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10-18-2010, 06:39 AM | #1 (permalink) | |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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11 Freedoms that Drunks, Slackers Pioneered and The Founding Fathers Opposed...
this article is making the rounds on facebook this morning. i thought it funny and kinda interesting.
Quote:
so there's been for some time versions of strict construction coming from the far right that seems predicated on a bizarre manufactured nostalgia for the late 18th century. bizarre because it's pretty clear (to me anyway) that the folk who advocate such positions have no operative idea of what life in the late 18th century was like, and even less of the repressive cultural space that unfolded in the early united states. maybe this is more present for folk who live in the area i do which presents many opportunities to gaze upon the painted portraits of various grim-to-miserable 17th=18th century puritanical white people that glower across the years at you and make you pleased that you are not one of them. but this is an interesting little piece, i think. the freedoms that precedent and historical change have brought us aren't really so bad, are they? unless you oppose drinking, dancing, frivolity, gambling, divorce.... why on earth would anyone dream of going back, even in their imagination, to such a historical period, one dominated by such a repressive puritanical culture? what this appears to have been like, in reality, is a situation of total "privatization" of an extremely intrusive and limiting system of social controls, the center of which was a rigid and authoritarian form of christianity, something which offered no appeal, no contestation. that there was formally considerable local control indicates, to me anyway, that the mechanisms of local control are not context independent, that their political meaning is not context independent, and if there's something to be learned from, say, town meeting forms of direct democracy in the 18th century, it is about the normative idea of direct democracy as opposed to the authoritarian "republic" model, and of the dangers of allowing too much social control to slide into informality. but what do you think?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
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10-18-2010, 08:01 AM | #3 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: bedford, tx
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seems to me just further proof that the left or the right have no clue what strict constructionism or originalism actually means.
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"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." |
10-18-2010, 09:47 AM | #4 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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sure we do, dk. it's about an absolutist interpretation on gun rights. that's it. in order to situate that in some less-than-obviously parochial framework, there's this whole hallucination of "judicial activism" which basically refers to patterns of rulings that you don't like. but rather than say you don't like em, you proceed with the pseudo-constitutionalist position that what you don't like violates the spirit of the original document.
you don't like the state on principle out of some wholesale misunderstanding of what the modern state is and does, and repeatedly have argued that what we need is a return to the good old days of the late 18th century, which you also conflate with some golden age of capitalism in a way that demonstrates you can't define capitalism, so dont, fundamentally, know what it is. but whatever. and now that this piece happens to have turned up that complicates the historical image of "local control" in the fantasy glory-days of the 18th century by demonstrating what anyone who's worked on the actual history of the period knows, which is that the founders were culturally quite reactionary by contemporary standards and that the glory days of the 18th century would not sit well with contemporary sensibilities, likely including your own. but beyond that, i thought the piece kinda interesting.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
10-18-2010, 10:58 AM | #5 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: bedford, tx
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Quote:
anyway, this article will look good and sound funny to those who still need to maintain that Libertarians are extreme right radicals, so enjoy it.
__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." |
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10-18-2010, 11:10 AM | #6 (permalink) |
warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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That's not true, DK. I enjoyed this article and my favourite libertarians happen to be socialists.
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot |
10-18-2010, 11:28 AM | #7 (permalink) |
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
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but the main point of the article, and the reason i pulled it into here (apart from thinking it interesting on it's own, if not exactly News) is...you are more "free" under the modern state system than you would have been in the 18th century american context **if** your sensibility is shaped by contemporary realities (which it is, like it or not). partly because that earlier context would be repressive to you. but mostly because you wouldn't be able to appeal to any institution to change any of it, and that because much of what's being pointed to in the article was at the time **not** matters of law, but rather of the rules of the social game.
it's also the case that under the present capitalist arrangement, you are **much** more free politically and culturally---and this without saying that this capitalist arrangement is rational or even desirable. it simply is, from a certain viewpoint. this for the same basic reason--the transfer of what were in the 18th century private, so informal rules that shaped social conduct on the part of the dominant class to spaces with formal/public mediation--which make of them political---which make of them something that can, in theory anyway, be changed through pressure. keep in mind too that the 18th century american situation was a pretty radically class stratified one, and that as happened over and over again across the "age of revolutions" you had a group of elites who came to be the "founders" who used popular agitation in their revolution phase only to turn against it once the revolution had "ended"--which means (of course) once they had power as a social group. alot of these account of social mores can be seen as indicating that class division, with the founders being a whole lot more reactionary, puritanical and rigid than the "people"---whom the "founders" were not, by virtue of their social positions. for what it's worth, i actually think direct democracy is something to be argued for and at the end of a revolutionary process a form of self-governance that would be desirable. but the thing that really separates your position from mine---more than anything else, really----is that i dont think it makes any sense to look to the past. nostalgia is for chumps. there's no going back. but that's another story.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite |
10-18-2010, 12:49 PM | #8 (permalink) |
Addict
Location: Houston, Texas
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Great article. The homosexuality part gave me a giggle. Could you imagine it being legal these days where I guy could whip out his wang in a greeting to another man?
"Hey, John, what's up, bro?" Timmy said as he jiggled his penis.
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Tags |
drunks, fathers, founding, freedoms, opposed, pioneered, slackers |
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