Friday, July 4, 2014

Happy Independence Day


Let's remember our nation was fighting against him:



And NOT for her:




19 comments:

Unknown said...

sorry, but this is a really stupid post.


"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

Matt Franko said...

Iirc she showed up 100 years later....

Matt Franko said...

Why don't they call it "Liberty Day" then?

Unknown said...

Independence Day, also commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States of America commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain (now officially known as the United Kingdom).

http://alainsojourner.blog.com/files/2011/09/New-York-City-Statue-of-Liberty-3.jpg

Matt Franko said...

Well as I said the holiday commemorates the day the colonies declared independence from the king of England not subjection to this copper clad thing

Matt Franko said...

And btw here we go with the metals again with this thing right libertarians gotta have their precious metals

Unknown said...

"not subjection to this copper clad thing"

you're bonkers. It's called the statue of liberty. The declaration of independence says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

I have no idea why you find this objectionable.

Matt Franko said...

Its called Symbolism, maybe Google it...

Joe said...

shut up, y

Unknown said...

shut up, Joe.

Unknown said...

the word 'liberty' doesn't belong to 'libertarians' or anti-government types. As far as I'm concerned extreme right-wing 'libertarians', people like Bob roddis for example, are fundamentally anti-liberty. The same goes for anti-government plutocrats, racist and religious bigots, and anti-democratic fascists who all claim to stand for 'liberty'.

So you shouldn't give the word liberty to those people. It doesn't belong to them.

Matt Franko said...

y, I basically agree with you...

Look this copper thing wasnt there in 1776 and now it is thrown in with all of the Independence Day imagery all the time.... when it wasnt even involved in what was going on in 1776...

OK, your quote here from 1776: "such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government."

OK, Now how do we go from this to what we see from Mill via Tom's post above where all of a sudden Mill says: " "For him, liberty in antiquity was a "contest... between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the government."

And then Mill dies and a few years later this copper THING shows up from France, etc...

When in 1776 it was just about replacing one form of govt with another... and SHE WASN'T EVEN IN THE SCENCE in 1776 now her advocates want to cram her in today like it was "all about her" all along or something.... I say BS...

(y, btw again I am using 'Symbolism'...)

rsp,

Matt Franko said...

Maybe SOME of the Founding Fathers had a handle on true 'liberty' but probably not all... (an exception imo would be the "give me liberty or give me death" guy...he sounds like he would have fit right in with our present day libertarian morons...)

Then it went straight downhill culminating in the placing of this copper thing overlooking NY harbor 100 or so years later as a symbol of some sort of 'victory' or something...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

See Tim Tayor, Economic Underpinnings of the U.S. Revolutionary War. Would there have been a revolution solely for liberty if there were not a strong economic motivation behind it?

See also Robert Parry, Thomas Jefferson: America’s Founding Sociopath. Doesn't get much more authoritarian than slavery, and slaves were by far the most important capital resources of the colonies. so much for Jefferson as liberal or libertarian icon.

Matt Franko said...

Well Tom this from Mill's wiki:

"In Mill's view, 'any means were licit for those who took on the task of educating 'savage tribes'; 'slavery' was sometimes a mandatory stage for inducing them to work and making them useful to civilization and progress."

So he seems to be some sort of "slavertarian" person here... and he was allegedly a big advocate of 'liberty' defined how?

so I see a lot of confused logic in all of this coming out of the libertarian camp...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

Aristotle, too. And Thomas Aquinas also, although he rejected Aristotle's view of natural slavery.

Almost no one considered women equal to men either, although Mill was an exception. See The Subjection of Women.

At the time it was published in 1869, this essay was an affront to European conventional norms for the status of men and women.

Mill thought that slavery may be a temporary necessity in the process of civilization, but regarding slavery in the US, he was an abolitionist.

Some slave owners in the US would have preferred abolition on principle, but in practice slaves constitued the capital base of a plantation economy. Ending slavery in the US was a huge economic wrench.

Matt Franko said...

marris no its not...

Tyanny is not defined as the suppression of "liberty"...

Here's wiki on Tyranny:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant

"A tyrant (Greek τύραννος, tyrannos), in its modern English usage, is a ruler of a horrible and oppressive character[1] who is an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution, and/or one who has usurped legitimate sovereignty. A tyrant usually controls almost everything. The original Greek term, however, merely meant an authoritarian sovereign without reference to character,[2] bearing no pejorative connotation during the Archaic and early Classical periods, though it was clearly a bad word to Plato, and on account of the decisive influence of political philosophy its negative connotations only increased down into the Hellenistic period.
Plato and Aristotle define a tyrant as, "one who rules without law, looks to his own advantage rather than that of his subjects, and uses extreme and cruel tactics—against his own people as well as others".[3] During the seventh and sixth centuries BC, tyranny was often looked upon as an intermediate stage between narrow oligarchy and more democratic forms of polity. However, in the late fifth and fourth centuries, a new kind of tyrant, the military dictator, arose, specifically in Sicily."

No mention of "liberty" here at all...

All Independence Day celebrates is the day that our nations founders came into agreement to replace the rule of what they viewed as a tyrant with a new GOVERNMENT...

"liberty" had nothing to do with it... other than they wanted to replace the current system of government with one that would better protect what they believed was a "right" endowed by their Creator...

Its NOT like they thought: "hey, we need more 'liberty' so lets get rid of this king and if we win, we will build a big copper statue of 'liberty' as a symbol of our victory! And then we can carry guns around with open carry and ingest cannabis with impunity and start digging immediately for gold/silver/copper mass measures of which we can use for our "money"... create a libertarian paradise!"

Anonymous said...

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France on the occasion of the centennial of American independence. So it is obviously a natural symbolic focus for Independence Day celebrations.

The concept of liberty was an important element of American revolutionary thinking, mainly in connection with renaissance notions of republicanism and civic humanism.

Matt Franko said...

Well Dan it was probably polite to accept the "gift" but it seems like a big mistake as this thing has taken over the whole scene...

And what appears now as nuance about how the founders replaced a tyranny with a new system of representative govt has indeed faded...

Here is a new book from the right's D'Souza check out the cover illustration:

http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/costco-removing-dsouzas-america-from-shelves/

These right libertarians simply associate "America" with this symbol ... to them, "America" is all about simply "liberty" or something... they pass right over things like 'community', 'solidarity' etc.

rsp,