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1 posted on 08/05/2015 6:29:55 PM PDT by Reverend Saltine
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To: Reverend Saltine

2 posted on 08/05/2015 6:32:18 PM PDT by Crim (Palin / West '16)
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To: Reverend Saltine
“I have the translation. ‘E plebnista’—it means ‘We the People….‘”

Nope. It don't.

3 posted on 08/05/2015 6:32:28 PM PDT by rjsimmon (The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
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To: Reverend Saltine

You can’t violate the prime directive.


8 posted on 08/05/2015 6:39:11 PM PDT by smokingfrog ( sleep with one eye open (<o> ---)
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To: Reverend Saltine

lol

good effort


10 posted on 08/05/2015 6:40:27 PM PDT by GeronL (Phony Crony Trump is a Chump, Cruz is for real, 100%)
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To: Reverend Saltine

One problem with the story.

When Sulu saw the rainbow flag he would have begged Kirk to transport down, and stay there!

:)


17 posted on 08/05/2015 6:49:42 PM PDT by rikkir (You can lead a horde to knowledge but you can't make them think. (TnkU ctdonath2))
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To: Reverend Saltine

“That which is ours is ours again.”


18 posted on 08/05/2015 6:54:52 PM PDT by Flag_This (You can't spell "treason" without the "O".)
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To: Reverend Saltine

Nice try, but I still support Trump.

(couldn’t resist)


30 posted on 08/05/2015 8:22:18 PM PDT by BobL (REPUBLICANS - Fight for the WHITE VOTE...and you will win (see my 'profile' page))
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To: Reverend Saltine
Wednesday, July 4, 2012

"E Plebnista" vs "We the People"


The original Star Trek series occasionally went, more or less boldly, into politics--perhaps most notably in the “The Omega Glory” episode which first aired on March 1, 1968. In this episode, Kirk finds himself on a strange planet caught in the middle of a war between a tribe of Asiatic village dwellers called the “Khoms,” and a group of wild nomads called the “Yangs.” (“Yankees” and “Communists,” get it). The Yangs are mostly barbarians, but they do evidence a (surprisingly familiar) past culture in their use of talismanic  “worship words” such as “Freedom,” “Liberty,” and “Justice for All.” 

The greatest of all Yang worship words—known as the "E plebnista"—can only be spoken by a chief. In the dramatic climax (which does not explain why the Yangs speak English and carry around American flags), Kirk resolves the great conflict by recognizing that E plebnista is actually a corruption of “We the People” and giving the Yangs a good dose of high school civics. 

YouTube: Captain Kirk Preamble

Gene Roddenberry’s here point is worth remembering: when the Constitution is made the subject of adoration, and when its key passages are converted into acontextualized proof texts, we end up with a ridiculous form of ancestor worship instead of a participatory democracy. We ignore the flesh-and-blood Founders by converting them into two-dimensional deities and their ideas about self-government into a prescriptive list of commandments. “We the people” becomes “E plebnista.”

For me, a sign that somebody has gone well down the E plebnista road to is the tendency to talk about the government as a “them” and the American people as an “us.” This is common on both sides of the political spectrum these days, depending on whose ox happens to be getting gored. 

If we can learn only one single lesson from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” But since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how participatory democracy works in a large republic. When we insist on speaking of the government as something other than ourselves, we invalidate the right of people who disagree with us to take part in the democratic process.

We miss the point badly when we try to guess what Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would have thought about the individual mandate or the top capital gains tax rate. That is “E plabnista” thinking, or lookin to the Constitution as a religious text designed to provide us with a list of commandments to run our lives by. But the whole point of “We the people” is that we are, well, the people. The Framers gave us a process that we can use to create the kind of society that we want to live in; they never meant to give us “worship words” to keep in a box. 



34 posted on 08/05/2015 8:45:14 PM PDT by Bratch
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