[extropy-chat] Why I am No Longer a Libertarian Either...

[The Avantguardian]

--- Robert Lindauer <robgobblin at aol.com> wrote:

> It's implied.  Read it again.

I don't need to read it again. I can recite the
preamble from memory and it is nowhere implied. Please
paste relevant text wherein you say that it is
implied.

> Which people?  "Our posterity".    And buddy unless
> you're daughters of 
> the american revolution, they weren't talking about
> you.

They were talking to the future so they didn't know
WHO they were talking too.
 
> Remember that "redskins", "negroes", "chinamen" and
> women were all 
> non-persons in the old America.

That's my point, the moment they were accepted as
people, the Constitution applied to them. It's kind of
magical like that huh? Don't forget that Old America
was a tiny sliver of runty states and commonwealths
stretched along the atlantic sea-board. Our America
stretches from sea to shining sea. Admittedly the
native-americans and the blacks got shafted, but
nobody twisted the arms of the Chinese to come here
and build our railroads for us. They did it of their
own free will and they accomplished a great deed for
which this country is grateful.


> This is how we got abundant food, good 
> roads, railroad tracks laid, abundant coal and steel
> - somebody worked 
> the mines and didn't get paid much if anything for
> it.

Yeah and others financed it and got rich for it and
still others claimed a few acres in the Oklahoma land
rush, grew some crops, and pretty much minded their
own business. So what's your point? That because some
Americans are rich and lazy while others are
hard-working and poor that the Constitution somehow
sucks? That does not logically follow.  

> This had been 
> going on for more than a hundred years  at the time
> of the drafting of 
> the constitution and its signing exclusively by
> slave owners, none of 
> whom showed remorse at the having of them.

You know what your problem is Robbie? It's that you
can't break your mind free of the cultural shackles.
Of course you are not alone in that since that is the
very thing you are accusing the founders of. You grew
up believing that slavery is wrong and because of this
you can't imagine how anyone at anytime could possibly
have condoned it. Slavery had been going on in the
world since the dawn of recorded history. You think
that a bunch of guys who grew up with it, saw it
everywhere, and were practically raised by
house-slaves themselves would somehow all wake up one
morning and slap themselves on the forehead and say,
"My God what was I thinking? Slavery is WRONG." If YOU
can't see how THEY thought it was perfectly acceptable
to keep slaves, then you are guilty of the very thing
that you are accusing them of and that is being unable
to lift your mind above the cultural context in which
you live and see the big picture.   
 
> Slavery was known to be wrong by the Jews around
> 3000BC, each of the 
> framers of the constitution were intimately familiar
> with Exodus.  They 
> SHOULD have known better.

You are right, the framers of the constitution were
intimately familiar with Exodus. Here are some
relevant excerpts:

Exodus 12:44 - but every slave that is bought for
money may eat of it after you have circumcised him.   

Exodus 21:2 - When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall
serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out
free, for nothing.

Exodus 21:7 - When a man sells his daughter as a
slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.

Exodus 21:20 - When a man strikes his slave, male or
female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand,
he shall be punished.   

Exodus 21:21 - But if the slave survives a day or two,
he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money.

Exodus is chocked full of laws from God regarding how
to treat slaves, how to punish them, what to feed
them, and nowhere does it say it is wrong to have
them. So don't try to pull that Jewish "holier than
thou" crap on me. The only thing the Hebrews had
against slavery was they prefered to own them rather
than to BE them. Just look at the history of Solomon,
second king of Israel son of the great David whose
star is the symbol for the whole of the Jewish people
and reputed to be the wisest man in the world.      

1 Kings 9:20-9:23 "All the people who were left of the
Amorites, the Hittites, the Per'izzites, the Hivites,
and the Jeb'usites, who were not of the people of
Israel-- 21 their descendants who were left after them
in the land, whom the people of Israel were unable to
destroy utterly--these Solomon made a forced levy of
slaves, and so they are to this day. 22 But of the
people of Israel Solomon made no slaves; they were the
soldiers, they were his officials, his commanders, his
captains, his chariot commanders and his horsemen."

I couldn't make this stuff up.  

> I like the ideas of the constitution.  It's clearly
> an advance over 
> what came before.  It's not clearly an end to the
> ongoing class-war nor 
> was it intended as such.  Instead it was intended to
> ensure the power 
> of those who took it by force and guile.

No. It was intended to allow for "Government of the
people, for the people, by the PEOPLE." I am sorry
that all the founders could leave for you was a scrap
of paper that had some really nice inspirational
platitudes written on it. I wish they could have left
you more of what they had. . . like vision, courage,
and the will to take what is rightfully yours.
 
> 
> Irrelevant.  Thinking that cigarette smoking is bad
> for you and 
> quitting are two different things.  Only one of them
> is important, 
> guess which.

Why would anyone quit if they didn't think it was bad
for them? 

> I grew up in the inner-city.  I spent -enough- time
> in Mexico.  I know 
> whereof I speak.

Yeah? Mexico is the Ritz-Carlton compared to
Bangladesh where 1 in 3 children are born retarded
because of thyroid defects caused by their mothers
getting insufficient iodine in their diet during
pregnancy. Why you ask? Because iodized salt costs a
couple of pennies more a pound. When you are digging
maggots out of your own shit for protein, then you
will understand true poverty. Until then, you are just
an apostate prince in a self-imposed exile of the mind
because you don't like your daddy's royal decrees. 
 
> Middle-class
> americans are, to 
> follow through the analogy, the house-niggers of the
> world.  We whip 
> the slaves when necessary, we take pride in our
> ability to read and we 
> say yessa massa when the boss says to work on
> saturday or he wants to 
> sleep with our women.

Do you always use nigger, china-man, and other
monikers of hate? You do have freedom of speech but
still it's not very progressive now is it? For the
record, I am nobody's slave. I am free, educated, and
powerful. I could seize power over others through
force and guile but I choose not to. I am a man of
reason and not some brute animal ruled by my instincts
for domination. That those who claim to be my leaders
seem to be, shames me greatly. But neither you nor
they would be wise to mistake my generous nature for
servility. 

> Don't worry, I dropped out.
Too bad . . . I am just getting started. :)



The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson

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