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Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually. Which makes it funny to see right wingers invoke him for their quasi-theocratic America because if there was anything he was remotely on the ball with it was that would not be a good thing.
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# ? May 19, 2014 03:18 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:22 |
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Jefferson's not a great person, and had some horrid views and actions. However, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. He wrote some great stuff, had some great ideas, and was a pretty good leader in many respects. Yes, he raped slaves. Not cool, but he wasn't much of a shitlord beyond that. The American Constitution was a revolutionary thing when it was created and quite useful. Did it properly address nation building in central Asia or campaign donation in Bitcoins? No. But studying it as a means of understanding the mechanisms of government is pretty important, and not something only idiots with teabags on their hat do. That said, we shouldn't really give a poo poo what the founding fathers wanted. I would instead argue it's good to know their intentions and ideas, especially in the context of their time. One of their biggest tenants was "We don't know everything, so change poo poo if it doesn't work. It's not like we're divine or anything."
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:18 |
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The constitution is James Madison's dishrag, not Jefferson's though. Jefferson did the Declaration.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:20 |
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Install Windows posted:The constitution is James Madison's dishrag, not Jefferson's though. Jefferson did the Declaration. Sorry, wasn't trying to talk about Jefferson, just the FF in general.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:24 |
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Berke Negri posted:Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually. The right isn't worshiping the actual, individual, and ultimately flawed humans behind the names. They are worshiping a bunch of fantasy ubermensch. Always keep that in mind. When the right is pining for the past they are not pining for the actual past but rather a fantasy version of it. There are a lot of people with perfectly valid reasons for looking at America's past and going "yeah let's not go through that again." That and they would just love to go back to a time where only wealthy white men had a say in anything and could do whatever the hell they wanted.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:29 |
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Additionally, I think we have do have a reasonable frame of reference in determining "founder" motivations by examining what was changed between the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The three things were written in the same close time period with most of the same people involved, and each successive set of documents reflects what was believed to be deficient in the previous one.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:32 |
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Last Buffalo posted:The American Constitution was a revolutionary thing when it was created and quite useful. Did it properly address nation building in central Asia or campaign donation in Bitcoins? No. But studying it as a means of understanding the mechanisms of government is pretty important, and not something only idiots with teabags on their hat do. But then the question becomes, why should we value the Constitution as a means of understanding the mechanisms of government, as opposed to more recent political science? When Madison and Hamilton were writing about how checks and balances cure factionalism, they were just guessing, based on some half-accurate accounts of ancient Greece and medieval Venice, and some abstract philosophy. Nowadays we can do empirical studies to actually test that proposition (and more importantly, test it to find the effects of differing checks and balances). Ben Franklin did a great thing by inventing the Franklin stove, but we've moved past that in terms of heating technology; why shouldn't we move past him* in terms of political technology as well? * yes I know that Franklin was super old by the time the Constitution was written and wasn't very involved, it's a metaphor Install Windows posted:Additionally, I think we have do have a reasonable frame of reference in determining "founder" motivations by examining what was changed between the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The three things were written in the same close time period with most of the same people involved, and each successive set of documents reflects what was believed to be deficient in the previous one. Wait, what? I thought that the Bill of Rights was pushed by the Anti-Federalists, and the founders only grudgingly adopted it because they were afraid that the Constitution wouldn't get ratified otherwise.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:53 |
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Ponsonby Britt posted:Wait, what? I thought that the Bill of Rights was pushed by the Anti-Federalists, and the founders only grudgingly adopted it because they were afraid that the Constitution wouldn't get ratified otherwise. The Anti-Federalists were a major faction of the founders! Also the constitution was ratified a year before the Bill of Rights were created, and the amendments weren't ratified until 3 years later. Thus if we want to determine what the founders as a whole thought, the things the Bill of Rights tell us about what they thought was missing are very useful.
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# ? May 19, 2014 04:58 |
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Install Windows posted:The Anti-Federalists were a major faction of the founders! Also the constitution was ratified a year before the Bill of Rights were created, and the amendments weren't ratified until 3 years later. I messed up here and meant to say "framers," but I think my mistake demonstrates another problem with how originalism is often used; it slips back and forth between "what did the people who wrote the Constitution understand it to mean?" and "what did American society at large understand the Constitution to mean?" Considering the views of the Anti-Federalists isn't helpful in figuring out the first question, but it is helpful in figuring out the second. And I know that the Constitution was ratified before the Bill of Rights, but my understanding is that the Federalists hit a roadblock after the first few states ratified it. To keep any states from rejecting the Constitution, they instead came to a compromise by promising to introduce the Bill of Rights after ratification, and so a bunch of states that had been leaning against the Constitution were persuaded to vote for it. I know it's only wikipedia, but this tracks with the other stuff I've read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Ratification_and_the_Massachusetts_Compromise posted:In December 1787 and January 1788, five states—Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut—ratified the Constitution with relative ease, though the bitter minority report of the Pennsylvania opposition was widely circulated. In contrast to its predecessors, the Massachusetts convention was angry and contentious, at one point erupting into a fistfight between Federalist delegate Francis Dana and Anti-Federalist Elbridge Gerry when the latter was not allowed to speak. The impasse was resolved only when revolutionary heroes and leading Anti-Federalists Samuel Adams and John Hancock agreed to ratification on the condition that the convention also propose amendments. The convention's proposed amendments included a requirement for grand jury indictment in capital cases, which would form part of the Fifth Amendment, and an amendment reserving powers to the states not expressly given to the federal government, which would later form the basis for the Tenth Amendment.
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# ? May 19, 2014 05:37 |
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The willingness to compromise by offering the Bill of Rights opportunity to the other founders gives us a good insight in what the majoritarian group behind the main constitution was willing to do. It obviously shows a willingness to make good on the promise of the amendment mechanism, and further a large proportion of the majoritarian part of the convention that drafted the constitution were also people who agreed with the tenets of what became the BOR. And notably, there's just about no conflict between what's in the first 10 and the constitution proper. Obviously in everyday politics nobody actually cares about what the intentions were when saying "gently caress you other team, Washington totally would have wanted this thing!" but historians and certain breeds of lawyer and judge alike do actually care why they did what they did, and why the country's stuck with what they did.
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# ? May 19, 2014 06:03 |
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Dusseldorf posted:It's not totally illogical in a Common law system that there should be the concern of the thought process behind writing a law taken in account besides purely the letter of the law. As a matter of jurisprudence I agree with you in part, but it's also worth noting that the strict formalistic originalism favoured by framer-worshippers like Scalia and Thomas (ie. textualist originalism, not original intentionalism) gives absolutely zero weight in theory to what the drafters of the US Constitution were trying to do. They purport only to care about the plain ordinary meaning of the black letter of the law at the time of authorship.
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# ? May 19, 2014 08:41 |
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Smudgie Buggler posted:As a matter of jurisprudence I agree with you in part, but it's also worth noting that the strict formalistic originalism favoured by framer-worshippers like Scalia and Thomas (ie. textualist originalism, not original intentionalism) gives absolutely zero weight in theory to what the drafters of the US Constitution were trying to do. They purport only to care about the plain ordinary meaning of the black letter of the law at the time of authorship. Or when it comes to the Second Amendment, just ignore Madison altogether and get super loving revisionist.
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# ? May 19, 2014 09:34 |
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Berke Negri posted:Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually. For my college paper I once wrote an Op-Ed piece calling out inane founder worship in which I called Jefferson a rapist, some dumbass Libertarian than came to the office and started a fight saying I was lying and that he was gonna complain to the college president. In short founder worship and those that partake in it are loving stupid and a detriment to our society.
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# ? May 19, 2014 19:16 |
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KomradeX posted:For my college paper I once wrote an Op-Ed piece calling out inane founder worship in which I called Jefferson a rapist, some dumbass Libertarian than came to the office and started a fight saying I was lying and that he was gonna complain to the college president. In short founder worship and those that partake in it are loving stupid and a detriment to our society. Did this libertarian in question own any land? Point out that only landowners got any sort of say in those times and if he had no land, well, sucks to be him!
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# ? May 19, 2014 19:40 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Did this libertarian in question own any land? Point out that only landowners got any sort of say in those times and if he had no land, well, sucks to be him! Even better I went to a CUNY school, a government run institution of higher learning. The fact that so many of the libertarians there would not be getting an education were it not for the government seemed to be lost on them.
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# ? May 19, 2014 23:06 |
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Smudgie Buggler posted:As a matter of jurisprudence I agree with you in part, but it's also worth noting that the strict formalistic originalism favoured by framer-worshippers like Scalia and Thomas (ie. textualist originalism, not original intentionalism) gives absolutely zero weight in theory to what the drafters of the US Constitution were trying to do. They purport only to care about the plain ordinary meaning of the black letter of the law at the time of authorship. I was most certainly not arguing the strong form of this argument that Scalia would argue, only a weak view that the intentions behind a law can be considered besides purely the text.
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# ? May 19, 2014 23:14 |
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KomradeX posted:For my college paper I once wrote an Op-Ed piece calling out inane founder worship in which I called Jefferson a rapist, some dumbass Libertarian than came to the office and started a fight saying I was lying and that he was gonna complain to the college president. In short founder worship and those that partake in it are loving stupid and a detriment to our society. I can only imagine that the office started clapping afterwards.
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# ? May 20, 2014 01:10 |
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Dusseldorf posted:I was most certainly not arguing the strong form of this argument that Scalia would argue, only a weak view that the intentions behind a law can be considered besides purely the text. I know, but what I'm saying is that Scalia would disagree vehemently with you. And it's almost paradoxical that his view is indicative of constitution-worshipping jurists. They don't give a poo poo about the intentions.
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# ? May 20, 2014 01:20 |
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Isn't Scalia the one that will track down a dictionary from the year a law was published to figure out exactly what each and ever word meant at the time? I mean, it makes total sense. As we all know people are 100% specific and literal about everything they say all the time.
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# ? May 20, 2014 06:11 |
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on the left posted:I can only imagine that the office started clapping afterwards. No but everyone did have a good laugh at the guy who didn't seem to know that Jefferson raped his slaves.
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# ? May 20, 2014 06:14 |
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KomradeX posted:For my college paper I once wrote an Op-Ed piece calling out inane founder worship in which I called Jefferson a rapist, some dumbass Libertarian than came to the office and started a fight saying I was lying and that he was gonna complain to the college president. In short founder worship and those that partake in it are loving stupid and a detriment to our society. I pissed off the college chapter of the Ron Paul for President when I started drawing political cartoons of him and mocking libertarianism. I drew the Ron Paul blimp getting caught on a burning cross and exploding. The emails were hilarious.
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# ? May 20, 2014 06:35 |
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Rand alPaul posted:I pissed off the college chapter of the Ron Paul for President when I started drawing political cartoons of him and mocking libertarianism. I drew the Ron Paul blimp getting caught on a burning cross and exploding. The emails were hilarious. I could only imagine, I wrote for the paper and was in charge at our college's political magazine (where in it's office I proudly hung a Soviet flag) and I loved pissing off our local chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, of which the two I had the closest contact with were not only Libertarians (one of them insisted he was an anarchist and that just made me want to beat the gently caress out of him more) but they were also Evangelical Christians and 9/11 Truthers and didn't think I was really doing my job unless their type were pissed off. It came to pass one night we were in the magazines office talking when one of them wandered in and talked up his 9/11 Truth bullshit, which a friend of mine was getting pretty pissed at since he had lost family in the Towers and I after going at every angle to debunk his bullshit (badly I will admit my memory sucks) I just said "You're in college, you should be loving ashamed of yourself" (to fall for such bullshit you see) and no, no one clapped but for a while among my friends it did become the go to phrase for when someone said or did something really stupid. In short if you take away anything from this it's that Staten Island is loving awful and so is a good 80 percent of the people that live here. Sadly since I graduated they handed the Op-ed section of the paper back over to conservatives and one who was argued that Africa was better off under colonialism than it is now.
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# ? May 20, 2014 07:00 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Isn't Scalia the one that will track down a dictionary from the year a law was published to figure out exactly what each and ever word meant at the time? I mean, it makes total sense. As we all know people are 100% specific and literal about everything they say all the time. If he does thats a really good practice. If your trying to interpret what was meant in a historical document, you should really break out the OED at the very least.
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# ? May 20, 2014 08:21 |
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KomradeX posted:No but everyone did have a good laugh at the guy who didn't seem to know that Jefferson raped his slaves. He was probably looking forward to a similarly coercive relationship with some poor trafficked Chinese woman.
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# ? May 20, 2014 13:30 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Isn't Scalia the one that will track down a dictionary from the year a law was published to figure out exactly what each and ever word meant at the time? I mean, it makes total sense. As we all know people are 100% specific and literal about everything they say all the time. The problem is, though, that there's a lot more people than just "the Founders" involved in Constitutional creation and amendments, if you really want to dig into it. Whose interpretation wins out when we're talking about the 14th Amendment? The fifteen people on the committee who drafted it (who probably disagreed over it and compromised)? The members of the House and the Senate who approved it to go to the states? The members of the state legislatures who ratified it? Every step in the amendment/ratification process involves a large number of people who probably have very different ideas as to what the amendment's intention is, why they're supporting it, and what they think its effects will be, so to fall back on the intent of a group of drafters (which isn't uniform anyway) is really understating the level of interpretation that can be possible when talking about the Constitution. It's equally valid to bring in the intentions and understandings of the people who then ratify the Constitution, which makes any discussion incredibly complicated due to the number of varied reasons why people end up supporting legislative proposals.
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# ? May 20, 2014 16:36 |
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UtinniOnTheRocks posted:The problem is, though, that there's a lot more people than just "the Founders" involved in Constitutional creation and amendments, if you really want to dig into it. Whose interpretation wins out when we're talking about the 14th Amendment? The fifteen people on the committee who drafted it (who probably disagreed over it and compromised)? The members of the House and the Senate who approved it to go to the states? The members of the state legislatures who ratified it? Every step in the amendment/ratification process involves a large number of people who probably have very different ideas as to what the amendment's intention is, why they're supporting it, and what they think its effects will be, so to fall back on the intent of a group of drafters (which isn't uniform anyway) is really understating the level of interpretation that can be possible when talking about the Constitution. It's equally valid to bring in the intentions and understandings of the people who then ratify the Constitution, which makes any discussion incredibly complicated due to the number of varied reasons why people end up supporting legislative proposals. That's actually kind of my point. The other snag is that if you get caught up on analyzing what each word means exactly you get issues with the fact that a sentence can mean something quite different than the individual words. The other thing is that words are fuzzy things in the human mind and mean different things to different people. The barriers are also fuzzy at best and words change over time. A dictionary may very well be what the word meant accord to professors 10 years before it was written.
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# ? May 20, 2014 16:39 |
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The Founding Fathers had some remarkable achievements but they were also the geniuses behind the unworkable Articles of Confederation and an electoral system that was guaranteed to result in a government crashing tie every time there was a competitive election. For a bunch of colonial backwater rubes who spent their whole lives making GBS threads in buckets they were pretty clever but its absurd to think they had a workable plan for the next 20 years much less then next 250.
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# ? May 20, 2014 16:52 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Isn't Scalia the one that will track down a dictionary from the year a law was published to figure out exactly what each and ever word meant at the time? I mean, it makes total sense. As we all know people are 100% specific and literal about everything they say all the time. He does, but only when it suits his purposes. Scalia uses "literalism" as a shield to protect his political opinions from scrutiny. When he comes out swinging against gay rights, the Voting Rights Act, women's rights, etc., he certainly doesn't seem too bothered about re-defining words.
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# ? May 20, 2014 17:55 |
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Most people with a brain DO find the Founding Fathers worship absurd. They weren't gods, they were men--and imperfect men at that. Slaveowners, monarchists, sexists...the group collectively referred to as the Founding Fathers had them all. No one thought past the next 20 years. In their wildest dreams they could never have imagined an international community like the one we have today, nor the level of technology we've achieved. The document they came up with (which, by the way, was their second bite at the apple after the Articles of loving Confederation failed hilariously) has an amendment to it that prohibits the quartering of troops in a private house, for gently caress's sake. It was written before there were streetlights, let alone automatic weapons. That's why we constantly find ourselves in uncharted legal waters--because the Constitution has no laws governing online privacy, or the use and sale of automatic weapons, or how to police the use of drones. We have been in need of a new Constitutional Convention for about 100 years now, but it will never, ever happen.
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# ? May 20, 2014 21:37 |
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Like I always do in threads like this, I would highly suggest watching the documentary series The Living Dead by Adam Curtis. Here's the first episode. The second episode is crazy too, but it's really the first ("On the Desperate Edge of Now", about the psychological component of Nazism and WWII) and the third episode ("The Attic", about Margaret Thatcher) that illustrate the kind of power that people can gain from exploiting the past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4
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# ? May 20, 2014 21:37 |
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DynamicSloth posted:The Founding Fathers had some remarkable achievements but they were also the geniuses behind the unworkable Articles of Confederation and an electoral system that was guaranteed to result in a government crashing tie every time there was a competitive election. For a bunch of colonial backwater rubes who spent their whole lives making GBS threads in buckets they were pretty clever but its absurd to think they had a workable plan for the next 20 years much less then next 250. Though the Articles were literally written when they were rebels on the run so it wasn't the best circumstances for drafting.
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# ? May 20, 2014 21:39 |
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Kaal posted:He does, but only when it suits his purposes. Scalia uses "literalism" as a shield to protect his political opinions from scrutiny. When he comes out swinging against gay rights, the Voting Rights Act, women's rights, etc., he certainly doesn't seem too bothered about re-defining words. You forgot that "torture isn't punishment" either, and thus not subject to constitutional scrutiny.
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# ? May 20, 2014 22:16 |
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I did my undergrad at the University of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson founded, designed and was president of. TJ worship is a big thing there, though it mostly seems to be ironic with being people aware of some of the messed up things he did during his life. Last year the commencement speaker was one Stephen T. Colbert. Colbert made numerous references to TJ raping slaves etc, and it made the current president and other admin squirm. It's well worth a look (it's on Youtube) if you have the time.
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# ? May 20, 2014 22:54 |
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Berke Negri posted:Jefferson is also an actual Very Bad Person unless you think raping women is somehow just ~chalked up to the times~ and can be excused. He's also kind of a shitlord intellectually. I would like to know where I can read more on "Jefferson is lovely" instead of Kens Burnsian hero worship.
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# ? May 20, 2014 23:44 |
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:I would like to know where I can read more on "Jefferson is lovely" instead of Kens Burnsian hero worship. You might give Garry Wills' Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power a read. It's a pretty good read, though focuses more on politics than personal matters.
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# ? May 21, 2014 00:47 |
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:I would like to know where I can read more on "Jefferson is lovely" instead of Kens Burnsian hero worship. It's weirdly rare, you would think that more historians would be interested in the Jefferson as Villain approach. Because I mean is there a better arch-villain in history than supergenius Thomas Jefferson? He was basically Mirror Doc Savage.
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# ? May 21, 2014 00:59 |
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He enslaved his own children, it doesn't get much more monstrous than that.
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# ? May 21, 2014 01:02 |
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DynamicSloth posted:He enslaved his own children, it doesn't get much more monstrous than that. History is weird.
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# ? May 21, 2014 01:18 |
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Short answer: A lot of powerful people privately don't care what the "founding fathers" wanted and a number of them are currently sitting on the bench of SCOTUS. Shorter answer: Origin myth.
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# ? May 21, 2014 01:18 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 12:22 |
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The most reprehensible thing I find about Thomas Jefferson, apart from him raping that slave woman, is how his views got progressively more pro-slavery as he got older, inherited more slaves, and sank deeper into debt because of his own extravagant spending. Like, he could rail against the evils of slavery when he was young, but once he started benefiting more personally from the fruits of slave labor, suddenly it was no longer as evil. Makes me dislike him even more than I think I would had he been a diehard slavery defender his whole life. Oh, and people like to defend Jefferson by calling him "a product of his time." gently caress that. Jefferson lived in an age where abolition was more talked about than ever, and where some of his fellow Founding Fathers freed their slaves, and three of them even became involved in abolitionist societies. Jefferson really had absolutely no excuse.
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# ? May 21, 2014 01:19 |