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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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His fans on r/The_Donald also seem to think his flag burning comments are intended to bait inevitable protesters into burning flags and thereby making asses of themselves, and by God I think they're actually right. Even if Trump really is as dumb as he acts (and I have my doubts), there's no doubt he's being advised by some brilliant, and very devious social engineers, probably Bannon.
edited 29th Nov '16 12:23:10 PM by CaptainCapsase
Well, in the hypothetical scenario where things get so bad that California's secession actually becomes a legitimate option and not just a fantasy for those of us lefters who are terrified of Trump, blue and red states wouldn't matter anymore.
As it stands, the cost of living is in and of itself a profound argument for folks to stay out of California. Here in Colorado, our primary relationship with California is refugees fleeing the insane housing prices. They come here in droves because they want affordable rent without sacrificing accessibility of weed.
edited 29th Nov '16 12:26:41 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I actually wonder how large of a role legalized marijuana played in this election. Our economy has gone to shit ever since that law passed due to a massive influx of what we've started calling Weed Tourists, despite many of them moving here to stay. Denver became the Marijuana Capitol of the U.S. pretty much overnight.
Since weed tends to be a priority of Democrats more than Republicans, I idly wonder how many Dems weren't voting in other states because they'd relocated here for the drug.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
x3 Or just burn this flag instead
◊.
Thought: If you really need to burn a Flag to protest Trump, burn down Nazi and Confederate Flags instead. Or Flags with Trump's face on it. That way, you're disagreeing with Trump and the Alt-Right, but you're not giving Trump or the Alt-Right any fuel to fire later down the line.
He just barely beat me to the idea.
edited 29th Nov '16 12:34:33 PM by DingoWalley1
In such a scenario, if California were to secede it wouldn't do so on its own. In which case, unity with the other western states would be important.
This is how civil wars start.
You know, this talk of secession hasn't stopped being annoying just because it's no longer about Texas or other conservative states defending their "state's right" to be oppressive.
Also I very much doubt that people moving to Colorado for weed had that much of an effect on the election. People don't move for just one reason and as stated a lot of people were moving out of California because of cost of living.
All this talk about Californian secession has encouraged me to ask... In either the current real-life climate or an appropiately worse fictional version, how do you think a splintering of the USA would probably go?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.In the current situation it couldn't happen. Like at all. Which is why it's fucking annoying. (It's also basically saying "fuck you, I wanna make sure I got mine" on a national scale in a lot of ways.)
For one thing, we have a national army and little in the way of state militias that could stand against federal forces. For two, our infrastructure is a lot more connected today than it used to be, which means that anyone seceding has to make sure that at least the surrounding states go with them or see the loss and rising prices of a lot of resources they're dependent on. For three, secession is a fringe position held by people with a huge microphone and are obnoxious.
Like, seriously, for secession to in any way be feasible a whole lot of things would have to go wrong. Things that extend far beyond the presidency or a party's ability to enact harmful policies.
edited 29th Nov '16 12:50:03 PM by AceofSpades
To finish the conversation from earlier and tie it to the present day:
@Hamilton and immigration: Rush Limbaugh said Hamilton "was an immigration hawk" on Tuesday. Politfact rates it HALF TRUE:
early on, Hamilton encouraged immigration to bring labour and fortune to the US, with extremely lax standards to even run for office. But after the Quasi-War
with France, he supported the Alien and Sedition Acts
, but with caveats. His partial change of heart was also partially self-serving and feud-fueled, as per usual: he believed Jeff wouldn't have won the presidency if only US-born had voted.
So again, lots of caveats, lots of little devils in little details. I betcha his initial support of immigration was self-serving as well.
Chernov wasn't the only biographer to overstate Hamilton's abolitionism.
In summary, Hamilton looked after his own self-interest, first and foremost, and that meant the interest of the new nation of the USA (the creation of which was its only to rise up, and then whose interest benefits the seat of power where he himself sits), and he would promote that by any means necessary. His support of Laurens' black batallions was entirely practical and logic-based, not principled. Another way of promoting his self-interest was by sucking up to rich people, which meant protecting their property rights.
The musical doesn't whitewash Hamilton as much as you'd think: his early claims of abolitionism.can be read as him trying to suck up to the revolutionary crowd (again, his chance to RISE UP), his later unconditional support of Washington and aggression towards any that would speak ill of him were him shoring up his main political support (and apparently 85% of his impulse control), he wants the Schuylers to get his status high, you'd have to be naive to set that aside, and so on and so forth. All along, it was All About Me.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.So he was a Trump-esque flip-flopper and inconsistent and capable of throwing any position under the bus for his advancement. Sure, that makes him no different from modern politicians, but it damn sure doesn't make him an abolitionist immigrant story success. That is my point.
I would contest the "success" part as well. More of an "ambition story". He had a mixed record.
Furthermore, unlike Trump, he had a pretty good understanding of the USA's own interest. In that situation, curtailing potential French influence on US politics made perfect sense. And is the opposite of what Trump is doing. Hamilton doesn't "flip-flop", he changes his mind according to what makes sense at the time. If you want a flip-flopping turncoat with no regard for the nation's interest, I refer you to Aaron Burr, sir.
Really, the only bit that is in question was his abolitionism: only when pragmatic for America. Which is a damn sight better than many of his contemporaries, let's be fair here.
edited 29th Nov '16 1:06:24 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.I thought this kind of casuistry faded with the irrelevancy of jesuits. Hamilton saying that Jefferson would not have won the election if only US-born would have voted is equivalent to Trump's "3 million illegals"...end of discussion. Its the same thing, Hamilton is saying more or less that there are two Americans, those born here and those who are immigrants, and one is more "real" than the other. The minute anyone forms that division, he's Trump, I'm sorry.
And Hamilton was a phenomenally unlikable human being. Only Washington put up with him and that's because Hamilton served the President's own interest of having a strong state and constitution. Yeah, Washington was a Federalist in Secret but played neutral in public.
Gore Vidal and Nancy Isenberg
have proven that Aaron Burr was a lot more consistent. And Hamilton was more or less responsible for that duel and his own death, complete with having a hair trigger in his pistol...
As a hero, the musical’s Hamilton represents the American dream in the form of an immigrant-made-good, born on the Caribbean Island of Nevis, then raising himself to high society through sheer determination and genius. Yet Hamilton — and the Federalist Party he headed — were hostile to the idea that the United States should ever be led by newcomers. It was the Federalists who pressed for a constitutional amendment barring naturalized foreigners from elected offices, and it was that supposed villain Burr, in the New York Assembly at the time, who gave an eloquent speech defending the liberal promise of the young republic. “America stood with open arms and presented an asylum to the oppressed of every nation,” he said. “Shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our Constitution?”
Hehehe.
I will laugh my ass off when all these 4chan alt right kids get their anime torrents throttled.
edited 29th Nov '16 1:15:52 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."You know what was contemporary to Hamilton...The French Revolution in the 1790s. In 1794, The Jacobins abolished slavery without compensation for slaveowners...one of the two times that has happened (second time was the end of the American Civil War).
Maximilien Robespierre who opposed a defense for slavery in France's constitution, dispatched Victor Hugues to liberate France's slave-run colonies, and Hugues arrived in Guadaloupe and led a freedmen-French army non-segregated force to victory against slave-masters and their English allies.
That's abolitionism.
Well, he was legitimately a "self-made man" as well as an immigrant (I don't know what the consensus was at the time, if there was one, as to whether he was eligible for the Presidency under the "natural born requirement"). The musical about him is not so much vindicating or (depending on how you look at it) giving Hamilton a Historical Hero Upgrade, as it is using applicability to tell Hamilton's story in a way that reflects immigrant stories. Although probably more factualy accurate, it's basically to U.S. history what Shakespeare's plays are to English history.
And I'd say that Hamilton does deserve some vindicating. A lot of the historically negative view of him had to do with buying into Jefferson as the ideal hero of American Democracy, and since the two were enemies, Hamilton necessarily ended up as the villain. A viewpoint of history that's not opposed to a strong central government and also questions the idea of Jefferson's Southern slave-holding gentleman farmers as the image of an American citizen is one that's naturally going to view Hamilton more favorably.
Although Hamilton was the arch-elitist, there is something that is appealing in his representation of the metropolitan America (traditionally in the North) rather than the agricultural America (traditionally in the South). A big thing underlying the current debate over Trump voters is this really ingrained idea that people who live in cities, especially ones in the North are somehow not real Americans and don't possess inherent virtues that rural Americans do.
Hamilton and to a greater extent Hamilton are about challenging this assumption (which is probably why they ended up in a "feud" with the incoming Administration).
Now granted, the comparitor with Trump's America is probably way more Andrew Jackson than it is Thomas Jefferson, but you wouldn't have Jacksonian Democrats without first having Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans.
Edit- Wait. Hamilton opposed people not born in the United States from voting. Wouldn't that quite clearly include himself? I guess that's not very surprising as it seems to be relatively common for immigrants to become natvists against new generations of immigrants. Still kind of weird though because I would have thought that Hamilton would have gotten some pushback in his own lifetime for not being born in the 13 colonies).
Regarding the duel. That's interesting/troubling. I had thought that Hamilton had [1]
though- the article lists him as an example, and while does sound like Chernow's characterization is more negative toward Burr, apparently it was known beforehand that Hamilton planned to fire into the air (there's disagreement whether or not Burr himself knew this though).
edited 29th Nov '16 1:26:22 PM by Hodor2
The point is why replace one myth with another. Jefferson was distorted beyond all proportion but how is doing the same to Hamilton balancing the force. Why do people want to keep Holding Out for a Hero and an ideal vision of America's founding father. Why not show that the Founding Fathers were all a mix of total scum and visionaries which is what Gore Vidal did in Burr?
If you want a progressive vision of democracy, anti-racism and equal rights, then you have to go to the French Revolution which invented modern democracy that the rest of the world accepted when the Communists arrived. The only true modern progressive of that time was Robespierre (and even he didn't want to give the women the vote), which goes to show how crazily radical one had to be to take those positions back then.
And you know Trump and Hamilton have a lot in common. Both are New York Social Climber, who overcompensate for their perceived drawbacks and likewise have tabloid gossip fodder sex lives. Trump is a descendant of German immigrants and his wife is an immigrant too, and yet he takes anti-immigrant positions. There's nothing especially surprising about it.
edited 29th Nov '16 1:28:36 PM by JulianLapostat

This is a straight up mimicking of a Roman Triumph.
edited 29th Nov '16 12:24:41 PM by MadSkillz