By my logic a person cannot be compelled to confess to a crime.
That is indeed what the fifth amendment says, but that isn't the point I was making. You were saying it is impossible for a person to voluntarily waive their rights, that the constitution does not allow it.
That is demonstrably false - a person can indeed waive their rights. Just as a person can voluntarily give a confession (which is waiving their fifth amendment right), a person can voluntarily allow themselves to be searched.
Once you've waived the right, it's too late to tell them "wait, no, you can't make me waive the right", unless you believe people should not be held to their agreements... it's a bit like complaining that once you've jumped off a cliff you can no longer choose to stay on top.
But you can’t not let them search you. Even if you decide not to board the plane. (The guy who tried that was arrested. Didn’t you hear?)
I didn't, and that is indeed a violation of his rights.
But you're still pretending it's a choice between "get violated or get arrested". You're still pretending that there's not another choice - don't fly at all. Don't buy plane tickets in the first place. Don't show up to the airport with the intention of refusing to be searched. If you show up anyway, then you have indeed reduced your choices, but at that point you've already jumped off the cliff.
If you want the TSA to fix their stupid policies, don't buy plane tickets is the choice you need to make.
Given the choice between getting your right to privacy violated and getting arrested, then if you seriously value that right to privacy, you should choose getting arrested, and let the courts sort it out. If enough people have to waste the courts' time with this, the courts will force the TSA to stop.
If you still choose to let them grope you, rather than get arrested, then you are indeed voluntarily giving up your right to privacy.
That's not entirely true. You have the right to remain silent, if speaking has the potential to incriminate you; that's why they tell you that anything you say can and will be used against you. They'd never have reason to use something you say in your favor, because that's not their job.
You can be compelled to testify against someone else, assuming such testimony does not incriminate you, which is equivalent to not having the right to remain silent.
By your logic, a person cannot confess to a crime to police or a judge, because the constitution says you can't be compelled to testify against yourself.
Indeed, just as you may decide to testify against yourself, you may also decide to allow the TSA to search you before you board a plane. Neither is unconstitutional.
Some rights are situational. We have the right to not be searched unreasonably. If you consent to a search, then you clearly believe it reasonable. (If you don't think it's reasonable, why are you consenting?)
For instance, a wife can't sign a contract to let her husband rape her every night.
That example is inherently self-contradictory. It's not rape if it's consensual, by definition (speaking specifically about adults). (I don't want to get into an argument about the specifics of rape. I'm specifically talking about agreeing to something, knowing what will happen.)
At any rate, your examples are all of people trying to consent to have crimes committed against them, not of people waiving a right.
The law does not say "One has the right to not be murdered". The law says "Nobody has the right to murder another person." Surely you can see that there's a difference.
Legally speaking, you can't waive a "right to not be murdered", because you don't have that right, and the right to murder you is not yours to give to someone else.
If you disagree, and still think waiving a right is unconstitutional, please refer me to the section of the constitution that says so.
As for "consenting away certain rights", it is well-established that consenting to a search virtually always makes that search legal - cops do not need a warrant to search your house if you willingly allow them to search your house. (The same goes for your car, or your pockets.)
I don't see why you all think consenting to a search by the TSA is somehow different.
(Again, I'm not defending the TSA. I'm just saying their searches are not unconstitutional so long as travelers consent to those searches.)
Yet you keep pretending the "sign this paper" bit isn't there.
You see, nobody is forced to travel by airplane. If you choose to fly, then you are choosing to submit to the TSA's idiotic rules. If they give you a choice of methods by which they examine your genitals, well, you don't get to pretend they're violating your rights one way but not the other.
Everyone knows you get searched, scanned, etc at the airport. Nobody is surprised by the security checkpoints. If you choose to be groped instead of ogled, that's your choice, and you can't complain about it.
There is a third choice, of course. You could decide not to fly.
The TSA's security theater is certainly stupid and pointless and a waste of resources, but as long as people consent to the searches, they're not unconstitutional.
Perhaps you can explain why it's constitutional for cops to search your house without a warrant if you give consent. (By your logic, it's not.)
And perhaps you can refer me to the part of the constitution which states a person cannot waive any of the rights listed there.
Incidentally, some brief googling turns up court decisions stating a person can waive a constitutional right if they do so knowingly. People can waive their constitutional right to counsel, for example; by your logic, it is unconstitutional for a trial to proceed without defense counsel even if the defendant wants to proceed pro-se.
What you're missing here is simple: if you are aware of your rights, you can waive them. Miranda is simply there to ensure that people who are arrested are aware of those rights. That's all it is - a reminder. Miranda does not give anyone any additional rights.
I assumed that you would read the implicit "knowingly" in my original statement. Obviously, if you're choosing a pat-down instead of a scan with the intent of arresting the TSA officer for touching you, then you know what you're doing, you're aware of your right against unlawful search, and you're capable of waiving it.
In fact I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people who know what a citizen's arrest is and when they can do it are also aware of what their rights are, and are therefore capable of waiving those rights if they so choose.
In my experience the biggest time sink in Gentoo hasn't been compiling things (which, as you say, can be done while asleep or otherwise away from the computer), it has been trying to get the system back into a working state when your system upgrade fails halfway through with build errors leaving you in a halfway state in which you can't get half your stuff working... I eventually just stopped upgrading those two systems entirely. In fact, last week I reconfigured one of those machines using Arch instead, in part so I would be able to update things reliably.
Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo, but I don't think I'll ever use it again for anything but something to tinker with when I'm bored.
By definition, consenting to a search makes that search constitutional. This is why police just need either consent or a warrant to search your home, for example - that's all they need to stay within the law. A search made without consent or a warrant would be unconstitutional, but that's not the situation here.
The fact is, if you opt for the pat-down, you're giving consent, and consent makes the search constitutional. (If you disagree, please refer me to the part of the constitution that says I cannot consent to a search of my person.)
This is not akin to a child not being able to consent to a sexual encounter with an adult. The reason is simple - the only reason children can't legally consent is that the law says they can't. You're presumably an adult, and by law, adults can consent to a search.
You can't arrest them for molesting you if you consented to the "pat-down" in the first place, and the pat-down is opt-in, so choosing it is giving consent.
So you're right, a citizen's arrest for this will never happen, but not for the reason you're giving;)
You can mod games you've bought through Steam... even Valve's own games are built to let you do that. If a game doesn't let you mod it, it's not Steam's decision.
It was not the knowledge itself that was evil, it was the choices they made that got them thrown out of Eden. You know, the same standard we're held to - we're accountable for our own choices.
You're mixing up consequences with culpability. Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; they were then forced to live with the consequences (i.e. mortality and everything that goes with it). I do not believe the act of eating the fruit of the tree was itself a sin, though the act of disobeying God probably was.
Knowledge itself is not a sin - neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament tell us we should not pursue secular knowledge. Indeed, the scriptures are pretty clear that it is what we do with our knowledge that can lead to sin.
I simplified it on purpose. You clearly agree with me that having faith in things we can't or won't or don't personally prove is an integral part of life. That's all I was saying.
I'm not sure why you're quibbling about what exactly we have faith in, since that's largely beside the point.
One's entire life is faith-based. We have faith that the people who wrote our science textbooks didn't make any nontrivial mistakes, for example. We have faith that the engineers who designed our cars didn't screw up. We have faith in the objectivity or integrity of journalists. We have faith that the doctor doing our kidney transplants isn't really a serial killer pretending to be a doctor.
This is especially obvious when we're young; when our parents tell us something is dangerous, we generally have faith that they're not just messing with us, even if we don't understand the reasons ourselves.
We accept a great deal of information on faith. Life would be difficult indeed if we refused to do so. This applies to scientists as much as anyone else (even if not in their field of expertise).
And the big irony here is that these fundamentalists would embrace all this.
I don't think it's ironic at all. Christianity is fully compatible with science. For example, the Bible does not claim the earth is 6,000 years old; it merely claims Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden approximately 6,000 years ago. It is unspecific about the length of time of the Creation. (The use of "day" in our English translations is unfortunate and misleading; the Hebrew word used there merely means "period of time".)
The fact that you claim those ideas are logical implications of Christian teachings suggests you aren't actually familiar with Christian teachings.
Furthermore, nothing in the Bible makes the claim "knowledge is evil". This also suggests you aren't actually familiar with the story in Genesis to which you're referring (Adam and Eve getting cast out of Eden).
Since I happened to stumble on it during a brief foray on google, I thought I'd mention that the FBI reported that 16.8% of hate crimes in 2008 were committed against whites, and more hate crimes were committed against Christians than against Muslims (8.7% vs 7.5%). (I lumped Catholics and Protestants together for the anti-Christian percentage; it's possibly higher depending on what exactly "Protestant" means and what groups are included in the "anti-other religion" percentage.)
So far I've found no evidence of a law stating hate crimes are not possible against a particular group of people, while I've found references to several laws that explicitly do not mention any particular group of people.
If you meant to say that a prosecutor would find it difficult if not impossible to convince a jury that "he hates whites" or "he hates christians" was the motive for a murder, that's a separate issue entirely, and it's possibly true, but you said "according to the law", so...
According to the law, it's not possible to commit a hate crime against a white man, or a christian, or... (insert other dominant group here), at least not due to their membership in that group.
Which has a more chilling effect on the surrounding community:
- Jim murders Bob because Bob is Irish. - Jim murders Bob because Bob was sleeping with Jim's wife.
Both are murder. However, the former causes fear among all Irish members of the community merely for being born Irish. The latter causes fear among... people who are sleeping with Jim's wife?
Hate-motivated murder has a much more far-reaching effect, and it should be punished accordingly.
Who in fact defines what exactly a hate crime is? Is the murder of a black person more heinous that the killing of an Irishman? If so, why? Seems to me that murder is murder, and calling one a "hate-crime" puts more worth on some one's life due to their race or creed, which goes completely against the principal of a blind justice system.
I'm pretty sure you don't understand. A murder is not a hate crime merely because the killer is one race and the victim another. A murder is a hate crime if and only if the killer's motive for killing was that the victim was of a particular race/gender/some other innate characteristic. It does not matter what that characteristic is, it only matters that it was the reason for the murder.
This is in no way incompatible with the justice system applying equally to everyone (a "blind" justice system). In fact, the system is built to account for this... It's not the arresting officer or the prosecution or even the judge who gets to decide whether the defendant's motive makes it a hate crime, that's up to the jury. The prosecution can certainly argue that it does, but juries are supposed to decide for themselves.
I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you'll be able to come up with reasons it's worse to murder someone because they're a particular race than to murder someone while robbing a bank, and why both are worse than spur-of-the-moment "crime of passion" sorts of murders.
For example, hate-motivated murders are far more likely to be repeated than most other types of murder. If you're willing to kill an Irishman merely because you don't like Irishmen, what's to stop you from killing the next Irishman you see? On the other hand, if you killed your spouse because you were arguing over who was cheating on who, and it just got out of hand, well, that's not likely to happen again.
This is why we have a distinction between manslaughter and murder. If you're going to claim that all murders should be treated equally regardless of motive, then you must also claim that manslaughter should be merged in with that universal punishment for murder. I don't think that's your intended goal, is it? So, you must decide: is motive important?
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... except before climbing up you see a guy at the top pushing people off, but you decide to climb up anyway.
By my logic a person cannot be compelled to confess to a crime.
That is indeed what the fifth amendment says, but that isn't the point I was making. You were saying it is impossible for a person to voluntarily waive their rights, that the constitution does not allow it.
That is demonstrably false - a person can indeed waive their rights. Just as a person can voluntarily give a confession (which is waiving their fifth amendment right), a person can voluntarily allow themselves to be searched.
Once you've waived the right, it's too late to tell them "wait, no, you can't make me waive the right", unless you believe people should not be held to their agreements... it's a bit like complaining that once you've jumped off a cliff you can no longer choose to stay on top.
But you can’t not let them search you. Even if you decide not to board the plane. (The guy who tried that was arrested. Didn’t you hear?)
I didn't, and that is indeed a violation of his rights.
But you're still pretending it's a choice between "get violated or get arrested". You're still pretending that there's not another choice - don't fly at all. Don't buy plane tickets in the first place. Don't show up to the airport with the intention of refusing to be searched. If you show up anyway, then you have indeed reduced your choices, but at that point you've already jumped off the cliff.
If you want the TSA to fix their stupid policies, don't buy plane tickets is the choice you need to make.
Given the choice between getting your right to privacy violated and getting arrested, then if you seriously value that right to privacy, you should choose getting arrested, and let the courts sort it out. If enough people have to waste the courts' time with this, the courts will force the TSA to stop.
If you still choose to let them grope you, rather than get arrested, then you are indeed voluntarily giving up your right to privacy.
That's not entirely true. You have the right to remain silent, if speaking has the potential to incriminate you; that's why they tell you that anything you say can and will be used against you. They'd never have reason to use something you say in your favor, because that's not their job.
You can be compelled to testify against someone else, assuming such testimony does not incriminate you, which is equivalent to not having the right to remain silent.
By your logic, a person cannot confess to a crime to police or a judge, because the constitution says you can't be compelled to testify against yourself.
Indeed, just as you may decide to testify against yourself, you may also decide to allow the TSA to search you before you board a plane. Neither is unconstitutional.
Some rights are situational. We have the right to not be searched unreasonably. If you consent to a search, then you clearly believe it reasonable. (If you don't think it's reasonable, why are you consenting?)
For instance, a wife can't sign a contract to let her husband rape her every night.
That example is inherently self-contradictory. It's not rape if it's consensual, by definition (speaking specifically about adults). (I don't want to get into an argument about the specifics of rape. I'm specifically talking about agreeing to something, knowing what will happen.)
At any rate, your examples are all of people trying to consent to have crimes committed against them, not of people waiving a right.
The law does not say "One has the right to not be murdered". The law says "Nobody has the right to murder another person." Surely you can see that there's a difference.
Legally speaking, you can't waive a "right to not be murdered", because you don't have that right, and the right to murder you is not yours to give to someone else.
If you disagree, and still think waiving a right is unconstitutional, please refer me to the section of the constitution that says so.
As for "consenting away certain rights", it is well-established that consenting to a search virtually always makes that search legal - cops do not need a warrant to search your house if you willingly allow them to search your house. (The same goes for your car, or your pockets.)
I don't see why you all think consenting to a search by the TSA is somehow different.
(Again, I'm not defending the TSA. I'm just saying their searches are not unconstitutional so long as travelers consent to those searches.)
Yet you keep pretending the "sign this paper" bit isn't there.
You see, nobody is forced to travel by airplane. If you choose to fly, then you are choosing to submit to the TSA's idiotic rules. If they give you a choice of methods by which they examine your genitals, well, you don't get to pretend they're violating your rights one way but not the other.
Everyone knows you get searched, scanned, etc at the airport. Nobody is surprised by the security checkpoints. If you choose to be groped instead of ogled, that's your choice, and you can't complain about it.
There is a third choice, of course. You could decide not to fly.
The TSA's security theater is certainly stupid and pointless and a waste of resources, but as long as people consent to the searches, they're not unconstitutional.
Perhaps you can explain why it's constitutional for cops to search your house without a warrant if you give consent. (By your logic, it's not.)
And perhaps you can refer me to the part of the constitution which states a person cannot waive any of the rights listed there.
Incidentally, some brief googling turns up court decisions stating a person can waive a constitutional right if they do so knowingly. People can waive their constitutional right to counsel, for example; by your logic, it is unconstitutional for a trial to proceed without defense counsel even if the defendant wants to proceed pro-se.
What you're missing here is simple: if you are aware of your rights, you can waive them. Miranda is simply there to ensure that people who are arrested are aware of those rights. That's all it is - a reminder. Miranda does not give anyone any additional rights.
I assumed that you would read the implicit "knowingly" in my original statement. Obviously, if you're choosing a pat-down instead of a scan with the intent of arresting the TSA officer for touching you, then you know what you're doing, you're aware of your right against unlawful search, and you're capable of waiving it.
In fact I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people who know what a citizen's arrest is and when they can do it are also aware of what their rights are, and are therefore capable of waiving those rights if they so choose.
In my experience the biggest time sink in Gentoo hasn't been compiling things (which, as you say, can be done while asleep or otherwise away from the computer), it has been trying to get the system back into a working state when your system upgrade fails halfway through with build errors leaving you in a halfway state in which you can't get half your stuff working... I eventually just stopped upgrading those two systems entirely. In fact, last week I reconfigured one of those machines using Arch instead, in part so I would be able to update things reliably.
Don't get me wrong, I like Gentoo, but I don't think I'll ever use it again for anything but something to tinker with when I'm bored.
By definition, consenting to a search makes that search constitutional. This is why police just need either consent or a warrant to search your home, for example - that's all they need to stay within the law. A search made without consent or a warrant would be unconstitutional, but that's not the situation here.
The fact is, if you opt for the pat-down, you're giving consent, and consent makes the search constitutional. (If you disagree, please refer me to the part of the constitution that says I cannot consent to a search of my person.)
This is not akin to a child not being able to consent to a sexual encounter with an adult. The reason is simple - the only reason children can't legally consent is that the law says they can't. You're presumably an adult, and by law, adults can consent to a search.
You can't arrest them for molesting you if you consented to the "pat-down" in the first place, and the pat-down is opt-in, so choosing it is giving consent.
So you're right, a citizen's arrest for this will never happen, but not for the reason you're giving ;)
You can mod games you've bought through Steam... even Valve's own games are built to let you do that. If a game doesn't let you mod it, it's not Steam's decision.
Did your cost estimate/comparison include the salaries of all the people that have to maintain and administer the hardware you bought yourself?
It was not the knowledge itself that was evil, it was the choices they made that got them thrown out of Eden. You know, the same standard we're held to - we're accountable for our own choices.
You're mixing up consequences with culpability. Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; they were then forced to live with the consequences (i.e. mortality and everything that goes with it). I do not believe the act of eating the fruit of the tree was itself a sin, though the act of disobeying God probably was.
Knowledge itself is not a sin - neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament tell us we should not pursue secular knowledge. Indeed, the scriptures are pretty clear that it is what we do with our knowledge that can lead to sin.
I simplified it on purpose. You clearly agree with me that having faith in things we can't or won't or don't personally prove is an integral part of life. That's all I was saying.
I'm not sure why you're quibbling about what exactly we have faith in, since that's largely beside the point.
Really? You really think science is faith-based?
One's entire life is faith-based. We have faith that the people who wrote our science textbooks didn't make any nontrivial mistakes, for example. We have faith that the engineers who designed our cars didn't screw up. We have faith in the objectivity or integrity of journalists. We have faith that the doctor doing our kidney transplants isn't really a serial killer pretending to be a doctor.
This is especially obvious when we're young; when our parents tell us something is dangerous, we generally have faith that they're not just messing with us, even if we don't understand the reasons ourselves.
We accept a great deal of information on faith. Life would be difficult indeed if we refused to do so. This applies to scientists as much as anyone else (even if not in their field of expertise).
And the big irony here is that these fundamentalists would embrace all this.
I don't think it's ironic at all. Christianity is fully compatible with science. For example, the Bible does not claim the earth is 6,000 years old; it merely claims Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden approximately 6,000 years ago. It is unspecific about the length of time of the Creation. (The use of "day" in our English translations is unfortunate and misleading; the Hebrew word used there merely means "period of time".)
The fact that you claim those ideas are logical implications of Christian teachings suggests you aren't actually familiar with Christian teachings.
Furthermore, nothing in the Bible makes the claim "knowledge is evil". This also suggests you aren't actually familiar with the story in Genesis to which you're referring (Adam and Eve getting cast out of Eden).
It's not the number of people the crime scares that matters. What matters is the intent with which the crime is committed.
Since I happened to stumble on it during a brief foray on google, I thought I'd mention that the FBI reported that 16.8% of hate crimes in 2008 were committed against whites, and more hate crimes were committed against Christians than against Muslims (8.7% vs 7.5%). (I lumped Catholics and Protestants together for the anti-Christian percentage; it's possibly higher depending on what exactly "Protestant" means and what groups are included in the "anti-other religion" percentage.)
So far I've found no evidence of a law stating hate crimes are not possible against a particular group of people, while I've found references to several laws that explicitly do not mention any particular group of people.
If you meant to say that a prosecutor would find it difficult if not impossible to convince a jury that "he hates whites" or "he hates christians" was the motive for a murder, that's a separate issue entirely, and it's possibly true, but you said "according to the law", so...
According to the law, it's not possible to commit a hate crime against a white man, or a christian, or... (insert other dominant group here), at least not due to their membership in that group.
Citation needed.
Poor form to reply to myself, but I left out the bit that connects HungryHobo's comments to mine:
The point is not that other types of crime do not affect the surrounding community, the point is that it's silly to pretend motive is irrelevant.
Which has a more chilling effect on the surrounding community:
- Jim murders Bob because Bob is Irish.
- Jim murders Bob because Bob was sleeping with Jim's wife.
Both are murder. However, the former causes fear among all Irish members of the community merely for being born Irish. The latter causes fear among... people who are sleeping with Jim's wife?
Hate-motivated murder has a much more far-reaching effect, and it should be punished accordingly.
Who in fact defines what exactly a hate crime is? Is the murder of a black person more heinous that the killing of an Irishman? If so, why? Seems to me that murder is murder, and calling one a "hate-crime" puts more worth on some one's life due to their race or creed, which goes completely against the principal of a blind justice system.
I'm pretty sure you don't understand. A murder is not a hate crime merely because the killer is one race and the victim another. A murder is a hate crime if and only if the killer's motive for killing was that the victim was of a particular race/gender/some other innate characteristic. It does not matter what that characteristic is, it only matters that it was the reason for the murder.
This is in no way incompatible with the justice system applying equally to everyone (a "blind" justice system). In fact, the system is built to account for this... It's not the arresting officer or the prosecution or even the judge who gets to decide whether the defendant's motive makes it a hate crime, that's up to the jury. The prosecution can certainly argue that it does, but juries are supposed to decide for themselves.
I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you'll be able to come up with reasons it's worse to murder someone because they're a particular race than to murder someone while robbing a bank, and why both are worse than spur-of-the-moment "crime of passion" sorts of murders.
For example, hate-motivated murders are far more likely to be repeated than most other types of murder. If you're willing to kill an Irishman merely because you don't like Irishmen, what's to stop you from killing the next Irishman you see? On the other hand, if you killed your spouse because you were arguing over who was cheating on who, and it just got out of hand, well, that's not likely to happen again.
This is why we have a distinction between manslaughter and murder. If you're going to claim that all murders should be treated equally regardless of motive, then you must also claim that manslaughter should be merged in with that universal punishment for murder. I don't think that's your intended goal, is it? So, you must decide: is motive important?
Googlets like this?
As others have mentioned, there are in fact cities where non-citizen residents can vote in local elections.
Yes, I have voted. What does that have to do with anything?
Switzerland has four official national languages, so their situation is a little different :)
I'd give you a convenient Wikipedia link, but Slashdot's comment box doesn't like letting me paste things in Chrome.