Comment Re:No (Score 1) 261
You do realize those rights at that point in time applied only to white male land owners, right?
You do realize those rights at that point in time applied only to white male land owners, right?
I should point out native americans are still largely unemployed, stuck in reservations on land white American's didn't want. One of their few rays of hope being the ubiquitous Indian Casino where they are exacting their revenge. Still they are second class citizens.
Blacks were still being massively discriminated against until the Civil Rights act which was around 180 years later. They are still second class citizens.
The poor, they are still second class citizens.
Women are the one group doing pretty well for themselves though they are still underrepresnted in government.
Look around the room at a State of the Union address. The room is still overwhelming full of affluent white men.
As for the founding fathers brilliant ideas on governence, it exploded in a bloody civil war in 80 years.
You need look no further than where the U.S. congress, courts and presidency are today. They are a smoldering ruin. They have never been the great institutions Americans are brainwashed in to thinking they are. Are they better than totalitarian dictatorships, sure. Are they models the rest of the world can aspire too, no, not really.
American governement is the best government money can buy.
Try reading Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It will disillusion you of the comic book U.S. History taught in U.S. school where the founding fathers are all saints and geniuses.
They were mostly self serving and profiteering. Its fitting Andrew Jackson is on the $20 dollar bill because he was infamous for profiteering off the battles he won, mostly by seizing the lands he took and splitting it up between himself and his friends.
The founding fathers weren't exactly the pillars of individual freedom you seem to think they were. They were an American centric elite and plutocracy trying to displace a Britsh centric elite and plutocracy, mostly so they could have a bigger cut of America's growing wealth.
You can tell because most of those constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights didn't apply to people who weren't affluent(i.e. who didn't own land), women, native American's, blacks/slaves and indentured whites. They applied mostly to white men who had wealth (at least enough to own land).
They actively prevented people who were not white, male and affluent from voting or holding office. They were mostly slave owners themselves, and they were for the most part very affluent and owners of very large real estate holdings. They were all 1%'ers.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were carefully designed to inspire support from enough people in the colonies for their Revolution to succeed, and to create the illusion of freedom, but they had no intention of relinquishing their power and control over the levers of government when it their Revolution did succeed. That plutocracy has never relinquished that control in the more than 200 years since.
The NSA along with the DHS, FBI, ATF and IRS are means for maintaining that control.
The Internet let a genie out of a bottle and created dangerous potentential for the rest of us to organize and try to win some of that power and control back.
When faced with the twin crises, and excuses, that were 9/11 and the 2008 crash it was nearly inevitable that The Powers That Be in the U.S. and U.K. would exploit every tool at their disposal, mainly computers and networks, to try to put a lid back on their control of their increasingly restless and networked homelands and to try to maintain their domination of the world as a whole in the face of increasing challenges.
The 2008 crash in particular resulted in widespread global disillusionment with the fact economies and governments are rigged to benefit the ruling elite and screw everyone else. When ruling elites start feeling that heat they trot out their police states, always have, always will.
The second system is entirely separate. It exists to present the voting options, register your choice and add your vote to the tally. To take the example of a polling station, when you arrive and register to vote you are given a key - one key per voting machine. You present this key to the machine, it permits access to the vote casting user interface, and once the vote is cast it interlocks the machine from presenting the voting options again until it is removed from the machine and returned to the polling clerk, who inserts it in a "reset machine" facility at his desk. (This is required to stop you just running the voting programme lots of times and casting many votes.) Note that this system knows nothing about your true identity, just that it has been used to register a vote.
Except that I have no control or even a method to confirm that this second system is truly a second system. In paper ballot voting in a polling station I physically see that my ballot bears no distinguishing marks before I fill it out, I see that it goes into a hopper with hundreds of other ballots, and I see that they don't note the time that I've come in to vote, only that I have.
I have no such observation of the inner workings of an electronic voting system. They cannot prove to me that they aren't tracking my account with even something so innocent as a simple timestamp relative to when my vote is cast.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome