This is what you said

this u?

Are you saying Prussia isn’t a Germanic-derived state?

… yes…? That is me asking if you meant what you just said. Jesus Christ.

They were culturally still european, otherwise, your enlightenment point wouldn’t make sense, either.

“Americans are not allowed to take from the European Enlightenment that I specifically cited as coming from Europe and which no serious historian doubts was instrumental in the thinking of the Founding Fathers and the founding documents of the US; an Enlightenment that arose independently of Native American polities and thinking - also something no serious academic disputes.”

Okay buddy. We’re done here.

lol, things in Prussia, ok.

This is what you said

Wait a second… are you suggesting that prussia could be considered a “germanic” country back then?

But it seems to be too much to ask of you that you remember your own claims.

Are you claiming the founding fathers weren’t european?

All seven were born and raised in the Americas.

Again, this is what YOU said

This framing is very cynical, since the european upper class probably got those concepts from the native Americans which the US displaced/genocided.

I can’t believe I have to remind you of what you said over and over again, and that you still don’t seem to recognize it. Do I need to underline it? Find a highlighter?

Again, not popular anymore at that point.

It was literally at the peak of the Bund’s popularity - which is pretty damning for anyone claiming that they were popular.

To prove the point you seem to ba making, you’d need to find a quote that backs the notion they were never popular

So when someone claims that the Bund was popular, citing an event, and I cite the actual details of that same event showing that the accusation of popularity is highly dubious, the burden of proof is on me.

Is that what you’re saying?

Op claims they were popular for a while and then not. You seem to take evidence from the “then not” part of the story and seemingly use it to prove they were never popular

I didn’t realize “When the biggest event they ever manage to have is outnumbered by counterprotesters 5-1 maybe they just aren’t that popular in the country” was such a huge leap of logic.

Wait a second… are you suggesting that prussia could be considered a “germanic” country back then?

Are you saying Prussia isn’t a Germanic-derived state? Do I… do I have to educate you on Christian colonialism in Europe now too?

Do you think they had things in saxony? Lol ^^

No, they had Diets.

Our notion that democracy was spear-headed in athens is highly romanticized.

… okay…?

Ahem… “Philosophy is when you are uninterested in the biggest anthropological discovery of the last two centuries. The less interest you have, the more philosophic it is.”.

Sorry that you were aware of early modern European racism two comments ago, but have seemingly entirely forgotten it now.

What? I thought it was…

This you?

This framing is very cynical, since the european upper class probably got those concepts from the native Americans which the US displaced/genocided.

Because I’m pretty sure this is the third time I’ve mentioned that this is what I’m refuting. It’s getting kind of tedious reminding you of what you just said a few comments ago. Are you even trying, or just keeping up the conversation so you don’t have to confront how monumentally incorrect your statement was?

But his accounts of other episodes are bolstered by his contemporaneous notes, video footage and text messages exchanged by members of the unit and reviewed by The Times.

While Madison Square Garden had prepared itself for the presence of the German Bund, many around New York City considered the Nazi sect less welcome in their city. About 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters gathered around the arena in protest of the Bund, carrying signs stating “Smash Anti-Semitism” and “Drive the Nazis Out of New York”.[6] A total of three attempts were made to break the arm-linking lines of police, the first of these, a group of World War One Veterans, wrapped in Stars and Stripes, were held off by police on mounted horseback, the next, a “burly man carrying an American flag” and finally, a Trotskyist group known as the Socialist Workers Party, who like those before, had their efforts halted by police.[4]

If you gather a crowd of 100,000 counter-protesters, several times larger than your own rally, not sure how ‘popular’ you are.

The point is about the concepts of the European Enlightenment being derived from Native Americans (which is absurd), not that the Founding Fathers specifically understood and owe some debt to Native American forms of governance (which is controversial but mainstream and backed by evidence).

Well, that’s exactly what the 13th amendment says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

And considering that legislators are often involved with the legal profession, the wording is carefully chosen - legal challenges to ‘involuntary servitude’ have been issued on everything from community service to military contracts. Slavery, as we would recognize it, was intended to be exterminated by the 13th. What kind of evidence would you accept for the intention of the drafters of the 13th to eradicate slavery?

It’s pretty easy to conclude that using convicts as slaves was a part of the plan. Remember, this was 1865, 99 years before the civil rights act. Black people may have been freed from obligate slavery, but the completely unequal laws made it quite easy to funnel black Americans into chain gangs.

Chain gangs were an innovation that primarily came about after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and championed by local elites in the South - I don’t find it a particularly compelling idea that the Radical Republicans in the Federal government were considering that before chain gangs became widespread. Furthermore, extensive civil rights actions were passed in the Reconstruction era when the Radical Republicans still dominated the government, including anti-segregation legislation and the election of the first African-American Congressmen. It was only once the time of the Radicals had passed and Reconstruction had been ended that Jim Crow laws as we would recognize it took hold.

Even if I’m a bit skeptical how “democratic” some of these were (since the prevalent ideology pre enlightenment in europe was that the demos wasn’t actually capable of conducting policy) and how much e.g. germanic things of all things would have influenced central and western european thought that much

Yes, goodness me, how silly thinking that Germanic institutions might have influence on Central and Western Europe, which were filled with Germanic-derived states.

(especially rince enlightenment philosophers usually referenced ancient greece - which actually didn’t really favour our notion of democracy).

What.

I’m still a bit baffled that you would consider it ridiculous that native American thought didn’t have any input on the enlightenment over 100 years after europe has discovered

Why would it? Ethnographic studies of Native Americans were not of considerable interest to European philosophers at the time. And certainly not accurate ones.

these people in that new continent had quite remarkably similar thoughts on liberty and equality as the enlightenment had.

… did they? SOME of them practiced democratic forms of governance. But unless you’re going to argue that the rationalist, social-contract style thinking of the Enlightenment was replicated amongst Native American tribes, I don’t really know how much similarity there is in the thinking beyond the commonality of all democratic polities, in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Also: the native Americans were right there, the founding fathers knew of their great law of peace and the US congress has even passed a resolution on how that great law of peace had influenced the US constitution.

Yes, I am well aware that the Founding Fathers knew about Native Americans and their forms of governance; that has very little to do with the Enlightenment-era ideals that predominated in the thinking and execution of the foundational documents of the USA.

Take a step back. We’re talking about prison labor. That labor is worth capital that the laborer will see none of. They are in state custody, potentially for the rest of their life.

There is a profit motive. The prisons make money selling slave labor.

My point is not to defend modern prison labor, which is pretty indefensible, my point is that the exception carved out for punishment was not meant as slavery-by-other-means, even if that’s what it turned into. See: ‘grinding the wind’ in contemporary prisons of the time.

It’s dumb and pointless, but was not meant to have a profit motive. It was meant as punishment, in the delusion that work was ‘reformative’.

Which contemporary democratic european societies do you mean, exactly? Which ones existed before the enlightenment?

Free Communes, guild-run city-states, peasant republics, the Swiss, Slavic Veche, Germanic Things, Diets, Parliaments, the Polish Commonwealth, the Hussites, Jesus fucking Christ.

Are you suggesting that the native american tribes couldn’t have had democratic societies?

No, I’m suggesting that the idea that the European Enlightenment era ideals of democracy were stolen from Native Americans because Europeans were too dumb to look at their own contemporary democratic societies and European history is fucking absurd.

This framing is very cynical, since the european upper class probably got those concepts from the native Americans which the US displaced/genocided.

Well, you see, every atrocity committed by Stalin or Mao was justified and it’s only CIA propaganda that makes you think otherwise. /s

“enlightenment ideas”, like democracy and such. This framing is very cynical, since the european upper class probably got those concepts from the native Americans which the US displaced/genocided.

What an absolutely bizarre idea.

The rally occurred when the German American Bund’s membership was dropping; Kuhn hoped that a provocative high-profile event would reverse the group’s declining fortunes.[2] The pro-Nazi Bund was unpopular in New York City, and some called for the event to be banned. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia allowed the event to go forward, correctly predicting that the Bund’s highly publicized spectacle would further discredit them in the public eye.[2]

The slavery thing was always more north vs south, Southern republicans were very much in favor of slaves too

The Republican Party was founded as an abolitionist party, man. The GOP didn’t achieve any power of note in the South until slavery was dead.

Cherry pick much? You picked exceptions while ignoring the rest. At no point did I use absolutes like “all” founders were idiots or something. Yet you cherry pick and suggest that invalidates my points. Good grief.

I’m sorry for contesting your points with the facts of the matter and pointing out that the literal majority of the Founding Fathers don’t fit your claim.

Whatever. I’m done. I stand by my point: understand the founders in their time, understand their flaws, understand that we have polished their images while ignoring flaws and context to make them heroic. They were humans. That’s all.

Yes, they were flawed and human. Flawed and human advocates for Enlightenment-era ideals which are very far from the “White Male Landowning Aristocracy” idea that you accused their ideals of being founded on.

“By saying all men were “created equal” Thomas Jefferson intended to abolish the system of hereditary aristocracy, where some individuals were born as lords and others were ordinary.”

Ok. Landed white male aristocracy.

Jefferson also believed in a 100% inheritance tax, so I’m pretty sure you can remove ‘landed’ and ‘aristocracy’ from the ideals intended there.

Then there was black people not getting to vote.

Each state set its own requirements for voting, and several Founding Fathers were advocates for total legal equality.

Women couldn’t vote.

This is undeniably true. None of the Founding Fathers were feminists.

If you didn’t have enough property you couldn’t vote.

Each state set its own requirements for voting, and a number of states had no property requirements.

Native Americans weren’t citizens until the 1900s. Don’t forget the awful treatment and suffering they received at the hands of Jackson.

Genocide Jackson wasn’t a Founding Father. Citizenship was not automatic for Native Americans until the 1900s due to the strange state of semisovereignity most Native American tribes have.

Let’s not bother discussing how long many of the founders owned slaves, despite their “enlightenment”, and how long it took them to free them. If they did.

Yes, let’s not forget the terrible slaver John Jay, who founded the foremost abolitionist movement in the US at the time, or Franklin, who advocated for total integration of white and black populations, or Hamilton, who was instrumental in New York adopting a hard abolitionist stance.

Nobody here is contesting the effect they had on the formation of this country, yet for some reason you want to argue that point.

No, the point I’m arguing is against you here:

Those “ideals” revolved around landed white males

Feel free to pile on some quotes if it helps you look the other way.

Sorry that actual primary source evidence doesn’t mean anything to you?

Again, you are framing their words in your mind today and ignoring the context they were written. For instance, “all men are created equal” was intended to give all white males a shot at “equality” in reference to hereditary white aristocracy, not people of other colors. We have revised that to mean literally everyone.

How many quotes of the Founding Fathers would it take for you to admit that there were a non-negligible number of them who believed in the Enlightenment ideals that were expressed in our founding documents? 5? 10? 100? Perhaps there is no number sufficient, and your mind is made up regardless of evidence. If that’s the case, it would be very helpful for you to state as much now.

You offer up quotes to prove how great they were but in the next breath say they were flawed while using those quotes as a rebuttal to my statement pointing out that these men were flawed.

Men can be great and flawed. Men can champion great ideals and be flawed. I don’t know why that’s so troubling to you?

Please read about these people,

Jesus, fuck. You think I haven’t?