Words have meanings — some times, they even have consequences. The title says:
79% of Airbnb Listings In Barcelona Are Illegal
The write-up says:
79% could be illegal
The former is a statement of fact and a serious allegation. The latter is just as non-committal and devoid of information as the (in)famous promise of Geico's advertising.
Which is it?
do not apply for a permit, fail to pay insurance and tourist tax, and ignore Catalonian law that forbids short-term rentals of rooms in private homes
Phew... Malum prohibitum crimes: it is only wrong because it is illegal. Screw you, Statists, get back to enforcing the malum in se — you know, the kind of thing, that is illegal because it is wrong.
Rather than the low road reponse taken in previous shootings, their's was exemplary in that they clearly identified themselves as better people.
Maybe, that's because none of the earlier dead have, actually, been innocent. Michael Brown in particular deserved to die (even if Eric Garner didn't).
Or, maybe, because these are a church-going folk — you know, the stupid, illogical, bigoted and parochial believers in a sky-god...
I don't know — but you are right in that their tolerance is sincere, and not a result of some "grass-roots" organisation making emphasis on tolerance one of the bullet points on a strategy memo. To be discarded and replaced with the opposite, when the situation changes.
Start by getting the government out of philanthropy and other benevolence. They suck at it, but insist on spending tax-dollars on it anyway.
But be careful — if you find something, that seems useful, the government may decide to impose it on everyone (at gun-point, which is how government does everything.)
It's bad news when the government is in such disarray that it needs a money from a billionaire to keep providing services to the country's neediest
but don't fall for it. First of all, such statements are self-contradicting — because it is exactly the money from billionaires, that the government spends on "the country's neediest" even when it is not shut down. Top 20% of the earners pay 84% of the income tax today... But, when a philanthropist chooses to spend his money this way, it is noble and legal, whereas for the government it is a patently unconstitutional thing to do:
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
— James Madison
Yes, boys and girls, "helping the needy" is just as illegal for the state to do as is eavesdropping on your communications or searching your house without a warrant...
Whether the reaction is "too quick" or not is the wrong question to ask. It is wrong to prosecute thoughtcrimes at all. Whether or not he is "sexist", he is still a brilliant scientist and a credit to whatever stations he was fired from.
Such prosecutions are not only unfair — and offensive to everyone, who values the First Amendment — they are also ineffective and counter-productive: people will not change their minds this way, they'll just learn to keep their mouths shut.
And, of course, it also exposes the preachers of tolerance and crusaders against bigotry as intolerant bigots. Some silver lining, I suppose...
But, as long as the projectiles do not land on the neighbors' properties, it certainly ought to be legal:
Drone regulations are being written by lobbyists for drone manufacturers and other companies. You’re going to wake up one day, and there’s going to be a drone outside your bedroom window writing you a ticket for sodomy.
The above suggestion may seem frivolous, but it is scarier, than you might think — a major part of the argument to abolish laws outlawing particular sexual "deviations" was that in order to enforce them, police must invade the privacy of everyone.
Well, if a robotic "officer" can do the job on its own, that major pillar goes away and the law can come right back into your house. Whether it catches you sodomizing your (happily moaning and otherwise consenting) partner, or flushing your toilet more times than the governor thinks is good for the Collective is irrelevant. As long as no human officer is needed, no privacy invasion has occurred.
Now, today no computers yet exist, that can distinguish legal penetration from illegal. But that's no going to last long — red-light cameras are everybody's favorite already. Though my ticket from such a device claimed, that "an officer reviewed the recording" — and maybe he did, I don't know, because he never showed up in court — I am quite sure, police don't stare at the camera-feeds themselves all day. Some algorithm must already be in place to flag suspicious cases for a human's review.
These systems will become more sophisticated very soon — and suggestions will be made to trust them to issue summons automatically too. Fortunately, making an argument for shooting an invading robot is much easier than it is to advocate shooting policemen, however nosy...
Tsk, tsk, tsk... So much hatred poured instead of simply offering a single example. Just ONE argument, that could be used to support gay marriage without also supporting incest — and my post, that troubled you, haters, so much, would've been defeated on its obvious merit...
Instead, I reducedyouall to imagining these vile things about my person (and non-existing relatives) — because putting together a reasonable rebuttal just is not an Illiberals' forte, is it? Like (very smart) squirrels, you just feel it, but — faculties required for putting a coherent argument replaced with those of group-think — can't put into words...
Yes, actually. I fully agree. But I am a Libertarian raging against Statism daily... All citizens ought to be equal before the law. How they want to associate with each other, calling it "marriage" or "union" or whatever is up to them and should have no legal meaning.
Maybe, there can be some justification for legally recognizing groups of people raising children together (their own or adopted) — but I am not sure about that either...
Time? No, it is long overdue. Now it is time for incest.
There is no argument for making acceptance of gay marriage mandatory, that would not also apply to making sex between and marriage of parent and (adult) child or between siblings legal. "Troll" my foot — do try to come up with one...
Oh, and before you say "Think of the (malformed) children of such unions!" — sorry, that's not enough. First of all, they don't have to have children with each other — like gay couples, they can adopt. Second, most of the existing laws banning incest make no difference between actual close blood-relatives "in laws" — it is equally illegal for a step-father to marry his adopted daughter (Woody Allen got away with it, because he never formally adopted his wife's child).
And third, the courts have ruled for years (here is a "1948 decision for example!), that any concerns for the health of the offspring are not sufficient grounds for denying the right to marry.
Within a generation the term "motherfucker" will become a disparaging sign of bigoted microaggression — which is, of course, much worse than the actual bona-fide aggression it manifests in our parochial times.
So providing education for poor people and recognising gay marriage lead inevitably to the Khmer Rouge?
First of all, corrections:
Not "providing education for poor people", but "forcing taxpayers to provide education for poor people". Tax-collection happens at gun-point — using thus-collected monies for benevolence is tyranny — and decidedly against the intent of Constitution-framers.
Not "recognizing gay marriage", but "forcing people to consider gay unions equivalent to married couples".
And now, yes, the above are made possible by the Collectivist sentiment — that the Individual's interests and desires are inferior to those of the Collective. Once that sentiment is adopted, there is no longer a legal barrier to prevent some future Khmer Rouge from killing millions. All they have to be able to claim is, it is done for "General Welfare".
If millions of victims is too stunning for you to be believable, try to think, how is Lynching somebody not a manifestation of "the will of the people"?
"COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD" — sounds familiar? Godwin's Law my tail — you aren't the first Collectivist in history...
What?!?! Information can be stolen? Somebody lost their own copy? Oh, no... How can it happen, that the same site, that diligentlyinsistsoncorrecting any attempts to accuse pirates of music and movies of "theft", have moderated a post containing the same misapplication of the Eighth Commandment so highly?
As usual, dave420 make claims without even an attempt at citations... Judging by the stalking following him with reminders of other past arguments dave420 lost in disgrace, that's just how the man is.
That the flag of USSR remains available in a variety of sizes and designs — including the face of Stalin — does not bother him one iota... Nor is the dreadful "Hammer & Sickle" printed on every bottle of a various brands of vodka a problem. Che Guevara T-shirts? He has them in a different colours (and sizes). No, it is the battle flag of a long-vanquished foe, that he must continue kicking even if takes making shit up to justify it. A real gentleman.
The end, as you noted elsewhere, is to compel Reason
Of course, this was the end. It is just, as I noted elsewhere, not a particularly worthy end...
what good is power unless you flaunt it every now and then?
Ok, at least, we agree, Statists are wrong...
The typical libertarian argument against government posits it as an all or nothing deal.
No, that's not true at all. The Libertarians do recognize the government as necessary — we just want its role to be as limited, as it was during the times of Jefferson and Franklin. It is to only play the roles given to it by the Constitution they wrote. And given explicitly — not the carte blanche, that Statists try to derive from the "General Welfare" and the "Commerce" bits. Namely:
Defend the country from enemies without
Maintain law and order within
Nothing else. No spending tax-monies on benevolence; no telling us, who we can hire; what we can smoke, what we must consider "marriage", how we can build our houses or what sort of appliances we can place into them, et cætera ad infinitum et nauseam.
the beast must be tractable to, at a minimum, the rule of law and the will of the people
First of all, take the "will of the people" part off — that's just a better-sounding spin on the "mob rule". If it is not prohibited by some law, it is legal even if most everybody else hates it (as was the case with Larry Flynt, for a well-publicized example). "Lynching" is an ultimate manifestation of the "will of the people" — stop bringing it up...
Second, the bigger the beast, the less tractable it is — and that's the point of the Libertarian teaching in general and the already cited Jefferson's quote in particular.
Or corporation for that matter.
Yes, "corporations" are the scary bogey-man of all Statists these days. But its nonsense — corporations compete with each other and are thus automatically less powerful than the government — which, by definition, is a monopoly. Sorry, I'm repeating myself (and others) here...
no one is forcing strip clubs to hire anyone, period
That's only because the entertainers are not, formally, employees, but are all "independent" and "renting" space in the joint. This legal dodge has been in place for ever and it is only a matter of time before some future Eric Holder or Elliot Spitzer puts an end to it.
a bigoted asshole like you.
Now that's fresh... We are done here.
I thoroughly loathe and despise your views.
Thank you, sergeant Painfully Obvious. I wonder, what happened to the "Please, don't hate" sentiment, though...
I have some wonderful arguments against them.
No, you don't. At most, you have something tortured, or else you would posted it here. Your best was to try the hair-splitting over striptease dancers — and even that failed. But now that you called me "asshole", it is too late to even try again.
Dragging in bigotry against gays, blacks, transgender persons
I, actually, did nothing of the kind, but with over half of Americans being less-than-proficient readers, I'm not surprised, you misunderstood me... Hop along.
The part of your argument that everyone else finds silly is that you think that the power to throw someone in jail or shoot them goes away if the government doesn't have it.
But it does have it — and ought to retain it. It just must be made to wield that power less — much less. That is the Libertarian argument.
We wrote the Constitution — and, in particular, the Bill of Rights — to limit the government's power, but (and this was predicted) the Statists have been eroding the limits since then. Even the right explicitly declared in the Second Amendment as such is now considered a mere privilege, for example.
violent government is the only solution to violent anarchy
Strawman.
The fundamental conceit of libertarianism is treating individual rights as being more powerful and having greater primacy than the rights dictated by collective force.
Yes. Because the Collectivism is the direct cause of Fascism and/or Communism. Once you subjugate the silly, selfish, cantankerous Individual to the Glorious Collective, any and all human rights abuses become immediately possible. From forcing you to pay for somebody else's education, to forcibly changing your opinion on what the word "marriage" means, to the outright killing fields. As long as it is done for The Greater Good (a.k.a. General Welfare, as the Statists like to intrerpret US Constitution), it all becomes justifiable.
In this world, there will always be some group of people with guns telling you what to do. Deal with it.
I am dealing with it — by arguing for the reduction of this group's size and power. Both have grown alarmingly since the inception of our Republic. But I see, that you have picked your side already.
But there is no particularly deserving end in this case. Nothing to justify the means with... Torture, at least, was claimed to prevent some acts of terror and even capture bin Laden.
Welcome to Police State 2.0.
Contrary to the "not really" you began with, Statism is the problem:
"If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have."
There isn't a great deal of difference to me between a government or a multitude of corporations making themselves privy to an increasing share of our personal lives
Actually, the difference is vast: for a corporation to compel either you or another corporation to reveal any data, it has to win legal case — or, a least, convince a judge to issue a subpoena. The government has been gradually lowering this bar for itself over the years — recall the "National Security Letters" (and how easy they are for the government to obtain).
But my point was not, that the government ought not to investigate legitimate threats against judges and public officials — even hard-core Libertarians would agree, that this is, actually, a proper role of the government. The point is, this particular investigation was patently illegitimate — the "threats" were bogus and hyperbolic and DoJ could not possible have hoped to ever win a conviction.
Their intention was to simply harass the dissenters by hitting them with subpoenas and giving them threatening "talking-tos". The prosecution, in other words, was malicious. That's the disgusting part.
The aspects of Libertarianism that relate to being largely left alone to pursue our lives appeal to me [...] The eagerness of Libertarians to remove regulations on corporate behavior
But there is no difference! What's good for the goose, is good for the chicken as well:
If a corporation can not discriminate on race or age in hiring a secretary, then you can not discriminate on same in hiring a babysitter.
If a corporation's employees can vote to obligate their employer to only hire from the same union they just joined, by what logic should your local supermarket be unable to vote itself into becoming the sole legal source of groceries for you?
If a strip-club can not turn away a transgender entertainer, then you can not be averting your eyes from "her" either — and it would be manifestly bigoted of you to not stick your dollar-bills right next to "her" penis.
Even more obvious examples abound. For example, the EPA considers any billabong in the US to be under its control and protection — so both private citizens and corporations alike now need a Federal Government's approval to build anything on their property, if it happens to have a lake, a stream, or a swamp, however small...
A lot of people thought that enslaving even inferior people was wrong
From what I read, the abolitionism was a fringe movement... While, neither my "fringe" nor your "a lot" are quantifiable, it was perfectly normal, for example (according to the tale of "The Man Put Up At Gadsby's"), to bring household slaves to Washington D.C. — and even sell them there — all without any fear of them running away and finding an anti-slavery shelter.
The North wasn't actually attacking slavery where it was legal, but trying to limit its expansion.
Thank you for confirming, the North did not go to war to free the slaves.
Didn't want to put this partisanship into the submission, so here it goes. In my opinion, this is yet another battle in war of Statists against Libertarians — and all the rest of us.
My point was, if, as the study found, the effects of "high sugar" and "high fat" was the same, then the observed phenomenon is, likely, due not to a particular food group, but the total caloric intake. Eat more — become stupider. Or, to play the relativism game, ear less — become smarter.
It would be outright un-scientific and render this a false study.
So was Estonia, and Latvia, and Lithuania — and Poland, even Ukraine. But that didn't help most of them retain their independence, when the Red Army blasted in.
Finland survived, while its nearly-identical twin Estonia did not — and the two became part of the "experiment" I mentioned.
Today there is no Estonian Torvalds, which is not surprising, but no Estonian Nokia either... I wanted to know Mr. Torvalds' — the most prominent Finn in today's world — opinion on that, but some asshole has already modded me down as "off-topic"...
The Blacks were considered inferior throughout the entire country. The North's attacks on slavery were motivated not by feelings of fairness, but to simply destroy the enemy's economic base.
So, the GP is right stating, that this was not "about slavery" in today's meaning of the concept — the war was not waged to restore fairness and bring about equal rights. You are right in that it was about slavery because it was that tactics of the Federal government, that pushed the rebels over the edge.
Secession was popular in flat states, where large plantations were viable. It was less popular in mountainous areas, where slaves were less common
Yes, were somebody to try to outlaw, say, airplane-building today (such as on account of their pollution), we might see Washington trying to secede. History will then claim, the bigots objected to clean air.
And while you are at it, move the Egyptian pyramids to a museum and away from prominence. For they too are monuments of a long dead slave-owning country.
I have much more respect for the Justice, than for most Congressmen. So, yes, I do find it probable, he has read it. Also, unlike most of them, he has legal background (mildly speaking) so the reading would've been much simpler for him.
But I was not talking about Scalia, but rather Roberts. Off-topic much?
Slashdot Mirror
Words have meanings — some times, they even have consequences. The title says:
The write-up says:
The former is a statement of fact and a serious allegation. The latter is just as non-committal and devoid of information as the (in)famous promise of Geico's advertising.
Which is it?
Phew... Malum prohibitum crimes: it is only wrong because it is illegal. Screw you, Statists, get back to enforcing the malum in se — you know, the kind of thing, that is illegal because it is wrong.
Was he punished? Yes.
Was the punishment for anything other than his alleged holding an offensive opinion? Yes.
Ergo, he was punished for a thoughtcrime.
That the punishment is light is irrelevant, and the distinction between merely having an opinion and stating it is without difference.
Maybe, that's because none of the earlier dead have, actually, been innocent. Michael Brown in particular deserved to die (even if Eric Garner didn't).
Or, maybe, because these are a church-going folk — you know, the stupid, illogical, bigoted and parochial believers in a sky-god...
I don't know — but you are right in that their tolerance is sincere, and not a result of some "grass-roots" organisation making emphasis on tolerance one of the bullet points on a strategy memo. To be discarded and replaced with the opposite, when the situation changes.
Start by getting the government out of philanthropy and other benevolence. They suck at it, but insist on spending tax-dollars on it anyway.
But be careful — if you find something, that seems useful, the government may decide to impose it on everyone (at gun-point, which is how government does everything.)
Of course, the Statists would lament:
but don't fall for it. First of all, such statements are self-contradicting — because it is exactly the money from billionaires, that the government spends on "the country's neediest" even when it is not shut down. Top 20% of the earners pay 84% of the income tax today... But, when a philanthropist chooses to spend his money this way, it is noble and legal, whereas for the government it is a patently unconstitutional thing to do:
Yes, boys and girls, "helping the needy" is just as illegal for the state to do as is eavesdropping on your communications or searching your house without a warrant...
Whether the reaction is "too quick" or not is the wrong question to ask. It is wrong to prosecute thoughtcrimes at all. Whether or not he is "sexist", he is still a brilliant scientist and a credit to whatever stations he was fired from.
Such prosecutions are not only unfair — and offensive to everyone, who values the First Amendment — they are also ineffective and counter-productive: people will not change their minds this way, they'll just learn to keep their mouths shut.
And, of course, it also exposes the preachers of tolerance and crusaders against bigotry as intolerant bigots. Some silver lining, I suppose...
Well, sadly, they don't have that right.
But, as long as the projectiles do not land on the neighbors' properties, it certainly ought to be legal:
The above suggestion may seem frivolous, but it is scarier, than you might think — a major part of the argument to abolish laws outlawing particular sexual "deviations" was that in order to enforce them, police must invade the privacy of everyone.
Well, if a robotic "officer" can do the job on its own, that major pillar goes away and the law can come right back into your house. Whether it catches you sodomizing your (happily moaning and otherwise consenting) partner, or flushing your toilet more times than the governor thinks is good for the Collective is irrelevant. As long as no human officer is needed, no privacy invasion has occurred.
Now, today no computers yet exist, that can distinguish legal penetration from illegal. But that's no going to last long — red-light cameras are everybody's favorite already. Though my ticket from such a device claimed, that "an officer reviewed the recording" — and maybe he did, I don't know, because he never showed up in court — I am quite sure, police don't stare at the camera-feeds themselves all day. Some algorithm must already be in place to flag suspicious cases for a human's review.
These systems will become more sophisticated very soon — and suggestions will be made to trust them to issue summons automatically too. Fortunately, making an argument for shooting an invading robot is much easier than it is to advocate shooting policemen, however nosy...
Tsk, tsk, tsk... So much hatred poured instead of simply offering a single example. Just ONE argument, that could be used to support gay marriage without also supporting incest — and my post, that troubled you, haters, so much, would've been defeated on its obvious merit...
Instead, I reduced you all to imagining these vile things about my person (and non-existing relatives) — because putting together a reasonable rebuttal just is not an Illiberals' forte, is it? Like (very smart) squirrels, you just feel it, but — faculties required for putting a coherent argument replaced with those of group-think — can't put into words...
Fail...
Yes, actually. I fully agree. But I am a Libertarian raging against Statism daily... All citizens ought to be equal before the law. How they want to associate with each other, calling it "marriage" or "union" or whatever is up to them and should have no legal meaning.
Maybe, there can be some justification for legally recognizing groups of people raising children together (their own or adopted) — but I am not sure about that either...
Time? No, it is long overdue. Now it is time for incest.
There is no argument for making acceptance of gay marriage mandatory, that would not also apply to making sex between and marriage of parent and (adult) child or between siblings legal. "Troll" my foot — do try to come up with one...
This is hardly news — and some legal professionals have said so. And the fight for Full Marriage Equality is already ongoing. All over.
Oh, and before you say "Think of the (malformed) children of such unions!" — sorry, that's not enough. First of all, they don't have to have children with each other — like gay couples, they can adopt. Second, most of the existing laws banning incest make no difference between actual close blood-relatives "in laws" — it is equally illegal for a step-father to marry his adopted daughter (Woody Allen got away with it, because he never formally adopted his wife's child).
And third, the courts have ruled for years (here is a "1948 decision for example!), that any concerns for the health of the offspring are not sufficient grounds for denying the right to marry.
Within a generation the term "motherfucker" will become a disparaging sign of bigoted microaggression — which is, of course, much worse than the actual bona-fide aggression it manifests in our parochial times.
First of all, corrections:
And now, yes, the above are made possible by the Collectivist sentiment — that the Individual's interests and desires are inferior to those of the Collective. Once that sentiment is adopted, there is no longer a legal barrier to prevent some future Khmer Rouge from killing millions. All they have to be able to claim is, it is done for "General Welfare".
If millions of victims is too stunning for you to be believable, try to think, how is Lynching somebody not a manifestation of "the will of the people"?
"COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD" — sounds familiar? Godwin's Law my tail — you aren't the first Collectivist in history...
Please, don't hate.
What?!?! Information can be stolen? Somebody lost their own copy? Oh, no... How can it happen, that the same site, that diligently insists on correcting any attempts to accuse pirates of music and movies of "theft", have moderated a post containing the same misapplication of the Eighth Commandment so highly?
As usual, dave420 make claims without even an attempt at citations... Judging by the stalking following him with reminders of other past arguments dave420 lost in disgrace, that's just how the man is.
That the flag of USSR remains available in a variety of sizes and designs — including the face of Stalin — does not bother him one iota... Nor is the dreadful "Hammer & Sickle" printed on every bottle of a various brands of vodka a problem. Che Guevara T-shirts? He has them in a different colours (and sizes). No, it is the battle flag of a long-vanquished foe, that he must continue kicking even if takes making shit up to justify it. A real gentleman.
Of course, this was the end. It is just, as I noted elsewhere, not a particularly worthy end...
Ok, at least, we agree, Statists are wrong...
No, that's not true at all. The Libertarians do recognize the government as necessary — we just want its role to be as limited, as it was during the times of Jefferson and Franklin. It is to only play the roles given to it by the Constitution they wrote. And given explicitly — not the carte blanche, that Statists try to derive from the "General Welfare" and the "Commerce" bits. Namely:
Nothing else. No spending tax-monies on benevolence; no telling us, who we can hire; what we can smoke, what we must consider "marriage", how we can build our houses or what sort of appliances we can place into them, et cætera ad infinitum et nauseam.
First of all, take the "will of the people" part off — that's just a better-sounding spin on the "mob rule". If it is not prohibited by some law, it is legal even if most everybody else hates it (as was the case with Larry Flynt, for a well-publicized example). "Lynching" is an ultimate manifestation of the "will of the people" — stop bringing it up...
Second, the bigger the beast, the less tractable it is — and that's the point of the Libertarian teaching in general and the already cited Jefferson's quote in particular.
Yes, "corporations" are the scary bogey-man of all Statists these days. But its nonsense — corporations compete with each other and are thus automatically less powerful than the government — which, by definition, is a monopoly. Sorry, I'm repeating myself (and others) here...
That's only because the entertainers are not, formally, employees, but are all "independent" and "renting" space in the joint. This legal dodge has been in place for ever and it is only a matter of time before some future Eric Holder or Elliot Spitzer puts an end to it.
Now that's fresh... We are done here.
Thank you, sergeant Painfully Obvious. I wonder, what happened to the "Please, don't hate" sentiment, though...
No, you don't. At most, you have something tortured, or else you would posted it here. Your best was to try the hair-splitting over striptease dancers — and even that failed. But now that you called me "asshole", it is too late to even try again.
I, actually, did nothing of the kind, but with over half of Americans being less-than-proficient readers, I'm not surprised, you misunderstood me... Hop along.
But it does have it — and ought to retain it. It just must be made to wield that power less — much less. That is the Libertarian argument.
We wrote the Constitution — and, in particular, the Bill of Rights — to limit the government's power, but (and this was predicted) the Statists have been eroding the limits since then. Even the right explicitly declared in the Second Amendment as such is now considered a mere privilege, for example.
Strawman.
Yes. Because the Collectivism is the direct cause of Fascism and/or Communism. Once you subjugate the silly, selfish, cantankerous Individual to the Glorious Collective, any and all human rights abuses become immediately possible. From forcing you to pay for somebody else's education, to forcibly changing your opinion on what the word "marriage" means, to the outright killing fields. As long as it is done for The Greater Good (a.k.a. General Welfare, as the Statists like to intrerpret US Constitution), it all becomes justifiable.
I am dealing with it — by arguing for the reduction of this group's size and power. Both have grown alarmingly since the inception of our Republic. But I see, that you have picked your side already.
But there is no particularly deserving end in this case. Nothing to justify the means with... Torture, at least, was claimed to prevent some acts of terror and even capture bin Laden.
Contrary to the "not really" you began with, Statism is the problem:
In other words, if you want Federal government to give you "free" public schools, you'll have to accept Department of Education Police — along with the (not-) SWAT teams.
Actually, the difference is vast: for a corporation to compel either you or another corporation to reveal any data, it has to win legal case — or, a least, convince a judge to issue a subpoena. The government has been gradually lowering this bar for itself over the years — recall the "National Security Letters" (and how easy they are for the government to obtain).
And that's when it bothers with the legal process at all — often it can simply just bust in and take your stuff (without warrant), seize any property on mere accusation of it being used in a crime, and confiscate bank accounts without even an accusation, only suspicion , or, as was the case with Reason.com, demand your "voluntary" cooperation or else...
But my point was not, that the government ought not to investigate legitimate threats against judges and public officials — even hard-core Libertarians would agree, that this is, actually, a proper role of the government. The point is, this particular investigation was patently illegitimate — the "threats" were bogus and hyperbolic and DoJ could not possible have hoped to ever win a conviction.
Their intention was to simply harass the dissenters by hitting them with subpoenas and giving them threatening "talking-tos". The prosecution, in other words, was malicious. That's the disgusting part.
But there is no difference! What's good for the goose, is good for the chicken as well:
Even more obvious examples abound. For example, the EPA considers any billabong in the US to be under its control and protection — so both private citizens and corporations alike now need a Federal Government's approval to build anything on their property, if it happens to have a lake, a stream, or a swamp, however small...
From what I read, the abolitionism was a fringe movement... While, neither my "fringe" nor your "a lot" are quantifiable, it was perfectly normal, for example (according to the tale of "The Man Put Up At Gadsby's"), to bring household slaves to Washington D.C. — and even sell them there — all without any fear of them running away and finding an anti-slavery shelter.
Thank you for confirming, the North did not go to war to free the slaves.
Didn't want to put this partisanship into the submission, so here it goes. In my opinion, this is yet another battle in war of Statists against Libertarians — and all the rest of us.
Pick your side...
Which would not surprise me either, actually.
Are we? I thought, we are talking about eating vs. not eating fats and sugars.
But, fine, let's talk about Mexico — the actual source of tomatoes (actually, that may have been in modern-day Ohio), chili peppers, and chocolate. Their obesity levels are even higher than the US'... You were saying?
So was Estonia, and Latvia, and Lithuania — and Poland, even Ukraine. But that didn't help most of them retain their independence, when the Red Army blasted in.
Finland survived, while its nearly-identical twin Estonia did not — and the two became part of the "experiment" I mentioned.
Today there is no Estonian Torvalds, which is not surprising, but no Estonian Nokia either... I wanted to know Mr. Torvalds' — the most prominent Finn in today's world — opinion on that, but some asshole has already modded me down as "off-topic"...
The Blacks were considered inferior throughout the entire country. The North's attacks on slavery were motivated not by feelings of fairness, but to simply destroy the enemy's economic base.
So, the GP is right stating, that this was not "about slavery" in today's meaning of the concept — the war was not waged to restore fairness and bring about equal rights. You are right in that it was about slavery because it was that tactics of the Federal government, that pushed the rebels over the edge.
Yes, were somebody to try to outlaw, say, airplane-building today (such as on account of their pollution), we might see Washington trying to secede. History will then claim, the bigots objected to clean air.
And while you are at it, move the Egyptian pyramids to a museum and away from prominence. For they too are monuments of a long dead slave-owning country.
But don't worry, if you don't, ISIS will blast them when they get to Egypt.
I have much more respect for the Justice, than for most Congressmen. So, yes, I do find it probable, he has read it. Also, unlike most of them, he has legal background (mildly speaking) so the reading would've been much simpler for him.
But I was not talking about Scalia, but rather Roberts. Off-topic much?