all of the "you can't give up freedom to gain security" idealists are just completely missing the whole point: terrorism is real
No, it's those restricting liberties that are missing the point.
No matter how restrictive you make things, terrorists will succeed. But even when they succeed, nothing permenant will occur -- people will die and be hurt, but the fundamental society is not injured and your nation is just as strong as before. A terrorist simply cannot destroy your nation or your way of life.
But if you sacrifice your own liberty without even gaining the safety you thought you were bargaining for, then you have accomplished something the terrorists could never achieve -- changing your way of life, altering the very social contract. You have undermined your government, your freedom and your own society, a far greater danger than any bomb.
Either you detain them and we get stories like this poping up, or you don't and once it is a actual bomber or something and people looking for someone to blame start asking "well he was clearly suspicious, he should have been stopped, detained, and questioned
I think most folks are in favor of stopping and questioning suspicous people, and then checking their bags if necessary. It was the several hours of wasted resources and time after that fruitless initial search that was not only intrusive and rude, but a diversion of police resources from potentially stopping a real terrorist.
Yeah, but the "correct" answer of course would be to say up front that you were neither, that it was a false choice.
But you didn't do that, you just went with stupid and argued against that, even though he specifically suggested you were NOT stupid.
It just stood out to me, because it's the same thing you did earlier in the thread -- latched on to the word "stupid" and got defensive about it in particular, not even noticing that the context was clearly NOT accusing you of being stupid.
I mean, seriously, what would you think if you had a friend who was constantly saying things like "I DON'T have a small penis!" even though nobody had suggested that was the case?
If you're going to start looking at who did what wrong, you should at least get your facts straight.
Indeed.
Third, the Mayor of New Orleans knew that a category 4 hurricaine was coming, and didn't declare a mandatory evacuation until 24 hours before the hurricaine struck.
Uh, interesting slieght of hand. Makes it sound like they knew a cat 4 hurricane was coming for days in advance! And of course they didn't -- it was a measly category 2 until saturday, when it became a category 3 and the mayor announced that everyone should evacuate. Sunday morning it went up to cat 4, and then 5, so Sunday they made the evacuation mandatory.
Fourth, George Bush told the NO Mayor to evacuate two to three days before that, but was ignored.
George Bush told the mayor to evacuate the city on Thursday or Friday? What planet are you talking about? Why would Bush tell them to evacuate for a category 1 or category 2 storm? We use those to wash our cars! I've not seen anyone, anywhere make a claim as ludicrous as this -- Bush told them to evacuate on thursday or friday, that's just too funny!
Sixth, in order for the Federal government to get involved, the state government must declare a state of emergency, then declare that it cannot cope with the emergency without further assistance, and request that the Federal government provide that assistance.
Yeah, that was the paperwork filed by the Governor the sunday BEFORE Katrina made landfall. Guess you don't follow the news very much, you can download a copy of the letter from the Governor's web site. She declared a state of emergency, said that state and local resources would be unable to handle the situation, and requested federal aid.
I find it fascinating from a psychological point of view that he gave you the option of being called rich or stupid, and he even opined that you were rich, but you chose to believe anyways that you were being called stupid.
I hope that some day you can work through this issue you have with your self-image.
Having endured very similar circumstances, last year with hurricane Ivan, I can tell you that cell phones worked a month before any land lines or internet.
The difference being, you were in the area where the disaster occurred and dealing with the damaged infrastructure. The people from Katrina are not sitting around New Orleans trying to fill out FEMA forms online, they are 600 miles away in Texas, Alabama, etc, where electricity, phones and computers are available to them.
Those computers are all old, donated systems from corporations looking for a tax break. Those computers do NOT have dual Xeon processors and Windows XP with IE 6 on them, they're old Pentiums and PIIs running windows 98/IE5 and that sort of thing. God forbid Wal*Mart should donate a bunch of new $400 Linspire computers to the Red Cross thinking they can actually be any help.
You wait in line for the computers, you wait in line for the phones, but hopefully everyone can get their stuff done. If you say "oh, none of the computers work with any of the forms you need to resume your life as a human being", then blammo, you just made everybody wait twice as long for the phone.
Why does everyone keep saying that the survivors don't have access to computers? Don't you guys realize that most of these people have LEFT the area?
They're not sitting in flooded houses with no electricity, they're sitting in evacuee centers where phones and computers are being made available (along with food, water, clothes, etc).
I know folks like to joke about Texas, but really we've had indoor plumbing, electricity and computers for several years now and we ARE making them available to the tens of thousands of folks from the affected areas for exactly this kind of use. Throwing one more hurdle in their way is not making it any easier.
So what are we going to do now? Rewrite the site for cross-browser compatibility? And have it crash miserably when it goes live? Better to keep those 87% of IE users, no?
I don't think anyone is really disagreeing with you (and I don't really see that you're disagreeing with others, either). Certainly if this is the site, then this is the site. Nobody wants them to take it down if they don't have an alternative in place (although, really, how long would it take to build an alternative that is compatible? a week? This is an online form that interfaces with an existing database, most web devs could build a low-tech HTML 3.0 version on a gray page background in 4 hours and leave the rest of the week for making sure the database spits out usable error messages when field validation fails)
The main point is we SHOULD complain and say that it isn't good enough, it isn't satisfactory, and it needs to be improved ASAP. It is unacceptable for an organization that specifically targets those with the least amount of choice in resources. Truthfully, I think it's unacceptable for ANY government organization, but this one in particular -- the evacuees don't get to pick and choose whether they have access to a phone, a Windows PC, a Mac, or a Linspire from Wal*Mart.
But we have to make noise about the issue so that it is fixed and people in power pay attention to it for the few moments they are forced to look at these normally invisible technical matters.
Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your strong point. I never said you called him stupid. I said you made an unfounded assumption and then insulted him. In fact, it was YOUR stated assumption that HE was calling you stupid because he disagreed with you on politics (though he of course did no such thing).
I can't imagine why you'd be so apt to think people were calling you stupid.
Somehow, I can't picture a guy whose clothes are still stained and wet, hasn't eaten a decent meal in a week, can't find his wife and kids, and no longer has a house to go back to, is going to give a shit that he can't use his favorite open-source browser.
So when the Red Cross finds a company nice enough to donate 100 PCs to the local evacuation shelter so that evacuees can check in with loved ones and start the FEMA paperwork, we're supposed to laugh at them and tell them "sorry, refugees! Shouldn't have picked such a sucky computer! LOL open source hippies!"
It's a lot easier to hook up a hundred new computers than it is to get a hundred new phone lines into a building.
Interesting how you took a fairly innocuous joke (based on the stereotype of the hippie flower-power mac user) and managed to make all sorts of assumptions about the writer's politics, and then insult him based on those incorrect assumptions.
No it doesn't -- iTunes 5 installs without a reboot. Quicktime 7 does require a reboot, presumably since it is relatively low level in the OS.
Still disappointing that Apple hasn't reduced the number of reboots necessary for software updates. Every now and then some silly software update will require a reboot and I wonder what the hell is going on -- Pages needs me to reboot the whole system?
Everything you're saying is true, but you're thinking like an American/westerner. The kind of paternal oversight of daily activities that would make you and me chafe is accepted in China.
The truly hardcore will no doubt work around the limits, but many more will be stopped before they get to the point where they would be so motivated.
B) This borders on stupid. Don't you think that people living in New Orleans (business owners, residents, etc) know and accept the risk? Or were you expecting them to be psychic, and forsee Katrina months before it occurred, and promptly sell all their property there, and move somewhere else?
I don't think that was the point at all. If people want to live in an inherently dangerous place (dramatically moreso than other areas nearby) and take that risk, that's not a problem. The question is whether we as taxpayers should repeatedly fork out hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the rebuilding, when we know that it is only a matter of time before it is completely destroyed all over again.
If poeple want to pay $80,000/year for insurance, more power to them.
(totally screwed the formatting of the first reply)
Pretty much says it all...you really couldn't be more wrong. That's a relief...
pretty much says what? Neither of those statement had anything to do with the Constitution of the United States, which is the document we're discussing, no?
Your assertation that the Constitution was ONLY about "civil" rights, continues to be both nonsensical (since the phrase "civil rights" never appears anywhere in it, or even the US Code until the 20th century) and legally baseless (the courts have repeatedly stated quite clearly that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights must be recognized by legal authorities for anyone in US legal jurisdiction, citizen or not.)
Your point of confusion seems to be that the phrase "Human Rights" is generally used today to describe concepts that would have simply been called "unalienable rights", "the rights of man" in the 18th century. These are the rights enumerated by the Constitution -- indeed, our Bill of Rights was one of the models used when the United Nations first drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom of Speech, Religion -- Human Rights -- sound familiar?
How can you assert that the government is established to DEFEND our rights
I specifically mentioned it in the first reply, does your capacity for researh begin and end at Wikipedia? Doesn't Wikipedia have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, anyways? it's public domain text!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
I repeat, and not to be mean, but for the sake of our nation -- go back and read a sixth-grade government text. You don't seem to have even the most fundamental understanding of any concepts underlying the founding of the nation or our legal code.
Pretty much says it all...you really couldn't be more wrong. That's a relief...>
pretty much says what? Neither of those statement had anything to do with the Constitution of the United States, which is the document we're discussing, no?
Your assertation that the Constitution was ONLY about "civil" rights, continues to be both nonsensical (since the phrase "civil rights" never appears anywhere in it, or even the US Code until the 20th century) and legally baseless (the courts have repeatedly stated quite clearly that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights must be recognized by legal authorities for anyone in US legal jurisdiction, citizen or not.)
Your point of confusion seems to be that the phrase "Human Rights" is generally used today to describe concepts that would have simply been called "unalienable rights", "the rights of man" in the 18th century. These are the rights enumerated by the Constitution -- indeed, our Bill of Rights was one of the models used when the United Nations first drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom of Speech, Religion -- Human Rights -- sound familiar?
How can you assert that the government is established to DEFEND our rights
I specifically mentioned it in the first reply, does your capacity for researh begin and end at Wikipedia? Doesn't Wikipedia have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, anyways? it's public domain text!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
I repeat, and not to be mean, but for the sake of our nation -- go back and read a sixth-grade government text. You don't seem to have even the most fundamental understanding of any concepts underlying the founding of the nation or our legal code.
I can't believe I have to bother pointing this out, but Civil Rights and Human Rights are very -- repeat very different beasts...
Really? Based on what...your say-so?
The Constitution lays out our Civil Rights or our Civil Liberties -- it makes no assertions of human rights, and as such, is meant to only apply to citizens of this Republic!
Again, based on what? Nowhere in the Constitution does it say "civil rights", much less define such a term.
However, both the US Supreme Court, and every writing ever published by the writers of the constitution (such as, say, the apparently inconsequential to you Declaration of Independence) clearly state that free men have rights given to us by God, and that it is to DEFEND those rights that we institute government. Notice that at no point does the government "give" rights, citizenship has no relationship to RIGHTS (as opposed to privleges, such as holding elected office, driving a car, etc). Quite the contrary, it is the defense of preexisting natural rights that give motivation for citizenship.
I can't believe I have to bother pointing this out Indeed, I can't believe you stopped studying the Constitution and US political history , as well as Supreme Court rulings, when you were 5 years old, and yet apparently have convinced yourself you grasp any of it.
To repeat for those of you in the cheap seats, the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution are the rights of all men, everywhere (though of course we don't often defend them with force for people outside our own borders -- however, we do often apply political and economic pressure, and provide refugee status to those who escape such rights-abridging nations). If you don't understand this simple principle, please go back to sixth-grade US History and civics class before you participate in any further discussion of US Constitutional law.
if freedom of the press was a socially unacceptable practice
The point you're missing is that freedom of the press isn't qualified in the constitution with any words that require context. It's given simply as an absolute.
"Cruel and Unusual," however, are clearly words that have to be interpreted. There is no timeless definition of either of those words, indeed the word "unusual" by definition REQUIRES comparison to other penalties which are "usual". The constitution offers no guidance as to what physical or temporal realms are to be compared for the sake of "usual"-ness, so the Supreme Court gets to make that call.
Clearly what is cruel and unusual today is not the same that would have been cruel and unusual 250 years ago. To determine that question, they looked at current state laws and found that in these United States the execution of minors is indeed unusual. To see if this itself was an anomoly, they broadened the search to include other nations.
Like it or not, the Supreme Court interprets law based on our western common law legal traditions, and it is not at all unusual in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, to see cases from the other nations cited -- not as legally binding precedents, but as potential sources of illustration and illumination of our legal codes, to see if a particular legal interpretation on our shores is interpreted differently elsewehere, and if so, why.
Geez, what a silly straw man argument. Nobody ruled on the death penalty because of international law, they merely used it as an illustration of broad social (un)acceptability of the practice. Which IS required, since "cruel and unusual" clearly requires some sort of contemporary context to be evaluated. They would use similar explanatory text in rulings about pornography or other issues that depend on social norms.
Or, just maybe, a whole lot more Americans would be dead while we attempted to "arrest" Bin Laden.
As opposed to now, where "we think we may have a pretty good idea where he might be"?
Maybe if all the military/intelligence reources, equipment and personnel hadn't been taken from Afghanistan for use in Iraq, the mass murderer who killed thousands of Americans on our own soil wouldn't still be walking free today.
For all the big talk about 9/11 the president constantly repeats, he sure doesn't seem to give much of a damn about actually capturing and punishing the madman behind it.
Yeah, those crazy hard-left kooks who only represent 49.9% of the voters? what kind of crazy government would ever recognize the views of such a piddling minority?
Slashdot was one of the first popular blogs, before the word blog existed. There was a time when it was just Rob posting neat stuff he found online, and the occassional commentary.
If it is still a blog or not I suppose can be debated, but its a matter of degree -- Slashdot is a blog that's grown massively in size.
Slashdot Mirror
all of the "you can't give up freedom to gain security" idealists are just completely missing the whole point: terrorism is real
No, it's those restricting liberties that are missing the point.
No matter how restrictive you make things, terrorists will succeed. But even when they succeed, nothing permenant will occur -- people will die and be hurt, but the fundamental society is not injured and your nation is just as strong as before. A terrorist simply cannot destroy your nation or your way of life.
But if you sacrifice your own liberty without even gaining the safety you thought you were bargaining for, then you have accomplished something the terrorists could never achieve -- changing your way of life, altering the very social contract. You have undermined your government, your freedom and your own society, a far greater danger than any bomb.
Either you detain them and we get stories like this poping up, or you don't and once it is a actual bomber or something and people looking for someone to blame start asking "well he was clearly suspicious, he should have been stopped, detained, and questioned
I think most folks are in favor of stopping and questioning suspicous people, and then checking their bags if necessary. It was the several hours of wasted resources and time after that fruitless initial search that was not only intrusive and rude, but a diversion of police resources from potentially stopping a real terrorist.
Okay, but once they looked in his backpack and it didn't have explosives...? Was he going to blow up the tube with the power of his mind?
Slashdot: News for PHB and Marketing Drones.
Slashdot: Buzzwords arranged in an almost sensible order.
Slashdot: Computer News for People New to Computers
Of course we can legally honor it -- or dishonor it, as we see fit, since we didn't ratify it.
Yeah, but the "correct" answer of course would be to say up front that you were neither, that it was a false choice.
But you didn't do that, you just went with stupid and argued against that, even though he specifically suggested you were NOT stupid.
It just stood out to me, because it's the same thing you did earlier in the thread -- latched on to the word "stupid" and got defensive about it in particular, not even noticing that the context was clearly NOT accusing you of being stupid.
I mean, seriously, what would you think if you had a friend who was constantly saying things like "I DON'T have a small penis!" even though nobody had suggested that was the case?
If you're going to start looking at who did what wrong, you should at least get your facts straight.
Indeed.
Third, the Mayor of New Orleans knew that a category 4 hurricaine was coming, and didn't declare a mandatory evacuation until 24 hours before the hurricaine struck.
Uh, interesting slieght of hand. Makes it sound like they knew a cat 4 hurricane was coming for days in advance! And of course they didn't -- it was a measly category 2 until saturday, when it became a category 3 and the mayor announced that everyone should evacuate. Sunday morning it went up to cat 4, and then 5, so Sunday they made the evacuation mandatory.
Fourth, George Bush told the NO Mayor to evacuate two to three days before that, but was ignored.
George Bush told the mayor to evacuate the city on Thursday or Friday? What planet are you talking about? Why would Bush tell them to evacuate for a category 1 or category 2 storm? We use those to wash our cars! I've not seen anyone, anywhere make a claim as ludicrous as this -- Bush told them to evacuate on thursday or friday, that's just too funny!
Sixth, in order for the Federal government to get involved, the state government must declare a state of emergency, then declare that it cannot cope with the emergency without further assistance, and request that the Federal government provide that assistance.
Yeah, that was the paperwork filed by the Governor the sunday BEFORE Katrina made landfall. Guess you don't follow the news very much, you can download a copy of the letter from the Governor's web site. She declared a state of emergency, said that state and local resources would be unable to handle the situation, and requested federal aid.
Facts, indeed.
I find it fascinating from a psychological point of view that he gave you the option of being called rich or stupid, and he even opined that you were rich, but you chose to believe anyways that you were being called stupid.
I hope that some day you can work through this issue you have with your self-image.
Having endured very similar circumstances, last year with hurricane Ivan, I can tell you that cell phones worked a month before any land lines or internet.
The difference being, you were in the area where the disaster occurred and dealing with the damaged infrastructure. The people from Katrina are not sitting around New Orleans trying to fill out FEMA forms online, they are 600 miles away in Texas, Alabama, etc, where electricity, phones and computers are available to them.
Those computers are all old, donated systems from corporations looking for a tax break. Those computers do NOT have dual Xeon processors and Windows XP with IE 6 on them, they're old Pentiums and PIIs running windows 98/IE5 and that sort of thing. God forbid Wal*Mart should donate a bunch of new $400 Linspire computers to the Red Cross thinking they can actually be any help.
You wait in line for the computers, you wait in line for the phones, but hopefully everyone can get their stuff done. If you say "oh, none of the computers work with any of the forms you need to resume your life as a human being", then blammo, you just made everybody wait twice as long for the phone.
Why does everyone keep saying that the survivors don't have access to computers? Don't you guys realize that most of these people have LEFT the area?
They're not sitting in flooded houses with no electricity, they're sitting in evacuee centers where phones and computers are being made available (along with food, water, clothes, etc).
I know folks like to joke about Texas, but really we've had indoor plumbing, electricity and computers for several years now and we ARE making them available to the tens of thousands of folks from the affected areas for exactly this kind of use. Throwing one more hurdle in their way is not making it any easier.
So what are we going to do now? Rewrite the site for cross-browser compatibility? And have it crash miserably when it goes live? Better to keep those 87% of IE users, no?
I don't think anyone is really disagreeing with you (and I don't really see that you're disagreeing with others, either). Certainly if this is the site, then this is the site. Nobody wants them to take it down if they don't have an alternative in place (although, really, how long would it take to build an alternative that is compatible? a week? This is an online form that interfaces with an existing database, most web devs could build a low-tech HTML 3.0 version on a gray page background in 4 hours and leave the rest of the week for making sure the database spits out usable error messages when field validation fails)
The main point is we SHOULD complain and say that it isn't good enough, it isn't satisfactory, and it needs to be improved ASAP. It is unacceptable for an organization that specifically targets those with the least amount of choice in resources. Truthfully, I think it's unacceptable for ANY government organization, but this one in particular -- the evacuees don't get to pick and choose whether they have access to a phone, a Windows PC, a Mac, or a Linspire from Wal*Mart.
But we have to make noise about the issue so that it is fixed and people in power pay attention to it for the few moments they are forced to look at these normally invisible technical matters.
Read the comment... I didn't call him stupid.
Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your strong point. I never said you called him stupid. I said you made an unfounded assumption and then insulted him. In fact, it was YOUR stated assumption that HE was calling you stupid because he disagreed with you on politics (though he of course did no such thing).
I can't imagine why you'd be so apt to think people were calling you stupid.
Somehow, I can't picture a guy whose clothes are still stained and wet, hasn't eaten a decent meal in a week, can't find his wife and kids, and no longer has a house to go back to, is going to give a shit that he can't use his favorite open-source browser.
So when the Red Cross finds a company nice enough to donate 100 PCs to the local evacuation shelter so that evacuees can check in with loved ones and start the FEMA paperwork, we're supposed to laugh at them and tell them "sorry, refugees! Shouldn't have picked such a sucky computer! LOL open source hippies!"
It's a lot easier to hook up a hundred new computers than it is to get a hundred new phone lines into a building.
You must assume...
Interesting how you took a fairly innocuous joke (based on the stereotype of the hippie flower-power mac user) and managed to make all sorts of assumptions about the writer's politics, and then insult him based on those incorrect assumptions.
Who is the stupid, narrow-minded one again?
No it doesn't -- iTunes 5 installs without a reboot. Quicktime 7 does require a reboot, presumably since it is relatively low level in the OS.
Still disappointing that Apple hasn't reduced the number of reboots necessary for software updates. Every now and then some silly software update will require a reboot and I wonder what the hell is going on -- Pages needs me to reboot the whole system?
Everything you're saying is true, but you're thinking like an American/westerner. The kind of paternal oversight of daily activities that would make you and me chafe is accepted in China.
The truly hardcore will no doubt work around the limits, but many more will be stopped before they get to the point where they would be so motivated.
B) This borders on stupid. Don't you think that people living in New Orleans (business owners, residents, etc) know and accept the risk? Or were you expecting them to be psychic, and forsee Katrina months before it occurred, and promptly sell all their property there, and move somewhere else?
I don't think that was the point at all. If people want to live in an inherently dangerous place (dramatically moreso than other areas nearby) and take that risk, that's not a problem. The question is whether we as taxpayers should repeatedly fork out hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the rebuilding, when we know that it is only a matter of time before it is completely destroyed all over again.
If poeple want to pay $80,000/year for insurance, more power to them.
(totally screwed the formatting of the first reply)
Pretty much says it all...you really couldn't be more wrong. That's a relief...
pretty much says what? Neither of those statement had anything to do with the Constitution of the United States, which is the document we're discussing, no?
Your assertation that the Constitution was ONLY about "civil" rights, continues to be both nonsensical (since the phrase "civil rights" never appears anywhere in it, or even the US Code until the 20th century) and legally baseless (the courts have repeatedly stated quite clearly that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights must be recognized by legal authorities for anyone in US legal jurisdiction, citizen or not.)
Your point of confusion seems to be that the phrase "Human Rights" is generally used today to describe concepts that would have simply been called "unalienable rights", "the rights of man" in the 18th century. These are the rights enumerated by the Constitution -- indeed, our Bill of Rights was one of the models used when the United Nations first drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom of Speech, Religion -- Human Rights -- sound familiar?
How can you assert that the government is established to DEFEND our rights
I specifically mentioned it in the first reply, does your capacity for researh begin and end at Wikipedia? Doesn't Wikipedia have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, anyways? it's public domain text!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
I repeat, and not to be mean, but for the sake of our nation -- go back and read a sixth-grade government text. You don't seem to have even the most fundamental understanding of any concepts underlying the founding of the nation or our legal code.
Pretty much says it all...you really couldn't be more wrong. That's a relief...>
pretty much says what? Neither of those statement had anything to do with the Constitution of the United States, which is the document we're discussing, no?
Your assertation that the Constitution was ONLY about "civil" rights, continues to be both nonsensical (since the phrase "civil rights" never appears anywhere in it, or even the US Code until the 20th century) and legally baseless (the courts have repeatedly stated quite clearly that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights must be recognized by legal authorities for anyone in US legal jurisdiction, citizen or not.)
Your point of confusion seems to be that the phrase "Human Rights" is generally used today to describe concepts that would have simply been called "unalienable rights", "the rights of man" in the 18th century. These are the rights enumerated by the Constitution -- indeed, our Bill of Rights was one of the models used when the United Nations first drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom of Speech, Religion -- Human Rights -- sound familiar?
How can you assert that the government is established to DEFEND our rights
I specifically mentioned it in the first reply, does your capacity for researh begin and end at Wikipedia? Doesn't Wikipedia have a copy of the Declaration of Independence, anyways? it's public domain text!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
I repeat, and not to be mean, but for the sake of our nation -- go back and read a sixth-grade government text. You don't seem to have even the most fundamental understanding of any concepts underlying the founding of the nation or our legal code.
I can't believe I have to bother pointing this out, but Civil Rights and Human Rights are very -- repeat very different beasts...
Really? Based on what...your say-so?
The Constitution lays out our Civil Rights or our Civil Liberties -- it makes no assertions of human rights, and as such, is meant to only apply to citizens of this Republic!
Again, based on what? Nowhere in the Constitution does it say "civil rights", much less define such a term.
However, both the US Supreme Court, and every writing ever published by the writers of the constitution (such as, say, the apparently inconsequential to you Declaration of Independence) clearly state that free men have rights given to us by God, and that it is to DEFEND those rights that we institute government. Notice that at no point does the government "give" rights, citizenship has no relationship to RIGHTS (as opposed to privleges, such as holding elected office, driving a car, etc). Quite the contrary, it is the defense of preexisting natural rights that give motivation for citizenship.
I can't believe I have to bother pointing this out Indeed, I can't believe you stopped studying the Constitution and US political history , as well as Supreme Court rulings, when you were 5 years old, and yet apparently have convinced yourself you grasp any of it.
To repeat for those of you in the cheap seats, the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution are the rights of all men, everywhere (though of course we don't often defend them with force for people outside our own borders -- however, we do often apply political and economic pressure, and provide refugee status to those who escape such rights-abridging nations). If you don't understand this simple principle, please go back to sixth-grade US History and civics class before you participate in any further discussion of US Constitutional law.
if freedom of the press was a socially unacceptable practice
The point you're missing is that freedom of the press isn't qualified in the constitution with any words that require context. It's given simply as an absolute.
"Cruel and Unusual," however, are clearly words that have to be interpreted. There is no timeless definition of either of those words, indeed the word "unusual" by definition REQUIRES comparison to other penalties which are "usual". The constitution offers no guidance as to what physical or temporal realms are to be compared for the sake of "usual"-ness, so the Supreme Court gets to make that call.
Clearly what is cruel and unusual today is not the same that would have been cruel and unusual 250 years ago. To determine that question, they looked at current state laws and found that in these United States the execution of minors is indeed unusual. To see if this itself was an anomoly, they broadened the search to include other nations.
Like it or not, the Supreme Court interprets law based on our western common law legal traditions, and it is not at all unusual in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, to see cases from the other nations cited -- not as legally binding precedents, but as potential sources of illustration and illumination of our legal codes, to see if a particular legal interpretation on our shores is interpreted differently elsewehere, and if so, why.
Geez, what a silly straw man argument. Nobody ruled on the death penalty because of international law, they merely used it as an illustration of broad social (un)acceptability of the practice. Which IS required, since "cruel and unusual" clearly requires some sort of contemporary context to be evaluated. They would use similar explanatory text in rulings about pornography or other issues that depend on social norms.
Or, just maybe, a whole lot more Americans would be dead while we attempted to "arrest" Bin Laden.
As opposed to now, where "we think we may have a pretty good idea where he might be"?
Maybe if all the military/intelligence reources, equipment and personnel hadn't been taken from Afghanistan for use in Iraq, the mass murderer who killed thousands of Americans on our own soil wouldn't still be walking free today.
For all the big talk about 9/11 the president constantly repeats, he sure doesn't seem to give much of a damn about actually capturing and punishing the madman behind it.
Yeah, those crazy hard-left kooks who only represent 49.9% of the voters? what kind of crazy government would ever recognize the views of such a piddling minority?
Slashdot was one of the first popular blogs, before the word blog existed. There was a time when it was just Rob posting neat stuff he found online, and the occassional commentary.
If it is still a blog or not I suppose can be debated, but its a matter of degree -- Slashdot is a blog that's grown massively in size.