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Comment by graphitezepp | Hacker News Reader

Founding father fetishizing (or whatever you want to call it) is very taboo in lefty circles because of how much conservatives do it. But that doesn't stop me personally from thinking that that group of people had the best ideas and developed the best framework for government the world has ever seen. It's just a shame it didn't work out to their intentions in practice.

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The issue is that the “Founding Fathers” are treated as if they thought collectively. They didn’t. Among themselves, they agreed, disagreed, and changed their mind on many things.

The same cannot be said today. If you even hint at non mainstream idea about gender or race in the Silicon Valley, you'll be shunned immediately

This is very dependent on the type idea you have, rather than the fact that it may be non mainstream.

That's incorrect. Scientific and neutral ideas that do not fit the mold cannot be safely discussed

Highly amused at how you have illustrated the bovine predictability of the HN hivemind. The HN crowd smugly pats itself on the back as being smarter and more enlightened than the average bear, yet in practice is tremendously narrow minded and hateful of anything that goes against its prevailing norms. The diversity agenda apparently does not include diversity of thought.

There is no "HN crowd" in that sense. This is a common illusion, known as the Hostile Media Effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

People with opposite views have opposite images of the "HN crowd". Since these images are determined by your/their own views, they don't contain any information about HN.

And so you prove my point yet even a step removed - to even mention that mentioning that a collective narrowmindedness might exist incurs criticism, is not permitted.

No, they didn't. They had some good ideas inspired by the Enlightenment and by Romanticism, but quite a few expressed the idea that the Constitution should be reviewed regularly and updated and adjusted for changing conditions. The issue is that many "conservatives" believe the Constitution was perfect from the get go.

You have a point there, in that the Constitution was designed to be changeable. It was not supposed to be easy to change, but possible. But there has been just one new amendment since 1971, and none since 1992.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...

Why would you need to change the constitution anymore? Now we just twist into a pretzel to reinterpret the meaning of things.

Changed by actually changing it. Not by just ignoring or talking around the constiution while claiming it still operates.

That’s a deliberate strategy on the part of the conservatives.

Ferishizing the past while simultaneously ignoring everything they have to say is a cynical way to anchor modern policy position with the distant past.

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