"Unfortunately, in the US at least, conservatives are so afraid of appearing 'unpatriotic' or being on record for having an opinion that Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly might mock that they will parrot whatever the Joe Sixpack line of thought is on any particular subject. What they think, and what they will say about what they think in mixed company, are frequently at odds. I can't count how many self-professed conservatives I have met who become in favor of legal equality for gays and lesbians, and admit that maybe women who have abortions aren't murderers, and that maybe laws that encourage racial profiling aren't a good idea, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were mistakes, after a few beers.
"Liberals, on the other hand, accustomed to being mocked, have come to wear it as a badge and pretty much say fuck-all exactly what they think, even if it cuts against the grain of 'politically correct' thought. It's probably stems from the fragmentation of the Democratic party under the right-leaning Clinton (and now the conservative Obama)."
There, that looks a little more accurate to me.
Or, perhaps, both your post and mine are full of shit, and the actual fact is that human beings are buzzing masses of individualistic, and often inconsistent, ideas and opinions, while labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are just shibboleths manipulated by various leaders and pundits for political purposes. Yes, that seems likely.
Maybe what we need is some sort of USENET to BitTorrent gateway.
USENET is the original P2P system; it's that decentralized nature that makes it resistant to censorship. But the peers are NNTP servers, not end users. BT is the new P2P system, and shows that same "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" robustness, but doesn't have discussion built into it. But it has the advantage that the peers are the end users, so there's no admin between you and what you want. BT can run over Tor or I2P for anonymity.
I don't know enough about BT do say if this is practical, but can we think of USENET posts as files to be shared by BT? Basically someone "subscribing" to, say, alt.slack, would be on the lookout for files named something like "alt.slack-<message-id>", and their client would automatically download them. (Or better: "alt.slack-<message-id>-<poster-email>", and you can build killfile-like filtering in at this level, and not even bother to download Ludwig Plutonium's latest posts -- or seek them out, if that's you're thing.) Throw in a couple of gateways to mirror current NNTP traffic onto BT; then over time, it would probably all migrate on to BT.
Regardless of what some may want to think the world is full of people who really aren't suited for a civilized society.
The problem is that a significant number of them are drawn to careers in law enforcement, where they get to be Authority Figures who can get away with abuses and assaults that ordinary crooks never could.
The average LEO is simply underqualified, undereducated, and undertrained for their job. But there is a significant minority who are corrupt; and a larger, more dangerous group who live in a black and white world and believe that they can do no wrong because they've got God on their side, that they are the "thin blue line" that is the only thing standing between us and rampaging hordes of Satanic destruction.
The reality is, the S.S. doesn't give a damn about the average person. They're concerned with counterfeiters and threats to dignitaries and the President.
Really, are we that ignorant of our history? The SS raid on Steve Jackson Games was one of the prime motivators that led to the founding of the EFF. Damn kids...no sense of history...get off my lawn...
It's a shame the Americans don't have some sort of central document that specifies whether their public should be paying for the defense of the nation...
What does invading another country have to do with the defense of the nation?
And of course, the fact that some sort of central document might specify that the government is allowed to do a thing, does not imply that that thing is a good idea.
progressives are first in line to cry censorship when it affects them, but when it affects a conservative... well they just deserve it.
Uh, no. It's progressives who you'll find supporting the right of the KKK to march, the right of racists to publish their filth, the right of nutcases to call conservative Democrats "socialists" and "Nazis".
However, that doesn't mean that progressives give up their rights to counter-protest, to point out that racists are assholes and idiots, or to organize boycotts of sponsors of pundits who call conservative Democrats "socialists" and "Nazis" (and to point out that Nazis hated socialists, that calling some a Nazi and socialist is comparable to calling someone both a KKK member and an NAACP supporter -- i.e., the mark of a total moron.)
Consider the response to the following... Bill Ayers comes to campus and a bunch of right wing fanatics try to stop him from speaking, what would the outcry be from the left?
You would hear folks on the left say, "He may have once been wrong about how to pursue worthy goals, but free speech applies to everyone, and is especially important on a college campus."
Now replace Bill Ayers with Ann Coulter, and ask the same question (reversing left/right).
If we reverse left/right, we won't have a bunch of "left wing fanatics" try to stop her from speaking. What you'll hear from liberals is, "She's wrong about everything, and we're going to show up to exercise our own free speech and make it clear that we know she's a moron, but free speech applies to everyone, and is especially important on a college campus."
And while Bill Ayers is an admitted terrorist
Citation needed. Ayers committed acts of vandalism, but to my knowledge has never admitted, or been convicted of, harming anyone. According to him, "We weren't terrorists. The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."
One may legitimately dispute his claim, on the basis that his acts endangered lives, or even believe that he was involved in acts that took lives (please note that I am not advancing either of these claims, just saying they may be legitimate points of argument); but calling someone who has said "We weren't terrorists", "an admitted terrorist", is at best a distortion, at worst an outright lie. Please document your claim that he is "an admitted terrorist", or withdraw it.
I'd go so far as to borrow some theology from Buddhism, and say that almost all the sorrow in the world for workers is caused by education beyond what they are allowed to do.
There are least two problems with that: 1) The Buddha's teaching was not about gods, so "theology" doesn't apply. 2) The Buddha taught that the origin of suffering is desire for unattainable conditions, a problem that applies to all classes and levels of education.
In that case, I'd have to question the social utility of colleges in a capitalist economy.
It's pretty low. That demonstrates one of the problems with capitalism -- and indeed, every other form of hierarchical organization. So long as you have a class of rulers (owner, investors, whatever) and a class of workers, it will be in the interests of the rulers to have the workers educated only to the point of being trained to do their jobs, and no farther.
They're not sprint, but ClearWire Chicago is a 4G WiMax provider
Clearwire is 51% owned by Sprint.
I have Sprint's 4G "Desktop Modem" plan in Baltimore -- which apparently runs on a network run by Clearwire...it's weird, and most people at Sprint seem to have no idea that this plan, or the device I'm using (which I bought from them, and has a bign Sprint logo on it), exists. But there's no cap.
And yet if prisoners were denied opportunities to work, you and your kind would be up front and center decrying the waste of manpower in prison, as well as the lack of job retraining skills for otherwise idle hands.
I don't know about the GP poster and "his kind", but the waste of manpower prison is a good thing: it provides an economic incentive to not lock people up. When locking me up means that you lose the tax dollars I pay, and have to provide me with room and board, you're only going to lock me up if I'm a threat. If by locking me up you get my skills for pennies on the dollar, there's a perverse incentive.
Job training does not imply selling the trainee's labor.
If justice knew how to lower the recidivism rate 50%, they would do it.
They do know. It's called job training.
Back in the day when Johnny Cash played at Folsom Prison, almost every man there was in school or learning a trade. And once they got out, the majority of them never came back. Today, there are only a handful of classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 long, and the three-year recidivism rate is 75 percent.
We know how to make the system much better. Job training, ending the War on (Some) Drugs, and taking mental health seriously would slash recidivism, lower crime, make our streets safer, and generally improve the quality of life for all Americans. We just don't care to do it.
If the GOAL is to educate children, then the tax dollars should follow the child even if said child doesn't attend a public school and goes to Harvard High School instead.
That does not follow. "If the GOAL is to protect citizens from crime, then the tax dollars should follow the citizens' defensive spending even if said citizen doesn't use the public police force and hires Blackwater mercenaries instead."
That said, I think charter schools could be an interesting way to run public schools -- though to date, they've generally shown no better, and perhaps slightly worse, performance than traditional public schools.
the effects of addiction of the worst (coke. meth, heroin) is far worse the effects of the war on drugs
No, they aren't. The effects of heroin addiction are constipation, and withdrawal that makes you feel like you have the flu when you don't get your fix. The effects of the War on (Some) Drugs is innocent people being gunned down in blitzkrieg raids, the highest incarceration rate on the planet, the continual erosion of civil liberties, and paranoia in people -- like yourself -- who are unfamiliar with the drugs in question.
i'm glad your victorian upper middle class examples...
Richard Pryor was "victorian upper middle class"?
yes, i am willing to lock away mafioso who don't care about destroying lives in order to get a buck, i have no problem with that
Except of course those are a tiny fraction of the people you're locking up. You're locking up recreational users who aren't hurting anyone, junkies who are harmless so long as they can get their fix, and small time dealer who are no more heartless than the guy at 7-11 who sells cigarettes and booze.
you apparently are happy with millions of lives destroyed because you have no appreciation what easy access to a highly addictive substance does to people and the freedom it destroys. you should be ashamed
Friend, I'm from Baltimore. Don't tell me what easy access to highly addictive substance does;
abut 10% of the adults in the city are heroin users. Most are harmless. For the rest, prohibition only adds to their problems, while it pumps up the murder rate and corrodes the morale and ethics of local police.
what you don't understand is that some drugs are far worse themselves to the destruction of freedom (addiction is bars in the mind) than any war on drugs and its effects on society.
No. They aren't. The destruction of freedom wrought by the War on (Some) Drugs is far, far worse than the effects of any drug.
free and unfettered access to the most addictive/ inebriating drugs leads to a growing population of people whose lives have become zombified
No, it doesn't. Look at all the cocaine and opiate addicts and users who have made their mark on the arts and sciences: Freud, Halsted (the "father of modern surgery"), Belushi, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jules Verne, Popes Leo XIII and Pius X, President McKinley, Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Percy Shelly, Cole Porter, Richard Pryor...I could go on and on.
Which is not to say that cocaine and opiate use are healthy choices or that I'm endorsing them; only that drug prohibition magnifies the negative effects of drug use, creates a violent black market, is corrosive to liberty, and anyone who favors it is either ignorant, stupid, or wicked.
So, look: you're simply ignorant and wrong about drugs and their effects. And yet you're willing to point guns at people and lock them in cages to control their behavior. You should be ashamed.
John Paul Stevens is an example of that. He was appointed by Gerald Ford and sold as a conservative. He is arguably the furthest Left of any Justice currently sitting on the Court.
John Paul Stevens is a conservative. He appears "left" only in comparison to the hard right composition of the rest of the court.
Robert Bork would almost certainly be considered not conservative enough by today's Republicans because he took the 2nd Amendment literally and believed it only applied to "well-regulated militias"
Taking the Second Amendment literally, one most certainly would not believe that is applies only to "well-regulated militias".
First, every able-bodied adult male is a member of the militia under federal law; and "well-regulated" is a term of military art meaning only prepared and trained. Second, if we consider a law saying, "A well-educated populace being necessary to the liberty of a nation, the right to keep and read books shall not be infringed", does that mean that only the "well-educated" have the right to have books? No; the introductory clause merely states the reason for the directive.
A software patent covers an allegedly novel method of information processing; how is such a method not a "new and useful process"?
In Gottschalk v. Benson, SCOTUS ruled that a "process" does not include mathematical algorithms. Methods of information processing are mathematical algorithms.
Since we know Pres. Obama is a straight ticket 'Progressive'
Obama is a moderate conservative: right wing (favoring the interests of the investment class), socially conservative (opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, opposed to the separation of church and state), and in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. Many of his policies that draw the most clamor from the Fox News set are close to, or even to the right of, those of Reagan or Nixon.
I don't see the word "Constitutionalist" anywhere up thread; and I don't think most of the ACLU members and supporters out there with the "I'm a Constitution Voter" bumper stickers would agree at all that supporting the Constitution is "right wing", no.
But what the hell, it's outdated and people like Elena Kagan know better than than the founding fathers.
Considering that the Founding Fathers envisioned an agrarian nation founded on stealing land from the American Indians, where only white male landowners could vote, where citizens had no recourse against oppression by state governments (since the Bill of Rights didn't apply to the states until Amendment XIV was passed), that many of the Founders owned slaves -- and in Jefferson's case, raped them -- yes, I do indeed hope that people like Elena Kagan know better than that.
Could we please put down the stupid mythology that the Founders were some sort of intellectual and moral paragons? They didn't believe that themselves. Thanks.
There is nothing in the Constitution that requires super-majorities for anything, except for amendments, trying impeachments, or overriding a Presidental veto. The filibuster is the Senate's own invention, part of the rules that it makes for itself.
Without that supermajority, legislation comes to a standstill, which is exactly what the founders wanted.
No, it's not. If they wanted a supermajority to be necessary to pass legislation, they would have coded that into the Constitution.
They tried that sort of weak government under the Articles of Confederation. It was an epic failure. So they made the Constitution, with a much stronger federal government.
Schools hold a monopoly much like Comcast has a monopoly in my home town.
No, public schools don't have a monopoly, as there are plenty of options outside of them.
Public schools are tax funded for the same reason as public fire departments, public roads, public police forces, public libraries, and so on -- they are public goods whose existence benefits everyone.
(You are, of course, free to believe and to argue that we'd be better off leaving kids whose parents can't afford good private schools, to remain ignorant; but that is not the assumption on which our current policy is predicated.)
You don't get to hire private security and then say, "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for police", because you still benefit when the cops take a burglar off the streets. You don't get to install your own fire suppression system and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for the fire department", because you still benefit when the FD shows up to put your neighbor's blazing house out before the fire spreads to yours. And you don't get to send your kids to private school (where they may, in fact, get a worse education than in public schools) and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for public schools", because you benefit from living in a society with a higher base rate of education.
I don't have kids; my tax dollars still go to educate the neighbor's brats. And the community is better off for it.
there have been "activists" and other sorts of folks who have been proponents of AGW that have indeed advocated the mass genocide of the human species. This is more a continuum of opinion ranging from merely zero population growth advocates
Wait wait wait. ZPG advocates are calling for "the mass genocide of the human species"???
You, sir, must either immediately retract that statement, or let it be know that you are a complete fucking idiot who has disqualified himself from any political, scientific, or philosophic discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, right. Let me see if I can fix that for you:
"Unfortunately, in the US at least, conservatives are so afraid of appearing 'unpatriotic' or being on record for having an opinion that Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly might mock that they will parrot whatever the Joe Sixpack line of thought is on any particular subject. What they think, and what they will say about what they think in mixed company, are frequently at odds. I can't count how many self-professed conservatives I have met who become in favor of legal equality for gays and lesbians, and admit that maybe women who have abortions aren't murderers, and that maybe laws that encourage racial profiling aren't a good idea, and that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were mistakes, after a few beers.
"Liberals, on the other hand, accustomed to being mocked, have come to wear it as a badge and pretty much say fuck-all exactly what they think, even if it cuts against the grain of 'politically correct' thought. It's probably stems from the fragmentation of the Democratic party under the right-leaning Clinton (and now the conservative Obama)."
There, that looks a little more accurate to me.
Or, perhaps, both your post and mine are full of shit, and the actual fact is that human beings are buzzing masses of individualistic, and often inconsistent, ideas and opinions, while labels like "liberal" and "conservative" are just shibboleths manipulated by various leaders and pundits for political purposes. Yes, that seems likely.
No. USENET is a P2P technology with no central control. Google Wave is controlled by Google.
Maybe what we need is some sort of USENET to BitTorrent gateway.
USENET is the original P2P system; it's that decentralized nature that makes it resistant to censorship. But the peers are NNTP servers, not end users. BT is the new P2P system, and shows that same "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" robustness, but doesn't have discussion built into it. But it has the advantage that the peers are the end users, so there's no admin between you and what you want. BT can run over Tor or I2P for anonymity.
I don't know enough about BT do say if this is practical, but can we think of USENET posts as files to be shared by BT? Basically someone "subscribing" to, say, alt.slack, would be on the lookout for files named something like "alt.slack-<message-id>", and their client would automatically download them. (Or better: "alt.slack-<message-id>-<poster-email>", and you can build killfile-like filtering in at this level, and not even bother to download Ludwig Plutonium's latest posts -- or seek them out, if that's you're thing.) Throw in a couple of gateways to mirror current NNTP traffic onto BT; then over time, it would probably all migrate on to BT.
The problem is that a significant number of them are drawn to careers in law enforcement, where they get to be Authority Figures who can get away with abuses and assaults that ordinary crooks never could.
The average LEO is simply underqualified, undereducated, and undertrained for their job. But there is a significant minority who are corrupt; and a larger, more dangerous group who live in a black and white world and believe that they can do no wrong because they've got God on their side, that they are the "thin blue line" that is the only thing standing between us and rampaging hordes of Satanic destruction.
And with hackers and RPGers who play games about them.
Really, are we that ignorant of our history? The SS raid on Steve Jackson Games was one of the prime motivators that led to the founding of the EFF. Damn kids...no sense of history...get off my lawn...
Not much different than standard cryonics procedure, then, which "preserves" freezer-burned meat.
More importantly, Alcor is to be paid $53,000 for freezing this hunk of meat. This has nothing to do with the wishes of the deceased, or about any long, long, long shot of reviving freezer-burned meat; it's all about the benjamins.
What does invading another country have to do with the defense of the nation?
And of course, the fact that some sort of central document might specify that the government is allowed to do a thing, does not imply that that thing is a good idea.
Uh, no. It's progressives who you'll find supporting the right of the KKK to march, the right of racists to publish their filth, the right of nutcases to call conservative Democrats "socialists" and "Nazis".
However, that doesn't mean that progressives give up their rights to counter-protest, to point out that racists are assholes and idiots, or to organize boycotts of sponsors of pundits who call conservative Democrats "socialists" and "Nazis" (and to point out that Nazis hated socialists, that calling some a Nazi and socialist is comparable to calling someone both a KKK member and an NAACP supporter -- i.e., the mark of a total moron.)
You would hear folks on the left say, "He may have once been wrong about how to pursue worthy goals, but free speech applies to everyone, and is especially important on a college campus."
If we reverse left/right, we won't have a bunch of "left wing fanatics" try to stop her from speaking. What you'll hear from liberals is, "She's wrong about everything, and we're going to show up to exercise our own free speech and make it clear that we know she's a moron, but free speech applies to everyone, and is especially important on a college campus."
Citation needed. Ayers committed acts of vandalism, but to my knowledge has never admitted, or been convicted of, harming anyone. According to him, "We weren't terrorists. The reason we weren't terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people. Terrorism was what was being practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States."
One may legitimately dispute his claim, on the basis that his acts endangered lives, or even believe that he was involved in acts that took lives (please note that I am not advancing either of these claims, just saying they may be legitimate points of argument); but calling someone who has said "We weren't terrorists", "an admitted terrorist", is at best a distortion, at worst an outright lie. Please document your claim that he is "an admitted terrorist", or withdraw it.
There are least two problems with that: 1) The Buddha's teaching was not about gods, so "theology" doesn't apply. 2) The Buddha taught that the origin of suffering is desire for unattainable conditions, a problem that applies to all classes and levels of education.
It's pretty low. That demonstrates one of the problems with capitalism -- and indeed, every other form of hierarchical organization. So long as you have a class of rulers (owner, investors, whatever) and a class of workers, it will be in the interests of the rulers to have the workers educated only to the point of being trained to do their jobs, and no farther.
Clearwire is 51% owned by Sprint.
I have Sprint's 4G "Desktop Modem" plan in Baltimore -- which apparently runs on a network run by Clearwire...it's weird, and most people at Sprint seem to have no idea that this plan, or the device I'm using (which I bought from them, and has a bign Sprint logo on it), exists. But there's no cap.
I don't know about the GP poster and "his kind", but the waste of manpower prison is a good thing: it provides an economic incentive to not lock people up. When locking me up means that you lose the tax dollars I pay, and have to provide me with room and board, you're only going to lock me up if I'm a threat. If by locking me up you get my skills for pennies on the dollar, there's a perverse incentive.
Job training does not imply selling the trainee's labor.
They do know. It's called job training.
Back in the day when Johnny Cash played at Folsom Prison, almost every man there was in school or learning a trade. And once they got out, the majority of them never came back. Today, there are only a handful of classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 long, and the three-year recidivism rate is 75 percent.
We know how to make the system much better. Job training, ending the War on (Some) Drugs, and taking mental health seriously would slash recidivism, lower crime, make our streets safer, and generally improve the quality of life for all Americans. We just don't care to do it.
Once you buy it, it is no longer "their" device, it is yours.
That does not follow. "If the GOAL is to protect citizens from crime, then the tax dollars should follow the citizens' defensive spending even if said citizen doesn't use the public police force and hires Blackwater mercenaries instead."
That said, I think charter schools could be an interesting way to run public schools -- though to date, they've generally shown no better, and perhaps slightly worse, performance than traditional public schools.
No, they aren't. The effects of heroin addiction are constipation, and withdrawal that makes you feel like you have the flu when you don't get your fix. The effects of the War on (Some) Drugs is innocent people being gunned down in blitzkrieg raids, the highest incarceration rate on the planet, the continual erosion of civil liberties, and paranoia in people -- like yourself -- who are unfamiliar with the drugs in question.
Richard Pryor was "victorian upper middle class"?
Except of course those are a tiny fraction of the people you're locking up. You're locking up recreational users who aren't hurting anyone, junkies who are harmless so long as they can get their fix, and small time dealer who are no more heartless than the guy at 7-11 who sells cigarettes and booze.
Friend, I'm from Baltimore. Don't tell me what easy access to highly addictive substance does; abut 10% of the adults in the city are heroin users. Most are harmless. For the rest, prohibition only adds to their problems, while it pumps up the murder rate and corrodes the morale and ethics of local police.
No. They aren't. The destruction of freedom wrought by the War on (Some) Drugs is far, far worse than the effects of any drug.
No, it doesn't. Look at all the cocaine and opiate addicts and users who have made their mark on the arts and sciences: Freud, Halsted (the "father of modern surgery"), Belushi, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jules Verne, Popes Leo XIII and Pius X, President McKinley, Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Percy Shelly, Cole Porter, Richard Pryor...I could go on and on.
Which is not to say that cocaine and opiate use are healthy choices or that I'm endorsing them; only that drug prohibition magnifies the negative effects of drug use, creates a violent black market, is corrosive to liberty, and anyone who favors it is either ignorant, stupid, or wicked.
So, look: you're simply ignorant and wrong about drugs and their effects. And yet you're willing to point guns at people and lock them in cages to control their behavior. You should be ashamed.
John Paul Stevens is a conservative. He appears "left" only in comparison to the hard right composition of the rest of the court.
Taking the Second Amendment literally, one most certainly would not believe that is applies only to "well-regulated militias".
First, every able-bodied adult male is a member of the militia under federal law; and "well-regulated" is a term of military art meaning only prepared and trained. Second, if we consider a law saying, "A well-educated populace being necessary to the liberty of a nation, the right to keep and read books shall not be infringed", does that mean that only the "well-educated" have the right to have books? No; the introductory clause merely states the reason for the directive.
In Gottschalk v. Benson, SCOTUS ruled that a "process" does not include mathematical algorithms. Methods of information processing are mathematical algorithms.
Obama is a moderate conservative: right wing (favoring the interests of the investment class), socially conservative (opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, opposed to the separation of church and state), and in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. Many of his policies that draw the most clamor from the Fox News set are close to, or even to the right of, those of Reagan or Nixon.
If you want an example of a straight ticket Progressive, look to Teddy Roosevelt -- he founded the party, after all. I'd like it if Obama were dedicated "to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics", but I sure don't see it.
Please don't use words when you don't know what they mean.
I don't see the word "Constitutionalist" anywhere up thread; and I don't think most of the ACLU members and supporters out there with the "I'm a Constitution Voter" bumper stickers would agree at all that supporting the Constitution is "right wing", no.
Considering that the Founding Fathers envisioned an agrarian nation founded on stealing land from the American Indians, where only white male landowners could vote, where citizens had no recourse against oppression by state governments (since the Bill of Rights didn't apply to the states until Amendment XIV was passed), that many of the Founders owned slaves -- and in Jefferson's case, raped them -- yes, I do indeed hope that people like Elena Kagan know better than that.
Could we please put down the stupid mythology that the Founders were some sort of intellectual and moral paragons? They didn't believe that themselves. Thanks.
There is nothing in the Constitution that requires super-majorities for anything, except for amendments, trying impeachments, or overriding a Presidental veto. The filibuster is the Senate's own invention, part of the rules that it makes for itself.
No, it's not. If they wanted a supermajority to be necessary to pass legislation, they would have coded that into the Constitution.
They tried that sort of weak government under the Articles of Confederation. It was an epic failure. So they made the Constitution, with a much stronger federal government.
No, public schools don't have a monopoly, as there are plenty of options outside of them.
Public schools are tax funded for the same reason as public fire departments, public roads, public police forces, public libraries, and so on -- they are public goods whose existence benefits everyone.
(You are, of course, free to believe and to argue that we'd be better off leaving kids whose parents can't afford good private schools, to remain ignorant; but that is not the assumption on which our current policy is predicated.)
You don't get to hire private security and then say, "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for police", because you still benefit when the cops take a burglar off the streets. You don't get to install your own fire suppression system and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for the fire department", because you still benefit when the FD shows up to put your neighbor's blazing house out before the fire spreads to yours. And you don't get to send your kids to private school (where they may, in fact, get a worse education than in public schools) and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for public schools", because you benefit from living in a society with a higher base rate of education.
I don't have kids; my tax dollars still go to educate the neighbor's brats. And the community is better off for it.
Oddly enough, I don't see any such disclaimer within the Bill of Rights. And in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, SCOTUS ruled that "First Amendment rights are available to teachers and students, subject to application in light of the special characteristics of the school environment."
You may now apologize to the GP poster for your ignorance-based insults.
Wait wait wait. ZPG advocates are calling for "the mass genocide of the human species"???
You, sir, must either immediately retract that statement, or let it be know that you are a complete fucking idiot who has disqualified himself from any political, scientific, or philosophic discussion.