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> For the better part of US history, there was almost no Constitutional check on state police power Yeah, that was a mistake which was corrected. You could ju
by jlgreco 14y ago
> For the better part of US history, there was almost no Constitutional check on state police power
Yeah, that was a mistake which was corrected.
You could just as easily say that democracy doesn't necessitate allowing all people to vote regardless of skin pigmentation, since at one point we had not yet recognized that it in fact does.
- rayiner 14y agoMy point is that we had a functioning democracy for a century before we decided everyone had ferderal due process rights against state police power.
- jlgreco 14y agoMy point is that I don't accept your definition of "functioning". Was the democracy functioning when only men were permitted to vote? I say not.
- saraid216 14y agoThen define "functioning" positively. I'm kinda curious to see what you come up with.
- jlgreco 14y agoFrankly just something that is a democracy at all. An elite ruling class that votes on things doesn't cut it for me, maybe it does for you.
- saraid216 14y agoI realize you have preferences. I, too, wish the world were as perfect as I imagine it could be. But that doesn't actually provide any ground on which we can communicate and build from.
- jlgreco 14y agoYou only have to compromise your definition of democracy if you are starting from the assumption that we must necessarily be included in that definition. In normal conversation untainted by prejudices of patriotism we are perfectly capable of using terminology that represents a state never realized in reality.
- saraid216 14y ago"I don't know" would have been acceptably mature response, but hey, I can appreciate bland rhetoric, too.
- jlgreco 14y agoBland rhetoric? You are just accusing me of redefining a word beyond usefulness for refusing to compromise standards for the sake of historic revisionism. How is "I don't know" even a response to what you wrote? You didn't ask a question...
- saraid216 14y agoI asked you what a functioning democracy was. You said it's any democracy at all. And then you dropped a bunch of irrelevant drivel about patriotism because it furthered the pedantic argument you had with rayiner. You never answered the question. Indeed, you refused to answer it.