> Good concluding paragraph. Very polite. Probably not quite fitting the usual online conversation format. You're supposed to call me Hitler or something. Sorr

> Good concluding paragraph. Very polite. Probably not quite fitting the usual online conversation format. You're supposed to call me Hitler or something. Sorry to disappoint you! :-) As I indicated in my concluding paragraph, we're not going to change each other's viewpoint, so I'm going to choose not to address your points one by one, and just say some are based on either incorrect or incomplete assumptions and others aren't persuasive from my perspective. I will add a historical point of fact to clarify one thing. The American civil war and the American civil rights protests are two different events a hundred years apart. The first was in the 1860s and the second in (roughly) the 1960s. The civil war settled the matter of slavery being legal (although there were other issues as well). Unfortunately, losing the civil war didn't change racial prejudice in the Southern states. Blacks there were no longer slaves but they were treated as second-class citizens and subject to grossly unjust non-protection under the law. This injustice persisted because Southern state governors, city mayors and police chiefs colluded to maintain the pretense of enforcing the laws equally while tacitly permitting gross discrimination and mob violence by racist whites against blacks. The civil rights protestors of the 1960s changed this when Martin Luther King adopted the peaceful protest strategies Gandhi used in India against British colonial rule. The violent police over-response against peaceful protestors exercising constitutionally protected free speech was obviously illegal. That undeniable evidence of Southern police and local governments behaving criminally against the constitution, not only as an aberration but systemically, forced both Southerners and the rest of the country to accept this ugly reality existed and make a choice how to deal with it. The horrific photos and films of illegal police violence against peaceful protestors changed public awareness and sentiment nationwide, providing the political support the President needed to send federal troops to Southern states to force desegregation. This was the civil rights protestor's plan, to use their protected speech rights to force the local governments to expose themselves publicly as tyrants. In conjunction with the media using their free speech rights to distribute the photographic evidence, the plan worked (the recent emergence of national live television broadcasts was also a key enabler). These ugly events led to some of our most important laws and legal precedents around free speech and elevated first amendment rights to a place of nearly sacred reverence among U.S. citizens. It's a dramatic historical episode well worth studying to understand American's intense support of free speech rights and deep distrust of government power. I offer this final historical note only as clarification of what happened and when re: "civil war" vs "civil rights protests" (which I think is uncontroversial). It's not intended to counter anything you wrote or to be argumentation. Thanks for the interesting discussion. Per my prior conclusion, I'll be moving on now...