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Install Windows posted:Yet the amount of text that remains unamended in the Constitution is actually quite large! And out of thousands of serious proposals to amend, only 27 have passed successfully. 'Get rid of the Constitution' sounds like really terrible politics, not just because of the optics but upending law and order at large definitely will not have unintended consequences and will lead to workers' paradise right? edit: brunch phone posting that isnt really meant as a direct response to above
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May 18, 2014 22:45
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:You may need remedial classes. It describes the liberal left as just as being complicit in constitution worship as the right, which is wrong, unless you've been selectively ignoring discourse the past fifteen years about how problematic the electoral college, disproportionate seating of the Senate, gerrymandering, and other issues are. It's a dumb feel good piece. You can derive how useful it is with the last paragraph talking about "leftists arguing for more expansionary monetary policy".
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May 19, 2014 02:27
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That article is actually very relevant to the discussion, raising the question of why does the left also cling to a dated set of rules that goes against their ideals.
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Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually. Which makes it funny to see right wingers invoke him for their quasi-theocratic America because if there was anything he was remotely on the ball with it was that would not be a good thing.
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May 19, 2014 03:18
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Last Buffalo posted:I wouldn't say he's a good person, I just don't think you need to write off his work because of it. It's not like society at the time were lockstep behind slavery, it was one of the defining issues on what to do about it for the entire antebellum period of American history. Sucrose posted:I addressed this upthread. Yes, many of the other founding fathers owned slaves. But some of them freed those slaves. I don't give George Washington a lot of slack, he owned slaves his entire life, but he at least did slightly better than Jefferson by freeing them upon his death, and not selling or buying any more slaves after the 1770s. Jefferson couldn't even do that, wouldn't even free them after he would no longer derive any benefit from them. Oh, and of other founding fathers, Franklin and John Jay freed their slaves (during their lifetimes), Hamilton never owned slaves, and those three were active in anti-slavery societies. Jefferson probably lived during a Southern political climate that was more open to the idea of abolition than at any other time before the civil war, and he continued to own slaves, treat them brutally, and even, as has been mentioned upthread, tried to dissuade men of his exact same region and social class from from freeing their own slaves. There's no real excuse for him. Besides, if everyone had just listened to Hamilton from the get go it probably would have saved America a good hundred plus years of clumsily pawing towards our modern system.
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May 21, 2014 05:54
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SedanChair posted:Even Hitler built the Autobahn. Plenty of Nazis saw themselves as good people. Godwin has his place, but I don't see why it's ridiculous on its face to say that chattel slavery ranks with the Holocaust and its proponents were personally the height of evil. Not even that, Jefferson being the architect of Indian Removal pretty much ranks him as up there one of the grand villains in the scheme of North American history. Or put another way, guess what was one of the inspirations for Generalplan Ost? 
Berke Negri fucked around with this message at 06:17 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 06:13
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Pauline Kael posted:Do you think talking about the death of tens of millions of Native Americans is appropriate for 2nd graders? Why shouldn't we talk about this?
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May 22, 2014 18:06
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Pauline Kael posted:Because it's inappropriate material for 2nd graders. Sorry if you don't get this, I hope you're not responsible for any 2nd graders. Perhaps you advocate the teaching of Calculus to them too, I'm not suggesting dragging out haunting heliotype prints of decaying and stricken native american corpses on the plains. We can just as easily do things as not rely on whitewashed myths of American history like Columbus was swell, Anything About Pilgrims, Old West, etc. History learned in childhood can be incredibly pervasive in a person's life so we should at least not be perpetuating stuff we already know is wrong. Also did we just have someone say, "native americans killed my great great great grandfather, so they weren't systematically murdered" what the hell.
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May 22, 2014 18:54
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Pauline Kael posted:I'm certainly not justifying it! We've moved a long way from the original point, but simply put, there was nothing *uniquely* evil about early America, no matter how much Sedan and friends want it to be so. American chattel slavery and the whole white supremacist push to cleanse (not conquer but outright remove for specifically white settlement) the continent of indigenous populations as a whole are somewhat peculiarly uncommon in the grand scheme of history though.
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May 22, 2014 20:00
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Nessus posted:The institution of chattel slavery in the American South (and a lot of the Americas by extension) was kind of uniquely awful compared to Roman slavery, being a thrall in Norse Europe, serfdom, corvee labor in Imperial China, etc. While there were certainly many elements in common and I am not somehow asserting that all those other things were "good," you usually had limited legal rights and privileges, in practice or in theory; alternately, your situation was at least bounded somehow... you had to work three months on the roads, yes, but then it ended. As a serf you had to work for your lord, but there were objective ways to gain freedom from those services, if difficult ones. I am not sure I would even put Spanish chattel slavery in the same category as American. It was never as widespread and (if you were a Christian slave) you in theory had limited legal rights and protections. American slavery is fine tuned to subjugate Africans in ways that don't make sense for traditional slavery; such as proscriptions against education, no recourse for manumission ever, and the specific destruction of black families. As to the question, "was this all inevitable?" it is worth pointing out that the Spanish colonies, while terrible on their own and suffered from disease just as much, still were able to cohabitate and exist instead of push for outright extermination like the American colonists.
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May 22, 2014 20:32
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Pauline Kael posted:This is the problem. I, and lots of other Americans, have family that were effected by the Holocaust. Literal blood relatives that got tossed in the ovens. You think it odd that something that's still in immediate memory for millions of Americans, horror caught on film for all to still see today, has a larger cultural effect than what happened 200+ years ago to a group that's pretty fundamentally out of the picture today? Are you dumb? "My relatives died in the holocaust, now let me turn around and dismiss the experiences of native americans because I am not related to any/apparently believe they no longer exist (why this may be so is unimportant!)" Berke Negri fucked around with this message at 17:29 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 17:20
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Pauline Kael posted:You and the rest of the 2jivecrew missed the point. I wasn't comparing jews to Native Americans, I was comparing the number of holocaust museums to museums dedicated to the victims of that progressive reformer, Pol Pot. No you weren't, you specifically mentioned "what happened 200+ years ago" meaning the beginning of Indian Removal. Are you just being purposefully disingenuous here?
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May 23, 2014 19:22
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Nessus posted:Studying other trends, it kind of depends if the revolution fails or if it simply never gets round to happening. A hypothetical altreality where Britain ends the revolution and never goes further West than the Mississippi would probably result with Mexico as a reigning super power, with ports to both oceans, sizeable population, good climate, and bounty of natural resources. It'd depend on how stable the government could be in the long run but it would be very favorable. Britain would likely have to wage a second war against the colonists (as in real life) to put down the slaveocracy, but as a part of the greater British Empire I think you'd see less drive to push into the West and you wouldnt have Jefferson's "every man a yeoman king" mentality pushing people out west probably. I could see North America being overall weaker as it continues its status as proxy battleground for the European powers, which means the tribes are still a necessity to placate politically and that you don't see France selling half the continent off. Spain probably just still crawls into a corner and dies, but independent Mexico less likely to be an likely target of European powers. Basically a much more divided politically and linguistically North America with slavery ending a lot sooner.
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May 23, 2014 20:13
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Amused to Death posted:Mexico already has three of these things(maybe not a bounty compared to the US, but at least more than many nations, namely oil and silver come to mind). Right, but the Mexican-American war saw Mexico losing almost half of the country (and ended up being some of the most resource rich parts) Mexico with the resources of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California is a lot different than modern Mexico.
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May 23, 2014 20:42
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You do realize that there are almost as many Native Americans (a people fundamentally out of the picture according to you!) as American Jews? I don't know where you get this idea that Native Americans are not a real part of American culture or society as countless foods, words, names for places/cities/states, the land come from Natives. If you are anywhere in the West land rights/use, water, etc. between tribal governments and US governments are still big issues to this day.
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May 24, 2014 00:08
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Generic Tea Party member running for Congress who doesn't even sleep if he doesn't have his pocket constitution pressed against his breast would like to disagree, unfortunately.
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May 24, 2014 01:19
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