this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
1737 points (97.5% liked)

Confidently Incorrect

3986 readers
1 users here now

When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.

Posting guidelines.

All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.

You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the comeback part, not the topic.

Rules:

• Be civil and remember the human.

• No trolling, insults or name calling. Swearing in general is fine, but not to insult someone.

• No bigotry of any kind, including homophobia, transphobia, sexism and racism.

• You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

• Try not to get too political. A lot of these posts will involve politics, but this isn’t the place for political arguments.

• Participate in good faith - don’t be aggressive and don’t argue for arguements sake.

• Mark NSFW posts if they contain nudity.

• Satire is allowed but please start the post title with [satire] so other users can filter it out if they’d like.

Please report comments that break site or community rules to the mods. If you break the rules you’ll receive one warning before being banned from this community.

This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:

  1. Be civil, remember the human.
  2. No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
  3. Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
  4. Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
  5. Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
  6. Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
  7. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
  8. No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It feels disingenuous to remove morality from the equation. Morality clearly played a role which is why thinkers like Frederick Douglass are still remembered to this day. Clearly there were other forces at play- political and economic which shaped how this played out, but morality was certainly involved.

Gonna get a little preachy here - skip this part if you don't wanna hear that.

All of American history from the Revolutionary war to today can be summed up with people trying to reconcile the conflict of individual freedom and equality. Those two cannot coexist, and a boundary must be placed on one in order to allow the other ideal to flourish.

The civil war is a great example, individual freedom allows one to own another person if that is their desire. Equality says that your individual freedom cannot impede another person's. This means slavery cannot exist in such a value system and equality was valued above individual freedom.

The current abortion debate has the same bedrock conflict. Does an individual's personal freedom allow them the right to stop being pregnant if they wish? Well equality says the unborn child should be considered, as the choice to terminate violates their individual freedom to exist.

Let me be clear - in this post I am not advocating for either side in the abortion debate. I am merely trying to show that most of American history has been defined by trying to draw the line between the two founding principles of the nation.