The passage I quoted is actually from a 1852 document, "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." I think it's representative, but I was wrong to describe it as the declaration of secession and I believe it's important to correct the error.

"The Civil War was really a class war. The 1% who had slaves, wanted the rest of the workers who had to compete with slave labor to say; "Hey, you Northern oppressors -- we want to import cheap goods and not have to buy American, because we can't compete by selling good not made by slave labor."

The Slave Masters wanted everyone in the South to say; "WE are being harmed by the North economically" -- when really, slavery probably reduced wages for MOST Southerners.

Right on the money. I wish I had mod points to give you.

The Lost Cause may seem romantic, but anyone who doubts that the Civil War was really about slavery needs to read the declaration of secession:

We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof. The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made.

for fuck's sake, put away the Poli-Sci 101 talk.

"...where is the government mandated shift..." "Where are the government demands" "The war here is..."

Socio-political bullshit.

If you have a disagreement with the post's claims, make your argument. If you find the language unclear, ask for clarification. If you think there are unreasonable insinuations being made, call them out. That's what I intend to do with your post.

To me, the above complaint doesn't look like a rational problem with the argument: it looks like an ideological problem with where you think it's coming from. Perhaps you think all academics are out-of-touch elites whose expertise should therefore be disregarded. Perhaps you think poli-sci students are liberty-hating "liberals" (according to the warped American definition of the word). If so, foolish caricaturing and stereotyping only looks good if you're preaching to the choir. It has no bearing on the validity of either argument.

Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so. I'm just sick of reasoned debate being jettisoned for ideological reasons of tribal identity and taste.

anyone who is so intellectually impoverished that they cannot or will not relearn menus really ought not be using a computer

Your use of the word "intellectual" is new to me. I had not previously seen it defined in terms of rote memorization.

Nearly twenty years ago I recall Linux supporters making the same arguments for the CLI and against the GUI. They wanted to preserve "privilege" for the elect. Not so different from Hollywood.

Nice username.

The first article you point to doesn't seem to say anything one way or the other - which would be unsurprising if this were, as you suggest, a complete misinterpretation. A brief perusal of the Web doesn't provide a lot of evidence beyond the two books I mentioned, which in itself suggests Dyer and Ward may have blown this out of proportion. However, I did find one scientific article by Meyer and Kump on the subject. It suggests:

at times in Earth history, notably the Late Ordovician, Late Devonian, and Late Permian, widespread shelf and cratonic-basinal anoxia, and, at least in the latter two cases, photic-zone euxinia, have accompanied mass extinction (Wilde & Berry 1984; Wignall & Hallam 1992; Wang et al. 1993, 1996; Bond et al. 2004). Could sulfide poisoning serve as the kill mechanism in these extinctions?

Biomarker evidence perhaps provides a more compelling link between euxinia and extinction for the Late Devonian and Late Permian (Grice et al. 2005). . . . But why would a collapse of marine productivity trigger terrestrial ecosystem disruption and extinction?

Sulfide release from the oceans serves as a link to terrestrial biotic crisis during the end-Permian. One-dimensional atmospheric modeling by Kump et al. (2005) predicted that toxic levels of H2S could rapidly accumulate in the well-mixed troposphere once reaction of sulfide with atmospheric hydroxyl radical reduced OH to very low levels. The abrupt rise in atmospheric H2S concentrations would be accompanied by rising atmospheric methane levels and destruction of the ozone layer. Not only would terrestrial organisms be unable to escape the toxic effects of H2S, but they also would be subject to high levels of UV radiation following the predicted collapse of the ozone layer.

This does sound very tentative. On the other hand, it corresponds with my tenuous understanding of the claims of Dyer and Ward. Can you shed any light? I don't want to be going around making false claims.

It's called a Canfield Ocean. It involves a loss of oxygen from the oceans, which emit hydrogen sulfide gas. The sea literally turns purple while the air is toxic and green. Scientists have theorized that such a transformation has been responsible for mass extinctions to it the past. Here's what Gwynne Dyer says about it in his book Climate Wars:

The evidence is still unclear on whether we run a substantial chance of triggering a Canfield ocean and a greenhouse extinction if we let global warming get out of hand. As with many aspects of this issue, we would only find out for sure when it was too late to do anything about it. But itâ(TM)s the only outcome of the current climate crisis that might convert a massive dieback of the human population into an actual extinction.

Apparently it's also explained in detail in Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky.

To all who said about Apple's lock-down "but the iPhone is not a computer", this was always the end game. The argument was that the iPhone is not a computer (a general-purpose platform), therefore it's OK to restrict what users can do with it. (And besides, they said, we'll still have our PCs.) They confused cause and effect. The iPhone is not a computer because it is locked-down.

With Apple making money hand over fist, it should be no surprise that Microsoft wants in. Will they succeed in their attempt at control? I don't know. But I'm certainly not going to make excuses for them.

Don't give me the any flak about hating Apple. My desktop is a Mac. But my new laptop runs Linux.

Your claim about God and creativity is roughly correct. God was the creator; it was the role of artists to reflect the majesty of God's creation. See M.H. Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. The development of the idea of authorship was partly a response to the upheavals of the industrial revolution. I have attempted to explain this in a video about the invention of the author. The video description includes references for further reading.

To address the larger point, audiences are significant contributors to the value and meaning of artistic works, as I explain in a video about audience labor. For something like Star Wars I would even suggest that the audience is the major contributor. However, the artist remains the largest individual contributor to his or her work, and before the audience gets involved they clearly haven't contributed much. It is the hits, not the also-rans, that in a sense belong to the audience.

Taking credit for their works was instituted in pre-modern copyright law. In 17th century England copyright was a censorship regime for licensing publishers, rather than a mechanism for rewarding authors. In order to allow the crown to keep tabs on who wrote what, the law required authors' names to be printed in books. Taking credit for their writing was a response to government monitoring, not the assertion of proprietorship that it later became.

Finally, Lucas is hardly the author of his films. Many, many people worked on them. The habit of giving credit for a film to a single person obscures their essential contributions. The recent copyright suit against one of the guys who made the storm trooper helmets gives a hint at how copyright can unjustly focus all credit in one individual.

This also shows that Apple is more valuable than air. After all, air is free!

Uh, yeah. The idea that price equals value is dangerous ideological mumbo-jumbo. Prices tell what something costs to buy. They do not indicate what it is worth to have. This is why political economists (particularly Marxist ones these days) distinguish between use value and exchange value.

Examples of market prices failing to reflect use values are too numerous to count. Fancy clothes and cars vs basic food, for example, or the most valuable things in life - such as love, meaning in life, and human kindness - that are only available for free.

The BBC also incinerated film copies of the episodes. My understanding is that this was done in order to save space in their archive. (I remember something about a leaking roof.)

When foreign stations licensed the show, they were sent copies of the episodes with instructions to return them or destroy them after broadcast. A number of episodes that survived did so because those stations failed to follow through. They violated the BBC's copyright (presumably unintentionally due to poor license compliance). Ironically, such episodes survived because of copyright infringement.

Beyond the loss of Web material like the Hitchhiker's Guide site, or of software for no longe obtainable platforms, I fear we may face a similar situation in the future due to DRM. The Doctor Who case demonstrates that the copyright holder cannot always be trusted with preservation of significant works[1], and copying is the best insurance against destruction.

[1] I emphasize significant works, by which I particularly mean those that are distributed widely. (Not personal journal articles as mentioned by another poster.) When works are distributed to the public, the public gains an interest in them. This interest is not reflected in law, but it does exist. (Indeed, I would argue that this interest arises because the public, through its activities of interpretation and evangelism, creates much of the value of such works. Think Star Wars or Rocky Horror.)