CDZ Americans and our heritage of Revolutionary ideals

[rightwinger]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of revolting against authoritarianism? Do you support the idea of freedom for all or not? Please be honest in answering.

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

Without the 3/5s clause, there'd be no Constitution and, therefore, no 13 "United States". Period.

Maybe so, it was a deal with the devil, but it also extended slavery to the mid 1800s by giving slave holding states legislative power beyond that their free citizens warranted

If slaves were counted as 3/5 a citizen, they should have had 3/5 of a citizens rights....they had 0

 

[rightwinger]

Read upon real American history like "1421", "1491" and Peter C. Newman's multi-volume history of the HBC and then we'll talk.

You are free to deviate from the topic and run off at the mouth. If the Iroquois hadn't spent so much time fighting themselve and other native American tribes, maybe they could have been coordinated enough to develop tech to fight off the European invaders. As it was, they were too petty and primitive against an advance civilization. Sad, but true.

God Bless America!

They had been around as long as the Europeans and were no where near as technologicially advanced as the Europeans...and that is what ended their socieites...had they been as advanced as the Europeans, they would still be in contrtol of the Continent....

Agreed about tech, but who says tech is the end all to be all?


The Chinese invented gunpowder and paper, but the West refined their usage much more so than the Chinese. Was it because the Chinese were stupid? No. IMHO, it's cultural differences of philosophy. Same goes for Native Americans; their culture focused less on tech and more on spirituality whereas Western philosophy was/is more the opposite.

EASTERN versus WESTERN PHILOSOPHY: Differences and Similarities. Cultural Intelligence, World Cultures comparison by Anastasia Bibikova and Vadim Kotelnikov

Facts About Ancient Chinese Gunpowder

Four Inventions of Ancient China: Paper Making, Gunpowder, Printing, Compass

I think the main reason was that China was a closed culture. All invention had to come from within

The west was constantly trading technology and invention which enabled them to develop metallurgy, chemistry and science at an accelerated pace

While I agree, note those are cultural differences. Add to this, it's a judgment call, not necessarily a truism, that one is better than the other.

It's true to say the Western mankind was more technologically advanced than Native American or Chinese mankind, but it's a different thing altogether to say Western culture is better than either of those two by equating technology with goodness.

I didn't say which culture was better...only that the free trade and open exchange of technology enabled them to advance technically at a faster pace

 

[there4eyeM]

And when it became clear that democratic progress would eliminate slavery, the slave states took an illegal route around inevitability.

 

[rightwinger]

And when it became clear that democratic progress would eliminate slavery, the slave states took an illegal route around inevitability.

Which accelerated the demise of slavery

 

[there4eyeM]

And when it became clear that democratic progress would eliminate slavery, the slave states took an illegal route around inevitability.

Which accelerated the demise of slavery

"Sho' 'nuf"!

 

[Divine Wind]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of revolting against authoritarianism? Do you support the idea of freedom for all or not? Please be honest in answering.

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

Without the 3/5s clause, there'd be no Constitution and, therefore, no 13 "United States". Period.

Maybe so, it was a deal with the devil, but it also extended slavery to the mid 1800s by giving slave holding states legislative power beyond that their free citizens warranted

If slaves were counted as 3/5 a citizen, they should have had 3/5 of a citizens rights....they had 0

Maybe so? Dude, please read the debate among the States on the ratification of the Constitution. Are you seriously suggesting the Constitution would have been ratified by all 13 states if the 3/5s clause wasn't in there?

Another way of stating it is that the seeds of the Civil War were written in the Constitution.

How the Founders Sowed the Seeds of Civil War
Whether America’s founders could have sown seeds of a more perfect union without dooming a following generation to reap the whirlwind of civil war is a question yet on the minds of the nation’s historians. Could anything have been done to avoid the bloodbath that took the lives of 2 percent of America’s population? It’s a staggering figure: 2 percent in today’s terms would mean the deaths of everybody in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. We usually think of nineteenth-century events—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision—when we consider what precipitated the crisis. But the roots of the conflict go back further, back to the formative years of the United States.

The flowers of death and destruction germinated from slavery, unmistakably the chief cause of the Civil War—although economics, geography, culture, fear, and the constitutional ambiguities of states’ rights must be factored in. American slavery was a hybrid of seventeenth-century English mercantilism, colonial labor shortages, and what we call racism. It was an evil which, in the interests of revolutionary unity, the Second Continental Congress declined to eradicate in the Declaration of Independence, and which the Articles of Confederation left to blight the Constitution......

.....If the delegates tiptoed around slavery, it was because the constitutional experiment was a minefield, says University of California at Los Angeles historian Daniel Walker Howe. The Framers hadn’t forgotten how divided the colonies had been over the question of independence from Britain in the first place. After four months of horse-trading in Philadelphia, the Constitution was signed by 39 of 55 delegates. “You couldn’t have had it be too antislavery or you wouldn’t have gotten all the states on board,” Howe said. Compromise was essential, “but in hindsight we can see that slavery came to flourish under the Constitution.”

Ratification showed the depths of division. Virginia agreed by a vote of 89 to 79. Almost 49 percent of the delegates to the convention of the largest state in the orchard of Revolution declined to partake of its new fruit. “This is a country that is very nervous about whether it will fall apart,” said Ron Chernow, biographer of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. “Slavery is the most difficult and incendiary issue, and that’s the one least likely to be tackled. It was an abdication of responsibility, and the seeds were planted for the Civil War.”......


Ratifying the Constitution [ushistory.org]

 

[2aguy]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of revolting against authoritarianism? Do you support the idea of freedom for all or not? Please be honest in answering.

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

No...they wanted to count slaves as part of their population for the power of representation in the new congress....the 3/5s clause weakened that ability but still got them to join the new nation.....and freed slaves counted as free people......

 

[2aguy]

As to the Iroquois Confederation...

Viral meme says Constitution 'owes its notion of democracy to the Iroquois'

The case against Iroquois influence

Despite this, many scholars have concluded that the evidence is short of convincing.

• The Iroquois government is in some ways radically different than the U.S. government.


For starters, the Iroquois’ federal system arguably bears more resemblance to the United Nations than the American federal system, focusing primarily on diplomacy.

The Iroquois council "was particularly concerned with matters of alliance, with the continuing firm alliance of the five member nations and alliances with other nations. It did not concern itself with the internal relations of the constituent nations," Tooker noted in a 1988 paper.

More important, the Iroquois system is based on hereditary positions and clan-based leadership -- elements that are entirely foreign to the United States’ system (and arguably seem more similar to the British system the colonists were trying to escape).

The Iroquois League’s governmental power was vested in a council of 50 chiefs known as sachems. Each sachem had a title that was essentially hereditary, and each of these titles belonged to a particular clan within a particular tribe. (The meme does have a point about the role of women: The successor to a League chief was chosen by the "clan mother," the senior woman of the clan.)

The division of council seats was fixed, but without any relation to the member nation’s population size. Meanwhile, as the council’s "firekeepers," the Onondagas had the the responsibility of presenting the matter to be discussed, Tooker wrote. And the council acted based on consensus, rather than by majority rule, as became the system under the Constitution of 1787.

"There is little in this system of governance the Founding Fathers might have been expected to copy," Tooker wrote. "It is doubtful, for example, that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention meeting during the legendary long, hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 would have proposed a system under which only their relatives could become members of Congress, and a system under which each legislator was chosen by a close female relative of the previous holder of the office.

Nor does it seem likely -- even if John Adams had heeded his wife's admonition to ‘remember the ladies’ -- that if such a hereditary system had been adopted, the Constitutional Convention would have opted for matrilineal inheritance of office, which by its very nature excludes a son from succeeding to his father's position."

 

[2aguy]

I think the fact that Europeans grew up under feudalism.....and the different "castes" in their society affected how they percieve authority.....that is also why they see centralized government more favorably than Americans do.

 

[Divine Wind]

And when it became clear that democratic progress would eliminate slavery, the slave states took an illegal route around inevitability.

Secession only became illegal after the Civil War, not before.....Which is why neither Texas nor California can legally secede regardless of how pissed off they are about who is President.

 

[Divine Wind]

I think the fact that Europeans grew up under feudalism.....and the different "castes" in their society affected how they percieve authority.....that is also why they see centralized government more favorably than Americans do.

Possibly, but I think monarchism, which has a long history in both Europe and Asia, had a greater influence on both European and Asian ideas of government whereas in America, our ancestors fled those ideas...mostly for religious reasons, but fled nonetheless.

FWIW, some were kicked out of their own country as dissidents and banished to the colonies.

 

[regent]

I wonder if America practices a life style today, that 100 years from now, Americans will not really understand and wonder why our generation tolerated the wrong?

 

[Divine Wind]

A gallup poll up to 2016:
Trust in Government

An editorial from 2015:

EDITORIAL: Americans suspicious of government
Americans have always been skeptical of their federal government. It’s in the republic’s DNA. The founding fathers even wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution, just in case. But skepticism in our time has become something close to contempt. The Gallup Poll finds that almost half the country says the United States government is “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans.”

The latest poll demonstrates a dramatic increase from a poll in 2003, when only a third of respondents felt that way. Now that number has grown to 49 percent of adults 18 and older.
A majority of those holding that view are Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. When George W. Bush was president — the subject was first broached in 2003 — the majority of those fearful of government overreach were Democrats. Gallup says this shows that “these attitudes reflect more of a response to the president and disagreement with his policies than a fundamental feeling about the federal government in general.” That’s putting a rosy cast on it.
The findings suggest that Americans are still concerned that the government is too big and spends too much, and have an understanding that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have. The government’s power to curry, thwart and obstruct is awesome, writing a proliferation of regulations that carry criminal penalties. The impact of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Communications Commissions can stifle economic growth and job creation, and small wonder that the people are concerned that their basic rights are endangered.

The largest single perceived threat cited — at 12 percent of all respondents — is the fear that the Second Amendment is most at risk. Gallup says this reflects concerns about what government is actually doing, not an overall philosophical concern that the government has grown so large that basic liberties are imperiled. Maybe. But maybe there’s more.
America was founded by hardscrabble settlers who wanted most of all to be left alone. The federal government was limited by the Constitution, which gave the government carefully and closely enumerated powers intended to protect individual liberties against federal encroachment. Those protections are still there, but honored more in the breech than in actual observance. Same-sex marriage has been forced on the states by a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court, with the majority opinion written by an addled justice more as a love poem to gays than carefully reasoned legal jurisprudence. The people are coerced into accepting something — a man can be the bride if he likes, a woman can carry her spouse over the threshold if she can pick him up — and nearly everyone understands this is sanity stood on its head. The right to conscience, on which the republic was founded, is thrown to the wind.

Nevertheless, the size and the scope of government remains what Gallup calls “a key issue for our time.” The candidates who are doing the best in the current primary season are those perceived by voters to be furthest removed from levers and authority of government power. Therein dwells the hope, small and forlorn as it may sometimes be, for lasting change.

 

[Divine Wind]

I wonder if America practices a life style today, that 100 years from now, Americans will not really understand and wonder why our generation tolerated the wrong?

No doubt we will grow/mature as a society just as we've done over the past few centuries.....just not as fast as many would like and too fast for others.

Which direction do you see us going?

 

[rightwinger]

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

Without the 3/5s clause, there'd be no Constitution and, therefore, no 13 "United States". Period.

Maybe so, it was a deal with the devil, but it also extended slavery to the mid 1800s by giving slave holding states legislative power beyond that their free citizens warranted

If slaves were counted as 3/5 a citizen, they should have had 3/5 of a citizens rights....they had 0

Maybe so? Dude, please read the debate among the States on the ratification of the Constitution. Are you seriously suggesting the Constitution would have been ratified by all 13 states if the 3/5s clause wasn't in there?

Another way of stating it is that the seeds of the Civil War were written in the Constitution.

How the Founders Sowed the Seeds of Civil War
Whether America’s founders could have sown seeds of a more perfect union without dooming a following generation to reap the whirlwind of civil war is a question yet on the minds of the nation’s historians. Could anything have been done to avoid the bloodbath that took the lives of 2 percent of America’s population? It’s a staggering figure: 2 percent in today’s terms would mean the deaths of everybody in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. We usually think of nineteenth-century events—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision—when we consider what precipitated the crisis. But the roots of the conflict go back further, back to the formative years of the United States.

The flowers of death and destruction germinated from slavery, unmistakably the chief cause of the Civil War—although economics, geography, culture, fear, and the constitutional ambiguities of states’ rights must be factored in. American slavery was a hybrid of seventeenth-century English mercantilism, colonial labor shortages, and what we call racism. It was an evil which, in the interests of revolutionary unity, the Second Continental Congress declined to eradicate in the Declaration of Independence, and which the Articles of Confederation left to blight the Constitution......

.....If the delegates tiptoed around slavery, it was because the constitutional experiment was a minefield, says University of California at Los Angeles historian Daniel Walker Howe. The Framers hadn’t forgotten how divided the colonies had been over the question of independence from Britain in the first place. After four months of horse-trading in Philadelphia, the Constitution was signed by 39 of 55 delegates. “You couldn’t have had it be too antislavery or you wouldn’t have gotten all the states on board,” Howe said. Compromise was essential, “but in hindsight we can see that slavery came to flourish under the Constitution.”

Ratification showed the depths of division. Virginia agreed by a vote of 89 to 79. Almost 49 percent of the delegates to the convention of the largest state in the orchard of Revolution declined to partake of its new fruit. “This is a country that is very nervous about whether it will fall apart,” said Ron Chernow, biographer of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. “Slavery is the most difficult and incendiary issue, and that’s the one least likely to be tackled. It was an abdication of responsibility, and the seeds were planted for the Civil War.”......


Ratifying the Constitution [ushistory.org]

Maybe you should have read my post. It would have saved you some typing

 

[Divine Wind]

Maybe you should have read my post. It would have saved you some typing

I obviously did and was amplifying on your short post. Does this bother you?

 

[rightwinger]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of revolting against authoritarianism? Do you support the idea of freedom for all or not? Please be honest in answering.

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

No...they wanted to count slaves as part of their population for the power of representation in the new congress....the 3/5s clause weakened that ability but still got them to join the new nation.....and freed slaves counted as free people......

It was a compromise that ended up kicking the can down the road and led to a war killing 600,000

 

[Divine Wind]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of revolting against authoritarianism? Do you support the idea of freedom for all or not? Please be honest in answering.

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

No...they wanted to count slaves as part of their population for the power of representation in the new congress....the 3/5s clause weakened that ability but still got them to join the new nation.....and freed slaves counted as free people......

It was a compromise that ended up kicking the can down the road and led to a war killing 600,000

True, but then it was President Lincoln who attacked the South precipitating the death of 2% of the US population.

Additionally, what was the alternative to the 3/5s clause? A 5-state United States with other 8 States remaining independent?

 

[rightwinger]

I'm saying Americans did not revolt against authoritarianism, they merely wanted to install their own. How can that be denied? After all, they did it, even writing it into the founding document.

edit...Further, Americans did not agree with the idea of freedom for all, that is risible. Their own founding document treats people as property, as unfree as possible.

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

No...they wanted to count slaves as part of their population for the power of representation in the new congress....the 3/5s clause weakened that ability but still got them to join the new nation.....and freed slaves counted as free people......

It was a compromise that ended up kicking the can down the road and led to a war killing 600,000

True, but then it was President Lincoln who attacked the South precipitating the death of 2% of the US population.

Additionally, what was the alternative to the 3/5s clause? A 5-state United States with other 8 States remaining independent?

Actually, the South fired the first shot

I think the 3/5 ths clause and allowing slavery was a sellout for a nation created on "all men are created equal'
Yes, they should have drawn a line in the sand and saved us future grief

People you legally consider to be property do not count as people you represent

 

[Divine Wind]

And you are not reporting the 3/5ths clause accurately.....it was designed to weaken the slave owning states........not empower them......you guys keep telling that lie....but we have the internet now and we aren't going to let you get away with it....

The 3/5 clause unfairly strengthened slave owning states. It gave them credit in representation in Congress for people that were considered property in those states. You may as well have given credit for the numbers of horses and cows....they had the same rights

No...they wanted to count slaves as part of their population for the power of representation in the new congress....the 3/5s clause weakened that ability but still got them to join the new nation.....and freed slaves counted as free people......

It was a compromise that ended up kicking the can down the road and led to a war killing 600,000

True, but then it was President Lincoln who attacked the South precipitating the death of 2% of the US population.

Additionally, what was the alternative to the 3/5s clause? A 5-state United States with other 8 States remaining independent?

Actually, the South fired the first shot

I think the 3/5 ths clause and allowing slavery was a sellout for a nation created on "all men are created equal'
Yes, they should have drawn a line in the sand and saved us future grief

People you legally consider to be property do not count as people you represent

Correct, yet it was the North that attacked the South.

So, if I understand you correctly, you would have rather just let the 5 free states form the "United States" by ratifying the Constitution and let the other 8 slave states stand on their own. Thanks for your input.

BTW, yes, slavery is deplorable but we're talking about 1789, not 2017.