You have a right to own weapons just as you have a right to speak freely.
These rights are both limited when they harm others. You cannot cause physical harm to others with your speech (yelling fire in a movie theater, making specific threats of physical violence) just like you cannot cause harm to others with a gun.
Owning a gun and using a gun to shoot someone are two very different things, just as speech and speech which incites violence are two different things.
Depends on what they mean by "3G services". If all they can download are ebooks from Amazon, then it's not expensive at all. In fact, if they have to purchase those ebooks, it's basically free for Amazon.
If it's 3G services that they can use as a general data connection, then yeah, that could be pricey. Of course, Amazon already has those 3G contracts with providers all over the globe, so there may not actually be any additional cost to Amazon.
Why bother voting at all? Why not just let one really smart person make all our decisions for us? That was Plato's conclusion... maybe he was right.
You wouldn't let some random black refugee poor woman make decisions about your household governance, but you demand that she have a say over more important matters? With such low standards of participation don't be surprised when she views you and your whole country with contempt...and votes accordingly
Who are you to say that she should have no voice in her government? What makes you think you are so much better than her?
How about instead of subjugating people, we educate them?
I can tell you one thing though - If you are certain you're better than people you know nothing of, then it is virtually certain that you are not.
Forcing people to either pay for health insurance or pay a tax seems an unwarranted use of government power for any nation that wishes to view itself as anything resembling a free nation
So you're saying that essentially every other modern democracy on the planet isn't free?
The government could instead require that people who do not wish to pay for health insurance regularly put some of their income into a fund they own but that they can only use for health care.
Or you could just force people to buy health insurance... The point of insurance is that it spreads out risk. If one person in a hundred gets sick, then you have everybody pay 1/100th of the cost, and then the one person who actually does get sick gets the medical care. Making private accounts doesn't accomplish this, because there's essentially no way someone can save enough in that account to pay for something like cancer treatment. That's why insurance was invented in the first place.
Because their values define our modern government. I could care less about us having different values than them. Of course values change. The problem is that the choices they made directly impact our daily lives through the Constitution.
For better or worse, their values have a direct impact on our lives. That's why we should examine them.
because it takes away the default right of the people to choose whether they buy health insurance
No, it doesn't. You just have to pay a tax if you don't want to buy health insurance. This is perfectly reasonable, since if you DO get sick while uninsured, chances are the state is going to wind up paying for you.
whether they go to a doctor
Again, nobody is forcing you to go to a doctor.
whether they get vaccines
I'm not sure that anyone is forcing you to get vaccines if you're home schooled, but even if they are, this is a matter of public health. By not getting your children vaccinated, you're endangering their lives and potentially the lives of the children around them.
The government forces me to pay for bombs, and wars I don't like. I don't have the right to refuse to pay for them. Why should you have the right to refuse to pay for healthcare?
I'm not bashing him, I'm merely stating facts. He owned slaves.
He COULD have freed his slaves. He COULD have paid them wages just like his paid laborers. He didn't. Perhaps he regretted that he didn't.
Obviously Jefferson did great things. He also personally kept human beings as slaves.
Just as Robespierre did great things. He also was personally responsible for the murder of thousands of people.
I'd really like you to show me where in the Constitution it says women can't vote.
Right, it also doesn't say that black people can't vote, or that property rights are inviolable, unless you have red skin.
Of course, the founders were very careful to enumerate their OWN rights quite specifically. When it came to women, black people, native Americans and anyone else who wasn't a white male of European decent, well, they just figured everyone would sort of understand what they meant, right?
"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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"
You don't think it's slightly more ironic that the man who wrote those words also owned slaves?
I'm not trying to censor Jefferson, I'm just saying it's ridiculous to use him as proof the founders weren't racist. Jefferson was obviously racist by his actions, even if he wasn't with his words.
Why do you think I have an agenda? My agenda is merely to point out that Jefferson was a slave-owner. From his words he clearly believed in the teachings of Locke and Hobbes, but from his actions, he obviously didn't believe he could put them into practice for everybody.
It's not that I find their actions unreasonable when considered in context. It's that we're told that the Constitution written by these men is the pinnacle of everything a governing document should be, and that (more or less) it is right about everything.
We've learned quite a bit in the past 240ish years... is it so unreasonable to think that we could write a better Constitution now?
Why do we believe that a bunch of slave owners knew more about equality, freedom, and governance than modern men?
Why do we allow the founders, who didn't even think women should have the right to vote, to influence our decisions on the role of government in health-care?
You are judging these men using the standards of today, this is ignorant.
Yet we are told that we should accept their Constitution as if it were infallible by the standards of today. I'm merely pointing out that these men were wrong about some things (womens rights, slavery, how they treated Native Americans), so maybe they were wrong about (or simply did not consider) others as well (such as health-care being provided by the government).
If the founders did not believe women had the right to vote, why should we care about their opinion on modern issues such as health-care? Clearly they were right about some things (free speech), but wrong about others (womens rights, slavery). Maybe, based on what we've learned in the past 240ish years, we could write a better Constitution today? Is that so unreasonable?
Many were slaveowners indeed... Does this make these men racist? Hardly.
What? A person who believes white men should be free while black men should be kept in chains is exactly racist. That does not need to be proven, it is by definition. Racism may have been acceptable at the time, but that doesn't change what it is.
The founders were wise and well educated men and clearly valued all human life.
They may have valued the lives of their slaves, but only in the sense that their slaves had monetary value. The only slaves that Jefferson ever freed were his own half-black love-children. If that isn't the sign of a conflicted, flawed man, I don't know what is.
Stop putting the founders up on some pedestal as if they had no flaws. Of course they did. For some of them, one of those flaws was racism. That is simply a matter of fact; they believed that white men were inherently superior to black men. This is how they justified their ownership of human beings.
They were also sexist; they believed men were superior to women, as evidenced by their denying women the right to vote.
Many of the founders were sexist and racist. These are facts. To deny them is to deny the very definitions of the words. This is not an attack on the founders, it is merely seeing them for what they were; men of their times.
You linked a bunch of Jefferson quotes as proof that the Founding Fathers were against slavery.
Jefferson owned slaves. What do you call someone who says one thing, but does the exact opposite? If Jefferson was truly against slavery, he would have freed his slaves and paid them wages.
Instead, he made bold statements about the nature of man and freedom, while at the same time keeping hundreds of men, women, and children in bondage.
Again, calling something bullshit does not make it so, no matter how loudly you say it.
No, but the fact that it's bullshit does make it bullshit. Were many of the Founding Fathers against slavery? Sure. Were many of them slave owners who were prepared to abandon the revolution if they had to give up their slaves? Also true.
Public school education huh? I'm sorry.
What? I don't even know how to respond to that sort of ridiculous statement. Sure, I went to public school. I also spent two years going to a private school in France, and have degrees from Stanford and the United State Naval Academy. What's your point?
It doesn't make sense to make statements like "Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance. " (Thomas Jefferson) while also owning slaves.
or blacks or irresponsible groups like women or landless men
How can you call that logical? You're broadly saying that women and landless men are irresponsible, and shouldn't be able to have a say in their government.
I didn't know that having a penis, being white, and being born into money made you intelligent. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
You are projecting your values and complete inflexibility on issues you consider important on to people trying to form a cohesive federation of States with very different interests.
No, I'm just saying that many of the Founding Fathers were wrong about some things. I understand that they did what they had to do in order to form a union. Then again, the very fact that they had to compromise on the slavery issue proves that some of them felt so strongly about their right to own slaves that losing it was a deal-breaker.
I have no respect for men who want freedom from tyranny for themselves, and yet are willing to fight for their right to keep other men in chains.
The Founders were against slavery? Then why did so many of them own slaves?
The document was specifically designed such that slavery would not survive and they knew this was the best that they would be able to do.
This is a bunch of revisionist bullshit.
SOME of the founders didn't want slavery. Many of them did. Many of them owned slaves.
The founders did not give women the right to vote. They did not give blacks the right to vote. They only gave white males (people like themselves) the right to vote.
If you can't see how flawed and hypocritical that made them, well, I don't know what to tell you.
Still? The Founding Fathers didn't want equality for all people. Many of them owned slaves. They could have included universal suffrage in the original Constitution. They didn't, because many of them were racist sexist hypocrites.
"No taxation without representation! (unless you're black) (or a native) (or sans-penis)" Give me a break. People need to stop worshiping the Founding Fathers. They were men, and they were wrong about many issues.
Ugh. So many typos... this subject just gets me worked up.
Many of the Founding Fathers were racist, hypocritical bigots. Thinking otherwise is just deliberately blinding oneself to the facts of history. You can justify their beliefs by saying they didn't know any better, or that it was just the times, but don't deny that many of them were racist bigots, and by logical extension, completely misguided concerning some moral issues.
Why do you believe the 3/5's clause was put there?
As a compromise to get the South to sign the document, while at the same time diminishing the Southerners ability to control the House and Executive simply because they bought/bred more slaves?
It goes to show how flawed the Founding Fathers were; they thought of their slaves as people when it came to being represented, but not people when deciding on their representation. Oh, and you know that whole thing about being free and equal? That only applied to your if you were white (and had a penis).
How can there possibly be any doubt that the fallibility of the Founding Fathers? Even THEY knew they would get some things wrong... that's why you can amend the Constitution.
That depends on whether solar storms are independent events. It could very well be that the (unknown) mechanism which causes such strong solar storms takes ~500 years to "recharge". It could be that such a storm occurs every (approximately) 500 years, and not that the chance of one occurring in every given year is 1/500th.
Parent asked why it was nothing to worry about. I told them why; because the chance of contracting the disease and dying from it are basically non-existent, especially when compared to other things. Before one worries about getting West Nile, it makes sense to worry about other, much more likely causes of death.
So you are saying we shouldn't worry about it until thousands die?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Let the CDC worry about it. Worrying and/or panicking over some disease you have almost no chance of contracting is just pointless.
How about you let the smart people handles [sic] and you just worry about getting your ticket to the 'B' ark.
Did you just make that up, or is that an expression? Either way, it's not very clever.
Fine though, you worry about West Nile. Maybe doing so will raise your blood pressure and cause you to have a heart attack, killing you. Which is certainly much more likely than you contracting and dying from West Nile.
Slashdot Mirror
These rights are both limited when they harm others. You cannot cause physical harm to others with your speech (yelling fire in a movie theater, making specific threats of physical violence) just like you cannot cause harm to others with a gun.
Owning a gun and using a gun to shoot someone are two very different things, just as speech and speech which incites violence are two different things.
I see no contradiction or conflict here.
If it's 3G services that they can use as a general data connection, then yeah, that could be pricey. Of course, Amazon already has those 3G contracts with providers all over the globe, so there may not actually be any additional cost to Amazon.
Why bother voting at all? Why not just let one really smart person make all our decisions for us? That was Plato's conclusion... maybe he was right.
You wouldn't let some random black refugee poor woman make decisions about your household governance, but you demand that she have a say over more important matters? With such low standards of participation don't be surprised when she views you and your whole country with contempt...and votes accordingly
Who are you to say that she should have no voice in her government? What makes you think you are so much better than her?
How about instead of subjugating people, we educate them?
I can tell you one thing though - If you are certain you're better than people you know nothing of, then it is virtually certain that you are not.
Forcing people to either pay for health insurance or pay a tax seems an unwarranted use of government power for any nation that wishes to view itself as anything resembling a free nation
So you're saying that essentially every other modern democracy on the planet isn't free?
The government could instead require that people who do not wish to pay for health insurance regularly put some of their income into a fund they own but that they can only use for health care.
Or you could just force people to buy health insurance... The point of insurance is that it spreads out risk. If one person in a hundred gets sick, then you have everybody pay 1/100th of the cost, and then the one person who actually does get sick gets the medical care. Making private accounts doesn't accomplish this, because there's essentially no way someone can save enough in that account to pay for something like cancer treatment. That's why insurance was invented in the first place.
For better or worse, their values have a direct impact on our lives. That's why we should examine them.
Should churches be allowed to not pay for vaccines for their employees children if they don't believe in vaccines?
Churches are already special enough in that they don't pay taxes. They don't need even more special privileges the rest of us don't get.
What's the difference between a big corporation and the Catholic church? One pays taxes. That's it.
because it takes away the default right of the people to choose whether they buy health insurance
No, it doesn't. You just have to pay a tax if you don't want to buy health insurance. This is perfectly reasonable, since if you DO get sick while uninsured, chances are the state is going to wind up paying for you.
whether they go to a doctor
Again, nobody is forcing you to go to a doctor.
whether they get vaccines
I'm not sure that anyone is forcing you to get vaccines if you're home schooled, but even if they are, this is a matter of public health. By not getting your children vaccinated, you're endangering their lives and potentially the lives of the children around them.
The government forces me to pay for bombs, and wars I don't like. I don't have the right to refuse to pay for them. Why should you have the right to refuse to pay for healthcare?
He COULD have freed his slaves. He COULD have paid them wages just like his paid laborers. He didn't. Perhaps he regretted that he didn't.
Obviously Jefferson did great things. He also personally kept human beings as slaves.
Just as Robespierre did great things. He also was personally responsible for the murder of thousands of people.
I'd really like you to show me where in the Constitution it says women can't vote.
Right, it also doesn't say that black people can't vote, or that property rights are inviolable, unless you have red skin.
Of course, the founders were very careful to enumerate their OWN rights quite specifically. When it came to women, black people, native Americans and anyone else who wasn't a white male of European decent, well, they just figured everyone would sort of understand what they meant, right?
"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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"
You don't think it's slightly more ironic that the man who wrote those words also owned slaves?
Why do you think I have an agenda? My agenda is merely to point out that Jefferson was a slave-owner. From his words he clearly believed in the teachings of Locke and Hobbes, but from his actions, he obviously didn't believe he could put them into practice for everybody.
We've learned quite a bit in the past 240ish years... is it so unreasonable to think that we could write a better Constitution now?
Why do we believe that a bunch of slave owners knew more about equality, freedom, and governance than modern men?
Why do we allow the founders, who didn't even think women should have the right to vote, to influence our decisions on the role of government in health-care?
You are judging these men using the standards of today, this is ignorant.
Yet we are told that we should accept their Constitution as if it were infallible by the standards of today. I'm merely pointing out that these men were wrong about some things (womens rights, slavery, how they treated Native Americans), so maybe they were wrong about (or simply did not consider) others as well (such as health-care being provided by the government).
If the founders did not believe women had the right to vote, why should we care about their opinion on modern issues such as health-care? Clearly they were right about some things (free speech), but wrong about others (womens rights, slavery). Maybe, based on what we've learned in the past 240ish years, we could write a better Constitution today? Is that so unreasonable?
Many were slaveowners indeed ... Does this make these men racist? Hardly.
What? A person who believes white men should be free while black men should be kept in chains is exactly racist. That does not need to be proven, it is by definition. Racism may have been acceptable at the time, but that doesn't change what it is.
The founders were wise and well educated men and clearly valued all human life.
They may have valued the lives of their slaves, but only in the sense that their slaves had monetary value. The only slaves that Jefferson ever freed were his own half-black love-children. If that isn't the sign of a conflicted, flawed man, I don't know what is.
Stop putting the founders up on some pedestal as if they had no flaws. Of course they did. For some of them, one of those flaws was racism. That is simply a matter of fact; they believed that white men were inherently superior to black men. This is how they justified their ownership of human beings.
They were also sexist; they believed men were superior to women, as evidenced by their denying women the right to vote.
Many of the founders were sexist and racist. These are facts. To deny them is to deny the very definitions of the words. This is not an attack on the founders, it is merely seeing them for what they were; men of their times.
Jefferson owned slaves. What do you call someone who says one thing, but does the exact opposite? If Jefferson was truly against slavery, he would have freed his slaves and paid them wages.
Instead, he made bold statements about the nature of man and freedom, while at the same time keeping hundreds of men, women, and children in bondage.
Again, calling something bullshit does not make it so, no matter how loudly you say it.
No, but the fact that it's bullshit does make it bullshit. Were many of the Founding Fathers against slavery? Sure. Were many of them slave owners who were prepared to abandon the revolution if they had to give up their slaves? Also true.
Public school education huh? I'm sorry.
What? I don't even know how to respond to that sort of ridiculous statement. Sure, I went to public school. I also spent two years going to a private school in France, and have degrees from Stanford and the United State Naval Academy. What's your point?
or blacks or irresponsible groups like women or landless men
How can you call that logical? You're broadly saying that women and landless men are irresponsible, and shouldn't be able to have a say in their government.
I didn't know that having a penis, being white, and being born into money made you intelligent. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
You are projecting your values and complete inflexibility on issues you consider important on to people trying to form a cohesive federation of States with very different interests.
No, I'm just saying that many of the Founding Fathers were wrong about some things. I understand that they did what they had to do in order to form a union. Then again, the very fact that they had to compromise on the slavery issue proves that some of them felt so strongly about their right to own slaves that losing it was a deal-breaker.
I have no respect for men who want freedom from tyranny for themselves, and yet are willing to fight for their right to keep other men in chains.
The man owned hundreds of slaves, and yet claimed to be against the peculiar institution!
Jefferson certainly engenders respect for many of his deeds, but when it comes to slavery, I don't know how the man slept at night.
The document was specifically designed such that slavery would not survive and they knew this was the best that they would be able to do.
This is a bunch of revisionist bullshit.
SOME of the founders didn't want slavery. Many of them did. Many of them owned slaves.
The founders did not give women the right to vote. They did not give blacks the right to vote. They only gave white males (people like themselves) the right to vote.
If you can't see how flawed and hypocritical that made them, well, I don't know what to tell you.
we still want equality for all people
Still? The Founding Fathers didn't want equality for all people. Many of them owned slaves. They could have included universal suffrage in the original Constitution. They didn't, because many of them were racist sexist hypocrites.
"No taxation without representation! (unless you're black) (or a native) (or sans-penis)" Give me a break. People need to stop worshiping the Founding Fathers. They were men, and they were wrong about many issues.
Many of the Founding Fathers were racist, hypocritical bigots. Thinking otherwise is just deliberately blinding oneself to the facts of history. You can justify their beliefs by saying they didn't know any better, or that it was just the times, but don't deny that many of them were racist bigots, and by logical extension, completely misguided concerning some moral issues.
Why do you believe the 3/5's clause was put there?
As a compromise to get the South to sign the document, while at the same time diminishing the Southerners ability to control the House and Executive simply because they bought/bred more slaves?
It goes to show how flawed the Founding Fathers were; they thought of their slaves as people when it came to being represented, but not people when deciding on their representation. Oh, and you know that whole thing about being free and equal? That only applied to your if you were white (and had a penis).
How can there possibly be any doubt that the fallibility of the Founding Fathers? Even THEY knew they would get some things wrong... that's why you can amend the Constitution.
That depends on whether solar storms are independent events. It could very well be that the (unknown) mechanism which causes such strong solar storms takes ~500 years to "recharge". It could be that such a storm occurs every (approximately) 500 years, and not that the chance of one occurring in every given year is 1/500th.
So you are saying we shouldn't worry about it until thousands die?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Let the CDC worry about it. Worrying and/or panicking over some disease you have almost no chance of contracting is just pointless.
How about you let the smart people handles [sic] and you just worry about getting your ticket to the 'B' ark.
Did you just make that up, or is that an expression? Either way, it's not very clever.
Fine though, you worry about West Nile. Maybe doing so will raise your blood pressure and cause you to have a heart attack, killing you. Which is certainly much more likely than you contracting and dying from West Nile.
You're much more likely to die in a car accident or by lightning strike.