I am from Europe. What was the American civil war about?

If 3 responses is your definition of getting dogpiled, then I would say you're using the wrong websites. 

Pretty much the whole point of a public forum, is to get lots of different perspectives. I can post a thread and expect to get 50 posts from 40 different people. The big benefit of this is that you aren't relying on one persons perspective and knowledge base.  

If I write a post about politics and make some errors, there's lots of people that can correct me. 

I've posted on Reddit, Facebook, ResetEra, Neogaf, YouTube. Small forums and big. Even on some of the smaller ones, if I only got 3 responses I'd feel like I was being ignored. 

That's a fair question and I appreciate it being asked.

Since there's some credibility challenges here to the idea that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, I'll note that I first heard this position from a Democrat professor who taught overseas about 20 years ago.  This isn't a position that is held along partisan lines or just in the south either (the prof was from New Jersey), and it shouldn't be dismissed easily.

As to the question at-hand, the issues of states' rights aren't just a cheap copout like pi guy proposes but has its roots in the 1787 conference in which many of the founders debated providing stronger powers to the federal government.  This gave us compromises like the bicarmeral Congress to address concerns from larger states that they'd be ruled by a minority (the House of Reps) and the smaller states' issue with being overpowered by larger states like VA and NY at the time (the Senate).  It also led to the 3/5ths voting rule to stop slave states from getting ghost districts (like California is now with illegals, incidentally), and the Bill of Rights as a written and explicit restraint on federal power over states and individuals.

Fast-forward a generation, and aside from the north threatening succession during the War of 1812 due to President Monroe's actions which harmed commerce with the UK out of Boston, we had the Nullification Crisis of 1830 because some states didn't like...wait for it...tariffs!  Yes, Andrew Jackson's tariffs from a few years earlier had sparked another debate about what rights a state had to balk at perceived federal government overreach (Gavin Newsom, eat your cold-blooded heart out!).  There's a great summary of this event here: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/nullification-crisis

Suffice to say, the first eighty years of US history (known as the first turning) were an era where multiple areas of the country debated and often fought over what exactly the relationship between the federal government and states were to be.  By the 1860s when the Civil War had broken out, slavery was used as a propaganda tool on both sides (Lincoln needed it as much as southern leaders to have a moral cause to justify families sending their boys to die in the most brutal war to-date in US history).  At the heart of the war though was the simmering issue of Washington's control over local affairs (which is a universal complaint today, especially when one's opponent is in office).

I'm not an American, either by birth or by passport, but have strong connections with the country through immediate family and proximity throughout my life.  It's a rich and fascinating history and it pains me to see that the government-run school system has allowed millions like pi guy boldly proclaim a misrepresented and oversimplified version of the country's past as though it were reality.  The truth is, as is often the case, far more fascinating and complex.

I was speaking to the original post I responded to, not to the collective chatter that has happened recently here.  If you were ever in a proper debate though (eg Oxford), you'd be called out for ad hominum for presuming upon my motives and that you're entitled to a reply.

I don't mind disagreeing with you, but up your game!

I was speaking to the original post I responded to, not to the collective chatter that has happened recently here.  If you were ever in a proper debate though (eg Oxford), you'd be called out for ad hominum for presuming upon my motives and that you're entitled to a reply.

I don't mind disagreeing with you, but up your game!

Err, I'm going to be blunt but that is called disagreement, it happens in debate, if a user can't handle it then they shouldn't bother trying to debate in the first place. We're not going to start moderating users for disagreeing with other users. If you have an unpopular opinion then naturally a few people are going to disagree with you and damn, 3 people isn't even that many at all, Lol.

Are users meant to elect someone to speak on behalf of the collective opinion? How do they organise that? How do we know what other peoples opinions are before they post? Lol. Are we as Moderators meant to say "Ah, one person has responded to this user in disagreement, therefore nobody else is allowed to respond to this user". Even when people have similar disagreements, they post different perspectives still and things that other people have not thought of. I know there's a lot of times where I've disagreed with someone and posted my opinion but another user has posted a far better detailed disagreement rebuttal than I did.

Fair enough if a dog-pile on a specific user is dragging a thread off-topic but...That's not the case here. I think it's a far bigger issue when a user pops into this thread every few months with a hot-take or argument bait, only to immediately vanish and not respond to anyone's responses, thus wasting everyone's time, which is a common trend with fans of a certain politician who just want to drop a grenade and run.

I don't see why we should do anything about you having an unpopular opinion.

That's a fair question and I appreciate it being asked.

Since there's some credibility challenges here to the idea that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, I'll note that I first heard this position from a Democrat professor who taught overseas about 20 years ago.  This isn't a position that is held along partisan lines or just in the south either (the prof was from New Jersey), and it shouldn't be dismissed easily.

As to the question at-hand, the issues of states' rights aren't just a cheap copout like pi guy proposes but has its roots in the 1787 conference in which many of the founders debated providing stronger powers to the federal government.  This gave us compromises like the bicarmeral Congress to address concerns from larger states that they'd be ruled by a minority (the House of Reps) and the smaller states' issue with being overpowered by larger states like VA and NY at the time (the Senate).  It also led to the 3/5ths voting rule to stop slave states from getting ghost districts (like California is now with illegals, incidentally), and the Bill of Rights as a written and explicit restraint on federal power over states and individuals.

Fast-forward a generation, and aside from the north threatening succession during the War of 1812 due to President Monroe's actions which harmed commerce with the UK out of Boston, we had the Nullification Crisis of 1830 because some states didn't like...wait for it...tariffs!  Yes, Andrew Jackson's tariffs from a few years earlier had sparked another debate about what rights a state had to balk at perceived federal government overreach (Gavin Newsom, eat your cold-blooded heart out!).  There's a great summary of this event here: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/nullification-crisis

Suffice to say, the first eighty years of US history (known as the first turning) were an era where multiple areas of the country debated and often fought over what exactly the relationship between the federal government and states were to be.  By the 1860s when the Civil War had broken out, slavery was used as a propaganda tool on both sides (Lincoln needed it as much as southern leaders to have a moral cause to justify families sending their boys to die in the most brutal war to-date in US history).  At the heart of the war though was the simmering issue of Washington's control over local affairs (which is a universal complaint today, especially when one's opponent is in office).

I'm not an American, either by birth or by passport, but have strong connections with the country through immediate family and proximity throughout my life.  It's a rich and fascinating history and it pains me to see that the government-run school system has allowed millions like pi guy boldly proclaim a misrepresented and oversimplified version of the country's past as though it were reality.  The truth is, as is often the case, far more fascinating and complex.

IG I’m still just a little traumatized by my experience with this thread lol. It’s easy to talk one-on-one; it’s not so easy when talking three-on-one. I agree that 3-to-1 is not much of a “dogpile,” though it is undesirable and def does enable an echo chamber to form; hence, why I believe there should be some protections for people who leave a comment which many disagree with here (within reason ofc. I’m not advocating for protection of somebody defending the Holocaust). Maybe it could be something simple like, “If you two want to debate, please take it to PM. Otherwise, you will be thread banned.”

You are traumatized because people called you out on your trolling. The trolling you admitted to commit.

Now you propose protection for people who can't put forward an intellectually honest argument. That's funny. Then again, I would agree that that is the only course of action that could make Trump voters participate in this thread again.

An echo chamber can only be created when moderators begin to ban people en masse, like it's done on ResetEra. There's no reason to believe that this will happen on VGChartz because that would require the moderators being motivated enough to do something. Just think of how long it took them until they did something about you despite how blatant you acted and how overdue it was.

Also, your PM proposal is crazy, considering how many PMs you sent me. Not to mention that the entire point of a forum is public discussion.