In ancient China, compass needles were reckoned to point south. Maps put the south at the top, and the emperor faced south for the feng-shui of it.
I wouldn't call him an underlord though, not to his face...
I can't exactly say why, but taking an imprint of my finger doesn't seem like a big deal where taking my blood and analyzing my DNA seems a bit invasive.
The sovereignty of the state ends at my skin; what goes on inside of it - my thoughts, my blood, my neurochemistry - is my own damn business.
anything not SPECIFICALLY granted the Federal government in the Constitution is supposed to remain the purview of the states.
Yes. And the federal government has the specific ability to tax, including as of the Sixteenth Amendment direct income taxes.
If you've read the Federalist Papers, you'll know that the Founders considered the idea of a national "income tax" to be vile, unethical, and immoral.
The Founders also generally found slavery and stealing land from the Indian nations to be fine, ethical, and moral, so pardon me if I don't find the argument by authority to be 100% convincing.
(Though I'm open to the possibility of scrapping earned-income taxes for a progressive combination of a graduated sales tax, property tax, and capital gains taxes.)
Some rights that have been voted away include my right to keep what I earn and not have it distributed to those that choose not to work and the 2nd amendment, the list goes on an on.
There is no "right not to be taxed" under the Constitution; the government is specifically empowered to collect taxes. We can argue about the wisdom of the application of that power, about the heavyhandedness of IRS enforcement, and the legitimacy of how the feds spend it (very little goes to social spending), but there's no basis for arguing that taxation itself is a violation of your Constitutional rights.
You are correct that many on the left have failed to adequately protect the RKBA, and have even opposed it. But the same can be said of many on the right - it was (then-governor) Reagan who signed the Mulford Act, the first major modern anti-gun legislation, to stop the leftist Black Panthers, and Bush I who signed a law forbidding the importation of "assault weapons".
i on the other hand think that it is by it's nature a bad thing.
Why do you believe that self-defense is by its nature a bad thing?
We don't have a gun culture in the UK and so we don't suffer a massive amount of gun related deaths.
Actually in the U.S., the states with the most "gun culture", i.e. the most liberal laws regarding owning guns, that have the lowest murder rates.
Our violence problem is not caused by guns - other nations with liberal firearms laws don't have our level of violence, and we still have a much higher level of non-firearms murders than the UK. And clearly gun laws don't solve the problem.
(It's interesting, BTW, how this has become a left versus right argument in the U.S.: yet one of the first modern gun control laws in the US, the Mulford Act, was signed by then-governor of California Ronald Reagan, and was targeted at the leftist Black Panther Party.)
Its extremely important that we don't forget the Holocaust so that it never happens again.
What, are you saying that the state should require citizens to memorize certain historical facts? "Failure to pass this history quiz is a felony"?
The problem with McCarthy was not that there were no communists, there were.
So what? The problem with McCarthy was that it is, and always has been, perfectly legal to be a communist (or a fascist, or a green, or a libertarian, or a monarchist, or a theocrat, or whatever); you have the right to hold any politicals beliefs, and to speak about them.
Conflating "communist" with "Soviet spy" is as stupid and dangerous as conflating "Muslim" with "Al Qaeda agent".
It said he used his *former* employer's email server. That most likely is criminal.
If I send you e-mail, I'm apparently "accessing" your server within the meaning of the law. If he sent e-mail from a personal account to "customers@formeremployer.com", then there's no hax0ring involved. (And formeremployer.com might want to put some access restrictions on their mailing list, but if the mail goes through when sent through normal channels, ipso facto he's authorized to send it).
It's the legal argument of the United States, Great Britan, and France, that 688 is indeed relevant to 678...
Yes, and it's a BS argument; 688 has nothing to do with Kuwait, and 678's authorization of military force was for the U.N. to use force to resolve that situation, not for member nations to intervene in Iraq's internal affairs. (I don't think it's been France's argument for a long time, either.)
You'll note that, back in 1991, the legality of the no-fly zones wasn't questioned, even Saddam Hussein acknowledged their legitimacy until 1998
As you point out by referencing an earlier thread, some people seriously assert propositions like those in your post. If you meant them ironically, well, good, but that's the problem with irony when discussing politics: the statement that you think is so outrageous that it's obviously meant in jest, is taken seriously by someone out there.
(In the heyday of USENET, there was a cliche that the proof of this is "left as an exercise for the reader's killfile"; I suppose on contemporary/., it's left as an exercise for the reader's foe's list.)
you intentionally amended the quote, in order to leave France out.
Eh? I fear you are confused; I didn't quote anyone.
Yes, France was a player in the creation of the no-fly zones. It's totally irrelevant, but if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to have that acknowledged, there you go.
Explain how a threat to US planes and pilots isn't a threat to the US.
If I point a gun at a burglar, it is a threat to him, certainly; it is not a threat to his family, his town, or his country.
Explain how their location has anything at all to do with this.
It has everything to do with it! In order to be a threat to a nation, you must be able to cause damage to that nation. Planes flying over Iraq can't do jack shit to any targets in the United States. (Invoking the supposed "overseas interests" of a nation is the way of imperialists, so I'm sure you're not going to attempt that.)
If troops in Nation A fire on invaders from Nation B, Nation B can't meaningfully say "Nation A is a threat to us!" and use it as a pretext to send in more invaders.
You'll note Resolution 678 specifically authorizes military force to implement resolution 660, and All subsequent resolutions
The resolution text says "All subsequent relevant resolutions". It is not a "Beat up Iraq for free" card; it is limited to resolutions relevant to 600 - i.e., those pertaining to the the Iraq/Kuwait situation. It does not authorize the Security Council or member nations to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs (however hideous and vile Saddam Hussein's rule).
Meaning, Military force is authorized against Iraq for noncompliance with any Security Council resolution passed before or after.
Nope. Not only is that reading contradicted by that word "relevant" that qualifies "resolutions" in 660; it is also a matter of the UN Charter that the Security Council itself, not individual member nations, makes decisions regarding action.
how dare we judge Egypt by our arrogant, self-centered western views on human rights and justice. I'm sick of phrases like "highly inhuman and dirty practices."...We need to respect Egypt's right to its culture.
Interesting. Would you have applied that to the Holocaust as well, respecting Germany's "right to its culture"? (Yeah, yeah, Godwin's Law; it's still a legitimate question.)
Should northern states have applied that to the Jim Crow South, respecting its "right" to a culture of rascism and segregation?
Should I apply that to my neighborhood as well? If the guy next door is beating his wife, should I respect his family's "right to their culture"?
Egypt is a sovereign nation, and that sets a legal limit on how much other nations can interfere; just as the Constitution sets limits on the ability of states to mess with each other, and laws set limits on my actions against a neighbor I think is engaging in crimes. But the idea that we can't talk to and negotiate with other nations, states, communities, and individual people to attempt to persuade them to change behavior we don't like is silly.
Unless you count continued attempts to shoot down US planes patrolling the UN-sanctioned no-fly zone.
The no-fly zones were illegal creations of the U.S. and Great Britain; a sovereign nation shooting at hostile aircraft that violate its airspace is not creating a threat to the violating nation.
But Saddam was far from a downtrodden lamb.
Yes, Saddam was a bad guy. That does not mean that anything done to oppose him therefore automatically becomes legal, ethical, or smart.
Re:-1 for self-contradiction, -1 for lateness
on
One Big Bang, Or Many?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In our human context of course, we know that humans with minds were there first to make laws for other humans to be subject to. Is it then so far out to say that a superior mind was there first to formulate the laws of physics which the universe and everything therein is subject to?
Yes, it is completely far out, largely because you are conflating the very different ideas of a "law of the state" (an institutionalized social norm) and a "law of nature" (a description of how the observable universe behaves).
The universe is not "subject to" the laws of physics, it will not be punished for violating them; the laws of physics are subject to the behavior of the universe, in that is the universe violates a "law" of physics, the law gets tossed out.
(Of course there's also the recursion paradox: if some "superior mind" was there before the observable universe, we've just pushed the question down on the stack and must now address the question of whow this ""superior mind" came into being - we've not made any progress toward a explanation.)
aside from stealing a bunch of names from old Christian mythology it doesn't really have much of anything to do with Christianity.
It's interesting to compare the Xian references in NGE (and also Trigun, where a priest walks around with a huge cross-shaped gun that's described as very heavy "because it's full of mercy") with references to Buddhism in American TV and movies (think Kung Fu, Kill Bill, et cetera).
Or say when doing the tatoo the guy who happens to be short on money this month decides to take the extra 200 from some dude visiting the shop yesterday, impregnates you with something like a chip or even some nanotech tools?
RFID chips are too large to be inserted via a tattoo needle, and are placed deeper into the flesh than ink. Nanotech on such a level has not yet been developed, and I assume that defensive nanotech would be available.
And if enough radioactive ink had been used in one of my tattoos to allow some sort of practical tracking, I'd be dead of the radiation poisoning by now. (If someone wanted to just flat-out kill me, there are much less complicated ways.)
You *already* need to take yourself apart to foil biometric ID. You'd need to get rid of your fingertips, retinas, and all your teeth, to begin with.
I don't broadcast my fingerprints (in fact I could wear gloves, or coat my fingertips with glue to mask them), nor do I tend to stick my eye up to retinal scanners or bite into things to leave teeth marks when I'm out and about in public. RFIDs, on the other hand, can be read at some distance.
Is the free market a failure, or is this the way it's supposed to be?
Markets can only produce efficient solutions when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, and with all costs accounted for. That's not the case in health care.
If you're having a heart attack, you're not able to shop around for the best deal or wait until an end-of-the-month sale.
Also and my neighbor's inability to afford treatment for communicable diseases puts me at risk. As we consider bird flu pandemics and bioterrorism, we need to understand access to basic health care as part of national defense.
Not the one this as directed at, but...John Wilkes Booth loved his "country" (the terrorist organization known as the Confederate States of America being, to his mind, a legitimate nation); he loved it enough to kill and die for it. I don't know the GP poster's intention in bringing that up; but to me, patriotism has always been a questionable virtue for just that reason. If it's a virtue to "love your country", what if your country is an ass?
For colllabortion between more than 2-3 people, use a Wiki or Notes.
Once upon a time, there were these things called "newsgroups"...
Wikis (or if your group is HTML literate, just setting up a local website on space everyone can access) are fine for producing documents, but are lousy at capturing threaded discussions over time. Setting up a local NNTP server works well for this.
Notes, of course, is a bloated proprietary monster that should have been killed long ago.
Putting close buttons in individual tabs is nothing but evil, wrong and stupid.
No, failing to provide each individual tab with its own close button is evil, wrong and stupid; until Tab Mix came along I wouldn't switch from Galeon to Firefox exactly because of the poor tab control in Firefox.
Aren't we fortunate that thanks for the values of freedom and openness held by Firefox developers, we can both have the behavior we want?
Slashdot Mirror
In ancient China, compass needles were reckoned to point south. Maps put the south at the top, and the emperor faced south for the feng-shui of it. I wouldn't call him an underlord though, not to his face...
The sovereignty of the state ends at my skin; what goes on inside of it - my thoughts, my blood, my neurochemistry - is my own damn business.
Yes. And the federal government has the specific ability to tax, including as of the Sixteenth Amendment direct income taxes.
The Founders also generally found slavery and stealing land from the Indian nations to be fine, ethical, and moral, so pardon me if I don't find the argument by authority to be 100% convincing. (Though I'm open to the possibility of scrapping earned-income taxes for a progressive combination of a graduated sales tax, property tax, and capital gains taxes.)
There is no "right not to be taxed" under the Constitution; the government is specifically empowered to collect taxes. We can argue about the wisdom of the application of that power, about the heavyhandedness of IRS enforcement, and the legitimacy of how the feds spend it (very little goes to social spending), but there's no basis for arguing that taxation itself is a violation of your Constitutional rights.
You are correct that many on the left have failed to adequately protect the RKBA, and have even opposed it. But the same can be said of many on the right - it was (then-governor) Reagan who signed the Mulford Act, the first major modern anti-gun legislation, to stop the leftist Black Panthers, and Bush I who signed a law forbidding the importation of "assault weapons".
Why do you believe that self-defense is by its nature a bad thing?
Actually in the U.S., the states with the most "gun culture", i.e. the most liberal laws regarding owning guns, that have the lowest murder rates.
Our violence problem is not caused by guns - other nations with liberal firearms laws don't have our level of violence, and we still have a much higher level of non-firearms murders than the UK. And clearly gun laws don't solve the problem.
(It's interesting, BTW, how this has become a left versus right argument in the U.S.: yet one of the first modern gun control laws in the US, the Mulford Act, was signed by then-governor of California Ronald Reagan, and was targeted at the leftist Black Panther Party.)
What, are you saying that the state should require citizens to memorize certain historical facts? "Failure to pass this history quiz is a felony"?
In the Unites States, a majority does not get to vote away individual rights. If we let that happen, then America's dead already.
So what? The problem with McCarthy was that it is, and always has been, perfectly legal to be a communist (or a fascist, or a green, or a libertarian, or a monarchist, or a theocrat, or whatever); you have the right to hold any politicals beliefs, and to speak about them.
Conflating "communist" with "Soviet spy" is as stupid and dangerous as conflating "Muslim" with "Al Qaeda agent".
If I send you e-mail, I'm apparently "accessing" your server within the meaning of the law. If he sent e-mail from a personal account to "customers@formeremployer.com", then there's no hax0ring involved. (And formeremployer.com might want to put some access restrictions on their mailing list, but if the mail goes through when sent through normal channels, ipso facto he's authorized to send it).
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: D'oh! :-) I'll just shut up now that my mouth is full of foot.
Yes, and it's a BS argument; 688 has nothing to do with Kuwait, and 678's authorization of military force was for the U.N. to use force to resolve that situation, not for member nations to intervene in Iraq's internal affairs. (I don't think it's been France's argument for a long time, either.)
There was objection long before 1998. The New York Times editorialized against them in 1992. Iraq objected before 1998: "Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zone because it was not a UN job," Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, 1993. Also in 1993, the U.N.'s legal department announced that it could find no authorization for the NFZs.
Objections were muted, though, since the U.S. and Britain would simpy veto any condemnation of the NFZs.
Many people were not praising it as a humanitarian mission.
As you point out by referencing an earlier thread, some people seriously assert propositions like those in your post. If you meant them ironically, well, good, but that's the problem with irony when discussing politics: the statement that you think is so outrageous that it's obviously meant in jest, is taken seriously by someone out there.
(In the heyday of USENET, there was a cliche that the proof of this is "left as an exercise for the reader's killfile"; I suppose on contemporary /., it's left as an exercise for the reader's foe's list.)
Eh? I fear you are confused; I didn't quote anyone.
Yes, France was a player in the creation of the no-fly zones. It's totally irrelevant, but if it makes you feel warm and fuzzy to have that acknowledged, there you go.
If I point a gun at a burglar, it is a threat to him, certainly; it is not a threat to his family, his town, or his country.
It has everything to do with it! In order to be a threat to a nation, you must be able to cause damage to that nation. Planes flying over Iraq can't do jack shit to any targets in the United States. (Invoking the supposed "overseas interests" of a nation is the way of imperialists, so I'm sure you're not going to attempt that.)
If troops in Nation A fire on invaders from Nation B, Nation B can't meaningfully say "Nation A is a threat to us!" and use it as a pretext to send in more invaders.
The resolution text says "All subsequent relevant resolutions". It is not a "Beat up Iraq for free" card; it is limited to resolutions relevant to 600 - i.e., those pertaining to the the Iraq/Kuwait situation. It does not authorize the Security Council or member nations to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs (however hideous and vile Saddam Hussein's rule).
Nope. Not only is that reading contradicted by that word "relevant" that qualifies "resolutions" in 660; it is also a matter of the UN Charter that the Security Council itself, not individual member nations, makes decisions regarding action.
France quit the "no-fly-zone club" early, withdrawling in 1998.
When said pilots are in Iraqi airspace illegally, no, it's not a threat to the U.S.
Interesting. Would you have applied that to the Holocaust as well, respecting Germany's "right to its culture"? (Yeah, yeah, Godwin's Law; it's still a legitimate question.)
Should northern states have applied that to the Jim Crow South, respecting its "right" to a culture of rascism and segregation?
Should I apply that to my neighborhood as well? If the guy next door is beating his wife, should I respect his family's "right to their culture"?
Egypt is a sovereign nation, and that sets a legal limit on how much other nations can interfere; just as the Constitution sets limits on the ability of states to mess with each other, and laws set limits on my actions against a neighbor I think is engaging in crimes. But the idea that we can't talk to and negotiate with other nations, states, communities, and individual people to attempt to persuade them to change behavior we don't like is silly.
The no-fly zones were illegal creations of the U.S. and Great Britain; a sovereign nation shooting at hostile aircraft that violate its airspace is not creating a threat to the violating nation.
Yes, Saddam was a bad guy. That does not mean that anything done to oppose him therefore automatically becomes legal, ethical, or smart.
Yes, it is completely far out, largely because you are conflating the very different ideas of a "law of the state" (an institutionalized social norm) and a "law of nature" (a description of how the observable universe behaves).
The universe is not "subject to" the laws of physics, it will not be punished for violating them; the laws of physics are subject to the behavior of the universe, in that is the universe violates a "law" of physics, the law gets tossed out.
(Of course there's also the recursion paradox: if some "superior mind" was there before the observable universe, we've just pushed the question down on the stack and must now address the question of whow this ""superior mind" came into being - we've not made any progress toward a explanation.)
It's interesting to compare the Xian references in NGE (and also Trigun, where a priest walks around with a huge cross-shaped gun that's described as very heavy "because it's full of mercy") with references to Buddhism in American TV and movies (think Kung Fu, Kill Bill, et cetera).
RFID chips are too large to be inserted via a tattoo needle, and are placed deeper into the flesh than ink. Nanotech on such a level has not yet been developed, and I assume that defensive nanotech would be available.
And if enough radioactive ink had been used in one of my tattoos to allow some sort of practical tracking, I'd be dead of the radiation poisoning by now. (If someone wanted to just flat-out kill me, there are much less complicated ways.)
I don't broadcast my fingerprints (in fact I could wear gloves, or coat my fingertips with glue to mask them), nor do I tend to stick my eye up to retinal scanners or bite into things to leave teeth marks when I'm out and about in public. RFIDs, on the other hand, can be read at some distance.
Markets can only produce efficient solutions when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, and with all costs accounted for. That's not the case in health care.
If you're having a heart attack, you're not able to shop around for the best deal or wait until an end-of-the-month sale.
Also and my neighbor's inability to afford treatment for communicable diseases puts me at risk. As we consider bird flu pandemics and bioterrorism, we need to understand access to basic health care as part of national defense.
BTW, from the blatant self-promotion department: stress kills. Massage and bodywork therapy fights stress.
Not the one this as directed at, but...John Wilkes Booth loved his "country" (the terrorist organization known as the Confederate States of America being, to his mind, a legitimate nation); he loved it enough to kill and die for it. I don't know the GP poster's intention in bringing that up; but to me, patriotism has always been a questionable virtue for just that reason. If it's a virtue to "love your country", what if your country is an ass?
May I suggest private newsgroups?
Once upon a time, there were these things called "newsgroups"...
Wikis (or if your group is HTML literate, just setting up a local website on space everyone can access) are fine for producing documents, but are lousy at capturing threaded discussions over time. Setting up a local NNTP server works well for this.
Notes, of course, is a bloated proprietary monster that should have been killed long ago.
No, failing to provide each individual tab with its own close button is evil, wrong and stupid; until Tab Mix came along I wouldn't switch from Galeon to Firefox exactly because of the poor tab control in Firefox.
Aren't we fortunate that thanks for the values of freedom and openness held by Firefox developers, we can both have the behavior we want?