Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Fourth of July

popehat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 324 posts

Re: The Fourth of July

#271

Post by rayiner »

geofft wrote: post #264
rayiner wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reach that conclusion? Lincoln believed that he was vindicating the founding principles. From the 1860 Republican platform: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... > 8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no persons should…

But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them. (Even if you discount those like Washington who owned slaves and felt bad about it, plenty owned slaves and thought slavery was a good and important thing and put their names to those words.) Is it enou…

> But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them.

The founding principles are not the beliefs of individual framers. They're what they collectively agreed on and wrote down and committed to. And slavery was not one of the principles they committed to. There is a document that committed to slavery as a founding principle, it's called the Constitution of the Confederate States. And we fought a civil war to wipe that document off the face of the earth. Here is what the Vice President of the Confederacy said about the founding in 1861: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...

> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time.

Lincoln and the Republicans were rejecting the compromise the Constitution included to enable slavery to continue. But they, quite correctly, didn't view rejection of that compromise as rejection of the founding principles. They saw it as a vindication of those principles.

> Is it enough to believe internally that you are vindicating what America's founding principles really were in order to be able to criticize the actual beliefs of the founding fathers without "cancelling America"?

If you want to make the argument that "gun rights are incompatible with the founding principles, as articulated in the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, etc." then that's a fine argument to make. That was the same kind of argument Lincoln and the Republicans made in arguing to end slavery. But that's very different from saying "it doesn't matter what gun rights are a principle articulated by the founders because those guys owned slaves and we don't need to defer to the principles they articulated." That's trying to cancel America.

Re: The Fourth of July

#272

Post by timsally »

dnautics wrote: post #39
kibwen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That particular mistake is too late to rectify now, unless someone is proposing to relocate 700,000 people. Hell, even just letting them vote as unofficial residents of the nearest state would solve the problem; Maryland can have those votes for federal office without having D.C. yield any of its own authority to enforce its borders.

Not really. Arlington VA was retroceded, no reason the rest (aside from actual federal buildings and facilities) couldn't be.

The biggest reason would be that the people of Maryland oppose retrocession. [1] You cannot make Maryland take back land they do not want without something like an amendment to the constitution.

Each year DC pays more federal taxes per capita than every other state. In raw dollars it is more than 22 other states. [2] The people of DC want representation to go along with that taxation.

[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/..., Q22 on page 6.

[2] https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc

Re: The Fourth of July

#273

Post by rayiner »

geofft wrote: post #253
rayiner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a serious attempt to cancel America, that goes beyond holding America responsible for its past wrongs. Someone posted a link to this tweet elsewhere in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/116818940954980... I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has d…

Like software, America is not the set of opinions it happens to have today but the process for changing those opinions. A healthy software development project has leadership that feels comfortable changing the software as they learn more about how people are using it. If, say, Kubernetes adds support for adding containers to an already-running Pod, that's not an attempt to "cancel" Kubernetes, it's an attempt to impr…

> The founders were, in fact, people who made serious errors of moral judgment, in the way the tweet you link points out. That's a reason we shouldn't, in fact, trust every opinion they had. We can still follow their opinions on process and principles - we can believe that all men were created equal, and take it to the logical conclusion that they didn't. We can believe in a representative democracy with certain features. We can believe in the various branches of government. We can believe, as they did, that people with their facilities of reason can govern better than any king with divine right.

Agreed. Add to that separation of powers, federalism, limited government, protection of private property, gun rights, free speech, religious freedom, etc. Because those are also principles that the country is built upon.

> A healthy software development project has leadership that feels comfortable changing the software as they learn more about how people are using it.

Your software analogy is very good, but it supports my point, not yours. Software, like our country, is built on structural principles. Kubernetes is built on containerization. UNIX is based on exposing everything as a file. L4 is based on various principles associated with microkernels. Those principles transcend any specific features. For example, you can argue against systemd on the basis that it contradicts the UNIX principle of having small, independent programs that each do one thing. We shouldn't be able to attack those principles through ad hominem attacks on the people who articulated them.

> If you really think that admitting that the founders owned slaves is an attack on the heart of America

That's not what the tweet is doing. Read the whole thing. The tweet is invoking that fact to attack one of the founding principles, specifically gun rights.

Apply your software analogy to the logic of the tweet, say in the context of ReiserFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS. ReiserFS has a design principle that various kinds of metadata are stored in a "single, combined B+ tree keyed by a universal object ID." That principle permeates the structure of the whole file system. Is it proper to attack that principle by saying "Hans Reiser murdered his wife?" That's exactly the sort of reasoning in the tweet.

Re: The Fourth of July

#274

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jessaustin wrote: post #235
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder Considering how much murder is happening there already, I wouldn't guess that the amount there would be if the police stopped investigating them would be smaller than the existing rate of murders by police. Also, as already mentioned, 0.0005% is the approximate rate at which the police kill black people, not the rate at which they murder them. What do you propo…

Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case. The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.

> Please don't assume that Democrats ever consider the best interests of "black neighborhoods". There's very little evidence that's the case.

That's kind of my point. The black vote has gone disproportionately to Democrats for many years and what they get for it is not the change they're promised even when their party controls the government, it's lip service and rage propaganda like "police murders" which can't possibly be the most significant problem faced by black families, because it gets them to go out and vote for the same party again even as they don't fix the real problems -- because if they fixed the real problems they couldn't run on it again next time.

Why are cities burning over "police murders" and not the War on Drugs or school choice? Why are we de-funding the police and not de-funding the zoning board? A cynic could answer.

> The most they can really claim is that they are often less overt in their racism than the other face of the status quo party.

I think this is a trope. Democrats are desperate to paint Republicans as racists because they're so reliant on the black vote. Then we get many stories about "dog whistles" and comments taken out of context and maximally uncharitable interpretations of any linguistic ambiguity, meanwhile the biggest actual reason Republicans don't much court black people is that they don't vote for them regardless, because Democrats will spend all day telling everyone they're nothing but racists no matter what they do.

Republican President signs criminal justice reform into law and then a cop commits murder in a city controlled by Democrats and it's the Republicans who are down in the polls.

Re: The Fourth of July

#275

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #238
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's when you start blindly believing it's perfect that it seems less than rational. Who said it was perfect? > Surely you don't need to hear the list again? Is there somewhere they keep this list? I keep getting partial versions. There's the ones where we list bad laws that haven't been on the books in many years, the ones (like police murders) that do literally happen but are dramatically less common than the lev…

Hmmm... let me guess: You got where you are 'cause you were the smartest and worked the hardest and won the race amongst equals?

Don't do that. Don't attack the speaker instead of the arguments. You don't know anything about me.

Re: The Fourth of July

#276

Post by AnthonyMouse »

filoeleven wrote: post #229
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that. There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.

What’s the probability of being killed in a terrorist attack? It happened a handful of times before in the US, then in 2001 reaction one attack spawned whole new agencies, onerous airport security changes, etc.—not to mention the longest running war in the country’s history. And for the most part, Americans were cheering about it. Why is 9/11 revered as a national tragedy while ongoing murders by racist police are be…

If you're looking for somebody to argue that the response to 9/11 wasn't an overreaction you're not going to get it from me.

Re: The Fourth of July

#277

Post by sizzle »

weiming wrote: post #42
myrandomcomment wrote: post #2

As a father, a husband, a former soldier and an American, this brings a tear to my eye. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” - Lincoln As an American I feel we are bound not by our failures of past moral…

What me and my family talked about today is that, as immigrants, we are so sad how much the "native born" people of the US hate their own country. They seem to never waste an opportunity to remind others of their disdain and it is more and more visible these days e.g. in big news media or on Twitter. Makes me sad and I hope this can change.

Twitter and social media platforms shoulder some of the blame here for this phenomenon you are noticing due to their engagement algorithms amplifying outrage in your newsfeeds.

Re: The Fourth of July

#278

Post by AnthonyMouse »

acdha wrote: post #244
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many Black people have white ancestors but ask how much of that was really consensual Doesn't this imply a problem with the whole "sins of the father" thing? Otherwise all of those people would have to be condemned as the offspring of a rapist.

Those are separate concepts: we should not condemn children for their parent’s crimes but that doesn’t mean that we should forget that those crimes happened. In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings: a slave owner’s fully white children had full status in society and lived in relative luxury but those borne by slaves inherited their mother’s statu…

> we should not condemn children for their parent’s crimes but that doesn’t mean that we should forget that those crimes happened.

But then what do you propose to do about it? All of those people are dead. We can't bring them back to life and punish them.

> In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings

It was no doubt a very important distinction to the children. I wouldn't want to have to argue it was a very important distinction to modern day descendants seven generations later when that ancestor represents less than 1% of their ancestors from that many generations ago.

And the usual argument is to want to assign guilt if you benefited from a bad thing one of your ancestors did. But having existence is a pretty huge benefit, which makes that argument taste quite sour.

Re: The Fourth of July

#279

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #271
geofft wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them. (Even if you discount those like Washington who owned slaves and felt bad about it, plenty owned slaves and thought slavery was a good and important thing and put their names to those words.) Is it enou…

> But that viewpoint is plainly at odds with the actual beliefs of the founding fathers who owned slaves, right? That is clearly a reinterpretation of the words that didn't match what the founding fathers meant by them. The founding principles are not the beliefs of individual framers. They're what they collectively agreed on and wrote down and committed to. And slavery was not one of the principles they committed to…

But what they collectively agreed to and wrote down was a pro-slavery document. It drastically boosted the electoral power of plantation states by counting slaves. It enshrined a national mandate to hunt down and recover slaves who escaped to the north. The one part of the Constitution Article V prohibits amending is the moratorium on slave importation laws!

Clearly, despite whatever lip service they felt they needed to pay to their forefathers, Lincoln's Republicans sharply reconsidered the consensus of the founding fathers, tore up the old rules, and remade them.

And whatever deference you want to give to Lincoln's political rhetoric over his actions, I don't see how you can muster any similar defense for the 19th Amendment.

And, respectfully: so long as the path we take to reaching a reconsideration of the 2nd Amendment --- a reconsideration supported by a pretty big faction of constitutional scholars! --- follows the rules in the Constitution, nothing has been "canceled". We're using the tools we've been provided specifically for the purposes they were provided for.

Re: The Fourth of July

#280

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #265
geofft wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an attention to argue that the founding principles of this country are open to legitimate debate and that people who love America can hold that some of them were simply wrong without loving America any less. What I don't get is this newfound attempt to argue that what we once called the Great Experiment is immune from criticism, to portray the success of America as an inevitable result of the holy prophets who…

> It is an attention to argue that the founding principles of this country are open to legitimate debate and that people who love America can hold that some of them were simply wrong without loving America any less. So you agree that it's an attempt to attack the founding principles. > What I don't get is this newfound attempt to argue that what we once called the Great Experiment is immune from criticism, to portray…

The Constitution you took an oath to defend includes a mechanism for altering it, which is why we no longer have chattel slavery, why women can vote, why we vote for senators, why we have a federal income tax, and why we have presidential term limits, all of which contravene consensus principles among the founders.

You could even litigate some of these changes --- maybe it's a bad thing that we directly elect senators! --- and your argument still fails, because to survive, it has to establish that "fuck the beliefs of these old dead white guys" is a uniquely disruptive idea, when in fact it's an idea we've had over and over again throughout our history.

Post reply on HN