The Wank Between The States
Let's kick it old-school with some Usenet wank, coming from the wankiest of all historian groups: U.S. Civil War geeks.

It starts off with a scholarly enough question, one that has been debated from here to Timbuktu and back in every U.S. history class I've ever been in: When Lincoln had the Maryland Legislature arrested to stop the state from seceding from the Union, were his actions criminal and illegal?

If you're remotely surprised that this gets kind of wanky, you've apparently never encountered Civil War scholars before. The topic is made of wank.

The original poster appears to have an agenda. An agenda which includes insulting Northern education: Maybe in the North they only teach the history that sounds good to them. He also makes sarcastically entitled posts, like The Union Army did the moral and righteous and glorious thing..., over whether the Indian Wars invalidate the whole anti-slavery argument re: the Civil War.

Plus there's the fun of arguing whether keeping Union troops at Ft. Sumner was an act of war, whether Jeff Davis was also guilty of criminal acts, and the never ending question of what is guvment for, anyway?

My own personal favorite exchange, by the way, is this:

[Lincoln] waged war on the South killing 620,000 men and murdering 50,000 Southern civilians including blacks., which provokes this response:

Man, if Lincoln could do all that, then just give me 100 Lincolns, and I'll take over the world. :-)

Perhaps Washington isn't our only president who's twelve stories high made of radiation?

There's a bunch of other microwank, scattered here and there. It's not huge, and god knows it's nothing new, but a nice scholarly wank is always a treat on a pleasant Sunday morning.

(ETA: Natty apparently has a bee in his bonnet and a bug up his butt. Both threads a little old, but I thought I'd share them, especially the one with the fun reactions over whether or not damnyankees still feel undoing slavery was worth their war dead.)