SNIP sorry your prize non-peered article is nothing more than worthless BS being pushed for a specific agenda ~ poorly at that if it didn't stand up to this individual's minimal scrutiny.
ipse
Oh, I dunno.
I didn't get the idea it was intended to be a scholarly article or footnoted white paper.
I'll use myself as an example. I make tons of posts referring to history--without citations. Am I dumb enough to expect people to believe them without citation just because of my incredible good looks, encyclopedic knowledge, unparalleled command of the facts, and bottomless humility? No. What I hope for is to jog something for the reader. If all I accomplish is a reader who says to himself, "Hmm. That's interesting. I'm going to file that away under "pending corroboration of Citizen by independent source"--if that is all I accomplish, great! The alternative would be to spend twice as long composing posts, citing sources, adding superscript numbers to direct the reader to the appropriate footnote, etc., etc. And, of course, there is then the whole question of whether I correctly followed one of the nine or twelve academically acceptable methods for formatting a citation.
I do agree with you on a certain level. For example, the "wall of separation" between church and state. Plenty of numbskulls try to apply this metaphor literally without knowing the full context (Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Assoc.). So, yeah. It would be
better if the blogger had made it a scholarly paper--no doubt whatsoever. On the other hand, the lack of citations--heck, even the fact that it is a blog post instead of a pdf of a white paper--tells readers that things are possibly skewed.
I do appreciate that you supplied the source material and straightened out the context. The only one I didn't have to research was the objections to the constitution. Well, that and the Blackstone quote about the first law of nature. That is one of those self-evident* truths that is sufficiently sweeping to have multiple positive uses. So, thanks for doing the research work and providing citations and links. Genuinely appreciated.
*Well known is that Thos. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that Ben Franklin made editorial suggestions after Jefferson drafted it.** Somewhere I have a biography of Jefferson with a number of photographs in the center of the book. Do you know that some lucky devil has the original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence? A photograph of it is in that biography. On that one piece of paper appears the handwriting of two American giants--Thos. Jefferson and Ben Franklin. Franklin made his editorial suggestions by drawing a line through the word(s), and writing his suggestion above or below. S
elf-evident is Franklin's suggestion. Jefferson originally wrote: "We hold these truths to be axiomatic..." What does
axiomatic mean? Self-evident. I think ol' Ben made the right suggestion.
**I have come across one source that said Jefferson and Franklin were
both assigned to write the Declaration of Independence by the congress. If true, I can only imagine the conversation where they decided how to divide up the labor. Separately, can you imagine telling Ben Franklin, "Well, Dr. Franklin, I think I got this under control. What if I write it initially, and you look it over and change what you like." Jefferson was what? 32 years old? 36? Not, me, mister. I woulda said something more along the lines of, "Have at it, Dr. Franklin. I'll check it over for spelling and punctuation."
