Wishing you all a geeky American Independence Day!

[darksumomo]

While I'm not the first on my flist to observe the day on LJ (underlankers and nebris both beat me to it here, I might have been the first on my flist to celebrate it somewhere on the web, as I posted Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (July 4th 2010 edition) on Daily Kos last night at 12:16 AM EDT. Here is the portion I posted that is relevant to tonight's

Comments

[etrangere]

that's pretty neat.

The revisions of Thomas Jefferson

[anonymous]

What a great article! It was especially enlightening after watching the move "1776." Thanks for the post!

[underlankers]

Y'know, it's worth reflecting that the Founders were the first revolutionary movement to have ever really succeeded in overturning an established order. They lost the fervor by comparison to others for the same reason that Bolshevism, the major revolutionary force of the 1920s looked like a bunch of pussies next to the Khmer Rouge. Ironically the most radical revolution of the Age of the Founders was neither US nor French but the Haitian one.

The deeper problem of course is that the first revolutionary movement is also the most tenuous as it will tend to lack backing of other similar states by virtue of being the first of its kind. Of course it is possible as in the case of Iran to be the first but to have the second be a related but entirely incompatible movement. Though given the close timing of the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War and the March on Rome you could argue that applied to Communism and Fascism.....

[underlankers]

Though I will note that Jefferson earns the deepest and bitterest hate-on for me of all the Founders.