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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@TheHandle I gotta admire the French for their persistence. Whenever it turned out that they'd had a Full-Circle Revolution, they just tried again a few decades later.
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!They were never entirely full-circle. Things genuinely changed. Not as much as was hoped for. Not in a smooth line. But progress was irrevocable. Just ask Louis XVIII how well restoring the Old Regime went; it fell down in the first place for good reason, namely, it was incapable of functioning.
So, not a circle. A spiral. RAW, RAW, FIGHT THE POWER!
edited 27th Nov '16 9:43:31 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.@henry
I don't think you'd like the Canadian system. Only party members can vote, which means that the kind of Independents who supported Sanders would never have had a say. In Canada a guy like Sanders would likely have never gotten to run for the leadership of a party, and even if he had, he would have lost even more thoroughly than he did under the American system. Clinton would have won still more handily than she did.
That's the advantage of the Canadian system—outside interference in party business becomes a virtual impossibility.
I am not in favor of Constitutional Convention every generation or two...that's too extreme, more that politicians accept basic reality and see the present. If they did that, then you wouldn't have the craziness that is the Modern Republican Party. Every government in the world has written and unwritten norms, and it functions with the help of the latter more than the former. It's only when the latter encroaches on the former that you need constitutional amendments. The Founders put slavery in the constitutional and allowed 3/5ths, even the ones who were skeptical and conscientious, because they thought that eventually slavery would fade away. The abolitionist movement was going on in England and France at the time, and they thought that gradually the South would follow the North and slowly phase it out. It was a belief grounded in The Enlightenment optimism of linear human progress. The South just didn't get the hint or the message, and they still haven't gotten the hint and the message.
I definitely do think the Electoral College has to go forever and that amendment will have to passed as soon as possible, which means if work starts now, you can maybe build consensus in House, Senate and 38/51 states in 10-12 years or put in place Amar's Voting Compact concept which can be institutionalized by bypassing the Constitution altogether. Once the EC goes, you have one vote, one person...and elections are no longer about "swing states" and over-representation of a minority. Now any candidate has to fight and travel across all states and get each vote...not impossible, it happens in India for instance. Even some Republicans and now Trump says that a Popular Vote Election would have a different campaign than their usual shtick. Stuff like gerrymandering and voter-I Ds used to disenfranchise African-Americans and others (Jim Crow as that North Carolina judge said) are other issues that need to be solved. It's unacceptable. Election Day being on Tuesday or it being Tuesday but not a National Holiday is another problem but I think if the rest are taken care of then it shouldn't be an issue.
The other issues are in the realm of propaganda. Liberals need to sing out hymns to Big Government and its virtues, how a strong federal government has repeatedly been able to correct regional injustices and develop America. And how distrust for government really means "fear of losing our rights to oppress people". This whole "States' Right" fetish has to be put to pasture. That battle has to be waged culturally. I want that Epic Movie about the Reconstruction and the Second American Revolution finished last week.
The ending was when they tried to start appeasing people.
I have no idea what to do with a time machine to the late Civil War/Reconstruction era, urge Sherman to be more thorough or for Reconstruction to not be abandoned for political expediency...
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot@The Handle: Careful with the song, Trump used it and his nutjob followers* are now claiming ownership of it. I really want to reclaim it.
(*)Not necessarily the same as his voters.
edited 27th Nov '16 9:57:25 AM by IFwanderer
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVNothing smells like a people's revolution like a big business billionaire.
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?Eric Foner and W. E. B. Dubois have long proven that the Reconstruction was not a disaster. That Ulysses S. Grant was actually a good President.
The idea of Reconstruction being a disaster is thanks to Confederate propaganda, used to justify Jim Crow. And the success of that propaganda is seen in the fact that even Hillary unintentionally bought it
until she was called out for it. It's an utterly refutable fabrication. The South and the Confederacy were the first post-truth movement in American history.
It wasn't until Steven Spielberg's Lincoln that you had a movie acknowledge that the Civil War was about slavery and not states right as Ta-Nehisi Coates noted (see the YMMV page of that film). The Lost-Cause propaganda shows up in countless westerns and historical films
.
@TheHandle It's funny, if it weren't for Les Misérables, that rebellion
probably would have been just a footnote in history. I'm glad the show made it famous — even failed revolutions are still worth learning about.
Agreed.
edited 27th Nov '16 10:05:14 AM by henry42
One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!If you take a long view of history no revolution or rebellion is really a failure, or entirely a success. The mere fact it happens at all is a kind of achievement.
The Arab Spring may not have gotten the hopes and aspirations of the people and international observers but I don't think anyone can say that it's a total failure. A leaderless revolution toppled a dictator in Egypt that had ruled for thirty years, and they did it by non-violent means. That has never happened in history. The closest I can think is those Anonymous Parisian Women who dragged Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Versailles to Paris and overnight shifted the capital from Versailles to Paris for the first time in more than a hundred years. That was a decisive shift in the political geography of France and it came entirely from below.
The American Revolution is a success in terms of stability and institutions but the end result is that America no longer resembles the vision of the founders. We go by their stated and implied ideals and not the reality of what they did and enabled. The real Alexander Hamilton was a token abolitionist and even bought and sold slaves for the rich Schuyler family (which owned slaves). That reality has to be removed for that cutesy musical to even work settling for an easy target like Jefferson (Once Patron Saint of the Seperation of Church and State...these days Paton Saint of American Hypocrisy). The fact that Hamilton came from immigrant stock matters more than the reality that Hamilton was against immigrant rights and votes and that it was Aaron Burr, an aristocrat who started banks and institutions to give them cheap loans to find work, campaigned to give them votes.
Fidel Castro who passed away is proof of that, and you can see a healthy debate about his legacy. He's either a tyrant or an anti-colonialist hero who played a huge part in ending apartheid. The reality is that he was both...an anti-democratic caudillo whose foreign policy record was exemplary in spreading democracy and equality to the poor, a sharp contrast to the US, a democratic nation whose foreign policy is exemplary in clamping down democracy and spreading inequality.
![]()
Before the Broadway Musical, it was one of the best-selling Doorstopper novels of all time, Victor Hugo's masterpiece, which rippled throughout Europe. I understand that for non-Francophones Adaptation Displacement might be fair to say. But it still stings a bit.
edited 27th Nov '16 10:35:39 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.Ayatollah Khamenei
said Les Misérables was his favorite novel. So you know that when those guys called for a fatwa on Salman Rushdie and sent assassins to murder his translator, it wasn't because they hated books or literature in general...
Other politicians tend to gravitate to Don Quixote, the favorite novel of David Ben-Gurion, Che Guevara and Fidel himself. It must be for that scene where Sancho Panza becomes a governor of an insula and does a pretty good job.
edited 27th Nov '16 10:44:31 AM by JulianLapostat
It's several chapters, and I think what they like is D.Q.'s desperate quest for rights to wrong in a world that don't give a shit.
As for the Ayatollah and others, do you really think these guys are ignorant or insensitive or heartless? They're real people, you know.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.You are right...I was just making a neo-liberal joke. Iran is one of those incredibly complex societies where most of the things are unsaid and unwritten. It's a theocracy but next to Saudi Arabia, it's a Popper-esque Open Society. It also had the best film-makers and most influential artists in the last thirty years.
@handle: That statement makes me feel neutral.
And everyone knows the best novel ever is Paradise Lost. The story of an evil god who casts the brilliant and morally upright Satan to the pits for daring to stand by his convictions. /s just in case it wasn't obvious. Fo' real tho, satan's got mad barz
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?Actually there has been a bloodless revolution which did topple a dictatorship....the one in Eastern Germany (and various other eastern European states). As a general rule, revolutions which consist of peaceful protests seem to work out the best, especially if they don't have a clear leader.
It is actually kind of sad that Les Miserable tends to get reduced to the musical...the books can be a chore to read with their numerous subplots and political as well as social-critical observations, but overall, it is worth it. You get a pretty good idea what ailed France during that period.
edited 27th Nov '16 12:54:27 PM by Swanpride
[[https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802972944532209664
realDonaldTrump:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally]]
Oh, Donald.
SMH.
edited 27th Nov '16 1:18:23 PM by SeptimusHeap
New Survey coming this weekend!

The States controlled by Republican legislatures that are actively trying to discriminate against LGBT people and ban abortion. That doesn't really change my opinion.