Did you know it’s “Constitution Day”? I didn’t.
This is an old image, [stderr] but:
Given the way the authoritarian regime has been eroding some of it, ignoring big chunks of the rest, and it never was intended to apply to huge swaths of the population, I don’t understand why anyone venerates it at all.
The difference between the constitution and toilet paper is that the constitution is not septic tank safe.
I love it! It was a coincidence, my Sunday Facepalm being about the constitution, I had no idea this was a federal holiday, saw it on Twitter, and looked it up. Sure enough, it’s another flag wavin’ holiday, yeehaw and all that shit. Fuck constitution worship, it’s a poison on the land.
Caine@#1:
Fuck constitution worship, it’s a poison on the land.
I usually don’t talk to constitution worshippers, but when I do, I try to lure them down the path that it’s the “social contract” with America and then I point out that it was voided from the get-go. It’s weird to me how many of the authoritarian-leaning nationalists are just a hop away from anarcho-nihilists – they just don’t realize it. “Uh,” says Gomer, “the social contract is the constitution!” Yeah, so when the government starts shredding the constitution, is the state still legitimate?
Part of the patriotic “education” (read: indoctrination) I got at school was about worshipping constitution, which is supposedly sacred. That’s really detrimental, because as texts written more than a century ago constitutions are flawed. But somehow it’s still not OK to rewrite and update a constitution, because it’s presumably sacred. It doesn’t matter than constitutions say nothing about some “modern” issues (minority rights, digital communications etc.). Or that there have been some technological advances (for example, guns are a lot more deadly nowadays).
Worshipping a constitution simultaneously makes it also a lot simpler to “interpret” (read: ignore). That point about church and state separation? Well, it’s somehow still OK to teach Christianity in public schools. (Latvian constitution says that “the church and the state are separated”, it doesn’t say that “the church is separated from state owned schools”.) We get people arguing about what some sentence in the constitution means and whether it allows or bans X. Instead we should be arguing about whether X is good or bad, and update constitution’s text when appropriate.
I usually don’t talk to constitution worshippers, but when I do, I try to lure them down the path that it’s the “social contract” with America and then I point out that it was voided from the get-go.
I would argue that the contract never existed in the first place. I hate the social contract argument. In debate tournaments I have often debated against debaters from another debate club, where they always spam the social contract argument. They want to argue that some person has such-and-such a legal right. Or maybe such-and-such an obligation. Why? Because: social contract. For some weird reason the terms of the social contract (that nobody has ever seen or signed) include exactly whatever a debater needs to prove. I have seen the social contract argument used to defend pretty much anything (and that includes a number of mutually exclusive ideas). How can there be a contract when people are unable to agree upon the terms of the contract?
@Ieva Skrebele
With police, of course.
I try to read the Constitution on the 4th of July. I reminds me what a bunch of subversive radicals those founding people were.