Well it was certainly an eventful day on the ol' Brexit front today.
The government lost control of the legislative agenda when 27 members of their own party including several former senior cabinet members voted against them and their House of Commons majority of 1 was wiped out when during the Prime Minister's speech to the House, one of their MP's stood up and crossed the chamber and sat on the opposition benches signalling his resignation and defection from the Tory party.
Originally posted by jaden_2.0
Well it was certainly an eventful day on the ol' Brexit front today.The government lost control of the legislative agenda when 27 members of their own party including several former senior cabinet members voted against them and their House of Commons majority of 1 was wiped out when during the Prime Minister's speech to the House, one of their MP's stood up and crossed the chamber and sat on the opposition benches signalling his resignation and defection from the Tory party.
There are people watching it like the ****ing olympics, wondering what will happen next. It's mental.
Originally posted by Putinbot1
Did you see Boris's dads comment on the Irish?
I didn't. I had heard that comments were made, I just didn't read up further than that.
Ha, what about the lies told to get that vote.
Originally posted by Putinbot1
Ha, what about the lies told to get that vote.
I believe that has been the cost of democracies for decades (at the minimum,) lies are told and people have to sort it out. If the purpose is to undermine the value of your democracy because you don't like the outcome we all know what that is.........
Originally posted by snowdragon
I believe that has been the cost of democracies for decades (at the minimum,) lies are told and people have to sort it out. If the purpose is to undermine the value of your democracy because you don't like the outcome we all know what that is.........
If only people would agree on a moral framework. They would be less likely to lie, if there was a social stigma against lying that had some teeth to it (Ostracized by peers, lynched by mobs..)
For all the propaganda against how bad the golden days were of religion and white supremacy, there were also the positives of the general public and the elites self policing morality.
Even gangsters didn't tolerate one of their own cheating on their wife, or leaving widows and their kids to fend for themselves.
Originally posted by snowdragonNo doubt, the Brexit lies have shaken many peoples faith in British Democracy
I believe that has been the cost of democracies for decades (at the minimum,) lies are told and people have to sort it out. If the purpose is to undermine the value of your democracy because you don't like the outcome we all know what that is.........
Originally posted by Putinbot1
Ha, what about the lies told to get that vote.
Oh, you mean just like "the lies" told about Hillary Clinton supposedly by Russia to "sabotage" her "win" against Trump in 2016 election?
Yeah, you'd like a do-over for that one as well... right, sore loser?
I've heard many people on You Tube claiming that the remainers were the ones brainwashed which is why the vote was so close so, yeah... I take your claims with a really, really big grain of salt, as always.
You lefties are such a bunch of crybaby sore losers.
When elections don't go your way, just blame russia...blame "racist" old white men... anything to manage your epic-level butthurt, eh? smh. 👇 ❌
What would Ben Franklin say about Brexit? Everyone knows Ben Franklin's famous words about trading security for liberty.
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MISCELLANEOUS
What Ben Franklin Really Said
By Benjamin Wittes Friday, July 15, 2011, 6:53 AM
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The article I was writing when I posted this two years ago is available here.
Here's an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all.
I started looking into this quotation because I am writing a frontal attack on the idea that liberty and security exist in some kind of "balance" with one another--and the quotation is kind of iconic to the balance thesis. Indeed, Franklin's are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship. A version of them is engraved on the Statue of Liberty. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten ever to upset. Every student of American history knows them. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government--that we empower governments to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run.
Very few people who quote these words, however, have any idea where they come from or what Franklin was really saying when he wrote them. That's not altogether surprising, since they are far more often quoted than explained, and the context in which they arose was a political battle of limited resonance to modern readers. Many of Franklin's biographers don't quote them at all, and no text I have found attempts seriously to explain them in context. The result is to get to the bottom of what they meant to Franklin, one has to dig into sources from the 1750s, with the secondary biographical literature giving only a framework guide to the dispute. I'm still nailing down the details, but I can say with certainty at this stage that Franklin was not saying anything like what we quote his words to suggest.
The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.
What's more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes--and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier--as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance--and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
Topics: Miscellaneous
Benjamin Wittes
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
@benjaminwittes
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