If you are convinced we are a Proposition nation not a people, we need to adjust the proposition. I am not, and reject we are or were mere propositions. Whoever utters these words has already betrayed us (you don’t utter them ).
So those who live in ideas can relax the grip of this obsession upon your minds, AND OTHERS.
Do let your obsession with our founding flaws go… there’s no sin to exercise. As we were never an exercise in mere intellect or social engineering, any so called flaws in our design… aren’t relevant. We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering and a people who devised a couple of political contracts, if this one has failed we remain a people and get another. No one claims there’s no such thing as France because they’re on their 5th Republic.
The core errors of the Enlightenment are over weighting the problem solving skill called reason, and the tendentious and contentious concepts of right, and the disagreements at times on facts and what they mean.
That’s not our problem.
Our problem is we talk and think too much.
We’re slaves to those who act.
The original sins to exorcise aren’t the Founders, but your own …your own vanity if you need a sin. The Vanity that minds can get it right is above all else the Enlightenment’s mortal sin.
So please define this corrupt version of liberalism other than by association with the globalists. I don't think you're wrong, btw. To cite someone you know well, Friedrich Hayek claimed to be classical liberal rather than a conservative. He did share a tradition, if we are starting from the Enlightenment, which includes David Hume and Adam Smith, to start, and arguably reached a 19th century apogee with JS Mill. (I know that Hume is now often deemed a conservative, but he wrote extensively on liberty, including market freedom, and his defense of free speech is worth reading even today).
I ask because I do think this tradition has been subverted, corrupted and co-opted. Let's take some examples. If we follow the Anglo-American tradition, the government exists by consent of and to serve the people. From Locke and Hume ("I am an American in my principles") to Franklin and Jefferson, et alia. Both intrinsic in this set of beliefs and explicitly stated, the people have a right to rebel -- to overthrow their government if it turns tyrannical or otherwise becomes so vastly dysfunctional it no longer fulfills its reason for existence. If instead we follow the UN on Human Rights as opposed the Anglo-American tradition which discusses Inalienable Rights, the people do NOT have a right to rebel -- do NOT have a right to overthrow or refashion their existing system of government. Instead, and in contrast, the people have a right to representation -- and generically defined participation. This effectively means the following: so long as elections are held in which people can vote, the state cannot neither be deemed tyrannical nor vastly dysfunctional. (The problems with elections globally? Well, books HAVE been written).
Such was not how our Founders understood it, but that seems hardly the core issue. We need introduce the distinction de facto / de jure (in reality vs in law). In British America prior to the revolution, local representation government was an empirical reality. The noted historian Jack P. Greene has well-documented that the conflict was very much the colonial assemblies -- the local "parliaments" -- against the British Parliament in terms of who had legislative authority -- and who actually represented the people living there. In other words, similar to the notion of a "jury of one's peers," representative government was practiced as first local and de facto -- not as nationalized and de jure. Democratic forms of governance existed on the community level -- or not at all. It had to actually practiced -- not conferred once every four years from above by the state as absolute sovereign. Hence classical liberalism emphasized individuals with some degree of self-determination who made choices which had consequences. The state had a greatly reduced role.
In contrast, the current practice of "democracy" -- of representative governance -- is de jure, not de facto: it is the ongoing ratification of absolutist corporate-state authority by highly controlled and hence largely ritual elections. One has the right to vote, but increasingly, one forfeits all the other rights -- including the once Inalienable Rights -- which were part and parcel of Classical Liberalism.
This has since gone global -- what many experts refer to as the "Liberal Peace Thesis." The UN (and often enough, USA) experts arrive, and impose or monitor national elections with NO concern for any de facto democratic practices in the community or representative governance on the local scale. Our experts then pronounce a winner and then call their work done. No concern about individuals engaged in self-determination (however limited) in the personal, professional, and economic spheres -- they voted. DONE. They are represented. They have participated. Now, let the State (often enough, the globalists working through their newly installed leader) do its work unhindered, unchecked. The people will vote again in 3, 4, 6 or whatever more years. DONE. None of this, however, is how Locke or Jefferson or JS Mill understood consent of governed and the social contract. So I'm not sure we can blame them.
Moreover, we have a wider war going on against individuals and even family units doing anything that smacks of self-reliance or self-determination: gardening is now bad for the planet. Exercise, not eating highly processed commercialized foods, and accepting responsibility for one's health and fitness: fascism. "Doing your own research:" socially unacceptable stupidity. (And to think I once taught college students how to do their own research -- and this was a standard part of the curriculum. How insane we all were). Self-defense in circumstances when the rule of law has completely broken down: unspeakable. Barbaric. Don't even go there.
I'll have to get off my intellectual ass and try to explain better -- if only to myself -- how classical liberalism was co-opted and corrupted by the globalists, working hand-in-hand for sure with certain American elites: see the Madeline Albright Doctrine, see JJ Mearsheimer on the Liberal Delusion, etc. But I'm far from ready to give up on the Classical Liberal tradition. That seems like conceding to the Neo-Feudalists. If you are not drawing on this tradition in opposition to the emergent Neo-Feudalism, what is your alternative? If say Locke to Hayek no longer matter, then why fight it? If it no longer means anything to be an American citizen, if we have only the rights the UN grants us, then f*ck it -- why bother?
I appreciate your attempts to understand where ideologies and realities criss-cross or keep company, but to suggest that "force" is the answer is to join the sociopaths.
If you are convinced we are a Proposition nation not a people, we need to adjust the proposition. I am not, and reject we are or were mere propositions. Whoever utters these words has already betrayed us (you don’t utter them ).
So those who live in ideas can relax the grip of this obsession upon your minds, AND OTHERS.
Do let your obsession with our founding flaws go… there’s no sin to exercise. As we were never an exercise in mere intellect or social engineering, any so called flaws in our design… aren’t relevant. We were built by over 160 years of blood, sweat, suffering and a people who devised a couple of political contracts, if this one has failed we remain a people and get another. No one claims there’s no such thing as France because they’re on their 5th Republic.
The core errors of the Enlightenment are over weighting the problem solving skill called reason, and the tendentious and contentious concepts of right, and the disagreements at times on facts and what they mean.
That’s not our problem.
Our problem is we talk and think too much.
We’re slaves to those who act.
The original sins to exorcise aren’t the Founders, but your own …your own vanity if you need a sin. The Vanity that minds can get it right is above all else the Enlightenment’s mortal sin.
So please define this corrupt version of liberalism other than by association with the globalists. I don't think you're wrong, btw. To cite someone you know well, Friedrich Hayek claimed to be classical liberal rather than a conservative. He did share a tradition, if we are starting from the Enlightenment, which includes David Hume and Adam Smith, to start, and arguably reached a 19th century apogee with JS Mill. (I know that Hume is now often deemed a conservative, but he wrote extensively on liberty, including market freedom, and his defense of free speech is worth reading even today).
I ask because I do think this tradition has been subverted, corrupted and co-opted. Let's take some examples. If we follow the Anglo-American tradition, the government exists by consent of and to serve the people. From Locke and Hume ("I am an American in my principles") to Franklin and Jefferson, et alia. Both intrinsic in this set of beliefs and explicitly stated, the people have a right to rebel -- to overthrow their government if it turns tyrannical or otherwise becomes so vastly dysfunctional it no longer fulfills its reason for existence. If instead we follow the UN on Human Rights as opposed the Anglo-American tradition which discusses Inalienable Rights, the people do NOT have a right to rebel -- do NOT have a right to overthrow or refashion their existing system of government. Instead, and in contrast, the people have a right to representation -- and generically defined participation. This effectively means the following: so long as elections are held in which people can vote, the state cannot neither be deemed tyrannical nor vastly dysfunctional. (The problems with elections globally? Well, books HAVE been written).
Such was not how our Founders understood it, but that seems hardly the core issue. We need introduce the distinction de facto / de jure (in reality vs in law). In British America prior to the revolution, local representation government was an empirical reality. The noted historian Jack P. Greene has well-documented that the conflict was very much the colonial assemblies -- the local "parliaments" -- against the British Parliament in terms of who had legislative authority -- and who actually represented the people living there. In other words, similar to the notion of a "jury of one's peers," representative government was practiced as first local and de facto -- not as nationalized and de jure. Democratic forms of governance existed on the community level -- or not at all. It had to actually practiced -- not conferred once every four years from above by the state as absolute sovereign. Hence classical liberalism emphasized individuals with some degree of self-determination who made choices which had consequences. The state had a greatly reduced role.
In contrast, the current practice of "democracy" -- of representative governance -- is de jure, not de facto: it is the ongoing ratification of absolutist corporate-state authority by highly controlled and hence largely ritual elections. One has the right to vote, but increasingly, one forfeits all the other rights -- including the once Inalienable Rights -- which were part and parcel of Classical Liberalism.
This has since gone global -- what many experts refer to as the "Liberal Peace Thesis." The UN (and often enough, USA) experts arrive, and impose or monitor national elections with NO concern for any de facto democratic practices in the community or representative governance on the local scale. Our experts then pronounce a winner and then call their work done. No concern about individuals engaged in self-determination (however limited) in the personal, professional, and economic spheres -- they voted. DONE. They are represented. They have participated. Now, let the State (often enough, the globalists working through their newly installed leader) do its work unhindered, unchecked. The people will vote again in 3, 4, 6 or whatever more years. DONE. None of this, however, is how Locke or Jefferson or JS Mill understood consent of governed and the social contract. So I'm not sure we can blame them.
Moreover, we have a wider war going on against individuals and even family units doing anything that smacks of self-reliance or self-determination: gardening is now bad for the planet. Exercise, not eating highly processed commercialized foods, and accepting responsibility for one's health and fitness: fascism. "Doing your own research:" socially unacceptable stupidity. (And to think I once taught college students how to do their own research -- and this was a standard part of the curriculum. How insane we all were). Self-defense in circumstances when the rule of law has completely broken down: unspeakable. Barbaric. Don't even go there.
I'll have to get off my intellectual ass and try to explain better -- if only to myself -- how classical liberalism was co-opted and corrupted by the globalists, working hand-in-hand for sure with certain American elites: see the Madeline Albright Doctrine, see JJ Mearsheimer on the Liberal Delusion, etc. But I'm far from ready to give up on the Classical Liberal tradition. That seems like conceding to the Neo-Feudalists. If you are not drawing on this tradition in opposition to the emergent Neo-Feudalism, what is your alternative? If say Locke to Hayek no longer matter, then why fight it? If it no longer means anything to be an American citizen, if we have only the rights the UN grants us, then f*ck it -- why bother?
But America was already in 1787 (the year of the Constitutional Convention) a fully formed nation of people.
I appreciate your attempts to understand where ideologies and realities criss-cross or keep company, but to suggest that "force" is the answer is to join the sociopaths.
>who serve the Eye at the End of Time intuitively understand that to best serve their God
Small 'g' god?
> with questionable physiognomy
??
Did you create that public-private-partnership map?