The constitution is about 19 pages long. Here's a pdf
31Did you read the entire thing?
11I doubt that, but OK.
22Yeps. One of my electives at uni was the history of the US constitution law for non-legal majors. I had to take 2 history classes for my degree and I thought it would be an interesting subject. Not only read it also had it read to me by my professor. He was a retired JAG officer and militant ACLU supporter.
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I guess we need to know what people consider long. The full document is longer than the Declaration of Independence , which I know a lot better. I can’t remember having to read the Constitution in school, just the preamble and a couple of amendments. This doesn’t excuse my ignorance though. Thanks for providing the whole document.
6Reading it and going over the contents is also a part of standard US high school curriculum. It's a graduation requirement. At least, it was when I graduated high school in California in the 90's.
1Yeah I kind of doubt that was a real requirement then and not something your social studies teacher mandated. It’s definitely not the case now or anywhere outside of the state afaik
1
In my experience, the two things that seem to surprise conservatives I've talked to are: the constitution is less than 20 pages long, it's on my phone, and we could read it together in about 30 min (no takers so far), and that there are living redwood trees in California older than Jesus. I don't know why the second one surprises them so much, but it's one that seems to consistently elicit surprise.
19Old trees are such a treasure. It's a shame that despite their strength they can also be fragile. My house has chestnut floors, easy to find in 1927, but then a blight wipes out 90% of the population. And not to mention us humans but we don't need to constantly talk about that, except to say it should be our goal to help these things grow for millenia.
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Maybe if they made it a podcast chaired by a bald angry man.
5There was a quote attributed to Lao Tzu I saw on tiktok the other day, and I was pretty damn sure it was nowhere in the Tao Te Ching, but I was curious if there was some weird translation out there I wasn't aware of.
The conversation went EXACTLY like this. Like down to the word.
2If you look into the original sources, it gets confusing pretty quickly. There's a bunch of other sources (e.g. the zhuangzi) that assign quotes to Lao Tzu, but they're probably made up.
However, Lao Tzu probably didn't write the Tao Te Ching, so 🤷♂️.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi
Basically, by making shit up and saying Lao Tzu said it, tiktok is continuing a long Chinese tradition.
1
If only people would respond with respectful "I doubt that, but ok".
These days, such a response is as scarce as an honest politician.
1I doubt that, but OK.
1
As a machine language model, it was a pretty easy read I will say.
1One of my favorite things to do with chat gpt is having it rewrite things as Trump. I wasn't interested in rereading the constitution a second ago, but it's going to be tremendous, you wouldn't believe how great it's going to be
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