Atari 2600. It’s the only console I ever owned and played. It was C-64/128, then nothing but PCs until today.

But that doesn’t please the shareholders or appease the apparently ever more concerning necessity for infinitely growing profits.

In Tabbycatistan there is only one vote.

Spoken like a person who will not have to live long under the consequences of that hubris, and whose family wealth will insulate their offspring.

I’m gonna vote for you, Biden, but your personal “peace” is a shitty umbrella the rest of us don’t get to live under.

Pol Kat

And the engines can’t make the power.

Project 2025 has been around for years. How have people not noticed it?

Cherry pick much? You picked exceptions while ignoring the rest. At no point did I use absolutes like “all” founders were idiots or something. Yet you cherry pick and suggest that invalidates my points. Good grief.

Whatever. I’m done. I stand by my point: understand the founders in their time, understand their flaws, understand that we have polished their images while ignoring flaws and context to make them heroic. They were humans. That’s all.

“By saying all men were “created equal” Thomas Jefferson intended to abolish the system of hereditary aristocracy, where some individuals were born as lords and others were ordinary.”

Ok. Landed white male aristocracy.

Then there was black people not getting to vote.

Women couldn’t vote.

If you didn’t have enough property you couldn’t vote.

Native Americans weren’t citizens until the 1900s. Don’t forget the awful treatment and suffering they received at the hands of Jackson.

Let’s not bother discussing how long many of the founders owned slaves, despite their “enlightenment”, and how long it took them to free them. If they did.

That’s just off the top of my head. Sure seems like landed white males were still top of the heap as far as the founders went.

E: that’s framing for you. A bunch of (often rich) white guys wrote the rules for white males to still be in charge. Enlightened or not, that’s how the country started. We have improved on their work in many ways, but as I stated originally, we need to take the shiny veneer off and look at who they were and what they really did. None of this is untrue.

The problem here is you’re fighting a battle that doesn’t need to be fought. Nobody here is contesting the effect they had on the formation of this country, yet for some reason you want to argue that point.

My point is that they were flawed, and that we have revised some of their motives and framing to suit both grade-school level and adult levels of patriotism and worship of the people at the helm of the country’s beginnings. People don’t want to hear that, and it sounds like you’re in the same boat. I’m sorry if that’s something you’ve decided you don’t want to discuss but would rather hyper focus on their successes like some kind of founding father Facebook page. You’re making this argument about your views. It was never about you. If you’ve read everything, good for you. Move on.

Feel free to pile on some quotes if it helps you look the other way.

Edit: welp. People like their sugar-coated history. Too bad. It’s amazing how far we’ve come and adapted over time to make things better for everyone rather than “just white males get to vote”; but nobody wants to hear about why we started out that way when a bunch of white males wrote the rules?

Again, you are framing their words in your mind today and ignoring the context they were written. For instance, “all men are created equal” was intended to give all white males a shot at “equality” in reference to hereditary white aristocracy, not people of other colors. We have revised that to mean literally everyone.

You offer up quotes to prove how great they were but in the next breath say they were flawed while using those quotes as a rebuttal to my statement pointing out that these men were flawed.

Pick one.

Please read about these people, not just the polished historical deep-dives that go soft on their flaws to give the books a veneer of honest and complete truth while extolling their virtues as Great Founding Fathers. They were humans of their time and station.

I’ll offer a cautionary note on that take. We really need to meet our heroes, in this case our founding fathers, and frame their words and mindset in the time they said what they did. Those “ideals” revolved around landed white males and not the sugar-coated “I can not tell a lie” history we got in 4th grade.

Shhh, just let it happen.

Snowflake “revolution” wants to hit the ”easy button”.

I could see that working for the relative short term, but the renewal of what should be public domain copyrights is pretty insane.

Unless you drive a big pickup.

I’d bet that those that are in the “extreme pride” bracket have ratcheted up their pride to ever higher levels.

Why would copyright ever drive culture? The only thing it’s designed to do is drive profits.

Ok, I follow. I think we’re already there. Plenty of people are doing stupid things that are dangerous, either out of ignorance, lack of forethought, or nowadays for clout on social media. Pretty sure people have been doing dumb things for a long time, but they were more lethal in the past.

This doesn’t have to be the binary choice you’re making it. Both can be done. Furthermore I also disagree with the premise that imperfect solutions should be immediately discounted. There is no perfect solution.

Private policing has been done.

You had to pay a fee to have them attempt to solve whatever crime you wanted investigated.

Too bad if you’re poor.

If you’re rich the crime will be solved. Doesn’t matter if they got the right person.

Police take bribes, so they can find the other “right person”.

They were used to force workers back to work when they rebelled over poor pay and working conditions.

They were used to hunt down escaped slaves.

Want to know why people didn’t want state-funded cops? Because those police would be used to limit their freedoms. Anyone participated in a protest lately? How about being pulled over because of your color? Assets seized? Not that you would have avoided these things with private police, though. Modern police still protect the capital of the wealthy, just on the taxpayer dime now, the rich don’t have to pay them directly.