[General Battuta]

My point is just that the media has always been merciless, petty, and partisan. Our country has been deeply polarized in the past. In a sense the post-WW2 island of civility was an anomaly, and today's increasingly partisan bickering is a return to the status quo.

[Lorric]

My point is just that the media has always been merciless, petty, and partisan. Our country has been deeply polarized in the past. In a sense the post-WW2 island of civility was an anomaly, and today's increasingly partisan bickering is a return to the status quo.

I think that is the main point. What I've been floundering around trying to grab onto. People in power should be scrutinised. But scrutinised fairly. The press, if they interview you, they don't want facts, they want to trip you up. If it was different, if they were unbiased, and sang the praises of those who accomplished things as well as exposed corruption, great people would come to the job I think. Today, I view politicians at best with apathy. I've only ever voted once, and that was to block a dangerous minority candidate, not because  I wanted my vote to win.

Yes, I truly hate today's press. If an alien came down and watched the news, they'd think we lived in the most terrible society, when even in the current economic climate we are prosperous, compared to most of the World.

[Lorric]

I'll go onto another point. Society in general is not geared for producing great people. It starts in the schools. The teachers and authorities bend over backwards to drag wasters who don't give a **** kicking and screaming through the system, while the people who do want to learn are left to fend for themselves. I believe it's called "No child left behind" in America. We have something similar in the UK. They get through despite the system, not because of it. If such resources were directed towards those people, and I'm not talking about just the gifted, although imagine if those resources were directed to them instead to groom them for important roles in adulthood. I mean anyone who tries. Anyone who wants to learn. A person with severe learning difficulties who tries is worth any number of able bodied people who don't give a ****. Throw those people away, and focus on the people who want to learn. Those people who don't give a **** drag everyone else down with them. They offer nothing to society, and damage the prospects of those who will offer something to society.

[NGTM-1R]

Astronomiya has raised some pretty compelling arguments/evidence that slavery was paramount to (though of course not solely) the cause of conflict; I'm surprised nobody has yet addressed his post.

Because it's too long.

I'd offer another interpretation for you: John Brown was the proximate cause of the Civil War.

Not his actual actions, but the way he was heroized in the North in general and by the Republican Party in particular for his plan to incite a racial war and have most people of power and property in the South murdered in their beds. Lincoln himself expressed admiration for Brown a couple times. When a man is elected who openly supported murdering you in your bed, bad things will happen one way or another.

Now, to say that slavery is a root cause is also true, but you're all viewing it as a moral issue rather than an economic one. The Civil War was inevitable because of the marriage of two completely different economic systems with no overlapping interests. The Emancipation Proclamation is the proof of this, by annihilating slavery in the states where it was the pillar of all economic activity (excepting Maryland, but only because Lincoln had arrested the legislature before they could secede and there was suspension of habeus corpus and the like). Karaj's point about it is thus turned on its head.