(Political freedom is just another personal freedom, just like economic freedom.)
Trade and the Internet are bad for the PRC government's control. The reason is quite simple. People may grow up in China, as they have in many other societies, accepting their system, oppressive as it is, as natural and perfectly reasonable. However, trade and communications threaten that complacency by exposing Chinese people to people of other societies and letting them exchange ideas and experiences. That exchange lets them know that it is possible to have a political system besides what they already have, that people can live without being oppressed by such a system, and that their system isn't "natural". That sounds like an oversimplification, and it is to an extent (it's not a matter of "poor, ignorant chinese folk finding out about America" but of becoming familiar with a different culture and internalizing that an aspect of one's own way of life isn't the limit of human experience), but it's true, and the PRC government knows it.
As for the "hypocrisy" of criticizing China while maintaining "Most Favored Nation" trading status with them (which merely means we do not favor any nation above them in trade, not that they're our favorite), and the idea that trade should be linked to human rights and that we should sanction certain nations for their government's misdeeds...What exactly have sanctions ever accomplished? We've tried to starve out Saddam Hussein for a decade, and all we've accomplished is the deaths of a large number of the poorest Iraqi civilians. Arms sanctions on the combatants in the former Yugoslavia led to mass slaughter of relatively defenseless Bosnians since the Serbs already had weapons. Libya and North Korea have been defiant for decades against global sactions, even as their people starve.
All sanctions have ever accomplished have been the isolation of deviant regimes and their bolstering by giving them an enemy (America or the entire world as the Great Satan!) to rally the people against. No leader has ever been deposed by sanctions, while untold numbers of innocent people have starved.
Because even the people on Slashdot who happen to be from the United States aren't "the US" or "the US government", but instead individuals with opinions and moral viewpoints who may (may) happen to dislike totalitarianism.
And that, of course, has exactly nothing to do with the US government butting ino the business of other nations.
"Communities" and "societies" are absolutely nothing without individuals. They come into existence purely through the actions and interactions of individuals and don't matter a damn compared to the individuals that comprise them. Once you forget that simple truth and try to glorify the "community" or the "nation" over the "lone individual", you get 99% of the barbarism and slaughter of this century.
This is just such a bizarre claim. I used to live a fair ways out in the country and I'd see UPS trucks drive regularly around the area for deliveries. Pay the fees, and they'll pick up and drop off almost anywhere - without a legal mandate.
And, if you think the fee is unfair, tell me what exactly the USPS does for people who can't afford postage...
I can send a one ounce letter 3-day fedex any time, so what the heck are you talking about? I believe it's called "economy 3 day" delivery or such.
I'm talking about the Private Express Statutes. No private entity in the United States may deliver a package for less than $3 or a letter for less than twice the cost of the United States Postal Service's price.
UPS offers a "Three Day Select" service, but skirts this law by requiring a minimum billing weight of one pound. FedEx offers the "Express Saver" service, which is three days. For a letter envelope weighing one ounce, FedEx in fact charges the legal minimum amount; UPS charges more. Of course, I did select "own packaging" when I priced it at UPS, so that might have raised the price. I'm on a slow link, so I don't want to retry. (Low Bandwidth Mode Slashdot all the way!)
All I said was that they'd like to have their cake (profits from easy deliveries) and eat it to (not have to deliver to or from less profitable areas)
I've never heard of a location UPS or FedEx wouldn't come to for package pickup. You just have to pay the fee. And yet, a lot of people in this country, mythology aside, do not get home delivery or pickup from the post office. If you do in fact live in Nowhere, AR, you'll probably have to drive to a dropoff box or the post office to send something or pick up a letter. As for dropoff, if the sender pays for it, UPS and FedEx will go virtually anywhere in the world and and hand-deliver it. The PO tends to leave yellow notes that ask you to drive to the nearest PO and pick up your package...during regular business hours, naturally.
Show me a plan that fedex has to deliver the mail even if they go bankrupt and I'll support letting them do first-class mail.
Well, aside from the insurance you can get on any package you send by FedEx or UPS, if either goes backrupt, you could go to court to recover your property. I'm willing to admit that there'd be complications if either (incredibly successful in the real-world) company went under, though we'd actually have warning in the real world and be able to avoid a foundering mail carrier. I'd like to see a plan that forced the USPS to deliver its packages as reliably and with as few losses as UPS and FedEx, and with a money-back guarantee if it's as much as a minute later than the quoted time of delivery.
Here's a good analysis of some of the flaws of the USPS.
When was the last time you heard about any government agency calling large scale attention to the fact that it needs to update itself for the times and serve its paying public better than ever, with new functionality and features?
The last time I heard about a government agency that wanted more revenue.
Gee. The post office is the only entity legally allowed to convey a one-ounce letter over the course of 3 or 4 days. Every other would-be mail carrier must offer this as an "next-day" or even "same-day" service. And, guess what, everyone else's service is inherently more expensive (compare the costs of physically conveying something any distance in one day or less versus three-or-four!).
Of course, because of that, they're evil bad private companies who can't do half the job of the shining government monopoly. Probably even better propaganda than the War on the Constitu-, oops, sorry, War on Drugs campaign.
This is because UPS and FedEx are prevented by law from offering a simple letter-delivery service. They may only offer parcel delivery and "special", more expensive, letter-delivery services (next-day, express, etc). The USPO has a government-granted monopoly on ordinary-letter delivery, which is the only reason it still exists. (The only reason why anyone is ever impressed with the whole "They'll deliver a letter for $0.25...$0.30...$0.33 cents anywhere in the country!" thing is that no one seems aware of that fact. Great free propaganda.)
And now the Post Office wants to get into email. Can you say "dying government entity looking for a new lease on life?"
The value of Slashdot, to me, is that it not only serves to locate news stories I might miss at other venues, but that it demonstrates that a collaboration of people working together can actually do useful things...like find those stories in the first place.
Further, moderation actually seems to more-or-less work in a more-or-less fair way. I usually completely disagree with stereotypical Slashdot groupthink ("Corporations/closed source/money Bad!"), but I've never seen any post I've made, even very critical ones where I get flamed in reply, moderated down. I have to assume that on the balance people who actually take the time to moderate take the whole thing seriously and try to be fair. Further, when I meta-moderate, I rarely find myself having to pooh-pooh the moderations shown to me.
As for Jon Katz, well, his articles are well-meaning but not terribly deeply thought through. Yes, a lot of rudeness occurs, but it can be ignored, just as is real life. Ignore obnoxious folk, and they lose any power over your life.
And if any of this is a little disjointed, please blame a minor head wound.:)
In my opinion, Caldera's case was the only major one that was valid. Seeing MS getting punished for things I don't believe they should be punished for hardly compensates for their evading real punishment for something which I wanted them to get zapped.
I still wish they hadn't settled. This was in essence a fairly clear-cut case of fraud (with regard to APIs and compatibility) and was the one case against Microsoft that deserved to win and nail that crew to the wall. Instead, it got lost in the whole monopoly myth and in the self-interested politicking by the heads of Sun, Netscape, et all. A real pity.
...That condemning the totalitarian government of the Republic of China on behalf of all Linux users is arrogant in the extreme, but that it's perfectly ok for someone to declare that "all us Slashdotters want to get rid of all software patents and patenting".
Come on. Sure, virtually everyone wants some kind of patent reform with regard to software, but we aren't all a bunch of IP-haters. Some of us just want a reasonable system, where someone doesn't grab "2+2=", but where something really novel can get patented by the inventor.
2000 came with nary a flicker or a siren last night.
On behalf of all the guys and girls who weren't skilled enough to be in the trenches making things Y2K compliant, I'd like to thank you and people like you for the months and years of work.
Alternately, for those deathly afraid of terrorism and hijackings, you could have airlines that press the point of their higher, turkish-prison-level security...though it doesn't seem like there's a great deal of demand for that.
Excellent point. There's no contradiction between a love of freedom and deciding to submit to consensual security measures in certain places. Even mandatory security measures that are carefully designed and harshly watched for abuse are proper if they protect our lives and liberties...otherwise there's really no point to a government, now is there?
But things aren't universally "better" for people now than they were X number of years ago.
Even with massive population growth in impoverished nations, the aggregate well-being of humanity has increased almost steadily since the dawn of agriculture - and sharply in the last few hundred years. A smaller portion of the species goes to bed hungry each night than it did 100 years ago - and a larger portion than then has a bed to sleep in.
Real, honest example to give you the idea of the sort of change technology has allowed: Someone living at the poverty line in a trailer park in the modern-day US enjoys a higher standard of living than nobility and royalty possessed in Europe 200 or more years ago.
Forgive Us for Our Wealth
on
The Timekeeper
·
· Score: 1
One of the things you complain about is that Americans consume "too much". What's the definition of "too much"? Nothing more than "what most other nations do, per capita". But most other nations are poorer than us. That's because their nations produce less wealth that they may exchange for material comforts. It's simple economics, but the kind of basic knowledge that a lot of self-styling revolutionaries lack.
Now, you don't have to like the gross disparity that exists. I don't like more than a billion people living in abject poverty on this planet. But a lot of people champion the idea of US somehow reducing its "consumption and waste" to something more along the lines of second- or third-world nations...Which, of course, translates to living conditions along the lines of second- or third-world. No thank you. Personally, I'd like second- and third-world nations to not be blocked from development by both hostile (tariffs, sanctions, and quotas) and well-meaning (limitations on foreign investment, attempts to force higher wages for foreign companies than the economy can bear or to impose environmental regulations identical to another country's) economic barriers, as well as destructive "assistance" from entities like the IMF or local government attempts to "plan" or "help" their economy once it actually gets going.
As to "destruction of the environment", it's pretty demonstrable that as technology advances, it gets cleaner. Private groups and companies can provably reduce the harm they cause and do so. On the other hand, the US government happens to produce more pollution that every company in the US combined...and is largely immune to environmental laws (the Boston Globe had a story about this recently - I'd direct you to their online archives, but I'm not a subscriber and don't want to pay for a single article:) ).
So, to get somewhere resembling a point before the cough syrup claims me...
The problem is not that westerners and Americans in particular consume too much. The problem is that in other nations, the people are too poor to consume as much, and hence have poorer living conditions.
I'll go out on a limb and say that this device used in the described method is OK with me. If I had a choice (ha!) between two airlines, one using it as described and one not having it, I might actually choose the airline with the scanner, in case it ever comes down to being scanned versus being felt up by minimum-wagers.
Personally, I don't have any problem with surveillance in a place as long as I'm made aware of it before I enter that place.
However, we should question why exactly we have to have such high security in airports, and why Americans have to be so security-conscious outside of the US. Maybe a foreign "policy" (in very loosest sense of the word) that involves sanctioning or bombing every country that sufficiently irritates our leaders has something to do with it...
I would chalk up the interveneing hostility to one of us not understanding what the other one meant to get across. Or possible both of us at different times.
"I believe in free speech, but there's got to be an exception for dirty words/weird ideas/this thing I don't like." I believe in freedom of speech, but lying in a transaction, or telling someone their cancer will clear up on its own are fraud and malpractice respectivly.
No kidding! Where, precisely, did I say anything remotely like it wasn't?
"I believe in open government, but they have to be able to keep secret things like how much money they spend on any "classified" military design project/their evidence justifying "anti-terrorist" actions/how the current war is really going." I believe in open government, but if there had been full disclosure of code breaking techniques or the plans for D-day, we'd probably be living under a swastika now.
Genuine needs of self-defense may require secrecy, but I will laugh in your face if you try to claim that, far more often than not, the privilege of military secrecy hasn't been used by the US government to hide grotesquely swelling budgets, impress politicians, and hide misdeeds. Or that the overwhelmingly vast majority of "crucial secrets" lack anywhere remotely near the importance of the examples you site. Are you aware that the design for the heated urinal in the SR-71 spyplane was once classified top secret, even though it did not compromise any aspect of the plane? A urinal. Top secret.
"I believe in due process, but in order to fight the drug war we have to have no-knock warrants/Army soldiers wandering around and ending up shooting goat-herders/ludicrous mandatory minimum laws/property confiscation laws." I believe in due proccess, but when you have reasonable belief of a violent crime in process, you stop someone from being hurt or killed and argue the fine points later. And if you can't make that argument sufficiently, you take your lumps like a professional.
If you want to pretend that is what I was talking about, you are welcome to your own delusion. It's a pleasant one, certainly, since I wish that was the only time our supposed Consitutional rights get "bent". Do feel free to ignore that numerous innocent, unarmed, unresisting people have just happened to have died in "high-intensity" police drug raids that happened to arrive at the wrong house. Or that the US Army is being used for drug interdiction along the US/Mexican border, and that an innocent South Texan teenage goatherd was shot to death while tending his herd on his own property last year...by a pair of jumpy US Army men who had been hunkered down near his property in a camoflagued blind for days. Or that judges are forced to send first-time cocaine traffickers to jail for longer than they usually sentence murderers - and without chance of parole, unlike said murderers in some cases. Or that merely being charged with many drug-related offenses can result in the confiscation of your house or car...and good luck getting it back.
All noble compromises, certainly. Actually, yours were strawmen, but thanks for trying.
Interesting. Examples of harmful broad and specific ways that people have decided it was necessary to "bend" fundamental principles and liberties for their various interests (as noble as they considered them) are, in your opinion "strawmen". I must conclude that either you really don't understand the meaning of the term or that you completely missed what I was saying. Or both.
Yes, the very nature of government requires that you surrender complete freedom of action in order to have your liberties protected. The idea is that one has the moral right to freedom of action where it does not impinge on the freedom or well-being of others. This is what government is supposed to allow, by stopping those who would impinge on others' rights.
Most libertarians, including myself, acknowledge government as a necessary evil because we don't happen to believe that a peaceful, genuinely free anarchy would last, as much as we'd like that. However, the power and reach of this evil must only be tolerated to the precise extent needed to preserve our liberties. Unfortunately, most people are far too willing to surrender "little" bits of their (and our!) liberties for many reasons. Even many people who call themselves "libertarians" are willing to make a fool's trade with their rights and the rights of other people on certain issues.
Slashdot Mirror
(Political freedom is just another personal freedom, just like economic freedom.)
Trade and the Internet are bad for the PRC government's control. The reason is quite simple. People may grow up in China, as they have in many other societies, accepting their system, oppressive as it is, as natural and perfectly reasonable. However, trade and communications threaten that complacency by exposing Chinese people to people of other societies and letting them exchange ideas and experiences. That exchange lets them know that it is possible to have a political system besides what they already have, that people can live without being oppressed by such a system, and that their system isn't "natural". That sounds like an oversimplification, and it is to an extent (it's not a matter of "poor, ignorant chinese folk finding out about America" but of becoming familiar with a different culture and internalizing that an aspect of one's own way of life isn't the limit of human experience), but it's true, and the PRC government knows it.
As for the "hypocrisy" of criticizing China while maintaining "Most Favored Nation" trading status with them (which merely means we do not favor any nation above them in trade, not that they're our favorite), and the idea that trade should be linked to human rights and that we should sanction certain nations for their government's misdeeds...What exactly have sanctions ever accomplished? We've tried to starve out Saddam Hussein for a decade, and all we've accomplished is the deaths of a large number of the poorest Iraqi civilians. Arms sanctions on the combatants in the former Yugoslavia led to mass slaughter of relatively defenseless Bosnians since the Serbs already had weapons. Libya and North Korea have been defiant for decades against global sactions, even as their people starve.
All sanctions have ever accomplished have been the isolation of deviant regimes and their bolstering by giving them an enemy (America or the entire world as the Great Satan!) to rally the people against. No leader has ever been deposed by sanctions, while untold numbers of innocent people have starved.
Because even the people on Slashdot who happen to be from the United States aren't "the US" or "the US government", but instead individuals with opinions and moral viewpoints who may (may) happen to dislike totalitarianism.
And that, of course, has exactly nothing to do with the US government butting ino the business of other nations.
"Communities" and "societies" are absolutely nothing without individuals. They come into existence purely through the actions and interactions of individuals and don't matter a damn compared to the individuals that comprise them. Once you forget that simple truth and try to glorify the "community" or the "nation" over the "lone individual", you get 99% of the barbarism and slaughter of this century.
This is just such a bizarre claim. I used to live a fair ways out in the country and I'd see UPS trucks drive regularly around the area for deliveries. Pay the fees, and they'll pick up and drop off almost anywhere - without a legal mandate.
And, if you think the fee is unfair, tell me what exactly the USPS does for people who can't afford postage...
I'm talking about the Private Express Statutes. No private entity in the United States may deliver a package for less than $3 or a letter for less than twice the cost of the United States Postal Service's price.
UPS offers a "Three Day Select" service, but skirts this law by requiring a minimum billing weight of one pound. FedEx offers the "Express Saver" service, which is three days. For a letter envelope weighing one ounce, FedEx in fact charges the legal minimum amount; UPS charges more. Of course, I did select "own packaging" when I priced it at UPS, so that might have raised the price. I'm on a slow link, so I don't want to retry. (Low Bandwidth Mode Slashdot all the way!)
I've never heard of a location UPS or FedEx wouldn't come to for package pickup. You just have to pay the fee. And yet, a lot of people in this country, mythology aside, do not get home delivery or pickup from the post office. If you do in fact live in Nowhere, AR, you'll probably have to drive to a dropoff box or the post office to send something or pick up a letter. As for dropoff, if the sender pays for it, UPS and FedEx will go virtually anywhere in the world and and hand-deliver it. The PO tends to leave yellow notes that ask you to drive to the nearest PO and pick up your package...during regular business hours, naturally.
Well, aside from the insurance you can get on any package you send by FedEx or UPS, if either goes backrupt, you could go to court to recover your property. I'm willing to admit that there'd be complications if either (incredibly successful in the real-world) company went under, though we'd actually have warning in the real world and be able to avoid a foundering mail carrier. I'd like to see a plan that forced the USPS to deliver its packages as reliably and with as few losses as UPS and FedEx, and with a money-back guarantee if it's as much as a minute later than the quoted time of delivery.
Here's a good analysis of some of the flaws of the USPS.
An arm of the US government using encryption to protect the privacy of the communications of ordinary citizens? Not on this planet, bub.
More like, "gee, now we can grep the post office".
The last time I heard about a government agency that wanted more revenue.
Gee. The post office is the only entity legally allowed to convey a one-ounce letter over the course of 3 or 4 days. Every other would-be mail carrier must offer this as an "next-day" or even "same-day" service. And, guess what, everyone else's service is inherently more expensive (compare the costs of physically conveying something any distance in one day or less versus three-or-four!).
Of course, because of that, they're evil bad private companies who can't do half the job of the shining government monopoly. Probably even better propaganda than the War on the Constitu-, oops, sorry, War on Drugs campaign.
This is because UPS and FedEx are prevented by law from offering a simple letter-delivery service. They may only offer parcel delivery and "special", more expensive, letter-delivery services (next-day, express, etc). The USPO has a government-granted monopoly on ordinary-letter delivery, which is the only reason it still exists. (The only reason why anyone is ever impressed with the whole "They'll deliver a letter for $0.25...$0.30...$0.33 cents anywhere in the country!" thing is that no one seems aware of that fact. Great free propaganda.)
And now the Post Office wants to get into email. Can you say "dying government entity looking for a new lease on life?"
The value of Slashdot, to me, is that it not only serves to locate news stories I might miss at other venues, but that it demonstrates that a collaboration of people working together can actually do useful things...like find those stories in the first place.
Further, moderation actually seems to more-or-less work in a more-or-less fair way. I usually completely disagree with stereotypical Slashdot groupthink ("Corporations/closed source/money Bad!"), but I've never seen any post I've made, even very critical ones where I get flamed in reply, moderated down. I have to assume that on the balance people who actually take the time to moderate take the whole thing seriously and try to be fair. Further, when I meta-moderate, I rarely find myself having to pooh-pooh the moderations shown to me.
As for Jon Katz, well, his articles are well-meaning but not terribly deeply thought through. Yes, a lot of rudeness occurs, but it can be ignored, just as is real life. Ignore obnoxious folk, and they lose any power over your life.
And if any of this is a little disjointed, please blame a minor head wound. :)
In my opinion, Caldera's case was the only major one that was valid. Seeing MS getting punished for things I don't believe they should be punished for hardly compensates for their evading real punishment for something which I wanted them to get zapped.
I still wish they hadn't settled. This was in essence a fairly clear-cut case of fraud (with regard to APIs and compatibility) and was the one case against Microsoft that deserved to win and nail that crew to the wall. Instead, it got lost in the whole monopoly myth and in the self-interested politicking by the heads of Sun, Netscape, et all. A real pity.
I neglected to say "People's".
Come on. Sure, virtually everyone wants some kind of patent reform with regard to software, but we aren't all a bunch of IP-haters. Some of us just want a reasonable system, where someone doesn't grab "2+2=", but where something really novel can get patented by the inventor.
Perhaps a combination of the methods is the best, to give users a clear idea of the date of publication and the true version of the product.
Something like "Application 4.6 (2000)" might be the best combination, where one doesn't have to dig through manuals to find a copyright date...2000 came with nary a flicker or a siren last night.
On behalf of all the guys and girls who weren't skilled enough to be in the trenches making things Y2K compliant, I'd like to thank you and people like you for the months and years of work.
It just means we have work to do.
Alternately, for those deathly afraid of terrorism and hijackings, you could have airlines that press the point of their higher, turkish-prison-level security...though it doesn't seem like there's a great deal of demand for that.
Excellent point.
There's no contradiction between a love of freedom and deciding to submit to consensual security measures in certain places. Even mandatory security measures that are carefully designed and harshly watched for abuse are proper if they protect our lives and liberties...otherwise there's really no point to a government, now is there?
Veep onna stick? :)
I'm still waiting for a voteworthy candidate...
Even with massive population growth in impoverished nations, the aggregate well-being of humanity has increased almost steadily since the dawn of agriculture - and sharply in the last few hundred years. A smaller portion of the species goes to bed hungry each night than it did 100 years ago - and a larger portion than then has a bed to sleep in.
Real, honest example to give you the idea of the sort of change technology has allowed: Someone living at the poverty line in a trailer park in the modern-day US enjoys a higher standard of living than nobility and royalty possessed in Europe 200 or more years ago.
One of the things you complain about is that Americans consume "too much". What's the definition of "too much"? Nothing more than "what most other nations do, per capita". But most other nations are poorer than us. That's because their nations produce less wealth that they may exchange for material comforts. It's simple economics, but the kind of basic knowledge that a lot of self-styling revolutionaries lack.
:) ).
Now, you don't have to like the gross disparity that exists. I don't like more than a billion people living in abject poverty on this planet. But a lot of people champion the idea of US somehow reducing its "consumption and waste" to something more along the lines of second- or third-world nations...Which, of course, translates to living conditions along the lines of second- or third-world. No thank you. Personally, I'd like second- and third-world nations to not be blocked from development by both hostile (tariffs, sanctions, and quotas) and well-meaning (limitations on foreign investment, attempts to force higher wages for foreign companies than the economy can bear or to impose environmental regulations identical to another country's) economic barriers, as well as destructive "assistance" from entities like the IMF or local government attempts to "plan" or "help" their economy once it actually gets going.
As to "destruction of the environment", it's pretty demonstrable that as technology advances, it gets cleaner. Private groups and companies can provably reduce the harm they cause and do so. On the other hand, the US government happens to produce more pollution that every company in the US combined...and is largely immune to environmental laws (the Boston Globe had a story about this recently - I'd direct you to their online archives, but I'm not a subscriber and don't want to pay for a single article
So, to get somewhere resembling a point before the cough syrup claims me...
The problem is not that westerners and Americans in particular consume too much. The problem is that in other nations, the people are too poor to consume as much, and hence have poorer living conditions.
I'll go out on a limb and say that this device used in the described method is OK with me. If I had a choice (ha!) between two airlines, one using it as described and one not having it, I might actually choose the airline with the scanner, in case it ever comes down to being scanned versus being felt up by minimum-wagers.
Personally, I don't have any problem with surveillance in a place as long as I'm made aware of it before I enter that place.
However, we should question why exactly we have to have such high security in airports, and why Americans have to be so security-conscious outside of the US. Maybe a foreign "policy" (in very loosest sense of the word) that involves sanctioning or bombing every country that sufficiently irritates our leaders has something to do with it...
No kidding! Where, precisely, did I say anything remotely like it wasn't?
Genuine needs of self-defense may require secrecy, but I will laugh in your face if you try to claim that, far more often than not, the privilege of military secrecy hasn't been used by the US government to hide grotesquely swelling budgets, impress politicians, and hide misdeeds. Or that the overwhelmingly vast majority of "crucial secrets" lack anywhere remotely near the importance of the examples you site. Are you aware that the design for the heated urinal in the SR-71 spyplane was once classified top secret, even though it did not compromise any aspect of the plane? A urinal. Top secret.
If you want to pretend that is what I was talking about, you are welcome to your own delusion. It's a pleasant one, certainly, since I wish that was the only time our supposed Consitutional rights get "bent". Do feel free to ignore that numerous innocent, unarmed, unresisting people have just happened to have died in "high-intensity" police drug raids that happened to arrive at the wrong house. Or that the US Army is being used for drug interdiction along the US/Mexican border, and that an innocent South Texan teenage goatherd was shot to death while tending his herd on his own property last year
Interesting. Examples of harmful broad and specific ways that people have decided it was necessary to "bend" fundamental principles and liberties for their various interests (as noble as they considered them) are, in your opinion "strawmen". I must conclude that either you really don't understand the meaning of the term or that you completely missed what I was saying. Or both.
Yes, the very nature of government requires that you surrender complete freedom of action in order to have your liberties protected. The idea is that one has the moral right to freedom of action where it does not impinge on the freedom or well-being of others. This is what government is supposed to allow, by stopping those who would impinge on others' rights.
Most libertarians, including myself, acknowledge government as a necessary evil because we don't happen to believe that a peaceful, genuinely free anarchy would last, as much as we'd like that. However, the power and reach of this evil must only be tolerated to the precise extent needed to preserve our liberties. Unfortunately, most people are far too willing to surrender "little" bits of their (and our!) liberties for many reasons. Even many people who call themselves "libertarians" are willing to make a fool's trade with their rights and the rights of other people on certain issues.