Was the Civil War fought over slavery or state’s rights?

There was a fascinating article on the demise of Firefly on fireflyfans.net, where the author says with some justification that the show’s heroes were patterned after an idealized Confederacy from the American Civil War, minus the slavery issue, and that this may have had a role in the show’s termination.  The claim that I’m uncertain about, however, is that the author says the Civil War was not fought over slavery, it was fought over state’s rights.  How much truth is there to this statement?  I know Abe Lincoln said that he didn’t care about freeing the slaves, just preserving the Union, but I remember from my high school history class that slavery was a pretty big issue at the time.  Then again, the winners write the textbooks, and I went to school in the North… how biased was my US History education?

Privacy and blogs

One of the issues with the Web is that blogs are often meant as a way to communicate with one’s friends, but it’s hard to keep jerks from finding them and using them against you without relatively inconvenient systems like password protection (that make it hard to show your entries to a new person).
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Which is of course one of the things that makes LiveJournal great!  The Friends system makes it easy to add and remove people’s access privileges.

Actually, part of my personal philosophy is that you shouldn’t do anything that you can’t defend, and that you should be willing to do and defend any actions that are morally right even if they are unpopular. As I think Confucious said, “the quality of a man is determined not by what they do when they are being watched, but how they behave in private.”  If you have made a mistake in the past, it should not bother you to freely admit that you’ve been in error if you have in fact learned from your mistake.  People have the right to change their minds, and it is OK, for instance, for you to have smoked marijuana in the past even if you are straightedge now.  Otherwise, people wouldn’t be able to grow and develop, they would be locked into whatever morality (or lack thereof) their parents chose for them.

The only problem is that privacy is necessary in oppressive, non-Libertarian societies where people will interfere with your life even when you’re just minding your own business, and they will try to enforce their morality upon you.  If I were gay in a society that lynched gay people, I probably wouldn’t come out on my blog despite this personal philosophy.

How do you folks feel about my personal philosophy?  Should I be embarrassed of it, or does it make sense? 😉