Unless you happen to be a member of the bar, I'll trust my teachers over you. (And if you're not in the United States, then you should realize that makes you a minority here on/. and state such in no uncertain terms. Same if you ARE a member of the bar, and want special weight to your answers here on/.)
(And to get this out of the way--I'm in New York State. The specifics of contract law varies from state to state, and even more from country to country. If you happen to be in another country or in a state that doesn't follow the UCC, then our differences may be real differences in the law, not inaccuraces in fact.)
When you pump gas, you accept the offer made to provide gas at that price. That. Is. Not. A. Contract.
Yes. It. Is.
A contract requires four things--an Offer, Acceptance of that Offer, Consideration on both sides (i.e., something of value from each side to the other), and a Legal Purpose.
I tell you that, if you cut my lawn tomorrow, I'll pay you $200. You come and cut my lawn tomorrow. I pay you $50. You then file in small claims court for--wait for it--breach of contract. And likely get both your $150 and some additional punitive monies.
The only way to agree to a contract is to agree to a contract, you can't do it via any random action.
No, not by any random action. But you can agree to a contract by undertaking a specific action that a reasonable person in your circumstance should know would result in a legal arrangement being formed between yourself and another party. Such as, you pumping gas at a gas station with a labeled price.
(Yes, the police can arrest you for stealing gas. And if the DA can't utterly convince 12 folk that the grainy photo was definitly you, you won't go to jail for it. But even if you beat the DA's rap, the gas store owner can still sue you in a civil action to recover their lost income from your underpayment.)
I'd be very interested in hearing where you abscribe this supposed large difference between purchases and contracts from. I suspect that you're just an arrogant nitwit and not a moron, and there is a real jurisdictional difference here. (Then again, you may just be a typical/. moron. Never can tell until you reply.)
The onus of communicating your point is on you, not me.
You said nothing about wanting to know all of the terms of any software you have before you purchase it. You said that you were not going to hold yourself to any contract you did not sign--and pumping gas is a classic case of non-written contracts.
To get back on topic, what are you told when you tell a merchant you want to see a copy of the EULA before you purchase the software?
Why does the constitution only apply to citizens though (on the holding)?
Well, in some parts it does--you need to be a citizen to vote, hold public office, or the like. But many of the non-systematic rights in the Constitution refer to "persons", not citizens, and have equal effect to visiting foreign nationals or to our own citizenry.
About the only thing that I can do that the Indian programmers working three floors beneath me can't is get called up for Jury Duty (reminds me--got to return the Court House questionarre), be drafted, or vote.
Parody is of course an exception, as is not-for-profit fanfiction.
Don't forget the original purposes of the fair-use doctrine: news and scholarly reporting.
(And don't ever think that fanfiction follows different rules; if you favorite fanfic writer suddenly got a million fans who paid him $1 each, the copyright holder would likely want a piece of the cash. It's just that most of the time, fanfics aren't worth tracking down.)
Though I would argue copyright should expire with the creator-- history has shown "the estate of..." can't be trusted to do anything but cash in on the artist's work.
"The estate of" is supposed to do nothing but cash in on the artist's work. The estate is the artist's widow or children, and of all the folk in the world those are the ones who should profit first from an artist's deathbed masterpiece.
(OTOH, making post-mortem copyright a one-person "living will" type would work just as well. One could even limit it to spouses or incompetent dependents until death or children until age 25)
The Godfather is a piece of art (whether a good or a bad one is another discussion) and culturally belongs to everybody; the fact that it "belongs" to someone in some narrow copyright sense is incidental.
The Godfather is a work of art. Like every other work of art since the dawn of time, it belongs to the artist.
The fact that it was a collaborative work does not diminish the ownership of its creator. In the end run, copyright is a limited run, and in a few hundred years it will all be public domain.
The books which go beyond the trilogy, however, disagree. Supposedly the Emperor lives in cloned bodies, and the dark side consumes the bodies so he has to get a new one ever so often. At the point where he's thrown out, and he falls through that hole, ostensibly someone catches him and transfers his spirit into yet another clone. The Emperor never dies according to some comic books.
Those "some comic books" are all Official Sanctioned Star Wars products. Lucasarts (or someone else similarly close to Lucas) dictates or approves every major plot arc, including the Emperor's brief-but-futile ressurection and Luke's temporary fall to the dark side.
And, y'know, Anakin did invite Luke to join him and overthrow the Emperor. In Cloud City, right after he cut off his arm.
Frankly, considering the small production runs of planes vs the high numbers of people who are qualified to be pilots...
That's just it. There *aren't* that many people who can be a USAF or Navy fighter pilot. Oh, there are a lot of people who can fly, but the window of "I can fly the hardest plane in the planet on the most dangerous type with the highest level of success"--we're talking about the difference between a professional sports team and folk who can play the same sport for fun.
And, now that I think about it, I forgot one huge cost in the pilot: the yearly cost of fuel and weapons for their training.
Autopilots get the hell tested out of them. Not because it saves human lives (hahahahhaa.... sorry), but because planes are really expensive -- and in this case, so is whatever it is landing on.
The per-pilot cost is actually in the range of the cost of their airplane, if not higher.
Compare:
Purchase cost of airplane
Maintenance cost of airplane
with
Pilot's salary
training
Insurance
housing
Training wash-outs
Recruitment
and
Personnel support
And, oddly enough, a rifleman's person-cost and equipment-cost are also about the same.
I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.
Kindly get yourself down to your local law library; your state capitol, local law school, or local community college should have a reasonably up-to-date sample.
You should be able to find the 20+ volumes of the USC, the 20-odd volumes of your local state couterpart to the same, maybe a copy of your town charter, and the 50-odd volumes of legal precedent and casework.
Why all this bulk? Because the nitty gritty of law can be very, very complex, after years and years of arguing as to what the law means in the innumerable situations that come up.
Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more
Law never was about right or wrong. Law is about what acts are illegal, and when your rights trump my rights.
This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.
Conspiracy crimes--which date back to Prohibition, mind you--require an illegal act or an illegal purpose. And if you're a US citizen, there's a rather finite ammount of time that they can hold you before they have to bring you before a jury and convince the jury that their conspiracy case is solid.
You're probably thinking of "terrorism" crimes, which are problematic when it comes to non-military enemy combatants and a bit unsettling when it comes to the investigative powers of our government.
As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.
Actually, the hundreds of thousands of laws across this country have strict priority, with the newest and the highest ones overruling the lower ones. The best example of this is sodomy laws--they're still on the books in the dozen-odd states that passed them, but they're irrelevent unless SCOTUS or the Constitutional Amendment process lets states outlaw sodomy again.
And if you're worried about not always following every law, just remember this: the law is only words on paper. When it comes down to the wire, it's three learned citizens (two lawyers and a judge) arguing a case which gets decided by twelve-sixteen common folk, who can almost ignore legal precedent at will.
Have you read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of sequels?
Have you read the other, oh, forty-odd books in the continuity of novels that was first published with Zahn's first three?
Did you happen to read Zahn's second attempt?
In any case, the "Thrawn trilogy" wouldn't make a good movie, because while it was a great novel series, the storyline wouldn't translate very well into movies. Too much of the conflict is internal or cerebrel, too much of it is drawn out over three books.
Could this be the not so thin edge of the wedge of moving all space funding to a militarily organisation rather than a civilian one?
BACK. Moving all space funding BACK to the military organization that started it.
And let's not forget that the USAF (1) is the source of a goodly portion of NASA's astronaughts, (2) is the only other government agency that launches into space, and (3) has a long history of working together with NASA within the federal budget.
Suppose the only way to save those 10,000 people was to experiment on one mentally-challenged orphan.
First line in the friggin response.
The fact is, everytime someone asks about animals and rights, they fall back to the retarded child, the retarded orphan. WHy> Their position is that retarded people and animals neither can utilize their rights, nor understand them. Yet they retain them despite the physical incapability to even grasp them. If animals can have their reproductive rights usurped "for the greater good(!)", then so can retarded people.
Y'know what? You're absolutely right.
Unless, of course, you think that the legally incompetent should be able to do all of those things that the courts say that they're not able to. (Not that the rights vanish, merely that the person needs to have someone else exercise them for them.)
"Is 1 child's death worth saving 10,000? What about 10 puppies?"
So, 1 human life is worth more than 10,000 saves. And 10 puppy-lives are worth more than 10,000 saves--so, by the only equal metere there, 1 human = 10 puppies.
That assumes the right to get drunk and endanger others exists.
It does. Try this: lease a racing track--one with walls large enough to smash into a 100 mph and not hurt anyone. Then get plastered. Then drive.
You have a right to "drink and drive." It is merely superceded by someone else's right not to be endangered.
As I said, to use *their* arguments, they should be in favor of sterilizing retarded or seriously impared humans for the exact same reason.
"There's too many of them, and they're starving to death."
Well, that certainly doesn't apply in America. And in the parts of the world where overpopulation IS killing humans, they *ARE* in favor for sterilization, even if only in an impermanent form.
I've never heard of PETA or anyone else arguing that only mentally defective felines should be sterilized.
Yet IIRC, isn't the Number 2 person at PETA taking Insulin that is not only a result of animl research, but contains animal products?
Veganism and environmentalism aren't synonyms. On a given day you might find me acting quite like an environmentalist, but you'll never see me acting like a vegan.
This answer does in fact state a position that animals are mroe valuable than humans.
No, it doesn't. In fact, by strict numbers, it says that animals are 1/10th as valueable as humans--but that the cost of a murder is far higher than the price of saving 10,000 lives.
Unless, of course, you'd be for killing that one infant.
Then they are in favor of "fixing" cats and dogs to prevent them from giving birth. What happened to those "rights"?
I'd wager that, like human rights, animal rights were ranked in importance, and "have a niche big enough to survive" and "don't be killed" come before "reproduction."
You may as well ask why you can't exercise your right to get drunk and drive--because that right is superceded by the right of someone else not to be killed.
This specifically addresses the OP's claim. A group of "environmentalists" who value "the planet" above human life.
VHEMT's no more an environmentalist group than scientology is a religion.
Perhaps you elect your politicians to protect the nation. I elect them to represent my ideals, something they've got a shitty record doing on both sides of the aisle.
That's because it's not their job to be moralistic idealists. That's what priests and private citizens are for.
Government's job is to protect the liberty of its citizens, from the three threats of government, other nations, and other citizens. "represent my ideals" is what led to a lot of heartache in Europe, and we shouldn't try and repeat the problem here.
How about, instead of letting the morons run the democratic party, you go get your greens to sign up for the democrats, and give the party some #@$!ing balls?
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Every last damn thing that the US Congress has done in the last 3 1/2 years that you might find objectionable was done to "provide for the common defense of the United States."
It's good that you know the bill of rights, but could you try studying the rest of the document, too?
On page two of this article, one long time outspoken PETA member is claimed to have rated a health rat as more important than a sick child.
Which was, in that same paragraph, an argument that parents should be allowed to euthanize. Just like the owners of a sick rat can kill it.
David Kupelian of World Net Daily considers PETA's official non-committal stance on abortion to be saying that an animal's life is worth saving, a human babies isn't.
The question for abortion is "is a fetus a legal person?" And the legal answer is "no." If you don't like it, I'd like to see a Constitutional amendment to that effect. Until then, saying that someone who's against abortion is agaisnt humanity is as nonsensical as claiming that someone who doesn't like onions hates vegetables.
I would say that PETA does consider animal life to be at least equal if not supperior to human life.
Equal to? Sure. That's a fair assessment of their position.
Superior to? That's just anti-environmentalist fearmongering.
Lincoln's revolution may have changed this in practice, but that's how it's supposed to work.
Nope. If the founders had intended for the new nation to be anything but one solid nation, they would have included provisions to that effect in the Constitution.
There is *NO HINT* of any plausibility of a state leaving the union without convincing a supermajority of its fellows, and Congress, and the President, to let it go.
When the Constitution was taken back to the states, they knew full well that they were surrendndering what sovergnty they had to become more fully one nation. This was after thirteen years of rule as a Confederation, and they knew that if they did not bind together they would become colonies of someone once again.
Certain anti-progress virtual luddites claiming otherwise were doing so for their own political gain on issues that were not supposed to reflect on sovergnity, but rather the degree of a state's autonomy within its own borders. A related, but seperate issue.
To further hammer home the point: what did the rebellious states do after succeeding from the union? Form a new government in hopes of acting as one nation of themselves. I'd be surprised if there was ever a statewide or federal officeholder since Washington who truly considered the states to be soverign bodies engaged in an alliance and not one nation with a divided government.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you happen to be a member of the bar, I'll trust my teachers over you. (And if you're not in the United States, then you should realize that makes you a minority here on /. and state such in no uncertain terms. Same if you ARE a member of the bar, and want special weight to your answers here on /.)
/. moron. Never can tell until you reply.)
(And to get this out of the way--I'm in New York State. The specifics of contract law varies from state to state, and even more from country to country. If you happen to be in another country or in a state that doesn't follow the UCC, then our differences may be real differences in the law, not inaccuraces in fact.)
When you pump gas, you accept the offer made to provide gas at that price. That. Is. Not. A. Contract.
Yes. It. Is.
A contract requires four things--an Offer, Acceptance of that Offer, Consideration on both sides (i.e., something of value from each side to the other), and a Legal Purpose.
I tell you that, if you cut my lawn tomorrow, I'll pay you $200. You come and cut my lawn tomorrow. I pay you $50. You then file in small claims court for--wait for it--breach of contract. And likely get both your $150 and some additional punitive monies.
The only way to agree to a contract is to agree to a contract, you can't do it via any random action.
No, not by any random action. But you can agree to a contract by undertaking a specific action that a reasonable person in your circumstance should know would result in a legal arrangement being formed between yourself and another party. Such as, you pumping gas at a gas station with a labeled price.
(Yes, the police can arrest you for stealing gas. And if the DA can't utterly convince 12 folk that the grainy photo was definitly you, you won't go to jail for it. But even if you beat the DA's rap, the gas store owner can still sue you in a civil action to recover their lost income from your underpayment.)
I'd be very interested in hearing where you abscribe this supposed large difference between purchases and contracts from. I suspect that you're just an arrogant nitwit and not a moron, and there is a real jurisdictional difference here. (Then again, you may just be a typical
Not trespassing, it's a place of business. Not stealing, he paid for the gas.
He's just not holding himself to the letter of the contract.
You, too are missing the point.
The onus of communicating your point is on you, not me.
You said nothing about wanting to know all of the terms of any software you have before you purchase it. You said that you were not going to hold yourself to any contract you did not sign--and pumping gas is a classic case of non-written contracts.
To get back on topic, what are you told when you tell a merchant you want to see a copy of the EULA before you purchase the software?
I will not be bound by any contract that I did not sign.
So what you're saying is, sometimes you just pump gas, throw what you think it was worth at the vendor, and leave--the listed price be damned?
How do you justify that to stock-holders?
Ethically selling recycling is a good thing, and fairly easy to any large body of people.
Fiscally proving that it's a good deal--well, that's where "reducing potential liabilty" and "advertising" and "goodwill" alll come ine.
Why does the constitution only apply to citizens though (on the holding)?
Well, in some parts it does--you need to be a citizen to vote, hold public office, or the like. But many of the non-systematic rights in the Constitution refer to "persons", not citizens, and have equal effect to visiting foreign nationals or to our own citizenry.
About the only thing that I can do that the Indian programmers working three floors beneath me can't is get called up for Jury Duty (reminds me--got to return the Court House questionarre), be drafted, or vote.
Parody is of course an exception, as is not-for-profit fanfiction.
Don't forget the original purposes of the fair-use doctrine: news and scholarly reporting.
(And don't ever think that fanfiction follows different rules; if you favorite fanfic writer suddenly got a million fans who paid him $1 each, the copyright holder would likely want a piece of the cash. It's just that most of the time, fanfics aren't worth tracking down.)
Though I would argue copyright should expire with the creator-- history has shown "the estate of..." can't be trusted to do anything but cash in on the artist's work.
"The estate of" is supposed to do nothing but cash in on the artist's work. The estate is the artist's widow or children, and of all the folk in the world those are the ones who should profit first from an artist's deathbed masterpiece.
(OTOH, making post-mortem copyright a one-person "living will" type would work just as well. One could even limit it to spouses or incompetent dependents until death or children until age 25)
The Godfather is a piece of art (whether a good or a bad one is another discussion) and culturally belongs to everybody; the fact that it "belongs" to someone in some narrow copyright sense is incidental.
The Godfather is a work of art. Like every other work of art since the dawn of time, it belongs to the artist.
The fact that it was a collaborative work does not diminish the ownership of its creator. In the end run, copyright is a limited run, and in a few hundred years it will all be public domain.
The books which go beyond the trilogy, however, disagree. Supposedly the Emperor lives in cloned bodies, and the dark side consumes the bodies so he has to get a new one ever so often. At the point where he's thrown out, and he falls through that hole, ostensibly someone catches him and transfers his spirit into yet another clone. The Emperor never dies according to some comic books.
Those "some comic books" are all Official Sanctioned Star Wars products. Lucasarts (or someone else similarly close to Lucas) dictates or approves every major plot arc, including the Emperor's brief-but-futile ressurection and Luke's temporary fall to the dark side.
And, y'know, Anakin did invite Luke to join him and overthrow the Emperor. In Cloud City, right after he cut off his arm.
Frankly, considering the small production runs of planes vs the high numbers of people who are qualified to be pilots...
That's just it. There *aren't* that many people who can be a USAF or Navy fighter pilot. Oh, there are a lot of people who can fly, but the window of "I can fly the hardest plane in the planet on the most dangerous type with the highest level of success"--we're talking about the difference between a professional sports team and folk who can play the same sport for fun.
And, now that I think about it, I forgot one huge cost in the pilot: the yearly cost of fuel and weapons for their training.
The per-pilot cost is actually in the range of the cost of their airplane, if not higher.
Compare:
with
And, oddly enough, a rifleman's person-cost and equipment-cost are also about the same.
I believe in the US it is possible to obtain a published set of all laws currently in effect and on the books. I think it's around 20 volumes, with the index itself being one 700-page monolithic tome.
Kindly get yourself down to your local law library; your state capitol, local law school, or local community college should have a reasonably up-to-date sample.
You should be able to find the 20+ volumes of the USC, the 20-odd volumes of your local state couterpart to the same, maybe a copy of your town charter, and the 50-odd volumes of legal precedent and casework.
Why all this bulk? Because the nitty gritty of law can be very, very complex, after years and years of arguing as to what the law means in the innumerable situations that come up.
Law has nothing to do with right and wrong any more
Law never was about right or wrong. Law is about what acts are illegal, and when your rights trump my rights.
This is great for tyrants, since there's always a law you can accuse someone of breaking. That's especially true in the US, now that there's a whole class of federal "conspiracy" crimes that don't require any proof of wrongdoing for a conviction.
Conspiracy crimes--which date back to Prohibition, mind you--require an illegal act or an illegal purpose. And if you're a US citizen, there's a rather finite ammount of time that they can hold you before they have to bring you before a jury and convince the jury that their conspiracy case is solid.
You're probably thinking of "terrorism" crimes, which are problematic when it comes to non-military enemy combatants and a bit unsettling when it comes to the investigative powers of our government.
As a democracy progresses, it becomes absolutely impossible for any individual to know, understand, or abide by the actual law. Indeed, many of the hundreds of thousands of laws and statutes conflict with each other, so you're a law-breaker no matter what you do.
Actually, the hundreds of thousands of laws across this country have strict priority, with the newest and the highest ones overruling the lower ones. The best example of this is sodomy laws--they're still on the books in the dozen-odd states that passed them, but they're irrelevent unless SCOTUS or the Constitutional Amendment process lets states outlaw sodomy again.
And if you're worried about not always following every law, just remember this: the law is only words on paper. When it comes down to the wire, it's three learned citizens (two lawyers and a judge) arguing a case which gets decided by twelve-sixteen common folk, who can almost ignore legal precedent at will.
Have you read Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy of sequels?
Have you read the other, oh, forty-odd books in the continuity of novels that was first published with Zahn's first three?
Did you happen to read Zahn's second attempt?
In any case, the "Thrawn trilogy" wouldn't make a good movie, because while it was a great novel series, the storyline wouldn't translate very well into movies. Too much of the conflict is internal or cerebrel, too much of it is drawn out over three books.
Piloted planes just seem so much more elegant than computer controlled rockets.
They are. They're also ineffective and ineffecient, if actually getting into orbit is your goal.
(Which, of course, reminds me of NASP, which despite its name was firmly a USAF project.)
Could this be the not so thin edge of the wedge of moving all space funding to a militarily organisation rather than a civilian one?
BACK. Moving all space funding BACK to the military organization that started it.
And let's not forget that the USAF (1) is the source of a goodly portion of NASA's astronaughts, (2) is the only other government agency that launches into space, and (3) has a long history of working together with NASA within the federal budget.
Suppose the only way to save those 10,000 people was to experiment on one mentally-challenged orphan.
First line in the friggin response.
The fact is, everytime someone asks about animals and rights, they fall back to the retarded child, the retarded orphan. WHy> Their position is that retarded people and animals neither can utilize their rights, nor understand them. Yet they retain them despite the physical incapability to even grasp them. If animals can have their reproductive rights usurped "for the greater good(!)", then so can retarded people.
Y'know what? You're absolutely right.
Unless, of course, you think that the legally incompetent should be able to do all of those things that the courts say that they're not able to. (Not that the rights vanish, merely that the person needs to have someone else exercise them for them.)
Sorry, you've got it backward
No... go back and read it again.
"Is 1 child's death worth saving 10,000? What about 10 puppies?"
So, 1 human life is worth more than 10,000 saves. And 10 puppy-lives are worth more than 10,000 saves--so, by the only equal metere there, 1 human = 10 puppies.
That assumes the right to get drunk and endanger others exists.
It does. Try this: lease a racing track--one with walls large enough to smash into a 100 mph and not hurt anyone. Then get plastered. Then drive.
You have a right to "drink and drive." It is merely superceded by someone else's right not to be endangered.
As I said, to use *their* arguments, they should be in favor of sterilizing retarded or seriously impared humans for the exact same reason.
"There's too many of them, and they're starving to death."
Well, that certainly doesn't apply in America. And in the parts of the world where overpopulation IS killing humans, they *ARE* in favor for sterilization, even if only in an impermanent form.
I've never heard of PETA or anyone else arguing that only mentally defective felines should be sterilized.
Why is this wrong?
Relativity.
Yet IIRC, isn't the Number 2 person at PETA taking Insulin that is not only a result of animl research, but contains animal products?
Veganism and environmentalism aren't synonyms. On a given day you might find me acting quite like an environmentalist, but you'll never see me acting like a vegan.
This answer does in fact state a position that animals are mroe valuable than humans.
No, it doesn't. In fact, by strict numbers, it says that animals are 1/10th as valueable as humans--but that the cost of a murder is far higher than the price of saving 10,000 lives.
Unless, of course, you'd be for killing that one infant.
Then they are in favor of "fixing" cats and dogs to prevent them from giving birth. What happened to those "rights"?
I'd wager that, like human rights, animal rights were ranked in importance, and "have a niche big enough to survive" and "don't be killed" come before "reproduction."
You may as well ask why you can't exercise your right to get drunk and drive--because that right is superceded by the right of someone else not to be killed.
This specifically addresses the OP's claim. A group of "environmentalists" who value "the planet" above human life.
VHEMT's no more an environmentalist group than scientology is a religion.
Perhaps you elect your politicians to protect the nation. I elect them to represent my ideals, something they've got a shitty record doing on both sides of the aisle.
That's because it's not their job to be moralistic idealists. That's what priests and private citizens are for.
Government's job is to protect the liberty of its citizens, from the three threats of government, other nations, and other citizens. "represent my ideals" is what led to a lot of heartache in Europe, and we shouldn't try and repeat the problem here.
Fine leadership style...
...
Leadership? LEADERSHIP?
THEY'RE THE DAMN MINORITY!
Another Green vote in 2008
How about, instead of letting the morons run the democratic party, you go get your greens to sign up for the democrats, and give the party some #@$!ing balls?
Every last damn thing that the US Congress has done in the last 3 1/2 years that you might find objectionable was done to "provide for the common defense of the United States."
It's good that you know the bill of rights, but could you try studying the rest of the document, too?
It's not a binary issue.
You can believe that there is something more important than A without being against A.
On page two of this article, one long time outspoken PETA member is claimed to have rated a health rat as more important than a sick child.
Which was, in that same paragraph, an argument that parents should be allowed to euthanize. Just like the owners of a sick rat can kill it.
David Kupelian of World Net Daily considers PETA's official non-committal stance on abortion to be saying that an animal's life is worth saving, a human babies isn't.
The question for abortion is "is a fetus a legal person?" And the legal answer is "no." If you don't like it, I'd like to see a Constitutional amendment to that effect. Until then, saying that someone who's against abortion is agaisnt humanity is as nonsensical as claiming that someone who doesn't like onions hates vegetables.
I would say that PETA does consider animal life to be at least equal if not supperior to human life.
Equal to? Sure. That's a fair assessment of their position.
Superior to? That's just anti-environmentalist fearmongering.
Lincoln's revolution may have changed this in practice, but that's how it's supposed to work.
Nope. If the founders had intended for the new nation to be anything but one solid nation, they would have included provisions to that effect in the Constitution.
There is *NO HINT* of any plausibility of a state leaving the union without convincing a supermajority of its fellows, and Congress, and the President, to let it go.
When the Constitution was taken back to the states, they knew full well that they were surrendndering what sovergnty they had to become more fully one nation. This was after thirteen years of rule as a Confederation, and they knew that if they did not bind together they would become colonies of someone once again.
Certain anti-progress virtual luddites claiming otherwise were doing so for their own political gain on issues that were not supposed to reflect on sovergnity, but rather the degree of a state's autonomy within its own borders. A related, but seperate issue.
To further hammer home the point: what did the rebellious states do after succeeding from the union? Form a new government in hopes of acting as one nation of themselves. I'd be surprised if there was ever a statewide or federal officeholder since Washington who truly considered the states to be soverign bodies engaged in an alliance and not one nation with a divided government.