Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The Relative Virtues Of An Unwritten Contitution?

Several hours after I wrote my morning post in which I, as so often, dissed the American Constitution,  following the white-hot Brexit debacle in the Britain, I listened to the most estimable Phil who was answering listener comments.  One that he answered included the proposal that Britain adopt a written constitution to replace their unwritten one which he objected to strenuously, making a very good argument for why a written Constitution is dangerous and almost bound to work to prop up an unacceptable status quo - exactly what I have been railing about forever.  

Here's a link to the video at the point where he addresses the comment which also includes the excellent point that looking to history can be useful but not if you don't take a fuller view of what that history meant, the actual nature of how the end came to be.  That is a point which so many people, especially those whose conception of history is derived mainly from movies and TV shows, need to learn.  In a way, it, as well, is relevant to my morning post from yesterday. 

Here's the full video which is just one of the many posts he did yesterday.  I have always found his work to be excellent, even when I might disagree with him on a point to start with, he's good enough at it that he's convinced me of some points.  I am now thinking that he is right about the benefits of an unwritten constitution, though any human scheme of laws is guaranteed to have problems, some of them turning out to be major problems.  



As he points out that there is a possibility of changing bad laws, as we have found it is almost impossible to change some of the very worst things about the American Constitution, the last major reform of it was a result of the Civil War and the reconstruction period in which the Federal government took control of the administration of the states that turned traitor until the fucking Electoral College resulted in the corrupt loser of the election after the corrupt Grant administration ending reconstruction and reimposing white supremacy in the South.   I could go on and on about that.  

I love Phil's take on British politics and he often has intelligent and interesting things to say about things elsewhere, including the United States.

6 comments:

  1. Please don't go on about that. You're not an historian by training or practice. You have the exact opposite approach that an actual historian should - you dismiss outright anyone who rejects your thesis and hold up whoever supports it, regardless of their errors in scholarship or lack of qualifications.

    Oh, and you employ ad hominem arguments to explain why those are not convinced by the same faux scholarship you are.

    Grant wasn't perfect, but he was a better president than you're giving him credit for. You're judging him not like an historian, but as a modern man projecting your standards on a people separated by 150 years of cultural change.

    I truly do wish you well and hope you'll consider moving to Canada. You really would like it up there if you find freedom of speech too triggering to deal with.

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    1. What are you rattling on about in the first paragraph?

      Are you denying that the major changes to the original constitution are the Civil War amendments? I would like to know what you propose as a more significant period of change in the Constitution.

      Are you denying that it took the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction to pass those amendments? Passed only because the system of white supremacy in the formerly Confederate states (in an open and bellicose treason against the United States) was all too temporarily suspended?

      Are you denying a. the corruption of the Grant administration or b. that Rutherford Hayes gained the presidency as a result of the Electoral College and a corrupt deal with the white supremacists resulting in him ending the period of reconstruction which, immediately, reimposed white supremacy in those states? Suspending the Civil War amendments in those states?

      Just what violation of history did I commit? Disagreeing with your favorite white racist historian? The line of Hollywood movies and novels creating a popular false history of the period? Or whatever it is that you mistake for the actual history of the United States.

      The only speech I've ever called for suppressing is lies, lies slandering individuals, of entire ethnic, gender or racial groups, the lies about history. I know the American right adores lies because they have to have people fall for them to gain and keep power, just like Putin loves lies, just like gangster governments all love lies and hate the truth. As history teaches us, that when you allow lies instead of disadvantaging them, they tend to drown out the truth.

      What is it about government by gangsters that you prefer over the kind of government that comes when people know the truth and the truth sets them free? Though, as I've concluded FROM A CLOSE READING OF HISTORY and experiencing a bit of it, now, it takes more than that, it takes people of good will following The Law and the Prophets as summed up in a sentence taken from Leviticus by both the Rabbi Hillel and Jesus, treating people as you would want to be treated. Maybe that's what you really, really hate about egalitarian democracy, that moral obligation.

      "too triggering to deal with" it's so funny how those kinds of phrases invented by feminists find their way into the mouth of a misogynist trying to pretend that arguments they don't like are as a result of psychological fragility when I've always and fully documented my arguments in that area. Well, I'm totally convinced that the pseudo-sciences of behavior that such concepts are born in are ideological fraud so it's not a surprise when such stock phrases that are created by those who fall for them turn out to be fungible and fit the purposes of people such as yourself. "More speech" being another of those.

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    2. Oh, and I suppose I should amend by comment by saying that I have opposed pornography and racism due to their promotion of bad behavior and inequality. I have no problem with the right of a free people of good will suppressing speech which has a damaging effect of people and the egalitarian democracy which is the only legitimate form of government, and with it protecting all of the good that can come from legitimate government, INCLUDING THE SUPPRESSION OF THINGS SUCH AS MALE AND WHITE SUPREMACISTS DO. I think only a total idiot would think that things which turn out to inevitably promote inequality and violence being allowed is some kind of flowering of freedom when it promotes one of the most dangerous things rampant in the human population which destroys freedom by encouraging the libertarian freedom of those with power to use it against other people.

      I suppose I should include disallowing lies about the environment, considering things like the burning of the Amazon and Trump's war against the natural world here as the planet is burning up due to what people you like are doing. I'd have suppressed all those extraction industry lies being told on FOX and ABC and in spots designed to sell their lies most effectively. When you buy lies packaged to gull the most people, it ends up not only enslaving you, it kills you in the course of time.

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  2. “Please don't go on about that. You're not an historian by training or practice. You have the exact opposite approach that an actual historian should - you dismiss outright anyone who rejects your thesis and hold up whoever supports it, regardless of their errors in scholarship or lack of qualifications.

    “Oh, and you employ ad hominem arguments to explain why those are not convinced by the same faux scholarship you are.”

    You mean like that one?

    “Grant wasn't perfect, but he was a better president than you're giving him credit for. You're judging him not like an historian, but as a modern man projecting your standards on a people separated by 150 years of cultural change.”

    I think the statement was about the Civil War Amendments, which had bugger all to do with Grant’s qualities as a President.

    “I truly do wish you well and hope you'll consider moving to Canada. You really would like it up there if you find freedom of speech too triggering to deal with.”

    You know you sound like you’re talking to the mirror, right?

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  3. Quebec is six hours from Bangor. That's all I'm saying. They think terms like "mankind" are triggering enough to warrant 86ing them from the lexicon.

    You're telling me you wouldn't be happy in an environment like that?

    Besides, my cousin, who lived there longer than a spell, told me the city is beautiful.

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    1. Well, Bunky, Bangor is three hours by car from where I live. You are obviously getting the bull shit you're flinging from the likes of Jordan Peterson who is, in addition to being an intellectual fraud and a lunatic and a snake oil peddler, a pathological liar as well as a weak man paranoiac.

      If I lived in Canada I'd live under the constant fear of the Republican-fascist Anschluss that the likes of an American government like you would like would conduct.

      You confirm my point that it's a discrediting of free speech absolutism that it's the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, the insecure little incel losers who are its foremost champions, their tool for destroying the rights of those who trigger their fragile little minds to Petersonian paranoia.

      My relatives who live in Arizona and who have lost their health insurance wish like hell they lived in Canada, their son is dying of cancer and the hospital just demanded that they bring a thousand in cash with them or he doesn't get his next shot.

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