They're doing it for the nostalgia -- they currently use horses, but there's more than one way to convince people they're doing something nostalgic.

The people who keep warning about growing government control over individuals aren't very well versed in history.

So are you planning to reconstruct an unchanged society to loose these unchanged children in 20 years from now? If not I feel like maybe teaching them to use the social systems of their time might be valuable -- long ago children used to learn Middle English, but as it turns out technology changes (as does everything else), and children (and parents) much change with it.

I'm not saying that spacial perception will suddenly cease to be important, but the idea that children don't change is absurd.

/ As is the idea that all experience older people have is relevant or useful, or that all of the things younger people think they know better are wrong, or that either side is unjustified in their opinion

If only there were some way to combine technology and social interaction. Something like a systematic way to express and broadcast thoughts and feelings for the purposes of sharing one's mind with other humans and visa versa.

It also fails to acknowledge that LEGO is itself technology -- relatively modern, high technology in the grand scheme of humanity -- or provide any meaningful distinction between "good" technologies like verbal language and "bad" technologies like iPads.

As with virtually all "kids these days" rants it's nothing more than an attempt to relive the past by forcing it on today's young people.

All of society is based on the idea of depriving people of their rights. We trade the right to murder for the right to be secure against murder. We trade the right to enforce our individual political will upon others for the security of representative government. We can debate which things we value and which trades we want to make, but the idea that there's some ideal "free" society is irrational.

So your argument is "it suited people in the past, and now we're stuck with it"?

They modified the Bill of Rights. Most of the proposed amendments went through without any trouble, in a very short period, without any significant public debate or interaction. If we're going to take intent into account we could reasonably presume that, while they wanted the process to be deliberate, they did not expect it to be arduous.

But again, the basis of your argument is "the Bill of Rights was enacted a long time ago, so we shouldn't change it", which is contrary to the revolutionary actions and contemporary self-governance that the authors of the constitution undertook. If we're going to honor their "intent" we should hold their ancient opinions in less regard and plot our own course.

I made no claim about the "intent" of the authors, other than that it was difficult to determine. I maintain that claim, as you've provided no counter-evidence, nor even a coherent counter-claim. The primary document is not terribly clear, provides almost no direct context or definitions, and was authored in a culture that very few people alive today firmly understand. The document itself does not have a single author, which further complicates the conception of "intent" because it's quite likely that the original authors did not fully share an intent even at the time it was written, just like most jointly authored documents today.

If that claim makes me corrupt I don't want to be subject to your conception of righteous. The idea that you can figure out what a group of people "really meant" by reading a handful of contemporary documents is ludicrous. It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that their intentions matter -- then as now only outcomes matter, as intentions are purely form of internal rationalization.

Exactly. Just like zero lead in your peanuts = more lead in your pistachios.

You know we're allowed to make revisions to the constitution, right? And that they don't have to be mere clarifications to the original text? You know, like the existing 27 amendments do?

So women don't get guns?

As it stands, basically you have to break the law if you want a hippopotamus for self-protection. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Freedom isn't an absolute ideal in and of itself. In any society freedom is balanced against many other goals, like order and security and reliable food production and access to professional soccer. We make many trades among those goals, and it's perfectly reasonable to debate what we should value and what trades we should make. But the idea that somehow any change in values or their balance is necessarily a negative actions because it represents the loss of a specific freedom, or that we need to permanently preserve the particular values that were important to a small group of rich colonists hundreds of years ago is itself tyrannical. We should be free as a people to set our own values for our own time just as the people did when they first formed our government.

I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context -- most humans have trouble figuring out what the person across the table from them intends, at least without significant interactive discussion.

But more importantly, why do we care what people hundreds of years ago *intended* or even what they *wrote*? What makes them so special? Why don't we get to choose our constitution in the same way they did? They took only a couple of years to add a whole slew of amendments -- why aren't we entitled to do the same, even if our choices now are contrary to their intent at the time?