The General Crisis of the 17th Century • Hacker News Board

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#91

Post by amyjess » Tue, Jun 16, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #76

afarrell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested in reading that case law if you can dig it up for us.

Most of the cases that are usually cited were, upon close reading, decided based on clauses in various state constitutions. The one exception that I am aware of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunn_v._Georgia where the decision was made in a state court and hence was only binding for that state. By contrast in the early years after the 14th was passed, the Supreme Court stated in both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U…

> Most of the cases that are usually cited were, upon close reading, decided based on clauses in various state constitutions.

Yes. One of the arguments against adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was that the states already had similar clauses. That was the reason why they're amendments and not part of the original Constitution, in fact. The argument went something like this:

"Here's your new Constitution! Please ratify it."

"Um, there's no Bill of Rights."

"Well, the states already have Bills of Rights."

"Yeah, that sounds like a loophole waiting to happen. Add a Bill of Rights or I'm not ratifying it."

"Fine, fine. I promise that if you ratify it, we'll amend it with a Bill of Rights the first chance we get."

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#92

Post by amyjess » Tue, Jun 16, 2015, 4:03 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #35

amyjess wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights You also have to remember that until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, the Bill of Rights only applied to acts of Congress ("Congress shall make no law...") and not to state legislatures.

You have oversimplified the history. After the Fourteenth Amendment arrived, there was considerable confusion about what it actually meant for state laws. And it took a long time for the very complex details to get ironed out. That is why the case I pointed to was nearly a century after the 14th amendment was passed. See http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/03/12/the-14th-amendmen... for a detailed (and admittedly so…

> You have oversimplified the history. After the Fourteenth Amendment arrived, there was considerable confusion about what it actually meant for state laws. And it took a long time for the very complex details to get ironed out. That is why the case I pointed to was nearly a century after the 14th amendment was passed.

I'm not disagreeing with you.

I was just placing a hard earliest point where the Bill of Rights could apply to the states, not saying that it was immediately interpreted as such as soon as it was ratified.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#93

Post by amyjess » Tue, Jun 16, 2015, 4:04 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #27

amyjess wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always felt that people would enjoy history more if teachers would remember that history contains story .

In fact, etymology-wise history preceded and begat story. It was only as an analogy to history that we invented that signifier for the concept of story.

Actually, I wasn't talking about the etymology at all, just providing a nice mnemonic for educators to remember when deciding how to teach history.

I do find etymological stuff like that fascinating, though.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#94

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Jun 16, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #67

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owe? A thousand years of stagnation? A repressive regime that enslaved half the world for the benefit of a handful of their own rich?

What did the Romans ever do for us? In all seriousness, though, we tend to ignore how advanced the Roman civilization was compared to the "barbaric" ones outside of its borders. For example, when the Romans invaded Dacia around year 106 they created a new capital, at Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulpia_Traiana_Sarmizegetusa ), which became a proper Roman city, with an amphitheatre, a for…

That makes me wonder what the Romans DID to those people, to blast them back to the stone age.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#95

Post by pluma » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 9:59 AM UTC

panglott wrote: post #90

tomjen3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the states vote on the issue? Either way I cannot reconcile saying no to them not being allowed to secede with Wilsons 14 points (and, on a personal point, I very much enjoyed my childhood in Southern Jutland, which was one of the areas that voted to join another country after WWI) or even the American revolution. I also can't argue against going to war with them to end slavery but that shouldn't necessarily mean…

Secession had been a topic of politics in the South for decades, and was was unpopular for a long time. After the South Carolina Fire-Eaters forced the issue in 1861, a wave of secession fever swept the South. Most seceding legislatures passed secession with large majorities, except for edge cases like Kentucky (where the state government rejected secession then basically collapsed). None of this was democratic, of c…

Of course it was democratic. It's easy to forget that the definition of who is or isn't a citizen and who is or isn't eligible to vote is historically impermanent.

It's not even comparable to women's suffrage: women were citizens who couldn't vote because of their gender, whereas slaves were in an entirely different category. The closest equivalent in the modern US would be prisoners (except their status is not intrinsic but temporary). In terms of human rights, slaves weren't really treated as human. Slaves are property, not unlike cattle and livestock.

This mindset is obviously appalling from a human rights point of view, but it's misleading to call a state undemocratic just because it doesn't categorize a large segment of its population as people (the "demos" in "democratic"), even if we wouldn't consider it democratic by our (mostly superior) modern ideas of who should or shouldn't be represented in a representative democracy.

The secessions happened around a time when those definitions began to change and more non-slaves became increasingly uncomfortable with the dehumanizing idea of slave ownership (in part carried by new religious ideas though it would be naive to thank religion for abolishing slavery). One of the reasons this change of mind was met less favourably in the seceding states was that they were the ones most economically dependent on slave ownership and therefore most threatened by any legislation that would make the practice illegal or less viable.

Heck, considering how latent racism still is in the modern US, it should be easy to imagine how the idea that black people are no different from white people except for irrelevant details like the colour of their skin wasn't actually widely accepted at the time. It's not like free slaves were treated as equals to white men either -- although at least recognizing them as human (and citizens) certainly was an improvement.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#96

Post by pluma » Thu, Jun 18, 2015, 10:31 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #20

pluma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardle…

> even if there was a referendum and even if that referendum was formally valid and the outcome was in favour of the secession, the constitution of the Ukraine forbids the secession and therefore renders the referendum invalid by definition. That's kind of weird. What does it take to peacefully annihilate/void a constitution, then? I would assume that if every citizen revokes their citizenship to the original country…

Constitutions work like anything else in politics: if nobody acknowledges their validity, they might as well not exist. In other words, if nobody opposes voiding the constitution, it can be voided regardless of what it claims.

Of course most countries with such provisions have some systems in place to prevent this from happening (e.g. by having a supreme court that is legally bound to act in the spirit of the constitution).

Countries ceasing to exist is actually an interesting topic.

Germany, for example, is generally regarded to have been founded in its current form after WW2 when it received its Grundgesetz (literally "foundational law") that effectively became its constitution. The Federal Republic is not the same government as the Third Reich.

However a few decades later the Democratic Republic (East Germany) dissolved and was absorbed by the Federal Republic. So cities in East Germany were formerly German under the Third Reich, then German in the Democratic Republic and now German in the Federal Republic.

Additionally the Third Reich is called "the Third" because there were two other empires preceding it: the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and the German Empire (1871-1918). So if we consider the Federal Republic as a successor to all three of these, does that mean Germany only existed since the foundation of the German Empire in 1871?

Well, no. Germany as the political entity we would today recognize as Germany indeed began in 1871, but it was preceded (with a few years of chaos in between) by the looser German Confederation (1815-1866) which in turn was preceded by the much larger Holy Roman Empire (962-1806).

If you try to dig any deeper than that you end up with various kingdoms incorporating separate parts of what later became Germany and a lot of parts we wouldn't consider German, so at that point the term "Germany" loses its meaning.

But in all that basically means there are three separate entities we could think of as "Germany":

1. The Federal Republic of Germany, which is an internationally recognized country today.

2. The internationally recognized nation of Germany, which has existed since the foundation of the German Empire and which since the reunification is represented solely by the Federal Republic.

3. The socio-cultural entity we call Germany, which dates back to the Holy Roman Empire (and, in parts, even beyond).

Also consider the role of Austria during WW2: because Austria had been annexed by Germany ("voluntary" or not) it effectively ceased to exist as a separate entity. However Austrians would very much disagree if you said that Austria as an entity ceased to exist as well (and later popped into existence again).

It gets even more complicated if you consider all the various parts that were at various times part of "Germany" (in any of its forms) or not.

At the end of the day, a country is whatever other countries agree to be a county and the cultural, geographic and political definitions tend to not always line up.