Two cultures: Hunters and Gatherers vs Free Stuff

[kwc57]

First..sure she was. She's essentially advocating for home schooling. And where are you getting these numbers? Some states get back more then they put in. And who is forcing Catholic schools to teach birth control?

And yeah..people did come here because they had to. Ever hear of the Great potato famine? There were many famines in China. Additionally there were wars, persecution and a great deal many other things. Ever bother to read what it says on the Statue of Liberty?

""Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

While the US was a miserable place to live, many places in the world were far worse.

And yeah..since the New Deal..the concentration of wealth has gotten far worse. Thanks to Ronnie Reagan and the boys.

There are plenty of places on the planet where there is less "inequality" of wealth. Are there any in particular that you'd really care to live in?

I'm fine right here.

New York is by far the best city in the world.

So while you like to bitch about it, in reality you are just fine and dandy living with the "injustice"?

 

[kwc57]

oh, and just because i can't resist when people lie about the founders...i'll say this.

If that is so...just why did they spend nearly 20 years in negotiations with england, trying to remain a protectorate of england while colonist were being imprisoned and murdered if they wanted to "...become the masters of the colonies?" seems to me that men of unbridled ambitions would have just avoided all the crap and revolted in the first place. It's another one of those statements that defies common sense!

What was it washington said when the delegation came to his farm and asked him to become the first president of the us...oh yeah. "have i not yet given enough?"

yep...sounds like the master of america to me.

Dude, the founders were men with all the frailties of men. I could fill up a book with things they did i don't agree with. But i'm not going to allow bull shit to be made up and spouted as fact in some lame attempt to use revisionist crap to support any ideology...especially a failed one that is antithetical to our founding!

Stop it!

stop what?

Washington was a "master". He owned slaves. So did jefferson. In fact..he had kids with one of them.

doesn't it embarrass you at all to make statements this ignorant? You do realize that washington maintained far more slaves at mt. Vernon than was profitable for him to maintain because he did not wish to break up families and did not trust any who bought to slaves to keep families together. Setting them free also included unacceptablew risks, to them at that tiime. By the end of the revolutionary war he personally opposed slavery and pledged to never buy another. His will provided for the emancipation of all his slaves should they choose to leave.

Doesn't sound like ambitions to be 'master of the universe' to me, but hey, don't let the history get in the way of your misconceptions. Most of the founders were not slave owners and did not condone slavery.

View attachment 17592

 

[The T]

First..sure she was. She's essentially advocating for home schooling. And where are you getting these numbers? Some states get back more then they put in. And who is forcing Catholic schools to teach birth control?

And yeah..people did come here because they had to. Ever hear of the Great potato famine? There were many famines in China. Additionally there were wars, persecution and a great deal many other things. Ever bother to read what it says on the Statue of Liberty?

""Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"

While the US was a miserable place to live, many places in the world were far worse.

And yeah..since the New Deal..the concentration of wealth has gotten far worse. Thanks to Ronnie Reagan and the boys.

There are plenty of places on the planet where there is less "inequality" of wealth. Are there any in particular that you'd really care to live in?

I'm fine right here.

New York is by far the best city in the world.

NYC is a cesspool.

 

[Foxfyre]

Just back from delivering food stuffs to a local facility who will be preparing Easter dinner for the homeless tomorrow. They serve meals every day but try to do something a little more special on special days. There were a couple of young men out on the walk who seemed to be picketing the shelter.

Out of curiosity, I approached one of the young men and asked what he was protesting and why this facility? He wasn't 100% coherent but seemed to object to the facility holding a church service in advance of the meal which was 'coercive' and then something about greedy, selfish, hateful, racist America that put the homeless on the street and deprived good people of the American dream or some such as that.

And then I received this in my morning e-mail.

It seemed to fit:

We have become a nation of 'free stuff'.

The folks who are getting the free stuff don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.

And, the folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop.

And the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!

Now... the people who are forcing the people who pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.

So... the people who are GETTING the free stuff have been convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff by the people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff and giving them the free stuff in the first place.

We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.

Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded. The reason?

The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.

The United States officially became a Republic in 1787, 225 years ago. The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff.

Time is running out to turn that around.

The United States was created on a concept of exceptionalism meaning that it was the only nation the world had ever known in which the people would have their rights secured and then be free to govern themselves and live their lives as they chose. Little by little, we have seen that exceptionalism eroded and chipped away until we are now approaching a tipping point.

We have to decide if we understand American exceptionalism and are convinced that it is worth preserving. Or whether we will succumb to the pressures of the 'free stuff' crowd and turn our freedom over to the government who will assign what rights and freedoms we will have.

And there isnt a lot of time left in which we will have a choice.

 

[Foxfyre]

I give credit where credit is due, and you are due a lot of credit for your very excellent grasp of U.S. history and the correct interpretation of it. (Unlike a few of our other members here but they seem to be unmovably convinced of the righteousness of their perceptions and are unlikely to be easily educated.)

It is absurd to exalt progressivism as producing all that is good, noble, compassionate, and virtuous while completely dismissing or denying that progressivism is at least partially responsible for the increasing divide between rich and poor, responsible for an increasing permanently unemployable underclass, responsible for the breakdown of traditional institutions and values that made the USA the exceptional nation that it is, responsible for unsustainable trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see/

Conversely, had we stuck with the undisputable values of the Founders, we could have avoided so many of those negatives.

Some of our friends here reject that our history has any relevance to our present, that the principles that worked in the late 18th and 19th centuries are of no use to us in modern times, and we should avoid discussing the virtues of the hunters and gatherers versus those who clamor for free stuff.

And which "undisputable" values were those? That people with a different skin color could be bought and sold as property? That women had no rights whatsoever? That the people leading this country should only be voted in by White Christian Males with land?

Those values?

This is what I mean about cherry picking. And this is what "progressivism" is all about. It's progressing past the things that aren't worth keeping. It's also the ability to figure out when you are wrong..and what "values" are wrong.

Most of the Founders did not advocate or support slavery, but in order to form a union of all the colonies, that issue was taken off the table during the vote for and ratification of the Constitution that neither specifically protected/supported slavery nor forbade it. It was much like the rigid theocracies that existed in some place. Most of the Founders deplored those, but did not make it an issue when the Constitution was written.

One of the values promoted by the Founders was their faith in a mostly religious and morally centered free people to eventually get around to doing the right thing. And they were right. By around the turn of that century, those little theocracies had all dissolved. Over the next 60 years, through non violent activism, the people pushed for an abolition of slavery which came to a head with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Mind you the vast majority of Americans were ready to end slavery at that time. And so slavery that had existed in American since the 16th century, had been practiced by Native Americans and also the Africans long before that, has now become a distant memory. Now no natural born American, no immigrant, no Native American anywhere would even consider slavery to be anything other than evil and wrong.

The values promoted by the Founders were respect and reverence for life, for liberty, and for a free people, with their rights secured, to pursue happiness in any way that they chose to to do and however they defined what that would be. The values promoted by the Founders is that the people would have their rights secured and would otherwise be totally free to govern themselves and form whatever sort of society they wished to have.

Is that cherry picking?

 

[Wiseacre]

Most of the people who lived at the time of this country's founding were themselves recent immigrants or decendents of immigrants from places where they had no rights or liberties, or very few. They came from autocratic monarchies or gov'ts that could take anything and everything, propertry rights were next to non-existent. So when the Constitution was written many people wanted the new gov't to be less powerful, less intrusive, and less autocratic; that document was designed to LIMIT what the gov't could do. They hoped they had left that behind and would have a chance to live their lives, build something for themselves rather than the gov't or the aristocracy, and give their children a shot at a better life.

In many ways, many on the left want to take us back to what our ancestors tried to escape: a gov't that could control every aspect of your life. Some perhaps do not fully realize the path we're on, and by the time we do it might well be too late to do anything about it.

 

[The T]

I give credit where credit is due, and you are due a lot of credit for your very excellent grasp of U.S. history and the correct interpretation of it. (Unlike a few of our other members here but they seem to be unmovably convinced of the righteousness of their perceptions and are unlikely to be easily educated.)

It is absurd to exalt progressivism as producing all that is good, noble, compassionate, and virtuous while completely dismissing or denying that progressivism is at least partially responsible for the increasing divide between rich and poor, responsible for an increasing permanently unemployable underclass, responsible for the breakdown of traditional institutions and values that made the USA the exceptional nation that it is, responsible for unsustainable trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see/

Conversely, had we stuck with the undisputable values of the Founders, we could have avoided so many of those negatives.

Some of our friends here reject that our history has any relevance to our present, that the principles that worked in the late 18th and 19th centuries are of no use to us in modern times, and we should avoid discussing the virtues of the hunters and gatherers versus those who clamor for free stuff.

And which "undisputable" values were those? That people with a different skin color could be bought and sold as property? That women had no rights whatsoever? That the people leading this country should only be voted in by White Christian Males with land?

Those values?

This is what I mean about cherry picking. And this is what "progressivism" is all about. It's progressing past the things that aren't worth keeping. It's also the ability to figure out when you are wrong..and what "values" are wrong.

Most of the Founders did not advocate or support slavery, but in order to form a union of all the colonies, that issue was taken off the table during the vote for and ratification of the Constitution that neither specifically protected/supported slavery nor forbade it. It was much like the rigid theocracies that existed in some place. Most of the Founders deplored those, but did not make it an issue when the Constitution was written.

One of the values promoted by the Founders was their faith in a mostly religious and morally centered free people to eventually get around to doing the right thing. And they were right. By around the turn of that century, those little theocracies had all dissolved. Over the next 60 years, through non violent activism, the people pushed for an abolition of slavery which came to a head with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War, and the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Mind you the vast majority of Americans were ready to end slavery at that time. And so slavery that had existed in American since the 16th century, had been practiced by Native Americans and also the Africans long before that, has now become a distant memory. Now no natural born American, no immigrant, no Native American anywhere would even consider slavery to be anything other than evil and wrong.

The values promoted by the Founders were respect and reverence for life, for liberty, and for a free people, with their rights secured, to pursue happiness in any way that they chose to to do and however they defined what that would be. The values promoted by the Founders is that the people would have their rights secured and would otherwise be totally free to govern themselves and form whatever sort of society they wished to have.

Is that cherry picking?

See also the 3/5ths Compromise...as a rmedy to get Southern States aboard to ratify the Constitution as they knew Slavery would have to be dealt with later on...IF the DOI, and the Constitution were to hold water in the cause of Liberty.

 

[Katzndogz]

The left is convinced that Plato was right when he wrote The Republic. Thomas More was correct in creating Utopia and Thomas Hobbs was on the right track in Leviathan.

That each wrote and rewrote their subject matter trying to find a way in which the government did not become so tremendously powerful that the city could not exist without a government that exerted so much control the people themselves lost their humanity.

Then Karl Marx wrote the communist manifesto who solved the problem by claiming that in the perfect communist world a government would be unnecessary. That is the goal of anarchists, we just all love each other so much, we work without pay, take only what we need and no more. This is the imaginings of the starry eyed college kids.

 

[Foxfyre]

Most of the people who lived at the time of this country's founding were themselves recent immigrants or decendents of immigrants from places where they had no rights or liberties, or very few. They came from autocratic monarchies or gov'ts that could take anything and everything, propertry rights were next to non-existent. So when the Constitution was written many people wanted the new gov't to be less powerful, less intrusive, and less autocratic; that document was designed to LIMIT what the gov't could do. They hoped they had left that behind and would have a chance to live their lives, build something for themselves rather than the gov't or the aristocracy, and give their children a shot at a better life.

In many ways, many on the left want to take us back to what our ancestors tried to escape: a gov't that could control every aspect of your life. Some perhaps do not fully realize the path we're on, and by the time we do it might well be too late to do anything about it.

Exactly. I have posted before that from Old Testament times, the people have clamored for a king who would make their lives better, less difficult, less risky. The Founders were smart enough to realize that the king thing wasn't working out so well anywhere in Europe. They longed to be free to be in charge of their own destinies despite how difficult that might be or what the risks might be.

Now we have a nation so used to the government 'takiing care' of them that they are becoming increasingly willing for the government to have the whole responsibility. They are poorly schooled in history. Otherwise they would know that in no dictatorship, no monarchy, no theocracy, no totalitarian or authoritarian government at any time in history have the people been better off. The only ones who thrive under such governments are the few who the government favors.

The problem is that if the current generation does not turn this around, by the time we all pass on, there will be too few left who know or understand the history to have any voice, much less any power. The rest will have been indoctrinated by the very government seeking to wrest power from the people.

 

[LoneLaugher]

You are not in touch with our nation's young people.

 

[The T]

You are not in touch with our nation's young people.

The very same young that are being lied to about the Founding of this nation courtesy of Gumint Education that only teaches them to be good citizens, Good workers...and that's it?

The same education citizen that thinks ALL students deserve a good grade even if they get it wrong...all get a trophy...Competition BAD...only to come to find out that they were lied to and we see shit like OWS when these same young people get in the real world and they find out the real world keeps score?

Really?

 

[LoneLaugher]

From your e-mail. ( nutters seem to get lots of e-mails )

"The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff."

What are the chances of you breaking this down for me? Does it mean that there are more freeloaders....people who are able but unwilling to support themselves....than there are hard-working Americans? That is what is seems to say.

I'd love for you to provide some numbers. You know.....like HOW MANY ABLE-BODIED AND ABLE-MINDED AMERICAN ADULTS ARE THERE? THEN, HOW MANY OF THOSE ARE UNWILLING TO WORK TO SUPPORT THEMSELVES AND ARE BEING SUPPORTED BY THOSE WHO DO? HOW MUCH DOES THIS SUPPORT COST?

HOW MANY?
HOW MUCH?

 

[Foxfyre]

From your e-mail. ( nutters seem to get lots of e-mails )

"The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff."

What are the chances of you breaking this down for me? Does it mean that there are more freeloaders....people who are able but unwilling to support themselves....than there are hard-working Americans? That is what is seems to say.

I'd love for you to provide some numbers. You know.....like HOW MANY ABLE-BODIED AND ABLE-MINDED AMERICAN ADULTS ARE THERE? THEN, HOW MANY OF THOSE ARE UNWILLING TO WORK TO SUPPORT THEMSELVES AND ARE BEING SUPPORTED BY THOSE WHO DO? HOW MUCH DOES THIS SUPPORT COST?

HOW MANY?
HOW MUCH?

Does it matter how many? Or how much? Or does it only matter if it is true? I said nothing about people not being willing to work. That is a conclusion you drew from your own apparently prejudiced little mind.

And whether or not we are 'nutters', people who read and write and who have friends generally get more e-mail than those who don't.

This is from Huffington Post, nobody's idea of a rightwing propaganda publication:

Nearly half, 48.5 percent, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4 percent lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.

The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)

Means-tested programs, designed to help the needy, accounted for the largest share of recipients last year. Some 34.2 percent of Americans lived in a household that received benefits such as food stamps, subsidized housing, cash welfare or Medicaid (the federal-state health care program for the poor). . . .
Nearly Half Of Americans Live In Households With Government Aid

That was more than two years ago, and it is a certainty that the number of people receiving government assistance has not gone down but has increased.

Then add to that all the people receiving government grants to do certain tasks or study certain things or grow certain products or not grow certain products or to work in certain industries such as green industries, etc. or to provide services to certain areas, etc., it doesn't take a math wizard to get to well over 50% of the population depending on federal monies for some or all of their living.

Every dime the federal government gives to all those people is taken out of somebody else's pocket or is borrowed which adds to the national debt for other people to pay.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

What are the chances of you breaking this down for me?

Zero.

The facts and truth would likely conflict with rightist dogma – can’t risk that.

 

[Foxfyre]

The number in that Huffpost piece actually startled me because that is the first time I had seen it. A full 34.2% of Americans are receiving means tested government assistance? That is more than 1 out of 3 Americans with the numbers increasing, not decreasing. We already know that close to 1 out of 2 Americans pay little or no federal income tax to help share the burden and responsibility.

I wonder how many of the 57 USMB members who checked off something in the poll up there think that is a tolerable or sustainable situation?

 

[The T]

From your e-mail. ( nutters seem to get lots of e-mails )

"The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff."

What are the chances of you breaking this down for me? Does it mean that there are more freeloaders....people who are able but unwilling to support themselves....than there are hard-working Americans? That is what is seems to say.

I'd love for you to provide some numbers. You know.....like HOW MANY ABLE-BODIED AND ABLE-MINDED AMERICAN ADULTS ARE THERE? THEN, HOW MANY OF THOSE ARE UNWILLING TO WORK TO SUPPORT THEMSELVES AND ARE BEING SUPPORTED BY THOSE WHO DO? HOW MUCH DOES THIS SUPPORT COST?

HOW MANY?
HOW MUCH?

Nutters seem to get alot of e-mails? like the ones you get from your subscription in Obama's tripe-worthy sites?

Don't tell us that you're NOT a subscriber...YOU would be hung as a liar.