Birthright citizenship ain’t in the Constitution! I’m issuing an EO ending it! Well, of course it’s in the Constitution: The 14th Amendment Section One reads (the Wiki):
‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’
But of course a cadré of legal beagles of similar stripe say, as with this Oct. 31 Amerikan Thinker op-ed by Daniel John Sobieski: ‘Ending Birthright Citizenship’ (a few outtakes, and I ♥ the ad about medical hemp oil being legal now):
“History, as the saying goes, is a lie agreed upon, and there has perhaps been no bigger lie detrimental to the future national security and economic well-being of the United States that the 14th Amendment, clearly written to protect the rights of African-American slaves liberated by the first Republican President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, somehow confers citizenship on the offspring of anybody whose (sic) pregnant and can sneak past the U.S. Border Patrol.
[Actually, Daniel John Sobieski, they say that ‘history belongs to the victor’.]
“U.S. citizenship is rendered meaningless if it is defined as an accident of geography and it is the clear that this was not the intention authors of those who wrote the 14th Amendment and shepherded it into the Constitution. President Trump has rightly targeted birthright citizenship as an historical error that needs to be corrected.”
This is the leg they’re standing on as to buttress their arguments:
“Michael Anton, a former national security adviser for Trump, pointed out in July that “there’s a clause in the middle of the amendment that people ignore or they misinterpret – subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
“What they are saying is, if you are born on U.S. soil subject to the jurisdiction of the United States – meaning you’re the child of citizens or the child of legal immigrants, then you are entitled to citizenship,” Anton told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in July. “If you are here illegally, if you owe allegiance to a foreign nation, if you’re the citizen of a foreign country, that clause does not apply to you.”
“Anton is stunningly correct and clearly echoes the sentiments and legislative intent of the authors of the 14th Amendment. The only question is whether this historical error is better corrected though a clarifying amendment, legislation, or through a Trump executive order. GOP Rep. Steve King, R-IA, has proposed legislation:
In January of this year, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) proposed the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2015 (HR 140) that seeks to amend current law by making requirements for citizenship more narrow, and, in King’s opinion, more constitutional…”, including:
‘And subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ So once the practice began, it grew out of proportion and today between 340,000 and 750,000 babies are born in America each year that get automatic citizenship even though both parents are illegal immigrants. That has got to stop.”…
He quotes other Constitutional Scholars, including some who’d testified before the House Judiciary Committee in October, 2008, Herr Trump himself in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” what magnets Anchor Babies are for other illegals to enter (they didn’t say ‘this shithole country of ours’) etc. Their conclusions are that it may not in fact take a Constitutional Amendment to nullify it, just the courts interpreting it correctly, as the ‘framers’ had obviously intended it, or with ‘corrective legislation’. He winds up with this dilly:
“The current interpretation of birthright citizenship may in fact have been a huge mistake and given the burden illegal aliens have imposed on our welfare, educational, and health care systems as well as through increased crime on our legal system, a very costly one.”
In his Nov. 1, 2018 ‘The American oligarchy’s attack on birthright citizenship; All men are not created equal’, Eric London, wsws.org writes in part:
“With this move, the American oligarchy is repudiating the basic democratic principle upon which the American republic was founded, embodied in the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal.” If the American president can, by executive fiat, strike out the 14th Amendment, what is to stop him from overturning the entire Bill of Rights, which guarantees free speech, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, due process, and the right to counsel, among other fundamental protections?”
[Well, he has, other Presidents already have, but…moving on…]
“Trump’s proposal, which comes in the final days of the midterm election campaign, is a provocation by the administration and its fascist staffers aimed at whipping up xenophobic sentiments and creating a constituency for a right-wing extra-constitutional movement. Such a movement is deemed necessary to implement Trump’s pro-corporate, pro-war, anti-immigrant agenda.”
It would produce an underclass of immigrant families afraid to send their children to school, give birth in hospitals, or send their sick children to the doctor’s office. Millions of children would become stateless, lacking citizenship in any country. Slum districts and even walled ghettos with third world, apartheid conditions would become commonplace.
If applied retroactively, the rescission of birthright citizenship would reportedly place over 10 million people at immediate risk of deportation. Either way, the government will respond to the growth of the undocumented population with further moves toward martial law, including the construction of more detention camps and the deployment of more immigration agents and soldiers, not only to the border but to major metropolitan areas.
As the American Immigration Council wrote yesterday, the decision “would also impose hardship on all Americans, who could no longer point to a birth certificate as proof of citizenship. If place of birth no longer guaranteed citizenship, then all Americans—not just those whose parents were undocumented—would be forced to prove their parents’ nationality to the government in order to be recognized as a US citizen.”
London then notes that since the stolen election in 2000 and the endless ‘war on terror’, both parties have shredded the Bill of Rights. He writes that Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Sen. Claire McKaskill (D-M) support Trump on the issue.
Some write that both Bill Clinton and Harry Reid were of a similar opinion, but London wasn’t the only one to note that at a campaign stop for Ben Jealous, Bernie Sanders avoided the issue, even though he’s called the Prez a racist, xenophobe, so and so in the past. Jeb Bush had also campaigned on the issue.
The Washington Post (including videos) on Oct. 30 quoted even some Republicans (Rep Mike Coffman, as saying ‘whoa, Nellie; ya can’t do that’, and:
‘Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said Trump was engaged in “a transparent and blatantly unconstitutional attempt to sow division and fan the flames of anti-immigrant hatred in the days ahead of the midterms.”
Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that birthright citizenship IS enshrined in the Constitution, and he can’t change it with an EO, plus:
“Ryan also said that Republicans did not like it when President Barack Obama changed immigration policy by executive action and that altering the Constitution would be a lengthy process.”
I assume he’s referencing O’s quasi-con ‘Dream Act’. And yes, Obomba’s been shouting from the rooftops against this evil ploy, but to me it all rings hollow in the face of his massive anti-immigrant moves, including deporting millions, caging many (including families) on concrete floors with space blankets as bedding.
The Wapo piece had also included that Boss Tweet was wrong about Amerika being the only nation to have Birthright Citizen language:
“NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration, has compiled a list that shows 33 nations grant citizenship to anyone born within their borders. The list includes Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and most other countries in Central and South America. The United States and Canada are the only two “developed” countries, as defined by the International Monetary Fund, that have unrestricted birthright citizenship laws.”
This isn’t NumbersUSA, but has similar information.
From Kevin Alexander Gray’s (author of Killing Trayvons) November 2, 2018, counterpunch.org: ‘14th Amendment Nullification Threatens the Core of Citizenship’ (a few outtakes):
“When I was in the military in the 1970s, I heard two white soldiers talking on the rifle range. One soldier asked the other how he learned to shoot so well.
“I like shooting cans right off the fence,” the other soldier responded, adding: “Af-ri-cans, Puer-to-Ri-cans and Mex-i-cans.”
The comment came to mind when I heard Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., saying, “Birthright citizenship is a mistake,” and when he and his GOP cohorts started talking about immigrants having “anchor babies.”
“People come here to have babies,” said Graham. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called, ‘Drop and leave.’”
“Drop a child.” It’s as if he were talking about animals.
Graham says he’s considering introducing a bill to rescind Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
Section 1 does confer citizenship on anyone born in the United States. But that’s not all it does.
The second sentence of that section says: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any Also called the “due process” clause or the “equal protection” clause, this part of the 14th Amendment is the very foundation of U.S. civil rights law. The new nullifiers who talk of getting rid of Section 1 are signaling their larger purpose and are targeting all those they hold in contempt, like so many cans on the fence.
The Reconstruction-era amendment, finally adopted as part of the Constitution in 1868, ensured that former enslaved Africans and their children were U.S. citizens. Together with the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery, and the 15th, which prohibits the government from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude, the 14th Amendment is fundamental to the whole country’s long walk toward human rights and equality under the law.”
Gray reminds readers that the 1954 SCOTUS Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was based on the discriminatory nature of segregation in which white supremacy loomed large in the debates, as it does today. He further contends that opponents of the decision claimed that black children would be ‘threatening morality’ by people ‘unfit for the responsibilities of American citizenship’ is quite similar to Lindsay Graham’s slurs against immigrants ‘coming to drop a child’. And further, that tampering with the 14th Amendment would bring Amerika back to the 1857 days of Dred Scott, at its core ‘once a slave, always a slave; once undocumented, forever undocumented, down to one’s children and children’s children’.
Amen.
Bonus: speaking of due process: ‘Due Process; Lamenting the death of the rule of law in a country where it might have always been missing, Lewis H. Lapham (a teaser)
“Trump didn’t need briefing papers to refine the message. He embodied it live and in person, an unscripted and overweight canary flown from its gilded cage, telling it like it is when seen from the perch of the haves looking down on the birdseed of the have-nots. Had he time or patience for looking into books instead of mirrors, he could have sourced his wisdom to Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, who presented the case for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Not that it would have occurred to Trump to want both, but he might have been glad to know the Supreme Court had excused him from any further study under the heading of politics. In the world according to Trump—as it was in the worlds according to Ronald Reagan, George Bush elder and younger, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—the concentration of wealth is the good, the true, and the beautiful. Democracy is for losers.
The framers of the Constitution were of the same opinion. The prosperous and well-educated gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 shared with John Adams the suspicion that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization,” agreed with James Madison that the turbulent passions of the common man lead to reckless agitation for the abolition of debts and “other wicked projects.” With Plato the framers shared the assumption that the best government, under no matter what name or flag, incorporates the means by which a privileged few arrange the distribution of property and law for the less fortunate many. They envisioned a wise and just oligarchy—to which they gave the name of a republic—managed by men like themselves, to whom Madison attributed “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society.” Adams thought the great functions of state should be reserved for “the rich, the wellborn, and the able”; John Jay, chief justice for the Supreme Court, observed that “those who own the country ought to govern it.”
(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
as i was pasting this diary together, i was quite mindful of the fact that our adopted son is an anchor baby. his azteca birth mother gave birth to him at a midwifery clinic in el paso, knowing he’d be born as an amerikan citizen, and that he’d be adopted by parents who could provide the life for him that she knew she couldn’t afford.
she’d already had one exquisite daughter, delisia of the shining eyes, by the same soldier stationed in el paso who was our son’s biological father. and her we are. good night.
thanks for the lapham. I used to read him when he was editor at Harper’s.
yours truly called it to you in an email about throwing rocks. yes, Bill Maher, we are way more like Gaza than you think. is it only the non-citizens they can shoot for throwing rocks? how is a trigger happy soldier on edge for the future purity of his nation supposed to tell the difference? in a rock fight? “today, evil demonstrators against US policy deployed human shields to make US soldiers look bad for shooting kids throwing rocks. and it is part of the nefarious policy of children to store their weapons in proximity to other people, on the roads & in the fields. we will deal w/a child’s need for a hug in our shiny new tent cities.”) anyway, yes, I caught about 5 mins of B.M. the other night. he had the head of the ACLU on and some other libtarded losers. it was so funny how they danced quickly through certain things instead of just tiptoeing around them as always. like the idea that the US is Gaza. “We aren’t Gaza, are we???” asks B.M. well, let’s see how much time he gave to that thought.
and everything was how voting democrats will save us. so predictable, boring and stupid. it’s no longer hard to believe how blind & feckless the social democrats were at the rise of Hitler. maybe it was J St. C. this weekend at CP who pointed out that Pelosi has basically admitted that their “shrill rhetoric” is an electoral ploy. talking about Yemen or Trump’s and his family’s business deals is just politics. (but Russiagate is dead serious, dontcha know?) child camps don’t exist except as political juggling pins. so if the dems make some gains in the election, we’ll be back to the civility, comity, dignity, mendacity, duplicity and complicity we’ve come to expect from these asses.
anyway, I don’t know how much more i’m going to be involved in this public advocacy group I have done some volunteer work with, for reasons you, w.d., know about, but i’m going to suggest that instead of more public transportation for the disabled or section 8 housing stuff, we press for the great and greatly fracked and nuked and mined and lumberjacked state of WA to SECEDE. with a soviet yell, we cry Leave! Leave! Leave! in the midnight hour…(thanks Billy Idol.)
people need to be clear: burn the gov’t to the ground & salt the earth afterward. you can’t make peace with Alien. or Hydra. all you can do is kill it.
(btw, Juliania, w.d.’s comments about Plato’s politics are correct. his philosophy rationalizes oligarchy & is designed as a critique of Periclean Athens. and it is of course people who claim positively to not believe the bible who are quickest to understand some things about it, like, again, J St C’s dark joke about Pharaoh Trump tossing anchor babies in our Nile, the Rio Grande. very appropriate comparison. in the mythology of the story, the richest kingdom in the world kills the babes of the slaves who built that kingdom. who were also migrants. as someone else pointed out, w/o migrants labor, esp in agriculture, this country would be one hell of a lot “poorer.” so yeah, let’s kill the kids of the people who built this country. same as it ever was. and here we go again, back to Cronos devouring his children. you know ICE creates jobs right? jobs with benefits & money & lots of fresh air in the great outdoors. doing things like destroying water supplies left for migrants.)
welcome for the lapham; great art, too. i’d even considered doing a who diary for discussing it. the whole issue was on ‘the rule of law’, iirc. oddly, when i was searching for media for this on the café’s media pages, i’d stopped at a painting of cronus devouring his chirren. pretty grisly painting.
i like st. clair’s metaphor. and yes, over yonder had mentioned how bibi/idf the prez’s moves are on the border: accordian razor wire, drones, planes, snipers, and now local militias, a flash from the past.
yeah, from mahr’s ears to the gods: the dems will save us! i won’t unwind any of it, but ‘Democratic candidates praise Trump’s attacks on immigrants as troops arrive at the border’, Eric London,, wsws, 5 November 2018 (as well as elected Ds)
nice to read your great polemics, and i really will try to answer your emails at least semi-soon. best laid plans of mice and wimmens and all that rot…
from the book of Jacob, known in the English bible as James.
ch. 5 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned, you have killed the righteous [just] man; he does not resist you. (think Assange in that last bit. etc.)
yeah, that’s not even in Joel Osteen’s lectionary. epistle of straw, as Luther said. cuz it doesn’t easily cohere w/typical protestant otherworldly, capitalist, gnostic, disney b.s. like, you know, any other part of the bible, imho.
whoosh; how apropos, j. and grrrreat final paragraph.
re: assange. i’m very vexxxxed with consortium news, but needs must. this is terrifying: ‘Break-in Attempted at Embassy; Fears Raised of Abduction’, Joe Lauria, Consortium News
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Amurkkkan ego and super-ego in tatters and its id trembles in the wind.
Say, I believe my ancestors have long been citizens by accident of geography. Does this mean I’ll need fascist indoctrination to become a True Citizen?
Shite! Makes me regret being exodited by the Pharoah. At least their slavery lasted longtime.
my stars, aXe; who let you out of bedlam? i was thinkin’ about you just the other week. but help the old crone out: who’s the quote from?
great graphic, an almost familiar visage.
I’m only vacationing. Quote’s from Yellowbelly (Lincolshire) Maggie.
hay-ull; i blog from inside bedlam, but under a pseud. lord luv a duck, who’s yellowbelly maggie, pray tell? thatcher?
i tried to embed a cartoon image of first american indigenous watching a pilgrim babby with the speech bubble saying something about ‘anchor babbies’.
Well, here’s my two bits for what it is worth. I cannot ascribe to Plato any dogma, and certainly not one that supports oligarchy as you so definitively claim, dear j of 9, though the oligarchs, of course, do claim that. And to the critique of the founding fathers I will agree in part that the wealthy were they assuredly, but I was glad to see that another adjective was added, or at least a compound descriptive: well-educated. And I will strongly state that the wealthy part of the description is the accidental pejorative, and not the ‘well-educated.’ And that, dear folk wraps up all the non-approbriam inflicted upon mob rule. The bulk of the people in that day and age, the age of the founding fathers, were not well-educated.
There is no instinctively better condition for the wealthy in any age that should give to them the rule over the many, and Plato never advocates that. The hero of his dialogues, Socrates, and indeed he himself, both turn their attention upon the education of the youth without the acquirement of money – that’s what distinguishes Socrates. Barefoot in Athens. Not a sophist. And that’s why he earned devoted disciples in somewhat similar fashion to those of Christ. So, well-educated and well-meaning oligarchs? Maybe that’s needed to kickstart the process once it becomes corrupted. But oligarchy in and of itself isn’t the be-all and end-all. A well-educated populace is.
In my admittedly poverty-stricken judgement, today’s oligarchs do not have, and would not be described by Plato as having a good education. In fact, the poor probably have a far better one, having escaped the propaganda mills to a certain extent and being exposed as Socrates was to the education of the streets. It’s not incidental at all that he chooses in the Meno to demonstrate an obscure geometrical truth using a slave boy as pupil. Instead of ‘Let them eat cake’ (or desire to) I would offer ‘Let them eat books’ (and desire to.) That way lies real freedom. It’s in us, and it doesn’t take money to get there, as you yourself, j of 9, and you yourself, wendye, excellently epitomize.
You see, I agree with Bernard Suzanne, that the dialogues of Plato ought to be read as an entire construct on the idea of “What is a man?” – just as The Republic (Politeia) is about the virtuous soul of a man living in a polis or state, not about the different kinds of states and their pluses and minuses. They are being used, writ large, to describe him, even as they are ultimately proven inadequate to the task.
I think Plato was pointing out that there are potential problems with any state,(echoed by Franklin with his ‘if you can keep it’) since the building blocks, the people, are where it is at. Look at the end chapters of that dialogue and the impossibilities mount exponentially as far as the state is concerned. And of all his companions in the ‘race’, for Socrates only Glaucon remains standing. Why? Because, as a good student, he followed to the end. Which no student, burdened by the malice of debt, can do in our educational system today.
End of rant.
HA HA HA HA HA HA. Systems are only as strong as their weakest link, whomans? HA HA HA HA HA. That’s some conservative shite, comrade. Maysbe were we all robots, then any system would be fine, because a) it’d be followed to the statement and b) nobody’d half a contrary opinion! Maysbe an aristocrat would even say, you’se all should be robots cause you donknow better and it’d make our jobs easier. S’only cause you’se ain’t robots that our systems keep getting fucked.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
If’n that’s the essence of Platon, well, you done demonstrated how miserable his philosophy wert.
as i said on the bolsonaro thread, if you have nothing substantive to add to the conversation, and choose the low road of mockery, please skedaddle. i can’t even tell WTH you’re trying to say to juliania with your half-hillbilly dialect.
it’s not necessary to reduce all of Plato to his political considerations but I think the assessment quoted by w.d. is correct. and it is vital to consider whether abstract considerations of epistemology, etc., may not be so abstract after all. in any case, part of the problem is the distinction b/n Socrates the historical figure (esp & above all else, in the Apology) & Socrates the Platonic mouthpiece. in the Crito, Socrates rationalizes submission to the state in what is nothing but ethical sophistry & inconsistent w/the Socrates of the Apology. The metaphysics of the Phaedo come limping along to help justify why “the mother” (Athens) can kill one of its sons, despite her son not committing any crime (sorry, that’s pretty screwed up. part of the reason for the modern association of Platonism with authoritarianism, if not fascism.)
it’s b/c the ethos of resistance of the Apology has to nipped in the bud & allowed for only a truly “great souled” person. Socrates the person, the historical figure, is not a model to be imitated, except in his pursuit of abstract truths, aka “forms”.
but Aristotle seems uncertain whether women are “human beings,” lacking the fully developed logical part of the male. some of the mythologies & fantasies of his age, Plato rejects.
and even Plato’s most ardent detractors usually admire The Symposium and other things about Plato. but even there, intellectual love is the highest & the passions are for the rabble, who must be controlled. intellectual reproduction, cultural reproduction, is more important than mere animal reproduction. courage, the virtue of warfare, associated w/the heart, is also superior to the spiritual motion associated w/bowel movements, the passions, but inferior to mind. the state recapitulates the tripartite hierarchy of the soul, via oligarchy. and the forms…it doesn’t matter what capitalism is doing, it matters what it sounds like on paper. it all looks like this well-running, well-intentioned machine (if you throw enough obfuscatory verbal b.s. at it), in theory, just like Plato’s Republic. and that’s what matters, not what “the system” does, but rather claims to do, in the abstract.
the embodiment of the system in reality is the state bureaucracy. despite the brutal mockery of Dostoevski, Kierkegaard, Kafka, etc., of the system and system builders, they could not imagine at the time how richly it was deserved, what The Republic would look like when moved from the philosophy text book to the market, farm and courthouse in the industrial age. the “mental” class running everything means in reality lawyers & MBA’s & stock traders running everything, w/their thorough disdain of things the masses, the rabble do for a living, like farming. etc., etc.
in the Bible, the most common word for “mercy” means a bowel movement. not the mind’s mastery of formal truths, contemplative perception of formal “beauty,” but the unclinching of sphincters, the grasping, scheming anality of obsessive control, w/no freedom to feel at all, no sympathy.
the place of mercy is also the place of birth, the womb.
yeah, Plato has been a pretty pernicious influence.
i appreciate your rant, and will read it again later, but technically speaking, what j called my formulation about plato, was actually lewis lapham’s in the ‘teaser’ at the end of the OP.
on later edit: i should have mentioned that j of 9 might take some time to see your comment and respond, as he’s having a hella time being homeless in oly.
allow me to add that i’d featured in my teaser what i’d thought to be true, although i hadn’t read plato since i was 17, and had relied on snippets and lengthy quotes of others.
but additionally lapham had brought:
“The framers borrowed the words for their enterprise from the English philosopher John Locke, who had declared his seventeenth-century willingness “to join in society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name property.” Locke could not conceive of freedom established on anything other than property. Neither could the eighteenth-century framers of America’s Constitution. By the word liberty, they meant liberty for property, not liberty for persons, and by the end of the summer of 1787 the well-to-do gentlemen in Philadelphia had drafted a document hospitable to their acquisition of more property.
But unlike our present-day makers of money and law, the founders were not stupefied plutocrats. They knew how to read and write (in Latin or French, if not also in Greek), and they weren’t consumed by an all-consuming desire for wealth. From their reading of Plutarch, they understood that oligarchy was well-advised to furnish democracy with some measure of political power because the failure to do so was likely to lead to their being roasted on pitchforks. The costs of their living they adjusted to sober and practical use in preference to gaudy self-glorifying display.
Accepting of the fact that whereas democracy puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not, they designed a contrivance to accommodate the motions of the heart as well the movements of a market. The Constitution joined the life of an organism with the strength of a mechanism, offering as warranty of its worth the character of men capable of caring for such a thing as a res publica, attentively benign landlords presumably relieved of the necessity to cheat and steal and lie.”
this is lapham quarterly’s page on plato.
lord luv a duck, aXe; he was being ironic. chill out.