That's ludicrous. The only system of government that considers all liberty essential is, by definition, anarchy.
If the word is, as you seem to suggest, a qualifier, then it still distinguishes the essential from the non-essential. I'm much more inclined to believe that his usage was a matter of style, and that he was using "liberty" as a collective noun, like "sand", rather than to believe that he was advocating anarchy.
"Liberty" is not the same concept as "freedom", especially not in the sense you mean it, as in anarchy. Liberty is about your rights being respected, not about being "free" to make whatever choice pops into your head. You aren't "free" to go on a schoolyard killing spree, but you are still free. Only a sociopath thinks they have the "right" to do anything they may want to do, and that if they accept the law stopping them from doing it then they've sacrificed a "right" even though they would violate the rights of others*. A free society is one where the law exists to protect liberty, preventing both the government and subsets of the people from oppressing others. And here's the key: You don't have to give up any of your liberty to do so.
Anarchy actually has much less liberty than our republic, because anyone stronger than you can deny you your liberty entirely. To the extent that this still happens in our society (which is a lot of course) it is a corruption of the system. The intent of the system was to attempt to provide the safety and safe guards to preserve liberty, and no more. Every one of them at the Continental Congress, Ben Franklin especially, was concerned with their own liberty, and thought that a stronger centralized government was the way to do this. And they were very literally concerned about their safety, they had only recently fought off the British. "A little temporary safety" would have saved lives, but Ben is saying that isn't worth it if it costs you liberty. That's the context of the original quote, a literal admonishment not to sacrifice liberty for safety.
Which brings me to the grammatical argument. The word "essential" is a qualifier as in a modifier as in an adjective. In the phrase "essential liberty" it implies a sub-class of liberties that are non-essential as much as the phrase "painful pain", "necessary-for-human-metabolism O2", or "temporary safety". All safety is temporary, because life is dangerous and unpredictable. Using the adjective "temporary" is intended to remind you of that. Using "essential" as an adjective on "liberty" is the same.
This is a theme throughout Franklin's writings. That's why you'll never find him using this quote or anything like it in defense of sacrificing some amount of liberty that you might describe as "inessential". Though it would be easy to disprove my thesis if you found such an example.
* Or, lest offense be taken, libertarian, BSDL advocate, compulsive literalist, and other harmless folk trying to make points rather than actually feeling like they've lost some actual liberty, "inessential" or otherwise, by giving this up.
I'll have you know that Chief Engineer Piggi La Forge is a most fastidious pig, and it would be most shocking to find him anything but immaculate. Even your insinuation has sent him squealing off in dismay. Fortunately he didn't realize who exactly you were comparing to a pig, or I'd never be able to coax him from the shower.
The comment was made knowing that people want security and safety from that which they cannot control. He was warning that the ultimate price is your freedom so you should only trade it for what is permanently worth it and you should trade only what is necessary to achieve that goal.
So you do think he was saying it is okay to trade that subset of liberties ("liberties", not liberty, i.e. not what he said) which are essential, so long as the safety gained is permanent? As in, if Massachusets had been able to permanently save themselves from the dangers of war, then it would be reasonable to give up their liberty?
And you want to say this was Ben Franklin's point?
LOL, no.
All safety is temporary. All liberty is essential. Life is dangerous, and only worth living if you are free. That is the point.
Stop getting Ben Franklin to shill for your worldview when the man was not about trading liberty for anything -- read anything else the man wrote and tell me it supports this interpretation of the singular quote. He sacrificed safety to gain liberty. If you disagree with his worldview, then just stop quoting him.
They didn't have the FDA and similar agencies back then. "Liberty" and "freedom" aren't the same thing, by the way, and the right to serve people food in unsafe conditions is only "freedom" if you use an anarchic and sociopathic definition of "free".
If Thompson's bill was worth supporting before, then his bill should still be worth supporting after annoying e-mails, spam or for all I care: murder. If it was only worth supporting because he liked the guy, then it was never worth supporting to begin with.
In an ideal world of complete knowledge and perfect logic, sure.
In reality, if the Senator's support for the bill was based in part on Jack Thompson's explanation of what the bill would accomplish and why it was important, and the weight he gave to Jack Thompson's opinion was based on the assumption that JT wasn't a wingnut hyper-aggressive narcissistic asshole, then yes it's perfectly reasonable that getting harassed by JT would change his opinion of the bill.
Yes it would be nice if congressman read the bills and voted on them based solely on their own logical analysis of the bill. But realistically even if they always tried, they can't "logically" deduce the effect of every bill, and thus the outcome is a subjective qualitative prediction at best, and thus the opinion of others can in fact be relevant to deciding whether to support it.
Obviously those "others" shouldn't include JT unless you want to be sure of what isn't true, but hey the Senator figured that out with a little help from Ol' Jack himself in due time.:)
Maybe they figured out that everyone immediately jumped to Firefly when they heard Serenity, and they didn't want that association.
Why would they care? They didn't care about naming the first shuttle Enterprise after a vote, which obviously associated with Star Trek, a show that at the time was mostly popular with a select audience of geeks upset that the show was canceled due to low ratings. But if you didn't know or care about Star Trek, there was a history of naval vessels bearing the name so it was relevant. Serenity doesn't have a history like that, but it does fit perfectly with the other two modules and thus would not cause anyone who didn't care about Firefly to say "Why the arf did they name it that?"
Not that I care, but I don't see why NASA would either.
If you can't come up with an argument without quoting trite, overused phrases from Bartlett's book of quotations, keep your trap shut.
It isn't my argument, so I don't care. Frankly after reading about this I'm not inclined to think it wasn't a completely legitimate, rights-abiding warrant.
But when someone tries to twist the words of Ben Franklin to suggest it's okay to trade some liberties for some safety, as long as they aren't those select few essential ones you know, then I've got a problem.
Yes, "per night" would be a correct statement. So would "per day" when context clearly implies the unit-of-time definition of day. Since ultimately what is of interest is the fraction of time the satellite is in darkness (units of time/units of time) it's the more apt way of putting it. Regardless, "per day" is completely correct, and thus pedantry is not served by trying to correct it.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT I hate the many paraphrased forms of that quote. As soon as you take out the part about the liberty given up being essential, and the safety temporary, you end up with a wholly unreasonable statement.
We sacrifice inessential liberties for safety all the time.
Benjamin Franklin considered all liberty to be essential. That's why he said "Essential liberty", not "Essential liberties". "Essential" modifies the concept of liberty itself, not certain particular instances of liberties. This was not an accidental word choice.
Also, I feel it is safe to say that Franklin considered all safety won through the sacrifice of liberty to be temporary.
He chose those words specifically so as to remind the reader that liberty is essential, and safety is temporary.
The spirit of Ben Franklin's quote was really that there are some very particular freedoms that should not be sacrificed. That one about being free from unreasonable search and seizure is just non-negotiable.
Actually the spirit of his quote is much closer to the paraphrasings than to your interpretation. He didn't mean it's okay to sacrifice "inessential" liberties any more than he meant that it's okay to sacrifice "essential" liberties if the safety you are gaining is permanent.
They're overly broad, and they come from a place of blind, ideological patriotism.
Benjamin Franklin was an ideological patriot. How sad that we'd try to revise history to make him anything else.
It's a violation of B.C.'s Friends of Gays policy. Too many emails mass-sent proudly proclaiming their friends' sexuality clogs the network, so they have to stop it.
So what you're saying is that even in the distant future humans will be so amazingly primitive that they'll still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea?
Plus, if I understand the device, then it's powered by a couple huge weights slowly falling down a screw. Whatever future society encounters it may not fully understand it, and based on the "Doomsday myth" might assume something is supposed to happen when the weights reach the bottom. There'll be a whole society of people who want to find out, and on that auspicious day they'll travel up to the mountain and have a big party and sit around speculating what'll happen. Will a secret passage open up containing the wisdom of the ancients? Will the whole thing collapse as if mimicking the destruction that will soon engulf the world? Then the moment finally comes, the bells sound one final time, the weights settle at the bottom of the machine... and it stops moving. That's it. They wait around for a while, but still nothing happens. They all leave, and one is heard to mutter "Whoever these Society of the Long Now people were, they're a bunch of jerks."
Tell him you're studying a new art form that merges chaos theory with Feng Shui. He doesn't want to mess up your coding by disturbing your Chaos Qi, now does he?
Slashdot Mirror
That's ludicrous. The only system of government that considers all liberty essential is, by definition, anarchy.
If the word is, as you seem to suggest, a qualifier, then it still distinguishes the essential from the non-essential. I'm much more inclined to believe that his usage was a matter of style, and that he was using "liberty" as a collective noun, like "sand", rather than to believe that he was advocating anarchy.
"Liberty" is not the same concept as "freedom", especially not in the sense you mean it, as in anarchy. Liberty is about your rights being respected, not about being "free" to make whatever choice pops into your head. You aren't "free" to go on a schoolyard killing spree, but you are still free. Only a sociopath thinks they have the "right" to do anything they may want to do, and that if they accept the law stopping them from doing it then they've sacrificed a "right" even though they would violate the rights of others*. A free society is one where the law exists to protect liberty, preventing both the government and subsets of the people from oppressing others. And here's the key: You don't have to give up any of your liberty to do so.
Anarchy actually has much less liberty than our republic, because anyone stronger than you can deny you your liberty entirely. To the extent that this still happens in our society (which is a lot of course) it is a corruption of the system. The intent of the system was to attempt to provide the safety and safe guards to preserve liberty, and no more. Every one of them at the Continental Congress, Ben Franklin especially, was concerned with their own liberty, and thought that a stronger centralized government was the way to do this. And they were very literally concerned about their safety, they had only recently fought off the British. "A little temporary safety" would have saved lives, but Ben is saying that isn't worth it if it costs you liberty. That's the context of the original quote, a literal admonishment not to sacrifice liberty for safety.
Which brings me to the grammatical argument. The word "essential" is a qualifier as in a modifier as in an adjective. In the phrase "essential liberty" it implies a sub-class of liberties that are non-essential as much as the phrase "painful pain", "necessary-for-human-metabolism O2", or "temporary safety". All safety is temporary, because life is dangerous and unpredictable. Using the adjective "temporary" is intended to remind you of that. Using "essential" as an adjective on "liberty" is the same.
This is a theme throughout Franklin's writings. That's why you'll never find him using this quote or anything like it in defense of sacrificing some amount of liberty that you might describe as "inessential". Though it would be easy to disprove my thesis if you found such an example.
* Or, lest offense be taken, libertarian, BSDL advocate, compulsive literalist, and other harmless folk trying to make points rather than actually feeling like they've lost some actual liberty, "inessential" or otherwise, by giving this up.
I'm an idiot.
Ohhhhh... If you want it to be possessive,
It's just "I-T-S."
But if it's supposed to be a contraction,
Then it's "I-T-apostrophe-S,"
Scalawag.
No, the easiest way to remember is with a song (starts about 10s in).
It's not surprising when a pig gets dirty.
I'll have you know that Chief Engineer Piggi La Forge is a most fastidious pig, and it would be most shocking to find him anything but immaculate. Even your insinuation has sent him squealing off in dismay. Fortunately he didn't realize who exactly you were comparing to a pig, or I'd never be able to coax him from the shower.
Truly, there is never a time to quote Leia. Not even on Slashdot. Truly.
I know. Somehow, I've always known.
The comment was made knowing that people want security and safety from that which they cannot control. He was warning that the ultimate price is your freedom so you should only trade it for what is permanently worth it and you should trade only what is necessary to achieve that goal.
So you do think he was saying it is okay to trade that subset of liberties ("liberties", not liberty, i.e. not what he said) which are essential, so long as the safety gained is permanent? As in, if Massachusets had been able to permanently save themselves from the dangers of war, then it would be reasonable to give up their liberty?
And you want to say this was Ben Franklin's point?
LOL, no.
All safety is temporary. All liberty is essential. Life is dangerous, and only worth living if you are free. That is the point.
Stop getting Ben Franklin to shill for your worldview when the man was not about trading liberty for anything -- read anything else the man wrote and tell me it supports this interpretation of the singular quote. He sacrificed safety to gain liberty. If you disagree with his worldview, then just stop quoting him.
They didn't have the FDA and similar agencies back then. "Liberty" and "freedom" aren't the same thing, by the way, and the right to serve people food in unsafe conditions is only "freedom" if you use an anarchic and sociopathic definition of "free".
Superfreighter -- a unit for large amounts of particulate and SO2 pollution. Approximately equal to 50 million cars.
Whoa, whoa. "Car" isn't a standard unit of measurement. I assume you meant Volkswagon Beetles, but then the conversion factor might not be the same.
If Thompson's bill was worth supporting before, then his bill should still be worth supporting after annoying e-mails, spam or for all I care: murder. If it was only worth supporting because he liked the guy, then it was never worth supporting to begin with.
In an ideal world of complete knowledge and perfect logic, sure.
In reality, if the Senator's support for the bill was based in part on Jack Thompson's explanation of what the bill would accomplish and why it was important, and the weight he gave to Jack Thompson's opinion was based on the assumption that JT wasn't a wingnut hyper-aggressive narcissistic asshole, then yes it's perfectly reasonable that getting harassed by JT would change his opinion of the bill.
Yes it would be nice if congressman read the bills and voted on them based solely on their own logical analysis of the bill. But realistically even if they always tried, they can't "logically" deduce the effect of every bill, and thus the outcome is a subjective qualitative prediction at best, and thus the opinion of others can in fact be relevant to deciding whether to support it.
Obviously those "others" shouldn't include JT unless you want to be sure of what isn't true, but hey the Senator figured that out with a little help from Ol' Jack himself in due time. :)
After a major cyber-terror attack: ICANHAZURINTERNETS Act
Not enough emphasis on the duh, I think. What you just said is "Give me a cheeseburger and assrape me."
Really? *scribbles into notebook titled "Essential Chinese Phrases"*
Maybe they figured out that everyone immediately jumped to Firefly when they heard Serenity, and they didn't want that association.
Why would they care? They didn't care about naming the first shuttle Enterprise after a vote, which obviously associated with Star Trek, a show that at the time was mostly popular with a select audience of geeks upset that the show was canceled due to low ratings. But if you didn't know or care about Star Trek, there was a history of naval vessels bearing the name so it was relevant. Serenity doesn't have a history like that, but it does fit perfectly with the other two modules and thus would not cause anyone who didn't care about Firefly to say "Why the arf did they name it that?"
Not that I care, but I don't see why NASA would either.
Soon, all Jack will have left is an empty clenched fist, which he will be free to wave at anyone passing by his refrigerator box.
Just wishful thinking on my part...
If you can't come up with an argument without quoting trite, overused phrases from Bartlett's book of quotations, keep your trap shut.
It isn't my argument, so I don't care. Frankly after reading about this I'm not inclined to think it wasn't a completely legitimate, rights-abiding warrant.
But when someone tries to twist the words of Ben Franklin to suggest it's okay to trade some liberties for some safety, as long as they aren't those select few essential ones you know, then I've got a problem.
Yes, "per night" would be a correct statement. So would "per day" when context clearly implies the unit-of-time definition of day. Since ultimately what is of interest is the fraction of time the satellite is in darkness (units of time/units of time) it's the more apt way of putting it. Regardless, "per day" is completely correct, and thus pedantry is not served by trying to correct it.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT I hate the many paraphrased forms of that quote. As soon as you take out the part about the liberty given up being essential, and the safety temporary, you end up with a wholly unreasonable statement.
We sacrifice inessential liberties for safety all the time.
Benjamin Franklin considered all liberty to be essential. That's why he said "Essential liberty", not "Essential liberties". "Essential" modifies the concept of liberty itself, not certain particular instances of liberties. This was not an accidental word choice.
Also, I feel it is safe to say that Franklin considered all safety won through the sacrifice of liberty to be temporary.
He chose those words specifically so as to remind the reader that liberty is essential, and safety is temporary.
The spirit of Ben Franklin's quote was really that there are some very particular freedoms that should not be sacrificed. That one about being free from unreasonable search and seizure is just non-negotiable.
Actually the spirit of his quote is much closer to the paraphrasings than to your interpretation. He didn't mean it's okay to sacrifice "inessential" liberties any more than he meant that it's okay to sacrifice "essential" liberties if the safety you are gaining is permanent.
They're overly broad, and they come from a place of blind, ideological patriotism.
Benjamin Franklin was an ideological patriot. How sad that we'd try to revise history to make him anything else.
... on Planet Suck! HAR HAR HAR!
Ah, this must be that new form of pedantry I've heard about, where it's no longer about actual correctness.
It's a violation of B.C.'s Friends of Gays policy. Too many emails mass-sent proudly proclaiming their friends' sexuality clogs the network, so they have to stop it.
Rent-a-cops can still call Bust-your-face-a-cops. TFA says it was the state police that served the search warrant. So there you go.
So what you're saying is that even in the distant future humans will be so amazingly primitive that they'll still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea?
Aw, bummer. So in other words the future society will find it, and it'll already be stopped long before reaching the 10,000 year count. :(
Oh well, they can still assume it was a doomsday countdown. :)
Lol, yeah, I can even see that happening.
Plus, if I understand the device, then it's powered by a couple huge weights slowly falling down a screw. Whatever future society encounters it may not fully understand it, and based on the "Doomsday myth" might assume something is supposed to happen when the weights reach the bottom. There'll be a whole society of people who want to find out, and on that auspicious day they'll travel up to the mountain and have a big party and sit around speculating what'll happen. Will a secret passage open up containing the wisdom of the ancients? Will the whole thing collapse as if mimicking the destruction that will soon engulf the world? Then the moment finally comes, the bells sound one final time, the weights settle at the bottom of the machine... and it stops moving. That's it. They wait around for a while, but still nothing happens. They all leave, and one is heard to mutter "Whoever these Society of the Long Now people were, they're a bunch of jerks."
Since that wouldn't help me make a pretentious linux nerd joke.
Tell him you're studying a new art form that merges chaos theory with Feng Shui. He doesn't want to mess up your coding by disturbing your Chaos Qi, now does he?