or all of my opinions here.

(9) FEELING COLD. Not that Kate Paulk liked any of these Hugo nominees, but in her pass through the Best Semiprozine category she delivered the least condemnation to Sci Phi Journal:

Sci Phi Journal edited by Jason Rennie – Sci Phi was the only finalist with any content that drew me in, and honestly, not all of it. I could have done without the philosophical questions at the end of each fiction piece, although that is the journal’s signature, so I guess it’s required. I’d rather ponder the questions the stories in questions raised without the explicit pointers – although I will say they weren’t as heavy-handed as they could have been, and they did highlight the issues quite well. I’m just fussy, I guess.

(10) AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GRAPHIC NOVEL. Paul Dini signs at Vromans Bookstore in Pasadena on Friday, June 24 at 7:00.

Dark Knight

This is a Batman story like no other the harrowing and eloquent autobiographical tale of writer Paul Dini’s courageous struggle to overcome a desperate situation.

The Caped Crusader has been the all-abiding icon of justice and authority for generations. But in this surprising original graphic novel, we see Batman in a new light as the savior who helps a discouraged man recover from a brutal attack that left him unable to face the world. In the 1990s, legendary writer Paul Dini had a flourishing career writing the hugely popular “Batman: The Animated Series” and “Tiny Toon Adventures.” Walking home one evening, he was jumped and viciously beaten within an inch of his life. His recovery process was arduous, hampered by the imagined antics of the villains he was writing for television including the Joker, Harley Quinn and the Penguin. But despite how bleak his circumstances were, or perhaps because of it, Dini also always imagined the Batman at his side, chivvying him along during his darkest moments. A gripping graphic memoir of one writer’s traumatic experience and his deep connection with his creative material, Dark Night: A True Batman Story is an original graphic novel that will resonate profoundly with fans. Art by the incredible and talented Eduardo Risso…

(11) WORLD FANTASY AWARD WINNER. Jesse Hudson reviews Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria at Speculiction.

If it isn’t obvious, A Stranger in Olondria is one of those novels where the road beneath the feet only reveals itself after the reader has taken the step—what the foot lands so rich and engaging as to compel the next step.  The novel a journey of discovery, there are elements of Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle as much as Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan.  A coming of age via a very personal quest, Samatar unleashes all her skill as a storyteller in relating Jevick’s tale.

But the novel’s heart is nicely summed up by Amel El-Mohtar: it is about the human “vulnerability to language and literature, and the simultaneous experience of power and surrender inherent in the acts of writing and reading.”

 [Thanks to Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day LunarG.]

249 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/23/16 Where The Scrolls Have No Name

  1. Apparently I missed that when my 15-month old clambered on the Keyboard, he changed my username, too. So I have a comment in moderation that thinks my name is ‘q .

  2. Haven’t heard much from ‘q since early ST:TNG!

    (Fixed your name, approved your comment.)

  3. about systematic bias against certain names on identical resumes.

    I’ll look at this more later, but the latest studies show that this bias has disappeared.

  4. There IS in fact a word for a philosophy that looks at the effects of classism without pretending racism isn’t also a thing – it’s intersectionalism. People who say it’s about classism want to erase intersectionalism.

    Okay, quick look. I’ll accept this. However, people who are only looking at racism are making the same mistake as people who are only looking at classism. Disadvantage is a complex issue.

  5. ” This is likely one basis of racism, but slavery was one of the less destructive results.

    The absolute and total madness of this quote.

  6. @Lenora Rose
    Intersectionality is very important. Ignoring racism and all the damage it has done and continues to do is foolish. Ignoring sexism same. Classism comes somewhere after those. It intersects with them yes. But a classism without racism and sexism would be a very different world than the one we live in. I don’t know if it would be better as we’ve never gotten a chance to see such a world.

    @Hampus Eckerman
    I’m with you.

  7. ” This is likely one basis of racism, but slavery was one of the less destructive results.

    The absolute and total madness of this quote.

    You don’t think genocide was worse? Some indigenous populations were totally wiped out.

  8. Lela E. Buis:

    How about this one? Genocide and slavery are two of the most horrible and destructive foms of racism that has ever existed.

  9. I think we have to remember that there was no politics of genocide in Belgian Congo, only colonialism and slavery, and that killed twelve million people, double the amount of the holocaust.

    Slavery is one of the most reprehensible and disgusting acts that have been performed in the human history. It is about kidnapping people, breaking up families, destruction of communities, accepting the deaths of millions during transportation, even more on arrival. Slavery and genocide goes hand in hand.

    To come here and say that slavery wasn’t about racism, not even about slavery, but about the economics of slavery is disgusting and a total disregard of all the human suffering slavery caused.

  10. I am quite sure that all of us agree that the global elites and the 1% (or even the 0.01%) is a big problem, but it is possible two have two thoughts in ones head at once. Racism exists. Classes exists. And quite often they both go together. You have two be aware of both.

    If I look at Sweden, a country which has a very high economic mobility, it is still true that most of the economic elites come from the same nobility that was the elite 300 years ago. That slavery still affect people in US, with a much smaller economic mobility, is a given and nothing to close ones eyes against.

  11. O.o.

    Wow.

    Look, Lela, of course the Civil War was about slavery. Abolition was going to destroy the South’s economy because the South’s economy was founded on kidnapping people, keeping them in chains, and forcing them to work for nothing on pain of torture.

    And of course slavery was about race; race was how the Southern governments agreed who was fair game for kidnapping, imprisonment, forced labor and torture and who wasn’t.

    Don’t give me this shit about indentured servants also existed and they were WHITE boo hoo! Indentured servants had contracts–contracts that specified when their term was up, how they could be treated during their term, and even how many times per week they could be offered a less popular food choice for dinner! It’s not the same at all.

    I will believe the Southern fascination with the Civil War is really about history when they can tell me what all their ancestors who didn’t fight in the Civil War did, and how they died, and especially all the women.

    Now, sure, intersectionality is a thing. Southern society is racist, but also deeply classist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and all these things interact, so yes, class matters too. But racist is certainly one brick in the pile and those Civil War monuments and myths are part of that.

  12. Occasionally when hanging out with other chronically ill or trauma survivors we will find ourselves accidentally playing the one-up game. My list of or specific illnesses is greater than everyone else’s or my traumatic experience(s) are. Fairly quickly in the game one of us realizes what’s happening and points out how foolish we’re being because each of us has been greatly affected by our illness(es)/trauma(s) and we are together to support each other.

    I think when it comes to slavery and attempted genocide the same situation exists. If we could speak to those who were wiped out I think they’d agree. Slavery and genocide are both horrific and leave lasting scars. Both are forms of racism, sexism, and abuse by the powerful and those aligned with them. Rather than arguing about who had/has it worse we need to work together to stop it from happening anywhere anytime anymore. We need to make reparations and fix social, institutional, and political systems to stop it.

  13. Lincoln multiple times proposed compensated emancipation plans, including after the start of the war, and the slave holders shut him down every time.

    After secession and before the outbreak of war, he pushed emancipation in the District of Columbia through Congress successfully.

    During the war, the only legal basis he could find for an executive order ending slavery was the War Power, so he used that because it was what he had.

    After Lee’s surrender, knowing the job wasn’t done on slavery, he pushed for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

    He wasn’t a dictator. He didn’t think he was a dictator, and didn’t try to be a dictator. He was a scheming politician, and he schemed against slavery from at least his one term in Congress until his dying breath.

    Don’t go dissing the Great Emancipator for not valuing political purity over real-world results.

    As for slavery itself– Slavery across history isn’t particularly about race, but in the US, for historical reasons, it became very much about race, and to a rough approximation, you could tell who was a slave and who wasn’t just by looking at them. Also, the US practiced what was possibly the most extreme, most brutal form of slavery known, absolute chattel slavery with the slave having no rights at all.

    And this enabled people who were, themselves, quite shockingly racist by the standards of even racists today, to recognize that it was wrong, and an abomination to their God and everything they valued.

    And they passed laws that tried to override at the state level the federal Fugitive Slave Act, so that they would have a legal excuse for not cooperating with slave catchers coming after escapers. They were part of the Underground Railroad, or cooperated with it, or looked away and didn’t interfere. And when things kept getting worse and worse, they voted for Abraham Lincoln, whom, yes, everyone knew was the anti-slavery candidate.

    No, they weren’t saints, not by a long shot. But a great number of them picked up rifles when the time came and marched to war.

  14. Swedish history has always downplayed the swedish role in the slave trade. I can’t remember being taught about it in school at all. We had no slaves ourselves, so how could we be at wrong? But we had slaves in our colonies until 1847.

    Sweden was also the largest exporter of slave chains in the world. And we had a colony at Saint-Barthélemy created for the specific reason of being a haven for slave traders:

    ” Free import of slaves and trade with black slaves or so called new Negroes from Africa is granted to all nations without having to pay any charge at the unload.”

    We also had swedish slave ships, but I think they only made 50 trips or so total.

  15. And slavery was very much about race in the Swedish colony. There were three legal types of persons: White people, free coloured people and enslaved black people.

  16. @Tasha Turner:

    Occasionally when hanging out with other chronically ill or trauma survivors we will find ourselves accidentally playing the one-up game.

    A friend and I refer to that as the Oppression Olympics. The Olympics where nobody wins. It is really easy to play by accident, and I try to catch and stop myself before I imply that my trauma is greater than anyone else’s.

  17. @World Weary: Most civil war memorials were built when there were still lots of people left around who had lived through the war and Reconstruction. One of my history professers told me that Lincoln’s murder guaranteed that the Congress would have no checks in its desire to punish the South. Lincoln apparently planned a much more pragmatic policy.

    Booth did terrible harm to the South by killing Lincoln. A profound and self-inflicted wound.

    @Lela E. Buis: Again, the underlying motivation for this philosophy was about wealth and power.

    Power justified by denying the humanity of black people.

  18. Rather than arguing about who had/has it worse we need to work together to stop it from happening anywhere anytime anymore. We need to make reparations and fix social, institutional, and political systems to stop it.

    I agree. Colonialism has a bad rep for a reason. We can’t go back and fix the situation in 1863, but we can move forward from here, which takes looking at the larger economic, political and social picture.

    Do you mean reparation payments, though? I think the 40 acres and a mule was the reparations, and Affirmative Action has been a similar effort. I can’t see the math ever working out for payments.

  19. >Again, the underlying motivation for this philosophy was about wealth and power.

    Power justified by denying the humanity of black people.

    I said this. Please read above.

  20. As for slavery itself– Slavery across history isn’t particularly about race, but in the US, for historical reasons, it became very much about race, and to a rough approximation, you could tell who was a slave and who wasn’t just by looking at them

    As I understand it, Native Americans were also enslaved at a high rate from the 1500s, which continued in some areas of the Americas even past the EP, such as in the Western territories. At some periods the volume of this slave trade was about equal to the trade in African slaves. This information has somehow been erased, and looking at it means we have to broaden our discussion of slavery and its results. Native Americans also suffered the effects of genocide that African Americans escaped.

    What have we done to repair this damage to Native Americans?

  21. In many eras in many places, the only justification required to enslave another was, “Dude, your side lost!” The Enlightenment meant that the West needed a “better” reason for holding someone in bondage. Racism became necessary to the project of running slave economies. Christian theology was twisted to support racism. (Fred Clark has written a lot about this lately.) Science was twisted to support racism. (“They don’t feel pain like we do.” [We beat them to ensure compliance, though, and oddly enough it works.]) The racism excused the slavery.

    Post-slavery, racism continued to underpin the ongoing theft of black labor and capital. Look up the Rosewood massacre and the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie on the contribution of federal housing policy to racial segregation after World War II, and local housing policy before that.

    Class is super-important. So is intersectionalism. We just finished a primary campaign for the nominally Left party in the USA where there were intersectionalism failures by some – by no means all – partisans on both sides: one group arguing that it’s all about class and another arguing that it’s all about race and/or gender. Both were wrong. (Even Marxist theory has incorporated race, gender and culture into its program for many decades.)

    Lela really doesn’t seem like a reactionary Lost Causer, but does seem too much like a pre-WWII Marxist who thinks mere economism is sufficient to explain everything. Such people end up producing what amount to apologias.

  22. race was how the Southern governments agreed who was fair game for kidnapping, imprisonment, forced labor and torture and who wasn’t.

    I don’t think you can blame black slavery on “Southern governments.” African slaves were brought to the US by European companies and slave traders were independent businessmen, normally unaffiliated with governments.

    Don’t give me this shit about indentured servants also existed and they were WHITE boo hoo! Indentured servants had contracts

    What do you think about the white women who were kidnapped from the streets in Europe and brought to the US as breeding stock?

  23. The Enlightenment meant that the West needed a “better” reason for holding someone in bondage. Racism became necessary to the project of running slave economies. Christian theology was twisted to support racism.

    Good point.

    Lela really doesn’t seem like a reactionary Lost Causer, but does seem too much like a pre-WWII Marxist who thinks mere economism is sufficient to explain everything. Such people end up producing what amount to apologias.

    What started this off was a request for analysis of the economic underpinnings of the Civil War. That’s what I’ve attempted to produce here. There were also social and political issues at work, including racism, which can also be addressed. However, economics remains as a huge driver of the war and the resulting boondoggle.

    To recap, the economic system in the South was dependent on slave labor, and when it fell there was no workable plan to replace it. This led to migration of free blacks to Northern cities, which were unprepared and unable to take in the migrants. This situation has never been improved in a meaningful way.

  24. @Lela E. Buis–

    Do you mean reparation payments, though? I think the 40 acres and a mule was the reparations, and Affirmative Action has been a similar effort. I can’t see the math ever working out for payments.

    The 40 acres and a mule plan was never implemented. Never started. Sherman’s Special Orders #15 and the Freedmen’s Bureau Act were explicitly reversed. Land that did get redistributed under military jurisdiction during the war was mostly returned to its slaveholder owners after the end of the war.

    So no, the slaves never got reparations and sharecropping on the same land they’d worked as slaves, with not much better conditions, was a widespread result.

  25. @Lela: Some of your comments suggest you think the “40 acres and a mule” idea was really implemented systematically throughout the old Confederacy. It was not. It was a military order issued by Sherman that applied specifically to Southeastern Georgia including the Sea Islands and it didn’t last:

    And what happened to this astonishingly visionary program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly concludes, “returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts to the planters who had originally owned it” — to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.

    ETA: Ninja’d by Lis Carey!

  26. @Lela E. Buis: The US Civil War was about conflicting economic systems. The issue of slavery was involved, but not all of the impetus for the war.

    You’ve framed economics as a primary motivation for people who cited race as their primary motivation. People who, when the war was lost, carried that belief with them, through Jim Crow to the present day. When monuments were erected across the South, from the least to Stone Mountain, it wasn’t to memorialize a broken economic system, but for the singular cause that united white southerners, rich and poor. Slavery was clearly in service of an economic system, but it was a terrible system. It didn’t matter to the people involved if it worked well as long as it validated their beliefs.

  27. The 40 acres and a mule plan was never implemented. Never started. Sherman’s Special Orders #15 and the Freedmen’s Bureau Act were explicitly reversed. Land that did get redistributed under military jurisdiction during the war was mostly returned to its slaveholder owners after the end of the war.

    A few African America families did manage to hold onto their distribution. Others homesteaded when land became available through that program. However, a large number of freedmen and their families were unable to make a decent living and migrated to Northern cities looking for wage-paying jobs. This caused issues that have never really been addressed.

    So no, the slaves never got reparations and sharecropping on the same land they’d worked as slaves, with not much better conditions, was a widespread result.

    It was a widespread result everywhere in the South. My Grandad was a sharecropper.

  28. You’ve framed economics as a primary motivation for people who cited race as their primary motivation. People who, when the war was lost, carried that belief with them, through Jim Crow to the present day…Slavery was clearly in service of an economic system, but it was a terrible system. It didn’t matter to the people involved if it worked well as long as it validated their beliefs.

    People are typically unwilling to admit how economics works as a driver of human actions. They don’t want to say “I’m trying to get rich so I’ll enslave you.” Instead, they come up with other reasons, “You’re not human, and according to scripture, God has given me a right to enslave you.” Afterward, they have to justify what they did. Nevertheless, the economic motivator is there. They were trying to get rich.

    Again, this is the economic analysis. The situation can be analyzed from other viewpoints, as well.

  29. Yes, Lela, it was a widespread result everywhere in the south. That was part of my point.

    Yes, of the small number of former slaves who ever got 40 acres and a mule, a few, a very few, managed to hang onto them after the order was reversed and most of the distributed land returned to the traitors. And then there weren’t enough landowning ex-slaves to easily ignore the refusal of the traitors to do business with them, and indeed active efforts to make their lives impossible.

    So no, there were no reparations paid, though I make no pretense of knowing what’s the right way to address thar terrible injustice now.

  30. reversed and most of the distributed land returned to the traitors.

    I dispute use of the word “traitors” for Southern landowners. It’s not the same thing as secessionists. Using this rationale, the people of the UK are now traitors to the EU because they’ve voted to secede from the union. Luckily I don’t think there will be a civil war about it.

  31. And slavery was very much about race in the Swedish colony. There were three legal types of persons: White people, free coloured people and enslaved black people.

    That’s 1638 and the New Sweden Company, right? Swedes brought the log cabin design? I didn’t know that. 🙂

  32. No, Lela, the Confederacy were traitors, engaged in armed rebellion against the lawfully elected government of the United States. There is no ambiguity about this at all.

    The EU, on the other hand, isn’t a country, a nation, a state, whatever term you prefer. The UK isn’t committing treason; it is, however unwise I think it is to do so, invoking a provision incorporated in the EU agreements, that allows any member country to withdraw.

    There is no such provision in the US Constitution, however much the traitors and their descendants may want to imagine one into it. There is, though, a very clear definition of treason, which the misnamed Civil War more than adequately meets.

  33. There is, though, a very clear definition of treason, which the misnamed Civil War more than adequately meets.

    It depends on what side you were on. Legality and the Constitution are one thing, but why weren’t the Revolutionary War leaders branded as traitors, too? Because they won the war, of course.

  34. Lela E. Buis: Huh? The Revolutionary War leaders WERE regarded as traitors, by whoever was still loyal to the King.

    Remember Ben Franklin’s admonition, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  35. Yes, if the Revolution had failed, the Founders would have been hanged for treason. This is not in doubt, and they were well aware of it. That’s what that “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” line in the Declaration is about. That yes, they knew damned well they were traitors to the British Crown.

    And the Confederates were traitors to the United States of America. Then they lost. They should have counted themselves luckier than they ever deserved for not hanging for it.

    Instead, they set about manufacturing a self-justifying mythology for what, if northerners were as rude as those Nice, Polite Southerners, we would call The War of Southern Treason.

  36. U.S. law on treason is as people have described. Despite that, according to the holy Wikipedia, only one person was excecuted for treason during the American Civil War.

    The war was a pretty awful turn of events and I think people knew there were issues even in the heat of the moment.

    What could the Southern landowners have done instead? Large scale farming is pretty much unsustainable without government subsidies because it’s economically unprofitable. There’s still no good answer to that. If you read what I posted above, the issues with farming are still unanswered. The modern solutions is just to employ undocumented migrants.

  37. And the Confederates were traitors to the United States of America. Then they lost. They should have counted themselves luckier than they ever deserved for not hanging for it.

    I hope you’re talking about the Confederate leadership, and not the ordinary landowner. The ordinary landowner was just trying to protect their own economic interests. Do you have an answer about how the situation should have been addressed?

  38. The southern slave holders, who included all the significant land holders despite your wish to elide that fact, we’re the people who voted for the politicians who wrote the secession resolutions, who raised regiments to fight the war, whose sons fought in the war, and whose human property they were fighting to retain.

    Damned right they were traitors.

    As for what they could have done instead:

    They could have accepted the fact that slavery was done expanding. There was no appetite in the free states for starting a war the the Slave Power, but they were frustrated, disgusted, and fed up with the slave holders determination to keep expanding slavery, into new territories and the free states.

    They could have responded seriously to Lincoln’s attempts to negotiate compensated emancipation.

    They could have done both those things–especially since your theory is wrong, and free labor agriculture was significantly more profitable, in the north, and in the south after the end of slavery. Unwilling, coerced labor is expensive.

    But then, they were, after all, abysmally ignorant of economics.

  39. “That’s 1638 and the New Sweden Company, right? Swedes brought the log cabin design? I didn’t know that. ?”

    Nope, it was the late 18:th century and the Swedish West India Company. But the log cabin design is correct! 😀

  40. Lela E. Buis:

    “What could the Southern landowners have done instead?”

    They should have abolished slavery.

  41. The southern slave holders, who included all the significant land holders despite your wish to elide that fact, we’re the people who voted for the politicians who wrote the secession resolutions, who raised regiments to fight the war, whose sons fought in the war, and whose human property they were fighting to retain.

    I think you have a serious chip on your shoulder. This was 150 years ago.

    Compensated farm labor is still an issue in the US, or there wouldn’t be such a fight about undocumented workers. Repeating what I’ve said above, farming is an example of a “perfect competition” which means the more you produce, the less profit you get for it. In order to make it sustainable, you have to find a way to radically reduce labor costs, or else provide a government subsidy. Food production within national borders is often seen as a national security issue, which is used to justify the government subsidies. Both these methods mentioned above are currently used to sustain the US farming industry. As I understand it, there was no reasonable option offered for the large scale Southern planters to continue in business after the emancipation of slaves.

  42. I don’t think @Lis Carey’s problem is a chip on her shoulder. I think it’s trying to communicate with someone who wants to brush aside 300+ years of institutional racism and talks about slavery as a sad but economic necessity which is infuriating IMHO.

  43. Take care with ellipses.

    @Lela E. Buis: Again, this is the economic analysis. The situation can be analyzed from other viewpoints, as well.

    Yes, but not necessarily equal ones. I’m sure a novel could be based on the premise that northern abolitionists engineered a war in order to achieve an economic advantage over southern slaveholders, but the reality is that abolitionists and slaveholders saw themselves in a social context. However base the trade may have been when it was first practiced by Britain’s colonies, it became something else. At the time of the war, the South’s justification for slavery and secession was a social system based on white superiority. However wealthy some white southerners had become from owning black people, they were supported by a populace that did not profit from slavery, but was nonetheless willing to subjugate black people.

    Northern farms outproduced their Southern counterparts without slavery. I know, automation, but that was a product of a better society. The North could produce more crops with 40% of its population devoted to agriculture to the South’s 80% because it built the schools, factories, and transportation networks to do so. However defective the North was, it was free in a way the South was not.

    And while the South maintained an unjust society at all costs, the North moved on.

  44. >“What could the Southern landowners have done instead?”

    They should have abolished slavery.

    But how could they have remained in business and still pay the labor costs? The crops they were planting were labor intensive and required extensive hand processing. Currently all these industries have moved out of the US and into Asia and Africa to exploit low labor costs there. Without government subsidies, they were unsustainable in the US.

    Eventually Southern farming recovered and moved to beef cattle and more easily managed crops. Now small farmers typically have a day job and farm on the week ends. Large scale farming still needs automation and/or low-paid migrants in order to make it work.

  45. So many excuses. The slavers should have been shoot dead. That is the only reasonable option with regards to slavery.

    The campaign against slavery was 100 years old at the time and slavery had already been banned a long time before in other countries. There had been lots of time to adjust the economy if they had wanted. But they preferred to dehumanize others, to keep them prisoners, to disregard their rights as human beings.

    No excuses. The slave owners were the worst dreggs of humanity. And still are today.

  46. At the time of the war, the South’s justification for slavery and secession was a social system based on white superiority.

    Dang. And this didn’t happen any earlier, like maybe in 1500? You all are still ignoring the whole Colonialism thing, like Southern plantation owners made the whole plan up in 1850. I’m starting to see the reason for Confederate flag waving here.

    Again, you’re focusing on Southern plantation owners and erasing the atrocities committed against native peoples under the whole Colonial system. This included widespread slavery and genocide of several native peoples in the Americas, Africa and Australia by European colonists typically driven by economic stimuli and government policies. Some native peoples were entirely exterminated.

    I’m repeating myself, plus I’m noticing that posters here don’t seem to understand the paradox of focusing on black slavery in the American South while erasing these broader repercussions of Western Colonialism, including enslavement of other native peoples and genocide.

    That means I’ll leave it at this.

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