Hysteria from the left...

That version of the Democratic Party was an amalgam of regional centers. The Pendergast Machine of Kansas City wasn't to be confused with the Democratic organization in Mississippi.

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Les Cargill

They had an entire regime of abject bull-wash that under girded their beliefs:

"Calhoun also asserted that slavery, rather than being a "necessary evil", was a "positive good", benefiting both slaves and slave owners."

Somebody actually did the heavy lifting[1]. They produced a book titled "Time On The Cross" and no - the South was "wealthier" than other regions. I put "wealthier" in quotes because the US never had a stable currency nor even really a coherent banking system until the Civil War and after. Hard money was very rare in the US. Much of the wealth in the South was slaves, which, ironically held and increased in value while currencies and land fluctuated.

[1] went to county courthouses and totted up records...

Cotton was the feedstock into the British textile industry. It made a great deal of money for planters. SFAIK, they took payment in pounds sterling...

But that has nothing to do with the children and grandchildren of the generation that lost the Civil War. This is called "The Lost Cause Myth".

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Les Cargill

It depends on what you mean by "the bulk of the population". Even simple yeoman farmers did fairly well in the South in the Antebellum system in terms of food and clothing. And mountain people could do even better.

The "poor southerner" trope comes along during and after Reconstruction. And at some point, the frontiersman goes from being Daniel Boone to being the cast of Deliverance.

Uh.... it *was* the real economics. Nobody was fooled by it. Antebellum slavery was an artifact of British Mercantilism; India was just as poor or worse until the 20th century.

There was a different sort of urban poverty on the North.

Yes, because Lincoln was a Republican, and Jefferson founded the party that became what we call the Democrats at the time of the Civil War.

It's Jefferson/Jackson v. Hamilton/Lincoln. Always has been.

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Les Cargill

I forget the source but there was nothing to be done to fully fix it.

That's not true. They tried.

Potatoes are insidious - they increase the caloric density that poor land can produce. So you get a Malthusian Trap. This was just a perfect storm...

From the link below:

" In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."

Feeding all those people was a logistical impossibility. It took

20th century logistics to counter the Ukrainian famine in the 1920s ( run by Herbert Hoover ). Even then, it was very bad. We're so good at this now it's easy to forget how hard it was.

The British government did manage to make it worse, but it was too big a food gap to overcome:

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Les Cargill

Bill Sloman is an old poopy-pants!

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

and

from

term.

"Calculator" == "look up"

You are right, it is orders of magnitude both faster and more accurate. One should not clutter the mind, especially when man has conceived of technological solutions to alleviate just such things.

snip

+1

Hehehehe... Leadership induced or otherwise.

I am sure Kim Jong Un is gonna have a fun week.

I mean the Famine of 1921, not the 1932 one.

You have to be specific about famines with the Soviet Union in that span of time :)

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Les Cargill

Just as well, 'cos the schools are only 'teaching' them propaganda anyway.

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I'm happy to be treated with the contempt I deserve. You can't manage it, because your judgement is poor.

Some of the regular posters to s.e.d. don't like what I post - which isn't quite the same as not taking me seriously. John Larkin doesn't like not be being praised at regular intervals, and you don't like being shown up as a trivial twit.

I can live with that.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

But not how to make change :-( ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Seventy-five isn't old - or at least not old enough to have incontinence issues.

John Larkin is as ill-informed as ever. He and Jim Thompson both post links to web-sites that anybody with some capacity for critical thinking would reject as propagating partisan nonsense.

Their judgement on other issues isn't great either.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

ly on a single crop. The British might have been able to save more of the I rish from starvation than they did, but agricultural productivity wasn't hi gh back then, and there weren't enough ships to move enough grain to Irelan d to save all that many people if there had been enough grain around to shi p.

Essentially by expropriating English landowners in Ireland. Some politician s might have wished to do something like that, but while Victorian opinion could live with lots of starving poor in Ireland, it wouldn't have put up w ith taking money or goods from the respectable well-off.

The potato crop failed and people starved. That's a famine. The UK governme nt might - in theory - have been able to minimise the starvation, but didn' t. If they'd blocked attempts to feed the starving Irish that might count a s genocide, but doing nothing isn't actually a crime (and certainly wasn't seen as one back then).

In fact they spent quite a bit on importing maize from the US (which the Ir ish didn't like much, and didn't happen to be - on it's own - as adequate a diet as the one you got from mostly eating potatoes). It was more incompet ence than genocide.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Another obsolete skill. I don't carry small change any more - almost everybody accepts payment by electronic funds transfer. All I have to do is wave my debit card, though I do keep a sharp eye on how much money has been transferred.

The Netherlands worked that way before we left in 2013.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Cursitor Doom's definition of "propaganda" is essentially stuff he disagrees with. What "Russia Today" publishes is mostly Russian propaganda, but Cursitor Doom treats it as gospel.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I'm afraid I have to disagree. I don't like Cajun food. :-)

Lousiana happens to be one of the 8 states within my professional responsib ility the last 4 years. Working with the people there has been a distinct pleasure. They are to a man and woman bright, helpful, and cheerful.

Please don't tell them I said that. :)

Here in San Antonio, most of the public schools, and many of the private on es, had numerous white, black, brown, and bronze individuals long before an yone came up with the term "integration". Honestly, when I was in elementa ry school, I never even noticed there were a number of children whose skin color differed from mine. It was only later, when the big broo-ha-ha over school integration flared up it occurred to me there had been a number of d ifferent ethnic groups represented.

Well, there is that.

Deep South? Lousiana? Nonsense!! Anyone born north of Austin, TX, is a Y ANKEE!!!! :-)

Seriously, I think a few actual facts are in order:

1. Not every state in the Confederacy was an obligate slave state. Texas, for example, was not.
2. The Civil war was not about slavery. It was a major point of contentio n, yes, but a number of the states were not concerned whether slavery was l egal or not, per se. The Confederate States wanted to be able to choose fo r themselves whether or not slavery should be legal or not, as well as othe r issues. Of course, a number did want slavery to be legal, but the centra l issue was state's rights. Well, putatively. In reality, of course, it w as all about money.
3. Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, slave trading had all but die d out both in the North and the South. Even the number of slaves maintaine d in the South was on a slow decline, until cotton became king.
4. Even after the cotton explosion and the upswing of slaves on cotton and tobacco plantations, slave trading in the U.S. represented less than 7% of the slave traffic in the new world.
5. Without question, some slaves in the U.S. had objectively terrible live s. I also will not ever agree that slavery is moral. All that said, most slaves in the U.S. had a reasonably decent standard of living. In fact, th e living conditions for most slaves were superior to that of many poor whit e sharecroppers. The living conditions for household slaves on a successfu l plantation were in fact almost opulent. Again, that is no excuse for sla very, but the fact is almost all slaves in the U.S. were in far, far better circumstances than those in the spice islands, where a slave was an expend able commodity, with an average life expectancy of about 7 years.