The "we" would be the people who live in these democracies, and I think we all agree on which countries are such a democracy and which aren't.
Which ones are they then? Is it the surveillance country without free speech that the UK has turned into? Or the my economy collapsed 20 years ago and there is unemployment through the roof which is so bad that there are riots in the street several times a year France? Please tell me where this liberal democracy has done more then just lip service. Sure, you have individual rights, but can you actually say that anyone is free? Or more free then they were 20 years ago?
Nice strawman. Yes, if you look at it from the very narrow perspective of the last seven years, and only in a certain north-american country, then yes, you could get that impression. I was kinda aiming for the larger picture, liberal democracies have been going strong for about 200 years now, and we are richer, happier, and much, much better off than the people living in countries that are dictatorships, oligarchies, theocracies or socialist republics. I'm not saying our system is perfect, but it sure as hell is the best we've seen so far.
Nice strawman indeed. If this isn't the pot calling the kettle black. The last seven years has nothing on what I said and the north American country your referring to wasn't even on the radar. Perhaps you should look into what your actually saying a little more but life isn't what you think it is.
The federal government was a permisive government in that it needed explicit permision from the states to act. This permision was granted through the constitution and it's amendments which also directly stopped any other allowed act from walking in certain areas. Being the supreme law of the land does not change that nor does it entitle the US federal government to act outside of the scope in which the UK's parliament or some other government could. Don't argue an effect as a reason.
bsolutely not. The original States yielded their sovereignty to the federal government when the Constitution was ratified: they cannot "enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility," nor can they "lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports" or "lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War", without Congressional approval.
No they did not. The states yeilded aspects of their sovereignty to the federal governemnt. The federal government was supposed to be a representative of the states that dealt with certain aspects of sovereignty in order to keep a uniform set of rules across the states. The states retained all other rights of sovereignty and actually do have the same sovereign immunity against lawsuits as the federal government does and Obama's DOJ just argued in the warrent-less wire tapping cases. States can and do have laws that are different then the federal government's. Some of them increase penalties for the same violations, some of them decrease penalties and some have no penalties whatsoever. Further more, if the states have yielded their sovereignty, there wouldn't be jurisdictional limits to the enforcement of federal laws. The feds are very limited to what and when or where they can enforce laws. I suggest you look into the situation a little more deeply before showing your ignorance. BTW, it's congressional approval, not constitutional. The constitution which is what gives the federal government it's powers, limits the state's abilities in certain matters to that of the federal government and to the congress.
No. "We the People of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Not "We the States..."
Quit fucking around with semantics. Post the rest of the preamble. "We the people of the United States" See where it says states? Ever wonder why other countries call a state a country? "in order to form a more perfect union" Union of states, not people. The people of the states formed a union of the states. "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America" for the what? United States of America, not the United people or United citizens of America.
You really need to study up on some history. Look into the articles of confederation for instance. And if your seeing anything about the civil war, you need to find another teacher.
Has the original balance of power shifted from State to Federal government? Sure. Some of that is due to changes in the Constitution; some of it is extraconstitutional or downright unconstitutional.
With the exception of moving the senators from being appointed by the states to elected by the people (big mistake), the rest of the powers lost were due to expansions of interpretations constitutional clauses that are now taken to mean something outside it's original context. This really st
The problem is that you simply cannot blast music loud enough to keep someone from sleeping. It will give them hearing damage and end up lowering the volume through the degradation of your hearing. Anything loud enough to cause an annoyance but no permanent damage can be ignored and you can sleep through it. It happens all the time with people falling asleep while driving their cars, running heavy equipment and so on.
If they are making noises loud enough to damage the hearing, then they are damaging the person and by definition torturing them if doing it on purpose. If they are playing loud music, then it simply cannot be torture no matter how much you want it to be. Find something more substantial to claim Amerika is evil with.
I find it funny that you even have the balls to say crap like that.
First of all, torturing is a legal definition and for the most part, to the definitions we have accepted, we have not spent the last 5 years torturing people. That's just fabricated bullshit and you probably know it.
Second, the US didn't invade any country against international law. That's more bullshit. The entire idea that the US violated international law requires the assumption that we gave up our right of sovereignty. That simply hasn't happened. If you actually knew how the world works and how countries in the world get their power or right of sovereignty, you wouldn't be making that statement at all. The US has given some of it's sovereignty up when it signs and ratifies treaties but it has given nothing up that would make it subject to any international law that causes Iraq to be illegal.
Finally, you are a complete idiot full of bullshit. US soldiers who have violated the rules of war or the USMCJ have been punished. Your last statement of "massacring its population with impunity" is completely unfounded and cannot be derived by any other means that your complete and utter ignorance.
Now, you have been wrong on the first three parts of your comment, should we even examine your opinion on the role of modern democracy or should we just leave it as your a complete tool who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground? It's up to you.
Miner parties have a greater say then you think they do. Their biggest problem is that they are run by idiots who have no clue to how the system was set up or why it was set up that way.
The federal government isn't supposed to be the supreme government of the land, it is supposed to be the governing body over a collections of states that united the states (read state as individual countries) that takes specific roles and tasks on as outlined by the constitution. The US federal government was never designed to have the same powers as the UK's parliament or any other country's government. Yet you have third parties and probably a lot of the people supporting them (like you) that have no real concept of where the power is or what the fucking purpose the the US government is. The US government is supposed to be a government of the states, not the people. The people had a say in how it operated because of the house of representatives but the senate and president was always selected by the states until they allowed the people to elect the senate in recent times.
The fact that you attempt to compare the US government to au's and claim the US system is shit just shows how little you actually know about it.
I'm not sure we all "agree" nor and I sure who "we" are.
The "western liberal" in democracy is pretty much what seems to be taking rights away and making things less free either directly or indirectly. If you think everyone agrees to that, your crazy.
Louder then it would need to be to cause permanent hearing damage in which case it would defeat itself as a form of torture.
Stress is not torture. I don't care how much you want it to be, stress, your job, your kids- all of which is tied around stress, just is not torture. Having to put up with something you don't want to is not torture. Having to do something you don't want to is not torture.
I don't know if I would want an Easter-egg that just popped up and said "* no known fatal defects * a decent, logical GUI not designed by a geek with ADD/ADHD".
Maybe I'm missing something but I want something a little more snazzier.
First of all, earsplittingly painfully loud is something you injected and is opinion not a fact.
Second, I don't think I ever denied that hitting them with a hose, putting them into stress positions, or water boarding was torture. Listening to loud music, watching movies they don't like, and shit like that aren't torture.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that any sovereign nation has to get permission from the UN or any other outside entity in order to act on it's own interest. The point of not getting permission from the UN is just moot because the UN could also authorize an unprovoked attack against an innocent nation just as easily. But from a UN perspective, there was a resolution that said if X wasn't done, there would be serious consequences. It may be a stretch of liberty to claim war was an intended consequence but it is one of the most serious consequences availible.
Second, what turned out to be "no real reason whatsoever" was a myth perpetrated by the leaders of Iraq at the time and was understood to have been a creditable threat by the international community leading up to the war. The international community disagreed with the actions that needed to be taken to response to the threat but it isn't like everyone actually thought there was "no real reason whatsoever" when the actions were starting to take place. Things get even more muddled up when you consider the countries like France and family members of UN officials who were violating UN sanctions and actually using them to make beneficial oil deals with Iraq which defeated the applied attempts to gain satisfactory compliance to the mandates of the armistice agreements ending the first gulf war.
In other words, Iraq wasn't complying because attempts to force them into compliance were undermined by the greed of key players in actions taken against them and Iraq itself due to fear of attack from neighboring countries it wasn't kind to in the past created the entire myth of yellow cake, WMDs, and terrorist connections. Applying what we know now to an action we took then is about as bright of an idea as blaming Marie Curie for the Nuclear bomb. All the information availible today has to be applied as it was known in the past in order to fully understand the actions of the past.
As for the war being compared to an accident, I didn't say that. I said that the differences in the intentions are the same. In other words, A-B=C but C-d!=a+b the process in looking at the differences are the same but the similarities stop there or don't have to go any further. Now, is doing X different then doing Y, and if so, which is worse, that was the comparison.
Obviously, or at least in any sane interpretation of the events, yes there is a difference. Collateral damage which there is/was an attempt to avoid but unsuccessful, is completely different then raping and killing a large portion of your population that you are entrusted to provide the security for. Saddam attempted genocide against his own citizens, many of them completely innocent of any wrong doing and that is different then collateral casualties of war.
And I understand why you went the path you did. It's a line that immigration advocates have been trying to blur for a while now so that when you are apposed to people illegally entering or staying in the country and don't give a rats ass about those who do it legally, you end up being a xenophobe, racist, or something and the person in the wrong gets reversed to you.
But keep in mind, generally, when anyone makes a reference to the legality or illegal nature of something, they are talking about the law's interpretation of the situation. Granted, there will be people who will be wrong and there will be idiots who just don't know what they are talking about. I would hope I was clear enough in my presentation over it when I said "had to do with the prosecutor not prosecuting illegal aliens known to have broken the law (that's why their called illegal aliens, not immigrants)". But then again, with the blurring I mentioned earlier, I understand your reaction.
Shaving and bathing, ok, that's not torture, that's promoting good hygiene in a community environment so that the prisoners don't wind up with lice.
Shaving was listed as a form of torture on the document posted at wiki leaks.
Being made to listen to music you don't like isn't so bad, but it is when you're made to listen to the same song over and over at a high volume for days. Making fun of their ideals or making them watch a movie for retribution, infantile and not even close to what I expect from professional soldiers, let alone professional soldiers under my employ.
There is a difference between unprofessional behavior and torture. My problem isn't with the unprofessional behavior- the soldiers could have been asses for all I care. My point was that things that normal people in all societies are exposed to on daily basis's are being called torture simply to inflate the charge. Yes, it is wrong if the military was unprofessional and acted like school children or recess bullies, but is it really torture? I say no it isn't and it can't be when people are exposed to the same or very similar shit day in and day out in the same society housing the prisoners.
Yea, I apologize for that. I was talking everyone else' "your mean" comments and applying it to yours too.
As for people being kicked and so on, I wasn't really talking about that, I was speaking to specific acts like loud music or music you don't like or videos and movies and crap. That's not torture by any stretch of the imagination- even if your shackled to the floor or something. How about someone on house arrest for a minor non-violent crime who can ask but doesn't get permision to change the channel, how about someone who just can't leave at all? Hospital room usually have one TV and two beds, sick patients can't leave, are they being tortured because they were forced to watch wheel of fortune or Matlock?
If it is something that normal people in the society can be exposed to, then I don't see how it could ever be considered torture. My father spent the first 20 years of his working life in a factory with loud machinery and this was years ago before ear protection was more then a good idea. When I was 7, I lived in a house at the bottom of a hill on a highway route and all through the night, we heard semi trucks coming down it with their jake brake on, when I was 25, I live above a bar that constantly had loud music playing and I couldn't even hear the TV over it. That's just my life, I'm sure there are worse examples out there of every day people enduring more because of money problems, choice, society at large or whatever. I simply cannot see how it can be considered torture all the sudden. If the county jail was in the same spot as my apartment above the bar, would the Geneva convention kick in? I doubt it and I don't think anyone should think it would. It simply is not torture.
here is NO form of punishment or harassment acceptable under the US Constitution that's not ordered by a judge and/or jury.
Really? So then "except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger" is just filler material so the fifth amendment doesn't look like a virus or something?
There is a problem here. None of the people, (Saddam included) were being punished. They were being detained and interrogated which is an act of military operation. It's nice to ignore these little facts when pushing your points but attention to detail is something that is really needed here. Especially if someone takes this to the supreme court for a ruling and they half ass it like you are and end up with a ruling that doesn't address the real situation.
The problem is that so many things that are common to all societies all around the world are considered torture now. Shit that you experience as a child is now torture, crap you willingly did as a teen or college student is now torture. When you say treat someone right, is that right some code for better then everyone else in the society the prisoner is being held in?
I mean come on, dropping a bible into the piss bucket is torture? What if it was a copy of Clinton's biography or a tale of two cities? Is that torture too?
It doesn't matter if it is cleaner, it just isn't torture. Prisoners are not supposed to be comfortable, they are after all, prisoners. We can argue to the level of comfort/uncomfort to the extent of convicted verses accused but you don't do a crime just to get a "better life" then members of the society. There is real torture and when you start calling watching a movie or TV show that you don't like, or listening to music you don't like, or having the lights left on 24 hours a day, which is something that everyone has done at some point in time, torture in the same sense as hooking generators up to your genitals or breaking fingertips then dropping food and water- clothing just out of reach, or starvation, or whatever that causes direct physical harm, you weaken the argument against the real torture.
I'm sorry that you seem to think what would equate to a kids life of having to watch the news or whatever instead of cartoons because the adults in the room control the TV to torture. But that causes no physical or mental harm to anyone and simply isn't torture. Sure, we have an obligation to not harm prisoners, but it's being taken way too far.
I understand the obvious difference between killing somebody in immediate self-defense, and doing the same just because you can. I wasn't defending Hussein in any way. Just saying that "inside his own country's borders" and "to his own people" is a silly argument coming from the same Americans who financed the gratuitous war on Iraq. I'm saying, Kurds (you know, the ones that got gassed) are still trying to get their own country, but you never hear a peep from the establishment in Washington about Turkey cracking down on them.
Well, we did support the kurds until Clinton dropped the ball. That's sort of pointless now, but Bush did work with them and put political pressure on Turkey to remain civil to them. The problem is more to the point that the country the kurds want to create encompasses part of Turkey and there is a history of raids in attempts to take ground and redraw the borders.
If my brother punches me, it's very different from some douchebag who doesn't even live in the same town, and who then claims it's in my best interests while setting up camp in my backyard.
Well, actually, getting punched by family is different then getting punched by a complete stranger. But that is still different then attacking someone you might know who lives in the same town.
Here is the deal, you kill to protect yourself or someone near you, your a hero, you kill a stranger, your evil, you kill a stranger that you are supposed to protect, you are a coniving evil person with no regard for honor. Which would you be more mad at, your father for killing your mom, a gang banger who killed her in a drive by shooting aimed at someone else, or a cop who shot her dead in the back of the cruiser while taking her to the hospital for a broken ankle?
Yes, what animals we have become when watching a movie is fucking torture.
Man, I wonder if I can get the geneva convention to rain on the ass of my ex-roommate for all the crap I had to sit through. Of course I could have closed my eyes or turned away but it was still torture right.
Evidently you didn't. If you did, you would realize that I was talking about the bullshit being called torture to inflate or inflame the situation. I fully acknowledged the real torture when I made fun of the kids life compared to real torture. So your comments are unfounded.
And yes, even if you were attempting to get at the permission side of the argument, a kid is forced to do what their parents want, a frat member has to go along with the rest of the frat to remain in it. There is nothing in what I said that your rape and sex would come into play on. So pay some attention.
Because it was his own people he killed, not an invading army.
It's like you killing your own mom because she thought I was better then you compared to you killing some stranger who made the same comment compared to you killing someone in the defense of your own life. All of them have degrees associated to them and some are worse then others.
It's all in the justification in the actions that brought you to the killings. If you wreck your car and kill a passenger or pedestrian when ice is on the road, did you have an accident or are you just as guilty as a mass murder who exterminates an entire town because he fears rebels may be around? Similarly, if your in war and it's your life against theirs, and you happen to shoot or kill some innocents in the process of fighting the war, are you still as guilty as the person who rapes and kills kids or gases 10,000 people?
Of course your not. And if you want to imply it is the same, then expect people to think your just fucking stupid or crazy.
Yes, sadly in this day, forcing someone to shave, to bath, to listen to music they don't like, to watch TV shows making fun of their ideals or image is akin to starvation, braking bones, inserting surgical instruments into the human body or operating with nothing to dull the pain, pulling off fingernails, and threatening someone with death and taking them almost there.
My what a strong race of people we have grown into. To think, your childhood and a weekend at a frat party or clubbing in the winter is now torture.
All of your points have been debunked time and time again or are unproven theories. Realclimate has an answer for all the bunk you have espoused so far, including the BS nugget you just crapped.
Oh god, please refer me to something other then your holey site that uses the debunked works to justify debunking the work that debunks it. And no, none of my points have been properly addressed at all, and certainly not in the context I stated. I posit that your length in time to reply was because you were looking for links to such debunking that wasn't there.
At this point I'm going to stop arguing. It's obvious we are not going to agree. I just don't understand how you can call me an alarmist when you and people like you are fear mongering just as much about the economy. It's a bit hypocritical.
You don't understand the entire point of my posting do you? You are claiming doom and gloom and ignore or brush aside anything that might mitigate that scenario or even calls to better understand them in order to make an open ended claim about something in the distant future that likely won't ever effect anyone alive today outside of the variances in storm strengths and such that we have lived with out entire life and claim that something has to be done about it right now. Then when that something directly effects you and me, and some of us look at how it is going to directly effect us, you call me an alarmist. But when given the opportunity to debunk what I claimed will be the effects of the political solutions being thrown about, you just ignore those effects and claim you don't support that approach without offering what you do support. And when asked the questions of why does it have to happen right this minute instead of when advances are actually present that will limit the harms to me and the economy I use, there is no answer, just a do something now. Do you seriously suggest that I'm as irrational as you? Do you really think I'm hypocritical or that our positions are equal in stature?
There is literally mounds of evidence that support global warming and the damage it can cause but if you choose to ignore it for political reasons then so be it.
And those mounds of evidence all rest on one single point that has never been proven. The point that a shift in less the one half of one percent of the atmospheric green house gasses can actually provide the end game scenarios you describe and that man kind can do nothing about it except listen to you. And the worst problem about it is when I point out that the political solutions on the table do nothing to actually address the problems of pouring the GHGs that you claim are the basis for your doom and gloom scenario, you want to ignore that and claim I'm the bad guy for not heeding your warnings.
Is it really too much to ask or so unreasonable that if we have to give up freedoms and work harder to pay for things we already and normally use and can already afford, that we make sure the so called solutions actually address the problems and do something about it? For fucks sake, why is that such a spot for brain washed people like you? Why must we ignore any consequences of the solutions and not pay attention to if they will actually do anything and just accept them? I know that what you want with global warming- just accept it- don't question it- it's the one true religion, but your little game is more important when it actually effects us and not some mythical time in the future.
It's just the nature of science. In ten more years or so no one will be questioning it. I guess turning a blind eye to the fact that the ice caps are in worse shape than they have ever been in human history is something some people are going to continue to do until their own house is under water.
We are in the "in ten more years" stage of the last prophecy that hasn't panned out. By
I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Are you suggesting that if you enter a country illegally, you are not an immigrant? Because dictionaries disagree.
I know you don't understand what is being said. That is why I provided all the links and references to the legal terms. Illegal and legal are, well, legal references denoting noncompliance or not with the laws in a political entity. When referencing the terms, you need to consult the legal definitions not some other dictionary.
Now, if you want to claim a disagreement, then by all means do so in the context of the usage. If we are talking about legal and illegal, then you must use the legal definitions which state that regardless of any other definition you might be able to find, anyone entering the US who isn't a citizen or patriot and who doesn't fit into a specific category defined by law is an "alien" and if they are not in the US legally, they are "illegal aliens" without regard to their intentions, any definition in any dictionary you find or anything but the actual law in force at the time.
And yes, even if someone does fit within the actual OED or websters definition of immigrant, they can still be "illegal aliens". It is not in error to classify them as such because we are talking about legal rights and legal terminology not some arbitrary usage of a definition that applies to anthropology.
Slashdot Mirror
Which ones are they then? Is it the surveillance country without free speech that the UK has turned into? Or the my economy collapsed 20 years ago and there is unemployment through the roof which is so bad that there are riots in the street several times a year France? Please tell me where this liberal democracy has done more then just lip service. Sure, you have individual rights, but can you actually say that anyone is free? Or more free then they were 20 years ago?
Nice strawman indeed. If this isn't the pot calling the kettle black. The last seven years has nothing on what I said and the north American country your referring to wasn't even on the radar. Perhaps you should look into what your actually saying a little more but life isn't what you think it is.
The federal government was a permisive government in that it needed explicit permision from the states to act. This permision was granted through the constitution and it's amendments which also directly stopped any other allowed act from walking in certain areas. Being the supreme law of the land does not change that nor does it entitle the US federal government to act outside of the scope in which the UK's parliament or some other government could. Don't argue an effect as a reason.
No they did not. The states yeilded aspects of their sovereignty to the federal governemnt. The federal government was supposed to be a representative of the states that dealt with certain aspects of sovereignty in order to keep a uniform set of rules across the states. The states retained all other rights of sovereignty and actually do have the same sovereign immunity against lawsuits as the federal government does and Obama's DOJ just argued in the warrent-less wire tapping cases. States can and do have laws that are different then the federal government's. Some of them increase penalties for the same violations, some of them decrease penalties and some have no penalties whatsoever. Further more, if the states have yielded their sovereignty, there wouldn't be jurisdictional limits to the enforcement of federal laws. The feds are very limited to what and when or where they can enforce laws. I suggest you look into the situation a little more deeply before showing your ignorance. BTW, it's congressional approval, not constitutional. The constitution which is what gives the federal government it's powers, limits the state's abilities in certain matters to that of the federal government and to the congress.
Quit fucking around with semantics. Post the rest of the preamble. "We the people of the United States" See where it says states? Ever wonder why other countries call a state a country? "in order to form a more perfect union" Union of states, not people. The people of the states formed a union of the states. "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America" for the what? United States of America, not the United people or United citizens of America.
You really need to study up on some history. Look into the articles of confederation for instance. And if your seeing anything about the civil war, you need to find another teacher.
With the exception of moving the senators from being appointed by the states to elected by the people (big mistake), the rest of the powers lost were due to expansions of interpretations constitutional clauses that are now taken to mean something outside it's original context. This really st
The problem is that you simply cannot blast music loud enough to keep someone from sleeping. It will give them hearing damage and end up lowering the volume through the degradation of your hearing. Anything loud enough to cause an annoyance but no permanent damage can be ignored and you can sleep through it. It happens all the time with people falling asleep while driving their cars, running heavy equipment and so on.
If they are making noises loud enough to damage the hearing, then they are damaging the person and by definition torturing them if doing it on purpose. If they are playing loud music, then it simply cannot be torture no matter how much you want it to be. Find something more substantial to claim Amerika is evil with.
I find it funny that you even have the balls to say crap like that.
First of all, torturing is a legal definition and for the most part, to the definitions we have accepted, we have not spent the last 5 years torturing people. That's just fabricated bullshit and you probably know it.
Second, the US didn't invade any country against international law. That's more bullshit. The entire idea that the US violated international law requires the assumption that we gave up our right of sovereignty. That simply hasn't happened. If you actually knew how the world works and how countries in the world get their power or right of sovereignty, you wouldn't be making that statement at all. The US has given some of it's sovereignty up when it signs and ratifies treaties but it has given nothing up that would make it subject to any international law that causes Iraq to be illegal.
Finally, you are a complete idiot full of bullshit. US soldiers who have violated the rules of war or the USMCJ have been punished. Your last statement of "massacring its population with impunity" is completely unfounded and cannot be derived by any other means that your complete and utter ignorance.
Now, you have been wrong on the first three parts of your comment, should we even examine your opinion on the role of modern democracy or should we just leave it as your a complete tool who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground? It's up to you.
Miner parties have a greater say then you think they do. Their biggest problem is that they are run by idiots who have no clue to how the system was set up or why it was set up that way.
The federal government isn't supposed to be the supreme government of the land, it is supposed to be the governing body over a collections of states that united the states (read state as individual countries) that takes specific roles and tasks on as outlined by the constitution. The US federal government was never designed to have the same powers as the UK's parliament or any other country's government. Yet you have third parties and probably a lot of the people supporting them (like you) that have no real concept of where the power is or what the fucking purpose the the US government is. The US government is supposed to be a government of the states, not the people. The people had a say in how it operated because of the house of representatives but the senate and president was always selected by the states until they allowed the people to elect the senate in recent times.
The fact that you attempt to compare the US government to au's and claim the US system is shit just shows how little you actually know about it.
I'm not sure we all "agree" nor and I sure who "we" are.
The "western liberal" in democracy is pretty much what seems to be taking rights away and making things less free either directly or indirectly. If you think everyone agrees to that, your crazy.
Louder then it would need to be to cause permanent hearing damage in which case it would defeat itself as a form of torture.
Stress is not torture. I don't care how much you want it to be, stress, your job, your kids- all of which is tied around stress, just is not torture. Having to put up with something you don't want to is not torture. Having to do something you don't want to is not torture.
I don't know if I would want an Easter-egg that just popped up and said
"* no known fatal defects
* a decent, logical GUI not designed by a geek with ADD/ADHD".
Maybe I'm missing something but I want something a little more snazzier.
First of all, earsplittingly painfully loud is something you injected and is opinion not a fact.
Second, I don't think I ever denied that hitting them with a hose, putting them into stress positions, or water boarding was torture. Listening to loud music, watching movies they don't like, and shit like that aren't torture.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that any sovereign nation has to get permission from the UN or any other outside entity in order to act on it's own interest. The point of not getting permission from the UN is just moot because the UN could also authorize an unprovoked attack against an innocent nation just as easily. But from a UN perspective, there was a resolution that said if X wasn't done, there would be serious consequences. It may be a stretch of liberty to claim war was an intended consequence but it is one of the most serious consequences availible.
Second, what turned out to be "no real reason whatsoever" was a myth perpetrated by the leaders of Iraq at the time and was understood to have been a creditable threat by the international community leading up to the war. The international community disagreed with the actions that needed to be taken to response to the threat but it isn't like everyone actually thought there was "no real reason whatsoever" when the actions were starting to take place. Things get even more muddled up when you consider the countries like France and family members of UN officials who were violating UN sanctions and actually using them to make beneficial oil deals with Iraq which defeated the applied attempts to gain satisfactory compliance to the mandates of the armistice agreements ending the first gulf war.
In other words, Iraq wasn't complying because attempts to force them into compliance were undermined by the greed of key players in actions taken against them and Iraq itself due to fear of attack from neighboring countries it wasn't kind to in the past created the entire myth of yellow cake, WMDs, and terrorist connections. Applying what we know now to an action we took then is about as bright of an idea as blaming Marie Curie for the Nuclear bomb. All the information availible today has to be applied as it was known in the past in order to fully understand the actions of the past.
As for the war being compared to an accident, I didn't say that. I said that the differences in the intentions are the same. In other words, A-B=C but C-d!=a+b the process in looking at the differences are the same but the similarities stop there or don't have to go any further. Now, is doing X different then doing Y, and if so, which is worse, that was the comparison.
Obviously, or at least in any sane interpretation of the events, yes there is a difference. Collateral damage which there is/was an attempt to avoid but unsuccessful, is completely different then raping and killing a large portion of your population that you are entrusted to provide the security for. Saddam attempted genocide against his own citizens, many of them completely innocent of any wrong doing and that is different then collateral casualties of war.
I think we are on the same page now.
And I understand why you went the path you did. It's a line that immigration advocates have been trying to blur for a while now so that when you are apposed to people illegally entering or staying in the country and don't give a rats ass about those who do it legally, you end up being a xenophobe, racist, or something and the person in the wrong gets reversed to you.
But keep in mind, generally, when anyone makes a reference to the legality or illegal nature of something, they are talking about the law's interpretation of the situation. Granted, there will be people who will be wrong and there will be idiots who just don't know what they are talking about. I would hope I was clear enough in my presentation over it when I said "had to do with the prosecutor not prosecuting illegal aliens known to have broken the law (that's why their called illegal aliens, not immigrants)". But then again, with the blurring I mentioned earlier, I understand your reaction.
Shaving was listed as a form of torture on the document posted at wiki leaks.
There is a difference between unprofessional behavior and torture. My problem isn't with the unprofessional behavior- the soldiers could have been asses for all I care. My point was that things that normal people in all societies are exposed to on daily basis's are being called torture simply to inflate the charge. Yes, it is wrong if the military was unprofessional and acted like school children or recess bullies, but is it really torture? I say no it isn't and it can't be when people are exposed to the same or very similar shit day in and day out in the same society housing the prisoners.
Yea, I apologize for that. I was talking everyone else' "your mean" comments and applying it to yours too.
As for people being kicked and so on, I wasn't really talking about that, I was speaking to specific acts like loud music or music you don't like or videos and movies and crap. That's not torture by any stretch of the imagination- even if your shackled to the floor or something. How about someone on house arrest for a minor non-violent crime who can ask but doesn't get permision to change the channel, how about someone who just can't leave at all? Hospital room usually have one TV and two beds, sick patients can't leave, are they being tortured because they were forced to watch wheel of fortune or Matlock?
If it is something that normal people in the society can be exposed to, then I don't see how it could ever be considered torture. My father spent the first 20 years of his working life in a factory with loud machinery and this was years ago before ear protection was more then a good idea. When I was 7, I lived in a house at the bottom of a hill on a highway route and all through the night, we heard semi trucks coming down it with their jake brake on, when I was 25, I live above a bar that constantly had loud music playing and I couldn't even hear the TV over it. That's just my life, I'm sure there are worse examples out there of every day people enduring more because of money problems, choice, society at large or whatever. I simply cannot see how it can be considered torture all the sudden. If the county jail was in the same spot as my apartment above the bar, would the Geneva convention kick in? I doubt it and I don't think anyone should think it would. It simply is not torture.
Really? So then "except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger" is just filler material so the fifth amendment doesn't look like a virus or something?
There is a problem here. None of the people, (Saddam included) were being punished. They were being detained and interrogated which is an act of military operation. It's nice to ignore these little facts when pushing your points but attention to detail is something that is really needed here. Especially if someone takes this to the supreme court for a ruling and they half ass it like you are and end up with a ruling that doesn't address the real situation.
The problem is that so many things that are common to all societies all around the world are considered torture now. Shit that you experience as a child is now torture, crap you willingly did as a teen or college student is now torture. When you say treat someone right, is that right some code for better then everyone else in the society the prisoner is being held in?
I mean come on, dropping a bible into the piss bucket is torture? What if it was a copy of Clinton's biography or a tale of two cities? Is that torture too?
It doesn't matter if it is cleaner, it just isn't torture. Prisoners are not supposed to be comfortable, they are after all, prisoners. We can argue to the level of comfort/uncomfort to the extent of convicted verses accused but you don't do a crime just to get a "better life" then members of the society. There is real torture and when you start calling watching a movie or TV show that you don't like, or listening to music you don't like, or having the lights left on 24 hours a day, which is something that everyone has done at some point in time, torture in the same sense as hooking generators up to your genitals or breaking fingertips then dropping food and water- clothing just out of reach, or starvation, or whatever that causes direct physical harm, you weaken the argument against the real torture.
I'm sorry that you seem to think what would equate to a kids life of having to watch the news or whatever instead of cartoons because the adults in the room control the TV to torture. But that causes no physical or mental harm to anyone and simply isn't torture. Sure, we have an obligation to not harm prisoners, but it's being taken way too far.
Well, we did support the kurds until Clinton dropped the ball. That's sort of pointless now, but Bush did work with them and put political pressure on Turkey to remain civil to them. The problem is more to the point that the country the kurds want to create encompasses part of Turkey and there is a history of raids in attempts to take ground and redraw the borders.
Well, actually, getting punched by family is different then getting punched by a complete stranger. But that is still different then attacking someone you might know who lives in the same town.
Here is the deal, you kill to protect yourself or someone near you, your a hero, you kill a stranger, your evil, you kill a stranger that you are supposed to protect, you are a coniving evil person with no regard for honor. Which would you be more mad at, your father for killing your mom, a gang banger who killed her in a drive by shooting aimed at someone else, or a cop who shot her dead in the back of the cruiser while taking her to the hospital for a broken ankle?
Yes, what animals we have become when watching a movie is fucking torture.
Man, I wonder if I can get the geneva convention to rain on the ass of my ex-roommate for all the crap I had to sit through. Of course I could have closed my eyes or turned away but it was still torture right.
Get fucking real.
Evidently you didn't. If you did, you would realize that I was talking about the bullshit being called torture to inflate or inflame the situation. I fully acknowledged the real torture when I made fun of the kids life compared to real torture. So your comments are unfounded.
And yes, even if you were attempting to get at the permission side of the argument, a kid is forced to do what their parents want, a frat member has to go along with the rest of the frat to remain in it. There is nothing in what I said that your rape and sex would come into play on. So pay some attention.
Go back and read what I said again before you make a bigger ass of yourself.
Because it was his own people he killed, not an invading army.
It's like you killing your own mom because she thought I was better then you compared to you killing some stranger who made the same comment compared to you killing someone in the defense of your own life. All of them have degrees associated to them and some are worse then others.
Well, actually that is ok.
It's all in the justification in the actions that brought you to the killings. If you wreck your car and kill a passenger or pedestrian when ice is on the road, did you have an accident or are you just as guilty as a mass murder who exterminates an entire town because he fears rebels may be around? Similarly, if your in war and it's your life against theirs, and you happen to shoot or kill some innocents in the process of fighting the war, are you still as guilty as the person who rapes and kills kids or gases 10,000 people?
Of course your not. And if you want to imply it is the same, then expect people to think your just fucking stupid or crazy.
Yes, sadly in this day, forcing someone to shave, to bath, to listen to music they don't like, to watch TV shows making fun of their ideals or image is akin to starvation, braking bones, inserting surgical instruments into the human body or operating with nothing to dull the pain, pulling off fingernails, and threatening someone with death and taking them almost there.
My what a strong race of people we have grown into. To think, your childhood and a weekend at a frat party or clubbing in the winter is now torture.
Who was it that said, "I don't pay women for sex, I pay them to leave after it"?
I don't remember if it was something on TV or a quote by a real person but it fits in just right.
Oh god, please refer me to something other then your holey site that uses the debunked works to justify debunking the work that debunks it. And no, none of my points have been properly addressed at all, and certainly not in the context I stated. I posit that your length in time to reply was because you were looking for links to such debunking that wasn't there.
You don't understand the entire point of my posting do you? You are claiming doom and gloom and ignore or brush aside anything that might mitigate that scenario or even calls to better understand them in order to make an open ended claim about something in the distant future that likely won't ever effect anyone alive today outside of the variances in storm strengths and such that we have lived with out entire life and claim that something has to be done about it right now. Then when that something directly effects you and me, and some of us look at how it is going to directly effect us, you call me an alarmist. But when given the opportunity to debunk what I claimed will be the effects of the political solutions being thrown about, you just ignore those effects and claim you don't support that approach without offering what you do support. And when asked the questions of why does it have to happen right this minute instead of when advances are actually present that will limit the harms to me and the economy I use, there is no answer, just a do something now. Do you seriously suggest that I'm as irrational as you? Do you really think I'm hypocritical or that our positions are equal in stature?
And those mounds of evidence all rest on one single point that has never been proven. The point that a shift in less the one half of one percent of the atmospheric green house gasses can actually provide the end game scenarios you describe and that man kind can do nothing about it except listen to you. And the worst problem about it is when I point out that the political solutions on the table do nothing to actually address the problems of pouring the GHGs that you claim are the basis for your doom and gloom scenario, you want to ignore that and claim I'm the bad guy for not heeding your warnings.
Is it really too much to ask or so unreasonable that if we have to give up freedoms and work harder to pay for things we already and normally use and can already afford, that we make sure the so called solutions actually address the problems and do something about it? For fucks sake, why is that such a spot for brain washed people like you? Why must we ignore any consequences of the solutions and not pay attention to if they will actually do anything and just accept them? I know that what you want with global warming- just accept it- don't question it- it's the one true religion, but your little game is more important when it actually effects us and not some mythical time in the future.
We are in the "in ten more years" stage of the last prophecy that hasn't panned out. By
I know you don't understand what is being said. That is why I provided all the links and references to the legal terms. Illegal and legal are, well, legal references denoting noncompliance or not with the laws in a political entity. When referencing the terms, you need to consult the legal definitions not some other dictionary.
Now, if you want to claim a disagreement, then by all means do so in the context of the usage. If we are talking about legal and illegal, then you must use the legal definitions which state that regardless of any other definition you might be able to find, anyone entering the US who isn't a citizen or patriot and who doesn't fit into a specific category defined by law is an "alien" and if they are not in the US legally, they are "illegal aliens" without regard to their intentions, any definition in any dictionary you find or anything but the actual law in force at the time.
And yes, even if someone does fit within the actual OED or websters definition of immigrant, they can still be "illegal aliens". It is not in error to classify them as such because we are talking about legal rights and legal terminology not some arbitrary usage of a definition that applies to anthropology.