Francisco Ferrer

My Post #47 refutes your claim in Post #47 that Adams's belief that the Constitution was "made only for a moral and religious people" is true today. Numerous court rulings, of which I have given a fair sample, demonstrate that the Constitution today is a means to support the rights of non-religious, moral people. Furthermore, as I have earlier shown, not even the original Constitution was "designed to work only for decent people" or "made only for a moral and religious people," since it explicitly protected and preserved the highly immoral institution of slavery. God-given, self-evident rights? One of the supposedly self-evident rights that the Constitution upheld was for slave owners to to be able to haul their runaway Africans back to the plantation without Yankee abolitionists interfering. But perhaps "decent" slaves had no complaints.

Ok, Bob... is this statement true? "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams Greg All I know is that he spoke those words... ...and that they are true today. Greg In John Adams's lifetime it was not unconstitutional for a school district to provide clergy to perform nondenominational prayer at elementary or secondary school graduation. It is today. In John Adams's lifetime it was not unconstitutional for a nativity scene to be displayed inside a government building. It is today. In John Adams's lifetime it was not unconstitutional to post the Ten Commandments in public schools. It is today. In John Adams's lifetime it was not unconstitutional to have daily Bible readings and the reciting of the the Lord's Prayer in public schools. It is today. So much for the idea of a Constitution made only for a religious people.

...because I know how those moral principles work in the present. Fine. Use your knowledge of the present to show how the American system of government, which included the Fugitive Slave Clause, was designed to work only for decent people. Perhaps your argument is that since there is no Constitutional slavery in the living present, there couldn't have been any in the dead past, an argument similar to the idea that since the guillotine is not used today it must not have been used in the past. It certainly does. John Adams understood that self evident truth... and so do I. And if the US Constitution isn't working for you right here and right now... then you aren't decent. What do you know of John Adams? Is your information based on his present existence or are you relying on documents from the dead past? The fact that John Adams and some other Founders opposed slavery does not mean that the Constitution did not require return upon claim of any "Person held to Service or Labour" in one state who had escaped to another state. Adams did not suspend the clause during his administration. Should one therefore conclude that none of the many slaves who were returned to bondage under this provision were decent? Or that those who got their slaves returned to them were decent?

I don't know exactly how to break this to you, Frank... but now is not the dead past. Today in America slavery does not exist, except for the stupid fools who have sold themselves into slavery to their own debts and the insurance bureaucracy. Greg In Post #32 you wrote, "This is because the American system of government was designed to work only for decent people." Now if you are truly unwilling to examine an event in the "dead past," how could you know anything about the process or rationale under which the American system of government was designed? If, as you claim, the Constitution "was designed to work only for decent people," provide evidence that the Fugitive Slave Clause, an unambiguously clear provision of the original Constitution, benefited decent people. If, on the other hand, you have forbidden yourself from reviewing documents from 1787 then you are making historical claims and at the same time saying those claims cannot be validated.

Yes, and therefore turns it into a completely different idea. Hegel's dialectic is an almost supernatural mechanism by which the "Idea" acts on reality, whereas Marx's dialectical materialism is exactly opposite, and it says that material forces shape human ideas. Your argument could just as easily be applied to Rand and Plato and "prove" that Objectivists are dominated by Platonism because they turn the primacy of consciousness over existence on its head. Just because two people might agree on some point doesn't prove that one "dominates" the thinking of the other. While Marx and Engels rejected a dogmatic use of Hegel's dialectic, they retained what eminent Marxist scholar Louis Althusser called "its rational kernel." As for Rand and Plato, what part of her philosophy does she owe to the author of The Republic?

Except that she didn't distance herself from the Romantics per se or associate her theory exclusively with the school of Romantic Realism. E.g.: "Romanticism is the conceptual school of art." "What the Romanticists brought to art was the primacy of values." "Following the rule of fundamentality, it is as a volition-oriented school that Romanticism must be defined." "The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices." "Philosophically, Romanticism is a crusade to glorify man’s existence; psychologically, it is experienced simply as the desire to make life interesting." "Romanticism demands mastery of the primary element of fiction: the art of storytelling—which requires three cardinal qualities: ingenuity, imagination, a sense of drama." Note that all of the definitions above can be applied just as well to Neoclassicism. Rand's key goal of presenting man as he might be or ought to be is unmistakably classical. . And why didn't she call her book on aesthetics The Romantic Realist Manifesto? Years ago I concluded that the underlying meaning of "Romanticism" and "Naturalism" in Rand's theory is "Here's what I like" and "Here's what I dislike."

Without Hegel, Marxism would have taken an entirely different shape. Hegel aimed his dialectic toward pantheism. Marx merely took the Hegelian structure and oriented it toward atheistic, "scientific" materialism. Marx's structure was lifted largely from the Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, (The Essence of Christianity,1843). So if Hegel is all about "spirit," Marx is all about immutable "history." We can choose to ignore the essential Hegelian thread in Marx's thought, but it's there all the same. Consider the following passage from Hegel's Philosophy of History and argue, if you will, that it had no influence on the Marxian argument: As to the political condition of North America, the general object of the existence of this State is not yet fixed and determined, and the necessity for a firm combination does not yet exist; for a real State and a real Government arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme, and when such a condition of things presents itself that a large portion of the people can no longer satisfy its necessities in the way in which it has been accustomed so to do. But America is hitherto exempt from this pressure, for it has the outlet of colonization constantly and widely open, and multitudes are continually streaming into the plains of the Mississippi. By this means the chief source of discontent is removed, and the continuation of the existing civil condition is guaranteed. (p, 103)

Two months ago when I entered the theatre to see this fascinating documentary (now on DVD), I was a doubter. I now firmly believe Johannes Vermeer used a form of camera obscura to obtain the stunning realism in his works. This should in no way diminish the master's greatness, any more than we should feel disappointed that a novelist gathered notes in a library before writing about the 17th century. What is especially valuable in the film is the insight and perseverance of Tim Jenison, the Texas inventor who solved the mystery of how Vermeer rendered his photo-realistic masterpieces and then spent five years using those same techniques to recreate an exact duplicate of The Music Lesson. The film is mostly narrated by libertarian Penn Jillette. Here's an essay on the topic by Jenison: http://boingboing.net/2014/06/10/vermeers-paintings-might-be.html

The great irony of Rand's literary theory is that the real world Romantics (the ones who existed outside Rand's imagination) were with few exceptions extremely hostile to reason, capitalism, civilization, even reality itself. For example, Keats criticized Newton's optics for "unweaving the rainbow." Hegelianism dominated the early Romantics and Marx. It also doesn't help Rand's case that "Naturalists" Crane, Wharton and Wright were better novelists than Hugo.

This is because the American system of government was designed to work only for decent people. Decent people should not have to put up with their slaves running off and not being returned. Thus the Constitution and its Fugitive Slave Clause made sure that the God-given right to property in human beings would not be abridged. Of course, if you weren't decent, you didn't get your slaves back. Presumably, they became the property of someone who was decent.

Most of the 13 original states formally abolished slavery before 1800, so it is hardly "unfair" to to treat independence from a local master as philosophically separate from independence from a foreign master. The human problem is one and the same. Yes, I've seen Giamatti's John Adams twice. One day I'll watch it again.

Excuse me but you seem to...as you stated, with obvious disdain, "greatest generation phooey!" Surely you have an idea as to what a great generation would be comprised of, you know, values. Oh, I didn't know you did a vulcan mind meld on me and know what terms I think of. Really. Never mind. Happy 4th. of July! -J I wished to make the point that there is nothing admirable or remotely great about a populace whose voting majority would send FDR to the White House four times, who with few exceptions never seriously questioned the wisdom of centralizing the economy, granting the President unlimited authority over the nation, enslaving young men by the millions, and lending material aid to the worst murderers in history. Were the young men and women of the 1770's much better? Perhaps not. Too many of them believed that God had invented the African expressly to till their fields and serve their tea.

You should talk to soldiers who were there. No one of them ever marched cheerfully to their deaths. Most of them were scared but they could focus well enough to complete their missions or die trying. Any soldier who tells who he cheerfully faced death is either lying or is deluded. Only Jihadis are happy to die for Allah and that is because they get to fuck their 72 virgins endlessly. Ba'al Chatzaf I didn't say that that in the heat of battle men weren't scared. I referred to the myths they were given to suckle on in their childhood. What I will say is that my father's generation all too quickly swallowed the big lie that government equals country, that patriotism is following orders from FDR on down, and that real men don't think too hard about why exactly they're fighting German or Japanese (or Vietnamese or Sunni) soldiers--they just do it.

Hello So who is the greatest generation... for you? Can you tell me why? -Joe It's an idiotic contest for collectivist minds. Greatest generation. Greatest vintage of human beings. Do people who come here really think in those terms?

Sure, sure. My uncle was at Iwo Jima. For centuries children have been raised on stories of men marching cheerfully to their deaths while singing the glory of King and Country. Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die Statism will begin its overdue retreat when men are not so quick to answer the bugle call of "duty."

What the G--D----- ACA is--practically--is Medicaid for everybody not on Medicare if not rich and the degradation of Medicare in the direction of Medicaid which in turn had degraded American medicine starting in the mid-60s. And let us not forget the progressive enslavement of American doctors. --Brant there!--I feel better too! On principle (which remains unknown to me) many Republicans will fight the socialization of medicine tooth and nail and, with the same ferocity, fight to preserve the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program. This is the genius of the two-party political system.

For an intelligent man, I wonder if you actually considered the tone of your post? Or, if you did, you chose to the words carefully? You're right. My words were vulgar and poorly chosen. I retract the first sentence.

Maybe the voters that created the opportunity to enact the Affordable Care Act, which "puts consumers back in charge of their health care" will be called the Greatest Generation by their children. Sure, they were scared, worn down, perhaps misinformed, but they saw a poorly run system that had to be set right. God bless 'em.

World War II officially began in September 1939 after Hitler, a killer of millions of people, invaded and annexed Poland. Naturally, in order to defeat this monster, FDR and Churchill allied with Stalin, also a killer of millions of people, who had in September 1939 also invaded and annexed Poland. To make sure the ruler of Eastern Europe was not a ruthless dictator like Hitler, FDR sent ruthless dictator Stalin essential military aid and used U.S. personnel to round up and repatriate millions of people trying to escape from him. There is pretty good evidence that Roosevelt's administration also gave Stalin the A-bomb. Stéphane Courtois, the editor of The Black Book of Communism, which estimates death tolls under 20th century communist regimes at 95 million, makes a point which few historians have recognized: After 1945 the Jewish genocide became a byword for modern barbarism, the epitome of twentieth-century mass terror... more recently, a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has also prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world. After all, it seems scarcely plausible that the victors who had helped bring about the destruction of a genocidal apparatus might themselves have put the very same methods into practice. When faced with this paradox, people generally preferred to bury their heads in sand. That's right, the "Greatest Generation" four times elected a leader complicit in a horror many times larger than the Third Reich's.

Mao, whose rise to power was due in no small part to the policies of "soft-fascist" FDR, killed four times more people than the Third Reich, yet, thank God, not one of his victims underwent soapification.

Greatest generation--phooey! Most Americans of the 1930's and 1940's bought the lie that the Depression was caused by laissez-faire, that FDR was a saint, and that the duty of American boys was to die overseas to save "democracy" in places like the Soviet Union.

If the word "redskins" is, by nature, derogatory, racist or disparaging, why would the following Native American high schools choose "redskin" to represent their teams? (Source: http://cnsmaryland.org/interactives/redskins-map/index.html ) Redskins High Schools that are Majority Native American Red Mesa High SchoolTeec Nos Pos, ArizonaAmerican Indian99.31% Wellpinit High SchoolWellpinit, WashingtonAmerican Indian91.21% Kingston High SchoolKingston, OklahomaAmerican Indian57.69%The law governing trademarks does not specifically disallow racism but prevents granting protection for a trademark that "may disparage" persons. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1052 Now, as George Will has pointed out, if "redskin" is disparaging because it refers to a person's skin color, then so is the name of an entire state, Oklahoma, which "is based on Choctaw Indian words which translate as red people (okla meaning 'people' and humma meaning 'red')." http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/Oklahoma/Oklahomanameorigin.html Why not discontinue trademark protection for the Oklahoma State University Cowboys and the University of Oklahoma Sooners? And why is Nabisco allowed to use the word "Oreo" to sell cookies?

I wonder why Rand didn't use this same argument to defend the ownership of Africans by many of the Founders of "the greatest, the noblest and. . . the only moral country in the history of the world."

Define dud. The fact that it will inspire folks to read her works makes it a unqualified success. +1 Wish The Fountainhead was redone for the big screen. -Joe I do not. While the 1949 Fountainhead movie may have its flaws, it is intelligently directed and features a bold, stylized approach in costumes, production design and cinematography. It is not the world as it is; it is the world as it might be. Chances are that a 21st century movie version of the book would be as bad as the Atlas Shrugged movies.

Yes, I wonder why Bush and Cheney didn't give the Iraqis a constitution like the one they cherished and honored during their administration?