Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9489520:


Jacob

19
The roof is on fire, eh? 31 5, 11:34am

@TheChief There's a difference between regulating democracy by protecting certain civil liberties and then just limiting it because you fear what the people might do to powerful elite's power and money. They were doing the latter.

Because marriage is a legal institution and legal institutions legally can't discriminate for arbitrary reasons.

The sanctions on Iraq resulted in the deaths of 400,000 children.

No, you didn't. You're just flip flopping at this point. Regardless, the constitution still is largely useless when it gets in the way of some elite's interests.

If I recall the quote I used, then it was part of a speech about gay marriage.

They set up a system where only wealthy white men had power. You had to have a certain amount of property to vote, you had to be male to vote, you had to be white to vote, and you often had to be well off to even try to get into office. You mean the man that 60% of the country hates? Both him and Hillary have record high disapproval rates. Democracy is when you actually have choices, not two people everyone hates who will ultimately govern the same.

TJ also said "all men are created equal" when he not only owned slaves but viewed blacks as racially inferior. The founding fathers often said hypocritical and contradictory things, but their actions speak loud enough. Again, look at the system they set up. You had to already be in an elite to even vote, let alone hold actual power. You also can make lots of things sound reasonable if you remove context and word it properly. I can find you Libertarians and Ancaps who defend Pinochet (who we helped take power btw) using similar rhetoric.

Madison:
". The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, — when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority "

Hamilton
"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first arc the rich and well-horn, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. .. . Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.. ."

You hurl "anti-American" around as if it were an insult, which is kinda cute.

You keep acting like Trump's rise to the GOP nomination is a crisis of democracy. It isn't, most people hate him, the U.S. is hardly a prober democracy given that the rich hold far more influence than actual voters. Trump is what you get when power juggles from the right wing to the center right, from republican to democrat. Trump is what you get when an alienated working class feels, and in this case justly, fucked over. Also plenty of tyrants have won by forcing themselves on the population, and many of them were aided by the US in doing so.

I challenge you to come up with a reason why this makes the criticisms I made of the US invalid and how it isn't just a poorly done attempt to say "but other nation's mess up too!". It's absurd.