redlegphi

I'm going out on a limb and am going to say that none of the current generation have been slaves. Maybe a few have been discriminated against and that is about it. I haven't discriminated against anybody though. I, however, have been passed over for promotion because I am not a minority under the "affirmative action" crap. I'm still waiting for my apology. Since I am white, I guess I will be dead and gone for several generations before someone apologizes to my great-great-grand kids 2 Points which I think I've already made but will restate: 1) While legal slavery ended in 1865, forms of slavery continued in the U.S. until around the end of WW2. So it's entirely possible that an African-American who was enslaved is still alive. 2) Even if all of the slaves are dead, the fallout from slavery affects African-American families to this day. Therefore, they get an apology too.

You don't think a leader, figurehead, board of directors, or representative can honestly apologize for the actions or errors of the populace/company/group? And even if they can't, how would their attempt harm you? To the degree you abstract an apology from the person who is directly responsible, you diminish its value. Why would an apology even matter if the person apologizing had nothing to do with the bad act? And when we're talking about apologizing for something that occurred before any of us were born, it's even more ridiculous. So no, I don't believe Reid, Pelosi, et al should be able to apologize for slavery on behalf of the entire country. A genuine, heartfelt apology for a non-trivial offense is a rare and precious thing. A sham apology like this one, clearly politically motivated, diminishes us all. Its main effect is to desensitize people to apologies in general and induce a cynical response when a real one comes along. The politicians have already done that very thing to politics itself. They should leave it at that. As I've tried to explain on numerous occasions so far, apparently to no avail, the "person" apologizing here is the Congress, not Reid or Pelosi. So yes, that "person" was alive for the actions and that "person" is responsible for the bad act. So now that "person" is apologizing.

Well then I guess it's OK that he ran off to South America without telling anybody where he was going or leaving anybody in charge. My apologies Gov. Sanford. You are a saint among men.

Actions carried out by a group as a whole. As opposed to individual actions. For example, in this case the collective action is the US government allowing slavery to continue legally. An individual action would be a plantation owner purchasing a slave. In the discussed resolution, the Congress is apologizing for the collective actions of the US government, not the individual actions of individual slave owners who are pretty much all dead.

Yes. Also why don't we make it a law that when a girl hits puberty, she has to wear a bikini. While I agree with you that superstitious behavior is ridiculous (in ALL religions) it's not my place to tell anybody how they can and can't raise their children. If a Muslim father feels that his daughter needs to wear a burqa once she hits puberty in order to protect her modesty, that's his right as a father. Once she hits 18, if he's still forcing her to wear it, then arrest his ass.

No it's not. See posts #s 101 and 123. Fuck it, I'll even reiterate it so you don't have to scan back up to those posts. It's not about the actions of any individual people, it's about the actions of the separate entity known as the US government. Nancy Pelosi isn't apologizing, the government is. If it would help, just think of the government like a guy named Frank. Frank is apologizing for his actions against African-Americans.

That I will agree to. This is the kind of thing that will further alienate France's Muslim community. If people feel like their nation is out to get them, they don't tend to feel a lot of loyalty to that nation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he can't run for re-election in 2010 due to term limits, correct? And his Presidential shot is pretty much down the tubes. He's already resigned his slot as Chairman of the RGA, I'd bet that's all we're going to see from him as far as resignations go. He'll just ride out the rest of his time as Governor and then go do whatever.

Outlawing the burqa is attempting to treat a symptom of the issue instead of addressing the issue itself. If France wants to prosecute men who beat or kill their wives/daughters/whatever for not wearing a burqa, more power to them. If they want to prosecute men for forcibly keep a woman from leaving the home without a burqa on, more power to them. However, believe it or not, there are some Islamic women who want to wear it, much like their are some Catholic women who choose to wear a nun's habit. They believe doing so brings them closer to God/Allah. Now I think most religious rituals like this are loony, but if they choose to wear such garb, then who are we (or France) to impinge on their religious rights to worship their God/Allah as they see fit?

The Roman Catholic bikini team? Now I'm definitely not rejoining the Church.

He apparently decided to go with the "South American woman he met online" route. Gotta give him points for difficulty of execution and originality. Had he bothered to put the Lt Gov. in charge before he left, he probably would have gotten away with it.

A workplace and the federal government are two very different things.

Do co-workers fill in for smoking breaks for some? How often does the "prayer break interrupting the assembly line" actually happen? Wendy P. I would suppose that would depend on what shift you're working and how many hours. There are five prayer times during the day. I would guess that the average workday would include 2-3 prayers, unless it's an excessively long shift.

What do burqas have to do with religion? Wearing of the burqa is an interpretation of the Islamic requirement for women to keep modest.

So, just so I'm clear, you think the restriction of the free practice of one's religion is "great"?

That would be when you described the 1940's as "not that long ago" (again, your words, not mine). I would probably describe any period in which people from that period are still alive as "not that long ago". I would not describe all of those periods as "the present day." Semantics really, but there you go.

Right. Which is why it's important. Without that Proclamation, it wouldn't have been the policy for the Army to free the slaves as they moved through the south. Without the Proclamation, the Army would have just moved on through, and left them behind still as slaves. Yet some folks here insist the Proclamation wasn't responsible for any slaves being freed... More important to the subject of the thread, some folks here (including myself) are insisting that the Emancipation Proclamation (and the 13th Amendment, for that matter) did not de facto free all slaves, that many of those it did free were returned to forced bondage, and that it is not an apology by the US government for legalizing and supporting the institution of slavery within its national borders. Since our national government had failed to formally apologize for legalizing and supporting said institution up until this point, some in Congress thought it might be a good idea to state for the record that the American government has a history of treating African-Americans poorly and to apologize for that fact. I really fail to see why this resolution causes such heartache among some in here.

The resolution is not an apology by white people to black people. It's an apology by the United States government, which de jure and/or de facto allowed slavery and Jim Crow to exist within the national borders for an extended period of time.

At what point did "the present day" and "the 1940s" become the same thing?

>1) The Emancipation Proclamation was a worthless document that accomplished nothing. Worthless? No. Did it free a lot of slaves? Not until the Union Army swept through the south. >2) Slavery in the United States persisted well past the end of the civil war--probably right up to the present day. The first part is true for a shockingly large number of African-Americans up until about 1945. While there probably people serving in illegal bondage in the US in "the present day", I would say the number is probably small enough to not play a part in this discussion. >3) You, yourself, probably own dozens of slaves, even if you don't realize it. As far as I know, nobody has asserted anything close to this. >4) These are extremely important issues worthy of the immediate and undivided attention of all branches of our government, which should immediately drop all other business and tend to this. I don't know how much time this took in the House or Senate, but given the vote totals, I'm going to say not much. And while it may not be extremely important to you, people with some history of slavery in their families may consider it important. Others, like myself, may also consider it important because it's important for our country to admit to the mistakes we've made in the past and apologize for them. That's part of being a responsible nation-state.

I'm gonna need more chickens. And boots.

Yes it does. As Billvon has pointed out clearly, Lincoln could declare anything he wanted about the Confederacy's slaves. Until the Union army took the ground, the proclamation was just meaningless words on paper. Also, you both keep leaving out the word "some". The Emancipation Proclamation freed SOME slaves. The Civil War ended slavery for SOME. And I don't know why you're acting like the slaves should thank the US government for returning them to a state of freedom that they were born with and were stolen out of. It'd be like if Billvon stole your guns and I then demanded that you thank him if he gave them back.

Depends. Peonage was also illegal in the United States after the Civil War, but the government turned a blind eye, making it de facto legal. If a government has made what warpedskydiver describes illegal while still allowing it to occur, then they're doing the same thing and should fix things on the enforcement end and apologize. Kinda like our Congress just did.

It seems to me this is a perfect case of "one size does not fit all." Wind farms are great, in some places. Southern Idaho and Northern Nevada, for example, have huge chunks of desert, with high winds. No one lives there, and they are great places for wind farms. Sticking them in the middle of populated land really doesn't make sense in very many places. When the government intervenes to try to "build wind power" we end up with wind farms where people don't want them, rather than where they make sense. As a side note, did anyone else read the article about building wind farms on tethered balloons in the jet stream? Interesting stuff. Where they make sense is up for argument. Sure, building them in the middle of nowhere makes sense aesthetically. But then you have to consider that you're going to have to build transmission lines to get the power from the isolated wind farm to the end users. You're also going to have to build more turbines, because more the electricity will be lost covering the distance between the turbines and the end user. What makes sense really all depends on what's important to you.

I would wager that most people resist coal plants and nuclear plants being built in their neighborhood as well. I'd be curious to see a poll on which of the three people would be the least happy to see in their neighborhood.