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rayinertoday at 3:06 AM2 repliesview on HN

You’re complaining about where the founders didn’t follow their principles to their logical conclusions. But you overlook that you’re using the founders’ own principles to criticize how they fell short. You can’t even articulate the complaints you’re making using concepts indigenous to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.

You talk about slavery. But the countries those slaves were from enslaved their own people and sold them to America. Those cultures didn’t think slavery was wrong. The difference is that the founders created a system that ultimately precipitated in a civil war to vindicate the founding principles. One where (mostly British) Americans killed hundreds of thousands of their own cousins to free enslaved people belonging an entirely different ethnic group. Such mass fratricide for the sake of non-kin was completely unprecedented in history. Africans never did that. Middle Easterners never did that. Asians never did that.

You asked in another comment whether I would have been “disenfranchised” under the system the founders originally created. Maybe, but I would have been a serf in my home country too. I would have been a serf under the principles my own ancestors created, because almost everyone was. Only once you created a system where a large share of the population had a franchise did it even make sense to talk about “disenfranchisement.” It was the “0 to 1” step that was the hard one from which everything else followed.


Replies

datsci_est_2015today at 12:34 PM

What’s the endgame of your argument here? It reeks of American exceptionalism of the type where its citizenry is not allowed to critically assess the effectiveness of its systems because other systems are somehow worse in some facets. This entire response is whataboutism.

Should disenfranchised Americans simply roll over because there are people more disenfranchised in other places in the world? Are some forms of disenfranchisement more acceptable than others? E.g. as long as we can narrowly interpret the words of the founding fathers (originalism) to be in favor of it?

TimorousBestietoday at 1:01 PM

Your second paragraph does not make the argument you seem to intend. Most other places in the world did not require an incredibly bloody civil war in order to (partially) abolish slavery.

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

> Those cultures didn’t think slavery was wrong.

Southern antebellum culture was so beyond the pale it not only “didn’t think slavery was wrong,” it thought slavery was so good and so fundamental to its way of life that “mass fratricide,” as you put it, was preferable to abolition.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407005