Dear Everyone.

[jonfmorse]

I realize I'm a day late here, but that's okay. I'm trying to save you from making the same mistake next year.

"Tea parties" as a protest against taxes are a bad idea intellectually. You see, the Boston Tea Party was a protest against two things:

1) The lowering of taxes on the East India Company in order to allow them to be able to compete

Comments

[daddygod]

I'm guessing the idea of general concept vs. actual recreation of a previous event was lost on you then.

[jonfmorse]

Lemme put it this way: invoking the Boston Tea Party to protest high taxes voted into law by our own elected representatives is sort of like going out with a girl you're really into and singing "The One I Love" to her.

I mean, if she doesn't realize what the song's actually about, just like most people don't realize what the Boston Tea Party was actually about, then she might be all goo-goo over you singing her a love song...

[daddygod]

They're being referred to as "Tea Parties" just because they're protests about taxes. No one said they had to have anything to do with the specific protest at the original Boston Tea Party because quite frankly they don't and were never intended to.

[jonfmorse]

/headdesk

I dunno about other places, but here, there were plenty of interviews with people participating who specifically invoked what they thought were the reasons for the original Tea Party, and why this protest was therefore "so appropriate", on camera.

My point is that there are way too many people who actually do think that the Boston Tea Party was full-stop a protest against high taxes, and invoking it for that purpose with thousands of brain-dead media drones ready and willing to parrot them will serve to widen that ignorance even further.

[absolutcalm]

As if intellectual accuracy has anything to do with it.

Protests don't need intellect.

[tuftears]

Because we need a large number of politicians and extremists getting drunk in a crowd! };)

[tal125]

There is public education for you (or it's lacking) - I have had to re-explain things to my daughter because her teacher's keep fucking it all up. Including the one who keeps referring to the U.S.S. Constellation in Baltimore's Inner Harbor as "Old Ironsides". It was great fun telling her:

1. The U.S.S Constitution was "Old Ironsides"
2. The U.S.S. Constellation is NOT the sister ship of Constitution that people think it is. One was built in 1794, t'other 60'ish years later.

Neither was ever taken in battle and were as a result never taken back by the Marines. <.

[tal125]

Addendum - the original Constellation, however, WAS a sister to Old Ironsides but was broken up in 1853.