This is all irrelevant to the question at hand.

So, I've given my answer. You just don't like it.

I'm glad I'm amusing you, but I can't just keep repeating the same answer over and over just because you don't like it.

I have answered your questions. You just didn't like my answers. I'll return us to the beginning of the conversation: the Confederacy is nothing to celebrate — it was shameful treason and a military disaster.

Civilians were ordered to leave, hospitals and churches were not burned. The rest of the city was fair game in a military campaign and skirmishing continued around the city until the end of the war. It was not indiscriminate violence against civilians, it was an ugly thing, but we were fighting a war against traitors.

This is, of course, incorrect. It was about maintaining a system of government sponsored white supremacy. There were tarriff issues, but they did not cause the war. The future of slavery and the question of inclusion of new states as either slave or free led to the war.

Actually, I watched a video of a man dragging a woman out of an elevator and then I wondered, quite reasonably, why the fuck is he so casual and why is the other guy so unalarmed?

Why should I justify the collective punishment of civilians? I never said that's right. I said I was proud my great-great-grandfather marched with Sherman to burn Atlanta. Atlanta was a military target.

I haven't gone back to a negative moral value to the term. There are good and bad traitors, morally speaking. Troops who fought for the Confederacy were bad traitors. Some were less bad, and some fought for reasons that mitigate their treasonous actions, but all were traitors. Bad ones.

There are no circumstances. They were traitors. They fought on the losing side, which was fighting for a morally wrong idea.

As we discussed George Washington was a traitor to the British crown. Clearly he was a "good" traitor in our book, as Americans. The Confederates were bad traitors. They took up arms against our country for an unjust cause.

Taking up arms for just cause makes you morally right, but George Washington was still a traitor to the King of England.

Not sure where you're going with this. You've already accepted that someone who participated in the CSA political system can be called a traitor, you've yet to explain why people who took up arms and fought for that system should not be traitors.

Right, they were traitors. I'm proud that my great-grandfather marched with Sherman to burn Atlanta. They deserved it.

You don't understand how civil wars work?

Yes, Washington was a traitor to the King of England. But he won. The French Resistance fought against the Vichy and the occupation of the Germans, neither of which were accepted by anyone as their government, so, techincally, they weren't traitors, but again, they also won.

If they took up arms against their own country, yes. They are traitors.

Why would you proudly display the flag of a bunch of traitors? And not even good traitors — they got whipped.

How about an American flag?

Where did I defend him? Thanks in advance!