As I explained elsewhere, requirements for new prospective citizens are never and should never be applied to native-born citizens for several reasons--some good, some bad and yet unavoidable. If there were never any restrictions whatsoever on immigration then larger countries could invade smaller ones by simply sending people over there to register to vote. The entire premise of the 'zero restrictions on immigration' camp is warped beyond comprehension. It's just untenable.
Bible-thumbing douchebags are a problem. They are nowhere near a problem, globally speaking, as Qu'ran-thumping douchebags. The two problems are orders of magnitude apart. If you can't admit that, then you are hopelessly delusional. Immigration is by definition a global issue; you can't wriggle out of this by appealing to America's relatively small Muslim population. Might I suggest you try taking a deep breath or two and realize it's possible to be for LGBTQI rights, against corporate greed, against Trump, etc. and still be against allowing open Islamofascists to not only enter the country, but become citizens. These people do exist, you realize that? They're not just Trump's imagination.
And once again, the ideological test I am talking about is not religious. If you reject most of the core precepts of our constitution for supposedly Christian or secular reasons then I'd say you should be no more or less unwelcome than someone who rejects them for supposedly Islamic reasons reasons. If a Christian from Jamaica wants to become a citizen and he's one of those people who openly advocates that gays should be killed, don't let him become a citizen either. The point is to have some fucking standards, and stop changing the subject to bible belt blowhards (whom we cannot deny birthright citizenship to by any stretch of the imagination) every ten seconds to assuage your white/Western guilt. We've been domesticating our centuries and we've made remarkable progress. Not a single country in the world cites "The Bible" as its constitution.
It is my understanding that the tediousness of uranium centrifuging is the single largest barrier to non-nuclear countries developing atomic bombs. It's my understanding that this process can take years depending on the equipment available. Once you have the U235, the rest is extremely simple. a U-bomb is just a glorified gun shooting a uranium bullet into an incomplete uranium sphere, maybe with some neutron reflectors or something tossed in to make it nicer. If this process were easy or cheap, there would be a lot more nuclear paranoia in the world because uranium ore isn't exactly hard to get ahold of. Reactor-grade stuff requires many fewer passes of course, but it still ain't an easy business.
Plutonium creation I know very little about, but if the presence of U238 in the final problem isn't a problem then I don't see how it could be much more expensive in principle. You could simply vaporize or aerosolize the stuff and slowly convert it to Pu with no centrifuges required. The only particularly tricky and costly aspect is doing it safely, which was the entire point of this conversation.
Japan has had no serious nuclear accidents; at least, not serious in terms of public safety.
It repeat after me: only needs a "great deal of development" because of safety concerns. Lock some engineers in a room overnight and tell them to build a reactor with zero safety concerns and it will be quite simple. I'm not terribly familiar with breeder technology but it cannot possibly be remotely as expensive as uranium centrifuging.
Here's my breeder reactor design and I'm 70% sure it'll work despite my knowing almost nothing: aerosolize the U238 or other isotope-to-transmute of choice. Set up a convection system that thoroughly mixes and circulates the powder near your neutron source--this could be done in a relatively neutron-transparent liquid or (maybe) a gas. Set up your neutron detectors and thermal imaging all around the area. When fission rates increase and/or when it starts looking hot, your neutron source retracts into its safety chamber and a series of fans blows away any residue dust off of it. Resulting powder is measured and melted or compressed into appropriate ingots for fuel usage. If it's going too slow, increase rate of neutron flow. If it's too fast, reduce it. If it's so fast that it blows up, oh well, stuff blows up with oil and coal all the time. None of this is prohibitively expensive unless/until you try to make it super safe.
Hate speech, while not a concept I subscribe to, is almost universally portrayed as being an exception to the general rule of free speech. As the footnote in my last post tried to clarify, I am talking about the flat rejection of principles, not limited or nuanced interpretations. I was actually thinking more about the freedom of religion component of the first amendment, since the apostasy laws in Islam are uniquely terrifying and subscribed to much more widely than is generally acknowledged.
But sure, if some otherwise lovely Belgian Christian or atheist wants to become a citizen and he or she is completely against the foundational core of all three precepts in the first amendment... screw 'em. The ultimate religious source isn't the point; it's the terrestrial consequences that matter. I don't want people with anti-American values to settle here, because I am pro-tolerance.
And I think the GPL is better at preventing closed-source forks than BSD/MIT/Apache.
I don't care about your cherry picked statistics. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts of how this shit actually works and actually costs, not the 5000 foot view of the situation after the corporations and politicians have had their way with it.
If the dumbass corporate bureaucrats (I don't exonerate the nuclear power industry itself, you see) and/or regulators have somehow found a way it more expensive to make plutonium than to separate uranium... that still doesn't speak to the fundamental difficulty of doing things a certain way. There's a reason why we took the time and money to do the trinity test, even though the uranium bomb was a lot more reliable. Centrifuge separation is very tedious and expensive.
I said "if left to its own devices." I'm also talking long term, after a breeding program is established so you don't need to constantly refine more fuel. Nuclear requires subsidies because of the safety regulations, not because it's hard to pile some plutonium underneath a tank of water. Or maybe you actually think it's expensive to build the nuclear reactor itself?
Right. After Fukushima Daichi, all we have to do is convince the public that nukes are too safe and we need to start cutting corners.
I don't live in Japan. This article isn't about Japan. It is true that some old reactor designs are still in use worldwide and these need to be phased out. This isn't going to happen as long as the anti-nuclear lobby continues to discourage investment.
And just how many people died due to Fukushima? I'm willing to bet it's a lot less than the people who died from the BP oil spill.
I'm pro-safety, but the anti-nuclear movement isn't about safety. It's about hysteria and misinformation. Quick, without checking, how many people do you think got cancer and died after Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear disaster we've ever had in this country?
Nonsense. Do you know how many years dioxins last before they degrade? Neither do I. Because no one cares about babysitting extremely toxic chemicals, even if it were demonstrated that they wouldn't degrade for hundreds of years. Toxic heavy metals will last for millions or even BILLIONS years! OMG! Won't someone please think of those babysitting costs??
Also, the "thousands of years" argument always indicates a profound ignorance of the time value of money.
Also: keep it on site. Nuclear doesn't generate tons of waste, that's the whole point. It uses very, very little fuel. It can all be stored on site, unless the plant is closed down, which in principle it wouldn't ever need to be because nuclear is by far the cheapest method we have of generating power.
Nuclear power has gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter and it has nobody to blame but itself.
Painfully ignorant. Do you understand that nuclear power works in exactly the same as coal except instead of trucking in tons of coal you simply put a pile of fissile material under the water and let it sit there for a very long time before you need to refuel ? The only expense is the initial refining of the U235 but after that you can breed more fuel.
Beyond these relatively small fixed costs, nearly every single dollar that nuclear costs more than coal is due to increased safety regulations. Some of those regulations we obviously need. One of those safety concerns (namely, security and proliferation concerns) is actually quite worrying. But it is completely wrong to argue that nuclear is intrinsically more expensive than paying to dig up and cart around thousands and thousands and thousands of tons of coal.
I'm tempted to say it's a lost cause at this point. Most of these people still believe that Three Mile Island was some huge tragedy that caused a huge spike in cancer rates, regardless of what the science says. Most of them probably don't remember that the BP oil spill, which happened just a few years ago, killed like a dozen people.
And it also turned the entire Gulf of Mexico dark. Anyone else recall those satellite pictures? Can you imagine the hysteria we would have seen if that dark stuff were actually radioactive, instead of merely being highly toxic?
Nuclear would never fail if left to its own devices. Which is not to say that we should blindly deregulate it, but...
Look, let's actually examine how nuclear works: you put a pile of fissionable material near some water. It turns the water into steam, which turns a turbine. This is goes on for an extremely long time before you need more fuel. This is demonstrably and obviously much cheaper than constantly mining coal and trucking it in and burning it to boil the water to turn the same turbine. Over the long term it's cheaper than building tricky wind turbines or solar panels, too.
The higher costs of nuclear are entirely the result of safety regulations which far exceed what we demand from coal or oil, which have already done tremendous damage to the planet and are even as we speak actively poisoning us with mercury. Mercury poisoning just isn't as scary as radiation, though.
No, it just needs to not be treated as being vastly different from non-nuclear hazards. The chemical hazards of coal and petroleum are vastly worse than the radioactive hazards you speak of.
The "nuclear is expensive" claim is only true because the anti-nuclear lobby has made it that way. If breeder reactors were used, modern fail-safe designs used (unlike Fukushima's reactors) and a "opportunity cost of human life" approach used to dictate safety regulations, then it would be much cheaper than coal and most renewables. The problem is that everyone views damage from radiation as being much more dangerous than global warming, acid rain, oil spills, toxic heavy metal poisoning, etc. so we overspend and obsess over it ways that we never do over coal.
(On the international stage, there are also entirely legitimate concerns over weaponization and nuclear proliferation.)
I know I've done like half a dozen postscripts at this point but this bears underlining: a constitution by definition is the very core of a nation. If you disagree with huge chunks of a nation's constitution, you are rejecting the very institution you are ostensibly petitioning to become a member of.
That's a far cry from arguing over tax codes, or the specifics of gun control, or whether or not faith-based initiatives violate the first amendment.
It's not "any law"... it's the first amendment. If you completely disagree[1] with the first amendment of our constitution then it makes very, very little sense to argue that you (as a non-native) should be granted the privileges of citizenship. Or do you think that nothing should be asked of our prospective citizens?
For comparison, you can be denied citizenship in Switzerland if you wear sweatpants too much or don't make many Swiss friends. Japan pretty much flat out denies you citizenship if you aren't ethnically Japanese. You can't even TRAVEL to many European countries (let alone become a citizen of them), including the UK, if you are a member of a legal but controversial political group.
1. I don't mean quibbling over the details of the interpretation. For example, if you were an Islamist who believed that sharia negates all three of the core principles involved in the first amendment and that sharia should be imposed on everyone. This is a minority belief among Muslims, but it is not a tiny minority.
It's also worth noting that "the constitution" is not the same thing as every single law the government passes, and of the principles outlined in the constitution the majority of people would argue that the first amendment is the most important and central to our idea of freedom (some would put it behind the second and/or tenth, though.) It is not at all unreasonable to expect prospective citizens to learn the bill of rights (only the third is not terribly relevant to today's society) and indeed it's very possible there already is such a requirement for the written citizenship test.
That's a very narrow definition of "support the constitution." Not "obey the constitution", but to "support" it. Obeying is much less than supporting, and supporting something is generally not synonymous with wishing to overturn it.
This whole tangent also seems like a fairly minor quibble. Our government already cares about what existing citizens believe in a variety of ways,... they're narrow areas, but they're there. Do I need to drag them out? Do you really want to argue about whether or not such an ideological test legal under current black and red letter law? You can't be a Secret Service member whilst articulating the belief that the the country would be better off if Obama were dead, but I don't view this as a particularly egregious violation of the first amendment.
How about we step away from the positive for a moment and into the normative... do you or don't you think it is a good thing for people who oppose intolerance to... actually oppose it? Not by forcing people into silence, but by saying that if you articulate odious things there WILL be some level of negative consequences for you if you choose to or wish to live in a tolerant society like ours?
As I said in another post, I view the argument you're championing here in the same way I view the argument that the GPL takes away peoples' freedom (by not letting them take away the freedoms of other people), or that shooting someone who is randomly firing into a crowd of civilians is wrong (because shooting people is wrong).
An ideal does not need to be applied to a point of absurdity or self-negation for it to be a cohesive, non-hypocritical ideal. Do you agree or disagree?
Your next move, should you choose to make it, is to decry that if we actually had standards for citizenship (like every other goddamn country on Earth) we'd have to kick out all existing citizens that don't meet those standards, which is ludicrous. No one handles birthright citizenship the same way they handle citizenship through naturalization, and the lack of options for stateless citizens makes that idea cruel and untenable.
Please. "My religion is that Bruce Perens must die." Does that mean I'm now immune from prosecution if I manage to hunt you down?
There are numerous precedents for the idea that if a regulation isn't specifically aimed at religion, you can't use the cover of religion to claim exemption from it.
Since we already have an oath of citizenship requiring that one support the constitution, this isn't a terribly radical thing I'm proposing here. I'm merely saying that this provision should be given some eyes and some teeth. If you don't support the constitution, including the first amendment, then you don't get to become a citizen, period. "But my religion doesn't allow me to grant other people religious liberty and/or freedom of speech and/or freedom of the press!" is not a valid excuse.
Every other country that I'm aware of requires respect for its laws and/or integration with its culture as a prerequisite for citizenship. Even with the most tortured readings, the first amendment of our constitution does not indicate that we are completely unable to examine the beliefs of prospective citizens. Not their religious beliefs, just their beliefs about terrestrial matters. If they choose to base those beliefs on ancient books of nonsense, that's not our concern.
To tolerate (or not tolerate) is not a verb describing a singular physical action one can take, and the beliefs we shouldn't tolerate are a similar spectrum of gray.
We should not tolerate an arbitrarily large assortment of bad beliefs among our candidate citizens, for instance. That doesn't mean we have a religious test, but it does mean that that we have the right to reject prospective citizens who by their words or deeds clearly reject the first amendment of our constitution. Every other country in the world discriminates based on ideology, and yet there is a very sizable contingent of people here who believe it is wrong if we were to set up any impediment at all for any imported ideology, because (apparently) the existence of home-grown right-wing crazies justifies, nay, demands that we import as many Middle Eastern right wing crazies as we can to balance them out.
Indeed. It's shocking how many people fail this basic sanity test.
This isn't a simple right vs. left, either. Plenty on the left (particularly in Europe, but more and more stateside) are guilty of tolerating and insisting that we all tolerate some of the most despicable flavors of intolerance when it comes to Islam.
And it's ok to not tolerate intolerance, just as it's ok to shoot people who are indiscriminately shooting other people, and it's ok for the GPL to deny you your "right" to deny other people their rights.
Not that I particularly equate 'Hillary' with 'tolerance', nor that I'm on board the more hysterical brands of Trump-bashing, but I am getting sick of the anti-anti people. It's ok to quit your job if you find out your employer, the one whom you helped make fithy rich, is doing things you consider evil with the money he made. It's more than ok--you're a hypocrite if you DON'T quit your job in such a situation.
Only a moral toddler would argue it's intolerant to object to (not try to ban, but to simply refuse to support) intolerant views.
They weren't explicitly endorsing any side. The Hillary support is an implicit consequence of our current electoral system, but I don't think you can use that unfortunate fact to automatically brand them hypocrites.
People have a general right (if not a duty) to boycott their company if their leader is using or has used the MONEY he's making from their labor (not merely his words) to support an odious cause. Boycotting is in general reasonable when the person or organization is actively spending large amounts of money on an odious cause. If you disagree, then I'm not sure how you can ever support boycotting; ergo, you should boycott yourself for boycotting these guys.
I personally wouldn't do what they've done in this particular situation, and I think half of the attacks against Trump are laughably off-mark and in their self-destructive hysteria they threaten to make the word 'liberal' even more of a dirty word, but what these developers are doing is (in principle) completely reasonable.
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As I explained elsewhere, requirements for new prospective citizens are never and should never be applied to native-born citizens for several reasons--some good, some bad and yet unavoidable. If there were never any restrictions whatsoever on immigration then larger countries could invade smaller ones by simply sending people over there to register to vote. The entire premise of the 'zero restrictions on immigration' camp is warped beyond comprehension. It's just untenable.
Bible-thumbing douchebags are a problem. They are nowhere near a problem, globally speaking, as Qu'ran-thumping douchebags. The two problems are orders of magnitude apart. If you can't admit that, then you are hopelessly delusional. Immigration is by definition a global issue; you can't wriggle out of this by appealing to America's relatively small Muslim population. Might I suggest you try taking a deep breath or two and realize it's possible to be for LGBTQI rights, against corporate greed, against Trump, etc. and still be against allowing open Islamofascists to not only enter the country, but become citizens. These people do exist, you realize that? They're not just Trump's imagination.
And once again, the ideological test I am talking about is not religious. If you reject most of the core precepts of our constitution for supposedly Christian or secular reasons then I'd say you should be no more or less unwelcome than someone who rejects them for supposedly Islamic reasons reasons. If a Christian from Jamaica wants to become a citizen and he's one of those people who openly advocates that gays should be killed, don't let him become a citizen either. The point is to have some fucking standards, and stop changing the subject to bible belt blowhards (whom we cannot deny birthright citizenship to by any stretch of the imagination) every ten seconds to assuage your white/Western guilt. We've been domesticating our centuries and we've made remarkable progress. Not a single country in the world cites "The Bible" as its constitution.
It is my understanding that the tediousness of uranium centrifuging is the single largest barrier to non-nuclear countries developing atomic bombs. It's my understanding that this process can take years depending on the equipment available. Once you have the U235, the rest is extremely simple. a U-bomb is just a glorified gun shooting a uranium bullet into an incomplete uranium sphere, maybe with some neutron reflectors or something tossed in to make it nicer. If this process were easy or cheap, there would be a lot more nuclear paranoia in the world because uranium ore isn't exactly hard to get ahold of. Reactor-grade stuff requires many fewer passes of course, but it still ain't an easy business.
Plutonium creation I know very little about, but if the presence of U238 in the final problem isn't a problem then I don't see how it could be much more expensive in principle. You could simply vaporize or aerosolize the stuff and slowly convert it to Pu with no centrifuges required. The only particularly tricky and costly aspect is doing it safely, which was the entire point of this conversation.
Japan has had no serious nuclear accidents; at least, not serious in terms of public safety.
It repeat after me: only needs a "great deal of development" because of safety concerns. Lock some engineers in a room overnight and tell them to build a reactor with zero safety concerns and it will be quite simple. I'm not terribly familiar with breeder technology but it cannot possibly be remotely as expensive as uranium centrifuging.
Here's my breeder reactor design and I'm 70% sure it'll work despite my knowing almost nothing: aerosolize the U238 or other isotope-to-transmute of choice. Set up a convection system that thoroughly mixes and circulates the powder near your neutron source--this could be done in a relatively neutron-transparent liquid or (maybe) a gas. Set up your neutron detectors and thermal imaging all around the area. When fission rates increase and/or when it starts looking hot, your neutron source retracts into its safety chamber and a series of fans blows away any residue dust off of it. Resulting powder is measured and melted or compressed into appropriate ingots for fuel usage. If it's going too slow, increase rate of neutron flow. If it's too fast, reduce it. If it's so fast that it blows up, oh well, stuff blows up with oil and coal all the time. None of this is prohibitively expensive unless/until you try to make it super safe.
Entire towns have been rendered uninhabitable by underground coal fires that can apparently burn for hundreds of years, but we don't go apeshit over it because that news story doesn't contain the magic word:
"radioactive".
Hate speech, while not a concept I subscribe to, is almost universally portrayed as being an exception to the general rule of free speech. As the footnote in my last post tried to clarify, I am talking about the flat rejection of principles, not limited or nuanced interpretations. I was actually thinking more about the freedom of religion component of the first amendment, since the apostasy laws in Islam are uniquely terrifying and subscribed to much more widely than is generally acknowledged.
But sure, if some otherwise lovely Belgian Christian or atheist wants to become a citizen and he or she is completely against the foundational core of all three precepts in the first amendment... screw 'em. The ultimate religious source isn't the point; it's the terrestrial consequences that matter. I don't want people with anti-American values to settle here, because I am pro-tolerance.
And I think the GPL is better at preventing closed-source forks than BSD/MIT/Apache.
I don't care about your cherry picked statistics. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts of how this shit actually works and actually costs, not the 5000 foot view of the situation after the corporations and politicians have had their way with it.
If the dumbass corporate bureaucrats (I don't exonerate the nuclear power industry itself, you see) and/or regulators have somehow found a way it more expensive to make plutonium than to separate uranium... that still doesn't speak to the fundamental difficulty of doing things a certain way. There's a reason why we took the time and money to do the trinity test, even though the uranium bomb was a lot more reliable. Centrifuge separation is very tedious and expensive.
Right. After Fukushima Daichi, all we have to do is convince the public that nukes are too safe and we need to start cutting corners.
I don't live in Japan. This article isn't about Japan. It is true that some old reactor designs are still in use worldwide and these need to be phased out. This isn't going to happen as long as the anti-nuclear lobby continues to discourage investment.
And just how many people died due to Fukushima? I'm willing to bet it's a lot less than the people who died from the BP oil spill.
I'm pro-safety, but the anti-nuclear movement isn't about safety. It's about hysteria and misinformation. Quick, without checking, how many people do you think got cancer and died after Three Mile Island, the worst nuclear disaster we've ever had in this country?
Also, the "thousands of years" argument always indicates a profound ignorance of the time value of money.
Also: keep it on site. Nuclear doesn't generate tons of waste, that's the whole point. It uses very, very little fuel. It can all be stored on site, unless the plant is closed down, which in principle it wouldn't ever need to be because nuclear is by far the cheapest method we have of generating power.
Nuclear power has gone from too cheap to meter to too expensive to matter and it has nobody to blame but itself.
Painfully ignorant. Do you understand that nuclear power works in exactly the same as coal except instead of trucking in tons of coal you simply put a pile of fissile material under the water and let it sit there for a very long time before you need to refuel ? The only expense is the initial refining of the U235 but after that you can breed more fuel.
Beyond these relatively small fixed costs, nearly every single dollar that nuclear costs more than coal is due to increased safety regulations. Some of those regulations we obviously need. One of those safety concerns (namely, security and proliferation concerns) is actually quite worrying. But it is completely wrong to argue that nuclear is intrinsically more expensive than paying to dig up and cart around thousands and thousands and thousands of tons of coal.
I'm tempted to say it's a lost cause at this point. Most of these people still believe that Three Mile Island was some huge tragedy that caused a huge spike in cancer rates, regardless of what the science says. Most of them probably don't remember that the BP oil spill, which happened just a few years ago, killed like a dozen people.
And it also turned the entire Gulf of Mexico dark. Anyone else recall those satellite pictures? Can you imagine the hysteria we would have seen if that dark stuff were actually radioactive, instead of merely being highly toxic?
Nuclear would never fail if left to its own devices. Which is not to say that we should blindly deregulate it, but...
Look, let's actually examine how nuclear works: you put a pile of fissionable material near some water. It turns the water into steam, which turns a turbine. This is goes on for an extremely long time before you need more fuel. This is demonstrably and obviously much cheaper than constantly mining coal and trucking it in and burning it to boil the water to turn the same turbine. Over the long term it's cheaper than building tricky wind turbines or solar panels, too.
The higher costs of nuclear are entirely the result of safety regulations which far exceed what we demand from coal or oil, which have already done tremendous damage to the planet and are even as we speak actively poisoning us with mercury. Mercury poisoning just isn't as scary as radiation, though.
No, it just needs to not be treated as being vastly different from non-nuclear hazards. The chemical hazards of coal and petroleum are vastly worse than the radioactive hazards you speak of.
The "nuclear is expensive" claim is only true because the anti-nuclear lobby has made it that way. If breeder reactors were used, modern fail-safe designs used (unlike Fukushima's reactors) and a "opportunity cost of human life" approach used to dictate safety regulations, then it would be much cheaper than coal and most renewables. The problem is that everyone views damage from radiation as being much more dangerous than global warming, acid rain, oil spills, toxic heavy metal poisoning, etc. so we overspend and obsess over it ways that we never do over coal.
(On the international stage, there are also entirely legitimate concerns over weaponization and nuclear proliferation.)
I know I've done like half a dozen postscripts at this point but this bears underlining: a constitution by definition is the very core of a nation. If you disagree with huge chunks of a nation's constitution, you are rejecting the very institution you are ostensibly petitioning to become a member of.
That's a far cry from arguing over tax codes, or the specifics of gun control, or whether or not faith-based initiatives violate the first amendment.
It's not "any law"... it's the first amendment. If you completely disagree[1] with the first amendment of our constitution then it makes very, very little sense to argue that you (as a non-native) should be granted the privileges of citizenship. Or do you think that nothing should be asked of our prospective citizens?
For comparison, you can be denied citizenship in Switzerland if you wear sweatpants too much or don't make many Swiss friends. Japan pretty much flat out denies you citizenship if you aren't ethnically Japanese. You can't even TRAVEL to many European countries (let alone become a citizen of them), including the UK, if you are a member of a legal but controversial political group.
1. I don't mean quibbling over the details of the interpretation. For example, if you were an Islamist who believed that sharia negates all three of the core principles involved in the first amendment and that sharia should be imposed on everyone. This is a minority belief among Muslims, but it is not a tiny minority.
It's also worth noting that "the constitution" is not the same thing as every single law the government passes, and of the principles outlined in the constitution the majority of people would argue that the first amendment is the most important and central to our idea of freedom (some would put it behind the second and/or tenth, though.) It is not at all unreasonable to expect prospective citizens to learn the bill of rights (only the third is not terribly relevant to today's society) and indeed it's very possible there already is such a requirement for the written citizenship test.
Hah. I just wikipedia-ed your name and saw the OSS stuff. I'd be very interested to know if you think the GPL analogy is apt (no wordplay intended.)
I was merely saving you the bother of tediously typing out a very common response. I've had this conversation before.
That's a very narrow definition of "support the constitution." Not "obey the constitution", but to "support" it. Obeying is much less than supporting, and supporting something is generally not synonymous with wishing to overturn it.
This whole tangent also seems like a fairly minor quibble. Our government already cares about what existing citizens believe in a variety of ways,... they're narrow areas, but they're there. Do I need to drag them out? Do you really want to argue about whether or not such an ideological test legal under current black and red letter law? You can't be a Secret Service member whilst articulating the belief that the the country would be better off if Obama were dead, but I don't view this as a particularly egregious violation of the first amendment.
How about we step away from the positive for a moment and into the normative... do you or don't you think it is a good thing for people who oppose intolerance to... actually oppose it? Not by forcing people into silence, but by saying that if you articulate odious things there WILL be some level of negative consequences for you if you choose to or wish to live in a tolerant society like ours?
As I said in another post, I view the argument you're championing here in the same way I view the argument that the GPL takes away peoples' freedom (by not letting them take away the freedoms of other people), or that shooting someone who is randomly firing into a crowd of civilians is wrong (because shooting people is wrong).
An ideal does not need to be applied to a point of absurdity or self-negation for it to be a cohesive, non-hypocritical ideal. Do you agree or disagree?
Your next move, should you choose to make it, is to decry that if we actually had standards for citizenship (like every other goddamn country on Earth) we'd have to kick out all existing citizens that don't meet those standards, which is ludicrous. No one handles birthright citizenship the same way they handle citizenship through naturalization, and the lack of options for stateless citizens makes that idea cruel and untenable.
Please. "My religion is that Bruce Perens must die." Does that mean I'm now immune from prosecution if I manage to hunt you down?
There are numerous precedents for the idea that if a regulation isn't specifically aimed at religion, you can't use the cover of religion to claim exemption from it.
Since we already have an oath of citizenship requiring that one support the constitution, this isn't a terribly radical thing I'm proposing here. I'm merely saying that this provision should be given some eyes and some teeth. If you don't support the constitution, including the first amendment, then you don't get to become a citizen, period. "But my religion doesn't allow me to grant other people religious liberty and/or freedom of speech and/or freedom of the press!" is not a valid excuse.
Every other country that I'm aware of requires respect for its laws and/or integration with its culture as a prerequisite for citizenship. Even with the most tortured readings, the first amendment of our constitution does not indicate that we are completely unable to examine the beliefs of prospective citizens. Not their religious beliefs, just their beliefs about terrestrial matters. If they choose to base those beliefs on ancient books of nonsense, that's not our concern.
To tolerate (or not tolerate) is not a verb describing a singular physical action one can take, and the beliefs we shouldn't tolerate are a similar spectrum of gray.
We should not tolerate an arbitrarily large assortment of bad beliefs among our candidate citizens, for instance. That doesn't mean we have a religious test, but it does mean that that we have the right to reject prospective citizens who by their words or deeds clearly reject the first amendment of our constitution. Every other country in the world discriminates based on ideology, and yet there is a very sizable contingent of people here who believe it is wrong if we were to set up any impediment at all for any imported ideology, because (apparently) the existence of home-grown right-wing crazies justifies, nay, demands that we import as many Middle Eastern right wing crazies as we can to balance them out.
Indeed. It's shocking how many people fail this basic sanity test.
This isn't a simple right vs. left, either. Plenty on the left (particularly in Europe, but more and more stateside) are guilty of tolerating and insisting that we all tolerate some of the most despicable flavors of intolerance when it comes to Islam.
And it's ok to not tolerate intolerance, just as it's ok to shoot people who are indiscriminately shooting other people, and it's ok for the GPL to deny you your "right" to deny other people their rights.
Not that I particularly equate 'Hillary' with 'tolerance', nor that I'm on board the more hysterical brands of Trump-bashing, but I am getting sick of the anti-anti people. It's ok to quit your job if you find out your employer, the one whom you helped make fithy rich, is doing things you consider evil with the money he made. It's more than ok--you're a hypocrite if you DON'T quit your job in such a situation.
Only a moral toddler would argue it's intolerant to object to (not try to ban, but to simply refuse to support) intolerant views.
These people work for Luckey's company, not one of Soros'. Not sure, but that seems kind of relevant?
They weren't explicitly endorsing any side. The Hillary support is an implicit consequence of our current electoral system, but I don't think you can use that unfortunate fact to automatically brand them hypocrites.
People have a general right (if not a duty) to boycott their company if their leader is using or has used the MONEY he's making from their labor (not merely his words) to support an odious cause. Boycotting is in general reasonable when the person or organization is actively spending large amounts of money on an odious cause. If you disagree, then I'm not sure how you can ever support boycotting; ergo, you should boycott yourself for boycotting these guys.
I personally wouldn't do what they've done in this particular situation, and I think half of the attacks against Trump are laughably off-mark and in their self-destructive hysteria they threaten to make the word 'liberal' even more of a dirty word, but what these developers are doing is (in principle) completely reasonable.
So far, many more people who have supposedly blasphemed Islam have died for blaspheming it than people have died for supporting Islam.
in America (to be clear)