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by marcosdumay 428 days ago
I'm not sure the US population ever really believed in fundamental freedoms.

They had an apartheid up to 60 years ago. There are living people from that time, and you can't believe in any human right and have an apartheid at the same time.

2 comments

People believe in logical inconsistencies all of the time, it’s practically the default. Also there is no such thing as perfect freedom, it’s best thought of as an optimization problem with many dimensions.

As an example, the civil rights act necessarily curtails the freedom of association.

"They had an apartheid up to 60 years ago."

For many of us outside the US there's a dichotomy here. The North won the bitterly contested Civil War and freed the slaves but never really afforded them true freedoms. Why?

The perception from the outside is that conscience over slavery per se drove the North to war and not concern for the fact that slaves were actually people who were suffering enslavement and or unfairly treated.

Edit: Given the Civil War why was the Civil Rights Movement 100 years later necessary?