When an apple has molded you don’t cut off the moody part and hope the rest doesn’t mold.
When you allow a corrupt government to set the rules, you’ll never see anything in power held accountable.
And when you let them make any other form of justice taboo, and let them convince you of it, then justice no longer exists.
And when a car gets a flat tire, you don’t get new car, you fix the flat. We can all come up with a useless analogy to make a empty point.
The fact is, the basic principles and concepts that were outlined in the founding documents - ALL men are created equal, and we are are ALL endowed by our creator with the inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, et al, - are still relevant today, and are still the best principles and concepts upon which to base a government today.
We could fix a lot of our problems with a few easy steps, like getting all money out of political campaigns, but that would require all parties to negotiate with each other, AND the voters, in Good Faith, and that’s what’s been lacking in government. Very, very few of them, on either side, have earned the trust of the people, and many of them have earned unforgivable scorn. They need to start listening to the people.
So we may need to do some serious tuning up and upgrading, but the chassis and the body are still good, and the drivetrain can be brought up to speed, as long as the guys on the second shift don’t keep coming in and taking a sledgehammer to it every night, and destroying all our work.
The car has been broken down for awhile and you’re still pretending it drives while the right wing is banging it with hammers while it’s on its way to a compactor.
It wasn’t even made of steel the first time but tin - those words aren’t part of the constitution, they’re from the declaration of independence, and even then excludes women.
You can’t fix a car that’s been broken beyond repair, and you can’t even rebuild it while people are finishing off what semblances there are with a giant hammer.
Y’all have been needing a new car for awhile but still think it’s fine. Then enjoy your fantasy as it’s thrown into the furnace of reality.
We generally refer to the Founding Documents - the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, with equal weight. They are the three founding Documents on display in DC.
The Declaration of Independence is the statement that made us a Nation, and is every bit as important and relevant as the Constitution. In fact, until the Constitution was ratified in 1789, this was the sole document that defined America in the 13 years between.
So the opening line, declaring all men to be created equal, is huge. Further, it refers to these things as God-given rights, which means they cannot be taken away by any human, including a president, or even a long.
And “Men” is a metaphor. You say it excludes women, but in fact, it doesn’t even really include men. It means people in general, ALL people.
Further, it doesn’t even include the racial element that contemporary society likes to ascribe to hypocrisy. When they were talking about All Men Being Created Equal, they didn’t mean racially, or even economically. They meant equal as far as class distinctions. Specifically, they were rejecting as a society, the notion of an Aristocracy, in which some people are literally considered to be better quality humans in every way, simply because of their family influence. That superiority gives them great advantages in education, business, government, courts, military, etc.
Not only were they rejecting the Aristocracy, they were literally founding a new nation with that as one of its founding elements. At that time, a totally new nation hadn’t been created in human memory, and now that this enormous uncharted landmass had been discovered, here was the first actual nation, that wasn’t just a colony of predatory European nations. ALL of those nations recognized the concept of Aristocracy, and none of them liked the idea of a NEW nation where the Aristocracy wasn’t respected.
Of course, France broke with the rest, and supported the Continental Army, but that was more a matter of sticking it to England. The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend, and all that. Considering that our revolution inspired their revolution a few years later, with a much nastier outcome, perhaps it wasn’t the French Monarchy’s best poke at the British. Worked out good for us, though.
Well, yeah, but bigger than that. It has been a customary social expectation for literally centuries, to refer to all collective humanity as “men.” Tolkien was merely using it the same common, traditional way, same as the Founding Fathers, and pretty much everyone else in history, until the last few decades.
Damn, you’re more full of kool-aid then the kool-aid man. There’s no reaching you.
Documents signed by rich white guys that at first excluded non-whites, the poor, and women, of which all this can be proven by history via the founders having slaves as just one example of their hypocrisy, is the best you got? Okay lol.
Hell, it’s those documents that ensured Trump won, because presidents aren’t elected by popular video the but by the “electoral college” because the founders were such fucking snobs that they couldn’t trust voters to actually fully pick someone.
They were just some some rich dudes who didn’t want to pay taxes and strung along a bunch of poor idiots with them. Same then as now, and always has been.
Condemning 18th century people because they didn’t live their lives by 21st century cultural norms is a silly argument. Plenty of our philosophical and political concepts come from ideas as old as the Greeks. We don’t reject valid ideas because the society that produced them didn’t live by our modern values. Of course they didn’t, they were a different society.
We can’t agree with each other in how we should behave NOW, but we should condemn people from the past because they refused to live by proper modern standards, too?
You think you are so much more enlightened than the past? Guess what? So did they. Every generation, no matter how far back you go, thinks they were the most modern, most enlightened generation in history. And yet a few generations down the road, and they all start to look old- fashioned.
When the Founding Fathers wrote those documents, NOBODY had created a nation based on the concepts and standards that became the American government. Every other government in the world favored the wealthy and well-connected. America would be the first nation where the lowliest citizen still held the exact same rights as the wealthiest.
We haven’t always lived up to that promise, but that promise still remains, and it is still a worthy promise to defend. I hear people celebrating the death of America, without any consideration about what would replace it. Nobody has suggested a better system, and destroying the current system, with nothing to replace it, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
I take it back, you’ve become one with the kool-aid.
Not only having the audacity to think America was the first to do that (lol - they based it on an old Greek model), but it’s so western centric it would make a fascist blush, even though you don’t have the same intentions.
But more than that, even hundreds of years before America existed, there were plenty of people who knew slavery - and especially the kind practiced in the USA at the time - was bad. There were countries where it was outlawed.
You can do all you want to excuse the hypocrisy of those founders, it doesn’t excuse that they were just rich hypocrites who definitely knew better, but chose not to do better.
I didn’t say the FFs were the first do base a government on Democracy, I said they were founding a new, independent country for the first time in recent human memory - for millennia, every other country was either conquered by another power, or was divided or combined through some political sleight of hand. No entirely NEW country had been founded outside of previously undiscovered (by Europeans) islands, and even those were Colonies, not new independent nations. It took discovering an entirely unknown continent for a new, independent country to be founded from the ground up, something that hadn’t happened in Europe for centuries.
The FFs recognized this unique opportunity in recent history, and instead of basing their new government on the systems they were already familiar with (mostly monarchies), they decided to reintroduce the Greek concept of Democracy, and give the people a say in their government.
You can dismiss that watershed moment in political history, but it became the inspiration for countless revolutions and independence movements for the next 200+ years. Every island nation that was once colonized by England, France, the Netherlands, etc, and is now an independent nation, was following the example set by the American Colonies. America, and the Founding Fathers, may not have been perfect in anyone’s mind, but if you live in a Democratic nation, with elections, and just rule of law, you can thank America’s Founding Fathers for establishing that system as normal in the world. It absolutely didn’t exist before the American Revolution. Aristocracies ruled, and everybody else did what they were told. You complain about American slavery, but every citizen of every monarchy at the time was essentially a slave as well, with little to no agency over the arc of their life.
You also missed the point that the “equality” that they based America on wasn’t about race, and I specifically said that. Many slave owners had moral issues with slavery, but allowed their economic requirements (greed) to speak louder than their moral qualms, and looked the other way, often with weak, self-serving excuses. Washington specifically wondered if this was the moment to outlaw slavery, specifically when he was overseeing the ratification of the Constitution. He came to the conclusion that with America as weak as a baby, and hostile nations still preparing to attack, he felt like it was the wrong time to address the issue, and it should wait until America was a stronger nation. While that may have been a valid point at that specific moment, it also allowed the gaping wound of slavery to fester for almost a century, until it metastasized into the Civil War. Kind of a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
On one hand, he wasn’t completely wrong, tackling the slavery issue at the very beginning, when the rest of the government infrastructure was being developed, would have caused a huge controversy that would have resulted in America looking far different, probably divided into multiple weak competing, possibly warring, nations, instead of one strong one. OTOH, it’s no coincidence that Washington’s decision favored his own personal economic situation, with which he was nearly obsessed.
That’s why we can’t look at the FF’s “equality” language through our 21st century sensibilities. Equality meant something different to them than it does to us. It’s what we think about all the time, but in a racial sense, while they were primarily concerned about Economic/ Class Equality, something that should be our current priority as well. They saw Economic Inequality as the mechanism that the wealthy use to control the people, and they didn’t want that for American citizens, and founded our nation as a sanctuary from the enslaving Aristocratic system.
While we look back with acorn at the FFs for the way they failed to address address racial issues at the start, they in turn, would look at us with scorn for not protecting our country from the ravages of Sociopathic Oligarchs, the very threat that they founded this country to avoid and prevent. And here we are, letting them take our entire country, because we were too intellectually, politically, and morally weak to resist the MAGA Traitors from the start. Our Founding Fathers may have been slaveowners, but they wouldn’t have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs take our nation from us.
We have been carefully socialized in a Pavlovian manner, to respond certain ways to racial issues ( and gender issues, religious issues, etc), and it keeps us at each others’ throats, and it’s all just a distraction to keep us from addressing the real problem that the Founding Fathers made their priority - ECONOMIC EQUALITY. The wealthy know this, and it’s time the rest of us got on board, too, and stop complaining about each other.
So, yeah, the Founding Fathers weren’t perfect humans, what’s new? Neither are we, for all of our bluster and self-righteousness about their shortcomings. If we are waiting for perfect people to be our leaders, then we are doomed to be ruled by psychopathic political philosophies like MAGA.
The bottom line is that whether we adhere to it as tightly as we should, the concept of founding a country on equality and personal liberty is still a valid one. We shouldn’t dispense with the entire system simply because bad people have figured out how to abuse and exploit the Good Faith efforts that such a system relies on.
Instead, we should rededicate ourselves, and our nation, to a Good Faith return of our nation to those positive, humane, moral values, and crush the the Conservative Propaganda Machine’s Bad Faith efforts to redefine their evil values as normal. The America of our Founding Fathers may not be perfect, but it’s better than whatever the treasonous MAGA Nazis have in store for us.
I mean, show me the unprivileged, non-aristocratic, non-colonials who signed a single founding document. They wanted their own aristocracy off the backs of their fellow man and to tell the king to shove it.
Not a thing was “discovered”, only ravaged and stolen. Describing the 100% predatory and selfish inception of the country as the “first real nation” reaches incredible levels of American mythology. I don’t like the Catholic church, but there’s a reason the way the founders are revered is considered legitimate blasphemy.
When an apple has molded you don’t cut off the moody part and hope the rest doesn’t mold.
When you allow a corrupt government to set the rules, you’ll never see anything in power held accountable. And when you let them make any other form of justice taboo, and let them convince you of it, then justice no longer exists.
And when a car gets a flat tire, you don’t get new car, you fix the flat. We can all come up with a useless analogy to make a empty point.
The fact is, the basic principles and concepts that were outlined in the founding documents - ALL men are created equal, and we are are ALL endowed by our creator with the inalienable rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, et al, - are still relevant today, and are still the best principles and concepts upon which to base a government today.
We could fix a lot of our problems with a few easy steps, like getting all money out of political campaigns, but that would require all parties to negotiate with each other, AND the voters, in Good Faith, and that’s what’s been lacking in government. Very, very few of them, on either side, have earned the trust of the people, and many of them have earned unforgivable scorn. They need to start listening to the people.
So we may need to do some serious tuning up and upgrading, but the chassis and the body are still good, and the drivetrain can be brought up to speed, as long as the guys on the second shift don’t keep coming in and taking a sledgehammer to it every night, and destroying all our work.
Your two party system can never become a modern car.
The car has been broken down for awhile and you’re still pretending it drives while the right wing is banging it with hammers while it’s on its way to a compactor.
It wasn’t even made of steel the first time but tin - those words aren’t part of the constitution, they’re from the declaration of independence, and even then excludes women.
You can’t fix a car that’s been broken beyond repair, and you can’t even rebuild it while people are finishing off what semblances there are with a giant hammer.
Y’all have been needing a new car for awhile but still think it’s fine. Then enjoy your fantasy as it’s thrown into the furnace of reality.
We generally refer to the Founding Documents - the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, with equal weight. They are the three founding Documents on display in DC.
The Declaration of Independence is the statement that made us a Nation, and is every bit as important and relevant as the Constitution. In fact, until the Constitution was ratified in 1789, this was the sole document that defined America in the 13 years between.
So the opening line, declaring all men to be created equal, is huge. Further, it refers to these things as God-given rights, which means they cannot be taken away by any human, including a president, or even a long.
And “Men” is a metaphor. You say it excludes women, but in fact, it doesn’t even really include men. It means people in general, ALL people.
Further, it doesn’t even include the racial element that contemporary society likes to ascribe to hypocrisy. When they were talking about All Men Being Created Equal, they didn’t mean racially, or even economically. They meant equal as far as class distinctions. Specifically, they were rejecting as a society, the notion of an Aristocracy, in which some people are literally considered to be better quality humans in every way, simply because of their family influence. That superiority gives them great advantages in education, business, government, courts, military, etc.
Not only were they rejecting the Aristocracy, they were literally founding a new nation with that as one of its founding elements. At that time, a totally new nation hadn’t been created in human memory, and now that this enormous uncharted landmass had been discovered, here was the first actual nation, that wasn’t just a colony of predatory European nations. ALL of those nations recognized the concept of Aristocracy, and none of them liked the idea of a NEW nation where the Aristocracy wasn’t respected.
Of course, France broke with the rest, and supported the Continental Army, but that was more a matter of sticking it to England. The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend, and all that. Considering that our revolution inspired their revolution a few years later, with a much nastier outcome, perhaps it wasn’t the French Monarchy’s best poke at the British. Worked out good for us, though.
so “Men” in the Lord of the Rings sense
Well, yeah, but bigger than that. It has been a customary social expectation for literally centuries, to refer to all collective humanity as “men.” Tolkien was merely using it the same common, traditional way, same as the Founding Fathers, and pretty much everyone else in history, until the last few decades.
Damn, you’re more full of kool-aid then the kool-aid man. There’s no reaching you.
Documents signed by rich white guys that at first excluded non-whites, the poor, and women, of which all this can be proven by history via the founders having slaves as just one example of their hypocrisy, is the best you got? Okay lol.
Hell, it’s those documents that ensured Trump won, because presidents aren’t elected by popular video the but by the “electoral college” because the founders were such fucking snobs that they couldn’t trust voters to actually fully pick someone.
They were just some some rich dudes who didn’t want to pay taxes and strung along a bunch of poor idiots with them. Same then as now, and always has been.
Condemning 18th century people because they didn’t live their lives by 21st century cultural norms is a silly argument. Plenty of our philosophical and political concepts come from ideas as old as the Greeks. We don’t reject valid ideas because the society that produced them didn’t live by our modern values. Of course they didn’t, they were a different society.
We can’t agree with each other in how we should behave NOW, but we should condemn people from the past because they refused to live by proper modern standards, too?
You think you are so much more enlightened than the past? Guess what? So did they. Every generation, no matter how far back you go, thinks they were the most modern, most enlightened generation in history. And yet a few generations down the road, and they all start to look old- fashioned.
When the Founding Fathers wrote those documents, NOBODY had created a nation based on the concepts and standards that became the American government. Every other government in the world favored the wealthy and well-connected. America would be the first nation where the lowliest citizen still held the exact same rights as the wealthiest.
We haven’t always lived up to that promise, but that promise still remains, and it is still a worthy promise to defend. I hear people celebrating the death of America, without any consideration about what would replace it. Nobody has suggested a better system, and destroying the current system, with nothing to replace it, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
I take it back, you’ve become one with the kool-aid.
Not only having the audacity to think America was the first to do that (lol - they based it on an old Greek model), but it’s so western centric it would make a fascist blush, even though you don’t have the same intentions.
But more than that, even hundreds of years before America existed, there were plenty of people who knew slavery - and especially the kind practiced in the USA at the time - was bad. There were countries where it was outlawed.
You can do all you want to excuse the hypocrisy of those founders, it doesn’t excuse that they were just rich hypocrites who definitely knew better, but chose not to do better.
Completely missed the point.
I didn’t say the FFs were the first do base a government on Democracy, I said they were founding a new, independent country for the first time in recent human memory - for millennia, every other country was either conquered by another power, or was divided or combined through some political sleight of hand. No entirely NEW country had been founded outside of previously undiscovered (by Europeans) islands, and even those were Colonies, not new independent nations. It took discovering an entirely unknown continent for a new, independent country to be founded from the ground up, something that hadn’t happened in Europe for centuries.
The FFs recognized this unique opportunity in recent history, and instead of basing their new government on the systems they were already familiar with (mostly monarchies), they decided to reintroduce the Greek concept of Democracy, and give the people a say in their government.
You can dismiss that watershed moment in political history, but it became the inspiration for countless revolutions and independence movements for the next 200+ years. Every island nation that was once colonized by England, France, the Netherlands, etc, and is now an independent nation, was following the example set by the American Colonies. America, and the Founding Fathers, may not have been perfect in anyone’s mind, but if you live in a Democratic nation, with elections, and just rule of law, you can thank America’s Founding Fathers for establishing that system as normal in the world. It absolutely didn’t exist before the American Revolution. Aristocracies ruled, and everybody else did what they were told. You complain about American slavery, but every citizen of every monarchy at the time was essentially a slave as well, with little to no agency over the arc of their life.
You also missed the point that the “equality” that they based America on wasn’t about race, and I specifically said that. Many slave owners had moral issues with slavery, but allowed their economic requirements (greed) to speak louder than their moral qualms, and looked the other way, often with weak, self-serving excuses. Washington specifically wondered if this was the moment to outlaw slavery, specifically when he was overseeing the ratification of the Constitution. He came to the conclusion that with America as weak as a baby, and hostile nations still preparing to attack, he felt like it was the wrong time to address the issue, and it should wait until America was a stronger nation. While that may have been a valid point at that specific moment, it also allowed the gaping wound of slavery to fester for almost a century, until it metastasized into the Civil War. Kind of a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
On one hand, he wasn’t completely wrong, tackling the slavery issue at the very beginning, when the rest of the government infrastructure was being developed, would have caused a huge controversy that would have resulted in America looking far different, probably divided into multiple weak competing, possibly warring, nations, instead of one strong one. OTOH, it’s no coincidence that Washington’s decision favored his own personal economic situation, with which he was nearly obsessed.
That’s why we can’t look at the FF’s “equality” language through our 21st century sensibilities. Equality meant something different to them than it does to us. It’s what we think about all the time, but in a racial sense, while they were primarily concerned about Economic/ Class Equality, something that should be our current priority as well. They saw Economic Inequality as the mechanism that the wealthy use to control the people, and they didn’t want that for American citizens, and founded our nation as a sanctuary from the enslaving Aristocratic system.
While we look back with acorn at the FFs for the way they failed to address address racial issues at the start, they in turn, would look at us with scorn for not protecting our country from the ravages of Sociopathic Oligarchs, the very threat that they founded this country to avoid and prevent. And here we are, letting them take our entire country, because we were too intellectually, politically, and morally weak to resist the MAGA Traitors from the start. Our Founding Fathers may have been slaveowners, but they wouldn’t have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs take our nation from us.
We have been carefully socialized in a Pavlovian manner, to respond certain ways to racial issues ( and gender issues, religious issues, etc), and it keeps us at each others’ throats, and it’s all just a distraction to keep us from addressing the real problem that the Founding Fathers made their priority - ECONOMIC EQUALITY. The wealthy know this, and it’s time the rest of us got on board, too, and stop complaining about each other.
So, yeah, the Founding Fathers weren’t perfect humans, what’s new? Neither are we, for all of our bluster and self-righteousness about their shortcomings. If we are waiting for perfect people to be our leaders, then we are doomed to be ruled by psychopathic political philosophies like MAGA.
The bottom line is that whether we adhere to it as tightly as we should, the concept of founding a country on equality and personal liberty is still a valid one. We shouldn’t dispense with the entire system simply because bad people have figured out how to abuse and exploit the Good Faith efforts that such a system relies on.
Instead, we should rededicate ourselves, and our nation, to a Good Faith return of our nation to those positive, humane, moral values, and crush the the Conservative Propaganda Machine’s Bad Faith efforts to redefine their evil values as normal. The America of our Founding Fathers may not be perfect, but it’s better than whatever the treasonous MAGA Nazis have in store for us.
A whole speech just sidelining the Native Americans as insignificant.
Wow.
PS: it’s the “conservative propaganda machine” that defends the founders as justified in everything.
I mean, show me the unprivileged, non-aristocratic, non-colonials who signed a single founding document. They wanted their own aristocracy off the backs of their fellow man and to tell the king to shove it.
Not a thing was “discovered”, only ravaged and stolen. Describing the 100% predatory and selfish inception of the country as the “first real nation” reaches incredible levels of American mythology. I don’t like the Catholic church, but there’s a reason the way the founders are revered is considered legitimate blasphemy.