Posted on 07/28/2008 4:54:15 PM PDT by Loud Mime
Oh splendid! Then you could not have failed to see the Jefferson quote #5823 NEGROES, rights of, which gives us a much more accurate and complete perspective of Jefferson’s ignorance and prejudice than the inferior quote you inflicted on this forum.
A quote is accurate or inaccurate, not superior or inferior. The quote I posted was accurate. Grow up.
Are you saying that our founding fathers, and specifically Thomas Jefferson, suffered from ignorance and prejudice? Would you concede that people have different ideas/notions of what constitutes beauty? These are subjective judgements. Do you begrudge Jefferson such a judgement?
I do thank you for posting that quote. That Jefferson didn’t find beauty in the black race assures me that he had no relationship with Sally Hemmings because it couldn’t have been a relationship in that situation. I appreciate, also, that he said that it ought to be able for us to quantify beauty. For me, as a woman, John Kerry is absolutely, strikingly ugly. It derives largely from the fact that his eyes are set downward. In everybody, but especially in women, I like the ‘cat eye’. Most people have their eyes straight across. Jean-Forbes eyes are set downward in an orientation I’ve never seen before, and that weirdness is compounded by the fact that his eyebrows look set to slide off his face.
Here’s another famous Americans position of pulchritude that I think might interest you:
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare....Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. I could notice this as a boy, down South in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black satin skin of the South African Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection....
The white man’s complexion makes no concealments. It can’t. It seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed. But these efforts show what they think of the natural complexion, as distributed. As distributed it needs these helps. The complexion which they try to counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few—to the very few. To ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a good one. The hundredth can keep it—how long? Ten years, perhaps.
The advantage is with the Zulu, I think. He starts with a beautiful complexion, and it will last him through. And as for the Indian brown—firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant, and restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all colors and adding a grace to them all—I think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint.
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Samuel Clemens might have been the original tanorexic or tanaholic. He was a redhead; his wife was white and he wrote testaments of love to her that make grown men cry.
Your citing the Notes on Virginia was timely. Just last week I purchased an old copy of "The Life and Selected Writings for Thomas Jefferson" from a wonderful used bookstore in Denver. It's almost 800 pages.
Your post took me to this:
Back in the late eighteenth century the Virginia slaveowners who were Jefferson's contemporaries hadn't taken this Jeffersonian antislavery seriously. They knew Jefferson personally, and knew he meant no harm. And many of them were in the habit of saying the same sorts of things themselves, in appropriate company.
By the mid nineteenth century, however, southerners had to take Jefferson's antislavery writings seriously, because northerners were taking them seriously, and using them against the South. Taking the Declaration of Independence in conjunction with Jefferson's antislavery utterances (well publicized in the North for more than two decades), northerners were able on the eve of the Civil War to read antislavery intentions into the Declaration of Independence itself, and thus to enlist both the Declaration and its author on their side in the coming war. In a letter of April, 1859, Lincoln wrote,
"All honor to Jefferson -- to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
Source and more...
I loved your comments! I was judging Soliton’s post from a political angle. Some people want to degrade this nation from its Founders; we’re seeing it as Obama’s popularity increases. You addressed the beauty of people and the contradiction of Jefferson’s [uncited] writing and his affairs.
I never thought of that angle, but you brought it to center stage with a proper entrance and presentation.
The response should be most interesting, if tendered.
I had entered the quote on Google and used other searches, but could not find the quote you cited; thanks for providing us with the source.
I await your other answers.
The body of the Constitution.
The "body" of the Constitution is indistinguishable from the amendments because the amendments are enacted in accordance with the body.
I disagree. The body of he Constitution establishes the processes of the government. The Amendments limit its scope and powers in certain areas, and in few cases change the process of government (Amendment XVII). The Amendments follow the body; they are numbered in order.
The Constitution had to be in force before Amendments were added. The Constitution could not be in force until it was ratified by several States. After ratification, the Bill of Rights did not come into effect until 1791.
You only explained a clarification of the Second Amendment. I'm curious as to what else you meant by saying that you could imagine a better constitution.
Spoken like a devoted propagandist. The accuracy of a quotation is critical to the point being advanced, of course, but its effect is lost when it is made to fit an agenda that cannot be entirely admitted. You know that as well as anyone. So does most everyone in this forum. Who do you think you’re kidding? Get wise to yourself.
As usual, I have no idea what you are talking about.
First amendment: All rights begin at conception. The congress may not take sides on religious issues or favor one religion over another. The press and individuals shall have freedom of political speech.
It’s true that many of the Founding Fathers are condemned in some quarters for being racists and slaveholders, but the fact remains that when they came, one by one, onto the world scene in the last half of the Eighteenth Century, slavery was endemic throughout the colonies with scarce a whisper of opposition to be found anywhere, and that by the time they departed that same way, one by one, in the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century, slavery had been reduced to a despised and crippled institution, confined to one segment of American society, with a raging abolitionist feeling that had even penetrated the South. And, it was the sentiments and the philosophy of the Founding Fathers which fostered that dramatic change.
Please do try to keep up. “As usual” huh. For someone who usually has “no idea” about that of which I am speaking, you certainly do respond a lot. Do you largely confine your mystified responses to me, or do you indulge in your mystified responses more as a general practice?
You had offered a Jefferson quote to illustrate, or so you later claimed, the ignorance and prejudice afflicting our Founding Fathers, poor fellows. I contested the quote as inferior for its purpose, and proposed either one of two other Jefferson quotes as a supplement to the original that would give us a much fuller and more comprehensive understanding of the degree of ignorance and prejudice oppressing our Founders.
Your response was to declare a quote as “accurate or inaccurate, not superior or inferior,” as though the appropriateness of a quotation has no relevance to the point being proposed. This is the argument of a propagandist, who does not consider either the last moment or the next moment when selecting his argument for the present moment. It was, in this instance, so lame as to be embarrassing.
Hope that helps.
Engrish? I love Engrish!
That’s actually the correct way to say it. The commonly used and wrong way is to say ‘what I am speaking about’ or worse yet, ‘what I’m talking about’. Notice the dangling preposition.
And it’s quite immature and inappropriate for you to employ this infantile tactic against anybody, but especially those who are demonstrably superior to you in terms of intellectual development. That would includes the Founding Fathers.
That would include the Founding Fathers.
Pardon the typographical error.
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