Slashdot Mirror
Leaked: Obama's Rules For Assassinating American Citizens
cathyreisenwitz writes "For over a year now journalists, civil liberties advocates, and members of Congress have been asking the Obama administration to release internal memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel justifying Obama's targeted killing program. While the White House continues to deny that such memos exist, NBC is reporting that it has acquired the next best thing: A secretish 16-page white paper from the Department of Justice that was provided to select members of the Senate last June." Spencer Ackerman at Wired says the leaked rules "[trump] traditional Constitutional protections American citizens enjoy from being killed by their government without due process" by redefining the concept of "imminence."
The fact the salves were 3/5 of a person was an abolitionist move. It helped ensure that slaves could not be compelled to vote for their own slavery.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
The original design was sovereign States who delegated a small, well-defined subset of their powers to a common body
That common body was structured so as to make it somewhat self-limiting, somewhat difficult to expand its reach..
It was also structured with layers of increasing responsibility that theoretically would help elevate the finest people to higher offices, even as it filtered out to a degree some of the more extremist voices.
The U.S tried that. It was called the Articles of Confederation. And it was so dysfunctional they scrapped it for the U.S. Constitution.
Somalia is not what libertarians want, but it is the result of what most libertarians say they want.
In theory what libertarians want is to given the country without allocating their power to a representative. That is to say they want to be free to make all their own decisions, and fit everyone else to be the same. The problem is that like anarchists they have no suggestions on how this would work. They don't all agree on what the actual rule of government would be, they don't have as mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between different ideas of the role of government, and they tend to believe you can have relationships with people without mutual obligation.
tldr; libertarians believe in as postcode we would all want to live in, but which wouldn't work.