Quote: (03-05-2013 02:34 PM)Icarus Wrote:
Quote: (03-05-2013 02:28 PM)j r Wrote:
Except for slavery.
No. The problem was not slavery. The problem was not giving the slaves a sovereign entity when they were freed. Few former American slaves moved to Liberia.
Countries whose populations consist of former colonists and former slaves have way too much friction, and tend to live in a state of permanent low-intensity civil war. Brazil is the perfect example.
What are you talking about? The founders failed to decisively deal with slavery, thinking it was on it's way out. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and slavery become the foundation for a tremendous amount of wealth being made by the planters. The result was an actual Civl War that killed almost a million people.
And why should slaves be shipped off to anywhere? Those people more than earned their citizenship toiling for to make other people rich. The low-intensity civil war that persisted was because southern whites refused to give blacks either their freedom or their equality, instead attempting to keep them in a state of perpetual squalor in order to continue benefitting from their labor.
Also, what's with all the people arguing in favor of democracy, but not in favor of universal suffrage. You can't have a democracy that keeps substantial portions of society locked out of power, at least bit for long. When people argue for keeping power limited to the elites, it's usually because they imagine themselves being part of the elites, but how do you think that would operate today. You really want a test to determine who can vote? Who do you think is going to grading those tests? If there a voting test today, it would probably have a question like "Describe the importance of feminism to modern America."
It's weird how people trust elites to make decisions for everyone else, even after elites continue to fuck things up royally.