RightsofMan

RightsofMan https://www.dailykos.com/news/RightsofMan News Community Action Copyright 2005 - Steal what you want Mon, 27 Jan 2020 04:40:31 +0000 Mon, 27 Jan 2020 04:40:31 +0000 Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Daily Kos rss@dailykos.com (Daily Kos) Sunday Open Thread: August 26 is Womens's Equality Day in the US https://www.dailykos.com/story/2018/8/26/1789091/-Sunday-Open-Thread-August-26-is-Womens-s-Equality-Day-in-the-US and it is also Pungenday, Bureaucracy 19, 3184 YOLD (for you Discordians out there) World History this day 1071 – The Seljuq Turks hammered the Byzantine army at Manzikert, and took the emperor captive.The emperor was ransomed for some gold and assorted chunks of Anatolia. The Byzantine army was shattered and scattered, as well as demonstrably no longer invincible. The emperor was humiliated, there were coups and rebellions, and the whole empire went downhill from there fairly rapidly. 1346 – Though greatly outnumbered, the English won a horribly lopsided victory over the French at Crecy. The English use of massed longbows proved vastly superior to the French combination of crossbows and armored knights and took an especially heavy toll upon the knights. Because of this stunning victory, the war only dragged on for 107 more years, and, in the end, the French won. 1789 - The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France, proving yet again that talk is cheap. US History this day 1920 - The 19th amendment to US Constitution took effect, giving women the right to vote. Et Voila!, women's equality, non? Heh. 1970 - Leaders of the "second-wave feminist movement" led a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality. I surmise that a full on prolongued national strike by all women and all of their allies might accomplish something, probably martial law, unfortunately. Every woman in this country needs to go (re)read Lysistrata. Science & Technology this day 1768 - Captain James Cook set sail from England aboard HMS Endeavour. 1791 - John Fitch got a US patent on the steamboat. 1 883 - The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa began its final stage The Arts this day - Misc. this day - Birthdays of Note this day 1676 - Robert Walpole, scholar and politician 1728 - Johann Heinrich Lambert, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, logician 1740 - Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, inventor, developed a man carryng hot air balloon 1743 - Antoine Lavoisier, chemist 1873 - Lee de Forest, engineer, invented the triode 1874 - Zona Gale, novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Pulitzer winner. 1882 - James Franck, physicist 1901 - Jimmy Rushing, singer and bandleader 1906 - Albert Sabin, physician and virologist 1918 - Katherine Johnson, physicist and mathematician 1935 - Karen Sparck Jones, computer scientist 1937 - Don Bowman, country singer and songwriter who wrote wildwood weed 1940 - Vic Dana, dancer and singer 1940 — Nik Turner, musician and songwriter 1941 - Chris Curtis, drummer and singer 1943 - Dori Caymmi, singer, songwriter, arranger, and guitarist 1944 - Maureen Tucker, singer, songwriter. and drummer 1946 - Valerie Simpson, singer and songwriter, half of Ashford & Simpson 1949 - Leon Redbone, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer Deaths of Note this day 1723 - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, microscopist and biologist 1865 - Johann Franz Encke, astronomer, think Encke's gap 1910 - William James, psychologist and philosopher 1958 - Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer 1972 - Francis Chichester, pilot and sailor 1974 - Charles Lindbergh, pilot and explorer 1981 - Lee Hays, singer, songwriter and weaver 1989 - Irving Stone, author - - It is pretty clear that we are not yet remotely close to achieving women's equality, and, if I may, I have a suggested solution to propose, yet another march: <div class="align-center"> <figure class="image-captioned width-xl"><img alt="womanwarriors.jpg" class="width-xl" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/578650/large/womanwarriors.jpg?1534552724" title="womanwarriors.jpg"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> </div> - - So now some music Womens Equality Day <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=w" title="" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w_fygyQiHoA" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Jimmy Rushing <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=xiETUJXRk7o" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xiETUJXRk7o" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Don Bowman <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=zXqRoEOVTtQ" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zXqRoEOVTtQ" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Vic Dana <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=IlQPCUgsNIc" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IlQPCUgsNIc" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Chris Curtis <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=X3aLTl1pa9c" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/X3aLTl1pa9c" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Dori Caymmi <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=goE1fxNGV" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/goE1fxNGV_g" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Maureen Tucker <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=WZseqKBMq4c" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WZseqKBMq4c" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Valerie Simpson <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=-chaxk5M-XI" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-chaxk5M-XI" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Leon Redbone <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=F6d1-k2p1Ck" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/F6d1-k2p1Ck" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Ralph Vaughn Williams <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=67eu-zjf1ps" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/67eu-zjf1ps" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> Lee Hays <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=xHD28SsJfXk" title="" data-frameborder="0" data-height="315" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xHD28SsJfXk" data-width="560">YouTube Video</a></div> - Photo: It's an open thread, so do your thing Crossposted from http://caucus99percent.com rss@dailykos.com (enhydra lutris) August26 Crecy DonBowman JimmyRushing KokoTaylor Manzikert MaureenTucker OpenThread RightsofMan WomensEquality _1789091 Sun, 26 Aug 2018 13:13:06 +0000 "Wicked and Seditious"-- Thomas Paine's Rights of Man https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/10/2/1703089/--Wicked-and-Seditious-Thomas-Paine-s-Rights-of-Man Note: This is the third in what has grown into a series of diaries on the life and work of Thomas Paine and what it means for us today. The first two essays, on <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/14/1536857/-The-Radical-Act-of-Compassion-Thomas-Paine-s-smallest-fish" target="_blank">compassion in the writings of Paine</a>, and on actor <a href="https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/29/1676144/-Beginning-the-World-Over-Again-Thomas-Paine-Returns-to-Public-Television" target="_blank">Ian Ruskin’s interpretation of Paine</a> for our times can be found at the links. For more about Thomas Paine, including online and library resources, visit my blog, <a href="https://paineandfriends.com/" target="_blank">paineandfriends.com.</a> In honor of Banned Books Week at the end of September, I decided to revisit Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Originally published in England as two separate pamphlets (in March 1791 and February 1792), the 200-page book is still widely considered Paine’s most important and influential work. It is also, according to the American Library Association “one of history’s most banned political narratives.” In England, it was contraband for decades. Selling this work of “seditious libel” could get you arrested, fined, imprisoned – or even, as in one case, transported. Both a defense of the French Revolution and an ideological take-down of English monarchy, Rights of Man caused a political furor almost unimaginable for us today. (Yes, even in the age of Trump). In 1792, brought to trial by the Crown, Paine fled his native England to avoid being hung as a traitor. He would never return. Since that time, Rights of Man has remained controversial, a regular target of censorship efforts around the world. Even in the United States it hasn’t always been safe from challenges in schools and libraries. Nor is it difficult to understand why. Paine’s insistence, conveyed in plain language, that ordinary citizens have an inherent, always-existing right to choose – and if necessary to change – their governments was and continues to be toxic to authoritarians of all political stripes. I first encountered Rights of Man around 2010. Having read Paine’s The Age of Reason and Common Sense, I was prepared for the conventions of eighteenth-century language, as well as Paine’s impressive gift for both lucid explanation and (often hilarious) sarcasm. I was not prepared for the sheer breadth and compass of Paine’s democratic vision – nor the depth of his feeling for the oppressed. Of the supposedly “vulgar ... ignorant mob,” the lowest of the poor classes throughout Europe, Paine offers this insight, two centuries before activists had a word for marginalization: <blockquote> It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the back-ground of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy. </blockquote> The book is filled with such insights. Yet, even after a second reading, I still find Rights of Man a difficult work to fully absorb. It is nearly impossible to summarize, because it is so many things at once. Far more than a polemic, it is also reportage, protest, political theory. It is at once sober journalism and withering satire, careful analysis and impassioned plea for justice. The late commentator Christopher Hitchens describes it as “one of the first ‘modern’ texts,” and “both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society” (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: a Biography, 11). In its reach and complexity, the book is different, even, from Paine’s other writings. Unlike Common Sense or The American Crisis, it’s less a call to arms than a spur to thought and reflection – though it is filled with evocative metaphor and stirring language. Unlike The Age of Reason, it doesn’t target a specific foe, such as organized religion – unless that foe is monarchy and “hereditary government,” which will strike most readers of today as last century’s news. Ironically, the main barrier to fully appreciating Rights of Man in 2017 may be that its critique of government has been largely blunted over time – by the very progress that Paine himself hoped for and advocated. What was “seditious libel” worthy of trying to hang an upstart writer back in 1792 is today the “common sense” of nearly all modern democracies. As Paine states in “Letter to the Addressers,” his summary and defense of Rights of Man, “I have asserted ... and by fair and open argument maintained, the right of every nation at all times to establish such a system and form of government for itself as best accords with its disposition, interest, and happiness; and to change and alter it as it sees occasion.” That is – people, meaning ordinary citizens, are the creators and shapers of government. And those same ordinary people have the right to change and reshape their government if they so choose. Paine doesn’t need to convince us that such a belief is right, just, or natural. In the twenty-first century, we hold those truths to be self-evident. What shocks us is that anyone might believe – or have ever believed – otherwise. Americans in particular have been telling ourselves this story of how governments are best formed for over two hundred years. We tell it this way because we learned it from our Founders, including and especially Thomas Paine. So what, if anything, can a work like Rights of Man say to us today, when so many of its precepts come already-written into our upbringing? Haven’t we been hearing this business about representative democracies and written constitutions ever since we first learned to pledge allegiance “to the republic” for which our flag is supposed to stand? Well ... perhaps – but it is helpful to remind ourselves of how much reality – political reality, in particular – is invented. Rights of Man – like all Paine’s work, like the writings of all our Founders – was created at a time when modern democracy was experimental and widely mistrusted. Words and concepts matter. Historians point out that in Rights of Man, Paine transformed the meaning of the word “democracy” itself, giving it the largely positive connotation it carries today. In the late eighteenth century, thinkers and writers were still using “democracy” as a slur – a synonym for anarchy, lawlessness, “mob rule,” and the unmooring of civil order. John Adams understood the word in this sense, and like others of his time, characterized democracy as a kind of contagion – as “Paine’s yellow fever.” The statesman Edmund Burke became Paine’s ideological rival – and the catalyst for the writing of Paine’s book, when he dismissed as irrelevant some “paltry sheets about the rights of man.” American political discourse has been, and continues to be, one long debate about rights: who has them, who should, what they entail, how they are to be enforced, what puts them under threat. When the Supreme Court hears a case, whether on health insurance or campaign funding or immigration, it acts as an arbiter of rights. Many of its most important cases historically have referenced and interpreted the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, better known to all of us as the Bill of Rights. We are nearly incapable of imagining a world without rights – or at least a theoretical assertion of them – as a given. <div> <figure class="image-captioned align-right"><img title="Paine_scan_--_cropped_w_quote--3-4_size.jpg" alt="Paine_scan_--_cropped_w_quote--3-4_size.jpg" src="https://images.dailykos.com/images/455614/large/Paine_scan_--_cropped_w_quote--3-4_size.jpg?1506827945"> <figcaption></figcaption> </figure> It has become too easy for us post-moderns to forget there was a time in which rights were part of a foreign and forbidden language, a cause to charge writers with madness and treason, to jail booksellers and publishers and to burn authors in effigy. The media of Thomas Paine’s day cast his work in precisely those terms, whether through vicious editorial cartoons of “Mad Tom, the Man of Rights” or a scurrilous government-funded “biography” packed with falsehoods. Yet Paine – and his ideas – have persisted. Among many other things, Rights of Man advocates for a progressive tax structure and what we might today call a welfare state: government pensions for the old, education for the young and the unemployed, help for the impoverished and for new parents. Many of these ideas did not see fruition until a century and more after Paine’s death. Many others have yet to be even tried. Paine did not live to see most of the changes that his words helped bring about. And just as Paine failed to see the coming Reign of Terror in France – an oversight that nearly got him killed (there were any number of things that nearly got Thomas Paine killed before he actually died ... at the age of 73) – so he also failed to see that the dissolution of monarchy would not bring an end to war. Nor could he have known that democracy wasn’t a cure-all, and that many of the abuses he attributed to “the monarchical system” would prove a hazard to representative systems as well. The presidency of Donald Trump is far from the earliest example, but of course it springs most readily to mind. In reading Paine’s (many) descriptions of monarchy as a thing afflicted by the weaknesses of both infancy and old age, it’s hard not to keep seeing Trump, the would-be emperor of America, with his alternating temper-tantrums and breathtaking ignorance. <blockquote> It is government through the medium of passions and accidents. It appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. It reverses the wholesome order of nature. It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of nonage over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government ... </blockquote> Likewise, in contemplating the phenomenon of “alternate facts” and “fake news” that we read about daily, Paine’s warnings about the “the puppet show” and “mystery” of government take on new resonance. <blockquote> ... certain it is, that what is called monarchy, always appears to me a silly, contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open – and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter. </blockquote> (And if you think Thomas Paine may have invented The Wizard of Oz in that observation, you wouldn’t be alone.) </div> <div> Yet for me, as always, the most moving aspect of Paine’s writing is never ideology – or even bold, strong language, but rather the author’s compassion – and the kind of open-hearted idealism that our cynical culture loves to deride as naive fantasy. There are moments, perhaps more of them in Rights of Man than any of his other works, when Paine’s belief in his fellow humans — that is, in us — ordinary Jane-and-Joe Average citizens like you and me — is not only profoundly touching, but unsettling. Throughout the book, it is clear that Paine rests his faith less in a specific form of government than in “we the people” and our willingness to assert and protect not just our own rights – but those of others. Representative democracy will work, he tells us, not because of this or that party or leader, but because “the nation” (in the Rousseauist sense, meaning “the people”) has the ultimate power to shape and control government. “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it,” he tells us. “Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. .... Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.” Those are rousing and hopeful words – words fit to encourage a resistance. Paine also believed that we the people could see through the orchestrated lies that government (or the media) so often peddles. In “Letter to the Addressers,” he writes: <blockquote> ... how easily does even the most illiterate reader distinguish the spontaneous sensations of the heart, from the labored productions of the brain. Truth, whenever it can fully appear, is a thing so naturally familiar to the mind, that an acquaintance commences at first sight. No artificial light, yet discovered, can display all the properties of daylight; so neither can the best invented fiction fill the mind with every conviction which truth begets. </blockquote> In Rights of Man, this sentiment is even more streamlined and poetic. <blockquote> ... such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness. </blockquote> In this age of floating signifiers, fake news, and tweeting presidents, it is challenging, even daunting, to adopt Paine’s optimistic stance on the self-evidence of truth. Media and technology have changed all of that, we keep hearing. We may (rightly) ask if Paine was being naive – and whether we are naive to trust what he says. </div> <div> But we should not forget that speaking truth to power has never been a magic trick or a one-time proposition. Truth may “only” need to appear – but most of the time it needs to appear over and over again before it sinks it. Thomas Paine knew this, even if he doesn’t say so here. We can tell that by the number of times that he did, in fact, repeat those democratic ideals that we think we know, but rarely expend the effort to examine or teach or defend. Paine did all these things throughout his life, very often at great personal risk, over, and over, and over again. Thomas Paine persisted – on many fronts beyond the printed page. And through those efforts, his thoughts and ideas have persisted into our own time. We need to remember that, and follow his example. </div> <div> <hr> Learn more about the life and work of Thomas Paine at: <a href="https://paineandfriends.com" target="_blank">paineandfriends.com</a> <a href="http://thelifeofthomaspaine.org/" target="_blank">thelifeofthomaspaine.org</a> </div> <div> <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content">x</div> <div class="dk-editor-embed embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 center-block"> <div class="remove-embed-content"><a class="new_iframe_placeholder" href="#">x</a></div> <a class="iframe_placeholder youtube dk-embed" href="//youtube.com/watch?v=h9-xmHfsTr8" data-width="500" data-height="281" data-src="//www.youtube.com/embed/h9-xmHfsTr8" data-frameborder="0">YouTube Video</a></div> </div> Actor/writer Ian Ruskin as Thomas Paine discusses Rights of Man. </div> rss@dailykos.com (urban unicorn) AmericanFounders AmericanHistory Americanliterature AmericanRevolution Compassion FoundingFathers FrenchRevolution IanRuskin Rights RightsofMan ThomasPaine worldliterature _1703089 Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:31:02 +0000 And so it starts. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/17/1600934/-And-so-it-starts So it starts, The criminalizing of the first and basic right of our citizenship. Our freedom of speech. Our first act of rebellion against the royalist and corporate interest of England by throwing what would be worth today as much as a million dollars of tea into the harbor of Boston. And act of free speech and a “disruption of economic activity.” State Senator Doug Ericksen of Ferndale Washington has proposed a bill for the next state legislative session to make such an act a felony. In effect making freedom of speech a crime. Civil discourse is a corner stone of our national DNA. We might not agree with what someone or a group might say or protest about instead we have always defended the right to protest. If Mr. Ericksen feels that this will stop property damage, there are laws currently on the books for punishing people who damage property. But to punish anyone for their political speech or any discourse about the nature of the state is wrong. It appears that this is his intent to silence the public discourse. There is a word for that. We all know it, we all oppose it. This is harbinger of where the republicans want to take our country. We need to organize against just these actions. We are entering dark times in our liberty; we need to take it back now. rss@dailykos.com (airmechldr) 1776 2016 bernie FreedomofSpeech Hillary Liberty RightsofMan TeaParty trump _1600934 Thu, 17 Nov 2016 18:42:56 +0000 F*ck the Founding Fathers https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/9/10/1015399/-F-ck-the-Founding-Fathers Of all political literature available in this overheated climate, I have to say that I love the <a href="http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/jeremiad.htm">Jeremiad</a> the most.  Such tomes with their counterfactual premises, their appeals to consequences both real and imagined, and always, always, always, their simple, simplified, simplistic conclusions wrapped up in Founding Father rhetoric designed to distract the audience from the very concept of self-rule.  Could there ever be anything more un-American than a literary work that both extolls the downfall of a nation we never were, and regresses us into permanent slaves to dead men who were determined to keep their experiment in democracy from suffering that exact fate? Political rhetoric often falls back upon the easy crutch of claiming the legacy of the Founding Fathers.  It's the lazy appeal to inappropriate authority that spews most readily from the mouths of partisan hacks who've never actually engaged with the voluminous body of evidence left by these dead white guys that points to a fear that this is exactly what would happen in a nation of uneducated people.   So fuck the Founding Fathers.  Fucke 'em.  Not hardly any of them are people most of us would spend any time with, if we knew all that much about them.  Ben Franklin, who worked his way into the upper crust as a newspaper man and inventor, also <a href="http://www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf3/price.htm">fit right in with wingnuts</a> who think helping the poor makes them like being poor, wanted to <a href="http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/officialamerican/englishonly/">ban the speaking of German</a> in the state of Pennsylvania, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/opinion/24lepore.html">let his sister live in dreadful poverty</a> when he could easily have lifted her up with him.  Fuck old Ben, he was an asshole. The point of being an American is ownership of one's fate.  Like Thomas Paine said: <blockquote>Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, <a href="http://www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/singlehtml.htm">he has no longer any authority</a> in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered.</blockquote> Fuck the Founding Fathers and what they intended and what they would think, because not only are they dead and therefore not much concerned with what we are doing in the realm of phenomena they left behind, but they themselves found the idea of fealty to dead men repugnant.  They didn't want to be deified, and they certainly didn't set up the structure of a nation meant to ossify as the lands of their birth had.  They knew, as Socrates said, that the wisest man knows one thing, that he knows nothing. If anyone has any notion that that Thomas Jefferson's 18th Century experience could ever have imagined life in the 20th Century, please do step up and figure it for us.  I'd love to hear how George Washington, exhumed and revived, would fare in a world of iPods and televised war.  How's about that prig, John Adams?  He wasn't much of a man even in his own day.  Anyone care to live in a world in which only certain Christian sects are allowed to practice?  How's about his signature legislation, the <a href="http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Alien.html">Alien and Sedition Acts</a>?  Does that seem like the kind of guy whose every utterance should govern how we live and operate our democracy today? Seriously, these weren't prophetic men.  They didn't have the answers to every aspect of life in a future they never could have contemplated.  They were just a bunch of guys who read the right books, had the right understanding of human nature, and were able to compromise with each other enough to set up an enduring government that has overcome every obstacle, including internecine war.  Their genius wasn't in their ability to run our lives from 200 years in the past, it was in acknowledging that we would have to redefine the nation with each successive generation.  The irony of political rhetoric appealing to the intentions of the Founding Fathers is just this: if that particular group were reborn and unaware of their former lives, faced with the raft of problems and the dearth of solutions with which we grapple today, you know what they'd say before rolling up their sleeves and getting to work setting things aright if they could? Fuck those old bastards, their problems were easy. rss@dailykos.com (Fed up Fed) Democracy FoundingFathers Rant Recommended RightsofMan ThomasPaine _1015399 Sun, 11 Sep 2011 05:41:55 +0000 Thomas Paine Contra Glenn Beck https://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/9/9/900526/-Thomas-Paine-Contra-Glenn-Beck Glenn Beck's use of Thomas Paine is quite ironic considering Paine's view of the Judeo-Christian tradition and his distaste for Church and State connection. Either Glenn Beck is woefully ignorant or he is a charlatan who takes advantage of the ignorance of those he fleeces. The adulterous connection between church and state... [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason] rss@dailykos.com (pangeaprogress) ChurchState ClassicalGreece DavidBarton FoundingFathers Glenn Beck GlennBeck religionrepublicanparty Rescued RightsofMan RomanRepublic Sarah Palin SarahPalin Theocracy ThomasJefferson ThomasPaine thomaspainecontraglennbeck _900526 Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:28:37 +0000 Obama Ignores the Inalienable Rights of Detainees https://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/23/734674/-Obama-Ignores-the-Inalienable-Rights-of-Detainees In his recent speech on the treatment of foreigners detained for terrorism, Barack Obama made the following shocking statement: <blockquote> We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country, but even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. . . . I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. </blockquote> This is shocking because it comes from a scholar of Constitutional law. rss@dailykos.com (CatM) Constitution Guantanamo Obama RightsofMan Terrorists ThomasJefferson ThomasPaine _734674 Sat, 23 May 2009 15:14:01 +0000 Punished for Taking Paine's Name in Vain https://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/24/274236/-Punished-for-Taking-Paine-s-Name-in-Vain Not that Christopher Hitchens' diminuitive reputation requires further deflation, but the neo-con fellow-traveller's infinitesimal private parts have run into a buzz-saw over at the London Review of Books. John Barrell, an expert on the blot on English liberties known as the political trials of the 1790s, takes on Hitchens' little stocking-stuffer Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography from a position of actually knowing something about both Paine and the work of his other biographers. rss@dailykos.com (slangist) AmericanRevolution ChristopherHitchens Common Sense CommonSense EdmundBurke FrenchRevolution GeorgeGalloway KarlMarx LeonTrotsky Neocons RightsofMan TomPaine _274236 Sat, 25 Nov 2006 03:21:49 +0000