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The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military ca
by akiselev 8mo ago
The book Brett uses as his main source, Waging A Good War, is an incredible book that I strongly recommend. It treats the Civil Rights movement as a military campaign and analyzes it from the perspective of a military historian.
Not in the sense that it was viewed as a war by the protestors, but in the sense that the logistics, training, and operations of the Civil Rights movement were a well oiled machine that looked like a well organized, but nonviolent, army (including counterexamples where there was no organization).
One of the most memorable details is how James Lawson trained in nonviolence under Ghandi and came over to train protestors in nonviolent tactics. They gathered in church basements to scream insults and spit on each other to prepare for the restaurant sitins and other ops.
- mothballed 8mo ago[flagged]
- santoshalper 8mo agoPound for pound, Hacker News has the best bad takes anywhere. This is an absolutely terrible take, but at least it's very interesting.
- SpaceL10n 8mo agoFreedom means freedom to exclude and alienate at the government level? Is that your argument? I can see your hypothesis, but I don't see your evidence.
- Erem 8mo agoWhat, since released, internal memos or journals from mid-century civil rights leaders have revealed that destroying the constitution was their objective? Seems like a stretch.
- mothballed 8mo agoI believe the civil rights leaders themselves were mostly genuine. I think they were used as useful idiots on a couple instances to support the two most destructive policies of the US. (1) Secession. This was used for evil in the form of slavery. But it is the most powerful check of federal power by the states we had. The fact it could be used for evil did not mean it is better to get rid of it. (2) Expansion of the interstate commerce clause to mean basically anything. A main argument for why this can't be reversed is that it would destroy the civil rights acts, which acts upon even intrastate business. Rather what should have happened is 15th amendment should have been written to apply to private entities as well, instead of blasting away the interstate commerce clause.
- kryogen1c 8mo agoIm certainly sympathetic to #2 being one of the greatest unconstitutional practices of the modern US government, but is its genesis really the civil rights movement? There were many settled cases about interstate commerce before the Civil rights act, like Gibbons v. Ogden. https://www.britannica.com/money/commerce-clause/Interpretation-of-the-commerce-clause-in-United-States-Supreme-Court-cases https://www.britannica.com/money/commerce-clause/Interpretat...
- mothballed 8mo agoYou're absolutely right -- it's not really the genesis per se on #2, just one of the modern weapons used. Civil rights act is one of the main weapons used today to explain why we can't wind back interstate commerce clause, creating a sort of legal suicide pact where the interstate commerce clause interpretation is held hostage if you want to keep your civil rights. That is, the CRA was arguably one of the most important things for double sealing the deal on progressive era expansion of the ICC. Many times here on HN I have debated people who were well versed on constitutional law, and when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it. And they're right -- a nearly identical on many points CRA happened in 1875 as the one passed in 1964. The 14th and 15th amendment existed at both times, and the relevant points of the constitution stayed the same. Yet the latter was found constitution and the former was not, in large part due to the change in the meaning of the interstate commerce clause.