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AYC posted:But the law and its meaning changes-that's what the amendments are for. For example, much of modern jurisprudence with regards to civil rights issues is based on the 14th amendment, added to the Constitution nearly 80 years after it was written. Yet the amount of text that remains unamended in the Constitution is actually quite large! And out of thousands of serious proposals to amend, only 27 have passed successfully.
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May 18, 2014 22:29
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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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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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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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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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Ur-fascism is useless for understanding it.
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May 21, 2014 05:19
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Watermelon City posted:I disagree, obviously. Every one of Eco's 14 features of Ur-Fascism is a canny description of the political movements coalescing around Founding Fathers worship. No they aren't, furthermore Eco himself cautioned against assuming everything vaguely similar should be called it. The point of the essay was not "literally everything in history was one step from being ur-fascist".
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May 21, 2014 21:24
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Pretty sure America has killed more natives than Hitler killed Jews. The primary reasons Hitler is so vilified is because he was our enemy and he was the most recent genocidal maniac we fought in a major war. Yes, he was among the worst but Stalin was arguably even more terrible, but Stalin was our bro. Uh, dude, America treated Stalin as a bro for about 4 years, before mid 1941 and after mid 1945 Stalin was definitely in the top 5 most hated.
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May 23, 2014 01:38
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