beat him by a month.
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?p=23615
Don't worry, Eric (and many, many others) made that joke long before now, too.
2: Maybe I'm too much of a constitutional literalist, but I think "3/5ths" is a noticeably superior joke to "3/4ths".
Yeah, that's not even the same joke. It's just a missed opportunity.
i prefer a semblance of numerical accuracy over making it easier for people to get the joke.
I like to think that the framers made the original joke.
"black people count as a fraction" is the whole joke!
Making it just "a fraction" and ignoring the 3/5 compromise is like picking up a penny instead of a briefcase full of hundreds.
If the founder had created the 3/4ths compromise, the Civil War wouldn't have started until 1871.
"I would have laughed at this joke, but it was so imprecise."
2: Nice blog, BTW. Hope the house thing works out better soon.
well, i wasn't ignoring it. i was counting on historically-literate people seeing my "3/4" and thinking "wait, wasn't it 3/5? oh... yeah, i get it, 3 out of 4 years have passed in Obama's current term! so clever, that cleek!"
(clearly, my joke has failed, so explaining it does no harm!)
anyway...
14. thanks. us too. nightmare.
15: Everyone got it, it's just the malign Scalia influence has infected them, so they insist on the original fraction.
That's the whole joke!!
No, that's 3/5 of the joke.
I know this is a joke, but these are the sorts of false accusations of racism that drive conservatives batty. I honestly believe that McConnell, and most people who support his position, would likely be taking the same stance against any Democratic president in the current national political environment under these circumstances. It has nothing to do with the fact that Obama is African American. (You could argue that Obama being African American is what caused the GOP to go completely insane, thereby creating the current national political environment, but that seems wrong. They've been sliding down this slope for decades.)
none of the excuses or justifications the GOP has come up with so far pass the laugh test, might as well go with the obvious one.
I still say it should be Man-hattansplaining. Reasonable people can differ on whether the first letter should be capitalized.
18: Racism so suffuses everything the Republican Party does that it's almost impossible to falsely accuse the party of racism.
Yes, Republicans would have done the same thing against any president who is sympathetic to minorities. So what?
Republicans would have done the same thing against any Democratic president, and not done the same thing against any Republican president, even if it was President Ben Carson. If you're going to go down this road on absolutely every issue, why not just refer to the parties as The Racists and The Anti-Racists.
The non-racist Republicans who are being tarred as racists but still want to obstruct any Obama appointment are the true 3/5s of a victim here.
Racists are 7/10 of nonracists.
22
There would have been no President Ben Carson just like there would never be a President Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio -- they have the wrong ethnicity to be taken seriously on a national level in the Republican party as it stands today and as it has stood since the 60s (and before, but so did the Democrats).
I don't know what it would mean for the party itself to be racist, but the last I checked, enough of them were racist that the party couldn't cobble up a majority to beat an honest-to-god racist in the primaries. If the question is "are the Republicans opposing Obama's nominee because Obama is a Democrat or because Obama is black?" the answer is "yes".
Both 22 and 28 seem right. The joke, though, is both kinda lame and minor historian malpractice, since it plays into the narrative that the problem was that the constitution defined a slave as ONLY 3/5 of a person when the whole point of the clause was to increase the power of Southern whites by counting people whom they controlled and who couldn't vote anyway as 3/5 of a voter. If the constitution had counted a slave as 1.5x of a citizen it would have been way worse, and at 0x it would have been better. I'm 100% sure that Rauchway knows that, as do most of you, but once you do the joke is even less funny and plays right into the wrong narrative.
The counterfactual 5/3 constitutional provision.
It occurred to me kind of recently that that was an incredibly perverse aspect of the 3/5 compromise, and then it occurred to me that the fact that that had just now occurred to me almost a decade outside of any history class either meant that I was a rube or that I had been failed by the educational system -- probably both.
31 is me, and I'm not sure why my browser keeps clipping my name off at the last second.
I think I knew it as a rote memory thing, but it hadn't occurred to me as a smarty-adult until reading it just now.
counting people whom they controlled and who couldn't vote anyway as 3/5 of a voter
3/5 of a person. 0/5 of a voter.
I wonder how it is that US history as taught in schools gets so mangled in our minds. I even had a great (and very politically liberal) US history teacher and very liberal parents (my dad *strongly encouraged* me to read Howard Zinn as a companion to my AP class) and somehow I hadn't thought about it properly until I was playing fetch with my dog a couple of months ago and thinking about how reactionary politicians use dirty political tricks to subvert the will of the public.
For me, understanding human nature in the context of politics is something that was too abstract for me, for a long time. I think I had to observe current events for a decade before I started to grasp what people are like, in power. Before that they were like Star Wars figurines making up annoyingly complicated plots.
Math is so much more straight-forward.
I guess it takes while for people to start expecting to be systemically deceived/misled about important things without being completely paranoid. I'm not sure I have the "without being completely paranoid" part worked out yet, either.
Most women* couldn't vote but counted as whole persons for apportionment.
*Propertied New Jersey widows, represent!
Most women* couldn't vote but counted as whole persons for apportionment.
5/5 of a person. 0/5 of a voter.
29 is 6/3 ridiculous. All you need for the joke to work is to have had whitey assigning fractions of humanhood to non-whitey.
Aside from footnoting that some women could vote*, did I write anything contrdicting 41, dear bold-typefaced urple?
*Later the right was taken away.
5/5 and 0/5 should be converted into decimals.
43: I wasn't disagreeing with you, I was just converting your comment into a more standard format. The standard was established in comment 34.
Ah, well then we should apply it to children too. All non-voters, but whole persons.
(You could argue that Obama being African American is what caused the GOP to go completely insane, thereby creating the current national political environment, but that seems wrong. They've been sliding down this slope for decades.)
A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality.
Today this is an issue in regards to prisoners. Do non-voting felons count towards the population count of the district where they are incarcerated?
I think non-voting felons mostly count toward the day they get out.
51 is exactly right. Almost sure they do count.
53 is exactly right. 51 wasn't sure.
http://prospect.org/article/making-prisoners-count
making-prisoners-count
Common Core?
55: Yes, we knew there was a crisis in math education, when our prisoners weren't even able to count down towards the day of their release.
I used to think that people insisting that the way Republicans treated Obama was primarily racism must be people who weren't in America during the 1990s, but I've come around to the idea that they were basically correct. But how could that be, when Clinton was treated as illegitimate, just as Obama has been treated as illegitimate?
Then I remembered that Clinton won, what, 43% of the vote in '92? Whatever the number was, it was a not-insane reaction on the part of Republicans to feel that he wasn't, actually, a fully legit president*, and once you start from that premise, combined with a general sense that the Presidency was a Republican office (20 of 24 years before Obama), the way they treated him is explicable.
By contrast, Obama won as close as you can to a landslide these days, and even a lot of non-elected Republicans said good things about him between Election Day and Inauguration. He wasn't a demagogue, he talked about unity and bipartisanship, he was dignified (no Bubba he), he was free of personal scandal... and they treated him like dirt. The contempt comes from the color of his skin, not the letter beside his name.
*not that it was reasonable, honest, or fair--he won according to the rules, and the idea that Perot voters were primarily Bush voters was always dumb. But it was a less insane belief than e.g. Obama wasn't born in America
57: fortunately we've got a natural experiement coming up that should help resolve this question. I guess you are predicting that Clinton will be treated respectfully by the Republican Party? (Or is your prediction that she will also be treated like shit, but that her treatment will be due solely to sexism rather than racism (and again nothing to do with the letter beside her name)?)
57: I think the difference isn't that some portion of the Republican Party now hates Obama more than some portion of the Republican Party hated Clinton back in the 90s. Or for different reasons. It's that what used to be a portion of the Republican Party that a majority of the Republican Party itself thought had to be kept in control has taken over the whole Republican Party to the point that you can't be a Republican and not treat Obama with contempt.
And I think racism made that shift much easier.
sure, there's going to be a baseline level of partisan opposition to any Democrat. but just look at the number of "GOP chairmen" busted for sending racist email about Obama. there's a strong and widespread racist current in the GOP and a lot of it is focused on Obama personally.
maybe it's increasing the level of opposition. or, maybe it's replacing some of that partisan opposition - instead of good old, "I hate him because he's a Democrat!" maybe there's some "I hate him because he's a n***** !" or a mixture.
37: Yes, I was the same. I really want politics to be an expression of grand theories, not petty humans.
The most disillusioning part is accepting the "you're born on a team" narrative, instead of pretending that voters rationally pick a party. But it's true that not many people with Methodist parents are Taoist and vice versa...