A taste of Prager U

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

But I don't think it's hard to imagine Thomas Jefferson or James Madison being transported into a 21st Century version of the Constitutional Convention and, once up to speed, having the debate be about who to best achieve and protect individual liberties, make opportunity available to all, and strengthen the national identity around inclusiveness rather than exclusion.

I'm fairly certain they'd disagree with you.

eta: I think two white men, one a slave-owning and probably a slave raping plantationist & oh, lookee here, another slave owner, from the 18th century would absolutely crap bricks and find themselves more in Ajax's camp once they were up to speed. Lolol. I love that you posted that.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

eta: I think two white men, one a slave-owning and probably a slave raping plantationist & oh, lookee here, another slave owner, from the 18th century would absolutely ____ bricks and find themselves more in Ajax's camp once they were up to speed. Lolol. I love that you posted that.

- Doc

It's interesting that your view of them is essentially that of an extreme post-modernist Marxist of the type you agree with Peterson is unrestrained in our universities, too.

[_Maksutov]

If you want to go back to pre-Socialist America, it would be around the war of 1812...

...........

Early federal income taxes
The first income tax suggested in the United States was during the War of 1812. The idea for the tax was based on the British Tax Act of 1798. The British tax law applied progressive rates to income. The British tax rates ranged from 0.833% on income starting at £60 to 10% on income above £200. The tax proposal was developed in 1814. Because the treaty of Ghent was signed in 1815, ending hostilities and the need for additional revenue, the tax was never imposed in the United States.[55]

In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War, Congress imposed its first personal income tax in 1861.[56] It was part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US $800).[57] This tax was repealed and replaced by another income tax in 1862.[58]

In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first peacetime income tax. The rate was 2% on income over $4000, which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any. The purpose of the income tax was to make up for revenue that would be lost by tariff reductions.[59]

In 1895 the United States Supreme Court, in its ruling in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., held a tax based on receipts from the use of property to be unconstitutional. The Court held that taxes on rents from real estate, on interest income from personal property and other income from personal property (which includes dividend income) were treated as direct taxes on property, and therefore had to be apportioned (divided among the states based on their populations). Since apportionment of income taxes is impractical, this had the effect of prohibiting a federal tax on income from property. However, the Court affirmed that the Constitution did not deny Congress the power to impose a tax on real and personal property, and it affirmed that such would be a direct tax.[60] Due to the political difficulties of taxing individual wages without taxing income from property, a federal income tax was impractical from the time of the Pollock decision until the time of ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment (below).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_ta ... es#History

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

eta: I think two white men, one a slave-owning and probably a slave raping plantationist & oh, lookee here, another slave owner, from the 18th century would absolutely ____ bricks and find themselves more in Ajax's camp once they were up to speed. Lolol. I love that you posted that.

- Doc

It's interesting that your view of them is essentially that of an extreme post-modernist Marxist of the type you agree with Peterson is unrestrained in our universities, too.

Oh. Thanks for telling me what I think! You have any other 19th century men that you'd like to hold up as paragons of virtuous behavior once they were magically transported to the 21st century? Perhaps we want to throw Robert E. Lee into the mix?

As a side note I want to remind the dear reader James Madison never freed any of his slaves, not one out his 100.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

Oh. Thanks for telling me what I think!

Odd comment given that I pointed out your posted view aligned with the views of people you had been criticizing just up thread.

Or is this your way of saying your posts are just trolling and not representative of what you think?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Oh. Thanks for telling me what I think!

Odd comment given that I pointed out your posted view aligned with the views of people you had been criticizing just up thread.

Or is this your way of saying your posts are just trolling and not representative of what you think?

I think you don't read very carefully. I think I posted exactly what I thought and it should be interpreted plainly. Using this from your nicely crafted post:

If criticism of the left is they have corrupted the ideal of equality of opportunity with seeking equal outcomes, the criticism of the right is that they do not value equality of opportunity. It's the new aristocratic view that mainly seeks to protect those who have, not invest in capitalising on all of the potential in America, and louding decrying the idea that the system is NOT providing for equality of opportunity. In fact, this thread has been mainly about this issue.

I'm baffled that you'd use, lolol, slaveholders and probably a rapist salveholder (Jefferson), as someone who could be magically transformed into egalitarians once they were, uh, briefed up on the situation.

I'm further shocked that you'd use them mid-thread that discusses things such as White privilege that is 100% intolerant of nuance other than it exists and White males are guilty of enjoying it, AND YOU USE WHITE SLAVEHOLDERS AS PEOPLE WHO WOULD TOTALLY GET SOCIALISM.

damned Christ, lolol, you can't make this crap up and yet, here it is.

- Doc

[_honorentheos]

I'm baffled that you'd use, lolol, slaveholders and probably a rapist salveholder (Jefferson), as someone who could be magically transformed into egalitarians once they were, uh, briefed up on the situation.

This last week I was listening to a discussion on NPR regarding book awards and categories. It turned at one point to a discussion of H.P. Lovecraft and why he showed up on a list despite being an extreme and open racist. As is the fashion these days, the discussion took turns decrying everything about Lovecraft but ultimately arriving at his influence on the field of science fiction being such that it is, his inclusion was unavoidable since he essentially invented a genre of science fiction. One must hold one's noses when one speaks of science fiction because his genius was so deeply interwoven in, one can't ignore him without unraveling the history of science fiction.

Maybe it's because I spent too much time as a believing Mormon and for ill or good developed a view of human beings as neither monsters or saints that to me these kinds of conversations are like overhearing kids playing at being adults. But it's the language of the extremists who would see every slight transgression used to bring people down. It's the language of the people Jordan Peterson is constantly decrying in his public appearances, and is the language of the people who you agreed in your post to ceebs were behind the extreme left in agreement with Peterson. Maybe you don't agree with that when it's pointed out so explicitly, or perhaps more likely, you are just trying to ju jitsu a minor issue to score points against someone you feel butthurt towards from a past discussion rather than engage in discussion about the major points currently before us. Either way, it comes across as muddying up your views.

So, my view of Jefferson is as a product of his time, yes, but within that context his argument WAS the most optimistic towards humanity. I'm not interested in defending his slaveholding nor attacking it because that isn't the world we are living in today. In the context of people working out the best means for a society to organize a government that represented their ideals they believed best for humanity, his view was in favor of the common citizen rather than a ruling elite. Madison being pragmatic and optimized compromise-oriented, is far more responsible for the Constitution than any other single person as we inherited it. In the light of those discussions, those central values were present then in their ultimate aims for achieving success as a nation that was largely looked at globally as doomed to fail. In fact, we had failed up to that point as the Articles of Confederation were not leading to a successful form of self-governance and the Constitutional Convention was done in secret to hide the fact the founders were not just trying to patch the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez back together but instead rewriting the script entirely.

You want to argue my comment about a speculative 21 C. version of those events would be undone by their having been patriarchy-loving, privileged slave owning rapist, ok that's your view of things. Wrapping yourself up in the costume of identity politics to try and score a point about a minor item in a much broader post to do so? You might consider thinking more about that.

[_EAllusion]

As noted by English critics of Jefferson and co. there was something profoundly contradictory in slave holders preaching the virtues of liberty and democratic government. Yet they nonetheless supported democracy. They weren’t socialists, though they supported various policies that would be correctly called socialist in senses the term is currently used.

The problem with “what would Jefferson support today?” counterfactuals is there are two competing ways to answer that kind of question. One is to project everything the person thought at some given point in time (remember that people’s views change in their life) into some present issue and guess what they would think. The other is to look at a person’s intellectual disposition as guess what they’d think if they had a modern information/educational environment to operate on their personality.

To the former, Jefferson was a borderline agrarian communitarian. He’d probably be down with co-op style socialist thinking with bizarre quirks give his 18th century classical liberalism and limitations on democratic participation he favored. To the latter, the kind of people *like* Jefferson today are almost to a person raging liberals with a smattering of libertarians. It’s hard to know where he’d fall besides knowing he sure as hell wouldn’t be a social conservative. Which is funny given that he was a slaver.

[_EAllusion]

One of the hard things about reading Jefferson’s writings is that it is clear he thought slavery was wrong. He lacked the moral courage to give it up while alive. That's arguably worse. His writings on race contain 18th century white supremacist thinking that was on the liberal end of mainstream thinking given his cultural milieu. To the modern ear, it reads racist as hell. In the context of his time, he’s writing to the liberal end of the “middle ground.” Transport his views exactly as they are and he’s a somewhat to the left of Ajax. Transport him and give him a modern education and he’s probably a stereotypical liberal professor. *shrugs*

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Lest anyone mistake Thomas Jefferson with a college professor, whatever that means:

http://www.phillytrib.com/commentary/co ... 6f974.html

He was also a pedophile rapist. You want proof? OK.

As U.S. Envoy and Minister to France, Jefferson began living there periodically from 1784-1789. He took with him his oldest daughter Martha and a few of those whom he enslaved, including James Hemings. In 1787, he requested that his daughter Polly join him. This meant Polly’s enslaved chambermaid, 14-year-old seamstress Sarah “Sally” Hemings (James’ younger sister), was to accompany her.

Both Sally and James were among the six mulatto offspring of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles and his enslaved “domestic servant” Betty Hemings. Sally and James were half-siblings of Thomas’ late wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (meaning Thomas and Sally were technically related).

Thomas Jefferson, after repeatedly raping Sally while in Paris, impregnated her. Her first child died after she returned to America. But she has six more of Thomas’ children at Monticello.

But you don’t have to believe me. You can read the January 2000 official report by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation’s Research Committee, which concluded, based on DNA studies, primary and secondary documents, oral histories of Jefferson and Hemings descendants, and nationally renowned scholars, that there is a “high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’ children appearing in Jefferson’s records.” By “high probability” and “most likely,” you know that report actually and euphemistically meant “absolute certainty.”

The rest of the article is worth a read, if you're interested in Jefferson's, uh, collegial attitude toward slaves.

*shrugs*

- Doc