birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.

[Forty Two]

http://m.tvnz.co.nz/news/world/6339494

Some Merkins like to think they brought in the birth of human liberty. Not so. The beginnings of the freedoms we enjoy today were with Magna Carta in Britain, and especially with the habeas corpus principle, which prevented the king or other authorities taking control of individuals as 'punishment' without charge or trial.

Further human liberties grew from that most important beginning, and spread to other nations. But it all began in Britain 800 years ago.

Very true. Some Americans do think that Americans originated the concept of human liberty, but of course, in the 18th century the colonial Americans WERE British. English guys like Hobbes and Locke, Ashley-Cooper, etc. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Scots. Voltaire credited the Scots for originating the ideas that the French Enlightenment thinkers looked to - Adam Smith -- David Hume (who could outconsume Schopenhauer and Schlegel, of course).

The "American" notion of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness was derived by Thomas Jefferson from the Lockian concept of Life, Liberty and Property being inherent rights of man.

Understand, though, that some Americans also understand history. The American concept of freedom and liberty is a quintessentially British one, stemming back to Roman times, when Britain was engaged in a nearly constant struggle for freedom and liberty. Boudicca's rebellion against the Romans as far back as the 1st century CE and such.

Magna Carta is a documentary forerunner/ancestor of the American Declaration of Independence. Liberty owes a lot to Magna Carta.

[Hermit]

Still, you've got to start somewhere.

Why not start with Solon c. 638 – c. 558 BC whose ideas were implemented in Athens by Pericles (c. 495 – 429 BC)? Last time I looked Greece is located in the west both from a geographic and a cultural point of view, and as such its "golden age" is the original source of "the freedoms we enjoy today".

[pErvinalia]

I think you'll find that slugs from the triassic period are responsible for the freedoms we enjoy today, Hermit.

[Hermit]

I think you'll find that slugs from the triassic period are responsible for the freedoms we enjoy today, Hermit.

You have not read The Histories by Herodotus, have you? In Book I (Clio), Chapter 65 he relates how Lycurgus, the guardian of his nephew Leobetes, the Spartan king, imported the constitution of the Cretans and used it to replace Sparta's existing one. Crete was the cradle of civilisation when the slugs finally started to develop social systems in the cretaceous era (hence the name of the island). That the development of civilisation should have taken this long is of course entirely unsurprising. Slugs are, after all, famous for being, well, for being sluggish. Nevertheless, this was of course an achievement of global significance that still keeps reverberating millions of years later, but as you can see by the record of the Spartans (see Herodotus again), the freedoms we have come to enjoy today are absent there.

[cronus]

No one enjoys the idea that it was a Englishman who invented freedom, and speaking as a Englishman neither do I.

[Brian Peacock]

I for one accept and endorse whatever freedoms and liberties our true alien overlord think are best for our safety and well-belng.

[Svartalf]

How can you, a good Saxon, so sell out to the Norman?

[Seth]

http://m.tvnz.co.nz/news/world/6339494

Some Merkins like to think they brought in the birth of human liberty. Not so. The beginnings of the freedoms we enjoy today were with Magna Carta in Britain, and especially with the habeas corpus principle, which prevented the king or other authorities taking control of individuals as 'punishment' without charge or trial.

Further human liberties grew from that most important beginning, and spread to other nations. But it all began in Britain 800 years ago.

Actually, we 'Merkins built the first effective system of defending human liberty on the foundation of the Magna Carta and it's principles. We looked at what went wrong with the enforcement of the "Rights of Englishmen" in the Magna Carta and resolved not to embed those flaws in our founding documents. Some of the principle philosophies we enshrined because of the failure of the Magna Carta to control despotism and tyranny were freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and the right to keep and bear arms. The latter was ostensibly part of the "Rights of Englishmen" that was never effectively enforced because it was not considered to be a fundamental human right, but rather a permission of the sovereign, which of course the sovereign revoked at will literally before the ink was dry on the signatures.

There's no dispute that it was born in Britain, but there's also no dispute that it was murdered in its infancy in Britain.

[Blind groper]

Bearing in mind that, in the USA after independence, only 8% of the population were permitted to vote, and that slavery was massive for almost another century, civil rights for blacks minimal for a further century after that, and women not given the vote till 1920, I think that Seth's claims are rather on thin ice.

[Hermit]

Yabbut facts have never bothered Seth none.

[Seth]

Bearing in mind that, in the USA after independence, only 8% of the population were permitted to vote, and that slavery was massive for almost another century, civil rights for blacks minimal for a further century after that, and women not given the vote till 1920, I think that Seth's claims are rather on thin ice.

Not really. It's the results that matter.

[Blind groper]

Not really. It's the results that matter.

The results for the 200 years after independence were crap. Even today, I would suggest that my country is more free than the USA. Our racial minorities do not get shot by police for no reason.

[Brian Peacock]

Not really. It's the results that matter.

The results for the 200 years after independence were crap. Even today, I would suggest that my country is more free than the USA. Our racial minorities do not get shot by police for no reason.

Indeed. But the reason minorities get shot 'for no reason' by the police in the US is for the reason that a police officer cannot reasonably assume that the minority individual concerned is not themselves bearing arms - a problem that generally does not arise within a disarmed population. And if one assumes that any member of the population has the potential to deploy lethal force against a police officer then it seems only 'reasonable' for the officer to employ lethal force first, to protect life, or whatever. Add that to the fact that to a large extent the Black man is demonised in the US and you have a recipe for, well, shooting minorities for no reason, which somewhat impinges blanket claims that the nation represents the normatives of freedom and liberty to which all other nations should aspire.

[cronus]

America with its large borders would quickly succumb to foreign gnu imports smugglers if government banned guns. The USA? It is a artificial entity envisaged and planned by elites from above. A slave farm and its religion a slave religion. The natural borders that decide natural human power relations with one another and the land are not to be seen in America. It is a far less densely populated nation than the UK yet violence is ingrained in the culture. Why? Because their version of 'freedom' is pretense. It be shouted loudly across the world because they need to convince themselves their state and city borders are not actually prison cells. It is not a prison planet, in the way it is a prison nation. And owning guns - another way of shouting freedom in a meaningless way - means nothing when the government owns bigger guns, and more guns.

Jade Helm 15 * Ebola = Shit-storm 16

[Seth]

Not really. It's the results that matter.

The results for the 200 years after independence were crap. Even today, I would suggest that my country is more free than the USA. Our racial minorities do not get shot by police for no reason.

Neither do ours, usually.