software sold by Microsoft then and now (and by thousands of other commercial vendors) has a certain licensing agreement associated with it.
You presuppose that such "licensing agreements" are meaningful.
I can publish a book that says on the cover, "By purchasing this book, you agree to surrender all fair use rights, to never contradict any of the opinions expressed herein, to make underleg noises during the good parts, and to buy me a beer if we ever meet in person." That doesn't make it a valid contract.
I'm very damned impressed with Bill Gates. He's worked very had to create an environment where commercial software can exist, and I'm very damned grateful to him for it.
Considering the quality of "commercial software", I see nothing for him to be proud of or for anyone to be grateful to him about. He's pretty much done for software what modern recording labels have done to music: made huge profits, partly by illegal means and partly by buying favorable legislation, while gutting the relevant art.
Maybe it's one thing to find this stuff out for yourself, but posting it online? Thats just giving away information.
Um, yes. So what?
Indeed, it's not even giving away information - the satellites themselves go that by being visible. The site merely collects and passes along information.
If you want to keep stuff secret, you have to put it where nobody (except those sworn to be your loyal thralls) can see it. If anyone can look up and see it, it's not secret, and pointing guns at people who talk about it won't change that.
I'm sorry, but in order for the market to work and content to move into the digital age and away from physical media, there has to be DRM.
If market can't work and content can't move into the digital age without taking away freedom, then tough tittie; let the market fail and/or content stay on physical media.
But your claim is off; it's not that the "market" will fail, it's that current parasitic stakeholders will fail. No tears from me; RIAA and MPAA delenda est. Music and storytelling are not going away as human activities, and people will exchange valuable consideration to keep them going.
The real question is, should software developers impose their value system on end users or hardware manufacturers?
No one's "imposing" anything, unless you want to claim that a COTS developer who charges $50 for for software package is "imposing" their value system on end users.
As always, if you don't like the terms of the GPL, you are free to find other software. The GPL (present or future) is just a means of advocating for certain values. Should developers of free software advocate their value system to end users and hardware manufacturers? Yes! Advocating freedom, openness, and quality is a good thing.
The profession of software development is threatened by DRM (an attempt to take general purpose compuing machines out of the hands of the public) and by software patents (an attempt to make mathematical ideas into artificial private property), and we should use whatever means are at our disposal to advocate against these evils. The new GPL could be an excellent means to do so. (Note "could"; I'm not trying to judge the specifics for the moment.)
He spends quite a bit of time demonstrating first why it is necessary to redefine what a "person" is.
To accuse Singer of seeking to "redefine" personhood supposes that a definition had already been agreed upon, which (in the realm of ethics) is not true.
How he defines it is less important than the fact that he saw the need to justify (e.g.) abortion, euthanasia, and so forth, and redefined the concept of person to suit his needs.
No, he asked, "What is a person? What beings should be be granting ethical consideration to?", and arrived at the conclusion that abortion and euthanasia can be justified under some circumstances.
When you are sleeping or unconcious, you do not have sufficient intellect to earn rights. What gives you rights is the fact that you will wake up and be an intelligent being.
No. What gives me rights is that fact I have already been up and about as a sentient being. I have already attained "personhood".
There's a huge difference between a sentient being who's "paused", and a potential sentient being.
Another problem with your logic is that humans do not become intelligent enough to deserve rights until well after birth, unless you put the bar so low as many animals have rights. So now, you either are stuck with arresting people for manslaughter when they run over a cat and putting Fido on trial for killing a rabbit, or permitting infanticide.
I assume that you understand that acknowledging that animals have ethical rights requires no such arrests or trials, and you're just being a smartass. Running over a cat is a very sad accident, but it's not manslaughter. (Could be criminal negligence in an extreme case.) We don't put predatory non-human animals on trail because the fundament question of ethics is how should we, as intelligent beings, live; if we can somehow imagine a situation in which one baby, acting on some sort of instinct, killed another baby, it would be pointless to put the "baby killing baby" on trial.
But it's certainly possible to hold that a fully grown, conscious non-human animal is more of a "person" than a newborn human. I'd certainly make that claim for an adult chimpanzee versus an human fresh out of the womb. (Though of course, whatever logic says, I have the irrational attachment to the young of our species that most of us have hardwired into our brains.)
So it makes as much logical sense to say "You can enslave blacks because they have dark skin" as to say "You can destroy a foetus because it is not intelligent."
Under this view you cannot kill cows, but you can have sex with them. No, really. I'm serious.
You ought to read his actual paper to put this idea in context. Certainly having sex with animals is a) common in some societies, and b) if done non-cruelly, less ethically problematic than killing animals for pleasure.
But your chances of being oppressed rise when centralization occurs, just as your chances of being shafted rise when one player monopolizes an economic market.
Central versus local is orthogonal to libertarian versus authoritarian. I'll take a limited central government over an overbearing local goverment any day.
Ideally, the central/federal and local governments act as checks on each other. I certainly agree that the balance has tilted too far in the direction of centralism (I wrote a little about that here).
Power-hungry people do not gravitate toward smaller and less significant governments
Sure they do. "All politics is local", after all. The power of a federal government is largely abstract; if you want to rule people's day-to-day lives, become mayor.
Who granted anyone the authority to stop me from carrying out my anti-slavery raid, then?
God.
Heh. Please.
Or the people to whom the land belongs. Take your pick.
Land ownership is a creation of the government that issues the deed; if it's not my government but that of another locality, why should I care?
It's always amusing (in a sad sort of way) how some people who have money somehow envision the world as if everyone else is just as well off as they are.
It's the root of the conservative mind-set: lack of imagination. As Tim Kreider put it:
I've thought before that the most fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is not over issues of individual freedom vs. authority or progress vs. traditional values, but imagination. Conservatives don't have any. The status quo seems only inevitable and right to them, the natural order of things, and anyone who protests it is an impractical dreamer who should get a job or a malcontent who needs to be medicated. They're incapable of seeing their own historical moment as in any way anomalous or provisional; as Montag's colleagues assure him in Farenheit 451, "Believe me, houses have always been fireproof. Firemen have always burned books." They believe that they deserve their own lives; they can't imagine having been born as someone else. (Empathy, and by extension compassion, is a function of imagination.) They can't imagine what it would be like to be poor, or black, or gay, because, well, they're not, and they suspect that these unfortunate conditions are those people's own faults, a consequence of some moral failing or dereliction. (I always secretly felt this way about old people until I noticed I was aging as well.) Likewise people living in other cultures with different beliefs and customs; they're simply ignorant, deprived of the advantages of Jesus and Wal-Mart. Francis Fukyama, in a book with the straight-line title The End of History, argues that capitalist liberal democracy is the final culmination of all social progress, apparently unable to imagine a more perfect system than the one epitomized by Donald Trump and Kenneth Lay. Fukiyama knows his Hegel, but he clearly never saw Death Race 2000. Science fiction is political philosophy, too. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars trilogy, depicts capitalism as a transitional phase between feudalism and true democracy, fundamentally in conflict with human freedom, and envisions a credible--and far better--post-capitalist future. History is not inevitable but contingent on our choices. We're only just beginning to figure out what is an intrinsic part of human nature and what's culturally conditioned, so we might as well keep trying to change what sucks rather than complacently accept that sucking is just what the world is meant to do. But that's liberals for you: never happy, always agitating for change, clamoring for some hopeless pie-in-the-sky fantasy world where gay people get married and health care is free and nobody has to be poor, or where women work in offices and frequent saloons and Negroes can vote and must be addressed as "Mister", where slavery doesn't exist and men live without kings to rule them. Dream on, crackpots!
Actually the question is "What federal law guarantees you the right to travel by other than your own means, that is, your own feet?"
No, the question is "what part of the Constitution authorizes the federal goverment to deny you 'the ability to travel by other than your own means, that is, your own feet?'"
Our nation is (in theory) one of strictly limited and enumerated government powers, and broadly construed and unenumerated citizens' rights. A right need not be explicitly listed to exist; a federal power, however, does. (See Amendments IX and X.)
I'd just come home from school, so it must have been 4.30pm or so, London time.
Yes, it was 11:38am EST, so 4:38pm GMT.
It was about noon when we found out, I think. I was in high school, my junior year. It was right after lunch, we were wating outside our physics classroom for our teacher to arrive, and we saw him go into the computer lab down the hall. (This being the days of the Apple II, the computer lab had TV sets.) We went down there see what was going on.
I remember our physics teacher saying "The Space Shuttle blew up", and my internal reaction was "What the hell? Space Shuttles don't blow up. My model rockets blow up."
We watched the coverage the rest of the day, moving from classroom to classroom (broadcast TV, not cable or satellite.)
they're his heirs, they're entitled to whatever they inherited.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grant Congress the power to secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." No mention is made of securing these rights for heirs.
Of course the Constitution is pretty much a dead letter these days, but still, there's no basis in it for Congress to issue or enforce a monopoly (copyright or patent) for heirs, assignees, or anyone else besides the actual creator of the work. If the copyright and patent law were aligned with Constitutional principles, when you died your work would become public domain. (Which, since the purpose of such state power is supposed to be "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", makes sense; artificial monopolies on ideas will not motivate dead people to invent things or write books.)
Clearly every one of them is literate, very literate.
Except, apparently, when it comes to the Constitution of the United States...
Why don't you simply admit I'm right? I showed you.
No, you haven't. No citation of a law such as you describe has yet been provided.
Along with that question of who you are (which you have no choice but to admit such laws exist in those states, because they do), the very next thing that cop will say to you is "Let's see some ID."
Yes, they will. That doesn't mean that it is a crime to not have any such ID on you. That was your claim: "most states, if not all states, it is illegal to not have a photo identification on your person if you are over 16 years of age". I'm asking you again to substantiate it: name the state and the statute. (California once had one, it was struck down by Kolender v. Lawson.)
I've already stipulated that having and showing an ID can be a useful means of removing any reasonable suspicion. That does not mean that your claim, that it is unlawful to fail to carry such ID, is true. (After all, it would also be a useful means of removing reasonable suspicion to have a tattoo on my face so that I can't easily be confused with someone else.)
I think you should conceed that the Terry stop laws are effectively what I said.
So your arguement is that "stop and identify" laws, which require people to state their name to cops, somehow make it a crime to not carry photo id? No.
The Hiibel opinion states, "The Court is now of the view that Terry principles permit a State to require a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a Terry stop", not "require a suspect to produce identity papers." It also says, "As we understand it, the statute does not require a suspect to give the officer a driver's license or any other document. Provided that the suspect either states his name or communicates it to the officer by other means--a choice, we assume, that the suspect may make--the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs."
Requiring to see my papers is a search under the text of the Fourth Amendment - "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". A Terry stop is not a warranted search, but a mere "frisk".
Again, I stipulate that concenting to such a search - showing papers - may be in some circumstances a wise means of removing suspicion and preventing arrest for some other crime, but that does not mean that choosing to not carry or display such papers is a crime in itself, as you assert.
Otherwise it is meaningless - I could say I'm one of (Benedict Arnold, John Gacy, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates), or some other made up name (John Jobs, Jack Sky).
Or I could be carrying an easily obtained fake id. So what? Both lying to the cops and showing fake id are crimes. Leaving my wallet at home while I go walk the dog is not.
Even the best lawyers in the country disagree on the law. That is why we have courts.
Disagreements are over the interpretation and application of law, not on the text of the law itself.
I have worked with the poorest of the poor for over 10 years and I have NEVER found one single solitary poor person that didn't have a photo ID...I have yet to see a good argument as to how getting an ID is somehow hard. It is a myth.
If you get stopped on a corner by a cop you had better be able to identify yourself positively or they may take you in.
They can take me in, in the sense that they have more guns than I do; cops do whatever they can get away with. They may take me in, in the sense of following the law, if and only if they have specific and articulable facts supporting probable cause to believe that I've been involved in a crime. Not having a photo id on me is not grounds for such suspicion.
Now, if there is some misunderstanding, and Officer Friendly has cause to beleive that I've commited a crime because someone described the perp as a guy named J. Random Badguy who vaugely resembles a hippie version of Tom Cruise, is it useful for me to have some id on me to prove that while I fit the physical description, I'm not the guy they're looking for? Sure. Is it legally required that I have such id on me? No. I wasn't breaking any law when I went jogging yesterday and left my wallet home. If such a case of mistaken identity had arisen during my brief jog, yes, I could legally have been arrested - for suspicion of the crime that J. Random Badguy commited, not because I have violated some law mandating that I carry id with me.
the Court's most recent decision came in a June 2004 case, Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, Humboldt County. Hiibel was arrested and convicted in a Nevada court for refusing to identify himself to a police officer during an investigative stop involving an assault.
While the Hiibel decision was yet another example that literacy and rationality are not prerequisites for sitting on the Supreme Court, the case is not relevant to this question. Hiibel was asked to identify himself - "What's your name?" - not to produce identity papers. There is a sharp difference between empowering cops to arrest you for not giving them your name, and for empowering cops to arrest you for not carrying ID papers.
Again, I ask you to cite a law requiring a United States citizen to carry photo id; or please retract your earlier claim that such laws exist.
By the way, Maryland has a bill for this right now - HB 578.
This bill was (thankfully) defeated. But it applied to the "what's your name" questioning, not the demand for identity papers.
After all, we all know that drinking is far more important than voting (as if). Drinking effects you for the next say 8 hours, voting can affect your life and livelyhood. The next 8 hours are more important it seems. Maybe I make my point on how short sighted and backwards this is?
It's exactly because voting is more important than buying a beer that we cannot restrict it to those possessing driver's licences, or who can take the time and pay the money to go get a non-driver's ID or a passport. These can be substatial hurdles for the rural poor; people who don't have a birth certificate may find it very difficult to obtain such documents.
Unless obtaining photo id becomes as easy for everyone as voter registration - and I can't see how that's possible - requiring such id runs smack into the equal protection mandate.
The only safeguard against moral dictatorship is to keep the moral reach of governments small, localized, and competitive.
Ah. Like, it's supposed to be so much better to be oppressed by a local rather than a national government? Sorry, I must disagree.
The idea that local governments are better for liberty than a national government was laid to rest between the passage of Amendment XIV and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Governments and peoples cannot take military action against anyone in any place that they deem to be morally corrupt simply on the grounds that they are morally corrupt. Individuals and governments were never granted that authority by anyone.
Who granted anyone the authority to stop me from carrying out my anti-slavery raid, then? I didn't.
If crime goes up, I'll start planting criminals who attempt to harm me or my property. If more people had this attitude, I think crime would go down.
While I have no problem with (and encourage and teach) self-defense, "planting criminals" who "harm" your property is a serious crime. You do not get to be judge, jury, and executioner if some punk kid eggs your car, or even tries to steal it.
The news media said that the police said to just give up the cash and let him go, and to try to get his license plate number. Sorry, if he came to my store or home and asked for money, he'd get his cash in lead.
And you'd quite possibly get killed.
Whatever cash you lose is probably less than than the attorney fees plus lost wages you spend in court after killing the guy, or in the hospital if he wounds you - or your lost wages in the grave if he kills you.
If you're in a situation where repeated robbery is a threat to your ability to feed and house yourself, it may be worth it to fight. But in general, fighting an armed robber, who has the massive advantage of determining the time, place, and circstances of the encounter, is not the wise choice.
I live with the reality that exists or has been demonstrated, rather than with fantasy. We've seen what happens without government. Somalia. Afganistan.
Those aren't places without government. Rule by the local strongman or by roving gangs is still government.
And, you keep getting stuck with some form of organization, which is government.
"Anarchy" does not mean "no organization". It means "no hierarchy".
Also remember, the government didn't use to tax in the manner that they do now, or nearly as heavily as they do now.
The government also used to govern a sparsely-populated agricultural nation, not an urbanized industrialized one. (Or one with imperial ambitions.)
Americans still pay significantly lower taxes than other industrialized nations.
I don't believe that anarchy would work any better than communism worked. Anarchy would require everyone to behave...
Zenarchy holds that Universal Enlightenment is a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn about the state anymore.
Unfortunately, there are so many people with Sacred Cows (abortion, the "temperance" movement, slavery, drug use, whatever) that they believe must be universally abolished or allowed,
Some of these things are not like the others. Some of these things just don't belong....
To put "slavery" - the use of force to hold another human being to labor - in the same category wity "drug use" - the private decision to alter one's body chemistry - is ridiculous. If the next town over is allowing the keeping of slaves, I say we get a posse together and go free 'em, using whatever force is necessary.
And people want the final results in a few hours, tops?
Well...tough tittie. I want a million dollars, a trip to Europe, and a date with Kari Byron, but you can't always get what you want.
There's no legal reason why the process can't take a few days, and good technical reasons why, for maximum reliability, it should. Fast, acurrate, affordable: pick two.
If we're willing to trust air-traffic control and nuclear ballistic missile command-and-control to computers, I'm not quite sure why voting is such an intrinsically scary proposition.
We don't trust ATC and missle launches to computers entirely, we have manual back-ups and failsafes.
Slashdot Mirror
You presuppose that such "licensing agreements" are meaningful.
I can publish a book that says on the cover, "By purchasing this book, you agree to surrender all fair use rights, to never contradict any of the opinions expressed herein, to make underleg noises during the good parts, and to buy me a beer if we ever meet in person." That doesn't make it a valid contract.
Considering the quality of "commercial software", I see nothing for him to be proud of or for anyone to be grateful to him about. He's pretty much done for software what modern recording labels have done to music: made huge profits, partly by illegal means and partly by buying favorable legislation, while gutting the relevant art.
Um, yes. So what?
Indeed, it's not even giving away information - the satellites themselves go that by being visible. The site merely collects and passes along information.
If you want to keep stuff secret, you have to put it where nobody (except those sworn to be your loyal thralls) can see it. If anyone can look up and see it, it's not secret, and pointing guns at people who talk about it won't change that.
If market can't work and content can't move into the digital age without taking away freedom, then tough tittie; let the market fail and/or content stay on physical media.
But your claim is off; it's not that the "market" will fail, it's that current parasitic stakeholders will fail. No tears from me; RIAA and MPAA delenda est. Music and storytelling are not going away as human activities, and people will exchange valuable consideration to keep them going.
No one's "imposing" anything, unless you want to claim that a COTS developer who charges $50 for for software package is "imposing" their value system on end users.
As always, if you don't like the terms of the GPL, you are free to find other software. The GPL (present or future) is just a means of advocating for certain values. Should developers of free software advocate their value system to end users and hardware manufacturers? Yes! Advocating freedom, openness, and quality is a good thing.
The profession of software development is threatened by DRM (an attempt to take general purpose compuing machines out of the hands of the public) and by software patents (an attempt to make mathematical ideas into artificial private property), and we should use whatever means are at our disposal to advocate against these evils. The new GPL could be an excellent means to do so. (Note "could"; I'm not trying to judge the specifics for the moment.)
To accuse Singer of seeking to "redefine" personhood supposes that a definition had already been agreed upon, which (in the realm of ethics) is not true.
No, he asked, "What is a person? What beings should be be granting ethical consideration to?", and arrived at the conclusion that abortion and euthanasia can be justified under some circumstances.
No. What gives me rights is that fact I have already been up and about as a sentient being. I have already attained "personhood".
There's a huge difference between a sentient being who's "paused", and a potential sentient being.
I assume that you understand that acknowledging that animals have ethical rights requires no such arrests or trials, and you're just being a smartass. Running over a cat is a very sad accident, but it's not manslaughter. (Could be criminal negligence in an extreme case.) We don't put predatory non-human animals on trail because the fundament question of ethics is how should we, as intelligent beings, live; if we can somehow imagine a situation in which one baby, acting on some sort of instinct, killed another baby, it would be pointless to put the "baby killing baby" on trial.
(Let me suggest this essay by Tom Regan.)
But it's certainly possible to hold that a fully grown, conscious non-human animal is more of a "person" than a newborn human. I'd certainly make that claim for an adult chimpanzee versus an human fresh out of the womb. (Though of course, whatever logic says, I have the irrational attachment to the young of our species that most of us have hardwired into our brains.)
You misrepresent Singer here. He says "I use the term `person' to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future." That implies a certain level of intelligence (in the broad sense of "information processing ability", not IQ).
You ought to read his actual paper to put this idea in context. Certainly having sex with animals is a) common in some societies, and b) if done non-cruelly, less ethically problematic than killing animals for pleasure.
Central versus local is orthogonal to libertarian versus authoritarian. I'll take a limited central government over an overbearing local goverment any day.
Ideally, the central/federal and local governments act as checks on each other. I certainly agree that the balance has tilted too far in the direction of centralism (I wrote a little about that here).
Sure they do. "All politics is local", after all. The power of a federal government is largely abstract; if you want to rule people's day-to-day lives, become mayor.
Heh. Please.
Land ownership is a creation of the government that issues the deed; if it's not my government but that of another locality, why should I care?
It's the root of the conservative mind-set: lack of imagination. As Tim Kreider put it:
People participating in the boycott will not buy any games from Activision. That means lost sales on all titles.
Well, you're egocentric, so egocentric that you project your egocentricism onto everyone else.
(I'm not saying that I'm not egocentric, BTW. Just pointing out the reasoning.)
No, the question is "what part of the Constitution authorizes the federal goverment to deny you 'the ability to travel by other than your own means, that is, your own feet?'"
Our nation is (in theory) one of strictly limited and enumerated government powers, and broadly construed and unenumerated citizens' rights. A right need not be explicitly listed to exist; a federal power, however, does. (See Amendments IX and X.)
Yes, it was 11:38am EST, so 4:38pm GMT.
It was about noon when we found out, I think. I was in high school, my junior year. It was right after lunch, we were wating outside our physics classroom for our teacher to arrive, and we saw him go into the computer lab down the hall. (This being the days of the Apple II, the computer lab had TV sets.) We went down there see what was going on.
I remember our physics teacher saying "The Space Shuttle blew up", and my internal reaction was "What the hell? Space Shuttles don't blow up. My model rockets blow up."
We watched the coverage the rest of the day, moving from classroom to classroom (broadcast TV, not cable or satellite.)
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grant Congress the power to secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." No mention is made of securing these rights for heirs.
Of course the Constitution is pretty much a dead letter these days, but still, there's no basis in it for Congress to issue or enforce a monopoly (copyright or patent) for heirs, assignees, or anyone else besides the actual creator of the work. If the copyright and patent law were aligned with Constitutional principles, when you died your work would become public domain. (Which, since the purpose of such state power is supposed to be "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", makes sense; artificial monopolies on ideas will not motivate dead people to invent things or write books.)
If something is not contrary to a written law, it is not illegal. If we can't agree on that simple fact, further discussion is pointless.
Except, apparently, when it comes to the Constitution of the United States...
No, you haven't. No citation of a law such as you describe has yet been provided.
Yes, they will. That doesn't mean that it is a crime to not have any such ID on you. That was your claim: "most states, if not all states, it is illegal to not have a photo identification on your person if you are over 16 years of age". I'm asking you again to substantiate it: name the state and the statute. (California once had one, it was struck down by Kolender v. Lawson.)
I've already stipulated that having and showing an ID can be a useful means of removing any reasonable suspicion. That does not mean that your claim, that it is unlawful to fail to carry such ID, is true. (After all, it would also be a useful means of removing reasonable suspicion to have a tattoo on my face so that I can't easily be confused with someone else.)
So your arguement is that "stop and identify" laws, which require people to state their name to cops, somehow make it a crime to not carry photo id? No.
The Hiibel opinion states, "The Court is now of the view that Terry principles permit a State to require a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a Terry stop", not "require a suspect to produce identity papers." It also says, "As we understand it, the statute does not require a suspect to give the officer a driver's license or any other document. Provided that the suspect either states his name or communicates it to the officer by other means--a choice, we assume, that the suspect may make--the statute is satisfied and no violation occurs."
Requiring to see my papers is a search under the text of the Fourth Amendment - "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". A Terry stop is not a warranted search, but a mere "frisk".
Again, I stipulate that concenting to such a search - showing papers - may be in some circumstances a wise means of removing suspicion and preventing arrest for some other crime, but that does not mean that choosing to not carry or display such papers is a crime in itself, as you assert.
Or I could be carrying an easily obtained fake id. So what? Both lying to the cops and showing fake id are crimes. Leaving my wallet at home while I go walk the dog is not.
Disagreements are over the interpretation and application of law, not on the text of the law itself.
It is a fact that thousands of people in Georgia do not have government-issued identification. And they are hard to
Meaningless without a control. How can you do using only the latest World Book, or Britanica, or whatever?
They can take me in, in the sense that they have more guns than I do; cops do whatever they can get away with. They may take me in, in the sense of following the law, if and only if they have specific and articulable facts supporting probable cause to believe that I've been involved in a crime. Not having a photo id on me is not grounds for such suspicion.
Now, if there is some misunderstanding, and Officer Friendly has cause to beleive that I've commited a crime because someone described the perp as a guy named J. Random Badguy who vaugely resembles a hippie version of Tom Cruise, is it useful for me to have some id on me to prove that while I fit the physical description, I'm not the guy they're looking for? Sure. Is it legally required that I have such id on me? No. I wasn't breaking any law when I went jogging yesterday and left my wallet home. If such a case of mistaken identity had arisen during my brief jog, yes, I could legally have been arrested - for suspicion of the crime that J. Random Badguy commited, not because I have violated some law mandating that I carry id with me.
While the Hiibel decision was yet another example that literacy and rationality are not prerequisites for sitting on the Supreme Court, the case is not relevant to this question. Hiibel was asked to identify himself - "What's your name?" - not to produce identity papers. There is a sharp difference between empowering cops to arrest you for not giving them your name, and for empowering cops to arrest you for not carrying ID papers.
Again, I ask you to cite a law requiring a United States citizen to carry photo id; or please retract your earlier claim that such laws exist.
This bill was (thankfully) defeated. But it applied to the "what's your name" questioning, not the demand for identity papers.
It's exactly because voting is more important than buying a beer that we cannot restrict it to those possessing driver's licences, or who can take the time and pay the money to go get a non-driver's ID or a passport. These can be substatial hurdles for the rural poor; people who don't have a birth certificate may find it very difficult to obtain such documents.
Unless obtaining photo id becomes as easy for everyone as voter registration - and I can't see how that's possible - requiring such id runs smack into the equal protection mandate.
Ah. Like, it's supposed to be so much better to be oppressed by a local rather than a national government? Sorry, I must disagree.
The idea that local governments are better for liberty than a national government was laid to rest between the passage of Amendment XIV and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Who granted anyone the authority to stop me from carrying out my anti-slavery raid, then? I didn't.
While I have no problem with (and encourage and teach) self-defense, "planting criminals" who "harm" your property is a serious crime. You do not get to be judge, jury, and executioner if some punk kid eggs your car, or even tries to steal it.
And you'd quite possibly get killed.
Whatever cash you lose is probably less than than the attorney fees plus lost wages you spend in court after killing the guy, or in the hospital if he wounds you - or your lost wages in the grave if he kills you.
If you're in a situation where repeated robbery is a threat to your ability to feed and house yourself, it may be worth it to fight. But in general, fighting an armed robber, who has the massive advantage of determining the time, place, and circstances of the encounter, is not the wise choice.
Those aren't places without government. Rule by the local strongman or by roving gangs is still government.
"Anarchy" does not mean "no organization". It means "no hierarchy".
The government also used to govern a sparsely-populated agricultural nation, not an urbanized industrialized one. (Or one with imperial ambitions.)
Americans still pay significantly lower taxes than other industrialized nations.
Zenarchy holds that Universal Enlightenment is a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn about the state anymore.
The question then becomes, what to do in the meantime? Thornley has some ideas.
Some of these things are not like the others. Some of these things just don't belong....
To put "slavery" - the use of force to hold another human being to labor - in the same category wity "drug use" - the private decision to alter one's body chemistry - is ridiculous. If the next town over is allowing the keeping of slaves, I say we get a posse together and go free 'em, using whatever force is necessary.
Well...tough tittie. I want a million dollars, a trip to Europe, and a date with Kari Byron, but you can't always get what you want.
There's no legal reason why the process can't take a few days, and good technical reasons why, for maximum reliability, it should. Fast, acurrate, affordable: pick two.
We don't trust ATC and missle launches to computers entirely, we have manual back-ups and failsafes.