Re: bike light optics

On 4/8/2024 4:53 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 4/8/2024 10:42 AM, Zen Cycle wrote:

On 4/7/2024 5:11 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 4/7/2024 3:35 PM, zen cycle wrote:

On 4/7/2024 1:26 PM, AMuzi wrote:

On 4/7/2024 11:54 AM, Catrike Ryder wrote:

On Sun, 7 Apr 2024 12:25:03 -0400, zen cycle
<funkmasterxx@hotmail.com> wrote:
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bullshit. Constitutional originalists  - those claiming _such_ things as
"original Constitution had a better ethos" come up empty when reminded
that racism and misogyny were quite literally written into the original
version. Sure, when asked about the 3/5ths compromise they say 'oh,
yeah, except for that', then when asked about giving women the right to
vote they say 'oh, yeah, except for that'.

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Only fools believe the 3/5th compromise was a racist thing.  What it
was an attempt by the non-slave states to reduce the politcal power of
the slave holding states, who wanted to count all the slaves.
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Yeah, the slave states wanted to count them all.

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Exactly, as anyone who has read in the period knows.

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Maybe you should try reading in the period then.
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from The Federalist papers, #54
"The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied, that these are the proper criterion; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property, that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted, that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants."
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yeah....that's not about race at all.
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You should know better than to follow the lead of a willfully ignorant dumbass.
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Ditto Hammurabi's 'An eye for an eye'. That was not a call to mayhem but rather a groundbreaking call for mercy and limited reprisal.

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Thank you , yes I've read The Federalist a few times, years apart. It's always a good read and I must say generally underappreciated.
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Avoiding presentism, the issue at hand was a seemingly insurmountable barrier to union. Union being considered of exceptional even existential import, something was desperately needed to bring resolution.
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Nowhere on earth were slaves*, at that time or before, voting in general elections. Note that our Constitution even precedes William Wilberforce's eventually successful campaign in the British Empire.
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The distorted Southern economies relied on bondage (that reliance only increased after the Founding) but preferred to count 'all persons' for Congressional seats.  The Southern leaders had probably never heard of an irony meter but if there was one it would shoot off the end at that proposition.
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For both economic but also moral reasons the northern states did not generally allow bondage (Pennsylvania formally outlawed it in 1780, well before our Constitution, before Wilberforce, before anywhere else on earth AFAIK.) and were firm on not bumping the number of Southern representatives in the Congress.
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Even before the now mostly misunderstood 3/5 rule, several of the Framers including Jefferson privately wrote that the practice would necessarily have to end, albeit as St. Augustine pleaded, "not yet".
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p.s. Although the general practice in the Americas at that time was of black slavery, there were black freemen (including early patriot fatality Crispus Attucks) and there were not-black slaves. Still, I agree with you that this was and is inherently race tainted to our greater loss, then and now. It is also critically viewed as a rift between universal liberty and its selective denial, a fundamental conflict then and now, here and everywhere. Humans are imperfect but the Framers set up a system incontrovertibly aligned to destroy the chattel system well before anyone else on earth had considered it.

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?...As far as I know, international African slave trade and the practice of holding african slaves was generally banned by every nation which had practiced it well before the US did, while the US not only maintained slavery as an institution, but passed at least two laws - fugitive slave acts - as late as 1850 that reinforced the institution. Further to that, the Fugitive Slave acts were abused by domestic slave traders such that free blacks - either emancipated or born free - were abducted and sold into slavery in the south.
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"The historian Carol Wilson documented 300 such cases in Freedom at Risk (1994) and estimated there were likely thousands of others"
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https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Risk-Kidnapping-America-1780-1865/dp/0813192978
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Then there's Solomon Northrup:
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"born free around 1808 to Mintus Northup and his wife in Essex County, New York state.....In 1841, Northup was tricked into going to Washington, DC, where slavery was legal. He was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, and he was held as a slave in Louisiana for 12 years. One of the very few to regain freedom under such circumstances, he later sued the slave traders involved in Washington, DC. Its law prohibited Northup from testifying against the white men because he was black and so he lost the case."
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Northrup published his Memoir "12 Years a Slave"on the experience.
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  Then

2 generations later the nation sacrificed 3/4 million of her citizens to end it. Not the first instance on earth, but early to the change.
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*Of all descriptions, none in greater numbers at that time than the mostly Balkan/Slavic slaves within the Caliphate.

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 And of the American sailors enslaved by the Barbary moslems, many were killed, half the survivors were castrated. History, ours and everyone's, is full of violence injustice and general savagery.  Who could dispute that?

Was enslavement of american sailors by the Barbary muslims set up as _legal_ international trade scheme where governments of nations involved sanctioned and protect the trade? Were the laws where the slaves were traded set up to protect the slave owners and sanction the sale of humans?
Conflating international piracy with a legally sanctioned and protected slave trade is a desperate grasp at rationalizing the practice - an extreme case of "whataboutism".
The point is that you claimed the US lead the way via
"the Framers set up a system incontrovertibly aligned to destroy the chattel system well before anyone else on earth had considered it."
which is unequivocally wrong and completely indefensible. The Europeans - who admittedly started the african slave trade - banned the trade and ownership of slaves _well_ before the US even considered it as a national policy, and the US went so far as to protect the domestic slave trade and ownership _after_ international trade and slave ownership was banned by passing _federal_ legislation doing just that including language implicitly sanctioning slavery in our constitution.
The US held onto the barbaric practice long after other nations banned it, and literally fought a civil war over the issue. And yes, protecting the institution of slavery and allowing the practice during westward expansion were the main drivers of the civil war, regardless of how the magatard "historians" wish to rewrite history and call it "states rights issues" (I can hear our floriduh dumbass parroting right wing drivel now).
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