Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Discussion in 'SBAF Blogs' started by purr1n, Dec 26, 2018.

  1. TheIceman93

    TheIceman93 El pato-zorro

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    Please stop. You keep saying the same thing over and over. You didn't address any of the points in my previous post so this debate has run its course. Move on.

    I'll let Professor Paul Finkelman finish this off because I'm too tired to type this out for you. He is responding to another "scholar" named Hartmann who has also tried to deceptively link the 2nd Amendment with the suppression of slave revolts.


    "Hartmann implies that the Second Amendment was adopted (or at least written) to get Virginia's "vote" for ratification of the Constitution, which took place in July 1788. But this is not even remotely true. In 1788 the Second Amendment was not yet written and was not part of the debate over ratification of the Constitution." (Finkelman)

    "But these proposed amendments were not a quid pro quo for ratification, since none of those advocating amendments, like Henry, voted for ratification. Thus, there is no evidence — no historical record — for Hartmann's key proposition that the Second Amendment (which was not written until 1789) was somehow a prerequisite for the ratification of the Constitution in 1788." (Finkelman)

    "Hartmann's "history" gets even more confused when he argues that the purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect slave patrols (which he confuses with the militia) and that James Madison, Patrick Henry and George Mason all teamed up to do this. He argues that Madison changed the text of the Second Amendment to please Mason and Henry. This is almost amusing. Both Henry and Mason were Madison's political enemies, and neither was in Congress when Madison drafted the Bill of Rights. In fact the wording changes took place in the House and Senate. Nor did Mason and Henry have much to do with writing the Second Amendment since they were not in Congress. When the Second Amendment was proposed, Henry opposed it (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights)." (Finkelman)

    "After 1787 Mason joined Henry in opposing the Constitution (which Madison worked so hard to create), and both Henry and Mason opposed the Bill of Rights. Indeed Virginia was the last state to ratify the Bill of Rights (in 1791) because of Henry's opposition to the Bill of Rights. Henry wanted to scuttle the whole Constitution and not make it better. So he opposed all the amendments." (Finkelman)

    "This is not to say that slave patrols were not important to the South and slavery. They surely were. But the Second Amendment was directed solely at the federal government, which was prohibited from disarming state militias, and thus allowed the states to arm their militias if the federal government did not do so. Even if the amendment did not exist and the national government had abolished the state militias, the states would have been free to create their own slave patrols, just as they can create police departments and other law-enforcement agencies." (Finkelman)

    "The slave patrols were emphatically not the militia. The militias had just fought in the Revolution. The states wanted to preserve their militias in case they had to defend themselves against a foreign power or against some president who became a tyrant. Thus the Second Amendment promised that the states could keep their well-regulated militias."
    (Finkelman)


    I don't agree entirely with Finkelman's article, however. I do believe that the original intent of the 2nd Amendment was to guarantee each citizen's right to own firearms. I believe that Justice Scalia's majority opinion in DC vs Heller is legally sound. However, I still believe that Finkelman's article effectively destroys any notion that the 2nd Amendment was only about arming slave patrols. There just isn't any compelling evidence to prove this and it frustrates me that you so enthusiastically state it as fact.

    Link: https://web.archive.org/web/2018022...dment-passed-to-protect-slavery-no-1790894965
     
  2. mitochondrium

    mitochondrium Friend

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    I am so old it is a long time since I had to sit down and do my homework. In fact I am so old that I had the chance to talk to people who lived in the "most advanced welfare state" of the thirties and fourties.
    The German Empire (before the start of the first world war) already had a state run pension plan for workers. After the first world war memebers of the social democrats founded the "AWO" organisation for workers' welfare". After the Nazis took over they tried to get this organisation in line with their policy, that did not work. It was disolved and verboten.
    The NSV Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, organisation which was responsible for many of the "welfare acts" you cited was founded in 1931 as part of the Nazi party with the same goal as the AWO both where NGOs providing services for their paying members. Other such organisations were the red cross, caritas (catholic church)or the diakonie (prtestant church), which were not banned. During the times with high unemployment the NSV gave also money to members in need. In 1938 they had 1 million volunteers in their rank and in 1939 they had 11 million members. When unemployment was no longer a problem (mostly due to the armament program and other heavy industries) it started rendering services like for instance kindergardens where the children were taught: fold you hands bow your head your thoughts be with the Führer, he gives you your daily bread and saves you from all harm. If you were a member of the social democratic party good look getting any help there, you much more likely ended up in a concentration camp.
    This organisation was never governmental it belonged to the party like the Hitler Jugend and the Bund deutscher Mädel. The plan was to substitute the state with the party or to intertwine party and state. Hilter said who controls the youth controls the future. The Nazis penetrated areas which were formerly the domain of the family with the Hitler Jugend and the Bund deutscher Mädel. The aim of the NSV was to not leave welfare to organisations outside the party and it was not benevolence they had in mind but control. All tyrants know that the less the populace has to claim about the safer they are it was part of the Zuckerbrot und Peitsche approach "suger bread and whip". It was never intended as welfare for all but as give a bone to some. The control over the youth actually worked quite well with some. On numerous occasions zealous youth denounced their parents who then disappeared forever. Very few people fared well in Nazi Germany, those were self-inflicted hard times. After all it was not so easy to win the promised living space in the East, the plan to kill most Slavs and enslave some of them in order for the master race to fare well did not work out, luckily.
    So there may have been a so-called Welfare organisation in Nazi Germany, then again soial laws in the German Empire before WWI were more advanced than those of the French Republic at the same time. It certainly did not help people who did not agree with the Nazi party or not and its aim was not the welfare of all people. The venom the Nazi Party spread in German society most certainly was not helping the mental welfare.
    In the hand of a skilled surgeon a scalpel is a wonderful instrument, in the hand of a lunatic murderer not so much. In my mind historians calling Nazi Germany a Welfare State without putting this into perspective without looking at the underlying motive havn't done their homework. They have described an aspect without analysing it.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
  3. Deep Funk

    Deep Funk Deep thoughts - Friend

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    "Brave New World", yes you get it. A society controlled by pleasant incentives to avoid the real problems. Take your "soma" and stay stupid. No thank you.
     
  4. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    That's the very definition of fascism: the fusion of the party and the state. Does not really matter is the party is left or right wing.
     
  5. Deep Funk

    Deep Funk Deep thoughts - Friend

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    Which often makes me wonder. Why the focus on socialist roots or liberal roots? Follow the money and you know enough.

    Words and symbols might be pretty. It is about the transactions. Never trust a salesman/woman who does not like his/her own product and/or service. Once you understand that you will cringe a lot when reading the news.
     
  6. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    My dad sent me this email out of random this morning in all caps (just how he always sends it):

    Thing is, he is the same guy who considers something like BLM and any police reform as being against against white people. Anyhoo, the point is that I been seeing these similar comments in my neck of the woods as of late. Even with the increase Covid-19 numbers there's still plenty of people who are consider all of this as fake. Other states are forcing people to wear mask, in FL we aren't requiring it. Our Orange County (where Orlando is) is doing a mandatory mask order. However, the local GOP Party of Orange County with this Christian Family Group is suing the county as being a violation of the state constitution.

    As I tell my co-workers about FL, it's a battle of strong personalities, nothing else.

    Here's a FL women for ya about mask:

    https://twitter.com/RexChapman/stat...nAbS8FUZZnPTV4oCwSCf9OcWWgarWQEXbBnmpYYwAPRRY

    Personally I don't believe a state can compel you to wear a mask, however, for the sake of everyone try to wear one if you can.

    Going away from this for a moment, now mailing voting is partisan as f**k. I'm only going to talk about FL here, but in FL voting by mail has been a thing for decades. In matter of fact, in FL more registered GOP voters vote by mail than registered Dems. Now after this Covid-19 situation, more Dem voters requested their ballots in the mail for 202, while more of the GOP voters that I know who used to vote by mail are now calling it fraudulent and going to be voting in person. Never made sense to me since the majority of the Supervisor of Elections (FL County highest election official) are majority Republicans who run a tight ship with no drama. After 2018 some of the bad apples in South FL were removed by our now Senator Scott. I kind of wanna to say does the GOP want to shoot themselves in the foot in FL? FL GOP used voting by mail to get a bunch of rural conservative voters to start voting for them when the FL GOP took over the state government in the 90s.

    All I have to say is welcome to Florida, home of the Pub Sub and flakka.
     
  7. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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  8. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Nope, but most reporters I know are assholes. Sure Hollyweird likes to make them out to be heroes, but in reality they are scumbags who will stop at nothing to get a story and completely rewrite it so it bears no resemblance as to what they were told in order to sell themselves and the paper that they work for. I'd trust Dominick Dunne just as much if not more than anyone at the NY Times or Washington Post.
     
  9. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    Well, let's hope there is calm after the storm in the protest and conflict areas. Hopefully, people will continue to serve the system for the betterment of everyone's life or just use their liberties for something useful. Even if it just brings joy to a couple of people. Just talk does not do much good. Debating the problems is probably useful, you get to see what others think so people can form a decent opinion on the bigger thing.

    P.S. I just read the news about how the COVID is on the rise again in some regions. This sucks man.

    P.S.2 90% of the time the problem is between your 2 ears.
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2020
  10. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    Brave New World was entertaining, but being someones who has tried to figure out the technical field on gut instinct and mental gymnastics on a "philosophical" level, BNW has little to do with our society. Reality is that most people, whether they know it or not are working for some greater good in order to feed themselves. There are certain pointless activities but they fill the void to keep someone interested in life for the time being if they lack a higher purpose, besides vices.

    So much good work has been done for people for the stuff that we take for granted to actually function and we have more time because we don't need to do all the hard work that the machines do. There is no more "humane" time in history than this. The problem is the IT field should, imo, make political debates and news transparent. Less impulse controlled, less get the people under one flag because of fear or reasons. You should fear good things falling down based on logic and value. Like leaving free markets and becoming some planned economy that everyone knows sucked hard. It does not regulate itself like the free markets. All of the hard lefties are as bad as the hard-right idiots that never considered meditating or trying to figure out why some people had some faith or religion in their lives besides the damn greed and personal gain. The world needs to reset and figure itself out again to step in the right direction which is mostly what it has done for a long time. Advanced society and culture. The last step would be being able to help and control the environment instead of Leaning on it as a bug that we are mostly still doing, but not complaining. Stuff gets better every day because of hard work.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2020
  11. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    Besides mental mb I have taken personal interest and long time goal to help produce clean energy from waste or other sources (new and better tech). The biggest problem is talking and not doing anything useful based on your beliefs. I would feel quite good about myself then if I reached or helped someone reach that goal. I bet everyone has some interesting and worthwhile goal. I am so sick and tired of bs and pseudo-problems myself. Besides every hardship I have had, I love myself too much to waste time on "half-truths" and someones else's failure to have worthwhile goals in life.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2020
  12. robot zombie

    robot zombie Friend

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    To me the BNW parallels to our times are immediate. There's this idea with sci-fi that it is a grand prediction of the future, but I think more precisely dystopian sci-fi uses grand narratives as devices to emphasize problems with society that the author fears may become bigger issues as things continue to grow and change with advancement, technological and beyond. The point of a book like BNW is not "This exact thing may be our future." but rather to pose questions of what a future with the things we have now in it will look like, and in which ways it might go wrong.

    The interesting part is that not all of his ideas held up... they're just not matching what we know now, that he didn't know. So it's like a snapshot of fears people had then juxtaposed with fears we have now. That's something worth examining on its own, as I think it highlights some innate flaws in our ways of grasping 'the bigger picture' of things. Not what I wanna get into right now, though.

    I think when you toss out the grandiose aspects and abandon it as a literal description of anything, there are a lot of parallels in our media and how people engage with it. It's kind of always been that way, but the the prevalence of the internet, things really flipped around. I'm young, but just old enough to be on the cusp and watch dialogues and ways of getting info change very drastically. The further away I get from that time, the steeper the jump looks. It's still kind of a hard thing for me to internalize and understand.

    A lot of people feel that way, I think. And comparisons to the works of Huxley and Orwell are a strong way to get that message across... this rift in our politics, how the media works, how we interact... it's this big shift that's seemingly happened right under our noses. As jarring as reading Brave New World for the first time, for some of the same reasons.

    While it is true that we are living in a world of previously unimagined comforts and technological advancement, I feel like we have yet to realize how much our new tools can really hurt us. I'm talking about the media and really all of the tools we use for dealing with information. And given what you go on to say, I think we're in agreement there. Everything is done by feel now, these are the narratives we see and talk about. We're living in times where the only thing you really go to new OR old media for are comfy thoughts... and when there's fear, it's just reminding you where your comfort is found. There's always an answer to the fears. Really not so different from the fictitious soma of that book everyone's so up on.

    The idea being, there is no need for straight propaganda and forceful control when people are already placated. Honestly, it's hard to think that half of the issues put up now are the real causes of unrest. They're just easier to get people animated about... easier to present a clear solution to. Rack em up and knock em down. And yet, through the decades there is this prevailing issue "Will this ever end? Can we ever figure these things out?"

    Which to me, only begs the question of whether or not these things are the important things to figure out right now.

    To me, it's more than just people reading/watching stuff and getting all hopped up on ideas. There is real unrest under that, but in all of the confusion and stuff pulling on your emotions, it can be hard to see where the work actually needs to go.

    Debate is good... however, that is a term subject to major abuse right now. It's all about the debates we have. But what people don't seem to get when engaging in debates... winning a debate is not about who is right, but rather who has the stronger argument. Someone skilled at it can make the winning argument for all manner of things, good and bad. This is something that gets twisted in the emotionally-charged cacophony of our modern marketplace of ideas... people debate not in order to compare two arguments, but in order to 'win' so that they can feel right and brag about it. Goes down from social media and up through national press.

    There are no easy answers. And until everyone unifies on stepping back and completely re-examine how information flows and how we deal with bigger issues, from bottom to top, ain't nothin really getting done.

    I think you struck the nail on a lot of things. Namely, while we all play "battle of the ideologies," real problems that can't be solved that way advance on us... such as the vanishing viability of planet earth as a home. But then you get to that and people argue about who's responsibility it is! :confused:


    Honestly, in my personal life I generally forget all of it and just try to have a good impact on the people around me. Work towards the obvious cause/effect in front of me - leave the rest. I'm just one dude and I do what I can.

    There is a lingering grief in that, though... namely that not all issues can be solved by individuals simply working. They must work together. I can think of no greater example than the 'planet earth' issue. While the world plays blame games, our time to act runs shorter. You and I can do everything we can to minimize footprint and it is a drop in the bucket... the things that really need to happen there can only be accomplished by a unified global effort. But then, that is drastically hindered by the wormhole of conflicts and arguments whirling below it, it is so vast in reach that all of our problems, material and immaterial serve as its very pedestal. And one day that might literally be the death of us! No amount of hard work will solve that. Hmm... Huxley's "orchid garden?" Sometimes I think that lovely marriage of science and politics gets in the way of those who simply wish to work towards a common good more than people may like to look at, because it causes a lot of grief.

    I think the best anyone can hope for as an individual caught in this miasma of thoughts is to neither turn their backs to it nor become intertwined to the point of hamster-wheel-induced paralysis. As much as the backs and forths may not have the answers, they are a part of the world we live in. And observing them may not feel good, but sometimes hard work doesn't feel good either! That's a sacrifice you make in order to move through the world and impart things on it. I know I don't expect to live in a world free of things to fear any more than I expect to spend all of my time battling it. Sometimes the best things you can do exist completely outside of all of that.

    Big ole whirl out there, mhm.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2020
  13. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    Need to align thoughts towards what you want to align with.. Get rid of the noise. Focus on stuff and people worth your time (meaning you have something common, mindset, goals etc).
     
  14. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    I have been driving around the seashore seeing beautiful views.. For me being part of and maintaining what is there in the nature is good enough. Being grateful for everything that is and dosen't suck. I dont need an other planet.
     
  15. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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  16. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Looks like most of California is closing down again. We suck. I cannot believe our government let the ball drop on ironing out legislative issues regarding privacy so we could enable high-tech contact tracing. I cannot believe industries that track everything we do and where (Facebook, Google, Apple), can't lead an effort to save lives and livelihoods. I mean, they sure as well muscled and snaked their way into tracking most of what we do in our lives, but they can't do the same for the benefit of their citizens and their country? I cannot believe that out of all the restaurants and department stores I have been to recently, only two, a Golden Corral (of all places) and a quaint wine-breakfast place in Santa Clarita were the only two that checked my temperature. I can't believe why the government of CA is insisting on a binary open or closed approach instead of open but with controls?

    Why do we suck? Why can't we be like Taiwan?
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2020
  17. dmckean44

    dmckean44 In a Sherwood S6040CP relationship

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    I don't think contact tracing would work that well anyway. I rarely leaves the house with my phone and when I do I leave it in the car.
     
  18. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    It won't work for you, but it would work for many others. The idea behind it isn't based on 100% accuracy. It's like security in IT. You don't need 100% of machines to be running antivirus and be actively patched. In fact, 100% is impossible. However, if you can get a large chunk, then the environment is protected.

    Remember, it's not about you.

    We don't even have effective low-tech telephone call contact tracing.
     
  19. Stuff Jones

    Stuff Jones Friend

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    There doesn't seem to be a positive relationship between quality of governance and tech service presence. San Francisco ranks 149th of 150 US cities scored in terms of quality of government services per tax dollar spent.

    https://wallethub.com/edu/best-run-cities/22869/
     
  20. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    I don't understand what you are saying. What does San Francisco have to do with any of this?
     

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