too stupid for friends on Nostr: > "Would you want to live in a world where the Civil War didn't happen?" > "What does ...

> "Would you want to live in a world where the Civil War didn't happen?"
> "What does that look like?"
> "No slavery."
> "There are more people enslaved now around the world than at the time of the civil war; they're just not potentially US citizens or so-called freedmen."
> "Yeah but, no, I mean"
> "I think I know what you mean but I don't know that you know what you mean."
> "It would have been horrible though, we'd still have slavery in this country to this day."
> "Do you genuinely believe that? Do you think that all the advancement of industrialization would have stopped because some agrarian confederalist states withdrew from the Union?"
> "If we lost, we would still have slavery though!"
> "That's not what we know about the state of the Union before the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln didn't free Northern slaves, and had hoped to win the war without freeing slaves. If the North had lost, we would have lost a number of States in the Union and had competition for westward association in the West, but most likely would have abolished slavery in the same milquetoast way they did in our timeline -- you can't enslave citizens but prisoners are fair game."
> "But... they were the evil ones."
> "Perhaps, perhaps."