John John
Well, Tommy, are you through insinuating that I’m a bad person by misstating things and lying?
STOP THE CHARACTER ASSASINATION, TOMNDEBB!!!
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
John John
Quote it properly Tommy. A little different than what YOU said I said.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
john john
This is what I mean by your lack of reading comprehension. Get it straight, Tommy.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
John John you claim that you said this
while the original quote said
Notice that in the undoctored original, you screamed “ever” and did not emphasize “heard” at all. To people who are simply reading and not trying to worm out of their own words, the phrase “I have never heard” is simply a way to say “this isn’t so” without being held accountable. I hold you accountable. Tough. Get over it.
As for this:
It seems pretty clear that since everyone who has participated in this thread is aware of the fact that black Africans were involved in slave capturing, your attempt to raise it as an issue (falsely claiming that it is somehow hidden information) should have had some ulterior motive.
I have not called you any names. I have not attributed any evil actions to you. I have not claimed that you are a terrible person. You made two specific remarks in this thread that echo the language of people who often engage in blaming the victim.
If that is not your intent, put together a coherent thought that expresses your ideas differently. Don’t come attacking me for challenging your words with facts.
Tom~
quote:
I have never heard that blacks had EVER been charged with a hate crime.
while the original quote said
quote:[same thing]
I have never heard that blacks had EVER been charged with a hate crime.
See, tommy, it’s your reading comprehension and faulty interpretation of simple language again. I highligted the word HEARD in my quote to underscore my meaning - I HAD NOT HEARD EVER. Those words are simply, even you should understand them, and have no meaning other than the DENOTATION of those words. That means, NOT what YOU project onto them in your fancy.
I’ve produced my quotes, which clearly illustrate your active imagination or lies, and your need for remedial help in English. You have been debunked. I hope this is the last time we will visit this issue.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
Lonesome Polecat- you are obviously well read on the subject, and you make some very good points, but I have to disagree with you on some others.
1st- the comparative merits of Southern slavery and Northern capitalism as institutions. I think you are comparing the worst instances of the North with the most benelovent instances of the South. But rather than bicker back and forth on the issue lets just put it to a simple test. Lets compare the number of Southern slaves who attempted, often at great risk, to flee to the North with the number of Northern free blacks who went South voluntarily to sell themselves into slavery. That should give us an inkling of which system was preferable.
2nd- the idea that rather than emancipate their slaves Northerners just sold them South en masse. I can speak on this subject with some expertise since I have been actively involved in primary research on black communities in the North. I have examined countless original documents such as registers of slave births, manumissions, census records, journals, etc. I can assure you that your allegation is wrong, wrong, wrong. Sure, some instances must have occurred, but it can be documented that most who were born as slaves were manumitted and either stayed in the communities where they had lived or migrated to cities.
3rd- Southern attempts to ban the importation of slavery. Your facts are correct, but I sense you are trying to draw a false inference from them. This was no more a humanitarian move than cattle ranchers trying to ban the importation of beef is a vegetarian move. The dominant planter class in the Cheasepeake area and Tidewater Carolina knew that with the opening of Western land the demand for slaves would rise. Since they controlled the vast majority of the slave stock in the country they also knew that if the importation of more slaves were banned the law of supply and demand would cause the value of their human assets to skyrocket. And by the way, while you mention that New England shipping interests opposed the ban you neglect to point out that most other northerners supported it, and further neglect to mention that the crucial element in opposing the ban was southern land speculators seeking cheap slaves for their western lands.
Well, John John, I certainly hope it’s the last time you visit the issue. You are beginning to look a bit shrill.
The two quotes above are not identical. The bolding in your post of 6:49 was probably simply to highlight the sentence to which you referred. I left it bold to avoid any charges that I had tampered with it.
Your original, unbolded, statement had a key difference, however. In the second post you italicized the word “heard.” That had not been italicized in the first post. In the first post you simply used the common phrase “I have never heard that. . .” This attempt to emphasize a point in your repost that you did not emphasize in your second post indicates a certain ethical lapse. (It is customary to indicate at the time one quotes any changes to bolding, underscoring, fonts, or italics that are added to a reproduction so as not to mislead readers as to who inserted those changes.)
You did, however, scream the word “ever” in your first post, indicating that it was your belief that such an event had never occurred.
I have yet to attack your person. I have contested statements you have made. (And I am not doctoring the appearance of the quotes to change the effect of my presentation, in retrospect.) Get over it.
Tom~
Ok, you two, enough bickering, get back to the argument.
Yes, it certainly IS enough, and over such minutia.
Let’s just take brief a look at this.
The subject of the sentence, “I”, indicates that the writer is offering a subjective observation, consistent with any introversive nonimperative statement. So far, so good. The cluster verb, “have never heard”, is a negative perfect participial construction. One is given to wonder why the pluperfect was not used, and, failing that, why the auxiliary verb was separated from its postcedent modicand, particularly in light of the implied subjunctive mode of the subsequent dependent clause. Although English does share some of the qualities of some inflective languages, it is certainly more synthetic than inflective. (Note to agglutinatists: leave me alone.) Nevertheless, there is enough flexibility when ordering auxiliaries that one can emphasize a particular word simply by rearranging it, thus: “Never have I heard”, where emphasis falls upon the “never”. But because the writer was actually addressing a second person, we find what is called a “perplexing nominative”. What the writer might have heard is irrelevant unless he is informing the second person that he in fact did hear. Since we can be fairly sure the writer was not summarily dismissing every possible form of sensory experience except for hearing, we can presume the writer really meant, “Never have I known”. This we can assume unless we posit that he has never read or seen, but only heard. However, due to certain clarifications offered by the writer subsequent to the original quote, we are safe to assume that the writer did not mean to emphasize his knowing, but rather his lack of it. Therefore, a better construction than the perfect would be the declarative, thus, “Never did I know”. But because of the legendary ambiguity of English words derived from Anglo-Saxon, we cannot be sure, based on the isolated clause, whether the writer intended to comment on his cognition or his familiarity. Since the dependent clause was clearly meant to indicate a class of people with whom he was unfamiliar, we are left with “Never did I comprehend”. This is progress. We find now that the writer meant to imply something, not about his knowledge per se, but about his understanding. Therefore, we can finally construct this introductory clause as “Never did I apprehend.”
Now, let’s look at the dependent clause.
The reference to “blacks” is in the context of a nominative case. I believe this is where most of the confusion lay. Clearly, it was intended that “blacks” be the object of the writer’s apprehension. This is truly an exciting discovery because it allows us to drop the bothersome dependent clause altogether, removing any possibility that any modifier might precipitously dangle. God forbid. So, now we have, “Never did I apprehend blacks”. Well, did the writer mean any and all blacks? Plainly, no. He identifies especially blacks who might have been “charged with a hate crime”. We can ignore the unfortunate juxtaposition of singular and plural by assuming the writer to be an educated person who simply committed a typo, which is something we all do from time to tim. So, we can rephrase the predicate of the former dependent clause this way: “charged with hate crimes”. (Note to intraquotation punctualists: go away.) Now we have “blacks charged with hate crimes”. The redundant “EVER”, meant to emphasize the previous “never” is eminently forgettable at this stage, since we have already given “never” its appropriate emphasis by favoring Latin over German.
Now, to put it all together.
We end up with the quite sensible, “Never have I apprehended blacks charged with hate crimes.” From this, we can finally get at what the writer really meant to convey.
He is a bounty hunter who is merciful to blacks.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
Surgoshan said:
Don’t be so sure it was all “without the lash.” After slavery ended, a system of peonage took over. While it was technically illegal, it didn’t stop until the 1920s!
I would recommend a book written by a (former, I think) user of this very message board, Gregory Freeman (GregAtlanta here), Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves. I doubt it’s in most stores, as it was printed by a small publisher, but you can get it online, as here: http://search.borders.com/fcgi-bin/db2www/search/search.d2w/Details?&mediaType=Book&prodID=51355344
(Alternatively, I actually have two copies. If somebody wants to buy one from me, contact me in e-mail. But that’s not my point in posting this message.)
Anyway, peonage was a system in which black men were arrested – often on trumped-up charges, and punished with fines they couldn’t pay. Then white farmers would pay the fines and take the black men from jail to “work off their debt.” Problem was, it was almost never actually worked off. In his book, Freeman noted: “For those trapped in peonage, the technical distinction between themselves and the slaves of a previous generation was meaningless.”
Regarding the lash, it was certainly there. So was the gun. Indeed, the farmers may have been more likely to kill the black men because they didn’t have nearly as much invested in them as they had with slaves, who were seen as valuable property.
Obviously my eighth grade education failed to fully cover the harsher side of the evil sharecropping industry (eighth grade being the last time that I had a history class concerned solely with the state I lived in. After that it was world history, then European, then American [sparse twentieth century], then politics.).
Yes, well, I think a lot of high school history classes skipped over that part… They made it sound largely like slavery ended after the civil war. Maybe in law, but not in fact. 
Me asking Tom to produce proof of his allegation
Did you want to extend an apology to me, Tom?
JJ:
Sure:
JJ:
Sure:
And what I had said was
If you want to correct any misimpression I have created, state clearly what you meant. The complaint that “blacks were involved” with the taking of slaves is a frequent cry among a number of people who would prefer that poor blacks would just shut up and live in the ghetto. Your statement that black participation in slavery is “always omitted from the awful history” is both a falsehood and another echo of the people I have just mentioned. You may not be among those people. If that is true, you should stop echoing their sentiments and express yourself more clearly (omitting obvious falsehoods, of course).
Do I want to apologize? No. If any poster does not like the way their posts are interpreted, they are free to post clarifications. Until I attack you as a person I see no purpose in an apology.
If you choose to toss off casual phrases that I interpret in the light of how similar phrases used by groups of people within the U.S., I see no purpose in apologizing. If you actually could demonstrate that my interpretation differed from your cloudy meaning, I would acknowledge that. An apology is given in restitution for harm. No harm, no foul.
Tom~
JJ:
quote:
Of course you’ll be able to find that, blacks don’t get charged with hate crimes quote, where I said that, right tom?]]]
Tom does not produce.
Sure:
quote:
I have never heard that blacks had EVER been charged with a hate crime.
My saying “I’ve never heard of it ever” is quite different than a declarative statement saying that “I know they never do” But, Tommy, you knew what I meant.
JJ:
quote:
You will also find where I said slavery was a fact of life, right tommy?]]
Again, tommy does not, and can not, produce what is asked for. No surprise.
Sure:
quote:
What is always omitted from the awful history of black slavery is that BLACKS delivered other captured blacks to white Europeans and Arabs for money.]]]true
That was NEVER discussed, or widely known, during the 60’s. The general public was ignorant of that fact. It is now BECOMING more widely known, which will help us all avoid EVER repeating that horror.
And what I had said was
quote:
John John also threw out the red herring, quoted by KM2, implying that slavery was simply a fact of life for black Africans and the slaves sent to the U.S. were simply an extension of African social mores.]]]]
I said NOTHING about African social mores. That is YOUR invention. Also, your lumping me with Klanman, as you do above, is a NOT so subtle attempt to paint me as a racist. You realize what you wer doing, tommy. Not nice.
Do I want to apologize? No. ]]]]
Well, gee, who is surprised by that?
…if you actually could demonstrate that my interpretation differed from your cloudy meaning, I would acknowledge that. Tom~]]]
Why did you omitt the clarifying sentence “no one is without sin”? I’ll tell you why, it then implies that the only sin was that of the black man, when what I was saying is, BOTH committed sins in the slave trade. You must realize that the slave trade, as has been attested to by black historins, would NOT have been possible without black PARTICIPATION. iN OTHER WORDS, TOMMY, SINS ON BOTH HOUSES, as I said.
Kindly let the record show that tomndebb did not produce the proof of his allegation but instead demonstrated his own bias and confusion. I think it is noteworthy that you did not apologize but instead compounded your lie.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
John Johm: posted 12-09-1999 06:04 AM
We obviously disagree as to the interpretations of what has been said. You are, now, no longer discussing the topic; you are badgering me over differing interpretations.
If you are so wroth, go whine in the BBQ Pit.
Tom~
tomndebb
One has only to read this boring exchange between us to see who is badgering whom. You made a hateful accusation against me and failed to produce anything that would reasonably support that claim.
tom
It is hardly “wroth” it, tom.
Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.
[Jerry Garcia]
Hmmm . . . let’s see. We have Tom, who has been thoughtful, rational, and reasonably polite. And we have John John, who has obfuscated, attacked, and sidetracked.
Looks like game, set, and match to Tom, IMO.
-andros-
Did I say that? Heck, my unorthodox un-PC views cause enough controversy without adding to them 