He monkeyed with the courts, and didn't hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.
He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.
Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
One cool thing about learning Latin in high school was reading books from two-thousand years ago. Take Ovid's Ars Amatoria for example. He was the original PUA (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Amatoria): "The first two books, aimed at men, contain sections which cover such topics as 'not forgetting her birthday', 'letting her miss you - but not for long' and 'not asking about her age'."
It's important to note that Ars was intended to be satirical. However, when it was rediscovered, a lot of the context surrounding it was lost, so people too it seriously... and it became the basis of courtly love and thus modern romance.
When, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions [1918-1920], specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the government under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity.
I find this true today as well. A lot of people just can't seem to accept the idea that the founding fathers of the USA wanted to allow their descendants the same right to start over that they were exercising at the time.
I must admit that even given an appreciation of that I am hard pressed to imagine what a popular uprising and establishment of a new government would look like in today's America.
There is the possibility of calling a Constitutional Convention. But most people have the heebie-jeebies over that, as everything then comes up for grabs. Women's voting rights, separation of powers, two-term limit for presidents -- having a president at all. You name it.
Article V is the part of the Constitution that governs conventions. It is just for recommending amendments that get approved in the usual way. So there really shouldn't be any more concern about it than normal.
Or the second amendment, which a growing number of Americans feel no needed for, unfortunately. As of disarming the populace works well long term for citizens.
It's worked pretty well for citizens of other first-world countries who have practically zero chance of dying from gun violence. So, yeah, I'd say it works great long-term.
I don't think that can happen. I don't know, obviously, but despite our support for popular uprisings in other countries, I can't imagine the federal government not engaging in battle with the "traitors" knocking at their gates. I don't know what it looks like for the US military to engage its citizens en masse, but I'm guessing that happens before capitulation.
Other speculations?
Edit: I mean, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service are all built up around protecting the government from its people, right? The US government had been setting up a firewall between itself and its people for decades. (The NSA ostensibly not, but we know they were spying on Americans since at least 1945 [0]).
> Does anyone really want to fight that? The answer is probably No.
You won't be fighting the US military. Many of them will join with you. They are people, not killing machines. They are your neighbors and the sons and daughters of your neighbors. They will not fire on their countrymen because a politician told them to.
The men and women in our military swore to uphold the constitution. They did not swear to be the thugs for a group of elites who got elected only through virtue of millions upon millions of dollars of campaign contributions from organizations that do not have the best interest of this nation as their goal.
Hahahahahahahahaha. Sorry but your naivete is amusing.
Sure, I may have been 5 years old when I went through a [very short] civil war, but I still remember the news. Many soldiers didn't even know why they were being asked to shoot this or that. While in the barracks they were kept under strict radio silence from outside and most had no idea a civil war had started. They were just told to go there and shoot over there. They didn't know if they were shooting at their neighbors from back home, at somebody they hate, or what.[1]
Eventually news spread and the war got very very bloody as people who used to be comrades became personally involved in drinking the kool-aid. Luckily the bloody parts were removed from where I lived, but a lot of my classmates in elementary school were refugees.
Civil war ain't nothing to sneeze at. It is the worst type of war.
[1] There's a video from a private telling all of this to a news crew. Seeing it on TV is one of my earliest memories. It's in serbocroatian and I don't know if there's a version with English subtitles. -> https://www.facebook.com/zetraprojekt/videos/865414093588116...
I think what he's getting at is a valid point. It won't just be rebels against the military. If the rebellion or revolution picks up enough steam, significant elements of the military will likely defect to the other side and in a very real way the war would be the US military vs itself. Ex-US soldiers, officers, generals, with clandestine support from foreign powers like China and Russia, would be taking on the remaining part of the US military.
Or the US splits and the revolution is turned into a North vs South, East vs West, type of civil war.
I agree, eventually the military breaks up and starts fighting itself.
But you're still essentially fighting the US military. The biggest baddest military in the world. Surely the US military agrees that fighting the US military is a Bad Idea (tm).
Point is, civil war is messy. There's no clear right or wrong, good guy or bad guy, it's by definition neighbor killing neighbor, friend against friend, sibling versus sibling. Everyone thinks they are protecting the One True Way Forward to make the country great again.
The US military is a highly sophisticated war machine but ultimately it requires resources to support its operations. No military can ignore the cold hard facts of logistics, something that many armies have done to their own demise. If there is no continental US to provide the food, materiel or the money to pay for it, I doubt the machine could last very long.
Okay, so you're fighting half of the US Military. A civil war in the US isn't going to be against some mustache-twirling cartoon villain that everyone recognizes is the greater evil. It will be a complex conflict where the participants don't even agree on the facts behind things. Add to that the various identity groups who all vary widely in how much they trust the government...
Can you find any cause of action against the government that you feel is worth dying for, which is not actually a complaint about a majority-ish segment of the population?
I don't believe you'll find any rallying cry for "the citizens" vs "the government," just opposition among citizens that gets expressed in government.
In the last one, with about 1/10 our present population, about 3/4 million people died. The military split between sides, which, were it to happen now, would be the end of the country.
Very different. The EU has a legal method of succession (article 50), the US was brought together under a strict constitution, creating a single federal government. Compared to the original Articles of Confederation:
> In dramatic contrast to Article VII–whose unanimity rule that no state can bind another confirms the sovereignty of each state prior to 1787 –Article V does not permit a single state convention to modify the federal Constitution for itself. Moreover, it makes clear that a state may be bound by a federal constitutional amendment even if that state votes against the amendment in a properly convened state convention. And this rule is flatly inconsistent with the idea that states remain sovereign after joining the Constitution, even if they were sovereign before joining it. Thus, ratification of the Constitution itself marked the moment when previously sovereign states gave up their sovereignty and legal independence
A better comparison would be the formation of Canada, or better yet: the Quebec referendum to separate from Canada (put to a vote of the people, but narrowly lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_referendum,_1995)
Well...in history nobody has ever needed a document to start an uprising. And we aren't going to see one (atleast in the US) today cause most people have better things to do with their lives.
For a minute I assumed you were referring to King, Jr. He used some writing, but relied much more on oration and protests.
But yes, the Protestant theologian is a great example. The short time delay from the printing press to the Reformation, I think, highlights the immense power of the written word.
In modern America, I suspect the medium is more likely to be television than text.
H. L. Mencken also wrote: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Anyone who has not yet seen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
might do well to spend 90 minutes watching it,
and contemplating the state of their nation.
Nice translation. I'd love to see more of this type of thing; it is really difficult to read a lot of good texts from hundreds of years ago due to the changes in prose.
Sadly, it seems like we as a nation have broken nearly every rule Washington warned us about - political infighting, foreign entanglements, etc.
Finally, it was interesting to note the 10th paragraph about similar culture, values, religion, etc. It seems the Globalists have spent the last 30 years trying to counter this idea with the opposite one that diversity, multiculturalism, etc. is the way to go.
> The name of american, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.
> You’ve gotta be Americans before all else. You’re for the most part the same religion and culture...
It's interesting that Washington acknowledged the binding effect that shared culture has on a nation. I see the Nordic countries praised often on HN, and the counterpoint is always some variety of "but they have little diversity". I wonder what Washington would say about the US and the effects of a variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heritages now?
The US has always had a diverse variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural heritage. I'd guess that's part of the reason he's expressly telling them to ignore the differences.
Given that egregious quote mining, I guess you'd be immune to subtle arguments about context e.g. does someone stand at the head of an exclusively Lutheran Church and make a speech about how they should ignore their religious differences, no, that would be redundant. Which implies he knows there are differences enough for them to turn on each other if they don't make an effort to pull together.
Despite being written in 95 year old slang, I find this surprisingly readable. Especially compared to the original. There's a lot of broken grammar though. I wonder if that was how people actually spoke, or exaggerated for effect.
Mencken's whole schtick was to be a populist intellectual. At one point he was so famous that a letter from Germany simply addressed "Mencken, USA" got delivered just fine.
His usual essays and reportage use more elevated language than this. IIRC he wrote this to make the point that "American" was a separate language from "English", and stuck in every Americanism he could think of.
The median American today probably speaks better English than back then. Literacy is up, radio and TV are universal so you don't just hear people on your block, fewer of us are recent immigrants, etc.
I think the original is easier to understand and is written in plainer speech. But the 1920s version still has a lot of poetry to it, which surprises me since I always assumed that what made the original beautiful was the exact words and phrases used.
"He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don't care which."
That translates to "The King was protecting the Indians too much." Which was probably true.
Yeah, it's interesting to see that that part is explicitly pro-immigration by the people it refers to with the slurs, and complaining that the King is keeping them out.
The original:
> He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
(So the original Declaration did complain, in a fashion, that the King was obstructing immigration.)
That section struck me like a brick when I heard them reciting the Declaration on NPR yesterday morning. Later I saw this NYT opinion piece: "Did a Fear of Slave Revolts Drive American Independence" [1]. The article doesn't quite support the sensationalist headline, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Honestly it appeared like an assessment of Obama administration.
> He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.
> Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
As you know government cant create jobs except for government servants such as TSA screening agents. Their salary bill has be then paid for by the hardworking earning Americans. I think that is what that sentence means.
The Bloomberg article is talking about jobs that are creating by private industry. Government has no hand in it. If those business run a profit those jobs will be sustained else they will wither away unlike TSA people who will get paid no matter how much the passengers hate them.
I wouldn't defend the TSA. They have abysmal performance, but they are a small fraction of the country. My point is that most people being employed are not loafers. In addition, taxpayers that fund the federal government are generally the upper half of income earners. The poor really don't pay that much in taxes.
Moot of us are in the upper half of income earners. Those are he people who are working hard and keeping the economy running. But it is false to say these are the only victims. More taxes and more regulations inevitably means slower growth of small business leading to less employment of poor people. Not to mention the inflation that hurts the lower income half significantly more as it is an indirect tax on cash you hold.
Not really. NASA employees only 20K or so people most of which are doing some productive work. TSA on other hand employs 55K who do no productive work.
He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.
Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
Time passes, but some things don't change.