What if?

Regardless of what you think of these people, let's take a look at the other side of the coin and imagine... Now, what if Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Rielly, Sean Hannity and others like them were telling us the absolute truth? How would you react if you suddenly found out that every word they have been saying was the pure truth? Think about that for a couple of minutes... How would you react or feel?

I'm not a believer in fairy tales.
 
Zoom-boing was right. You really ARE one of those "kill the messenger" types. :lol:

Even Adolf Hitler could've told you that water is wet. Just because he was an evil mass murderer doesn't mean that couldn't deliver a fact and have it be... factual.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. That's not nice. But it doesn't invalidate every other thing they said or did.

I was just pointing out that Locke was a hypocrite. As were many of the people who were preaching freedom at the time. You may not like the fact that Jefferson and Washington owned slaves but it's the fact. No, it doesn't invalidate every other thing they said or did and I never said it didn't.

But it would be historically inaccurate to act like they all practiced what they preached.

I mean another example, it wasn't long after the ink dried on his signature for the Constitution that John Adams was violating it.

And I saw you thanked Murf there Zoom. So let me give you both a protip.

Protip: If Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi did exactly what our Founding Fathers and people like Locke did by saying one thing and doing another on something major then you wouldn't give them a pass. Yet, here you are excusing such behavior because it was "different times" or whatever bullshit. Sorry, that doesn't work. Be consistent.
 
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☭proletarian☭;1876088 said:
They paid lip service to Locke, but they never believed any of it. Hence the founding of a nation where all rich, white, landed gentry were equal and everyone else could go fuck themselves. The law itself reflected few principles that were good for the common man, instead adopting the liberalism of the rich elite who owned the factories and plantations, a philosophy which speaks of a God given right to exploit the lower classes. Theirs is the liberalism of the Bourgeois, rooted not in meaningful principles, but in the Divine Right of the Rich.

That's why there was a spate of amendments shortly after the Constitution was signed in 1789, a series I through X which constituted the bill of rights.
 
The Bill of rights still didn't change things. It was some time later before women, non-whites, and the poor would have any representation or rights- when true progressive liberalism first started to take hold in America and the Bourgeois temporarily had their hold on the State loosened. \

When a large portion of the citizenry decided the Constitution was inadequate and the government did not represent them, their right to self determination, supposedly protected by the Tenth Amendment was totally disregarded and reactionary Bourgeois interests in the north persuaded the Fed to use military force to protect their economic interest sin the South- a trend that would continue in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Viet Nam, and a great many other locales since.
 
☭proletarian☭;1876673 said:
The Bill of rights still didn't change things. It was some time later before women, non-whites, and the poor would have any representation or rights- when true progressive liberalism first started to take hold in America and the Bourgeois temporarily had their hold on the State loosened. \

When a large portion of the citizenry decided the Constitution was inadequate and the government did not represent them, their right to self determination, supposedly protected by the Tenth Amendment was totally disregarded and reactionary Bourgeois interests in the north persuaded the Fed to use military force to protect their economic interest sin the South- a trend that would continue in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Viet Nam, and a great many other locales since.

Of course the Bill of Rights changed things. How could it not? :eusa_eh:
When you look at it closely, slavery and discrimination violate the language explicitly. It was always a matter of time before Americans became enlightened and evolved enough to follow the language.

The U.S. Constitution was a document ahead of its time. It took a good long while for us to grow into it. This was The American Experiment. It was a new concept. No one knew for sure that it would work at all, let alone work so well. So, it's pretty easy to sit here from the comfort of the twenty-first century and judge these people. But they truly had a tiger by the tail. They were turning hundreds upon hundreds of years of human oppression and societal tradition on its ear.

Consider that George Mason, a slaveholder himself and instrumental in giving us the Bill of Rights, was said to morally abhor the practice. And while he didn't support freeing the slaves who were already in the country, he worked fervently to prevent more being brought in and to keep new states from becoming slave states. Already, abolition was on the people's lips. But the primary goal was to form the union and get those slave states into an agreement. So, while it's true that they were kicking the can down the road, the fix was already in. Our ideology is about free people and the language reflected that. Further, Article V would allow us to amend the document and resolve the conflict of slavery.

But look what happens when we "kick the can". :eek:

In it's declaration of independence, South Carolina sited the Tenth Amendment and Article IV, specifically Clause 3, The Fugitive Slave Clause :
""No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
South Carolina Secession Causes

Their argument was that the Federal Government and the Other States had violated the contract, thus nullifying it. Lincoln's argument was that it takes two to agree to a contract and two to negate it. To this day, people will still argue both sides.

But I think for the sake of discussion regarding the Constitution, we can leave a rehash of the Civil War for a later date. The important point is that the "kicking of the can" allowed for a murky area where the language of the document, the ideology of free people with unalienable rights, was, as a whole, at odds with the promises made to slave-holding states. This horrible compromise teaches us a valuable lesson about the high cost of expediency that we can still use today.

We NEED to have a referee on the field. The Constitution is that final arbiter which resolves our differences and allows us to disagree and still remain whole. We've seen what happens when it's not in place. I believe the intent of many of our founders was to leave room to abolish slavery at a later date, but to get slave states on board right then. Our embrace of a national ideology based on Liberty would eventually DEMAND abolition as we evolved and grew into it. But in kicking that can... they took the referee off the field, ignoring the arbiter of disputes for many decades.

The good news is that our Constitution has a growth mechanism... the amendment process. So, we've fixed the horrible compromise our founders engaged in. But the bad news is that we are still at risk of chaos. For the sake of expediency, we're seeing our contract with government twisted like a pretzel and sometimes... outright ignored. It can't be allowed to happen. That document is what keeps us whole and away from one another's throats.
 
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How was trying to copy the French anything all that new?
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. :eusa_eh:
The French Revolution was after the American Revolution. We had already ratified our Constitution (1787-1788) and they didn't storm the Bastille until 1789.
 

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