Oh for heaven's sake. Yet another goofy braindead Rupert Murdoch tirade against the evil liberals. Spare me. If you think there aren't any Republicans living on Nantucket, you have a very poor grasp of the demographics of rich enclaves like Nantucket Island. The only reason this is a story is that a few folks associated with liberal causes live there too.
I'm a libertarian, myself, but this whole bash-the-venal-liberals shtick is getting really old. In the first place, liberals have no power, and haven't had any for 35 years. Everything that's happened in this country during that time, good or bad, has been the fault of Republican conservatives and Democrat conservatives. So bashing liberals is intellectually equivalent to bashing leprechauns.
To call Bill Clinton a liberal is to be completely clueless about political reality. The fact that he's marginally more liberal than Dan Quayle is meaningless in real world terms. For example, conservatives like to bash liberals on the basis of their attitude toward the war on drugs. Ole Bill admitted to smoking pot, but during his 8 years, he oversaw the drug arrests of far more Americans than were arrested during Reagan and Bush's 12 years.
They're all for women's rights...unless it's Bill Clinton on the prowl. What in the world does Bill's lechery have to do with women's rights? It's just stupid. What do you think Bill did for women's rights? What did Bush or Reagan do for women's rights? And you won't get far holding up Republicans as paragons of feminism. Henry Hyde? Newt Gingrich? Rudolph Giuliani?
There are very few differences between the philosophies of both major parties, and those differences are rapidly diminishing. When those differences emerge, they are the result of historic accident rather than any particular thought process on the part of party leaders. You mention school vouchers. Please realize that Republican support of school vouchers has nothing to do with the reasonable belief that parents ought to be able to choose how their taxes are used to pay for their children's education. It has to do with the fact that the teacher's unions are solidly Democrat, and it's a chance to reduce the political clout of public school teachers.
Unless Americans get over this whole liberal/conservative smoke-and-mirrors show, and start seeing politics as something other than high school football (Hooray for our side!) we're just going to accelerate down the highway that leads to an oppressive totalitarian state. We're halfway there, and all some folks can do is argue about the paint job on the bus.
I still believe that C or assembler are good early languages,
As someone whose first real programming efforts were in 6502 assembler, I would agree, (except that maybe assembler isn't as easy these days, using modern processors.) Still, the theory seems irrefutable. If you want your programmers to understand the process from the ground up, why not start on the ground?
Of course, I could be an antique dumbass. It's been a long time. But once you can do machine level coding, you can do anything you want. Even write a new language.
Frankly, I dont want that posting on Slashdot: we cannot trust your information, since its anonymous, so why waste our time posting it?
Your statement is silly on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. In the first place, most of the postings on/. do not contain much in the way of "information." In the case of posts which do contain information, who would be foolish enough to accept the veracity of such information because it was tagged with a consistent screen name? If I assert that the moon is made of green cheese, are you any more likely to accept this "fact" if I post as knobmaker? Anyone who would judge the worthiness of factual information based on the anonymity of the poster is an idiot. For that matter, anyone who accepts any stranger's word for anything important is an idiot.
But even sillier is your implication that the value of a given piece of writing rests on the identity of the writer rather than on the writing itself. There is, for example, some doubt as to who wrote Shapkespeare's body of work. Are the author's accomplishments in some way rendered less admirable because these works might not be authored by the man who bore the name? What about Beowulf? Or the Bible? Do you dismiss the value of these works because the authors are unknown? And sadly (given the quality of most/. posts) to post on/. is to commit an act of writing. If a given post engages my interest to some degree, I don't care who wrote it. (By the way, I disagree with you, but I admire the clarity of your prose.)
Finally, consider this: would my refutation of your opinion be any less effective if I posted it anonymously? No, of course not, because it contains only arguments and assertions so generally accepted or disbelieved that they are not in dispute.
Of course, fairness compels me to admit I usually read at +1, to avoid reading a lot of nonsense from trolls, but when I'm moderating, I read at -1, to counteract the bias of the system (and many moderators) against anonymous posting.
Grow up a bit: the world, and all things in it, are complex. The Constitution is nothing unique, in that regard: it is a complex and difficult peice of brilliant lawmaking, and it requires the perpetual efforts of scholars to understand how to apply it today.
No. The fantastically convoluted body of case law which lawyers and judges have tortured and twisted into existence from the bedrock of the Constitution does not reflect any great ambiguity in that document. It reflects the ideological agenda of those who have circumvented the Constitution over the centuries, and made their shaky interpretations stick in the highest court.
The 2nd Amendment uses the term militia in a dependent clause. The dependent clause was still a dependent clause in the 18th century. To claim that the 2nd reflects a right of the state to regulate arms, when every other Amendment in the Bill of Rights asserts an individual liberty, is to ignore not only the clear language of the Amendment, but also the many writings of the founders which clarify their intent. Only a lawyer or a judge or someone whose fear of guns has unbalanced his judgement would claim that the federal government has not breached the 2nd. That they have done so is not the fault of those who framed the Amendment. It's the fault of those who for their own purposes decided to ignore the Amendment-- and got away with it.
On a side note, consider this: if you're so happy to take the text of the Constitution/Bill of Rights perfectly literally, why aren't you happy to take all the laws of the day? Especially, the laws written/supported by those very authors of the Constitution? What about the laws against Sodomy? And the restriction against Women voters which is implied by the literal use of "All MEN are created equal"?
Because, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress, the states, and local governmental units. The Constitution is the touchstone by which the legality of those laws is judged. The Bill of Rights is designed to prevent a tyranny of the Majority; that is why it is so much more difficult to pass a Constitutional Amendment than a new law.
As to the matter of women voting, have you forgotten that women received the vote via a Constitutional Amendment?
And here we have a perfect example of how the Constitution has been largely ignored in the latter half of the 20th Century. When moralists attempted to impose their vision of an alcohol-free country on their fellow Americans, they understood that they must pass a Constitutional Amendment to do so, since the Constitution did not give the federal government this power. When a similar pack of moral totalitarians decided to restrict access to various drugs of which they did not approve, they did so by simply ignoring the fact that the Constitution affords the federal government no such power. That they intended duplicity is a matter of historical fact, since the first restrictions of these unpopular drugs were made in the form of prohibitive taxation schemes.
No, the Constitution is not "difficult" or "complex." It's like a great city bombed into a warren of ruins, through which only certain trained pathfinders can move. But the original map was clear, and in my opinion, restoration is more vital than endlessly burrowing through the rubble.
A clear example, which is of prime relevance, is the fact that the Constitution and Bill of Rights never once use the word "privacy".
It never once uses the word "internet" either. Is it your contention that the Constitution is therefore irrelevant to any matter concerning the internet?
Furthermore, your argument is hung precariously on a semantic hook which does not support it, at all. When the founding fathers talked about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" what do you think they were talking about, if not privacy?
Your understanding of the Constitution is fundamentally flawed. The Bill of Rights is an addendum, spliced onto the body of the Constitution by those who feared that unless certain rights were explicitly enumerated, the government would run roughshod over individual liberties. But the basic concept of the Constitution is that the federal government has certain powers-- and no others. In other words, if the Constitution does not explicitly allow the federal government to curtail the privacy of its citizens, it is prohibited from doing so. 10th Amendment says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Unfortunately, the feds have grabbed all manner of powers to which they are not entitled, and ideologues on the Supreme Court have permitted it to happen.
(Just like these people complaining about the vanishing of the family farm.. nobody put a gun to the farmers' heads and forced them to sell their land.)
As a public service, here's a clue: When the bank forecloses on your farm, and the sheriff comes to evict your family, he will bring guns. If you refuse to leave, a gun will be put to your head.
You have very little chance of fighting off a determined gov through ownership of civilian weapons.
This is a popular view, and makes it more comfortable to accept the idea of domination by powerful police and military organizations. I believe it to be incorrect.
First of all, an uprising in America would not take the form of such Hollywood scenarios as Red Dawn. It would in all likelihood begin in the urban centers. Urban fighting is very different from fighting in open country, particularly if the people in power count the urban infrastructure as part of their assets. In other words, the American government is very unlikely to drop battlefield nukes on Manhattan, because they'd be destroying their own possessions. This scenario applies to many other aspects of a popular American uprising-- from powerplants to factories to transportation. The military would be constrained in its use of overwhelming force by the practical problems of occupying its own country.
Secondly, harassing tactics could prove so expensive that the authorities might be forced to negotiate with the insurgents. This has happened thousands of times in human history-- an inferior force has forced concessions from a superior force because it's cheaper than fighting a war.
Finally, proponents of the "resistance is futile" viewpoint seem to assume that American soldiers are robots who would feel no misgivings about crushing their own people. I think that's nonsense. Members of our military have grown up with the idea that this is a free country, and that freedom is a good thing. A sizable portion of them would, in my opinion, mutiny-- if asked to kill their own people. These mutineers would provide both military expertise and powerful weapons to the insurgents.
History provides numerous examples of disarmed people who were tyrannized by their own leaders. Far fewer examples can be found of this happening to armed people. Remember the American Revolution. The idea that the American rabble might defeat trained British troops and their mercenaries was an idea so ridiculous that few in England took it seriously. Until it was too late.
Wouldn't it be nice if the ACLU was as politically powerful as the NRA?
Yes, it would, because then there would be two politically powerful organizations defending the 2nd Amendment. The right to own weapons is one of the most important civil liberties, because without it, Americans would have to rely solely on the innate benevolence of government to preserve their other liberties.
By the way, the 2nd Amendment has been curtailed, in many ways. When I was a kid, you could order a war surplus rifle in good working condition for 20 bucks, from an ad in the back of a comic book, and the Post Office would deliver it to your house. And oddly enough, there was far less gun violence then than there is now-- especially among kids.
Still, I take your point. It's true that many ACLU members fear and hate guns, just as many NRA members fear and hate dissent. But in fact, they ought to be working together, not at cross-purposes.
Maybe I'm just early here, but it astonishes me that no one has posted a comment, except for trolls and ACs.
It's stuff like this that gives me hope that I'll live long enough to get a trip into space before I die. The government, as it usually does with everything it attempts, seems to have completely screwed up the exploration of space. It's been over 30 years since we sent a human being to another world, for heaven's sake.
I'm writing in Rutan for President in 2004. At least he's actually built something other than a portfolio.
The (technology) executives felt the government's plan was "not sufficiently strong because many of the key recommendations had been `watered down' and were not `mandatory,"' Undersecretary Kenneth Juster wrote.
In this case, isn't "ineffective" a good thing? The "technology executives" who want "stronger" regulation are probably not friends of open source software. In late years, the government hasn't had a reassuring track record, whenever it exerts its power.
Maybe this is a dopey consideration, and I'm just a soft-headed idealist, but I no longer buy anything made in Thailand, if I can help it.
Here's the deal: In February, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that in three months, Thailand would win the war on drugs. When the attempt officially ended, according to the Associated Press, 2,274 Thais had been killed. The government said that only about 35 of these killings were committed by the police, in justifiable self-defense, but the Thai people and various human rights organizations believe that many more of these killings were done by the police in extrajudicial executions.
This seems barbaric to me. The only way I have of expressing my opinion of these acts is to not spend my money on Thai goods.
P.S. There are still drugs in Thailand. Surprising, isn't it?
This is not just directed to you, but to everyone else who has been arguing against this point...it's only "Native Americans" compared to the Europeans.
You're missing the point entirely. Yes, of course it's generally accepted that human life did not originate in the New World, but the original poster's remark was a non-sequitur, or at best a semantic quibble. It's as if a prosecutor claimed that the defendant murdered Bob, and the defense attorney responded with "No, his name was actually Robert." Is that really a point worth making?
There is a right and there is a wrong. If everyone chose correctly we'd never have to worry about our freedom being taken away by those who are actually seeking to protect it.
Of course, Comrade, you are free... free to "choose correctly." Free to act in accordance with the good of the state. So long as you do nothing of which we disapprove, you are perfectly free. Is that what you mean by "freedom?"
People who believe their own moral system to be the only acceptable one make very poor advocates for freedom, because they cannot grasp the most basic fact about freedom. In a free society, you must grant freedom to those you despise, not just to those of whom you approve. The freedom to act "correctly" is the freedom you get in the People's Republic of China. That's not my idea of freedom.
No, sorry, won't cater to your anti-american viewpoint.
No, sorry, won't cater to your weird conservative paranoia. The original poster wasn't being anti-American. He was only pointing out that the good ole days weren't always good. I presume he's an American, and therefore used American examples.
It's folks like you, who shut their eyes to any criticism of America, who may eventually cause the destruction of this great country. Societies either progress or decline, and we're currently declining, in the most profound of American values-- personal liberty. Refusing to admit that problems exist will not solve those problems. Ignoring those problems doesn't make you a patriot, it makes you a traitor.
America was not made great by men and women who believed America was perfect.
Perhaps you would have preferred... a laundry list of atrocities in other countries, oddly selected to reflect mostly left-wing atrocities.
This has to be the most unimaginative and juvenile way of justifying the Bad Things that have been done in America. "But Mommy, Jimmy did so-and-so!"
Particularly pointless was this pedantic little remark about Native Americans: "There are no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia." Allrighty then. I guess it's okay that we slaughtered most of them and stole their land, because they didn't actually exist. I guess if the Chinese decide to take North America from us, it'll be okay, because we're not really Americans, just more-or-less recent immigrants. After all, if there was nothing wrong with dispossesing the redskins, who lived here for millenia, there'd be even less wrong with dispossessing the white folks, who've only been here a tiny fraction of that time.
It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context...
I'm not a lawyer, but PACs do this all the time. As far as I know, there are no laws that restrict citizens from contributing to the campaigns of politicians from outside their own district. I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
It seems to me that the net-savvy have not, for the most part, used their power. Make all the jokes you want about slashdotters living in their parents' basement and pining after non-plastic girls.. They're still a little smarter and more politically aware than many other groups, but they aren't catered to by any of the major political power machines. They tend to be disorganized and ineffective in their responses to various liberal and conservative Big Brother outrages. If some of that energy and rancor could be harnessed in the promotion of good government, positive things might happen.
Everyone writing to their congressentity on the same
day would make quite a bit of difference, especially if those
letters are polite, concise, and well-thought-out.
What would, I think, make the most difference would be to write to Smith and tell him that if he persists in his unAmerican campaign against opensource software, you're going to send money to anyone who opposes him in the next election. And then follow through, if he doesn't change his position. A website devoted to taking donations for that purpose, and reporting unfavorably on Smith's activities would be a good thought-provoker for Smith. When next year rolls around, it would be a good time to remind slashdotters with a little fun money what Smith stands for. Could be a substantial source of anxiety for Smith.
If I didn't give you my email address, then why are you sending me email?
If, like me, you had an online business, you wouldn't be asking this question.
Good thing this brilliant idea is optional. If it were mandatory, I'd have to let my earthlink account go. I'm not willing to risk confusing or offending any potential customers by making them respond to a challenge.
In my opinion, this is yet another demonstration of the folly of imposing spam solutions from above. The most effective, and least destructive solutions are applied by endusers, not government, and not ISPs. If you really want to do something about spam, develop Bayesian filters that are trivial to install, and easy for even the most computer-illiterate users to set up and use. Make 'em free, and seed the net.
I'm not willing to pay more just to keep some inefficient mom and pop in business.
It's not because they're inefficient that they can't compete on price. It's because they don't buy as many books as Walmart or even Borders and the other chain bookstores, and therefore they can't force the publishers to give them the same discounts the chains get.
Still, some folks would prefer the independent bookstores to stay in business for reasons of self-interest, and so we're willing to pay a little more for our books. Among those reasons: ambiance-- if you spend any time at bookstores, you'd like the experience to be as pleasant as possible, selection-- the chain bookstores seem to have a lot of books, but they buy books based primarily on which books sell the greatest numbers, unlike small specialty shops that carry a wider selection in their area of interest, and availability of small press titles-- you won't find small press books in the chain stores.
Finally, if your interests are primarily financial, reflect on the fact that mom and pop won't be able to buy your products if they go out of business. True, their store will be replaced by a chain store, with lots of minimum wageslaves-- but are those your best customers? And the profits from that chain will go elsewhere and won't be spent in your community.
Can you show me in the Constitution/Bill of Rights where it says Americans have the right to privacy?
Well, rats, now I have to let several perfectly good moderations go, just because I feel compelled to respond to this goofy idea.
Apparently vast numbers of Americans, including many who've sworn solemn oaths to defend the Constitution, don't understand the most basic fact about the document. The principle purpose of the Constitution is not to list the rights individual Americans have. The purpose is to limit the powers of the federal government to a few narrowly-constrained functions. If the Constitution does not specifically authorize the federal government to do a certain thing, it is not allowed to do that thing, Constitutionally speaking. That's why we had to have a Constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol on a federal level. (Apparently Americans used to have a better grasp of Constitutional principles than current Americans do.)
Therefore, the proper form of the previous poster's question is: "Can you show me in the Constitution/Bill of Rights where it says the federal government has the right to constrain or diminish in any way the privacy of American citizens?"
And the answer? Yes, I can show you the 4th Amendment, which details the circumstances under which the government can invade the privacy of Americans. Unfortunately, years of politically-active Supreme Courts have broadened the scope of the 4th Amendment to the point where it no longer provides any reasonable constraint on intrusive government prying.
Sure, it would be an entirely different conflict on every level, but it is not going to matter how much firepower your militia can muster.
Okay, say you're right and our military forces are all robotic True Believers who wouldn't mind slaughtering their fellow Americans. When you're standing meekly in the line that leads to the gas chambers, I'll be taking a few of the bastards with me. Of course, it's all the same in the end, I guess, but I prefer to go hard, instead of easy. I suspect there's a few million other rednecks (or gun-toting hippies, like me) who feel the same way. Could get messy for the forces of Our Glorious Homeland.
Jerry, you're a pretty good writer, but you don't know much about Vietnam. As I recall, you went there and shook a few ARVN hands. I spent a year there, so I feel entitled to my opinion.
Here are the sad facts: For every American who died in Vietnam, we killed at least 20 Vietnamese. We just got tired of dying before they did. They were tougher than we were, and that's likely to happen when you go to war for no better reason than to keep politicians in office.
Ask just about anyone who actually fought in Vietnam and they'll tell you the Army of South Vietnam was a joke. Who could blame them for being more concerned with personal survival than fighting and dying for a series of corrupt puppet governments? Think about it. How eager would you be to die for Thieu?
When the United States left Vietnam, the ARVN forces had the best military machine in SE Asia. On paper. But they wouldn't fight. That's the fact, and all the wishful historical revisionism in the world isn't going to change it.
South Viet Nam accordingly fell, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City; but that is not the same as our being kicked out by a handful of peasants with rifles.
We're gone, Jerry, and the peasants are in charge. There's no effective way to spin those facts.
By the way, you folks who are convinced that our military would unanimously crush any uprising... you're selling our soldiers short if you think they'd all start dropping napalm on American suburbs just because King George told them to. Some of them would, no doubt. We have our inevitable complement of good Germans here. But we also have true patriots in the military, who understand that there are lawful orders and then there are war crimes. I believe that if our forces were divided into those loyal to the current crop of politicians, and those loyal to the American ideal of liberty and the rule of law, the latter would own more military competence than the former, as well as the superior motivation.
I think not even Jerry would dispute the idea that motivation wins more wars than the latest weapons.
What the hell does anyone think a bunch of rednecks with guns can do against that?
A bunch of peasants armed with little more than rifles kicked us out of Vietnam. Furthermore, studies have predicted that only slightly more than half of our soldiers would obey if ordered to fire on their fellow Americans. The remainder who aren't good Germans would, presumably, mutiny.
Read up on what a few urban Jews with small arms did during the reduction of the Warsaw ghetto. Had the European Jews of the late '30s been armed as well as the average redneck, there might not have been a Holocaust.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for heaven's sake. Yet another goofy braindead Rupert Murdoch tirade against the evil liberals. Spare me. If you think there aren't any Republicans living on Nantucket, you have a very poor grasp of the demographics of rich enclaves like Nantucket Island. The only reason this is a story is that a few folks associated with liberal causes live there too.
I'm a libertarian, myself, but this whole bash-the-venal-liberals shtick is getting really old. In the first place, liberals have no power, and haven't had any for 35 years. Everything that's happened in this country during that time, good or bad, has been the fault of Republican conservatives and Democrat conservatives. So bashing liberals is intellectually equivalent to bashing leprechauns.
To call Bill Clinton a liberal is to be completely clueless about political reality. The fact that he's marginally more liberal than Dan Quayle is meaningless in real world terms. For example, conservatives like to bash liberals on the basis of their attitude toward the war on drugs. Ole Bill admitted to smoking pot, but during his 8 years, he oversaw the drug arrests of far more Americans than were arrested during Reagan and Bush's 12 years.
They're all for women's rights...unless it's Bill Clinton on the prowl. What in the world does Bill's lechery have to do with women's rights? It's just stupid. What do you think Bill did for women's rights? What did Bush or Reagan do for women's rights? And you won't get far holding up Republicans as paragons of feminism. Henry Hyde? Newt Gingrich? Rudolph Giuliani?
There are very few differences between the philosophies of both major parties, and those differences are rapidly diminishing. When those differences emerge, they are the result of historic accident rather than any particular thought process on the part of party leaders. You mention school vouchers. Please realize that Republican support of school vouchers has nothing to do with the reasonable belief that parents ought to be able to choose how their taxes are used to pay for their children's education. It has to do with the fact that the teacher's unions are solidly Democrat, and it's a chance to reduce the political clout of public school teachers.
Unless Americans get over this whole liberal/conservative smoke-and-mirrors show, and start seeing politics as something other than high school football (Hooray for our side!) we're just going to accelerate down the highway that leads to an oppressive totalitarian state. We're halfway there, and all some folks can do is argue about the paint job on the bus.
As someone whose first real programming efforts were in 6502 assembler, I would agree, (except that maybe assembler isn't as easy these days, using modern processors.) Still, the theory seems irrefutable. If you want your programmers to understand the process from the ground up, why not start on the ground?
Of course, I could be an antique dumbass. It's been a long time. But once you can do machine level coding, you can do anything you want. Even write a new language.
Your statement is silly on so many levels I hardly know where to begin. In the first place, most of the postings on /. do not contain much in the way of "information." In the case of posts which do contain information, who would be foolish enough to accept the veracity of such information because it was tagged with a consistent screen name? If I assert that the moon is made of green cheese, are you any more likely to accept this "fact" if I post as knobmaker? Anyone who would judge the worthiness of factual information based on the anonymity of the poster is an idiot. For that matter, anyone who accepts any stranger's word for anything important is an idiot.
But even sillier is your implication that the value of a given piece of writing rests on the identity of the writer rather than on the writing itself. There is, for example, some doubt as to who wrote Shapkespeare's body of work. Are the author's accomplishments in some way rendered less admirable because these works might not be authored by the man who bore the name? What about Beowulf? Or the Bible? Do you dismiss the value of these works because the authors are unknown? And sadly (given the quality of most /. posts) to post on /. is to commit an act of writing. If a given post engages my interest to some degree, I don't care who wrote it. (By the way, I disagree with you, but I admire the clarity of your prose.)
Finally, consider this: would my refutation of your opinion be any less effective if I posted it anonymously? No, of course not, because it contains only arguments and assertions so generally accepted or disbelieved that they are not in dispute.
Of course, fairness compels me to admit I usually read at +1, to avoid reading a lot of nonsense from trolls, but when I'm moderating, I read at -1, to counteract the bias of the system (and many moderators) against anonymous posting.
No. The fantastically convoluted body of case law which lawyers and judges have tortured and twisted into existence from the bedrock of the Constitution does not reflect any great ambiguity in that document. It reflects the ideological agenda of those who have circumvented the Constitution over the centuries, and made their shaky interpretations stick in the highest court.
The 2nd Amendment uses the term militia in a dependent clause. The dependent clause was still a dependent clause in the 18th century. To claim that the 2nd reflects a right of the state to regulate arms, when every other Amendment in the Bill of Rights asserts an individual liberty, is to ignore not only the clear language of the Amendment, but also the many writings of the founders which clarify their intent. Only a lawyer or a judge or someone whose fear of guns has unbalanced his judgement would claim that the federal government has not breached the 2nd. That they have done so is not the fault of those who framed the Amendment. It's the fault of those who for their own purposes decided to ignore the Amendment-- and got away with it.
On a side note, consider this: if you're so happy to take the text of the Constitution/Bill of Rights perfectly literally, why aren't you happy to take all the laws of the day? Especially, the laws written/supported by those very authors of the Constitution? What about the laws against Sodomy? And the restriction against Women voters which is implied by the literal use of "All MEN are created equal"?
Because, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress, the states, and local governmental units. The Constitution is the touchstone by which the legality of those laws is judged. The Bill of Rights is designed to prevent a tyranny of the Majority; that is why it is so much more difficult to pass a Constitutional Amendment than a new law.
As to the matter of women voting, have you forgotten that women received the vote via a Constitutional Amendment?
And here we have a perfect example of how the Constitution has been largely ignored in the latter half of the 20th Century. When moralists attempted to impose their vision of an alcohol-free country on their fellow Americans, they understood that they must pass a Constitutional Amendment to do so, since the Constitution did not give the federal government this power. When a similar pack of moral totalitarians decided to restrict access to various drugs of which they did not approve, they did so by simply ignoring the fact that the Constitution affords the federal government no such power. That they intended duplicity is a matter of historical fact, since the first restrictions of these unpopular drugs were made in the form of prohibitive taxation schemes.
No, the Constitution is not "difficult" or "complex." It's like a great city bombed into a warren of ruins, through which only certain trained pathfinders can move. But the original map was clear, and in my opinion, restoration is more vital than endlessly burrowing through the rubble.
Seemed to me that Bruce assiduously avoided saying anything at all informative. Maybe it's just me.
It never once uses the word "internet" either. Is it your contention that the Constitution is therefore irrelevant to any matter concerning the internet?
Furthermore, your argument is hung precariously on a semantic hook which does not support it, at all. When the founding fathers talked about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" what do you think they were talking about, if not privacy?
Your understanding of the Constitution is fundamentally flawed. The Bill of Rights is an addendum, spliced onto the body of the Constitution by those who feared that unless certain rights were explicitly enumerated, the government would run roughshod over individual liberties. But the basic concept of the Constitution is that the federal government has certain powers-- and no others. In other words, if the Constitution does not explicitly allow the federal government to curtail the privacy of its citizens, it is prohibited from doing so. 10th Amendment says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Unfortunately, the feds have grabbed all manner of powers to which they are not entitled, and ideologues on the Supreme Court have permitted it to happen.
As a public service, here's a clue: When the bank forecloses on your farm, and the sheriff comes to evict your family, he will bring guns. If you refuse to leave, a gun will be put to your head.
It's a clever analogy, but inaccurate, inasmuch as you can't rip and burn a copy of your ocean front home for all your friends.
This is a popular view, and makes it more comfortable to accept the idea of domination by powerful police and military organizations. I believe it to be incorrect.
First of all, an uprising in America would not take the form of such Hollywood scenarios as Red Dawn. It would in all likelihood begin in the urban centers. Urban fighting is very different from fighting in open country, particularly if the people in power count the urban infrastructure as part of their assets. In other words, the American government is very unlikely to drop battlefield nukes on Manhattan, because they'd be destroying their own possessions. This scenario applies to many other aspects of a popular American uprising-- from powerplants to factories to transportation. The military would be constrained in its use of overwhelming force by the practical problems of occupying its own country.
Secondly, harassing tactics could prove so expensive that the authorities might be forced to negotiate with the insurgents. This has happened thousands of times in human history-- an inferior force has forced concessions from a superior force because it's cheaper than fighting a war.
Finally, proponents of the "resistance is futile" viewpoint seem to assume that American soldiers are robots who would feel no misgivings about crushing their own people. I think that's nonsense. Members of our military have grown up with the idea that this is a free country, and that freedom is a good thing. A sizable portion of them would, in my opinion, mutiny-- if asked to kill their own people. These mutineers would provide both military expertise and powerful weapons to the insurgents.
History provides numerous examples of disarmed people who were tyrannized by their own leaders. Far fewer examples can be found of this happening to armed people. Remember the American Revolution. The idea that the American rabble might defeat trained British troops and their mercenaries was an idea so ridiculous that few in England took it seriously. Until it was too late.
Yes, it would, because then there would be two politically powerful organizations defending the 2nd Amendment. The right to own weapons is one of the most important civil liberties, because without it, Americans would have to rely solely on the innate benevolence of government to preserve their other liberties.
By the way, the 2nd Amendment has been curtailed, in many ways. When I was a kid, you could order a war surplus rifle in good working condition for 20 bucks, from an ad in the back of a comic book, and the Post Office would deliver it to your house. And oddly enough, there was far less gun violence then than there is now-- especially among kids.
Still, I take your point. It's true that many ACLU members fear and hate guns, just as many NRA members fear and hate dissent. But in fact, they ought to be working together, not at cross-purposes.
Maybe I'm just early here, but it astonishes me that no one has posted a comment, except for trolls and ACs.
It's stuff like this that gives me hope that I'll live long enough to get a trip into space before I die. The government, as it usually does with everything it attempts, seems to have completely screwed up the exploration of space. It's been over 30 years since we sent a human being to another world, for heaven's sake.
I'm writing in Rutan for President in 2004. At least he's actually built something other than a portfolio.
From the article:
The (technology) executives felt the government's plan was "not sufficiently strong because many of the key recommendations had been `watered down' and were not `mandatory,"' Undersecretary Kenneth Juster wrote.
In this case, isn't "ineffective" a good thing? The "technology executives" who want "stronger" regulation are probably not friends of open source software. In late years, the government hasn't had a reassuring track record, whenever it exerts its power.
Maybe this is a dopey consideration, and I'm just a soft-headed idealist, but I no longer buy anything made in Thailand, if I can help it.
Here's the deal: In February, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced that in three months, Thailand would win the war on drugs. When the attempt officially ended, according to the Associated Press, 2,274 Thais had been killed. The government said that only about 35 of these killings were committed by the police, in justifiable self-defense, but the Thai people and various human rights organizations believe that many more of these killings were done by the police in extrajudicial executions.
This seems barbaric to me. The only way I have of expressing my opinion of these acts is to not spend my money on Thai goods.
P.S. There are still drugs in Thailand. Surprising, isn't it?
You're missing the point entirely. Yes, of course it's generally accepted that human life did not originate in the New World, but the original poster's remark was a non-sequitur, or at best a semantic quibble. It's as if a prosecutor claimed that the defendant murdered Bob, and the defense attorney responded with "No, his name was actually Robert." Is that really a point worth making?
Of course, Comrade, you are free... free to "choose correctly." Free to act in accordance with the good of the state. So long as you do nothing of which we disapprove, you are perfectly free. Is that what you mean by "freedom?"
People who believe their own moral system to be the only acceptable one make very poor advocates for freedom, because they cannot grasp the most basic fact about freedom. In a free society, you must grant freedom to those you despise, not just to those of whom you approve. The freedom to act "correctly" is the freedom you get in the People's Republic of China. That's not my idea of freedom.
No, sorry, won't cater to your weird conservative paranoia. The original poster wasn't being anti-American. He was only pointing out that the good ole days weren't always good. I presume he's an American, and therefore used American examples.
It's folks like you, who shut their eyes to any criticism of America, who may eventually cause the destruction of this great country. Societies either progress or decline, and we're currently declining, in the most profound of American values-- personal liberty. Refusing to admit that problems exist will not solve those problems. Ignoring those problems doesn't make you a patriot, it makes you a traitor.
America was not made great by men and women who believed America was perfect.
This has to be the most unimaginative and juvenile way of justifying the Bad Things that have been done in America. "But Mommy, Jimmy did so-and-so!"
Particularly pointless was this pedantic little remark about Native Americans: "There are no such things as Native Americans, we all migrated here at one time or another from Eurasia." Allrighty then. I guess it's okay that we slaughtered most of them and stole their land, because they didn't actually exist. I guess if the Chinese decide to take North America from us, it'll be okay, because we're not really Americans, just more-or-less recent immigrants. After all, if there was nothing wrong with dispossesing the redskins, who lived here for millenia, there'd be even less wrong with dispossessing the white folks, who've only been here a tiny fraction of that time.
It's amazing how fast we forget and take things out of historical context...
No shit.
I'm not a lawyer, but PACs do this all the time. As far as I know, there are no laws that restrict citizens from contributing to the campaigns of politicians from outside their own district. I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
It seems to me that the net-savvy have not, for the most part, used their power. Make all the jokes you want about slashdotters living in their parents' basement and pining after non-plastic girls.. They're still a little smarter and more politically aware than many other groups, but they aren't catered to by any of the major political power machines. They tend to be disorganized and ineffective in their responses to various liberal and conservative Big Brother outrages. If some of that energy and rancor could be harnessed in the promotion of good government, positive things might happen.
What would, I think, make the most difference would be to write to Smith and tell him that if he persists in his unAmerican campaign against opensource software, you're going to send money to anyone who opposes him in the next election. And then follow through, if he doesn't change his position. A website devoted to taking donations for that purpose, and reporting unfavorably on Smith's activities would be a good thought-provoker for Smith. When next year rolls around, it would be a good time to remind slashdotters with a little fun money what Smith stands for. Could be a substantial source of anxiety for Smith.
If, like me, you had an online business, you wouldn't be asking this question.
Good thing this brilliant idea is optional. If it were mandatory, I'd have to let my earthlink account go. I'm not willing to risk confusing or offending any potential customers by making them respond to a challenge.
In my opinion, this is yet another demonstration of the folly of imposing spam solutions from above. The most effective, and least destructive solutions are applied by endusers, not government, and not ISPs. If you really want to do something about spam, develop Bayesian filters that are trivial to install, and easy for even the most computer-illiterate users to set up and use. Make 'em free, and seed the net.
It's not because they're inefficient that they can't compete on price. It's because they don't buy as many books as Walmart or even Borders and the other chain bookstores, and therefore they can't force the publishers to give them the same discounts the chains get.
Still, some folks would prefer the independent bookstores to stay in business for reasons of self-interest, and so we're willing to pay a little more for our books. Among those reasons: ambiance-- if you spend any time at bookstores, you'd like the experience to be as pleasant as possible, selection-- the chain bookstores seem to have a lot of books, but they buy books based primarily on which books sell the greatest numbers, unlike small specialty shops that carry a wider selection in their area of interest, and availability of small press titles-- you won't find small press books in the chain stores.
Finally, if your interests are primarily financial, reflect on the fact that mom and pop won't be able to buy your products if they go out of business. True, their store will be replaced by a chain store, with lots of minimum wageslaves-- but are those your best customers? And the profits from that chain will go elsewhere and won't be spent in your community.
Well, rats, now I have to let several perfectly good moderations go, just because I feel compelled to respond to this goofy idea.
Apparently vast numbers of Americans, including many who've sworn solemn oaths to defend the Constitution, don't understand the most basic fact about the document. The principle purpose of the Constitution is not to list the rights individual Americans have. The purpose is to limit the powers of the federal government to a few narrowly-constrained functions. If the Constitution does not specifically authorize the federal government to do a certain thing, it is not allowed to do that thing, Constitutionally speaking. That's why we had to have a Constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol on a federal level. (Apparently Americans used to have a better grasp of Constitutional principles than current Americans do.)
Therefore, the proper form of the previous poster's question is: "Can you show me in the Constitution/Bill of Rights where it says the federal government has the right to constrain or diminish in any way the privacy of American citizens?"
And the answer? Yes, I can show you the 4th Amendment, which details the circumstances under which the government can invade the privacy of Americans. Unfortunately, years of politically-active Supreme Courts have broadened the scope of the 4th Amendment to the point where it no longer provides any reasonable constraint on intrusive government prying.
Okay, say you're right and our military forces are all robotic True Believers who wouldn't mind slaughtering their fellow Americans. When you're standing meekly in the line that leads to the gas chambers, I'll be taking a few of the bastards with me. Of course, it's all the same in the end, I guess, but I prefer to go hard, instead of easy. I suspect there's a few million other rednecks (or gun-toting hippies, like me) who feel the same way. Could get messy for the forces of Our Glorious Homeland.
Jerry, you're a pretty good writer, but you don't know much about Vietnam. As I recall, you went there and shook a few ARVN hands. I spent a year there, so I feel entitled to my opinion.
Here are the sad facts: For every American who died in Vietnam, we killed at least 20 Vietnamese. We just got tired of dying before they did. They were tougher than we were, and that's likely to happen when you go to war for no better reason than to keep politicians in office.
Ask just about anyone who actually fought in Vietnam and they'll tell you the Army of South Vietnam was a joke. Who could blame them for being more concerned with personal survival than fighting and dying for a series of corrupt puppet governments? Think about it. How eager would you be to die for Thieu?
When the United States left Vietnam, the ARVN forces had the best military machine in SE Asia. On paper. But they wouldn't fight. That's the fact, and all the wishful historical revisionism in the world isn't going to change it.
South Viet Nam accordingly fell, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City; but that is not the same as our being kicked out by a handful of peasants with rifles.
We're gone, Jerry, and the peasants are in charge. There's no effective way to spin those facts.
By the way, you folks who are convinced that our military would unanimously crush any uprising... you're selling our soldiers short if you think they'd all start dropping napalm on American suburbs just because King George told them to. Some of them would, no doubt. We have our inevitable complement of good Germans here. But we also have true patriots in the military, who understand that there are lawful orders and then there are war crimes. I believe that if our forces were divided into those loyal to the current crop of politicians, and those loyal to the American ideal of liberty and the rule of law, the latter would own more military competence than the former, as well as the superior motivation.
I think not even Jerry would dispute the idea that motivation wins more wars than the latest weapons.
A bunch of peasants armed with little more than rifles kicked us out of Vietnam. Furthermore, studies have predicted that only slightly more than half of our soldiers would obey if ordered to fire on their fellow Americans. The remainder who aren't good Germans would, presumably, mutiny.
Read up on what a few urban Jews with small arms did during the reduction of the Warsaw ghetto. Had the European Jews of the late '30s been armed as well as the average redneck, there might not have been a Holocaust.