The Tea Party sees Thanksgiving as a morality tale about finding salvation in Capitalism. The Pilgrims were failed Socialists who turned to Capitalism for survival. Only after foregoing communal ownership of property and allowing private ownership did the colony prosper. (Communism could also have been used, but socialism is the bogey meme du jour.)
The actual historical details are much more interesting than the Tea Party myth.
The Pilgrims formed a start-up and the Merchants and Adventurers of London were their venture capitalists. The Merchants would put up the cash for the supplies and the trip to the New World and the colonists would put up the labor. They signed a seven-year contract in which all land, livestock, lumber, furs, and other trade goods were held in partnership. At the end of the seven year period, the company was to be dissolved and the assets distributed. The Pilgrims were more like shareholders in a corporation than socialists.
Interestingly, only one Pilgrim died on the 66-day voyage. This is attributed to the fact that the Mayflower had never carried passengers, she was a “sweet ship.” Seepage from previous wine cargos had impregnated the ship’s timbers and acted like a disinfectant.
The Mayflower landed in November of 1620 and the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. The colony’s governor, William Bradford, abolished the communal land arrangement and gave each household a parcel of land, in 1623. It seems unlikely that a colony in the grips of a famine, caused by evils of communal property ownership, would host a three-day feast. The prospects of a famine would come the following year with a devastating summer drought and the seasonal migration of fish and fowl.
Agriculture did become more profitable in following years, in part due to improved cultivation techniques of corn, a crop for which the colonists had no experience, and in part due to the increase in each individual’s exertion on their privately held land.
Two attempts to make payments to the investors were met with pirates, who captured the ships bringing back furs and timber. The investors, fearing a total loss of their investment, settled with the Pilgrims for £1800 after an investment of nearly £7000.
H/T: NY Times, New American, Dictionary of American History.
-David Drumm (Nal)
Elaine This guy is worse than Barton. Oh well, as someone on this blog said we will be moving to the left after the republicans takeover.
No need to fear climate change/global warming. God will take care of the earth until HE decides it’s time for the end of time–just ask John Shimkus, R-Illinois.
From Salon (11/9/2010)
And God said to Noah: Don’t fret about global warming
A Republican seeking to chair the House Energy committee explains why devastating climate is impossible
By Andrew Leonard
http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2010/11/09/john_shimkus_god_and_noah
Excerpt:
Back in March 2009, when Nancy Pelosi ruled the House of Representatives with an iron fist, one could chuckle at Republicans who came to committee hearings quoting scripture as the rationale for their positions on energy policy.
But now, when one of those very same Republicans is in the running for the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce committee, it just doesn’t seem so funny.
Juan Cole does us the unpleasant service of bringing back to life the comments of John Shimkus, R-Ill., a year and a half ago.
Shimkus starts by quoting Genesis 8, Verses 21 and 22, in which God makes Noah a promise.
Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though all inclinations of his heart are evil from childhood and never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.
As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.
Shimkus continues: “I believe that is the infallible word of god, and that’s the way it is going to be for his creation… The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.”
Bob,
“yet every [one] has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself”
The idea that certain rights are inalienable from the person isn’t a synthetic judgment. It’s analytical if one accepts the proposition that all men are created equal. Being that equality is a primary founding principle of the country in question, that is not beyond the bounds of Kant’s definition of analysis as opposed to synthesis. That your rights end where they infringe upon the rights of others is a natural extrapolation from that analysis. Self-determination is, as Kant says, the right to the property of the self. It is not a natural consequence that property of self correlates to chattel ownership of objects separate from the being. All may be one in a philosophical sense, but you are not your car, nor is your mother.
No offense to your mom, but I can’t resist a Jerry Van Dyke reference.
Here’s another paper, from 2003, regarding the CO2 lag:
Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III
Bdaman:
Yes it is. It was predicted by Lorius et al. 20 years ago.
In this paper from 2001:
In this paper from 1999:
Buddha,
If you insist on inserting Kant into this, the derivation of the inalienable right of self ownership and all its attendant sticks in the bundle can be arrived at analytically from the following:
“Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every [one] has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.”
“AS usurpation is the exercise of power, which another hath a right to; so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to.”
Re: the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments:
http://arts.cuhk.edu.hk/cgi-bin/cprframe.pl?query=03intro.htm,048
But not under Kant, Bob. Or does the categorical imperative not mean as much to you as it once did?
Buddha: “Ownership of self (self determination) and ownership of chattel are not the same thing.”
Under the Lockean theory of property, the latter necessitates the former.
bdaman,
Mars once had open oceans. And it’s a funny thing about the carbon cycle – it can be unbalanced and broken just like any chemical system. Just like what happened on Mars and Venus. Equilibrium is not a guarantee. It is state dependent. Anthropogenic carbon production changes the state.
By the way, when you sequester carbon in H2O you end up with carbonic acid and its dissociation products, bicarbonate and carbonate ions. Life is pH sensitive. The more acidic you make the oceans, the more life you kill. When the phytoplankton is gone, the food web looses its primary base and a major producer of oxygen.
On the ground and in the air.
Nice, Buddha, thank you and you are correct. However comparing the three, Earth, Venus and Mars, the Earth has one thing that the other two don’t. A vast amount of H20.
bdaman,
Mars lost it’s oxygen through ablation. It has too small a mass, and ergo lesser gravity, and weak magnetic fields that made it incapable of supporting a denser atmosphere long term. The action of the solar winds, the weak gravity and the lack of a strong magnetic field to counter the solar winds keeps stripping down Mars’ atmosphere. The rate of ablation keeps Mars from developing significant enough density of CO2 to re-start the Greenhouse Effect.
Also, it gets colder the further you get from the sun. Who’d have thunk it!
Blah blah blah, troll.
Was that for me, oh yea thats right I’m an admitted one.
Still waiting
What about Mars?
It’s got all the CO2 in the world, and yet it’s a freezing hell.
tell us all about that!
The CO2 lag is well known, accepted, and understood in climate science.
No it’s not, the cry is the more CO2 is released the hotter the planet will get. The cry is to regulate CO2 to stop the planet from warming.
Capitalism, in the unfettered form you mean, is about one thing: individual greed. It is the kissing cousin of fascism.
Socialism was not the Southern model.
Socialism is by definition a system that segregates and controls certain market segments for the good of society and not the individual.
Your complete revisionist and lying, greed driven agenda aside.
The fact you’re too stupid or too greedy to realize that there are such a thing as human rights? Locke and Kant would disagree. They were a lot smarter than you.
As to the rest, Reagan’s Trickledown Bitch?
Blah blah blah, troll.
Bdaman:
The CO2 lag is well known, accepted, and understood in climate science. The CO2 lag creates a positive feedback system, temperatures go up, CO2 is released causing temperatures to go up.
GG you have to understand that Buddha is the all knowing, he didn’t pick that avatar unless he was.
So tell us Buddha rub your crystal ball.
What about Mars?
It’s got all the CO2 in the world, and yet it’s a freezing hell.
tell us all about that!
Why is Mars a freezing Hell, yet Venus is a roasting misery, what with all that CO2.
Please enlighten us oh great one
Testicles in a bind aka Xboxershorts:
“The major point, that Plymouth and Jamestown settlers came here to escape socialism, is a complete lie.”
I never said that, Jamestown was definitely a business venture. I don’t believe Stoessel or Limbaugh say they were trying to escape socialism, they are saying that when the property was distributed to each man to work for himself their lot in the new world improved.
Capitalism saved America before it was founded. I wonder if John Locke learned/was inspired by the pilgrim’s experience in the new world? Maybe so, considering he wasn’t born until 1632.
The left must lie to avoid the truth and further their ideology. Capitalism works, socialism doesn’t as ekeyra pointed out above. I would lie to if I knew my philosophy was as bankrupt as our government.
Buddha is Laughing:
the “simple troll” Bdaman (your words not mine) has cleaned your clock day in and day out on global warming. It must suck to be dumber and less informed than a “simple troll”.
Maybe you are the simple troll on this blog.
Nicely done Gipper. You took a small piece of the argument, repeated it completely out of context and extrapolate from that to assert the entire argument is invalid.
The major point, that Plymouth and Jamestown settlers came here to escape socialism, is a complete lie.
These settlers came to the new world on a business venture.
It is actually secondary that, without Squanto’s generosity, they would have died.
Stossel, Limbaugh and now Akin are actively working to rewrite history. They should not be allowed to publicly lie like this.