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FWD.us Remixes the Statue of Liberty Greeting
theodp writes "In the days leading up to the Senate's passage of the landmark immigration bill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new ad from FWD.us, his pro-immigration reform PAC. The ad, 'Emma', contains an altered version of Emma Lazarus' famous 1883 poem 'The New Colossus' ('Give me your tired, your poor...'), which is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. 'In doing so,' notes the Latin Times, 'it [the ad] departs radically from the meaning of Lazarus' original — which exalted the Statue of Liberty as a "mother of exiles" and redeemer of the world's rootless poor — to accommodate the PAC's call for more high-skilled workers from abroad be allowed to work and live legally in the United States.' Instead of the original's call for 'the wretched refuse of your teeming shore' and 'the homeless, tempest-tossed', the FWD.us remix asks for 'the influencers and the dreamers...talent that is searching for purpose...those dedicated to the doing'. Here's a YouTube Doubler of readings of both versions — pick your fave, kids!"
The idea was that the USA would be a shining city on a hill, an example for other nations.
It wasn't supposed to be a beacon for immigrants.
"Hey, you can do this too"... not "Hey, come over here cause you can't get your shit together over there"...
From the summary:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new ad from FWD.us, his pro-immigration reform PAC.
This is inaccurate. The main focus of the PAC is on guest workers, not immigrants.
Seriously fuck that guy. I'm sure that if it wasn't him, some other unscrupulous douche would be in his place doing basically the same shit but he's the one here and now so fuck him and his abuse of the powerless.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
whichever one doesn't involve me competing head on with 1 million new (and desperate) working in the worst economy since WWII?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"Keep your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Send me your young, your rich,
Your highly skilled, willing to work 18 hour days.
They will soon be returned to you as wretched refuse,
on your teeming shore."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This news may be one of the most offensive things I've read all year.
The idea was that the USA would be a shining city on a hill, an example for other nations.
It wasn't supposed to be a beacon for immigrants.
"Hey, you can do this too"... not "Hey, come over here cause you can't get your shit together over there"...
Whose idea?
Why did the people who wrote our constitution include a clause granting citizenship to those who are born here? Had *they* already perverted the idea?
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"The shining city on a hill" is very recent, far more so than massive US immigration promoted by the US. The US desire for immigrants dates back at-least to the Louisiana Purchase (1803), where it was acknowledged that holding the land against other powers with colonial ambitions required occupation by US citizens, with economic ties to the east coast.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The statue of liberty didn't originally have that inscription, that was added later and itself had nothing to do with the symbolism of Libertas.
I am a brazen giant of Geek fame,
Who conquered networks astride from lan to lan;
Here at our white-washed, paywalls shall stand
A nerdy man whose torch lights flame wars
Master of walled gardens
Father of social Exiles. From his mouse-hand
Glows the world-wide web; his code wileding minions command
The air-gapped harbor that geocities frame.
"Keep, ancient pictures, your funny stories!" cries he
With silent lips. "Give me your engineers , your admins,
Your huddled masses yearning to code C,
The wretched refuse of your Mac store.
Send these, the clueless, tempest-tost to me,
I need more fodder for my golden horde!"
Here are the added lines:
...
And give me the influencers and the dreamers/
Talent that is searching for purpose/
Those dedicated to the doing
Send all these, the boundless born to me
I guess that's what you get when your writers are unaware of meter......I'd really like to know who thought the word 'influencers' meant anything. Woodie Guthrie could improvise more poetic speech live.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The idea was that the USA would be a shining city on a hill, an example for other nations.
It wasn't supposed to be a beacon for immigrants.
"Hey, you can do this too"... not "Hey, come over here cause you can't get your shit together over there"...
Are you Native American? If not, you're a hypocrite.
Richer than to put in place the tools to hand up our own.
Don't worry the engineers your looking for are working in the mail room or some such shit.
Not even listed on their resumes so they could get the job.
Or we paid to train him and he argued with his wife one day and now has a felony for no playing ball with a DA with a stick up his ass.
Don't worry Lots of people are deciding it is your big company that they dont need it is just not worth it.
You job is just not worth my life without a pension. I am better off even if I fail at my own thing. At least I tried.
Of course it is worth it to the person you bring into this country to transfer the knowledge to their county I mean terrorist.
Are you Native American? If not, you're a hypocrite.
Do you seriously think the Native Americans don't regret the way they left their borders open to anyone who turned up?
If they could go back in time and build a wall to keep Europeans out, I suspect most would eagerly have done so.
Why did the people who wrote our constitution include a clause granting citizenship to those who are born here?
To ensure that former slaves and their descendants were considered citizens. You're talking about the 14th Amendment, which was ratified 3 years after the Civil War. I believe in birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, but as a matter of historical fact that was not why the 14th Amendment was enacted. In fact children of white immigrants were considered citizens by birthright long before the Civil War.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
They told me it was a salad bowl (seriously). The idea that "we were and always had been a melting pot" is seriously idealized, but I will say that I believe in the ideal (even if it, to put it mildly, wasn't always practiced). Does that mean though that the US shouldn't place any limits on immigration, or that the US doesn't have the right to determine the criteria for immigration?
Mr Zuckerburg would throw the statue of liberty in your face with his ad. But when I see the H1B's roll in, I see no families. Why?
As for India, isn't it time to let them be free, of us? Canada's oil pipe to Huston Texas can only help the buyers in Brazil; are they not able to be free of us?
"We know who you are, we know where you came from and we know where you're going"
Anyone who thinks America should adhere only to the original wording of the declaration and the original constitution is an idiot. Basing society which has experienced 237 years of social change on an equally old document is ludicrous.
You want to discard the Constitution? Sorry, but the NSA beat you to it.
Society has changed, but human nature has not changed in our entire history. When those documents were written, they were written with those things in mind.
You might as well argue we shouldn't ground our engineering in physics because the position of the planets has changed.
Ah good, please remove Scalia and Thomas and Alito from the Supreme Court due to their idiocy.
The melting pot thing has been, IMHO, always been more an observation of fact, rather than an ideal. That is to say, the melting of several different kinds of metals together does, at times, give birth, to a stronger alloy. You don't want to use a weapon of pure iron up against someone using a blade of forged steel...your blade will crack in two when the blades meet. Unfortunately, the process is, as we've seen, closer to serendipity when a new alloy is discovered, especially since the science is still maturing; in other words, the US may be creating a lot of useful alloys, so to speak, but at times the furnace is running too hot for the right crystalline structure to appear for one alloy, or too cold for another. And that's not even touching on the madness of Uranium-type alloys (people) who are allotropic, and damn near impossible to work with / alloy with except under certain time-based circumstances.
And simple teaching of the US being a melting pot is not the same as it in action. In much the same sense as identifying programmers who are struggling (an earlier article) is not the same as finding a way to help them succeed. Identifying the alloys that are coming out of a furnace is one thing...improving the alloys that flow out of it is something else.
I am John Hurt.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
They were the Enlightenment ideas. Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Thomas Jefferson.
The United States of America was the first nation in history to be founded on ideas.
Every other country that ever existed was based on ethnicity. Even today we see people trying to break away to form ethnic homelands.
What Idea? The idea that the people allow a government, rather than the government allowing the people. The idea that a government was a social contract among free people in a state of nature. Personal sovereignty. Enumerated powers assigned to the government to secure life, liberty, and property.
Every other form of governance starts with some all-powerful people bequeathing to the subjects their privileges. Fucking Guevara wasn't a "revolutionary". There's nothing revolutionary about a government telling you what you can have, what you can do with what you have, or what you can get. It pretty much sums up most of the world's lives before the enlightenment.
The melting pot idea was introduced by people who had something to gain. It is perpetuated today by people who have something to gain. Companies who want cheap labor and politicians looking for a dependent population come to mind. Of course schools teach hooray-for-the-melting-pot. You are talking about the democrat party and unions. They teach constitution-as-a-living-document for the same reason: the document that constitutes what the government is can be molded to advance their leftist proclivities.
THL phish sticks
We don't have enough "influencers and dreamers" so we need to get them from somewhere else. Instead of working to generated increased interest in STEM and increase the number of skilled workers here, keep college tuition unaffordable to even further discourage our youth from pursuing tech careers.
Chief Gillespie, I didn't know that Sparta had gotten the Internet.
Native American's are immigrants too. There are no native peoples, only naturally born.
Your argument makes you look like a dumb prick.
Every other country that ever existed was based on ethnicity. ... The melting pot idea was introduced by people who had something to gain.
First you praise the US for not being based on ethnicity, and then you criticize the melting pot. Talk about a confused argument.
Zuck him. He can go zuck himself. What a motherzucker.
I try to tell myself it was all an illusion in the first place.
But it doesn't feel that way.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
We'll invite everyone in.
Culture? We have none. We are all citizens of the television.
Heritage? None. We are arbitrary, gray and without origins. We need government, television and shopping to feel a sense of place.
Values? We have nothing in common except that we like money, we like sex, and we like to shop.
It's the path to Idiocracy + Brave New World.
Why does Zuckerberg support it? Cheap labor. People who permanent vote for no majority rule. And more customers who haven't yet gotten jaded about the decay.
Futurist Traditionalism
Are you Native American? If not, you're a hypocrite.
Do you seriously think the Native Americans don't regret the way they left their borders open to anyone who turned up?
If they could go back in time and build a wall to keep Europeans out, I suspect most would eagerly have done so.
That's some looney stuff. Native Americans didn't worry much around their immediate tribal grounds. There wasn't a single tribe with the political or physical capacity to project the power your suggestion would have required.
Zuck's astroturf campaign rolls on...
The new one to makes me want to puke.
The old one is genius, and what my great-grandfather lived.
I think that he is the one who should get fucked. If he was on fire i wouldn't piss on him to put him out.
Why is Snark Required?
They told me it was a salad bowl (seriously).
I had a history professor who referred to it as a "giant tossed salad."
Maybe because they wrote it more than two and quarter centuries ago when it wasn't so easy for people to migrate. Anyone who thinks America should adhere only to the original wording of the declaration and the original constitution is an idiot.
I don't know, the constitution has barley been touched in 200 years for good reasons and even then it was mostly for making social statements to reiterate what it already says in very simple language.
The guys who wrote it were a lot more thoughtful about what they write than you or I and they envisioned a lot more than we have realized in those 200+ years I'm ashamed to say.
Immigration built this country, how dare we inherit such a beautiful land at such great costs from such a successful idea and throw it out the door the second we are in charge. I can say that clear of all bigotry being 1/6 native Cherokee, 2 parts German, 2 part Irish and 1 missing part but I have some ideas from my music tastes.
Idiocracy at large here.
Walls are a sign of a society in decline: Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, Berlin Wall, etc. They say: "here was our high-water mark, then we were swept back out".
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'll take brainers over beaners. Of course, my idea of brains doesn't mean indentured indian servants.
Um, perhaps the parent is referring to the idea of the Massachussettes Bay Colony's John Winthrop that America should be a "city on a hill." You know, a theocracy where church membership and the proper ethnic background ae required to vote. Sounds about right.
You can't have both multiculturalism and the "melting pot".
Celebrating the culture of the ancestor's homeland has displaced the American culture, since it focuses on persisting the injustices on the past and not the solutions of the present.
Walls are a sign of a society in decline: Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall
The "Chinese" starting building those walls several centuries BC, before there even was a China.
Hadrian's Wall was built in 122 AD, 354 years before the fall of the Western Empire, and 1331 years before the fall of the Eastern Empire.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Anti-immigration sentiment has run high and low to varying degrees since at least the 1890s, when we essentially shut down all immigration for China, and much for the same reasons, "they are taking our jobs." Somehow we still have jobs in America, even after four centuries of immigration......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Uhhh when they wrote that they not only had slaves, which were required because frankly there wasn't enough backs to do all the work, but they had hundreds upon hundreds of miles of open country, minus the Indians they slaughtered of course.
Today for every one you have climbing the fence to look for a job (which honestly I've had more than a dozen Americans ask to cut my mom's grass because they can't find any work, its fricking bad in the flyover states folks) you have probably a dozen criminals coming here to ply their "trade" because they know with all these "safe havens" its easy to set up camp here, you have whole busloads filled with those needing ultra expensive medical treatment (its gotten so bad in some places they are basically knocking them out and slipping them on a plane or bus, look up "guy goes into coma, wakes up in Poland" for just one example) and we have H1-Bs killing any chance of Americans learning those skills because they pay less for a master's than we do for a new econo-car.
We can't even feed our own (look up "face of hunger in USA" to see how many of our citizens go to bed hungry each night) or pay our own bills, we just can't support the damned planet folks, we just can't. Meanwhile while they open the floodgates they have sent more than 42,000 FACTORIES overseas since 2001, you have nearly half the population getting handouts or aid, its just not sustainable folks, its gonna collapse and when it does its gonna be REALLY ugly, worse than NO after Katrina ugly.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Unless you were born before the early 20th century when Irish were considered second-class citizens, I'd say your statement is a bit late.
Technoli
At least be consistent: immigrant's, people's, make's.
we do?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but almost all the anti-immigration sentiment that you see is because 'they' are taking our jobs.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
FWD.us made me think of the defunct VoIP service known as FreeWorldDialup and run by Jeff Pulver. Nevermind, then.
Kriston
Isn't there where Liberty is buried?
Gives an entirely new meaning to "having your salad tossed"...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Give us your frightened, your desperate, your exploitable masses,
Willing to work like slaves for nothing while we use them,
As platforms for political power and a permanent underclass,
'Til amnesty shears one flock of sheep to make room for the next.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
The idea of a melting pot was first popularized in the play, The Melting Pot (1908) by Israel Zangwill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Melting_Pot_(play) The famous line is:
"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming... Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians - into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."
If you read the play, you'll see that he was talking about what became a popular idea of assimilation, while preserving some of the native culture. Don't worry, we're not going to take your Christmas trees away.
Emma Lazarus wrote her poem in a climate of socialism. She was a supporter of the immigrant poor.
The Latin Times is correct to identify Zuckerberg's ad as a shameless distortion and exploitation of Lazarus' poem. He's using her name to bring about exactly the opposite of what she fought for. She wanted to bring the poor and desperate to America as a place of refuge. Zuckerberg wants desirable skilled labor because they'll work cheaper for him and he can make money out of them. But what do you expect from a billionaire?
"The New Colossus"
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, 1883
At what point in your lifetime has America not had jobs? I'm only in my mid 30s, but at no point in my life has America not had jobs.
In the past few years there were plenty of lazy fucks who were unwilling to work a job that was 'beneath' them.
The people 'taking our jobs' are taking jobs the complainers are unwilling to work for pay they are unwilling to accept.
Foreigners don't take American jobs, American's are too fucking lazy to do them in the first place.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Whether or not the melting of metals together creates a something stronger than the original metals may be chance. But certainly an alloy is better than blade composed of various chunks of unalloyed metals barely attached to each other.
The alternative to the melting pot isn't the salad bowl, it's the Balkans. Or pick your favorite salad bowl. Pretty much anywhere in the world where various cultures and peoples have become mixed they've either assimilated to the point of no longer being able to easily distinguish, or they've maintained tense relations centuries occasionally flaring into wars and massecres.
I grew up in the midwest and really liked he model there. Unlike the east coast where I hear Americans whose families have been in America for generations utter nonsense like "I'm Italian" or "I'm Polish", where I grew up everyone was just American. There was tension whenever blacks and whites interacted, but embracing mutual assimilation can even erase that even as it erased the differences between the Germans, French, English and others who settled the area. Instead we have America-haters saying we should exclude blacks from being full Americans - we have to treat them like some alien hybrid of African and American (thus the term "African American" even though most of their families have been in America longer than the families of most white people.
So by all means let's have a melting pot. Even if melting two metals together forms a blade weaker than either of the two metals, that blade will still be stronger than a blade made of two separate pieces of metal or a blade made from metals that have not thoroughly blended.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It wasn't where I grew up in the Midwest. We had two ingredients that could be considered separated like the ingredients in a tossed salad - there were blacks and whites. Have ingredients act like a tossed salad wasn't working out so well.
On the other hand, the people from all over Europe, as well as native Americans and people from other places too, were pretty thoroughly mixed and there were no other ethnic tensions to speak of. It was very common for people to have a little bit of Cherokee in them (a result of the trail of tears). People had German, French, English, Polish, Irish, Welsh, Mexican, Swedish, whatever ancestry and nobody cared much. It might occasionally be a fun parlor game to discuss ancestry - which usually meant guessing based on last names of grandparents, but other than that we didn't have people whose families had been in America for generations making absurd statements like "I'm Italian" the way I hear people do on the East Cost. The melting pot works. I've seen it.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I dream of someday being rich enough to support more immigration and even illegal immigration like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Walls are a sign of a society in decline: Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall
The "Chinese" starting building those walls several centuries BC, before there even was a China.
Would there even have been a China without those walls?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
At what point in your lifetime has America not had jobs? I'm only in my mid 30s, but at no point in my life has America not had jobs.
In the past few years there were plenty of lazy fucks who were unwilling to work a job that was 'beneath' them.
The people 'taking our jobs' are taking jobs the complainers are unwilling to work for pay they are unwilling to accept.
Foreigners don't take American jobs, American's are too fucking lazy to do them in the first place.
"...jobs, Mexicans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Africans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Chinese are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Arabs are too fucking lazy to do them..."
It sure sounds racist if you say that for any other nationality. For Americans it's ok?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
This is an absolutely awesome nerd explanation and one of the reasons I still frequent this site. However, you have a 6 digit UID so you can't be new here. Please in traditional slashdot style, make an equally epic analogy using a car. I expect the resultant analogy to be akin to a Mustang with a Delorean engine, Citroen running gear, Allison transmission, and some sort of JATO rocket sticking out of the trunk. DON'T LET ME DOWN!!!!!!
With the native population destroyed by disease, North America had a lot of bisons, timber and soil to spare.
A constitution isn't about society directly, it's about the use of power against that society, ie. government. The government allows you to exchange labour for materials at a floating (market) rate or not. The government allows you to exclude other people from your property or not. And, the government always needs a trial to imprison you or not. That last one was decided in 1215, as every second tweenie movie will tell you. In (about) 1923, the US courts decided the government needed a good reason to search someone's home. That social change has eliminated the last two rules to make people 'secure' is the greatest example of double-thinking.
It is supposed to be a melting pot - all of our differences subsumed into a common culture. All of us speaking one language perhaps made from words of many languages.
Salad Bowl is what we have - little chunks of different languages and cultures essentially separate from each other. It's all well and good on paper, but in real life it leads to balkanization - insular little barrios of different incompatible cultures, none of whom care to understand their neighbor.
His point was that ethnicity was not an important factor in the formation of the US, neither in one direction (separate ethnicities/only ethnicity x) nor in the other direction (melting pot). Basing your country on ideas instead of ethnicity of course encourages some kind of melting pot, but the melting pot is neither the means nor the end - it is just a side effect.
Whether it sounds racist should not be important, whether it is true should be the important distinction. And although I disagree with much of the sentiment behind GPs post, technically it seems to be true. Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and have only limited knowledge about the situation.
Maybe because they wrote it more than two and quarter centuries ago when it wasn't so easy for people to migrate. Anyone who thinks America should adhere only to the original wording of the declaration and the original constitution is an idiot. Basing society which has experienced 237 years of social change on an equally old document is ludicrous.
that's bullshit. if you want to change the constitution, there's a process for that, it's called amending it. any other law wouldn't magically change meaning because a period of time has passed. i don't see why the constitution should be any different.
It's based on the premise of knowing the future, did you expect it to be entirely factual? If we 'knew' an asteroid was going to hit and destroy the earth in 200 years you can bet many of the barriers to co-operation between nations would be put aside given the common threat. Given the decimation native Americans suffered from disease and mistreatment you can bet they would have wanted nothing to do with westerners had they known.
So by all means let's have a melting pot. Even if melting two metals together forms a blade weaker than either of the two metals, that blade will still be stronger than a blade made of two separate pieces of metal or a blade made from metals that have not thoroughly blended.
Wrong: bi-metal blades are extremely common in applications like jigsaws (sabre saws) and reciprocating saws ("sawzalls"), because they're more durable than single-metal blades. Bi-metal is not an allow, it's two separate metals joined together, without blending. You see it in blades because with a saw blade, you want the body of the blade to be flexible, but the teeth to be very hard (so they stay sharp), which are opposite qualities. Another example of completely separate metals on a blade is circular saw blades with carbide teeth: the blade is made of one kind of steel, and the teeth are made of small cut pieces of carbide (high-carbon steel), which are actually glued onto the blade body.
Our founding fathers were not perfect. Neither are the documents they wrote. The Constitution endorsed slavery. Many will argue it was a necessary evil in order to get a compromise and have all colonies endorse the document. If that's the case, then there is no reason to believe there are other compromises in the document and it isn't flawed in other aspects.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Basing society which has experienced 237 years of social change on an equally old document is ludicrous.
Agreed. That's why we amend the Constitution on a fairly regular basis to keep up with changing times. It has only been 21 years since the last amendment.
Our founding fathers were not perfect. Neither are the documents they wrote. The Constitution endorsed slavery. Many will argue it was a necessary evil in order to get a compromise and have all colonies endorse the document. If that's the case, then there is no reason to believe there are other compromises in the document and it isn't flawed in other aspects.
Then it is a good thing that they included provisions for modifying it, isn't it? The problem is that many people want to just pick and choose the parts they like and interpret the others in ways that make no logical sense when taken as a whole and accounting for the intentions of those who wrote it.
If one does not like it, one should campaign to amend it and not merely ignore or interpret away the parts one does not like.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
I see it like this: In the beginning, the US had lots of land and resources that needed working and cultivating. The US shipped people in (slaves) to aid in this initial nation building phase of it's existence. Before and after slavery, the US was over-joyed to find that lots of low-wage workers were shipping themselves to our shores. Everything happens for cold, matter-of-fact, practical reasons. Artists and PR people just make it look and sound lofty and pretty. They distort the pig of reality by applying lipstick to it. If they are good, they fool us and we allow what needs to happen to happen. If they are bad, we oppose nature, fate, practicality. This requires a great deal of effort. Like a man bailing water out of a leaking boat, eventually we realize we can't fight these natural laws.
I saw a drawing of his, about 20 years ago: "Proposed Replacement for the Statue of Liberty". It was, of course, a giant fan.
Yeah, salad tossers in the US are trying to toss everyone else's salad who doesn't toss salad.
Your analogy is flawed. It would be better to say that I don't want my engineering to be grounded on our understanding of the world as it was 250 years ago. In the last 250 years, we have refined Newtonian physics, created new material (plastics, anyone?), gained a better understanding of catastrophic events that can cause failure (plate tectonics, meteorology, and so on), and have better models for how the world works.
Note, also, that the GP was not suggesting that the Constitution be scrapped, but rather that we should not hold the original wording as sacred. Interpretation of the Constitution changes over time, and amendments are added. Or are you still okay with the 3/5ths compromise? A literal reading of the original Constitution is idiotic.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Whose idea?
Why did the people who wrote our constitution include a clause granting citizenship to those who are born here? Had *they* already perverted the idea?
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
Actually the framers of the constitution didn't include such a clause. The 14th Amendment changed that when it was ratified in 1868.
Looks like a good place to leave this: http://www.movetoamend.org.
Cheap storage VM.
Looks like a good place to leave this: http://www.movetoamend.org.
While the idea, amend vice ignore, is good their proposed amendment is deeply flawed. The language used would not only prohibit corporate speech, thus killing any right to advertise or promote their products unless granted permission by government, it would have the effect of eliminating all rights from any corporation. Including rights of property and many others.
Clearly it was put forth by someone who really just hates corporations for no logical reason while failing to remember that the vast majority of corporations are small affairs who would be destroyed by such a thing just as much as the megaliths they presumably are against.
It is also amusing to me, and has been since the ruling, that no one was up in arms over Unions (frequently corporations themselves) were buying elections and it only became a problem when organizations that were not unions got into the act.
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
I was asking what jobs we had left.
welfare is at an all time high, less Americans are employeed at any time since women entered the work force.
Lets be blunt the concept of hiring immigrants has never been about compassion, but about paying them lower wages than they could pay Americans.
If you want to have a conversation about Americans being lazy it starts with the stock holders and ends hipsters with bigger mouths than brains and 4 year degrees in beer drinking, and existential bullshit philosphy.
So immigrants take the jobs hipsters are too lazy to do, projecting their own laziness to the working class.
In short your faux call of "racism" on someone else, is really your own hatred of the working class.
the present, real unemployment around 19%, and more people not working since.
and stop with this Lazy American bullshit. Your projecting YOUR lazyness onto others who's "laziness" is wanting to make minimum wage.
Why is that so called liberals resort of conservative arguments when backed into a corner.
How many jobs do you think there were available in 1850? How many jobs do you think there are today? If immigrants destroyed jobs, there wouldn't be nearly as many.
Basically, if you're upset at "Indians" taking your job or "Mexicans" taking your job, you're not only racist, you're an idiot. If that doesn't match you, then please realize I am not talking about you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Obviously you haven't read the amendment. It allows for rights to be assigned to corporations through federal, state, or local law. It just prevents them from claiming the inalienable rights of people. Corporate advertising is not free speech, it is "commercial speech", educate yourself.
I think that Unions, religious organizations, and non-profits are just as devoid of inalienable rights as corporations. People have rights, not legal constructs. However, I can see why people are less upset about a group that domocratically elects it's leaders (at least in theory) vs. a group that is entirely profit driven and has no obligation to consider the wishes of it's owners (most stockholder votes are non-binding).
Cheap storage VM.
We don't need more job suckers, we need job creators.
Give us your entrepreneurs. Keep your "workers".
ad hominems.
the only reason they have jobs is because they can pay them less then me and boss them around more.
If you think "Americans are lazy and idiots", then you sir are a bigot and idiot as well
Is that culture, or just the most effective way to profit from the human weakness that demands constant entertainment in order to not feel lonely and existentially pointless?
Futurist Traditionalism
Wow, take a logic class. That wasn't ad hominem, that was abuse. I first presented my point, then secondly abused you. Apparently you're not very good at reading, because you didn't even respond to my point.
I don't think "Americans are lazy idiots," but there's a good chance you are.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."