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Verily, our voluble interlocutor’s prolix lucubrations are not wholly void of merit; indeed, the word “homosexual” was a 19th-century contrivance, invented, I believe, by the estimable Victorians; whilst prior to that, sexual behavior in all its variegation was simply styled sexuality, with its...

The late analytic philosopher David K. Lewis argued, in his book On the Plurality of Worlds, that all counterfactual worlds that are not logically impossible exist, but are only actual to their inhabitants. On this reading there exists a world in which the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, but...

An idealist might say that there is no way to prove the existence of an external, mind-independent world. If asked what a rose is, I might say it’s red, smells sweet, and that its thorns prick. We could say several other thing about it, but the above examples and any others you might list are...

Well, not exactly. You did write “much” metaphysics, not “all” metaphysics.

If metaphysics is nonsense, then any clained metaphysical truth must itself be nonsense, rendering your claim above nonsensical by your own stadards. If you want to dismiss metaphysics as meaningless, then it seems to me that the consistent stance would be to dismiss metaphysical naturalism...

My point is not to support idealism, though in fact I think there are good arguments for it, and I can offer some. It’s rather to show that Steve holds a metaphysical stance while decrying metaphysics as meaningless. His position is inconsistent.

You are selling metaphysics short. Your whole position is called metaphysical naturalism — which itself is a philosophical idea, not provable from within the idea itself. It is an assumption, a starting axiom, that may or may not be true. The standard rival assumption is metaphysical...

Of course if you secede and win by force of arms then the secession becomes de facto even if it is not de jure. But 1776 is not analogous to 1861. Unlike the south in 1861, the proto-U.S. was not part of Britain. It was a colony of Britain.

I don’t think even a peaceful agreement to separate the states would be legal today. The Articles of Confederation offered a mechanism for such a process, but the Constitution does not. It would appear that any type of separation would require a Constitutional amendment.

I’m speaking only of the Civil War.

They were contiguous. Georgia seceded.

A more prudent and possibly succesful strategy would have been for the southern states to petition for a voluntary and peaceful separation of the two regions, agreed upon by both sides.

This is all correct, but the larger point is that the entire secession was by itself an aggression against the whole of the United States, which included the southern states. It was an insurrection. Any attempt to frame the civil war as a war of northern aggression, as many southerners and their...

The Union, as Lincoln pointed out, is older than the Constituion, and the Articles clearly forbade secession. The Constitution only strengthened the Union, by federalizing it. The founding documents are plain, both explicitly and implicitly: breaking up the union can only occur on the consent of...

Moreover, Lincoln adhered to the exact letter and spirit of the founding documents, which was: No state or states could get out of the union, absent the consent of all the other states. He likened it to a contract. One side cannot legally break the contract, but both sides could consent to...

What do I think that isn’t true? Be specific. It’s not true that you imply that the North and the South were always separate countries? I think you do imply that. If you did not mean to imply that, then by logic you must agree with me that the so-called Confederates States made war on their own...

Oh, and then there is this, from the Articles of Confederation, which predated the Constitution: Bold by me. So let’s please drop this nonsense that the North warred on the South. The Confederates warred on the United States, full stop.

And yet oddly Fort Sumter, attacked by the Confederates, was a United States fort. Odd, that.

To hear you tell it, one might think that the United States and the so-called Confederate States were always two separate countries and one day the U.S.A. just upped and decided to invade and conquer the C.S.A.