106 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Jonathan Reece's avatar

Agreed. I think that the Founding Fathers had the right idea, though, when they tried to arrange things to minimise central government.

Expand full comment
Starry Gordon's avatar

And yet they kept slaves, with all that that implies.

Expand full comment
JackSirius's avatar

The greatest lie ever told in America is that the slaves were freed. Juneteenth my ass. Slavery never ended, it was simply rebranded as jobs. Slave/master became employer/employee, lender/debtor, landlord/renter, oligarch/sheeple. But in a system in which the foundational myth, cosmology, and religion are all based on a dominator god and his dominated creatures, what can we expect?

Expand full comment
Starry Gordon's avatar

You could check out Gnosticism, or certain flavors thereof. You don't get a better #1 god, but because you assume he's more or less evil or at least a fuckup, you're not disappointed by the cruelty and indifference of world, And revolt against #1 doesn't require struggling with angels and devils; just by doing small kindnesses and being polite to poor people you call all the machinery of the gods into question as the crock it is.

Expand full comment
JackSirius's avatar

I’ve always resisted labels, even after reading Elaine Pagels’ “Gnostic Gospels” back in ’81. Since then I've tried to suppress my inner heretic. But, given the current state of the world, that's now impossible.

Gnostic? I’ve heard it takes one to know one.

Expand full comment
Elaine's avatar

Every time reference is made to the Founding Fathers, someone has to interject the old distraction-brainwash of slavery.

So what they had slaves. That was the way things were then.

What's important is what the F. Fathers did, which includes the constitution, which was not good. The constitution was, as I understand it, a complicated means of attaining, by gradual methods, the eventual enslavement of the people.

The proof in in the current pudding.

Expand full comment
Starry Gordon's avatar

Since the slaves can't speak, I must quote Dr. Samuel Johnson: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?"

A curious paradox.

Expand full comment