"We are told to stay calm and vote as an outlet for our anger. Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on stolen land, built with the labor of stolen lives. The document that governs our lives effectively denied more than half of the population the right to vote. It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation. If you want to talk about incivility, let us be clear about how deep those roots reach. The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens.... When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice.... The Washington Post editorial board [called] for civility, but the definition of civility is malleable and ever-changing. Civility is whatever enables them to wield power without question or challenge...."
Writes Roxane Gay, in "These Are Desperately Uncivil Times. We Are Disgracing America" (NYT).
I've edited this down to exclude the particular issue about which she does not want to be civil so that it will stand as a general statement that is in accord with my position that calls for civility are always bullshit. I'm not going to try to look up whether there are other occasions where she has been the one calling for civility. She's not calling for it here. This post gets the "civility bullshit" tag because she's talking about calls for civility, and she, like me, is rejecting them.
Posts
84 comments:
Women not allowed to vote wasn't a civility matter, just common sense. It would ruin the country by making government self-destructive.
I guess she doesn’t think that her opponents also have some grievances. And that they can also be uncivil. Maybe even very uncivil?
Civility is a white precept. To ask for civility is racist.
The Indians didn't let squaws be chief. No good for fighting.
Another ignorant newspaper writer who has no idea of why the 3/5 rule was included in the Constitution. I was taught Civics in 8th grade but that was back when the country worked.
Though by now I should be over it, I'm continually astonished at the level of constitutional illiteracy among NY Times writers. The "three-fifths" rule was forced on the slaveholding states in order to suppress the number of congressional representatives from those states. It was not something they wanted, nor was it an expression of a southern racist belief that a slave was three-fifths of a person. It was in the slaveholding states' interest to count slaves as individual people, since congressional representatives are apportioned by total population! For crying out loud, leftists, get a clue!
Pussy hats expressed rage. Nobody called for civility. There were just suppressed laughs.
Any one insulted that slaves were not fully counted for purposes of representation, diminishing the effective power of slaves' masters, is deserving of lampoon.
The issue is not riots to show anger in place of voting. The issue is faked vote counts in the battleground states to steal elections. Who cares if idiots riot?
I don't think so. I would have thought the point about "civility bullshit" was that we are civil enough as it is. We can argue. We can have vigorous debate. We can say the emperor has no clothes. All that is allowed by ordinary politics. We don't have to be submissive to be civil.
Roxane's argument seems to be that we were never civil. Everything was violence and oppression from the beginning. Why not have more of it, especially when my pet issue is concerned? It doesn't seem to be the same thing.
Handmade tales. The Constitution never exercised liberal license to indulge diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry). Women were never disenfranchised. Blacks were never universally judged, labeled, and held as negotiable commodities under diversity schemes (e.g. "people of color", affirmative discrimination). To the contrary, The Constitution marginalized the influence of slavers and redistributive change schemes during transnational hostilities, and shortly thereafter until a civil war ended slavery, and mitigated the progress of diversity [dogma]. Lose your ethical religion. #HateLovesAbortion
Handmade tales. Forsake your Twilight faith. Lose your ethical religion. #HateLovesAbortion
It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation.
How fortunate we all are that we have Roxane Gay and The New York Times to give us such smart lessons about US history.
The alternatives to politics and the rule of law are anarchy and tyranny. Burning it all down is not the panacea some seem to think it might be.
She's full of shit because she's one of the first people to call for those who would disagree with her to be civil, pre-emptively.
Also, her reasons in the excerpt above are all bullshit, too. The Civil War was bad enough, but we may *never* have rid ourselves of that peculiar institution without the 3/5 compromise.
The context for the call to civility with regard to protests, at least in the US, is the MLK Jr. wing of yhe civil rights movement -- the one that, in the conventional understanding of that narrow slice of history -- actually worked. That's why there's that Ozymandias statue of MLK Jr. on the mall. And it's always explicitly or implicitly contrasted with more militant groups like the Black Panthers that were almost wholly unsuccessful at winning mainstream sympathy and support for their cause. No hearts and minds, as it were. Their successes were, at best, small and tactical, the fruits of identifying soft targets and terrorising them into compliance (affirmative action at the universities may be an example of one such success).
But the decision as to which path -- civil or uncivil -- is best ultimately rests, I think, on an assessment of whether one's views are compatible with mainstream public ethical and moral views or not. If they are, then civility is a viable strategy. If one is on the extremist fringe, however, then civility and moral suasion will achieve nothing at all. Only violence, disruption, and intimidation can achieve one's aims.
There might be a grey zone in between where one resorts to uncivil acts just to break through a media that is doing its best to suppress any serious discussion of one's views, but the resort to incivility inevitably makes one seem more extreme than perhaps one really is.
Trump is an example of this. He's the most centrist Republican President since maybe Nixon or even Eisenhauer (his views on trade and immigration placed him well to the left of post-Reagan Republicans), but because of his tone, he made it easy for his opponents to tar him as an extremist.
It’s an angry woman. She is of course in a rage over the prospect of not being able to murder her own kid.
(And if it’s not that, then I’m sure she still feels that way)
"Though by now I should be over it, I'm continually astonished at the level of constitutional illiteracy among NY Times writers. The "three-fifths" rule was forced on the slaveholding states in order to suppress the number of congressional representatives from those states."
I think they know that, though it would be better to be clearer that they do. The problem remains that a fraction was used to reach a compromise and that some people were represented as a fraction of a person in the founding document. That was better than counting them as a full person, for the reason you know, but the whole arrangement was rotten and the idea of 3/5 easily conveys outrage — justified outrage..
In other words, there's a difference between saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," and actually breaking bones with sticks and stones.
"she, like me, is rejecting them"
But for different reasons, no? She is in effect calling for #Resistance, since the Constitution is raaaccccist, and white supremacists enslaved people and stole land, etc. etc.
"There is a cultural obsession nowadays with civility"
I call BS. The prog elite is fine with incivility, as long as it is practiced by the right sorts of "protesters." And of course no prog was ever civil toward DJT.
"this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens — its women, its racial minorities and especially its children."
Well, the "country" could try harder to protect its racial minorities" against killing, but since the killing is done mostly by their fellow racial minorities, at levels unknown in the rest of the developed world, it would take oppressive measures that Gray et al. would denounce as raaaaccccist.
"The context for the call to civility with regard to protests, at least in the US, is the MLK Jr. wing of yhe civil rights movement -- the one that, in the conventional understanding of that narrow slice of history -- actually worked...."
Yes. That reminds me of this post from yesterday about why protesting at a judge's house is likely to backfire.
What Roxanne Gay is ticking off as talking points is typical of what some uber-liberals that I know use to justify the left’s actions while protesting. Yes, the US Constitution AS WRITTEN IN 1787, did count slaves 3/5 of a person as part of the census to figure out proportionally equal Congressional districts. I don’t believe it specifically prohibited women from voting but I would guess that Congress might have passed laws doing so. Yes, the government did seize land from the Native Americans and that slavery was legal until 1865. But Gay’s words (and those of other lefty drones / zombies) are referring to actions that occurred in the 1700’s and 1800’s, not today! The people who were affected by these actions she speaks of are all long dead as well as most of their descendants. Since those times, our Constitution has been amended to right those wrongs as well as laws have been passed to right the wrongs, long before anyone alive today was born (outside of a small number of 100+ year old women who were infants / small children when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920 and they were way too young to vote at that time).
What I am saying is that these uncivil bullshitters on the left don’t want people to realize our country has evolved over time to correct a large number of wrongs. That is what our Constitution allows our government and its citizens to do.. But the left is counting on the ignorance of today’s younger people in our country to fuel their protests. Ignorance born out of either not teaching history and how our government works in our schools (or worse, bastardizing those topics to misrepresent our history and laws to intentionally mislead the students).
Sorry, the whole 3/5 thing is so moronic. The slaves shouldn't have been counted at all. They were basically counted at 3/5 as another sop to the South. Of course, Southerners could have argued that the North was full of Foreigners who may or may not have been US citizens.
It should be noted this counting of slaves in determining representation was also used on the state level, which allowed big Planters in the low lands to be vastly represented in the State legislature. A Plantation owner with 20 slaves, in affect had 20 votes more than a poor white in the uplands.
The North should have corrected the problem after the civil war by giving the south a choice, either give Negroes the vote, or Congressional seats will be allocated based on the number of whites. Had they done so, the South might have removed the road blocks to Negro sufferage.
The "civility bullshit" point is about telling someone else to be civil (when hypocritically, you won't advise civility for your own side).
But there is this other situation of advising YOUR OWN side to be civil, because it's a good technique. That's still kind of bullshit, as I noted in that post yesterday, because you're not really in favor of civility as a general principle. You just see its value as a means to YOUR end, but if another means had been more effective, you'd have been for that.
I don't know about MLK. He was right about nonviolence. But if nonviolence didn't work, would he have switched to another means and on and on — "by any means necessary"?
Who is for civility just in general? Actually, I believe I am... and yet only up to a point. The question is: What point? And that's why it's always bullshit, because we know the point is going to have to do with which side you are on.
... "The Washington Post editorial board [called] for civility, but the definition of civility is malleable and ever-changing. Civility is whatever enables them to wield power without question or challenge...."
This writer cannot possibly not know that The Washington Post is owned and controlled by the world's richest man, who benefits personally when civility enables him to wield his enormous power without question.
So of course it's going to call for civility.
She seems oblivious to the fact that The Washington Post isn't a newspaper any more.
The cries for Civility after Jan 6th were especially loathsome and hypocritical. I don't agree with the finger wagging. If you want to make protesting outside someone's private residence against the law, fine. Just stop with the bullshit.
Of course, as we all know, even its against the law, the Leftwing judges and prosecutors will go after rightwingers and let Leftwingers off with a slap on the wrist or no punishment at all.
Boy those Nazis and Slaveholders make me so mad. If only I could travel back in time, I'd punch them in the nose.
IF three-fifths was a problem....zero fifths would have been better if it could have been sold at the concon.
Is leaking a draft Supreme Court decision civil? Asking for a friend.
“Any one insulted that slaves were not fully counted for purposes of representation, diminishing the effective power of slaves' masters, is deserving of lampoon.“
No, the disgrace is that that the slaves remained in slavery, weren’t given the full rights of citizens, and weren’t counted as whole persons.
Roxane Gay is a moron who makes dumb arguments. Anyone who makes the same stupid 3/5th argument just proves that. Also, "stolen land" is another tell that she's just some woke idiot.
There's no need to be civil, but remember, the people like the moronic Roxane Gay are always accusing the Republicans as being racists owned by the gun lobby who don't care if children get murdered and then bitch and moan that the Republicans aren't playing ball on the left's idiotic and ineffective gun control proposals. Maybe if the left had good ideas that could pass and stopped calling everyone they don't like a Nazi, they might find some more people agreeable to their point of view.
I don't care if politicians are all that civil, but just don't pretend that the left has been all that civil and they need to change, and certainly don't act surprised when ramping up the incivility gets you nowhere.
It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation.
I love it when libs show their ignorance. Is this true? Yes. Did it deny slaves the right to vote? No- they had no say.
Did the Constitution deny women the right to vote? No. That was up to individual states.
The Constitution is a set of general rules. Not a lawbook. If you want to see a lawbook masquerading as a Constitution, read the 46 pages of the New York State Constitution.
Althouse says "the whole arrangement was rotten."
With respect, no, it wasn't. It was an arrangement that lasted seven crucial decades.
Conceptualizing a society without slavery of any form was not within the ability or scope of the framers of the Constitution. That society had never existed, as any reader of the Bible could point out. Democracies and Republics fully embracing slavery had existed in the past, so it was more a problem of the unequal proportion of slaves within the various colonies, and this was subject to compromise.
To fail to imagine the situation of the Framers (who had to work without time machines) and pronounce them morally deficient for encompassing an institution that Paul the Apostle was willing at least to put up with is shallow presentism.
I reject anybody who repeats the "counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation." bullshit, civil or not.
It may represent outrage but it isn't justified, it's just ignorant. Don't presume to lecture me about the 'true founding' of the country if you don't understand events that are documented in excruciating detail.
The problem remains that a fraction was used to reach a compromise and that some people were represented as a fraction of a person in the founding document
Maybe it would have been better if we had had secession in 1786 instead of 1861. Politics worked early in our history because people were educated and compromise between people of good faith was possible. Neither of those conditions exists today. Idiot NY Times writers know no history and everything is a cause for combat these days. Some of it is Obama. In mentioning the murder of the Texas schoolchildren yesterday, hje had to bring up George Floyd, the criminal.
#WhenAlthouseSoundsLikePolifact
The point of civility, is that we cannot simply avoid all contact with people we disagree with, but we don't want to have to go about our lives in a state of perpetual hostility. Civility means that we can disagree about some things while continuing to treat each other respectfully. The author is correct, that this implies the points of disagreement are, in some sense, trivial. Unless you are a doctrinaire pacifist, there are some issues about which you are not prepared to be civil. Roxane Gay is saying that she refuses to be civil about pretty much anything. Her list of grievances is long and growing. Should I encounter her, I'll try to remember to get in the first punch. The person who uses violence first usually wins, especially when the opponent is weaker.
"I don't know about MLK. He was right about nonviolence. But if nonviolence didn't work, would he have switched to another means and on and on — 'by any means necessary'?"
I think MLK was committed enough to his operating principles to maintain nonviolence as the operating tactic for achieving his goals, and shrewd enough to know that at the first outbreak of even the most minor violence in their protests, the great mass of white racists in the nation, (and in police forces and statehouses and news rooms, etc.), would have taken that as proof that brutal control of black people was necessary and just...because, "Hey, look! They proved they ain't nothin' but violent savages!"
As we have seen subsequently, by those who blame George Floyd and Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin (and many others) for their own deaths.
She considers the founding of the nation, and its founding document, to be illegitimate.
Nothing else she says really matters.
I, for one, am tired of being civil to the left. I'd rather be left alone, but that's not good enough for them.
We all know eventually it's going to come to a head. The sooner that boil is lanced, the better.
How do you define "civility"? If you are shouting down contrary viewpoints, are you being civil? If you riot in the streets doing violence to others property, are you being civil?
I believe that being civil means following the rule of law.
When the rule of law is not being followed by a person or a group, then, by all means, be as uncivil towards them as they are towards you. This is called self defense.
It gets complicated when threats of uncivility are issued before uncivil behavior begins. Should one wait for the uncivil behavior before acting in self defense?
When people act uncivil without apparent cause, then I would say that a call to be civil is NOT bullshit since the uncivil behavior taints the group as being univilized and not worth listening to. In other words, you alienate those not already party to the dispute. Witness to this is how the vast majority of the country reacted to the rioting by BLM and antifa. That behavior and the ongoing robbery going on in various cities does nothing to endear their causes to me.
With the Left, it's always: Agree with us or else!
Fuck them.
Without debating the truth of Gay's statements regarding the Constitution, the first issue I have with "rage" about history is the injection of that much emotion into it. When one introduces emotion into an discussion, the other side focuses on the emotion, not the argument (if there is one). To rage against history is silly. How can one rage against the French Revolution or the 100 years war, or any other event that still influences the present.
To be clear, I think the emotion of the left, the posing of rage and anger, is separate from the issue of civility. Swear all you want. Be discourteous. I don't care. But raise your voice and you have probably lost me.
Every race has had land 'stolen.'
Every race has been enslaved at one time or another.
It still goes on every day in Africa.
Get over it.
Rage. Sometimes. You can tear things down, or try to fix them. If you do decide to tear things down, the people who think they can fix them will probably try to stop you. They will place a higher priority on stopping you, over fixing them.
Tearing things down will only succeed when there are enough of you that they can't stop you.
Then you have to rebuild and sometimes it works. Usually not, of course.
I'm totally against "civility" in the standard usage of the term. I like calling power-tripping, coercion-addicted State fellators (i.e., "liberals" and other collectivists) "power-tripping, coercion-addicted State fellators" because that's exactly what they are. You know what's NOT civil? Statism. Just consult the Democide statistics for confirmation.
It's a small point but I think Ann Althouse is wrong about this: "I think they know that, though it would be better to be clearer that they do" I don't think she knows it. As a Yale grad, so she was probably taught that everything in our founding documents was racist. No need to read and understand the document, just knowing it was written by white men, some of whom were slaveholders is all the proof needed.
There was a time in Congress when civility seemed to matter. Yet from the beginning tactical ploys were made for immediate gains. South Carolinians would beat someone with a cane, duels were held, rules were changed to facilitate partisan advantage. I think the genius of the founders was that they knew that politicians would be flaming bastard pricks, and made power a balanced system where total control was unlikely, so that competing self interest created stability. California is a counter example.
What has happened is that, due to electronic communications, the public sees all and there is no Gauzy veil that makes us respect our corrupt leaders, we have no illusions. This is good, we are now mature adults instead of adoring children. The future work is to learn to throw out more of the rotten fish as we smell them.
Well, I suppose there are people for whom tantrums worked when they were adolescents.
Whose side are you on?
"And if we dare to protest, …"
Oh, give me a break.
"Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on stolen land..."
Stopped reading right there. This "land acknowledgement" crap is... well- crap. Want to do something about it, sweet cheeks? Give your land back to the people it was stolen from. And if you don't own the land you're living on (most likely, for someone writing for the NYT), get your landlord to give it back. Then haul your ass back to where your ancestors came from.
BTW, don't let the door hit you in your brainpan on the way out.
"The document that governs our lives effectively denied more than half of the population the right to vote. It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation."
I always get annoyed by this. It misses the point. The 3/5 gave the South more representatives than they would have had while not granting any votes to that population. Counting the whole population would have only worsened that and given the South more power in the government. Slavery and no representation was the problem, not the 3/5 compromise. If anything, it might have been better to not count them at all since this would have given the South less people in Congress.
That was better than counting them as a full person, for the reason you know, but the whole arrangement was rotten and the idea of 3/5 easily conveys outrage — justified outrage..
So we have to calibrate our outage carefully, then? I mean, if the free states had had their way, slaves mightn't have been counted as people at all. The 3/5 arrangement was less rotten than that one would have been, for purposes of acknowledging the humanity of the enslaved, but more rotten from the standpoint of giving slave states more power.
In other words, it seems to me that outrage over the 3/5 compromise is nothing but theater - and theater based on historical fiction at that, since no one at the time believed it was saying anything about the humanity of chattel slaves.
Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on crushed lives, babies killed at the rate of 2,362 each day, before they even draw breath. [Guttmacher Institute]
"It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." ― Mother Theresa of Calcutta
Boy those Nazis and Slaveholders make me so mad. If only I could travel back in time, I'd punch them in the nose.
As so often happens, rcocean made my point in 1/5 the space.
the great mass of white racists in the nation, (and in police forces and statehouses and news rooms, etc.), would have taken that as proof that brutal control of black people was necessary and just...because, "Hey, look! They proved they ain't nothin' but violent savages!"
Boy, when you're right, you're right, Robert Cook. My lawyer/FBI agent/judge grandfather, my compounding pharmacist grandfather, and my two university-degree-holding grandmothers, all Wisconsinites, talked exactly like that when expressing their unquestionable racism. When my lawyer/judge grandfather and a lawyer uncle were talking about the "pickaninnies" and the distasteful fact of interracial marriage in about 1976, not aware that I was in the room, they suddenly started dropping the g's in their -ing's and lost that Midwestern accent in favor of an Arkansas rhotic twang.
Careful of the othering. White racism in the '60s AND '70s was too widespread - though sometimes, as at times today, disguised as "concern" for and "understanding" of the "historical roots" of what they treat(ed) as modern black people's diminished capacity - for you to engage in regional-classists gibes like that.
In the absence of civility, all that's left is rage.
"I, for one, am tired of being civil to the left. I'd rather be left alone, but that's not good enough for them."
Internet meme (can't find the link):
POLITICS IN A NUTSHELL
(two guys, one labelled "Conservative", one "Progressive")
Conservative Guy's t-shirt: LEAVE ME ALONE
Progressive Guy's t-shirt: NO
Just one more thing: "civility" is not "acquiescence," much less "capitulation." The Left wants it to be, but that's not what it means.
and shrewd enough to know that at the first outbreak of even the most minor violence in their protests, the great mass of white racists in the nation, (and in police forces and statehouses and news rooms, etc.), would have taken that as proof that brutal control of black people was necessary and just...
What utter nonsense. King knew that most white people were sympathetic to freedom for blacks and that the brutality of the Democrat southerners (Bull Conner was a member of the DNC) would backfire on them and increase the sympathy of the white majority.
A Black kid is fifteen times more likely to die from gun violence than a white kid. His murder is usually committed by another Black kid. If you want to stop the random murders of thousands of Black kids, you could bring back stop and frisk. That's a non starter. The 4th amendment against searches and seizures is sacrosanct. It's the 4th amendment absolutists, not the 2nd amendment variety, that have the greater body count.....She's remarkably self righteous and unreflexive in her criticism of America. Jefferson and Washington helped to found a country that broadened the rights of a fair number of the citizens of this country. They had an imperfect understanding of the very ideals that they preached, but they went quite a few steps further down that road than the other rulers of that era....One place you can never look for advances in human rights is Africa. Does she have any criticism for the kings of Dahomey, Benin, Buganda and other places. One of Jefferson's molested slaves had more right to the sanctity of her life (though not her liberty) than the unfavored wife of a King in Africa. They were killed on a whim.
this country, founded on stolen land, built with the labor of stolen lives.
Stopped reading there.
I agree wholeheartedly with liberals that slavery was by far the worst thing to ever happen in America.
"Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on stolen land..."
Whose land? The Anasazi or the Navajo, the Apache, perhaps the Comanche, or dozens of other nations and tribes that were at risk or subjugated under indigenous rulers. Perhaps the Aztecs who held human rites as the highest law of their land for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes.
but the whole arrangement was rotten and the idea of 3/5 easily conveys outrage — justified outrage
African-American, people of color (i.e. color bloc), 1/2 Americans, political congruence ("=")... the Pro-Choice religion, the wicked solution, less than a whole human.... Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.
The land theft idea is incorrect.
1. Justice is achieved only when we apply the standards of today to the actions of people centuries ago.
2. By todays standards of eminent domain, a local government can appropriate land for a reasonable price based on a conclusion that the government can give the land to even private parties that will create greater economic growth.
3. Hunter gatherer and subsistence agriculture was productively inferior to contemporary European farming methods. QED.
Another argument is that under Native Indian common law, real estate title was transferred by war and conquest, and subsequent deportation.
King knew that most white people were sympathetic to freedom for blacks and that the brutality of the Democrat southerner
Not only sympathetic, but conservativism held that they were brothers and sisters under a common faith, religion, ideology (i.e. Declaration, Constitution), from conception, long before the birth of our nation where they would stand against slavery and diversity under 50 shades of transhumanism, transAmericanism.
"And if we dare to protest, if we dare to express our rage, if we dare to say enough, we are lectured about" white privilege .
Roxanne seems to do little except express her rage.
"And if we dare to protest, if we dare to express our rage, if we dare to say enough, we are lectured about the importance of civility."
Tell it to the Jan 6 protesters. the ones in jail.
Newsflash: we don't give a shit about your "rage", any more than you care about ours.
Now, if you had intelligent and rational arguments for your positions, that would be different.
But if you had that, you wouldn't be Leftists.
We are told to stay calm and vote as an outlet for our anger.
Well, are you domestic terrorists, or members of a political system. Apparently you prefer being a domestic terrorist
Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on stolen land
Every single human being on this planet, other than maybe some Australian aborigines, lives on "stolen land". Every single person we stole the land from, had stolen it from someone else before we stole it from them
If you don't want to live on stolen land, then leave. Otherwise you can STFU, because you're equally guilty
built with the labor of stolen lives
John Calhoun loves you, you sound just like him
No, the vast majority of America was built by hardworking people who were NOT slaves, loser
The document that governs our lives effectively denied more than half of the population the right to vote
Yes, it did. Just like every other democracy at the time. Suck it up
It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation
You complete fucking moron.
Seriously, you're complaining that the US Constitution didn't give more power to slave owners?
Whinging about the 3/5 rule, a sure sign the whiner is a pathetic loser.
The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens
Oh, you mean like all the unborn being murdered in abortions? We're working on that
When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice
Which is why the Left is so eager for social media companies to censor conservatives. Because the Left is all about injustice and abuse.
I've edited this down to exclude the particular issue about which she does not want to be civil so that it will stand as a general statement that is in accord with my position that calls for civility are always bullshit. I'm not going to try to look up whether there are other occasions where she has been the one calling for civility. She's not calling for it here. This post gets the "civility bullshit" tag because she's talking about calls for civility, and she, like me, is rejecting them.
She's rejecting it because she's losing, not because she believes in any principles
Ann Althouse said...
I think they know that, though it would be better to be clearer that they do. The problem remains that a fraction was used to reach a compromise and that some people were represented as a fraction of a person in the founding document. That was better than counting them as a full person, for the reason you know, but the whole arrangement was rotten and the idea of 3/5 easily conveys outrage — justified outrage..
No, it doesn't. It conveys stupidity and ignorance..
Black non-slaves were counted as people. Indians who were not taxed were NOT counted as people.
Slaves, who were not being TREATED as people, were not allowed to be further used to empower their masters by being counted as people for purposes of Congressional representation and political power.
Slavery was rotten. No US Constitution that banned slavery was going to be approved. So, either you wanted to continue the Articles of Confederation (which never would have stopped slavery, or even stopped the importation of slaves), or you wanted a US Constitution that allowed slavery.
If you hated slavery, then you wanted a US Constitution, and one that gave as little political power to the slave owners as possible.
If you're such an intellectually pathetic loser that you can't work through the logic, and can't argue for the choice that made slavery the most likely to disappear, then you clearly aren't worth listening to on any subject.
Which clearly sums up "Roxane Gay"
Left Bank of the Charles said...
“Any one insulted that slaves were not fully counted for purposes of representation, diminishing the effective power of slaves' masters, is deserving of lampoon.“
No, the disgrace is that that the slaves remained in slavery, weren’t given the full rights of citizens, and weren’t counted as whole persons.
So, tell us, genius, how were the people who negotiated the US Constitution supposed to accomplish that task?
"They couldn't"? Wow, you don't say!
So, what should they have done? Created a system that gave the slave owners MORE political power, or less?
What's that? You're an intellectually defective loser who refuses to think about how to actually accomplish goals? You're just going to sit there and whine?
Yeah, that's what I thought
Someone wanna 'splain to me how 3 to 5 million North American Indians, many of them nomadic-hunter gatherers, "OWNED" an entire continent comprising 9.45 million square miles???
That works out to roughly 2.4 square miles per Indian.
Also, can anyone point to any instances where Stone Age cultures have not been swamped by more advanced ones, anywhere?
Help me out here....
In 1789 when the US Constitution went into effect, THE ENTIRE WORLD WAS RACIST -- north and south America, west and east Europe, north, central, and south Africa, west, south, north, and east Asia, and the Pacific islands. ALL RACIST (by present-day enlightened standards). So is it a surprise that our Constitution didn't embrace the priciples that we enlightened people now (NOW!) believe are important? It was pretty damn liberal for the time, and it provided a foundation for growth in a more liberal direction. Does the US allow slavery today? Do we allow Black people to vote? Do we allow women to vote and hold political office? Do we allow stupid and ignorant people to publish in major news sources?
So we have to calibrate our outage carefully, then? I mean, if the free states had had their way, slaves mightn't have been counted as people at all. The 3/5 arrangement was less rotten than that one would have been, for purposes of acknowledging the humanity of the enslaved, but more rotten from the standpoint of giving slave states more power.
The 3/5ths clause was not just about representation. It was also about taxation.
The slave states wanted the slaves to count as people for representation purposes, but not as people when it came to taxation, which was based on population.
The free states wanted the slaves to count as a whole person for taxation purposes, but not as a person for representational purposes.
The 3/5ths clause meant that slaves counted as 3/5 of a person for both purposes.
Given that the great bulk of progressive policy prescriptions over the past 60 years have been abject failures yet Democrats push for more while recognizing the failures of their actions, it has to establish a self loathing that manifests in striking out ever more irrationally and violently against those they view as opponents.
So, Serious Question
What's the alternative to civility Bullshit?
Locking up people that you disagree with?
Executing people you disagree with?
Ignoring people you disagree with?
Inquiring minds, want to know
Pauligon59 said...
How do you define "civility"? If you are shouting down contrary viewpoints, are you being civil? If you riot in the streets doing violence to others property, are you being civil?
I believe that being civil means following the rule of law.
When the rule of law is not being followed by a person or a group, then, by all means, be as uncivil towards them as they are towards you. This is called self defense.
It gets complicated when threats of uncivility are issued before uncivil behavior begins. Should one wait for the uncivil behavior before acting in self defense?
When people act uncivil without apparent cause, then I would say that a call to be civil is NOT bullshit since the uncivil behavior taints the group as being univilized and not worth listening to. In other words, you alienate those not already party to the dispute. Witness to this is how the vast majority of the country reacted to the rioting by BLM and antifa. That behavior and the ongoing robbery going on in various cities does nothing to endear their causes to me.
5/26/22, 1:37 PM
^^^^^^****THIS****^^^^^^^
On a tangent but related to the 3/5ths, it seems to me that all of the anti-majoritarian elements of the Constitution that are generally decried by lefties, as recently here as a thread a couple days back, because they interfere with running roughshod over the rest of us now were in one way or another responsible for the eventual elimination of slavery. Even with over-representation in the House, equal representation in the Senate and the need for super-majorities to override vetoes trimmed pro-slavery legislation. The requirement that a pro-slavery President get the approval of a reasonably evenly divided Senate, but not the House where they were over-represented, for appointments and treaties was a similar limitation. The supermajority required for conviction after impeachment meant the slave states couldn't simply eject an anti-slavery President from office as long as the Senate was evenly divided.
(To the 'but it took a war' jibe, the slaveholders got a vote in the matter.)
Be careful what you wish for.
Re: Gahrie:
The slave states wanted the slaves to count as people for representation purposes, but not as people when it came to taxation, which was based on population.
What tax? I thought that before the income tax amendment (1913) federal taxes were basically just tariffs and stuff like that, which might be indirectly affected by population, but which wouldn't have been affected in any way by the 3/5 compromise. I know tariffs were a sore point for the South (e.g. Calhoun and the Tariff of Abominations), but I don't recall the 3/5 compromise affecting the calculation of taxes to be paid in the southern states.
What tax?
Originally the states paid an annual tax to the federal government based on their population.
Re: Gahrie:
I was skeptical, but I see you are right!
What a convoluted way to implement the taxation clause, though:
Each of the 16 states was allocated its share of the national levy of $2 million. This quota was based upon population, with slaves counting as three-fifths of a person for allocation purposes. Only real property and slaves were taxed, and no property was taxed if it was permanently exempt from taxation by state law.
The 1798 tax had three parts:
Dwelling houses valued at more than $100 were taxed based upon the value, with highly progressive tax rates that ranged from two-tenths of 1 percent of the value up to 1 percent of the value.
Slaveowners were taxed 50 cents for each slave between the ages of 12 and 50 who was not precluded from working as a result of permanent illness or disability.
All other real property—called simply "land"—which included dwelling houses valued at $100 or less, was taxed at a fixed percentage of the value. Each state's land tax rate was computed separately, as a residual after the amount of tax derived from the first two categories was subtracted from the quota.
Post a Comment