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Do you differentiate between legal immigration and illegal "gate crashers"? Do you champion Open Borders?As for opening my home to strangers I do not know, I point you to the Statue of Liberty that greets immigrants as they sail to our shores. Is that all just empty nonsense now?
My maternal grandparents saw that statue as they sailed in from their Jewish stedel in Russia around the beginning of the 20th century. They were fleeing poverty and antisemitic persecution. Starting from scratch, they gradually built a scrap metal business, and were able to send their three sons to college (although their three daughters had to work their way to college).
This is the America I love and believe in. I don't want the upraised hand of the Statue of Liberty bearing the torch of Freedom to be cut off and replaced by a hand raising its middle finger!
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and is it that binary? if you haven't got the right paperwork, no matter your history and circumstances, you're deported as quickly as possible (and no cheating by fudging about what 'as possible' means)? if not that, it's Open Borders?
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What is "legal" immigration depends on the attitude of whatever lawmakers happen to be in the majority at any particular time. As a person who is generally motivated by kindness, I'm inclined to be more liberal about immigration than those people who are more hard-hearted or uptight about new would-be immigrants.
I am also concerned about the things our government does to make things harder for poor people in other countries, such as exploiting cheap labor and supporting oppressive dictators. Then when people are driven by desperation to come to our country in hope of a better life, our current administration does everything it can to screw them yet again.
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Ken, instead of retreating into hurt feelings and lamenting that my responses are not "of equal level" to yours, why don't you do me the favor of just answering one of my oft-repeated questions right now:
How do you feel about the current administration's policy of separating children from their parents at the border, sometimes to the point of losing track of who belongs to who, and keeping even very young children in various sorts of foster conditions--conditions that congress members who have actually visited the border ;often find shockingly squalid?
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I opted to leave this thread last weekend, simply because I had to get out of the house. I went to the Cotati Accordion Festival - which was a whole lot more fun. Since then, I've been too busy to comment - though I've read much of what has been posted.
Once more, back into the breach. Here is a fine example of what is wrong in America today - it's about the cognitive dissonance in the narratives:
Cascade wrote:
...Do you remember James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Reagan? As I recall, he said something to the effect that God gave us this world to use fully, and so we should use it up before the end times. I tend to think that the major Trump supporters are like that, and don't care about what they leave for the next generations.
To which cyberanvil replied:
Misattributed
That's just one example of how left-cover spin-doctors spread disinformation among leftists about what the so-called "right" is about.
- God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.
- Attributed in Setting the Captives Free (1990) by Austin Miles, and widely repeated after appearing in "The Godly Must Be Crazy", by Glenn Scherer in Grist magazine (28 October 2004). Grist afterwards retracted and apologized for Scherer's comment, noting that the quotation appears nowhere in Watt's Congressional testimony or any other source it could find. Watt has responded:
- I never said it. Never believed it. Never even thought it. I know no Christian who believes or preaches such error. The Bible commands conservation — that we as Christians be careful stewards of the land and resources entrusted to us by the Creator.
But this is a bi-partisan disease, here in Amerika. The "Right" has it's own litany of false beliefs about the term "Socialism" - and the history thereof. And what they don't know is actually a very important part of the puzzle of how we got to this point.
For, Once upon a Time, as the fairy tale begins, there were "Republicans" who were able to square the term "Socialism" with the language in the speech Abraham Lincoln gave after the battle of Gettysburg - you know, the one in which he spoke of "Government of, for, and by the People..."
Problem is, these left wing Republicans - who were known variously, as "sons of the wild jack-ass" or "Western Progressives" - were basically excommunicated out of the Republican Party in 1917 during World War One, on account of the fact that they had opposed America going into the war. This is a very important bit of American History that, by the powers-that-be has been conveniently buried, full fathom five. I wrote about it here. it - And here.
The Western Progressives were prairie populists, and thought of themselves as Republicans from the old Lincoln mold. After being bell, booked & candled by the Republican party top brass, in 1917, two of the most prominent members of this set, Senator Robert LaFollette, Sr., of Wisconsin, and Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., of Minnesota, went off and founded alternative, third parties; the Progressive Party of Wisconsin (1918-1924) and the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota (1918-1943). These were, in all regards, except the name, Socialist formations.
It is a fact that the old Republican Party, prior to 1917, had a wing which had definite "socialist tendencies."
Donald Trump, when he was running, appealed in his speeches, to the denizens of the Mid-West, in whom this old tendency lies dormant, and sleeping, in what we can properly call the collective unconscious. Steve Bannon, who is a very clever cookie - no matter what else one may say about him - cleverly crafted Trump's message to appeal to these people: the forgotten folks of the prairie.
In this, our earnest partisan Ken Burgess, we have a fine specimen of this tendency who, nevertheless has been conditioned, through programming, to view "Socialism" as a definitely negative quantity. I'll grant you, Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, & Maoism turned up heaps of corpses. But I seriously doubt, had Robert LaFollette, Sr. won the presidential election in 1924 - and he gleaned five million votes - that the outcome would have been anything like the "liquidation of the Kulaks."
-And that's for the simple reason that the "socialism" of the old-school, left-wing Republicans was benign, and genuinely "progressive."
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Catching Up :kburgess wrote:
That is a pure thumbnail summary of the Q Cult position, Ken. Thank you for the exposition. I think you will agree that it takes a certain amount of "faith" to believe it, all nine yards...I have heard interviews from folks who were working on this Plan that originally started around the 70's or around the Reagan era. This Plan was being developed by the patriotic military insiders, probably Navy and Marines as a means to completely unravel all of the deep state/globalist infrastructure that had been and was slowly taking over and destroying this country from the inside out in the areas of Banking, Media, Intelligence, Politics, Lobbies, Securities, and of course Govt/Politics.
Being developed through the military minds, it was a full blown system of intelligence, counter-intelligence, and contingency planning to get every last remnant of that system out of the USA.. ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ
One thing I have learned from conversations with my old friend who moved to Oklahoma twenty-one years ago, and has since become, first an Okie and then a Trumpie, is that the denizens of the red states are "hip" in their own, peculiar way - a "Way" that runs counter to what passes for "hipness" in our own West County.
For instance, they of the Red states, many of them, voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. They were Dixiecrats, and had had enough of Reagan & Daddy Bush. Twelve years, after all, was a long time. But after just three years of Billy Clinton they had seen enough, and were thoroughly disgusted with his performance: of how he & Janet Reno played Ruby Ridge, Waco, & the Oklahoma City bombing.
Furthermore, word had circulated among 'em of how Clinton had been involved with Bush in the nefarious doings around Mena, Arkansas. -And then there was the phenomena of what has been termed the "Clinton body count." Folks in the states adjacent to Arkansas are perhaps a little more "hip" on that subject, than the folks in California who reflexively vote Blue.
So you've got a bunch of disaffected former Democrats, who were basically alienated from the political process. Also, they had "Christian" tendencies, without being devout church-goers. This also has been noted by the social scientists. Trump appealed to these people. All, or most of the men in the Red states have served in the military. Most are veterans. Therefor they know how to use guns, and own them, too.
So there you have it - the perfect clientele for a designer Cult - one which can "believe" the litany you have presented here, Ken. Those of us who are wary of the "Military-Industrial Complex" however, might find it difficult to obtain "faith" in this new form of "Millennialism" - centering around the saving grace of the sitting POTUS.
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Ken, you have complained about my actually quoting you in a way that makes you feel disrespected, yet you seem to have no problem dissing "the Dems"--which of course includes me although I'm really more of a "Green"--as having "no moral compass at all." What's up with that? Am I and my friends really that bad?
And you, like Ray, simply refuse to answer my very basic, clearly stated questions in regard to your feelings about some of the current Republican policies that seem so flagrantly cruel to us liberals. Why? Our discourse could be so much more clarifying if we posed specific policy questions to each other. I wish you would ask me more specific questions like that too.
At least they tout themselves as something, the Dems take no moral compass at all other than filling the air with a lot of talk about themselves. Look at the evidence of the cities and States that they run.
There are a lot of R's that actually do embrace it, but just not so much in the news.
Ken.
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You start out the Realist and end up as the Idealist. You are fated to never reach your Nirvana.And of course there is corruption and people with some selfish motives in politics. Of course economics aren't what Adam Smith is presumed to have said; although he was actually quite the realist himself. I've said, and I suspect others have, that the solution, such as it is, is to push for more transparency, to vote for people with ethics, and to oppose inhumane and destructive policies along with those who support them. That seems like quite a specific set of 'solutions' to me.
The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness of majority rule in which the majority of an electorate can and does place its own interests above, and at the expense of those in the minority. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.I'm a bit shocked by your equation of democracy with mob rule! And why should a voter in one part of the country have more power than voters in another part? And why should rural interests be any more or less important than urban interests? We all need food, and we all need industry. Rural voters tend to be more conservative than urban voters, and that would boost Republican power, but is that a valid reason for giving their votes more power than mine?
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True. But what is your solution? Tyranny of the minority? Which is what we already have now to some extent, isn't it, given the Electoral College system, which gives more vote power to conservative voters in Montana than liberal voters get here in California?
The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness of majority rule in which the majority of an electorate can and does place its own interests above, and at the expense of those in the minority. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.
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arguing from the extremes is kinda pointless. Fun maybe, but not illuminating. Cyber already answered another question by highlighting his preference for binary arguments. Fortunately for the rest of us, the world's a bit more of a complex mixture in practice. We're not in a position where we have to reject changes to a two-hundred-plus year old compromise because of some cartoon tyranny that will inevitably ensue. (Yeah, I know, there isn't a claim of inevitability on this thread - I can do hyperbole too, though). But do you really expect a 'solution'? You didn't get one, instead you got a slightly-on-topic definition from poly-sci 101.True. But what is your solution? Tyranny of the minority? Which is what we already have now to some extent, isn't it, given the Electoral College system, which gives more vote power to conservative voters in Montana than liberal voters get here in California?
The Founding Fathers knew best.True. But what is your solution? Tyranny of the minority? Which is what we already have now to some extent, isn't it, given the Electoral College system, which gives more vote power to conservative voters in Montana than liberal voters get here in California?
"Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative government or psephocracy) is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies are types of representative democracies; for example, the United Kingdom is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy, France is a unitary semi-presidential republic, and the United States is a federal presidential republic".
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Our democracy has gotten less democratic as time goes on. At the time of the first census in 1790, soon after the constitution was adopted, the ratio of the populations of the most populous state to the least populous state was about 12 to 1, when each state was represented equally in the senate.The Founding Fathers knew best.
"Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative government or psephocracy) is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people,...
Now that ratio is 68 to 1!
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Wow--"psephocracy"! Never heard that word before. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I appreciate your civics lesson, Cyberanvil, but it doesn't really respond to my question in regard to your complaint about the tyranny of the majority, which is: what alternative to majority rule would you prefer?
The Founding Fathers knew best.
"Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative government or psephocracy) is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies are types of representative democracies; for example, the United Kingdom is a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy, France is a unitary semi-presidential republic, and the United States is a federal presidential republic".
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I'm satisfied with the present system.Wow--"psephocracy"! Never heard that word before. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I appreciate your civics lesson, Cyberanvil, but it doesn't really respond to my question in regard to your complaint about the tyranny of the majority, which is: what alternative to majority rule would you prefer?
Question -- If the Dems had won, would they still be attacking the Electoral College?
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seems to me we do not have a tyranny of the majority, but a tyranny of a minority. Is this not what you are seeing?
The following is representative of these opinions, from the article in the NYT by Michelle Goldberg.
"Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts. Here, in my debut as a New York Times columnist, I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule.
I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.
A combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms — which polls show is probable — they may not take back the House of Representatives. (According to a Brookings Institution analysis, in 2016, Republicans won 55.2 percent of seats with just under 50 percent of votes cast for Congress.)
And because of the quirks of the 2018 Senate map, Democrats are extremely unlikely to reclaim that chamber, even if most voters would prefer Democratic control. Some analysts have even suggested that Republicans could emerge from 2018 with a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority."
Wow--"psephocracy"! Never heard that word before. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I appreciate your civics lesson, Cyberanvil, but it doesn't really respond to my question in regard to your complaint about the tyranny of the majority, which is: what alternative to majority rule would you prefer?
Last edited by Barry; 09-01-2019 at 02:10 AM.
Becoming a Columnist in the Age of Trumpseems to me we do not have a tyranny of the majority, but a tyranny of a minority. Is this not what you are seeing?
The following is representative of these opinions, from the article in the NYT by Michelle Goldberg.
Michelle: Yeah, I think we’re learning that the Constitution may, in fact, be a suicide pact. It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question.
Reading just this one statement, one wonders if the Alt-Left is cheering or sending flowers. Your agenda is obviously pandering to the Alt-Left. Your ongoing litany of TDS will do well at the Times.
“I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse” I think she was basically right.
Good luck with Mr. Biden. Looks like you’ll have 4 more years of TDS in your gas tank.
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cyberanvil quoted:
cyberanvil wrote:Michelle: Yeah, I think we’re learning that the Constitution may, in fact, be a suicide pact. It’s a source of constant astonishment to me that the country has handed over the means to destroy civilization on this planet to an unhinged lunatic who lost the popular vote and was installed with the aid of a hostile foreign power. It’s such an epic institutional failure that it calls everything we thought we knew about this country’s stability into question.
Actually, the Constitution is one of the last bastions of protection we have against pure, undistilled fascism. Never mind that the document has been essentially neutered and is functionally caput. As long as it is still, in theory, the "law of the land" the tyrants - and they come in all shades along the "left/right" wavelength - can not practice the sorts of vicious deeds that the Nazis did as a matter of policy.Reading just this one statement, one wonders if the Alt-Left is cheering or sending flowers. Your agenda is obviously pandering to the Alt-Left. Your ongoing litany of TDS will do well at the Times.
What many "progressives" do not know - or else are in denial about - is that the "mother ship" of the "New Left," the I.P.S., - the Institute for Policy Studies, {which was established with a grant of ten million dollars from the Chase-Manhattan Bank in 1962} - has been quietly working towards the dismantling of the Constitution ever since 1962.
It seems that the big Banks & the Owning Class have been weary for some time about the way the Constitution ties their hands. -And so, they subsidized a faction of the "Left" to work towards the dissolution of the old System. So now we have arrived at the moment of the denouement. The eulogy for the Constitution, written - as is fitting - by a correspondent for the New York Times.
-& the pretext for discarding the Constitution can be blamed
on the emergence of Trump! What a perfect foil that man is !-
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So what you seem to be saying is that mankind reached peak wisdom in the mid eighteenth century, and that the Founding Fathers were able to anticipate all exigencies that might arise after their work was finished. Odd that they included ways to amend the Constitution, and in many of their writings specified that it was essential that it be adapted to the ongoing needs of the people. They also provided for a judiciary charged with interpreting the document, for the obvious reason that words change their meaning over time, the needs of the people change over time, and new and unanticipated conditions arise over time.
Patrick Brinton
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Scary, yes, but don't forget how we came through the Civil War. That was really scary!
cyberanvil quoted:
cyberanvil wrote:
Actually, the Constitution is one of the last bastions of protection we have against pure, undistilled fascism. Never mind that the document has been essentially neutered and is functionally caput. As long as it is still, in theory, the "law of the land" the tyrants - and they come in all shades along the "left/right" wavelength - can not practice the sorts of vicious deeds that the Nazis did as a matter of policy.
What many "progressives" do not know - or else are in denial about - is that the "mother ship" of the "New Left," the I.P.S., - the Institute for Policy Studies, {which was established with a grant of ten million dollars from the Chase-Manhattan Bank in 1962} - has been quietly working towards the dismantling of the Constitution ever since 1962.
It seems that the big Banks & the Owning Class have been weary for some time about the way the Constitution ties their hands. -And so, they subsidized a faction of the "Left" to work towards the dissolution of the old System. So now we have arrived at the moment of the denouement. The eulogy for the Constitution, written - as is fitting - by a correspondent for the New York Times.
-& the pretext for discarding the Constitution can be blamed
on the emergence of Trump! What a perfect foil that man is !-
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Well yes you could argue that man (person)kind had more wisdom then. For one they never experienced a culture that seems by way of capitalism or other means seems to be declining in intelligence, but only is addicted to things other than wisdom. We are not smart enough to know how that happened. As to the ongoing needs of the people is one of them an military assault rifle? There is another good example of declining morality as well as in increase in stupidity. Oh and the Judiciary, you can buy that, with enough senators in the pocket of the current craze, money. Or let's just chalk it up to greed shall we?
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Interesting to hear your opinion, cyberanvil. So do you think things like the women's vote and black slaves being 3/5 of the population should not have been tampered with?
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Dear me, Mayacaman, you are pessimistic!
cyberanvil quoted:
cyberanvil wrote:
Actually, the Constitution is one of the last bastions of protection we have against pure, undistilled fascism. Never mind that the document has been essentially neutered and is functionally caput. As long as it is still, in theory, the "law of the land" the tyrants - and they come in all shades along the "left/right" wavelength - can not practice the sorts of vicious deeds that the Nazis did as a matter of policy.
What many "progressives" do not know - or else are in denial about - is that the "mother ship" of the "New Left," the I.P.S., - the Institute for Policy Studies, {which was established with a grant of ten million dollars from the Chase-Manhattan Bank in 1962} - has been quietly working towards the dismantling of the Constitution ever since 1962.
It seems that the big Banks & the Owning Class have been weary for some time about the way the Constitution ties their hands. -And so, they subsidized a faction of the "Left" to work towards the dissolution of the old System. So now we have arrived at the moment of the denouement. The eulogy for the Constitution, written - as is fitting - by a correspondent for the New York Times.
-& the pretext for discarding the Constitution can be blamed
on the emergence of Trump! What a perfect foil that man is !-
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you can argue anything. You'd likely be wrong if you took your position, though. It takes a pretty starry-eyed view of the past to make that case. Education, both formal and informal, was way limited. Sure, individuals could be 'wise' in terms of personal relationships, interactions with nature, etc, though if you look at how they typically behaved you'd probably not draw those conclusions. There was more interpersonal violence then, low respect for universal rights, lots of respect for things like the church's authority, incredibly heavy drinking by modern standards, etc.... And as for dishonest politicians and judges, I think they predate the enlightenment's end by quite a lot.Well yes you could argue that man (person)kind had more wisdom then. For one they never experienced a culture that seems by way of capitalism or other means seems to be declining in intelligence, but only is addicted to things other than wisdom. We are not smart enough to know how that happened. As to the ongoing needs of the people is one of them an military assault rifle? There is another good example of declining morality as well as in increase in stupidity. Oh and the Judiciary, you can buy that, with enough senators in the pocket of the current craze, money. Or let's just chalk it up to greed shall we?
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However, kings ruled the world and there was no democracy at all.
Well yes you could argue that man (person)kind had more wisdom then. For one they never experienced a culture that seems by way of capitalism or other means seems to be declining in intelligence, but only is addicted to things other than wisdom. We are not smart enough to know how that happened. As to the ongoing needs of the people is one of them an military assault rifle? There is another good example of declining morality as well as in increase in stupidity. Oh and the Judiciary, you can buy that, with enough senators in the pocket of the current craze, money. Or let's just chalk it up to greed shall we?
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well now you make me stand where i said one could. In that case i would like to point out how starry eyed i am. When reading once long ago, ( but not in the 1800's), one could learn, as John Adams did, Greek, and Latin and math as it was. He wasn't knowledgeable how to put together a computer, which is technique and not wisdom. They wrote the damn thing remember, so there is no way there is more wisdom now then back then.
We have technique, we have craft, we have little in the way of ideals, unless you start counting people like Hitler. (Oh we had the occasional Ghandi i suppose.). I must point out that last was ironical, in no way do I subscribe to those "ideals", for Hitler. So 1800's education yes was there, but that probably count towards wisdom, but further along the craft thread. Certainly in Europe there was some, but America is pretty young.
The word "wise" following likewise: and you have Emerson and Thoreau. They could still enjoy it before it becomes a dung heap among fracking enterprises. I guess one could, perhaps those on the other side of the aisle, call that progress and maybe the respect for the church as well, since they throw anything at you to win an argument. Inter personal violence back then meant only the possible death or injury in a dual, nowadays before yesterday you could purchase a gun at any Walmart and go out and kill dozens. And back there they had honor and all. Here for a crime committed at the highest levels, even against the constitution, there is no shame or justice.
I think i will pass on the use of the church for taking any side on any moral argument. If the church cared at all about real justice instead of their tax breaks, they would speak out more against their own moral failures, or more on the side of just plain ol' justice along the border. Today if you get drunk you were more likely , before it became an issue for moral justice, to kill many along the road or yourself on the way home. Then you might have to sleep it off at the stable.
Oh and as for Politicians, who have all the honesty of a Glenn Beck educated man, that is to say neither knowledgeable nor humble, the way they make them now, like Moscow Mitch, or even gasp the current president ( not mine in case you have not guessed), they can do more damage in simple utterances than all the dishonest priests and politicians thru the ages.
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note the phrasing, it's deliberate: "You'd likely be wrong if you took your position, though. It takes a pretty starry-eyed view of the past to make that case. " I acknowledge your qualification/disclaimer.of course there were men of distinction, I find it hard to imagine they weren't equivalent to the best we have today. But no, 'interpersonal violence' included things like lynching, domestic abuse, witch burning (at times) and lots of violent crime. There's a reason that life expectancy was short and it wasn't all lack of measles vaccinations... one could learn, as John Adams did, .. and you have Emerson and Thoreau.... Inter personal violence back then meant only the possible death or injury in a dual,....
I tend to react to any polyanna-ish views of the past, when life was brutal, ugly and short for most. Things can be quite horrible today, but despite MAGA it's really never been better, awful as it is to think. There's no time that on the balance I'd return to; I'd rather focus on fixing what we have now without somehow thinking we've somehow drifted from our normal, virtuous and wholesome state in the past.
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Years ago, I read that the Founding Fathers very well were wiser than we are today. They did not have TV, radio, cell phones, etc. Their evening entertainment most likely consisted of sitting quietly and staring into a fire, which has been likened to meditation in its effect on the brain. So there's a good chance they were much wiser than we are today.
Eddie, you left out MLK Jr. in your list of idealists. Just sayin'.
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