The judicial branch is supposed to have the power to declare laws unconstitional, but has never done so in my lifetime.
As "TheGreek" has pointed out, this is not the case. Did you mean to write something else and typo or otherwise mis-write it? Or were you truly under the mistaken assumption that the courts have never turned anything around?
I just did. Very interesting, very clear-headed. I am a good bit more of an optimist than he is, though I agree with his conclusions about the current state of affairs. I am not ready to give up on the idea that it is possible for group to be constructed in such a manner as to prevent it from going bad as a consequence of its own design. All current evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Why can Libertarians quote every part of the constitution except the Ninth Amendment?
Actually, I can quote the 9th (and all the others) from memory. Here it is: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Now: How exactly do you imagine this can be interpreted to give the federal government any authority to legislate a "right not to be offended", as embodied in the FCC's 7-word regulations and "decency"/"indecency" regulations? Eh? Do you understand that what it is saying that the states, and the people, retain the right to perform personal actions, while you are trying to justify comfortable thoughts?
the consitution's preamble specifically speaks of "insuring domesic tranquility" and "promoting the general welfare".
Yes. And then the rest of the constitution defines the limits that delineate precisely how that may be done. If it were just a matter of hand-waving, the constitution would have said "any way you see fit" and stopped right there. But it doesn't do that. It is a document of great specificity, and obviously was intended to be so.
The bit about national parks is right on their web site.
I agree about the parks. They constitute a huge land theft, except where they were gifts to the people of deeded land. For instance, the Tocks Island park in Pennsylvania is a poster child for how government steals land directly from landholders for the purpose of making "parks."
The bits about private nukes and fire departments they hide, but it's been stated numerous times by Libertarians. And why not? Explain to me why I should be "forced" to give up my nukes based on the second amendment, and why I should be forced to pay for fire service for YOUR house.
Taking the last question first, you'd be smart to share such an expense with me, because if my house is next to yours, and it burns with no control, yours (and you, and your kids, and your cat, and everything you own) may burn as well. And vice versa. But you should not be forced to, no. Me, in such a circumstance, I'd be at my neighbor's door trying to convince them to go in with me for the most sophisticated firefighting gear we could afford as a group. But I would not consider forcing them, and I would certainly use said gear to put out a neighbor's home even if they had not contributed, based on two ideas: One, that such action would protect my home, and two, that I will benefit from saving my neighbor's ass one way or another. If nothing else, I'd save their pets and children, who are wholly innocent of all this divisiveness, and that would make me feel good.
As for nukes (and other weapons of mass destruction), it is my belief that the largest weapon one can possibly justify personally owning is a weapon you can use from within your home, to defend against threats actually present on your own property. But that's just me. I disagree with people who say that the ownership of a tool of deadly force is entirely a matter of personal freedom. When it becomes impersonal — meaning that no matter how well you aim it, you can't control who it kills — I think we're well past the point where "my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." As a libertarian, your rights are important to me as well, and I would not give someone the right to end your life as a side effect of an un-aimable weapon.
When you say "everything else is open for debate", you are entirely misconstruing the point of the 9th, which is that these rights are retained by the people and are not open for debate. I believe it is you, my misguided slashdotter, who is the one the founding fathers feared most. Not libertarians. We're closer to their outlook than you are, and by a huge margin. You don't legitimately get to restrain my right to go naked; because I retain that right. Get it now? Probably not, but that's not because it isn't obvious.:)
Surely you're not arguing that, based on your single sample, all 90 year olds are writing Perl scripts and are totally up-to-date on technology. I mean, come on.
Surely not. I was simply arguing that age is not a barrier to understanding technology. I will argue it another way if it makes it more clear: There are many aging engineers and scientists like my mother who are not suffering from degradation of brain function. They know how to, and are willing and able to, approach and comprehend technical issues. My point, perhaps poorly made (though I was quite explicit), was that age is not an excuse. If we must elect the exceptional individual, however, then best we get after that. Understand now?
Most of those aren't problems... The human body is a matter for PRIVACY, where public standards apply.
I respectfully, and with deep conviction, disagree. The legitimate constitutional authorization of government is not for it to be your mother. The constitution does not authorize the federal government (or the states, see amendment 14) to define what privacy means for the individual. That is, the constitution inherently supports a right to wear clothes if you so choose in that it says you have a right to privacy, but it does not support a right to tell me that I must also do so. There is not even the slightest basis for a "right not to be offended" anywhere in the constitution, and a great deal of the document goes out of its way to indicate the exact opposite, over and over, most famously, of course, in the first amendment.
There's an extremely high probability that you know nothing about the Libertarian party, except that they're for "less government and more rights.
You're quite wrong. I know a great deal about them. I suspect, however, that you do not, based upon your mischaracterizations. I also think you need to read the constitution with an eye for what it is, which is the authorization for the federal government with certain limits for state governments woven in. If it isn't laid out in the constitution or the amendments to the constitution, it is not a valid government function. There is no way around this. None whatsoever. There is a way to change the constitution, described within it, but until or unless such changes are made, many of these issues are not legitimate targets for legislators.
You make some excellent points with regard to a properly functioning democratic republic; accountability, the ability to focus upon the job(s) at hand. I would add that another item in favor is that when dealing with foreign countries, it gives them someone with a modicum of authority to talk to for each region, which is useful for trade.
However, as we have seen, this mechanism can fail to operate properly. Our politicians are not very accountable by virtue of the public's apathy; they vote in ways detrimental to the public and corrosive to the government at large, but said apathy fails to either deter or alter the system that put them there or in many cases, even cause the individual responsible to be replaced. As this article bemoans, the focus they should have has not resulted in representatives who are well informed as to the issues; rather, it has resulted in representatives who have learned very well indeed how to work the PACs and the public.
There is also an underlying risk, which I believe we have seen come to fruition recently, in our particular democratic republic as compared to a "straight" democracy. It can be illuminated as follows:
We have about 300 million citizens. A maximum risk of a straight democracy for that population is that about 150 million of them may suffer the consequences of a decision made by the other 150 million plus one. This would be a very unfortunate result, and in fact, is the risk that most people refer to when they talk about the "tyranny of the majority." The underlying subtext, of course, being that tyranny is bad, and that the minority must be protected from this.
Yet, when we think carefully about the comparable risks of our democratic republic, we see that the worst case is when 100% of the population, all 300 million of them, may suffer the consequences of a bad decision made by a few hundred people (the majority of the groups of congress-critters and senators.) In this case, the risk isn't tyranny over the minority, it is tyranny over everyone.
One is immediately tempted to argue that a republic is safer because these people have time to focus on the job and so will make better decisions, so the odds of such massively bad decisions are unlikely in the extreme. But we have recently seen that this is not necessarily the case.
The bill of rights has been rendered irrelevant at the whim of the executive in some situations, and entirely in others. The constitutional authority that the government was legitimately operating under no longer exists by dint of the government having stepped far outside the bounds of the constitution. People are held without access to court or representation and are even forbidden to hear the charges against them. The government has turned our money into play money by backing it with an unconscionable degree of debt — and nothing else. Our means of exchange could fall apart on any given day. It is currently held up by nothing more than the ignorance of the body of the population and the conspiratorial silence of the financial community. We are at war in circumstances that are dishonorable in the extreme, with consequences I can only describe as utterly shameful.
So... perhaps it would not be out of line to risk some form of the tyranny of the majority. Certainly the tyranny of the republic has proved to be just as real, and the final effects are, as I have explained above, considerably worse.
Perhaps technology could come to our aid in qualifying those who wish to vote, as to how qualified they actually are to vote on an issue-by-issue basis. Votes could be weighted, if not actually gated. There are serious downsides to this — such as the potential disenfranchisement of the poorly educated and genetically poorly endowed, intellectually speaking — but I submit that the current system is deep into the process of melting down, and so it is perhaps already past time to try to come up with something better. I'm currently a proponent of qualifying voters and using straight democracy in conjunction with a more bulletproof — and specific — constitution than the one we have today.
So what you're basically saying is: let's just give up on trying to make our existing politicians understand us and the things that are important to us, and stop trying to voice our opinion.
No. I didn't say, or imply, anything of the kind.
I simply observed that we are trying to educate these people with regard to technology, contrary to the claim that we need to do so, and the not too subtle implication that we aren't even trying. This does not appear to me to be the root of the problem. My feeling is that the root of the problem is the rampant mediocrity of the individuals the two party system produces for election, and subsequently elects. These people are hard at work destroying what I, at least, consider to be the most important things the government was supposed to be based upon; the constitution and bill of rights (first ten amendments, plus amendment 14, IMHO), and a powerful sense that personal liberty was one of, perhaps the, most important principles a government could be constituted to guard.
The courts are out of control, the government has abandoned the constitution wholesale, and the executive is having a veritable party based on the resulting situation. I don't think this republic can fix itself; it appears to me that we are in a very similar position to that in which Rome found itself in its last decade or two. Corrupt, lost in terms of guiding principles, weighed down by a complacent, ignorant population that just wants to be left alone to pursue their daily tasks without regard for the bigger picture, and all hope lost due to a ruling elite that has the pursuit of ruling as its priority instead of the good of the republic.
So form your own party, see how well you can do it.
My party is already formed. It is the libertarian party. The American people have determined that they are not interested in liberty, nor even particularly in the constitution; they want a mommy government that controls everything they do without thoughtful guiding principle, underlying legitimate constitutional authority, or any semblance of honor. And that is exactly what they have received. Unfortunately, that means I have received it as well. Hence my extreme dismay.
Techies spend thousands of hours educating government in the US. They do it in hearings, they do it as advisors, they do it as assistants. Even PACs try to teach these people how various elements of technology work, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Lack of teaching is not the problem. Nor is the problem lack of information these representatives can access on their own, so they can learn on their own, as any of American's best and brightest citizens — such as many of those here on slashdot — manage each and every day.
Nor is the problem the age of the representative. I'm closing on 60, and I know a great deal about technology. My mother knew more than any representative I am aware of when she died recently, and she was almost 90. I inherited her dual CPU Dell running Red Hat SMP when she died. She wrote some pretty tricky perl scripts; I wish I could have converted her to Python, but alas. I didn't say she was perfect.
In the US, the problem is that the parties keep putting incompetent (and worse) people up for election. Consequently the American people, having no effective way of dealing with the two-party monopoly upon government seats of power, keeps voting these incompetents into congress and the senate.
So the Internet is a series of tubes, you can't say words on television that are common in every schoolyard, and the human body is a matter for shame. And those are the small problems. Worse, we've invaded a country under false pretenses, with no valid reason beyond those already exposed as nonsense, the bill of rights has been forsaken, and the congress and the senate have seen fit to make the entire judicial process one that the executive can control from start to finish.
The tree of liberty is dead. It has been shat upon by millions and millions of sheep, trampled by elephants and donkeys, and finally the pulp was sold by that lady with the blindfold and one tit hanging out for King George to write out "signing statements" upon.
I'd tell you to vote libertarian, but most of you are just going to put another democrat or republican into office anyway. Literally, a crying shame. We have fallen so far.
There's no difference between watching CSI on cable or as a downloaded file.
Actually, it is quite possible that there is a significant difference. Television refresh rates (30 Hz per interlaced frame in the USA, 25 Hz in some other countries) are much lower than typical monitors (60 Hz, non-interlaced, or higher) and furthermore, MPEG and other encodings result in an entirely different set of artifacts and display update rates and distributions than does broadcast television.
The assumption underlying your statement is that it is the content that is the problem; that may not be the case. Having a light flashing in your eyes at a rate you can see, but tend to ignore, may be part of (or even all of) the problem. My point is, "watching TV" includes a broad group of experiences, some obvious, some not. Television hardware does not present content the same way a computer monitor does.
Out of interest, how much TV do people here watch?
I use a DVR to record John Stewart's Daily Show and I usually watch that while taking a bath, skipping commercials all the while. Takes about twenty minutes a day. I get my hard news by reading on the net. Other than that, we use our main projection system to watch DVDs and play the very occasional XBox 360 game. We're mostly into movies, and I'd say we watch one or two a week on average. So total broadcast time, maybe 100 minutes, total movie time, maybe four hours. all of it together maybe six hours. My partner probably watches four more hours a week than I do; she likes the home and garden channel, we're remaking a church into our home and those shows give her ideas. When a really good show comes out (for instance, Firefly), we catch it behind the curve by buying the episodes on DVD, then watch them over the course of a few months.
When we were raising our kids, we didn't allow television at all. That worked out very well; they're all three highly successful, wealthy, well educated and have strong families of their own now. They just don't "get" TV jokes, and I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. Neither do I.:)
For another data point, a family I know well basically uses TV to babysit their kid and has since just about day one. He exhibits strong ADD/autism spectrum symptoms, is years behind his peers, and at age six, is just beginning to speak so you can understand him. He's a ball of fire, runs around like crazy, and TV, the parents say, is the only thing that keeps him glued long enough for them to pursue any semblance of a normal life. I've a very dim opinion of all of this (in particular, I'm not sure you're entitled to a normal life when you've got a kid that needs attention... parenting isn't about just doing your duty if the kid is "normal") but it's not my business to interfere. They know what I think, because I pull no punches when asked. It's pretty painful to observe, I can tell you that. I never thought TV was a good babysitter, and I can't say I'm overly surprised that too much of it might actually be a causative agent in a disorder that manifests strongly as various types of social inabilities.:/
I grabbed the PDF of the report and will pass it on to them. Maybe it'll count for something.
There is no right to privacy in the Constitution or its amendments.
US Constitution, Amendment IV, Ratified December 15th, 1791:
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.
Now: What part of that do you fail to understand? Considering when it was written, it seems amazingly like it was formulated with our exact situation in mind. Brilliant people, the founders. Quite unlike our government today, I might add.
You probably accept that the airwaves "belong to the public"
No, I don't. No more than the air between you and I has ownership that has authority to mute or muzzle our ability to speak, regardless if there is someone else speaking at the time. The airwaves have been taken in a fait accompli by a government that had no authority to do so. However, even if I were to accept that the government had the authority to parcel them out to specific clients (I reiterate, I do not), I do not accept that the government has the authority to censor them because the first amendment says they are to make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and telling me I can't say something is precisely that.
and you probably accept that we need to regulate them technically to keep them usable
I accept that in order to keep the users limited to the corporate sponsors of congress, and prevent the general population from getting their hands on them, the government has established an "airwaves police." As an engineer and a ham radio operator I know better than to think the airwaves would be "used up" or "made useless" by free access to them. You'd have places where they are crowded, and you'd have places where they aren't. Just like the air we use to speak, the airwaves are a boundless and infinitely renewable resource. Furthermore, technologies like spread spectrum and digital multiplexing offer the ability to expand the availability by many orders of magnitude today. But do we see this? No. And why? Because the ability to access the airwaves is constrained by the "airwaves police", AKA the FCC.
if the airwaves belong to the public, then the public should be able to determine their use.
Oh, really? And the air by my house, I should be able to determine what you say because of that? Because I own my property, any sound waves that you make impinge upon it, I should have the right to muzzle your free speech? Not to mention that the constitution utterly forbids abridging the freedom of speech to the "public", that is, the group of people regulating the rest of the people, AKA "the government." Your argument is insane.
I know it's not a good idea and I wouldn't want to live in the same solar system as a society that tried it,
Really? Look up eugenics... very popular in the US for a while. Sample quote for you:
The eugenists were also instrumental in initiating legislation and carrying out eugenic sterilisations on institutionalised mentally subnormal, the epileptic and the psychotic. Indeed, the eugenicist Leon F Whitney wrote, "We cannot but admire the foresight of the (German) plan (of sterilising 4,00,000 people) and realise by this action Germany is going to make herself a stronger nation". He also observed "the Negroes furnished six times as many sub-normals as did the native-born whites".
After eliminating the 50% or whatever number of people who couldn't be bothered to learn but still "have a right to an opinion", I'm sure the 53percent number would drop precipitously.
Sure. But the point is, large numbers of people can't be bothered to learn, yet they have an opinion, which more importantly translates into an effect upon society.
Your argument translates into "Only those who know what they are talking about should be allowed to have an opinion", which, while attractive on the face of it, would probably mostly lead to lynchings, rails, tar, feathers, free rides out of town, and so forth.
They want to believe there is a god and that he's up there, watching them, and that he made them, and that everything will be OK, even better than OK, when they die. It is important to them. You mess with that, you'll get hammered. Don't say you weren't warned.
There is nothing funny about illiteracy in one's native language. It is nothing less than tragic, not to mention a stinging, dual condemnation of the school systems and parenting.
Actually, that hasn't been established at all. I noted the (unconstitutional) current state of affairs, which I in no way attempt to deny; then I quoted very plain and clear sections of the constitution, for which there is no higher authority, to show why the current state of affairs is, in fact, unconstitutional. If you can't pull a counter argument out of the constitution, then you don't have a counter-argument. Saying "you're wrong, nyah nyah" is a position that anyone with even the most tenuous grasp on the situation must recognize as pitifully weak.
If I stole the/. name Fyngyrz, and started posting some odd GNAA spam crap here, I'm guessing you would be quite pissed off
No, I wouldn't. If it came up, I'd simply explain that someone else is posting using the same ID. No big deal. You know, there are lots of people in the USA with my actual meat-name, and I don't worry about them, either.
But if I stole your actual name, likeness, etc... the potential of harm enters into the picture, just by the fact of being faulsly represented.
Yes, it does. But the potential of harm also exists if you own a gun, or have sharp fingernails, or simply have dirty hands. It is not reasonable to attack people (which is what the legal system does) based on "potential." If you do something, for instance, charge a purchase to my credit card, shoot me, or infect me with E. Coli, now we're talking harm, and there are laws to deal with that. No need for worrying about who you say you are (generating some vague potential for harm), we can concentrate on what you did. See? Potential isn't a problem. Actual commission of harm is the problem. Thinking that attempts to mitigate harm by restricting general potential is very, very rarely a reasonable thing. In the case of speech, it is never a good thing.
With this capability, the students could now post "Hi, I'm Bob Smith, and I molest children", which would be harming, even if caught and fixed after the fact.
If you are harmed by this, the harm will come from elsewhere. For instance, if I kick you because of it, then I have assaulted you, and there are laws for that. If I refuse you a loan because of it, then I have broken others laws. Etc. Speech, in and of itself, does not do harm. People do harm by their concrete actions.
Look at identity fraud, even AFTER you put an end to it, and fix the situation, you have years of fighting with credit companies and banks ahead of you
No. Identity fraud is no problem. The problem comes from people using your credit, not from them claiming to be you. The problem comes from them not paying bills -- after all, if you claim to be me, and do an outstanding job of managing your credit, then my credit will improve... no harm done, quite the contrary. So we can see that claiming an identity is not the problem. It is the concrete things you do under that identity that cause problems. Claiming identity is just speech. As such, it causes no harm.
Now that these kids have to potential towards genuine harm, we should sit and wait until they actually CAUSE irreversable harm? This eeems rather absurd, to be blunt.
That's terribly dangerous thinking. Using your reasoning, society could say, this person Omestes is a danger to the first amendment because the things he says indicate he doesn't understand it. Or because you own a steak knife. Or because you're male, and the rest of us would prefer to propagate our own genes... after all, you could hump our mates at some point in time... We'd better kill you before you do any of these things, because there is a potential for trouble here.
It's not about potential. It's about what you do. Any society that legislates on the basis of "potential" is already sliding downhill. And yes, we are.
An inmportant philosophical principle that was fundamental to our founders have long since been forgotten. Your rights end where someone elses begin.
Your right to speech has no limits. Neither does mine. The principle you cite here refers to the doing of harm. The utterance of words does no harm. Suppressing them, however, can do enormous harm, because open communications are paramount to all civilization. Hence the first amendment and the utterly uncompromising language it is couched
The simple fact is, yelling "fire" and causing a panic is NOT protected as free speech
You're confused. Yelling "fire" does not "cause a panic." It just causes the air to vibrate. Panic is a personal choice. If I yell "fire", and you panic, that's your fault -- not mine. I didn't cause a problem; you did. And consequently, you are the one who is out of line. You definitely should have paid more attention during fire drills. We're all taught that panic is wrong and must not be entered into. But if you didn't learn, and if your behavior is antisocial to such a degree that you would physically abuse your fellow citizens, you commit a crime. Assault, for instance. I didn't do that. If you file out quietly (or simply observe there is no fire and keep your seat), then no harm done. See? It's what you do that determines if there is a problem. Not the fellow yelling "fire."
In fact, I think an excellent argument could be made that if person A yells "fire" where there is none, and person B panics, then person B should be punished and person A should get a citizenship award, because he helped the public determine that person B is not safe to have around should a real emergency develop. No one wants some idiot panicking in the case of a real fire, after all.
Anyway, the simple fact is, all speech is protected in the USA, because the first amendment stipulates this at the federal level, and the 14th ensures that the same applies to the states.
Again, I am fully aware that the government has long ago abandoned the pretense of complying with the constitution. However, this does not in any way change what the legitimate set of actions with regard to speech are. It just makes the government illegitimate, lacking any legitimate constituting authority.
Should we ever meet a theatre, and you decide, for whatever reason, to yell "fire", I can assure you that I will not panic. Even if there really is a fire. Panic is antisocial and unhelpful in the extreme, not to mention stupid, and generally the mark of a pathologically selfish mindset. Like most criminal behavior. Fire (and other emergency) drills, on the other hand, are good practice.
Slashdot Mirror
As "TheGreek" has pointed out, this is not the case. Did you mean to write something else and typo or otherwise mis-write it? Or were you truly under the mistaken assumption that the courts have never turned anything around?
Well chosen; well said.
I just did. Very interesting, very clear-headed. I am a good bit more of an optimist than he is, though I agree with his conclusions about the current state of affairs. I am not ready to give up on the idea that it is possible for group to be constructed in such a manner as to prevent it from going bad as a consequence of its own design. All current evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Thank you for the pointer.
Actually, I can quote the 9th (and all the others) from memory. Here it is: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Now: How exactly do you imagine this can be interpreted to give the federal government any authority to legislate a "right not to be offended", as embodied in the FCC's 7-word regulations and "decency"/"indecency" regulations? Eh? Do you understand that what it is saying that the states, and the people, retain the right to perform personal actions, while you are trying to justify comfortable thoughts?
Yes. And then the rest of the constitution defines the limits that delineate precisely how that may be done. If it were just a matter of hand-waving, the constitution would have said "any way you see fit" and stopped right there. But it doesn't do that. It is a document of great specificity, and obviously was intended to be so.
I agree about the parks. They constitute a huge land theft, except where they were gifts to the people of deeded land. For instance, the Tocks Island park in Pennsylvania is a poster child for how government steals land directly from landholders for the purpose of making "parks."
Taking the last question first, you'd be smart to share such an expense with me, because if my house is next to yours, and it burns with no control, yours (and you, and your kids, and your cat, and everything you own) may burn as well. And vice versa. But you should not be forced to, no. Me, in such a circumstance, I'd be at my neighbor's door trying to convince them to go in with me for the most sophisticated firefighting gear we could afford as a group. But I would not consider forcing them, and I would certainly use said gear to put out a neighbor's home even if they had not contributed, based on two ideas: One, that such action would protect my home, and two, that I will benefit from saving my neighbor's ass one way or another. If nothing else, I'd save their pets and children, who are wholly innocent of all this divisiveness, and that would make me feel good.
As for nukes (and other weapons of mass destruction), it is my belief that the largest weapon one can possibly justify personally owning is a weapon you can use from within your home, to defend against threats actually present on your own property. But that's just me. I disagree with people who say that the ownership of a tool of deadly force is entirely a matter of personal freedom. When it becomes impersonal — meaning that no matter how well you aim it, you can't control who it kills — I think we're well past the point where "my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." As a libertarian, your rights are important to me as well, and I would not give someone the right to end your life as a side effect of an un-aimable weapon.
When you say "everything else is open for debate", you are entirely misconstruing the point of the 9th, which is that these rights are retained by the people and are not open for debate. I believe it is you, my misguided slashdotter, who is the one the founding fathers feared most. Not libertarians. We're closer to their outlook than you are, and by a huge margin. You don't legitimately get to restrain my right to go naked; because I retain that right. Get it now? Probably not, but that's not because it isn't obvious. :)
Surely not. I was simply arguing that age is not a barrier to understanding technology. I will argue it another way if it makes it more clear: There are many aging engineers and scientists like my mother who are not suffering from degradation of brain function. They know how to, and are willing and able to, approach and comprehend technical issues. My point, perhaps poorly made (though I was quite explicit), was that age is not an excuse. If we must elect the exceptional individual, however, then best we get after that. Understand now?
I respectfully, and with deep conviction, disagree. The legitimate constitutional authorization of government is not for it to be your mother. The constitution does not authorize the federal government (or the states, see amendment 14) to define what privacy means for the individual. That is, the constitution inherently supports a right to wear clothes if you so choose in that it says you have a right to privacy, but it does not support a right to tell me that I must also do so. There is not even the slightest basis for a "right not to be offended" anywhere in the constitution, and a great deal of the document goes out of its way to indicate the exact opposite, over and over, most famously, of course, in the first amendment.
You're quite wrong. I know a great deal about them. I suspect, however, that you do not, based upon your mischaracterizations. I also think you need to read the constitution with an eye for what it is, which is the authorization for the federal government with certain limits for state governments woven in. If it isn't laid out in the constitution or the amendments to the constitution, it is not a valid government function. There is no way around this. None whatsoever. There is a way to change the constitution, described within it, but until or unless such changes are made, many of these issues are not legitimate targets for legislators.
You make some excellent points with regard to a properly functioning democratic republic; accountability, the ability to focus upon the job(s) at hand. I would add that another item in favor is that when dealing with foreign countries, it gives them someone with a modicum of authority to talk to for each region, which is useful for trade.
However, as we have seen, this mechanism can fail to operate properly. Our politicians are not very accountable by virtue of the public's apathy; they vote in ways detrimental to the public and corrosive to the government at large, but said apathy fails to either deter or alter the system that put them there or in many cases, even cause the individual responsible to be replaced. As this article bemoans, the focus they should have has not resulted in representatives who are well informed as to the issues; rather, it has resulted in representatives who have learned very well indeed how to work the PACs and the public.
There is also an underlying risk, which I believe we have seen come to fruition recently, in our particular democratic republic as compared to a "straight" democracy. It can be illuminated as follows:
We have about 300 million citizens. A maximum risk of a straight democracy for that population is that about 150 million of them may suffer the consequences of a decision made by the other 150 million plus one. This would be a very unfortunate result, and in fact, is the risk that most people refer to when they talk about the "tyranny of the majority." The underlying subtext, of course, being that tyranny is bad, and that the minority must be protected from this.
Yet, when we think carefully about the comparable risks of our democratic republic, we see that the worst case is when 100% of the population, all 300 million of them, may suffer the consequences of a bad decision made by a few hundred people (the majority of the groups of congress-critters and senators.) In this case, the risk isn't tyranny over the minority, it is tyranny over everyone.
One is immediately tempted to argue that a republic is safer because these people have time to focus on the job and so will make better decisions, so the odds of such massively bad decisions are unlikely in the extreme. But we have recently seen that this is not necessarily the case.
The bill of rights has been rendered irrelevant at the whim of the executive in some situations, and entirely in others. The constitutional authority that the government was legitimately operating under no longer exists by dint of the government having stepped far outside the bounds of the constitution. People are held without access to court or representation and are even forbidden to hear the charges against them. The government has turned our money into play money by backing it with an unconscionable degree of debt — and nothing else. Our means of exchange could fall apart on any given day. It is currently held up by nothing more than the ignorance of the body of the population and the conspiratorial silence of the financial community. We are at war in circumstances that are dishonorable in the extreme, with consequences I can only describe as utterly shameful.
So... perhaps it would not be out of line to risk some form of the tyranny of the majority. Certainly the tyranny of the republic has proved to be just as real, and the final effects are, as I have explained above, considerably worse.
Perhaps technology could come to our aid in qualifying those who wish to vote, as to how qualified they actually are to vote on an issue-by-issue basis. Votes could be weighted, if not actually gated. There are serious downsides to this — such as the potential disenfranchisement of the poorly educated and genetically poorly endowed, intellectually speaking — but I submit that the current system is deep into the process of melting down, and so it is perhaps already past time to try to come up with something better. I'm currently a proponent of qualifying voters and using straight democracy in conjunction with a more bulletproof — and specific — constitution than the one we have today.
I'm just going to let your reply, be my reply. Thanks.
No. I didn't say, or imply, anything of the kind.
I simply observed that we are trying to educate these people with regard to technology, contrary to the claim that we need to do so, and the not too subtle implication that we aren't even trying. This does not appear to me to be the root of the problem. My feeling is that the root of the problem is the rampant mediocrity of the individuals the two party system produces for election, and subsequently elects. These people are hard at work destroying what I, at least, consider to be the most important things the government was supposed to be based upon; the constitution and bill of rights (first ten amendments, plus amendment 14, IMHO), and a powerful sense that personal liberty was one of, perhaps the, most important principles a government could be constituted to guard.
The courts are out of control, the government has abandoned the constitution wholesale, and the executive is having a veritable party based on the resulting situation. I don't think this republic can fix itself; it appears to me that we are in a very similar position to that in which Rome found itself in its last decade or two. Corrupt, lost in terms of guiding principles, weighed down by a complacent, ignorant population that just wants to be left alone to pursue their daily tasks without regard for the bigger picture, and all hope lost due to a ruling elite that has the pursuit of ruling as its priority instead of the good of the republic.
My party is already formed. It is the libertarian party. The American people have determined that they are not interested in liberty, nor even particularly in the constitution; they want a mommy government that controls everything they do without thoughtful guiding principle, underlying legitimate constitutional authority, or any semblance of honor. And that is exactly what they have received. Unfortunately, that means I have received it as well. Hence my extreme dismay.
Techies spend thousands of hours educating government in the US. They do it in hearings, they do it as advisors, they do it as assistants. Even PACs try to teach these people how various elements of technology work, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Lack of teaching is not the problem. Nor is the problem lack of information these representatives can access on their own, so they can learn on their own, as any of American's best and brightest citizens — such as many of those here on slashdot — manage each and every day.
Nor is the problem the age of the representative. I'm closing on 60, and I know a great deal about technology. My mother knew more than any representative I am aware of when she died recently, and she was almost 90. I inherited her dual CPU Dell running Red Hat SMP when she died. She wrote some pretty tricky perl scripts; I wish I could have converted her to Python, but alas. I didn't say she was perfect.
In the US, the problem is that the parties keep putting incompetent (and worse) people up for election. Consequently the American people, having no effective way of dealing with the two-party monopoly upon government seats of power, keeps voting these incompetents into congress and the senate.
So the Internet is a series of tubes, you can't say words on television that are common in every schoolyard, and the human body is a matter for shame. And those are the small problems. Worse, we've invaded a country under false pretenses, with no valid reason beyond those already exposed as nonsense, the bill of rights has been forsaken, and the congress and the senate have seen fit to make the entire judicial process one that the executive can control from start to finish.
The tree of liberty is dead. It has been shat upon by millions and millions of sheep, trampled by elephants and donkeys, and finally the pulp was sold by that lady with the blindfold and one tit hanging out for King George to write out "signing statements" upon.
I'd tell you to vote libertarian, but most of you are just going to put another democrat or republican into office anyway. Literally, a crying shame. We have fallen so far.
Actually, it is quite possible that there is a significant difference. Television refresh rates (30 Hz per interlaced frame in the USA, 25 Hz in some other countries) are much lower than typical monitors (60 Hz, non-interlaced, or higher) and furthermore, MPEG and other encodings result in an entirely different set of artifacts and display update rates and distributions than does broadcast television.
The assumption underlying your statement is that it is the content that is the problem; that may not be the case. Having a light flashing in your eyes at a rate you can see, but tend to ignore, may be part of (or even all of) the problem. My point is, "watching TV" includes a broad group of experiences, some obvious, some not. Television hardware does not present content the same way a computer monitor does.
I use a DVR to record John Stewart's Daily Show and I usually watch that while taking a bath, skipping commercials all the while. Takes about twenty minutes a day. I get my hard news by reading on the net. Other than that, we use our main projection system to watch DVDs and play the very occasional XBox 360 game. We're mostly into movies, and I'd say we watch one or two a week on average. So total broadcast time, maybe 100 minutes, total movie time, maybe four hours. all of it together maybe six hours. My partner probably watches four more hours a week than I do; she likes the home and garden channel, we're remaking a church into our home and those shows give her ideas. When a really good show comes out (for instance, Firefly), we catch it behind the curve by buying the episodes on DVD, then watch them over the course of a few months.
When we were raising our kids, we didn't allow television at all. That worked out very well; they're all three highly successful, wealthy, well educated and have strong families of their own now. They just don't "get" TV jokes, and I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. Neither do I. :)
For another data point, a family I know well basically uses TV to babysit their kid and has since just about day one. He exhibits strong ADD/autism spectrum symptoms, is years behind his peers, and at age six, is just beginning to speak so you can understand him. He's a ball of fire, runs around like crazy, and TV, the parents say, is the only thing that keeps him glued long enough for them to pursue any semblance of a normal life. I've a very dim opinion of all of this (in particular, I'm not sure you're entitled to a normal life when you've got a kid that needs attention... parenting isn't about just doing your duty if the kid is "normal") but it's not my business to interfere. They know what I think, because I pull no punches when asked. It's pretty painful to observe, I can tell you that. I never thought TV was a good babysitter, and I can't say I'm overly surprised that too much of it might actually be a causative agent in a disorder that manifests strongly as various types of social inabilities. :/
I grabbed the PDF of the report and will pass it on to them. Maybe it'll count for something.
US Constitution, Amendment IV, Ratified December 15th, 1791:
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.
Now: What part of that do you fail to understand? Considering when it was written, it seems amazingly like it was formulated with our exact situation in mind. Brilliant people, the founders. Quite unlike our government today, I might add.
No, I don't. No more than the air between you and I has ownership that has authority to mute or muzzle our ability to speak, regardless if there is someone else speaking at the time. The airwaves have been taken in a fait accompli by a government that had no authority to do so. However, even if I were to accept that the government had the authority to parcel them out to specific clients (I reiterate, I do not), I do not accept that the government has the authority to censor them because the first amendment says they are to make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and telling me I can't say something is precisely that.
I accept that in order to keep the users limited to the corporate sponsors of congress, and prevent the general population from getting their hands on them, the government has established an "airwaves police." As an engineer and a ham radio operator I know better than to think the airwaves would be "used up" or "made useless" by free access to them. You'd have places where they are crowded, and you'd have places where they aren't. Just like the air we use to speak, the airwaves are a boundless and infinitely renewable resource. Furthermore, technologies like spread spectrum and digital multiplexing offer the ability to expand the availability by many orders of magnitude today. But do we see this? No. And why? Because the ability to access the airwaves is constrained by the "airwaves police", AKA the FCC.
Oh, really? And the air by my house, I should be able to determine what you say because of that? Because I own my property, any sound waves that you make impinge upon it, I should have the right to muzzle your free speech? Not to mention that the constitution utterly forbids abridging the freedom of speech to the "public", that is, the group of people regulating the rest of the people, AKA "the government." Your argument is insane.
Really? Look up eugenics... very popular in the US for a while. Sample quote for you:
Sure. But the point is, large numbers of people can't be bothered to learn, yet they have an opinion, which more importantly translates into an effect upon society.
Your argument translates into "Only those who know what they are talking about should be allowed to have an opinion", which, while attractive on the face of it, would probably mostly lead to lynchings, rails, tar, feathers, free rides out of town, and so forth.
They want to believe there is a god and that he's up there, watching them, and that he made them, and that everything will be OK, even better than OK, when they die. It is important to them. You mess with that, you'll get hammered. Don't say you weren't warned.
If you found that amusing, you'll find this absolutely hilarious.
There is nothing funny about illiteracy in one's native language. It is nothing less than tragic, not to mention a stinging, dual condemnation of the school systems and parenting.
And in order to put a few knots in the rubber band, let me just state that the answer, unequivocally, is no to both formulations.
"Troll", eh? Too bad there isn't a meta-moderation for "deluded."
Let me fix that for you:
There. No problem, no need to thank me.
Personally, I found it very funny. But the mods... you know how the mods are.
Actually, that hasn't been established at all. I noted the (unconstitutional) current state of affairs, which I in no way attempt to deny; then I quoted very plain and clear sections of the constitution, for which there is no higher authority, to show why the current state of affairs is, in fact, unconstitutional. If you can't pull a counter argument out of the constitution, then you don't have a counter-argument. Saying "you're wrong, nyah nyah" is a position that anyone with even the most tenuous grasp on the situation must recognize as pitifully weak.
No, I wouldn't. If it came up, I'd simply explain that someone else is posting using the same ID. No big deal. You know, there are lots of people in the USA with my actual meat-name, and I don't worry about them, either.
Yes, it does. But the potential of harm also exists if you own a gun, or have sharp fingernails, or simply have dirty hands. It is not reasonable to attack people (which is what the legal system does) based on "potential." If you do something, for instance, charge a purchase to my credit card, shoot me, or infect me with E. Coli, now we're talking harm, and there are laws to deal with that. No need for worrying about who you say you are (generating some vague potential for harm), we can concentrate on what you did. See? Potential isn't a problem. Actual commission of harm is the problem. Thinking that attempts to mitigate harm by restricting general potential is very, very rarely a reasonable thing. In the case of speech, it is never a good thing.
If you are harmed by this, the harm will come from elsewhere. For instance, if I kick you because of it, then I have assaulted you, and there are laws for that. If I refuse you a loan because of it, then I have broken others laws. Etc. Speech, in and of itself, does not do harm. People do harm by their concrete actions.
No. Identity fraud is no problem. The problem comes from people using your credit, not from them claiming to be you. The problem comes from them not paying bills -- after all, if you claim to be me, and do an outstanding job of managing your credit, then my credit will improve... no harm done, quite the contrary. So we can see that claiming an identity is not the problem. It is the concrete things you do under that identity that cause problems. Claiming identity is just speech. As such, it causes no harm.
That's terribly dangerous thinking. Using your reasoning, society could say, this person Omestes is a danger to the first amendment because the things he says indicate he doesn't understand it. Or because you own a steak knife. Or because you're male, and the rest of us would prefer to propagate our own genes... after all, you could hump our mates at some point in time... We'd better kill you before you do any of these things, because there is a potential for trouble here.
It's not about potential. It's about what you do. Any society that legislates on the basis of "potential" is already sliding downhill. And yes, we are.
Your right to speech has no limits. Neither does mine. The principle you cite here refers to the doing of harm. The utterance of words does no harm. Suppressing them, however, can do enormous harm, because open communications are paramount to all civilization. Hence the first amendment and the utterly uncompromising language it is couched
You're confused. Yelling "fire" does not "cause a panic." It just causes the air to vibrate. Panic is a personal choice. If I yell "fire", and you panic, that's your fault -- not mine. I didn't cause a problem; you did. And consequently, you are the one who is out of line. You definitely should have paid more attention during fire drills. We're all taught that panic is wrong and must not be entered into. But if you didn't learn, and if your behavior is antisocial to such a degree that you would physically abuse your fellow citizens, you commit a crime. Assault, for instance. I didn't do that. If you file out quietly (or simply observe there is no fire and keep your seat), then no harm done. See? It's what you do that determines if there is a problem. Not the fellow yelling "fire."
In fact, I think an excellent argument could be made that if person A yells "fire" where there is none, and person B panics, then person B should be punished and person A should get a citizenship award, because he helped the public determine that person B is not safe to have around should a real emergency develop. No one wants some idiot panicking in the case of a real fire, after all.
Anyway, the simple fact is, all speech is protected in the USA, because the first amendment stipulates this at the federal level, and the 14th ensures that the same applies to the states.
Again, I am fully aware that the government has long ago abandoned the pretense of complying with the constitution. However, this does not in any way change what the legitimate set of actions with regard to speech are. It just makes the government illegitimate, lacking any legitimate constituting authority.
Should we ever meet a theatre, and you decide, for whatever reason, to yell "fire", I can assure you that I will not panic. Even if there really is a fire. Panic is antisocial and unhelpful in the extreme, not to mention stupid, and generally the mark of a pathologically selfish mindset. Like most criminal behavior. Fire (and other emergency) drills, on the other hand, are good practice.
Period. :)