Oh, yes they do! And naturally, like all other ruminants, they regurgitate a bolus of cud to chew. I remember reading someone’s (Gerald Durrell, maybe?) description of the stately passage of a ball of cud as it rose up a giraffe’s neck, visible from the oustide.
Leonard Neeble, is that you?
Most people went to war for the same reason most people always do - because their government went to war. The government of the United States went to war because the government of the Confederate States declared war on them. So the question is why did the Confederate government go to war? And the answer is they went to war over slavery.
During the war the Union government bent over backwards NOT to portray the war as an abolitionist crusade, for fear of alienating support for the war. The Union fought first and foremost to preseve the unity of the states, and abolition only came in as a means to an end. The Emancipation Proclamation only formally ratified what was already the Union army’s policy of treating slaves escaped of rebel masters as “contraband”, subject to forfeiture. And the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery guaranteed that the rebel cause would literally be lost, removing any possible impetus for further rebellion.
1616 was a long time after Luther, Calvin, and Copernicus. Plenty of time for Protestants to adopt heliocentrism, and Catholics to ponder adopting geocentrism in response. I can believe it was Galileo who made it a big issue, though.
Well, yes there were racists even in the North. But by and large, the North was strongly against slavery. However, the reason for the War is that the South seceded, and the South had one reason for that- the continuance of race-based slavery.
It gets even more complicated than that. Lots of things are solid, liquid, or gas, but within those broad categories, there can be many distinct phases, depending on the substance. For instance, there are something like a dozen different solid phases of water. And then there are also substances that aren’t solid, liquid, or gas. A liquid is a fluid with the equation of state rho = constant, and a gas is a fluid with the ideal gas law equation of state (which, incidentally, includes most plasmas-- Plasmas are a subset of gases, not a completely separate category), but there are a multitude of other equations of state possible for a fluid, resulting in something that is unambiguously neither liquid nor gas, but something else entirely.
I think the true causes of the Civil War are many and complex, but I think the key to this is that here in the North, we were generally taught it was ending slavery to preserve the Union ONLY, a noble quest by the Union to keep us together and help the slaves. So while slavery may or not be related to all the other reasons, it’s really the only reason we were taught.
I don’t think that it was true that the North opposed slavery. I think the majority of the people in the northern and western states were mostly indifferent on slavery. There was no widespread support for the idea of abolishing slavery throughout the country. Most northerners were probably willing to let slavery exist in the southern states.
But while the north and the west were not strongly anti-slavery, the south was strongly pro-slavery. It was the south that couldn’t accept the idea of a nation being half-slave and half-free; they insisted on it being all one. And if they couldn’t make the United States be all slave, they’d start a new country that would be.
This is why Lincoln didn’t push abolition was a war goal. The South was willing to fight for slavery but the North wasn’t willing to fight against it.
The South saw a threat that didn’t really exist. So they felt they were defending themselves. Meanwhile the North had no plans for attacking the South so they were angered when the South started fighting in “self-defense”. They saw Southern hostility as unprovoked. And this created the threat that the South had feared - the North now did want to fight the South.
This is why there are two such divergent views on the war. Both sides think the other side started it.
Could y’all start another thread for the Civil War debate?
Amen.
When were you taught this? I was in elementary in the late 1980’s and we learned that slavery was one contributing factor to the war.
Now, I think it’s swinging back the other way, teaching again that slavery was the main issue and the war may not have happened without the disagreement over it.
i would really like to see a coherent argument that the civil war would have happened if there was no slavery. i don’t know of one, and kind of doubt there is one, but i’m not a student of history, so if someone has some real evidence please bring it forward.
Excellent idea. Here it is.
In Billy Budd, the movie at least, the guy was an American-born sailor but in the tradition of the uneducated class of the time, did not really know what year he was born or anything much else about his early life. In the days before official identification, this was apparently pretty common for orphans and abandoned children. As a result, the British simply claimed he was one of theirs. They had the guns, they took anyone who could not cogently argue they were not British. Obviously it was common enough that someone wrote a book about it.
Thank you for the supporting information, Dr. Deth.
My dad went to English school and university, and had a lot of unflattering things to say about British history. OTOH they did abolish and attempt to enforce the end of the slave trade 30 years before the USA. However, there’s a cute rhyme in Punch at the time of the civil war:
Tho’ with the north we sympathize,
It must not be forgotten
That with the South we’ve stronger ties
That are composed of cotton.
After the war, the British paid some reparations to the USA for assistance they gave to the Confederacy naval forces. Maybe eventually some other issue would have come between the industrial north and the unindustrialized south, but at the time the majority of intellectuals (those pinko liberals of the north) believed that enslaving another human being could not be justified.
When that caused the south to attempt to secede, yes, a Civil War started over the issue of whether a atate could unilaterally withdrawl once they had joined the union. Even in Canada, what we learned in grade 2 or 3 was the simplified version, what we learned about grade 7 or 8 was the more complex version. (Just as we learned that Canadian Confederation was a “grand dream” of the Fathers of Confederation" in the early grades; by grade 7 or 8 it was time to delve into deeper issues like the Americans wanting to take over the whle continent, seperatism, etc.)
Perhaps that’s all this is… the “mistruths” are simplifications taught in the early grades or in those 10-minute public service films we were shown in the early grades.
Well, there might have been plenty of time for that to happen, but it bears no resemblance to what actually did happen. Protestants had not adopted heliocentrism, and Catholics never “pondered” adopting geocentrism. Geocentrism was the default position, and had been for at least two thousand years, backed by observation (both casual and systematic), common sense, and sophisticated scientific and mathematical theory. The evidence that had been offered in support of heliocentrism by 1616 was extremely weak, and there was a good deal of seemingly strong evidence against it (I don’t mean the Bible, I mean real scientific evidence, such as the fact that no sign of the stellar parallax motions predicted by Copernicus could be detected by the most careful measurements).
In 1616 you could probably have counted all the supporters of heliocentrism in the world on the fingers of two, hands, and there were really only two living heliocentrists of any prominence: Galileo and Kepler (Descartes was about 20, and probably not a heliocentrist yet). Furthermore (and ironically), the reasons that originally seem to have convinced Galileo and Kepler of the truth of heliocentrism were mostly just wrong. Kepler believed because of his attraction to Hermetic mysticism, and his wacky theory about the Platonic solids being between the planetary orbits; Galileo (so far as I can tell) believed because he thought, quite wrongly, that the motion of the Earth explained the ocean tides, and perhaps because he had begun to form a conception of angular momentum, but had falsely concluded from this that “natural” (i.e., unforced) motion was circular. It took the lifetime’s work of Galileo and Kepler combined to create even a moderately convincing case for heliocentrism that was actually based on fact and sound argument, and that attracted supporters in any numbers, and, even then, it was not until Newton showed that heliocentrism follows from his vastly improved system of mechanics (also rooted in Galileo’s innovations) that the matter was clinched.
It is no doubt true that, in the wake of Galileo’s trial, in 1632, Catholics were inhibited, for a while from making any arguments for heliocentrism (in 1633, Descartes, who was Catholic, was about to publish his heliocentric work, Le Monde, but quickly withdrew it when the news of Galileo’s condemnation reached him), whereas Protestants were still freely able to do so. As was the case in the Catholic Church before Galileo stirred things up, most Protestants did not regard astronomical theory as having much religious relevance, one way or the other.
My impression, however, is that it really was not very long before the case in favor of heliocentrism was strong enough that it became a de facto acceptable view even in the Catholic world, and efforts to suppress it were probably quietly abandoned long before the anti-heliocentric policy was officially overturned. Galileo’s Dialog (the book that occasioned his arrest) effectively refuted most of the major arguments against heliocentrism, and the Inquisition were not quick enough to seize all the copies before some got into Protestant hands, and were pirated and made widely available. In the same period, it began to become apparent that the unprecedented predictive accuracy of Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables (1627) was excellent positive evidence in favor of heliocentrism. Word got out about Descartes’ heliocentrist arguments too, even though they were not published until after his death (and even though his arguments were mostly wrong, they did persuade a lot of people).
digs said:
Good question. I was once participating in a discussion and I brought up “Newtonian fluids”. The other person assumed I was discussing Newton vs Relativity, and (a) was confused, and (b) was trying to talk about radioactive materials. I had to explain that Newtonian as a description for fluids is a totally different topic than Newtonian as a description for gravity. Durned polymaths playing in multiple science fields. Why couldn’t he specialize in 1 major discovery?
I’m not sure which boundary you are trying to denote - the Newtonian/Relativistic one for gravity and motion, or the macroscopic/atomic one for quantum mechanics.
The problem for you is that relativity and quantum mechanics don’t mesh well, so there’s no one label for you. 
adhay said:
While there is certainly some truth to that, your conclusion is too extreme. I mean, the US has plenty of reasons to exploit the indigenous folk of other countries for our own gain. I mean, what “resource” was “Capital” trying to exploit in Viet Nam? Or Korea? Those were geopolitically driven events, not resource exploitation events.
Porlock Junior said:
Right. It’s something along the lines of, “In the past there has been some debate on this matter, so let me set the record straight. This is heretical, and I do hereby formally declare it so, so you have been warned.”
adhay said:
Right. There were a lot of things going on up until Hitler decided to march his army across Europe. That kinda changed the game a little.
Wait, Germany’s military was a secret before the war?
Little Nemo said:
Wow, I was not aware of that. How big a role was the conflict between China and Japan? I do not recall hearing anything about the US and China collaborating against Japan. Why did they not?
beowulff said:
What’s the connection to what kfraser34 said?
During WWII, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek were known as The Big Four, the four chief allied leaders.
That may even have been me. The first time I encountered the concept of Newtonian fluids was in a discussion on this board, where I did in fact think “Newtonian” meant “not relativistic or quantum”. I don’t remember radioactivity being part of it, though.
Actually, I just read in a recent issue of Astronomy magazine that there was a guy in England who did before Galileo, but he never published his observations, so didn’t get credit. It’s known that he did from personal papers in the archives of the university he was affiliated with. I don’t remember his name, or the university, and I can’t find the issue of the magazine to look it up. If you’re interested, find a library with a subscription. It will be within the last 6 months.