Declaration of Independence in American (1921)
xroads.virginia.edu
xroads.virginia.edu
He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.
Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
Time passes, but some things don't change.
> Magna superstitio tibi sit natalis amicae:
> Quaque aliquid dandum est, illa sit atra dies.
("Your girlfriend's birthday should be a source of great dread for you: whenever it's time to give something, that's a dark day.")
I find this true today as well. A lot of people just can't seem to accept the idea that the founding fathers of the USA wanted to allow their descendants the same right to start over that they were exercising at the time.
I must admit that even given an appreciation of that I am hard pressed to imagine what a popular uprising and establishment of a new government would look like in today's America.
It has literally always been true, since the very beginning of the country.
Other speculations?
Edit: I mean, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service are all built up around protecting the government from its people, right? The US government had been setting up a firewall between itself and its people for decades. (The NSA ostensibly not, but we know they were spying on Americans since at least 1945 [0]).
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23...
The devastation of modern western society would be absolute. I can't even begin to imagine what the outcome would be.
Mind you, the US government has the largest military force in the world by far. Bigger than the next 3 or 4 biggest militaries combined.
Does anyone really want to fight that? The answer is probably No.
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/dec...
Do you really think the government will part calmly with its largest economy?
Do you really think Europe will part calmly with its second-largest economy?
> In dramatic contrast to Article VII–whose unanimity rule that no state can bind another confirms the sovereignty of each state prior to 1787 –Article V does not permit a single state convention to modify the federal Constitution for itself. Moreover, it makes clear that a state may be bound by a federal constitutional amendment even if that state votes against the amendment in a properly convened state convention. And this rule is flatly inconsistent with the idea that states remain sovereign after joining the Constitution, even if they were sovereign before joining it. Thus, ratification of the Constitution itself marked the moment when previously sovereign states gave up their sovereignty and legal independence
You won't be fighting the US military. Many of them will join with you. They are people, not killing machines. They are your neighbors and the sons and daughters of your neighbors. They will not fire on their countrymen because a politician told them to.
The men and women in our military swore to uphold the constitution. They did not swear to be the thugs for a group of elites who got elected only through virtue of millions upon millions of dollars of campaign contributions from organizations that do not have the best interest of this nation as their goal.
Rather than Tiananmen square, we would get Syria.
Sure, I may have been 5 years old when I went through a [very short] civil war, but I still remember the news. Many soldiers didn't even know why they were being asked to shoot this or that. While in the barracks they were kept under strict radio silence from outside and most had no idea a civil war had started. They were just told to go there and shoot over there. They didn't know if they were shooting at their neighbors from back home, at somebody they hate, or what.[1]
Eventually news spread and the war got very very bloody as people who used to be comrades became personally involved in drinking the kool-aid. Luckily the bloody parts were removed from where I lived, but a lot of my classmates in elementary school were refugees.
Civil war ain't nothing to sneeze at. It is the worst type of war.
[1] There's a video from a private telling all of this to a news crew. Seeing it on TV is one of my earliest memories. It's in serbocroatian and I don't know if there's a version with English subtitles. -> https://www.facebook.com/zetraprojekt/videos/865414093588116...
Or the US splits and the revolution is turned into a North vs South, East vs West, type of civil war.
But you're still essentially fighting the US military. The biggest baddest military in the world. Surely the US military agrees that fighting the US military is a Bad Idea (tm).
Point is, civil war is messy. There's no clear right or wrong, good guy or bad guy, it's by definition neighbor killing neighbor, friend against friend, sibling versus sibling. Everyone thinks they are protecting the One True Way Forward to make the country great again.
If there is a civil war, you kind of have to assume that each side is going to have access to some of the US's resources.
I don't believe you'll find any rallying cry for "the citizens" vs "the government," just opposition among citizens that gets expressed in government.
But yes, the Protestant theologian is a great example. The short time delay from the printing press to the Reformation, I think, highlights the immense power of the written word.
In modern America, I suspect the medium is more likely to be television than text.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/print_friendly.htm...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fsaJDi5AMLicz1HKd4tgmiCc...
Sadly, it seems like we as a nation have broken nearly every rule Washington warned us about - political infighting, foreign entanglements, etc.
Finally, it was interesting to note the 10th paragraph about similar culture, values, religion, etc. It seems the Globalists have spent the last 30 years trying to counter this idea with the opposite one that diversity, multiculturalism, etc. is the way to go.
> You’ve gotta be Americans before all else. You’re for the most part the same religion and culture...
It's interesting that Washington acknowledged the binding effect that shared culture has on a nation. I see the Nordic countries praised often on HN, and the counterpoint is always some variety of "but they have little diversity". I wonder what Washington would say about the US and the effects of a variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural heritages now?
> ....you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles...
"With slight shades of difference, ..."
Given that egregious quote mining, I guess you'd be immune to subtle arguments about context e.g. does someone stand at the head of an exclusively Lutheran Church and make a speech about how they should ignore their religious differences, no, that would be redundant. Which implies he knows there are differences enough for them to turn on each other if they don't make an effort to pull together.
His usual essays and reportage use more elevated language than this. IIRC he wrote this to make the point that "American" was a separate language from "English", and stuck in every Americanism he could think of.
The median American today probably speaks better English than back then. Literacy is up, radio and TV are universal so you don't just hear people on your block, fewer of us are recent immigrants, etc.
Reminds me of the fight for D.C. statehood.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/did-a-fear-of-slav...
This one?
"He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don't care which."
That translates to "The King was protecting the Indians too much." Which was probably true.
When you get to call the Southern European countries literally PIGS in print, without apology or consequences ...
(Which, as an aside, is using epithets that Trump would likely never say out loud to express a sentiment he's actively opposed to.)
The original:
> He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
(So the original Declaration did complain, in a fashion, that the King was obstructing immigration.)
> He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.
> Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
>He made a lot of new jobs
As you know government cant create jobs except for government servants such as TSA screening agents. Their salary bill has be then paid for by the hardworking earning Americans. I think that is what that sentence means.
The Bloomberg article is talking about jobs that are creating by private industry. Government has no hand in it. If those business run a profit those jobs will be sustained else they will wither away unlike TSA people who will get paid no matter how much the passengers hate them.
Moot of us are in the upper half of income earners. Those are he people who are working hard and keeping the economy running. But it is false to say these are the only victims. More taxes and more regulations inevitably means slower growth of small business leading to less employment of poor people. Not to mention the inflation that hurts the lower income half significantly more as it is an indirect tax on cash you hold.