Saying that all gay people fit the category of the coiffed manicured hormone therapy experiments that everyone thinks of... it's a little like saying that all the Italians look and sound like Mario and Luigi.
If rejecting gay people in a church (or anywhere else) is due to a misunderstanding of the Scripture, according to your argument it makes sense to change that behavior.
For the most part the "Gay Agenda" is just to be treated like a normal citizen.
Correct.
And that is why, being gay, I have an axe to grind with the Gay Pride movement.
It seeks to undo all that the Gay Rights movement set about to accomplish. Devoted people worked for years to get the word "gay" accepted as a household word, to have people accept it as valid and sane and not a sign of mental insanity. And they worked diligently to show the straight people that being gay, and being a transvestite, were two different things.
And what do you invariably see at Pride parades? Gay people being as outlandish, objectionable, heedless and irresponsible as you please, men in platinum blonde wigs, stiletto heels and sequins waving from the tops of parade floats as if they'd just won an award. Pudgy past-middle-age leather daddies in chaps, handlebar mustaches and bondage harnesses leering creepily into the news camera. The combined effect is one of a carnival freakshow that's spilled onto the street.
If Priders actually feel they're part of a "community" of gay people, how about a little forethought about the consequences of your choices and how they play off. Let's quit trying for a look that takes all the masculinity out of the men and all the effeminacy out of the women. It's like they've tried to find everything worthwhile about gay people, and actively look for ways to sabotage it. The image they convey is why so many gay people are quiet about their orientation - they don't want everyone assuming they're one of these people.
Stay right where you are, and start a social movement.
It's not just Assad in Syria that calls that kind of thing "terrorism".
No argument there. Governments call it that all the time. However, that only underscores their illegitimacy.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
When a government struggles to demonize the very rights guaranteed by the documents that created it, there really isn't an argument left to make for keeping it.
What, did you honestly imagine that we were meant to wait for permission from our government to reform it?
Disclosure: In drawing attention to the anti-subversive methods used by the status quo, I'm having to tout their strengths... and in that I'm definitely playing against my own feelings on the matter here.
Creating honeypot astroturf movements is typical powermonger handiwork. When you attract dissidents to a movement you yourself concocted, and in which you have people in positions of key influence, you can draw out the dissidents, distract them with propaganda and irrelevant action items, befuddle them with engineered scenarios, and ultimately either sabotage their efforts totally, or declaw most of the movement and keep them not only in check but your unknowing lapdog. All while they keep shouting antiestablishment slogans, unaware that they've become almost totally ineffective.
Punk is a good example of this. Occupy was started by various alphabet gestapo agencies within the U.S., and has been used successfully in other countries to astroturf and then down whole government regimes. And there are signs that Anonymous has been rendered little more than a front for the status quo, for those who know how to read them. Hippieism was another great instance of this: When you have your citizenry at home protesting wars abroad, distract them with "free love", and establish an invisible control structure via doubletalk in music lyrics (since you can informally influence who gets a record contract via corporate-government networking) and the buying and selling of very same drugs that you yourself as the government imported into the country. Result: Profit, you now have people rutting in the bushes drugged out of their gourds rather than protesting wars overseas, and you have an informal network of control that enables you to influence societal trends under the radar... more or less the same way that an icon is displayed on a computer screen due to the concerted effort of lots of tiny pixels. A few decades later when the resistance has depleted and your control network is better established, encourage hostility and bullying rather than "free love" as the theme of the day in order to generate an increasing, non-specific apprehensiveness among the general public. You're also free to use your personnel on a local basis to follow, harass, threaten and victimize any dissidents you may find who won't get with the program. This is the basis for "organized stalking" or "cause stalking". It also explains a lot of the trolling online, when chat rooms and forums are suddenly cluttered with abusive, derogatory responses when someone advocates a phenomenon that counters the status quo.
Not everyone within Anonymous, Occupy, etc. are sell-outs. Some genuinely believe in what they're doing. But they're prone to being misled by those who are, and those groups are where a lot of the effort is being made. Unless someone exposes it clearly as I'm doing, the mechanism works and dissent groups wind up trying to out-cloak-and-dagger the sell-outs... which only keeps them busy and successfully blunts their effectiveness.
Because the status quo is gambling that people won't have the gumption to come right out and dissent openly, clearly and directly. Usually by the time a citizenry has gotten that fed up, the brute-force dissent suppression (in whatever form) has already become legitimatized and has hit the street. So the idea is that the majority of people will opt for personal safety rather than collective liberty, and thus acquiesce to the oppression.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
You mean, it will be used by organised crime, totally unworkable on a large scale, and ignored by anyone with any influence?
No, I mean it will gradually and meekly attain a large a large demographic following because it's fairer than the existing system, while a concerted effort is made by the status quo to demonize and denounce it whenever they must discuss it at all. See also, Ron Paul's presidential campaign.
Kidding me? The Empire's been suppressing dissenters and subversives for centuries. Where do you think the Punk movement came from? You take the poorest people who are on the dole, you get them to network together to become an astroturf movement. As proof, you make the trappings of the movement thoroughly degrading and abusive (just like the more official representatives of The System are). And you bribe the more knowing and corrupt people within the scene to report dissidents back to you, at which point they "coincidentally" get arrested for whatever forms of vice or minor crimes they partake of with your agents. Deep cover can be had on the cheap, when everyone involved is on welfare to start with.
At that point, good luck forming a subversive network when you never know who's a sell-out. Sort of like the cloak-and-dagger sell-out kids planted within the Occupy movement, that have been spotted on YouTube.
Why are they pretending they can't and aren't doing all this already?
The answer to your question read literally, is because all governments are terrified of the People - and rightly so.
But at this point, they evidently feel that they've managed enough bluff and bluster and control to turn the screws on them, with only negligible resistance.
Why are they pretending they can't and aren't doing all this already?
Because to do it in secret means they have peoples' information.
But to be able to act upon it systematically, they must publicly admit that they do it. Hence, "We're going to start doing [foo]".
They can also pick up Governmental Power-Up Bonuses from it because the citizens will become too intimidated to dissent once they've implemented it openly.
Stay right where you are, and start a social movement. Governments aren't land masses; they can only exist by the consent of the governed. If things get bad enough, joining such a group would become a no-brainer and you'd have de facto government reform by a collective choice from all the citizenry. They'd just pick a form of government, select their political representatives, start making policy and wait for support for the old regime to fall away entirely.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
The People always have a choice - that's just the nature of politics. The problem has only been that the choices the People have been making have been in support of the old guard.
Posit: The War for Independence never ended, they just quit shooting. Britain started using bribery on public officials and began to chip away at the society that had formed, until the Union was indistinguishable from the tyranny that it left. The point was to get them to stop making their argument for individual sovereignty; if they'd kept making it, it would have spread back to England where large swaths of the folks there would have been demanding it. Britain would have lost a lot more than a few colonies, because it was a very sound idea. Valid ideas are always a threat to tyrants, and sometimes the best way to stop people from making their argument for them is to let them think they've already won.
Your concept about running out of continents to go off and colonize is quite right. It's time to stop running. The only other alternative is to just roll over, close your eyes and er... "think of England".
You've got it right, nimbius. But have you evaluated your conclusion a bit further?
part of me, as an american, yearns for this warrantless detention, that it may serve as a much needed nail in the coffin to which i have laid my patriotism. The other half would rather it not, for fear it would preclude my gainful employment and thus my credit, to which my entire life as an american is inextricably bound.
Your gainful employment, credit and whole quality of life are casualty of the systematic erosion of rights in this country. One of the resultants of tyranny is that you cannot exchange nitrogen and oxygen mixtures without oppression. While that situation exists, please do not labor under the common misconception that exchanging those mixtures is a net gain for you.
Quality of life does not happen in other than trace amounts under oppression. Governments default towards expansion and eventual oppression if left unchecked. Thus, in order to retain quality of life the People must collectively restrain their government, keeping it to its proper place. What the majority of the U.S. citizenry has not understood yet, by all appearances, is that constraining their government is an utterly necessary perquisite to having any significant amount of quality of life. It's one, or the other.
Ideally, those who understood this would encourage others and organize solutions together - we have an entire Internet at our disposal with which to organize (not "occupy", which merely means to take up space without any specified activity) collectively, and that we haven't done so by now with that unparalleled tool says a lot about the collective prioritization of most Americans.
So I'm with that first half of you as you'd described. Given that quality of life is dependent upon a critical mass of Americans constraining their government effectively, and given that the majority of Americans refuse to do so, we may as well let the place burn from top to bottom. There won't be any more meaningful oxygen conversion taking place, so it may as well. I'm actually looking forward to the martial law and the round-up now, despite being a staunch Patriot.
That's not my point. My point is this - if they're not making any more money, they won't be able to afford to keep crooked senators and buy horrible legislation.
I'm not trying to make a point to the RIAA/MPAA by not giving them money - I'm trying to gut them completely.
Now that is a very sound approach!
In order for it to be effective, we'd need to stop the funding completely. Encourage a boycott via internet ("Haven't given the MPAA/RIAA one red cent since [date]" in.sig lines? Mass campaigns to get people to abstain from funding them?
After all it doesn't matter what the people say or do, the elected officials simply ignore them if it comes down to them or a multinational. throw them out, you just replace shill A with shill B, no change at all.
"Well there's yer problem, buddy!"
We're encountering the symptoms of a lack of political accountability to the law, and to the People.
See my above link for a [darn good] patch for that.
The best way to get these guys is to cut off their revenue stream.
While I agree that it's productive, I have to disagree with that statement as written.
Boycotting can be very effective, but it's unlikely to happen significantly with the mainstream media. I more or less boycott the industry just because I don't find it entertainment but insult; however, most people aren't there yet. Either way, taking action in law to stop organized criminal behavior that's plainly detrimenting society is also not only necessary, but an implied duty in a society of laws.
(I know, our society hasn't looked like that recently. And I posit that the lack of public involvement is a large part of why.)
When do the various file-sharing services get together and collectively countersue the MPAA for obstruction of commerce, racketeering, and whatever else comes to mind when one industry gets together to choke another?
For that matter, when does the internet start to crowdfund a bounty in the form of attorneys' fees to go after these guys? Perhaps we were waiting until the ISPs implement "6 Strikes", at which point all the open public WiFi hotspots will necessarily be taken offline or passworded outside common public use.
Yes, these are difficult times, but some employers are not worth it.
Quite correct. But that is also the mindset that employers are increasingly betting prospective would-be employees will be too panicked - or apathetic - to have. If enough people just close their eyes and think of England when employers require this sort of thing, they'll be able to impose that expectation as standard practice. And then increase it.
Because some people need to eat and if the choice is to show your email or not having food on the table many would choose to give up their email. A law against it might help in that case.
I think it's wonderful: Now you can choose whether to put food on your table by working, or far more effectively by suing the pants off a would-be employer.
Honestly, if an employer demanded a copy of your housekey and fired you for declining, you'd have a valid case for wrongful dismissal. It's the same here. What's next, employers requiring jus primae noctis?*
This right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure by the government - let alone by any lesser entity - has been completely established. What's bizarre is that by now people have become so thoroughly fogged on what their rights are, that the argument for a need for new legislation on the point has been raised.
* Excluding Hollywood, where it has long been the traditional practice.
Whether or not *you* like it, most governments have the legal power/authority to do this, while civilians do not.
Did I miss a meeting? The federal government has only the authorities that were specifically delegated to it by the People. Those not delegated are retained by the People or, where vested by the People, in the States.
This has not stopped politicians from drafting all sorts of bogus legislation which purports to give them other authorities. But neither does that heap of paperwork legitimately do so. This is self-evident: I cannot give myself that which I do not yet have. I could take it from someone else without their consent, but that would make me a thief. In politics, it's called usurpation.
Amazing how we fought the War for Independence and established perhaps the only country in the world where the whole basis of governance is to represent and serve the People who made it... and 200-something years later we describe those same People as "[mere] civilians". Don't let anyone reframe the relationship between the People and our government like that, because it supports the imposition of a drastically different way of life than we, the People, established for our country.
Uh, one thing is tracking them everywhere they go, another is just logging the timestamps of when they go through the entrace door. There's a big difference.
There is, unless the one is just the thin end of the wedge to the other. And counter to the collective supposition, it typically is.
The same goes for mandatory drug-tests at work when they get older. Perhaps the employer would also like to get some bloodwork done, to make sure you're not going to keel over from something you're genetically-predisposed to in a few years.
Sorry, but I don't see how is mandatory drug-tests - an obvious and disgusting privacy violation - in any way similar to this.
Acceptance happens in drips and drabs. In the U.S., that sort of erosion of rights has been happening for over 200 years. So we must be very cautious when societal modifications like this start happening. Even if it's legit in Brazil, another country is likely to pick it up and adopt it with other directions in mind. Today, it's roll-call. In a decade or two, GPS for truancy. By then, ease-of-use would enable politicians and corporations to come up with all kinds of reasons why having it on you at all times would be so beneficial for many of your needs, nobody would seriously question it. From there, an identity-theft epidemic would justify chipping adults.
Our society - I don't know about Brazil's - has been getting increasingly more one-sided in disfavor of the individual. The approach in TFA doesn't seem like another likely maneuver towards that to you?
Well, I'm not part of "your society" either, but no, I don't see how is this a maneuver towards that, and apparently no one here has been able to explain it either.
Part of it has to do with the increasing commoditization of people. Going through an airport scanner is on par with being on the conveyor belt at a grocery store checkout counter. The mandatory drug tests from an employer we've discussed. And this. Part of it has to do with the instilling of a psychology of being a product, which all of these things do. I'm not sure I can explain it any better, and maybe it's just a human thing rather than something that can be effectively pinned down - much of the society I live in attempts to swat it out of their conscious perception, and so I don't have the terminology to convey it with precision. It's hardly ever used.
The other part has to do with the ongoing trends of how society in the U.S. is being terraformed. When it becomes a demonstrable pattern, proof is needed to demonstrate how this isn't - or wouldn't be - a part of it. At the moment, that appears to be only because it's happening in Brazil rather than the U.S.. Because it could so easily happen here, as part of an ongoing trend, it sets off mental alerts for people. If we had a functional government that wasn't always trying to do this - and often succeeding quite well - it probably wouldn't have the same connotations for people. The context would be quite different, and most people would read about it with nary a blip set off on their mental radars.
It's not common knowledge, but yes. Looked it up years ago but no longer have the cites for it.
Has to do with the federal government no longer acting within the Constitution, and therefore being in a corporate capacity. Therefore, everything is contractually-based. Slightly worse, the parents are merely the holders in due course. By the time it's reached the age of majority it's been the subject of a number of contracts from Certified Federal Citizenship (the "STATE OF [WHATEVER]"s are all federal), federal income tax benefits, public education benefits, etc. By accepting benefits, privileges and considerations, the parents are considered to have signed it over to the federal government in a compelled performance contract. Perhaps a good indicator of this are the municipal codes for practically anywhere in the U.S.: they only apply to "persons" which - in law, not English - refers to the subject of a contractual obligation. That's right, municipal codes don't apply to actual people, but only pull the strings of a contractual relationship.
Mind you, the contract isn't valid law. It's unconscionable (in the original sense of the legal term), it's outside the Constitution, and we've never given our representatives the authority to make those kinds of contracts (particularly on time we paid for). But it's the fictive argument on which they base their position. To obfuscate it, ranks of attorneys are actually officers of the court, systematically convoluting the legal definitions over generations. To sort out what they've been up do, you'd actually need to study them. I have.
Should I get to choose whether my child can reply to a roll call or not?
I love that question! If the State is going to make public education mandatory, perhaps there should be a better assurance that the schools haven't become repurposed to merely desensitize them to being oppressed and intimately micromanaged, in preparation for their adult years as citizens. So they will tolerate anything as voters, consumers and employees.
And this seems like a good issue to raise the question. Just as the introduction of backscatter scanners would have been the obvious point at which to raise the question of whether Homeland Security was really Constitutional.
[p]eople, it's a damn RFID tag, not a GPS embedded under their skin.
In this instance, how is it any different?
The same goes for mandatory drug-tests at work when they get older. Perhaps the employer would also like to get some bloodwork done, to make sure you're not going to keel over from something you're genetically-predisposed to in a few years. But let's not assess whether, as an employee, you're at least as entitled to independent third-party review of white collar crime within the management.
Our society - I don't know about Brazil's - has been getting increasingly more one-sided in disfavor of the individual. The approach in TFA doesn't seem like another likely maneuver towards that to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, but also a stereotype.
Saying that all gay people fit the category of the coiffed manicured hormone therapy experiments that everyone thinks of... it's a little like saying that all the Italians look and sound like Mario and Luigi.
I agree with your statement generally, actually.
But in this case it's unfounded.
That doesn't mean that they have to accept conduct, though, which is clearly condemned in the Bible.
Sodomy doesn't mean what you think it means.
If rejecting gay people in a church (or anywhere else) is due to a misunderstanding of the Scripture, according to your argument it makes sense to change that behavior.
For the most part the "Gay Agenda" is just to be treated like a normal citizen.
Correct.
And that is why, being gay, I have an axe to grind with the Gay Pride movement.
It seeks to undo all that the Gay Rights movement set about to accomplish. Devoted people worked for years to get the word "gay" accepted as a household word, to have people accept it as valid and sane and not a sign of mental insanity. And they worked diligently to show the straight people that being gay, and being a transvestite, were two different things.
And what do you invariably see at Pride parades? Gay people being as outlandish, objectionable, heedless and irresponsible as you please, men in platinum blonde wigs, stiletto heels and sequins waving from the tops of parade floats as if they'd just won an award. Pudgy past-middle-age leather daddies in chaps, handlebar mustaches and bondage harnesses leering creepily into the news camera. The combined effect is one of a carnival freakshow that's spilled onto the street.
If Priders actually feel they're part of a "community" of gay people, how about a little forethought about the consequences of your choices and how they play off. Let's quit trying for a look that takes all the masculinity out of the men and all the effeminacy out of the women. It's like they've tried to find everything worthwhile about gay people, and actively look for ways to sabotage it. The image they convey is why so many gay people are quiet about their orientation - they don't want everyone assuming they're one of these people.
Men? Nope....you suck one cock...and your gay.
Plain and simple.
Jock homophobia is pretty harsh and unfair, but there's actually a reason for that one.
It's because they're addictive.
It's not just Assad in Syria that calls that kind of thing "terrorism".
No argument there. Governments call it that all the time. However, that only underscores their illegitimacy.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
When a government struggles to demonize the very rights guaranteed by the documents that created it, there really isn't an argument left to make for keeping it.
What, did you honestly imagine that we were meant to wait for permission from our government to reform it?
I'm anonymous and demeaning. You're delusional.
FTFY.
Disclosure: In drawing attention to the anti-subversive methods used by the status quo, I'm having to tout their strengths... and in that I'm definitely playing against my own feelings on the matter here.
Creating honeypot astroturf movements is typical powermonger handiwork. When you attract dissidents to a movement you yourself concocted, and in which you have people in positions of key influence, you can draw out the dissidents, distract them with propaganda and irrelevant action items, befuddle them with engineered scenarios, and ultimately either sabotage their efforts totally, or declaw most of the movement and keep them not only in check but your unknowing lapdog. All while they keep shouting antiestablishment slogans, unaware that they've become almost totally ineffective.
Punk is a good example of this. Occupy was started by various alphabet gestapo agencies within the U.S., and has been used successfully in other countries to astroturf and then down whole government regimes. And there are signs that Anonymous has been rendered little more than a front for the status quo, for those who know how to read them. Hippieism was another great instance of this: When you have your citizenry at home protesting wars abroad, distract them with "free love", and establish an invisible control structure via doubletalk in music lyrics (since you can informally influence who gets a record contract via corporate-government networking) and the buying and selling of very same drugs that you yourself as the government imported into the country. Result: Profit, you now have people rutting in the bushes drugged out of their gourds rather than protesting wars overseas, and you have an informal network of control that enables you to influence societal trends under the radar... more or less the same way that an icon is displayed on a computer screen due to the concerted effort of lots of tiny pixels. A few decades later when the resistance has depleted and your control network is better established, encourage hostility and bullying rather than "free love" as the theme of the day in order to generate an increasing, non-specific apprehensiveness among the general public. You're also free to use your personnel on a local basis to follow, harass, threaten and victimize any dissidents you may find who won't get with the program. This is the basis for "organized stalking" or "cause stalking". It also explains a lot of the trolling online, when chat rooms and forums are suddenly cluttered with abusive, derogatory responses when someone advocates a phenomenon that counters the status quo.
Not everyone within Anonymous, Occupy, etc. are sell-outs. Some genuinely believe in what they're doing. But they're prone to being misled by those who are, and those groups are where a lot of the effort is being made. Unless someone exposes it clearly as I'm doing, the mechanism works and dissent groups wind up trying to out-cloak-and-dagger the sell-outs... which only keeps them busy and successfully blunts their effectiveness.
Because the status quo is gambling that people won't have the gumption to come right out and dissent openly, clearly and directly. Usually by the time a citizenry has gotten that fed up, the brute-force dissent suppression (in whatever form) has already become legitimatized and has hit the street. So the idea is that the majority of people will opt for personal safety rather than collective liberty, and thus acquiesce to the oppression.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
You mean, it will be used by organised crime, totally unworkable on a large scale, and ignored by anyone with any influence?
No, I mean it will gradually and meekly attain a large a large demographic following because it's fairer than the existing system, while a concerted effort is made by the status quo to demonize and denounce it whenever they must discuss it at all. See also, Ron Paul's presidential campaign.
Kidding me? The Empire's been suppressing dissenters and subversives for centuries. Where do you think the Punk movement came from? You take the poorest people who are on the dole, you get them to network together to become an astroturf movement. As proof, you make the trappings of the movement thoroughly degrading and abusive (just like the more official representatives of The System are). And you bribe the more knowing and corrupt people within the scene to report dissidents back to you, at which point they "coincidentally" get arrested for whatever forms of vice or minor crimes they partake of with your agents. Deep cover can be had on the cheap, when everyone involved is on welfare to start with.
At that point, good luck forming a subversive network when you never know who's a sell-out. Sort of like the cloak-and-dagger sell-out kids planted within the Occupy movement, that have been spotted on YouTube.
Why are they pretending they can't and aren't doing all this already?
The answer to your question read literally, is because all governments are terrified of the People - and rightly so.
But at this point, they evidently feel that they've managed enough bluff and bluster and control to turn the screws on them, with only negligible resistance.
I'm confused.
Why are they pretending they can't and aren't doing all this already?
Because to do it in secret means they have peoples' information.
But to be able to act upon it systematically, they must publicly admit that they do it. Hence, "We're going to start doing [foo]".
They can also pick up Governmental Power-Up Bonuses from it because the citizens will become too intimidated to dissent once they've implemented it openly.
Time to move... but to where?
Stay right where you are, and start a social movement. Governments aren't land masses; they can only exist by the consent of the governed. If things get bad enough, joining such a group would become a no-brainer and you'd have de facto government reform by a collective choice from all the citizenry. They'd just pick a form of government, select their political representatives, start making policy and wait for support for the old regime to fall away entirely.
It's more or less what BitCoin is doing to the old dominate-through-control-of-the-money-supply regime.
The People always have a choice - that's just the nature of politics. The problem has only been that the choices the People have been making have been in support of the old guard.
Posit: The War for Independence never ended, they just quit shooting. Britain started using bribery on public officials and began to chip away at the society that had formed, until the Union was indistinguishable from the tyranny that it left. The point was to get them to stop making their argument for individual sovereignty; if they'd kept making it, it would have spread back to England where large swaths of the folks there would have been demanding it. Britain would have lost a lot more than a few colonies, because it was a very sound idea. Valid ideas are always a threat to tyrants, and sometimes the best way to stop people from making their argument for them is to let them think they've already won.
Your concept about running out of continents to go off and colonize is quite right. It's time to stop running. The only other alternative is to just roll over, close your eyes and er... "think of England".
If anyone can spot a flaw in the above reasoning, please do let me know.
Thus far, the only one I've been able to find has been the animals. They'd be about the only innocent casualties in that scenario.
You've got it right, nimbius. But have you evaluated your conclusion a bit further?
part of me, as an american, yearns for this warrantless detention, that it may serve as a much needed nail in the coffin to which i have laid my patriotism. The other half would rather it not, for fear it would preclude my gainful employment and thus my credit, to which my entire life as an american is inextricably bound.
Your gainful employment, credit and whole quality of life are casualty of the systematic erosion of rights in this country. One of the resultants of tyranny is that you cannot exchange nitrogen and oxygen mixtures without oppression. While that situation exists, please do not labor under the common misconception that exchanging those mixtures is a net gain for you.
Quality of life does not happen in other than trace amounts under oppression. Governments default towards expansion and eventual oppression if left unchecked. Thus, in order to retain quality of life the People must collectively restrain their government, keeping it to its proper place. What the majority of the U.S. citizenry has not understood yet, by all appearances, is that constraining their government is an utterly necessary perquisite to having any significant amount of quality of life. It's one, or the other.
Ideally, those who understood this would encourage others and organize solutions together - we have an entire Internet at our disposal with which to organize (not "occupy", which merely means to take up space without any specified activity) collectively, and that we haven't done so by now with that unparalleled tool says a lot about the collective prioritization of most Americans.
So I'm with that first half of you as you'd described. Given that quality of life is dependent upon a critical mass of Americans constraining their government effectively, and given that the majority of Americans refuse to do so, we may as well let the place burn from top to bottom. There won't be any more meaningful oxygen conversion taking place, so it may as well. I'm actually looking forward to the martial law and the round-up now, despite being a staunch Patriot.
Actually, because I'm a staunch Patriot.
That's not my point. My point is this - if they're not making any more money, they won't be able to afford to keep crooked senators and buy horrible legislation.
I'm not trying to make a point to the RIAA/MPAA by not giving them money - I'm trying to gut them completely.
Now that is a very sound approach!
In order for it to be effective, we'd need to stop the funding completely. Encourage a boycott via internet ("Haven't given the MPAA/RIAA one red cent since [date]" in .sig lines? Mass campaigns to get people to abstain from funding them?
If anyone has a walkthrough for Iowa, please post a link to it here.
After all it doesn't matter what the people say or do, the elected officials simply ignore them if it comes down to them or a multinational. throw them out, you just replace shill A with shill B, no change at all.
"Well there's yer problem, buddy!"
We're encountering the symptoms of a lack of political accountability to the law, and to the People.
See my above link for a [darn good] patch for that.
The best way to get these guys is to cut off their revenue stream.
While I agree that it's productive, I have to disagree with that statement as written.
Boycotting can be very effective, but it's unlikely to happen significantly with the mainstream media. I more or less boycott the industry just because I don't find it entertainment but insult; however, most people aren't there yet. Either way, taking action in law to stop organized criminal behavior that's plainly detrimenting society is also not only necessary, but an implied duty in a society of laws.
(I know, our society hasn't looked like that recently. And I posit that the lack of public involvement is a large part of why.)
When do the various file-sharing services get together and collectively countersue the MPAA for obstruction of commerce, racketeering, and whatever else comes to mind when one industry gets together to choke another?
For that matter, when does the internet start to crowdfund a bounty in the form of attorneys' fees to go after these guys? Perhaps we were waiting until the ISPs implement "6 Strikes", at which point all the open public WiFi hotspots will necessarily be taken offline or passworded outside common public use.
Yes, these are difficult times, but some employers are not worth it.
Quite correct. But that is also the mindset that employers are increasingly betting prospective would-be employees will be too panicked - or apathetic - to have. If enough people just close their eyes and think of England when employers require this sort of thing, they'll be able to impose that expectation as standard practice. And then increase it.
Because some people need to eat and if the choice is to show your email or not having food on the table many would choose to give up their email. A law against it might help in that case.
I think it's wonderful: Now you can choose whether to put food on your table by working, or far more effectively by suing the pants off a would-be employer.
Honestly, if an employer demanded a copy of your housekey and fired you for declining, you'd have a valid case for wrongful dismissal. It's the same here. What's next, employers requiring jus primae noctis?*
This right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure by the government - let alone by any lesser entity - has been completely established. What's bizarre is that by now people have become so thoroughly fogged on what their rights are, that the argument for a need for new legislation on the point has been raised.
* Excluding Hollywood, where it has long been the traditional practice.
Whether or not *you* like it, most governments have the legal power/authority to do this, while civilians do not.
Did I miss a meeting? The federal government has only the authorities that were specifically delegated to it by the People. Those not delegated are retained by the People or, where vested by the People, in the States.
This has not stopped politicians from drafting all sorts of bogus legislation which purports to give them other authorities. But neither does that heap of paperwork legitimately do so. This is self-evident: I cannot give myself that which I do not yet have. I could take it from someone else without their consent, but that would make me a thief. In politics, it's called usurpation.
Amazing how we fought the War for Independence and established perhaps the only country in the world where the whole basis of governance is to represent and serve the People who made it... and 200-something years later we describe those same People as "[mere] civilians". Don't let anyone reframe the relationship between the People and our government like that, because it supports the imposition of a drastically different way of life than we, the People, established for our country.
In this instance, how is it any different?
Uh, one thing is tracking them everywhere they go, another is just logging the timestamps of when they go through the entrace door. There's a big difference.
There is, unless the one is just the thin end of the wedge to the other. And counter to the collective supposition, it typically is.
The same goes for mandatory drug-tests at work when they get older. Perhaps the employer would also like to get some bloodwork done, to make sure you're not going to keel over from something you're genetically-predisposed to in a few years.
Sorry, but I don't see how is mandatory drug-tests - an obvious and disgusting privacy violation - in any way similar to this.
Acceptance happens in drips and drabs. In the U.S., that sort of erosion of rights has been happening for over 200 years. So we must be very cautious when societal modifications like this start happening. Even if it's legit in Brazil, another country is likely to pick it up and adopt it with other directions in mind. Today, it's roll-call. In a decade or two, GPS for truancy. By then, ease-of-use would enable politicians and corporations to come up with all kinds of reasons why having it on you at all times would be so beneficial for many of your needs, nobody would seriously question it. From there, an identity-theft epidemic would justify chipping adults.
Our society - I don't know about Brazil's - has been getting increasingly more one-sided in disfavor of the individual. The approach in TFA doesn't seem like another likely maneuver towards that to you?
Well, I'm not part of "your society" either, but no, I don't see how is this a maneuver towards that, and apparently no one here has been able to explain it either.
Part of it has to do with the increasing commoditization of people. Going through an airport scanner is on par with being on the conveyor belt at a grocery store checkout counter. The mandatory drug tests from an employer we've discussed. And this. Part of it has to do with the instilling of a psychology of being a product, which all of these things do. I'm not sure I can explain it any better, and maybe it's just a human thing rather than something that can be effectively pinned down - much of the society I live in attempts to swat it out of their conscious perception, and so I don't have the terminology to convey it with precision. It's hardly ever used.
The other part has to do with the ongoing trends of how society in the U.S. is being terraformed. When it becomes a demonstrable pattern, proof is needed to demonstrate how this isn't - or wouldn't be - a part of it. At the moment, that appears to be only because it's happening in Brazil rather than the U.S.. Because it could so easily happen here, as part of an ongoing trend, it sets off mental alerts for people. If we had a functional government that wasn't always trying to do this - and often succeeding quite well - it probably wouldn't have the same connotations for people. The context would be quite different, and most people would read about it with nary a blip set off on their mental radars.
It's not common knowledge, but yes. Looked it up years ago but no longer have the cites for it.
Has to do with the federal government no longer acting within the Constitution, and therefore being in a corporate capacity. Therefore, everything is contractually-based. Slightly worse, the parents are merely the holders in due course. By the time it's reached the age of majority it's been the subject of a number of contracts from Certified Federal Citizenship (the "STATE OF [WHATEVER]"s are all federal), federal income tax benefits, public education benefits, etc. By accepting benefits, privileges and considerations, the parents are considered to have signed it over to the federal government in a compelled performance contract. Perhaps a good indicator of this are the municipal codes for practically anywhere in the U.S.: they only apply to "persons" which - in law, not English - refers to the subject of a contractual obligation. That's right, municipal codes don't apply to actual people, but only pull the strings of a contractual relationship.
Mind you, the contract isn't valid law. It's unconscionable (in the original sense of the legal term), it's outside the Constitution, and we've never given our representatives the authority to make those kinds of contracts (particularly on time we paid for). But it's the fictive argument on which they base their position. To obfuscate it, ranks of attorneys are actually officers of the court, systematically convoluting the legal definitions over generations. To sort out what they've been up do, you'd actually need to study them. I have.
Should I get to choose whether my child can reply to a roll call or not?
I love that question! If the State is going to make public education mandatory, perhaps there should be a better assurance that the schools haven't become repurposed to merely desensitize them to being oppressed and intimately micromanaged, in preparation for their adult years as citizens. So they will tolerate anything as voters, consumers and employees.
And this seems like a good issue to raise the question. Just as the introduction of backscatter scanners would have been the obvious point at which to raise the question of whether Homeland Security was really Constitutional.
[p]eople, it's a damn RFID tag, not a GPS embedded under their skin.
In this instance, how is it any different?
The same goes for mandatory drug-tests at work when they get older. Perhaps the employer would also like to get some bloodwork done, to make sure you're not going to keel over from something you're genetically-predisposed to in a few years. But let's not assess whether, as an employee, you're at least as entitled to independent third-party review of white collar crime within the management.
Our society - I don't know about Brazil's - has been getting increasingly more one-sided in disfavor of the individual. The approach in TFA doesn't seem like another likely maneuver towards that to you?