Here's the thing: In countries with written Constitutions something that only requires 50% of Parliament plus one guy is not a "great Constitutional Change."
Replacing the Queen would really shock the British people, but in legal terms Parliament has had that power for so many centuries you can argue about how many centuries it has had that power. The British people would be extremely shocked if Parliament actually acted on it's power to fire the Queen, and in that sense it would be a great change; but since the legal procedure to fire the Queen is well-known it would not technically be a Constitutional change.
It would be analogous to Clinton's Impeachment. Yes it was unprecedented, the voters were somewhat pissed off, and it had not happened in anyone's memory, but since it was well within the House's Constitutional powers to impeach a President it was not a Constitutional change.
Question: Can you name a single country whose last three leaders have actually been selected based on merit?
Hollande, Bush, etc. were selected by a process; but in 20-20 hindsight it's pretty clear there wasn't much merit involved. Or, to be more precise, the things you have to be good at to earn a Presidency (winning elections) have virtually nothing to do with the things you do as President.
If you read the Canadian Constitution the Queen (it actually says "she," because at the time Victoria was Queen) is hiring ministers, firing ministers, and basically the only check on her power is that a) nobody can mess with the provinces (but she also hires and fires their governments), and b) she has to have one guy a "Chair of her Majesty's Privy Council," who does a lot of the actual scut work.
Turns out the Chair of the Privy Council is the Prime Minister, and if he got half of Parliament to sign a decree replacing the Queen with Swiss Cheese the Courts would go along with it.
You do realize that the Queen cannot actually veto Legislation? If Parliament wants to fire her they can do that. They have, in fact, done exactly that to monarchs who they suspected were going to become Catholic.
What she can do is not that different from what you can do: promise to raise a big stink if laws she doesn't like are passed. Since she is significantly more popular then most politicians this gives her a lot of influence. But if her approval rating was the same as yours she wouldn't have any influence.
In short if your son has less influence then the Queen it will be because he sucks, and everyone hates him; just like you.
And given that it's a coalition government, and the one party that gives the government has already said "no" to the Bill, it's not likely that this bill be enacted.
I'd be surprised if they don't try to enact something vaguely related to Cybersecurity, with at least some of the objectionable features of the first bill, just to save face. But if they enact the exact legislation Clegg already killed he'll lose face, so that is truly dead.
By your standard the entirety of the ACLU is pro-Nazi because they defended the rights of the Nazi marchers in Skokie.
Moreover you're applying a double-standard again. Jews and Christians are also incredibly sexist. Depending on the exact varieties of Jewry, Christianity, and Sharia Law in question the Muslims might actually be the least sexist. Generally the actual rules in the law code for Jews and Muslims are pretty close, because Islamic law is a descendent of Jewish law. Just as almost all actual Jews refuse to treat the children of a divorced woman whose ex-husband was a dick as mamzerim, almost all actual Muslims do not do the extreme things mentioned by various anti-Sharia activists.
In the specific case we're talking about under Jewish law a divorce is only valid if both spouses agree, and if one spouse does not agree the marriage remains valid. Since Jewish law considers ethnic descent as extremely important, and Judaism is traced through the maternal line, a woman who has civilly divorced her husband but not religiously divorced her husband cannot have Jewish children. The children will be Mamzerim. OTOH, her husband could get another Jewish woman pregnant, and then the kids would be Jews. Rabbinical courts ignore this law, generally on the basis that it's theoretically possible the child in question belongs to the woman's official husband even if everybody knows they weren't on the same continent at the time, but if we're judging Islamic Law by the most cruel interpretation possible, without allowing for any of the ways people get around that; we really should do the same for everyone. Heck even with a way around the mamzer problem, it's not un-common for Orthodox Jewish men to extort better divorce from their ex-wives by refusing to sign the legal document that would make the divorce religiously valid.
Evangelical Christians can be even crazier, because they have no ancient law code. They have what feels right to the Pastor. And if the Pastor is sexist...
In general there's nothing the US Courts can do about any of this due to the free exercise clause.
And all this ignores the major place where Sharia is implemented in the US: Wills: Where in the US Constitution does any level of US Government get the right to re-write somebody's will?
Your reading comprehension skills are somewhat lacking.
I'm arguing that privately armed citizens do not promote freedom. You said they did during the Civil War.
That war is an example of privately-armed citizens defending slavery, while government-armed troops fight them. The South did not have the infrastructure to centrally arm everyone, so for the entire war Southern troops were using their own private weapons. Some units never saw the inside of a depot, much less received arms from the Confederate government. OTOH the North had cities and industries. It had an income tax, which it used to pay, arm, and equip one of the largest military forces of the day.
It's amazing how much the pro-gun lobby has managed to suppress the actual history of using guns to fight the government.
The KKK would not have succeeded in the absence of private firearms because the anti-racists of the day controlled the militia. There were actual pitched battles between racist Confederate veterans and the Radical Republican administrations of more then one state, including a private coup d'tat in Arkansas. The KKK plan was simple:
1) Get federal troops withdrawn
2) Use private firearms as good as the state militias, combine them with extreme ruthlessness and combat experience from the Civil War; to crush the existing state government.
3) Win.
After this worked a couple times the black community concluded that it would just have to take it.
I don't care how many times you say some other country banned guns before bad shit happened, in the US this has never happened. In most foreign countries the role of gun-bans in promoting oppression is exaggerated. What has happened is people joining the gun culture, and then using the power their private firearms grant them to oppress their neighbors.
You really shouldn't lecture people on issues you're so wrong about.
In 1830 slavery was banned in the last bit of mexico where it remained: Texas. Most Texans got around this by converting their slaves into indentured-servants-for-life. But since an indentured-servants kids aren't indentured the Texans rebelled at the first convenient opportunity.
If the Texans actually supported freedom they would not have re-instituted slavery on their territory when they became independent.
Thanks for replying Nic in a calm manner with interesting points.
1) Never under-estimate the distrust in the free market a people has when their first experience of said market was watching their relatives stripped naked and sold to a brothel because that was the only way poor Marse Johnnie could pay off his gambling debt.
Fair enough, but surely that was a century ago. Is it sensible to vote for policies that keep you fellow citizens dependent (pro-handout rather than pro-growth) because of memories of one hundred years ago? (all the while, choosing to ignore the slavery aspect of the Democratic Party from nearly the same timespan?).
You're missing a couple other Acts of black history.
They tried support for pro-growth policies basically from the removal of Reconstruction until the rise of FDR. They opposed unions. They tried setting up their own education system. Despite some successes (the guy who thought of this plan, Booker T Washington, founded Howard University), it didn't magically turn them into white's economic equal. The reason was pretty simple: white racism at the governmental level meant that legal protections did not really apply to black people. In the rare cases where a black person managed to get those legal protections (ie: Ossian Sweet) it was a lot more work then it was worth.
Blacks did not start making any progress in my hometown of Detroit until they were allowed into the Union movement. They didn't make progress nationally until white liberals started supporting aggressive Civil Rights Legislation.
One thing that really annoys them about conservative attempts to reclaim the black vote is that the right focuses so intensely on the party label. They are in the left-wing party because when they needed help the left wing helped them. This was true in the 1860s (the GOP of the day paid for a School System for freed slaves from Federal tax money), the 1870s (Reconstruction-era governments tended to be coalitions of the white working class and blacks opposed to rich white Democrats), the 1910s-1930s (unions were the first white institutions to accept blacks on an equal basis after Reconstruction), the start of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s (there are no Conservative leaders from that era who were instrumental in the Civil Rights movement, there are no liberal leaders from that era who weren't), etc.
I never said anything about a "rash" of terrorist incidents from the KKK/Skinheads/etc. I said there incidents.
Cool. I don't think anyone takes seriously the threat of the Far Right with regard to a global threat - they are simply too discredited these days. It is worth noting that the right (far, moderate and center) in general does seem to be having increasing support these days as Free Peoples slowly learn about the true nature of Islam, and learn that the political Left is embracing Muslims as a 'protected species' rather than standing up for Enlightenment values (which Islam is doctrinally opposed to). If the Left instead stood up for Enlightenment values they would neuter the support for the political right - but I cannot see this happening. Hence, the Left's current trajectory is leading to the erosion of liberty.
Two points:
1) No rational person would have taken a bunch of veterans from a beaten army organized by the number 20 Confederate General seriously in 1866. This did not stop Bedford Forrest from forming the KKK, and successfully dropping the black population of the former CSA 20 points.
2) The current crop of racists has a lot of friends in foreign lands. Hungary is run by a guy who has to compete with Anti-Semitic Jobbik for votes. The Greeks are likely to turn to similar racist Fascists in two elections unless Germany decides to open up it's checkbook.
3) For an atheist you're remarkably ignorant about non-Islamic faiths.
The difference being that in the Old Testament you have God saying "these people are on the land I promised you now go kill them all to make room" which is pretty much a one shot at the time kind of command. Whereas in the Qu'ran you have explicit ongoing instructions to kill, convert, or subdue everyone that isn't Muslim. In the first case you have violent stuff happening that God condoned at the time, in the other you have an ongoing call to violence by Islam's "prophet". And in some countries, putting "prophet" in quotes would have people calling for my death.
You're not thinking about this like a truly religious person. If God gave one guy in the Old Testament a command not to beat his wife every Christian and Jew would say "clearly God disapproves of wife-beating and I should not beat my wife."
Moreover if you actually read the passage in question in the Hadith you'll find that it is also only applied to a single incident. It uses the exact same form as genocidal passages from the Old Testament. The people who are supposed to be tracked down, and not allowed to hide "behind a single blade of grass" are the inhabitants of a single fortress. Since they happen to be Jewish the Hadith calls them Jews.
Let me put it to you this way: Hasidic Jews are all descended from Jews who lived under Islamic rulers. What's more likely, that every Islamic ruler who failed to murder their ancestors forgot about this particular Hadith; or that some white boy with an anti-Islam agenda and spotty knowledge of Arabic not only translated this passage correctly, he's also interpreting it correctly?
In these cases did an Armed Citizenry actually stop said rogue elements?
tbd.
So because you might get heavily fined for downloading music and/or video you are justified in shooting cops?
I'll agree the RIAA/MPAA/etc. suck, and should be defeated, but in the context of this debate "rogue element" means an element so rogue that there is no option but to take to the hills and start picking off po-pos. That's why you have the gun.
In the numerous cases where the government has actually oppressed it's people (slavery, segregation, etc.), can you name a single instance of the armed citizenry stopping them?
OUR government? Or *any* government?
Ours specifically.
The US controls it's entire territory, and mostly follows it's own rules. This means that a) armed rebellions rarely work (if the Army was likely to lose a battle in your County your County would belong to Mexico), and b) actual oppression to the level that would require one to shoot at the Army is rare. This is particularly true of the rural whites who tend to make arguments on the internet about how their hobby is the last defense of freedom, because historically rural American whites are the least oppressed people on the face of the Earth. If they were blacks from the inner-city it would be one thing, but white boys from Texas do not know the meaning of the word tyranny.
OTOH if I let people bring up other countries somebody will point out that Iraq has tried to murder the Kurds, but failed due to the fact that Kurds have guns. The situations are not comparable because Iraq has historically only had a tenuous grip on the Kurds, the Kurds have weapons that would be highly illegal here, etc.
Texans are cute. They think Santa Ana was oppressing them because their great-granddaddy;'s said so, but they can;t tell you exactly what was so evil. Here's what was so evil: Mexico abolished slavery. There was also bitching about taxes, but I think any humane person would say a free country can have high taxes, but it cannot have slavery.
Arguments like this are the reason 95% of my black friends do not vote Republican, and the 5% who do justify entirely with jeremiads against abortion.
The Civil War is actually the best counter-example. Before the War most of the military was the militia, each County had it's own regiment, which was armed by the residents of that County. It was a very decentralized system, with some states taking it very seriously and actually enforcing everyone's duty to show up with their guns, and others treating the militia as a fancy dress party.
The states that took it really seriously were mostly Southern. They were quickly forced to standardize their militias (before the war Louisiana and Tennessee actually had black troops in their militia units, but since this was unacceptable to the other states all were thrown out), arm them from Confederate Government armories, etc.
The North managed a lot more central control of it's military, arming almost everyone from Federal stores for the duration of the conflict, and the North won.
You know what really annoys me about gun rights guys? They claim to be pro-freedom, and the only defense against tyranny, yet the only time in the entire history of the United States, where the state has actually taken rights away from people never appears in any of their literature.
In 1876 blacks were armed. They had rights. They were actually a fairly large majority in several southern states, and a large minority (averaging 40%) in the rest. Then the Federal government pulled out, and it turned out that ex-Confederates were a lot more hardcore then ex-slaves. There were battles. There was an actual coup d'tat in Arkansas. But freedom lost, because freedom only wins when DC backs it up.
And your entire that gun rights protect freedom is basically that a) this one time a bunch of segregationists beat a corrupt segregationist, and b) sometimes white people can;t get in touch with the cops in time.
So your strategy is to hope the Evil Party President did not manage to get his guy into the Speaker's chair? Given that you can assassinate your way to a Speakership (a majority of the House votes on it, so if Obama arranged 32 deaths Pelosi'd be Speaker), that's not a very effective strategy.
At my High School conmen who took in distinguished military personages were not included in the history curriculum. So, no, I was never taught about the so-called "Businessman's Plot," which seems to have been entirely the fantasy of MacGuire.
You do realize that in the long history of insurgencies, nobody has ever had a period where they relied on long guns because their IEDs weren't ready? IEDs are trivial to make. An hour with the Anarchist's cookbook and you'll be fine. You'll probably be better off then the Taliban, who have a lot of illiterate guys in their ranks. You don't need to buy time.
What you need is secrecy. And being the guy who has an official license for a high-powered automatic rifle isn't very secretive.
Question: Did the new Sheriff in Athens actually enforce the Constitution, and de-segregate the County? Because if he didn't that's not much an argument for using private guns to protect freedom.
As for Matewan, that's not the government. I'm specifically arguing against the very common idea that a bunch of NRA members are our last defense of freedom against the Feds. I find that argument border-line racist (historically an Armed Citizenry is pretty much the only reason Segregation happened), and incredibly stupid (despite numerous requests no-one has been able to show a case where an Armed Citizenry stopped the US Army). Nothing I have seen from pro-gun folks has convinced to reconsider any of these arguments.
Grammer is useful. Indirect objects are actually an important part of a sentence.
In other words proving that you can murder an entire kindergarten class in under 30 seconds is not gonna convince me that you'll protect me from the US Army should the US Army want to oppress me.
A couple points: 1) Every Democrat who cares about racial issues knows that the original black party was the GOP. From the black point of view what happened was simple: FDR moved the Democrats a left on economic issues, which effectively made the black vote a swing vote, then Nixon made a tactical decision to side against the Civil Rights movement whenever he could justify doing so to non-racists to court white, limited government, conservatives from the Solid South.
Never under-estimate the distrust in the free market a people has when their first experience of said market was watching their relatives stripped naked and sold to a brothel because that was the only way poor Marse Johnnie could pay off his gambling debt. Blacks lean towards Federal power over private citizens not because blacks actually trust the Federal government more then you do, indeed they trust it less; it's because they have literally zero trust in their neighbors.
2) I never said anything about a "rash" of terrorist incidents from the KKK/Skinheads/etc. I said there incidents. And this is just true. It doesn't make the news because KKK/Neonazi/etc. terrorism is so routine that it isn;t news, but it does happen. In the continental US there've probably been more skinhead murders of transgendered black guys since S11 then casualties of Islamic terrorism.
3) For an atheist you're remarkably ignorant about non-Islamic faiths. "Torah" is Hebrew for "the Law." Leviticus is a Code of Laws. Most Jews have managed to rationalize not following Levitical law, but there's always a guy. Right now he's busy fighting to expand Israel to include the entire former Mandate of Palestine, so he isn't really focused on murdering people until the Knesset gets fired, a Ultra-Orthodox descendent of King David is declared King, and strict Levitical law is applied to the entire Holy Land; but quite a few Israeli Jews have all these things on their to-do-list.
State-side Evangelical Christians have very weird, and completely irrational ideas, about what "freedom of religion" means. They are fighting to make Creationism mandatory in science class. They are convinced "No Religious test" was a typo. They are even more convinced that the First Amendment does not apply to the states, ignoring the 14th Amendment.
4) Polls are incredibly tricky to use. According the US Polls a health program that forced everyone who does not have health insurance to buy said insurance, but included significant subsidies so it didn't cost them much, made sure it was real insurance, allowed people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance at the same price everyone else pays, etc. would be very popular. But people were pissed at how divisive the ObamaCare debate was, so ObamaCare is under-water in the popularity stakes. Similarly you frequently see poll results where you know people are joking, or lying.
The problem with Sharia polls specifically is they don't generally say which version of Sharia they want to implement. Sharia Family Law, for example, is so unobjectionable that it in many cases it is Unconstitutional for US Courts to not enforce it in families were everyone wants Sharia law to be used.
In general I agree with you. I'm accepting the Second Amendment types premise that the Federal Government could actually impose tyranny on it's citizens with the full support of the Armed Forces, to point out how absurd their argument is.
If the Shit hits the fan it won't matter which guns are legal. What'll matter is what people who can make bombs do.
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Here's the thing:
In countries with written Constitutions something that only requires 50% of Parliament plus one guy is not a "great Constitutional Change."
Replacing the Queen would really shock the British people, but in legal terms Parliament has had that power for so many centuries you can argue about how many centuries it has had that power. The British people would be extremely shocked if Parliament actually acted on it's power to fire the Queen, and in that sense it would be a great change; but since the legal procedure to fire the Queen is well-known it would not technically be a Constitutional change.
It would be analogous to Clinton's Impeachment. Yes it was unprecedented, the voters were somewhat pissed off, and it had not happened in anyone's memory, but since it was well within the House's Constitutional powers to impeach a President it was not a Constitutional change.
Question:
Can you name a single country whose last three leaders have actually been selected based on merit?
Hollande, Bush, etc. were selected by a process; but in 20-20 hindsight it's pretty clear there wasn't much merit involved. Or, to be more precise, the things you have to be good at to earn a Presidency (winning elections) have virtually nothing to do with the things you do as President.
All the Commonwealth realms are like this.
If you read the Canadian Constitution the Queen (it actually says "she," because at the time Victoria was Queen) is hiring ministers, firing ministers, and basically the only check on her power is that a) nobody can mess with the provinces (but she also hires and fires their governments), and b) she has to have one guy a "Chair of her Majesty's Privy Council," who does a lot of the actual scut work.
Turns out the Chair of the Privy Council is the Prime Minister, and if he got half of Parliament to sign a decree replacing the Queen with Swiss Cheese the Courts would go along with it.
You do realize that the Queen cannot actually veto Legislation? If Parliament wants to fire her they can do that. They have, in fact, done exactly that to monarchs who they suspected were going to become Catholic.
What she can do is not that different from what you can do: promise to raise a big stink if laws she doesn't like are passed. Since she is significantly more popular then most politicians this gives her a lot of influence. But if her approval rating was the same as yours she wouldn't have any influence.
In short if your son has less influence then the Queen it will be because he sucks, and everyone hates him; just like you.
And given that it's a coalition government, and the one party that gives the government has already said "no" to the Bill, it's not likely that this bill be enacted.
I'd be surprised if they don't try to enact something vaguely related to Cybersecurity, with at least some of the objectionable features of the first bill, just to save face. But if they enact the exact legislation Clegg already killed he'll lose face, so that is truly dead.
By your standard the entirety of the ACLU is pro-Nazi because they defended the rights of the Nazi marchers in Skokie.
Moreover you're applying a double-standard again. Jews and Christians are also incredibly sexist. Depending on the exact varieties of Jewry, Christianity, and Sharia Law in question the Muslims might actually be the least sexist. Generally the actual rules in the law code for Jews and Muslims are pretty close, because Islamic law is a descendent of Jewish law. Just as almost all actual Jews refuse to treat the children of a divorced woman whose ex-husband was a dick as mamzerim, almost all actual Muslims do not do the extreme things mentioned by various anti-Sharia activists.
In the specific case we're talking about under Jewish law a divorce is only valid if both spouses agree, and if one spouse does not agree the marriage remains valid. Since Jewish law considers ethnic descent as extremely important, and Judaism is traced through the maternal line, a woman who has civilly divorced her husband but not religiously divorced her husband cannot have Jewish children. The children will be Mamzerim. OTOH, her husband could get another Jewish woman pregnant, and then the kids would be Jews. Rabbinical courts ignore this law, generally on the basis that it's theoretically possible the child in question belongs to the woman's official husband even if everybody knows they weren't on the same continent at the time, but if we're judging Islamic Law by the most cruel interpretation possible, without allowing for any of the ways people get around that; we really should do the same for everyone. Heck even with a way around the mamzer problem, it's not un-common for Orthodox Jewish men to extort better divorce from their ex-wives by refusing to sign the legal document that would make the divorce religiously valid.
Evangelical Christians can be even crazier, because they have no ancient law code. They have what feels right to the Pastor. And if the Pastor is sexist...
In general there's nothing the US Courts can do about any of this due to the free exercise clause.
And all this ignores the major place where Sharia is implemented in the US: Wills:
Where in the US Constitution does any level of US Government get the right to re-write somebody's will?
Only the government would have both an "Unknown" category and an "Other-Unknown" category....
Your reading comprehension skills are somewhat lacking.
I'm arguing that privately armed citizens do not promote freedom. You said they did during the Civil War.
That war is an example of privately-armed citizens defending slavery, while government-armed troops fight them. The South did not have the infrastructure to centrally arm everyone, so for the entire war Southern troops were using their own private weapons. Some units never saw the inside of a depot, much less received arms from the Confederate government. OTOH the North had cities and industries. It had an income tax, which it used to pay, arm, and equip one of the largest military forces of the day.
It's amazing how much the pro-gun lobby has managed to suppress the actual history of using guns to fight the government.
The KKK would not have succeeded in the absence of private firearms because the anti-racists of the day controlled the militia. There were actual pitched battles between racist Confederate veterans and the Radical Republican administrations of more then one state, including a private coup d'tat in Arkansas. The KKK plan was simple:
1) Get federal troops withdrawn
2) Use private firearms as good as the state militias, combine them with extreme ruthlessness and combat experience from the Civil War; to crush the existing state government.
3) Win.
After this worked a couple times the black community concluded that it would just have to take it.
I don't care how many times you say some other country banned guns before bad shit happened, in the US this has never happened. In most foreign countries the role of gun-bans in promoting oppression is exaggerated. What has happened is people joining the gun culture, and then using the power their private firearms grant them to oppress their neighbors.
You really shouldn't lecture people on issues you're so wrong about.
In 1830 slavery was banned in the last bit of mexico where it remained: Texas. Most Texans got around this by converting their slaves into indentured-servants-for-life. But since an indentured-servants kids aren't indentured the Texans rebelled at the first convenient opportunity.
If the Texans actually supported freedom they would not have re-instituted slavery on their territory when they became independent.
Thanks for replying Nic in a calm manner with interesting points.
1) Never under-estimate the distrust in the free market a people has when their first experience of said market was watching their relatives stripped naked and sold to a brothel because that was the only way poor Marse Johnnie could pay off his gambling debt.
Fair enough, but surely that was a century ago. Is it sensible to vote for policies that keep you fellow citizens dependent (pro-handout rather than pro-growth) because of memories of one hundred years ago? (all the while, choosing to ignore the slavery aspect of the Democratic Party from nearly the same timespan?).
You're missing a couple other Acts of black history.
They tried support for pro-growth policies basically from the removal of Reconstruction until the rise of FDR. They opposed unions. They tried setting up their own education system. Despite some successes (the guy who thought of this plan, Booker T Washington, founded Howard University), it didn't magically turn them into white's economic equal. The reason was pretty simple: white racism at the governmental level meant that legal protections did not really apply to black people. In the rare cases where a black person managed to get those legal protections (ie: Ossian Sweet) it was a lot more work then it was worth.
Blacks did not start making any progress in my hometown of Detroit until they were allowed into the Union movement. They didn't make progress nationally until white liberals started supporting aggressive Civil Rights Legislation.
One thing that really annoys them about conservative attempts to reclaim the black vote is that the right focuses so intensely on the party label. They are in the left-wing party because when they needed help the left wing helped them. This was true in the 1860s (the GOP of the day paid for a School System for freed slaves from Federal tax money), the 1870s (Reconstruction-era governments tended to be coalitions of the white working class and blacks opposed to rich white Democrats), the 1910s-1930s (unions were the first white institutions to accept blacks on an equal basis after Reconstruction), the start of the Civil Rights movement in the 50s (there are no Conservative leaders from that era who were instrumental in the Civil Rights movement, there are no liberal leaders from that era who weren't), etc.
I never said anything about a "rash" of terrorist incidents from the KKK/Skinheads/etc. I said there incidents.
Cool. I don't think anyone takes seriously the threat of the Far Right with regard to a global threat - they are simply too discredited these days. It is worth noting that the right (far, moderate and center) in general does seem to be having increasing support these days as Free Peoples slowly learn about the true nature of Islam, and learn that the political Left is embracing Muslims as a 'protected species' rather than standing up for Enlightenment values (which Islam is doctrinally opposed to). If the Left instead stood up for Enlightenment values they would neuter the support for the political right - but I cannot see this happening. Hence, the Left's current trajectory is leading to the erosion of liberty.
Two points:
1) No rational person would have taken a bunch of veterans from a beaten army organized by the number 20 Confederate General seriously in 1866. This did not stop Bedford Forrest from forming the KKK, and successfully dropping the black population of the former CSA 20 points.
2) The current crop of racists has a lot of friends in foreign lands. Hungary is run by a guy who has to compete with Anti-Semitic Jobbik for votes. The Greeks are likely to turn to similar racist Fascists in two elections unless Germany decides to open up it's checkbook.
3) For an atheist you're remarkably ignorant about non-Islamic faiths.
I will confess I'm n
The difference being that in the Old Testament you have God saying "these people are on the land I promised you now go kill them all to make room" which is pretty much a one shot at the time kind of command. Whereas in the Qu'ran you have explicit ongoing instructions to kill, convert, or subdue everyone that isn't Muslim. In the first case you have violent stuff happening that God condoned at the time, in the other you have an ongoing call to violence by Islam's "prophet". And in some countries, putting "prophet" in quotes would have people calling for my death.
You're not thinking about this like a truly religious person. If God gave one guy in the Old Testament a command not to beat his wife every Christian and Jew would say "clearly God disapproves of wife-beating and I should not beat my wife."
Moreover if you actually read the passage in question in the Hadith you'll find that it is also only applied to a single incident. It uses the exact same form as genocidal passages from the Old Testament. The people who are supposed to be tracked down, and not allowed to hide "behind a single blade of grass" are the inhabitants of a single fortress. Since they happen to be Jewish the Hadith calls them Jews.
Let me put it to you this way:
Hasidic Jews are all descended from Jews who lived under Islamic rulers. What's more likely, that every Islamic ruler who failed to murder their ancestors forgot about this particular Hadith; or that some white boy with an anti-Islam agenda and spotty knowledge of Arabic not only translated this passage correctly, he's also interpreting it correctly?
That's 50 state governors, 50 State Lieutenant Governors, 99 houses of State Legislatures, etc.
That's not a "few" bullets.
When in US history has the government been taken over by rogue elements?
Its happening right now.
In these cases did an Armed Citizenry actually stop said rogue elements?
tbd.
So because you might get heavily fined for downloading music and/or video you are justified in shooting cops?
I'll agree the RIAA/MPAA/etc. suck, and should be defeated, but in the context of this debate "rogue element" means an element so rogue that there is no option but to take to the hills and start picking off po-pos. That's why you have the gun.
In the numerous cases where the government has actually oppressed it's people (slavery, segregation, etc.), can you name a single instance of the armed citizenry stopping them?
OUR government? Or *any* government?
Ours specifically.
The US controls it's entire territory, and mostly follows it's own rules. This means that a) armed rebellions rarely work (if the Army was likely to lose a battle in your County your County would belong to Mexico), and b) actual oppression to the level that would require one to shoot at the Army is rare. This is particularly true of the rural whites who tend to make arguments on the internet about how their hobby is the last defense of freedom, because historically rural American whites are the least oppressed people on the face of the Earth. If they were blacks from the inner-city it would be one thing, but white boys from Texas do not know the meaning of the word tyranny.
OTOH if I let people bring up other countries somebody will point out that Iraq has tried to murder the Kurds, but failed due to the fact that Kurds have guns. The situations are not comparable because Iraq has historically only had a tenuous grip on the Kurds, the Kurds have weapons that would be highly illegal here, etc.
Texans are cute. They think Santa Ana was oppressing them because their great-granddaddy;'s said so, but they can;t tell you exactly what was so evil. Here's what was so evil: Mexico abolished slavery. There was also bitching about taxes, but I think any humane person would say a free country can have high taxes, but it cannot have slavery.
Arguments like this are the reason 95% of my black friends do not vote Republican, and the 5% who do justify entirely with jeremiads against abortion.
The Civil War is actually the best counter-example. Before the War most of the military was the militia, each County had it's own regiment, which was armed by the residents of that County. It was a very decentralized system, with some states taking it very seriously and actually enforcing everyone's duty to show up with their guns, and others treating the militia as a fancy dress party.
The states that took it really seriously were mostly Southern. They were quickly forced to standardize their militias (before the war Louisiana and Tennessee actually had black troops in their militia units, but since this was unacceptable to the other states all were thrown out), arm them from Confederate Government armories, etc.
The North managed a lot more central control of it's military, arming almost everyone from Federal stores for the duration of the conflict, and the North won.
You know what really annoys me about gun rights guys? They claim to be pro-freedom, and the only defense against tyranny, yet the only time in the entire history of the United States, where the state has actually taken rights away from people never appears in any of their literature.
In 1876 blacks were armed. They had rights. They were actually a fairly large majority in several southern states, and a large minority (averaging 40%) in the rest. Then the Federal government pulled out, and it turned out that ex-Confederates were a lot more hardcore then ex-slaves. There were battles. There was an actual coup d'tat in Arkansas. But freedom lost, because freedom only wins when DC backs it up.
And your entire that gun rights protect freedom is basically that a) this one time a bunch of segregationists beat a corrupt segregationist, and b) sometimes white people can;t get in touch with the cops in time.
So your strategy is to hope the Evil Party President did not manage to get his guy into the Speaker's chair? Given that you can assassinate your way to a Speakership (a majority of the House votes on it, so if Obama arranged 32 deaths Pelosi'd be Speaker), that's not a very effective strategy.
At my High School conmen who took in distinguished military personages were not included in the history curriculum. So, no, I was never taught about the so-called "Businessman's Plot," which seems to have been entirely the fantasy of MacGuire.
You do realize that in the long history of insurgencies, nobody has ever had a period where they relied on long guns because their IEDs weren't ready? IEDs are trivial to make. An hour with the Anarchist's cookbook and you'll be fine. You'll probably be better off then the Taliban, who have a lot of illiterate guys in their ranks. You don't need to buy time.
What you need is secrecy. And being the guy who has an official license for a high-powered automatic rifle isn't very secretive.
Question:
Did the new Sheriff in Athens actually enforce the Constitution, and de-segregate the County? Because if he didn't that's not much an argument for using private guns to protect freedom.
As for Matewan, that's not the government. I'm specifically arguing against the very common idea that a bunch of NRA members are our last defense of freedom against the Feds. I find that argument border-line racist (historically an Armed Citizenry is pretty much the only reason Segregation happened), and incredibly stupid (despite numerous requests no-one has been able to show a case where an Armed Citizenry stopped the US Army). Nothing I have seen from pro-gun folks has convinced to reconsider any of these arguments.
Grammer is useful. Indirect objects are actually an important part of a sentence.
In other words proving that you can murder an entire kindergarten class in under 30 seconds is not gonna convince me that you'll protect me from the US Army should the US Army want to oppress me.
A couple points:
1) Every Democrat who cares about racial issues knows that the original black party was the GOP. From the black point of view what happened was simple: FDR moved the Democrats a left on economic issues, which effectively made the black vote a swing vote, then Nixon made a tactical decision to side against the Civil Rights movement whenever he could justify doing so to non-racists to court white, limited government, conservatives from the Solid South.
Never under-estimate the distrust in the free market a people has when their first experience of said market was watching their relatives stripped naked and sold to a brothel because that was the only way poor Marse Johnnie could pay off his gambling debt. Blacks lean towards Federal power over private citizens not because blacks actually trust the Federal government more then you do, indeed they trust it less; it's because they have literally zero trust in their neighbors.
2) I never said anything about a "rash" of terrorist incidents from the KKK/Skinheads/etc. I said there incidents. And this is just true. It doesn't make the news because KKK/Neonazi/etc. terrorism is so routine that it isn;t news, but it does happen. In the continental US there've probably been more skinhead murders of transgendered black guys since S11 then casualties of Islamic terrorism.
3) For an atheist you're remarkably ignorant about non-Islamic faiths. "Torah" is Hebrew for "the Law." Leviticus is a Code of Laws. Most Jews have managed to rationalize not following Levitical law, but there's always a guy. Right now he's busy fighting to expand Israel to include the entire former Mandate of Palestine, so he isn't really focused on murdering people until the Knesset gets fired, a Ultra-Orthodox descendent of King David is declared King, and strict Levitical law is applied to the entire Holy Land; but quite a few Israeli Jews have all these things on their to-do-list.
State-side Evangelical Christians have very weird, and completely irrational ideas, about what "freedom of religion" means. They are fighting to make Creationism mandatory in science class. They are convinced "No Religious test" was a typo. They are even more convinced that the First Amendment does not apply to the states, ignoring the 14th Amendment.
4) Polls are incredibly tricky to use. According the US Polls a health program that forced everyone who does not have health insurance to buy said insurance, but included significant subsidies so it didn't cost them much, made sure it was real insurance, allowed people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance at the same price everyone else pays, etc. would be very popular. But people were pissed at how divisive the ObamaCare debate was, so ObamaCare is under-water in the popularity stakes. Similarly you frequently see poll results where you know people are joking, or lying.
The problem with Sharia polls specifically is they don't generally say which version of Sharia they want to implement. Sharia Family Law, for example, is so unobjectionable that it in many cases it is Unconstitutional for US Courts to not enforce it in families were everyone wants Sharia law to be used.
So because a guy with a weapon that's highly illegal (an RPG), can challenge the Army, logically guys with legal rifles can challenge the Army?
I am not following the logic here.
In general I agree with you. I'm accepting the Second Amendment types premise that the Federal Government could actually impose tyranny on it's citizens with the full support of the Armed Forces, to point out how absurd their argument is.
If the Shit hits the fan it won't matter which guns are legal. What'll matter is what people who can make bombs do.