Founding fathers would approve!

A common argument conservatives often throw is that the Founding Fathers would approve of a behavior or political/societal practice. For example, they say the Founding Fathers would not approve of separation of religion and state, which I previously wrote about on a different post.

Aside from how dumb is such argument in any sense, the idea of justifying anything morally by saying someone 300 years ago would approve of it is pathetic.

Using the Founding Fathers argument, they should also believe in slavery or at least segregation. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry were all slave-owners.

Among American presidents, twelve of them owned slaves. Eight of them owned slaves while in office. George Washington is believed to own more than 1,500 slaves while in office. George Washington’s slaves were not freed even when he was passing Northwest Ordinance, which banned slave ownership in north of the Ohio river.

Jefferson fathered multiple slave children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, the likely half-sister of his late wife Martha Wayles Skelton.

Despite being a lifelong slave owner, Jefferson routinely condemned the institution of slavery, attempted to restrict its expansion, and advocated gradual emancipation. As President, he oversaw the abolition of the international slave trade.

Founding Fathers were not hypocrites, were they? I’m not sure what to call it but owning slaves while trying to free them seems a lot like hypocrisy to me.

Did Founding Fathers approve hypocrisy? Should we be hypocrites and justify it using the Founding Fathers argument? How is a moral practice justified because someone in 1801 was doing it?

James Polk became the Democratic nominee for president in 1844 partially because of his tolerance of slavery, in contrast to Van Buren. As president, he generally supported the rights of slave owners. His will provided for the freeing of his slaves after the death of his wife, though the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended up freeing them long before her death in 1891.

The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people. Many southerners who could be considered Founders were pro-slavery. Their children fought against northerners in the

James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution because of his pivotal role in the document’s drafting as well as its ratification. He is also a slave owner, believed to own more than 100 enslaved people.

Madison occasionally condemned the institution of slavery and opposed the international slave trade, but he also vehemently opposed any attempts to restrict its domestic expansion. Madison did not free his slaves during his lifetime or in his will.

When Madison was writing the Constitution, the Fathers did not give women right to vote. They didn’t consider all human beings equal. They did not believe a woman is suitable to work in politics.

I don’t blame them though. I think they should’ve done much much better but ethics were much different back then. It’s not ethical to restrict a woman or control here today, because we believe in a different ethical system from then, which is a good thing. We don’t get our ethics from 1800’s.

Slavery is just one example of many wrong things Founding Fathers or American presidents did, of course.

Let’s not even mention that those people were colonizers and they stole land and killed indigenous people of those lands brutally. Let’s not mention their behaviors toward each other, even white people, and other countries. We can even forget about the massacres and anything else.

If you get stuck in an island of cannibals, will eating a human be justified? If all your neighbors beat their wives or daughters, will you do it too? If all of your family members smoke crack, would you do drugs?

I don’t believe a sane person would do anything wrong or immoral just because others do it. Trying to justify a wrongdoing with “but he did it too” seems just stupid, doesn’t it? It’s childish.

Aside from that, why just get wrong things from the Founding Fathers? I previously have explained how Founding Fathers resisted the idea of involving religion in laws.

Thomas Jefferson was a deist. George Washington belonged to a church, but may or may not have been a believer, he was silent about it. Thomas Paine was a deist and an opponent of organized religion in general and Christianity in particular. Ben Franklin was a deist, but sympathetic towards Christians.

Will conservatives shut up about religion, Christianity, and the separation of Church and State because Founding Fathers did as well? I guess not. Maybe they got the hypocrisy from the slave-owning Fathers.

Do judge a book by its cover

Why not judge a book by its cover? Isn’t the cover there to show what’s in the book? Sure there are some idiots who ruined the true meaning and purpose of cover but that doesn’t change the fact that the cover is there for the single purpose of introducing the book.

One of my favorite comedians of all time, if not my most favorite one, is George Carlin. Carlin explains language and our fear of using straight language very well. He explains how we invent new words to satisfy or avoid our fears.

I think our way of thinking right now is very much influenced from our new fears. Media has a big impact on our way of thinking and media, I believe, is the biggest source of our fears. These fears have changed us a lot and one of its effects is our language.

The sole purpose of language is communication. When we change the meaning behind words, we change our way of communication. We change the way we interact and we change the way we live. This affects a lot of other parts of our lives as well.

Language can also deliver feelings and words are very much important in that matter. New language we’re speaking, the one with newly-invented mild words, fails to deliver our feelings correctly.

George Carlin gives a pretty good example about it. There’s a condition in combat, most people know about it, when a fighting person nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can’t take any more input, the nervous system is either snapped or is about to snap, in the first world war that condition was called shell shock.

Simple honest direct language. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along, and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shellshock! Battle fatigue.

Then again time passed an the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

The war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years (at the time Carlin was explaining), and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet you if we’d have still been calling it shellshock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time.

Remind me again, why not judge a book by its cover? Isn’t that its whole purpose, to make it possible for us to make a judgement? What has changed and why it has changed? I truly miss the time that we put purpose in things we created and we valued them enough to stick to its good and only change it for the better!

Justifying privacy!

Trying to justify the right of privacy is like trying to justify any other human right. They are called rights, not because you need to justify them, but because we came to a consensus that they are integral parts of a working society. The right to privacy is like the right to not being harmed, your right to free speech or right to freedom. All of these are nothing you need to justify in order to acquire them, you innately have them, period.

You may choose not to use them, but you can never use that as grounds to deny them to others. The answer “because I have a right to privacy” is enough to satisfyingly answer the “I have nothing to hide” paradigm; no justification needed for making use of basic human rights.

Roe v Wade overturned by American Taliban

In a predicted event, SCOTUS overturned the Roe v Wade decision and decided that every state in U.S. should decide on its own about women abortion rights. This overturn holds that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion.

While those in Germany are abolishing Nazi-era laws, forbidding doctors from providing information about abortions, those in Supreme Court of the United States are bringing them back. While those in Germany are making progress about human rights, Those in United States are taking America back to the Middle Ages. I’m pretty sure if they could, they would’ve burn some women accused of witchery.

“For almost a century, doctors have been forbidden and punishable by penalty from providing factual information about methods and possible risks to women who are considering terminating a pregnancy,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann of Germany said in a statement.

“Today, this time of distrust in women and distrust in doctors is coming to an end.”

Any criminal court sentences handed down based on the law since October 1990 will also be repealed, and any ongoing proceedings will be discontinued.

However, in America, English speaking Taliban is taking power and enforces sharia laws on people. Speaking of which, neo-Republicans are constantly emphasizing the lie of Christian foundation of United States. I guess they know how to repeat a lie just enough times to make people believe it. After all, they are professional liars from Middle Ages.

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Paralogism

Aside

Paralogism: a piece of illogical or fallacious reasoning, especially one which appears superficially logical or which the reasoner believes to be logical.

How to become a Republican in modern day

  1. Disagree with Democrats, even if you truly agree with them.
  2. Resist understanding.
  3. Lie.
  4. Be racist.
  5. Claim to be an advocate of freedom while passing laws that violates people freedom.
  6. When you feel there’s no attention on you, spread conspiracy theories; or make them.
  7. Use the word “regime” to scare people.
  8. Claim anything wrong happening is because if Obama.
  9. If you disagree with someone or something, say it’s Marxist.
  10. Anything goes wrong, blame it on Antifa and BLM.
  11. The only science that matters to you should be the ones that may suit your agenda.
  12. Claim to be working for people while in fact you’re serving capitalists and the rich, only.
  13. Claim banning people from social networks is bad, then ban books and information.
  14. Blame every destroyed family on homosexual and trans people.
  15. Spread conspiracy theories like white replacement.
  16. Embrace hypocrisy.
  17. Bully ones you don’t like, then act like a victim.
  18. Claim elections are rigged while you’re in office as a result of those elections.
  19. Get roasted and owned frequently by media that reveals your lies, but never give up and feel ashamed.
  20. Never be good for anything. Serve your masters, yourself, and whatever benefits you personally, and don’t care about anything or anyone. Be absolute garbage.

Online debates

I’m sick and tired of online debates. I used to do them. I used to spend a lot of time trying to convince people of certain matter or trying to trigger them to become angry and explain certain things to me.

It’s not been so long since I’ve come to understanding that online debates are no more than a waste of time. For me, online debates always had trolling, misinformation, and intense deviation from the main subject. It’s needless to say that it is very rare for an online debate to end well or actually help some parties.

Real debates are moderated. The debaters actually agree on the context of the debate, agree on the major concepts and meanings on the subject of discussion, and they agree on definitions mostly. A debate will be moderated by a third party, supposedly neutral, and the moderator will handle the stream and direction of the debate.

That is very important. Often in online debates, parties end up somewhere far from the original subject of the debate. Most of the times, people find themselves arguing about definitions instead of the original subject. There are many trolls as well who only enjoy angering people or spend their time by wasting others’.

Real debates have dialogue. Every party will have a say and every party will be asked to behave with a good manner and intention to actually educate others while, at the same time, challenge others. Online debates are too much focused on challenging part or the illusion of winning the argument.

In a real debate, the parties involved in the argument are clear but in an online debate, everybody can hop in and throw a comment or get involved with no prior coordination. That makes the debate take/waste much more time.

A real debate has a point. There is a goal to reach in every debate but when it’s online, often on social networks, the goal is simply to show the other person is a loser. A real debate consists of educated people on a specific matter, while in online debates, people with any level of understanding on the subject just writes a comment and hits enter.

Online debates seem like a competition to convince people that some party is right or the others are wrong. The good feeling of so-called owning people makes people do whatever they can to win the fight. I’ve seen people spend hours to research a matter, while they’ve already made up their mind, to win an argument. It is good to get educated on a subject but I don’t think that’s a healthy way to do it.

Online debates are waste of time. They are no good for anything but for trolls to spend time and satisfy their need to be seen. I try to avoid them, and I try to simply not get involved with them as much as I can. I also have been blocking and avoiding interaction with people who I see as trolls so I don’t unintentionally entrap myself in a meaningless conversation with them.

Assumptions

There’s a story about a little kid who keeps shredding paper and his parents take him to all kinds of doctors to get him to stop shredding paper. And finally, they take him to the most expensive doctor in the world.

The doctor turns to the kid and says “kid, if you stop shredding paper, your parents will stop dragging you to doctors.” The kid turns to his parents and says “why didn’t you just say so?”

Sometimes I realize the most rational solution to many of conflicts I have is to just let go of my assumptions and ask for what I just assumed to be true or the case. Sometimes I just take some assumptions as evidence for my conclusions.

What those parents needed to do was to simply ask the kid to stop and that would make the process of ending the paper-shredding much easier. What I do need to do is to take a rest and give a fresh eye to problems and conflicts I have. Some of those for sure have much simpler and easier solutions I haven’t thought of.

Of course sometimes it’s needed to see the most expensive doctor, that’s even needed so we get reminded of the story, but that’s not always the case, I’m pretty sure about that.

Consequences of Roe v. Wade overturn

The expected reversal of Roe v. Wade will trigger the most significant and far reaching challenge to Big Tech Trust & Safety policies in the history of the Internet. Anti-choice states will demand access to search and location data. And that’s only the beginning.

Internet security should not be taken for granted. We already know that data-collectors sell these information to one who pays the most and buying such data is easy even for a normal citizen. The fact that these data can end up in the hands of dangerous people who will give you death sentence is frightening.

This is a time for reconsideration of our safety and privacy practices as well as a demand for more strict regulations on people’s privacy-related matters on internet.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, states should pass laws on people’s privacy to protect people from being recognized as someone who did or aided an abortion. Every humane legislator should fight this law and pass other laws that will practically make this overturn ineffective.

Human privacy was always essential to freedom and security but these are the times we should take it more seriously. Every major player in the field should now act upon the matter and spread the information about the consequences of this overturn for our privacy and the consequences of privacy-violation for this overturn and our lives.

This is a great example for us and everybody to see how privacy is essential for us and is far more serious than what anyone could think. Privacy is a matter of human right and it should be respected as one of the most important of our rights whatsoever.