So what do you call the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act? I call both unconstitutional because their only existence is a conspiracy against "its own citizens." They have been chartered to do anything it takes, including suspending a person's constitutional rights, all in the name of protecting the country.
As for Snowden, he broke the law by releasing classified documents. I don't care what they showed, he still broke the law.
(I had to sign the same type of document he did saying I wouldn't disclose classified information, which doesn't end even though I retired.)
Even if you don't care for the Department of Homeland Security, they have such a wide range of scope that it's hard to see the overall department as existing as a conspiracy against U.S. citizens. IMO, the main problem is that it doesn't really seem to be an obvious improvement on the systems that existed before, at least not to the average citizen. The Patriot Act has always had a lot of problems, but it's also a publicly available document and a law that was passed by Congress and signed by the President. It's also been modified on numerous occasions, and most of the time in the direction of increasing limits on government powers, not reducing them. Congress should replace it with something better, but it's not exactly a front-burner issue right now.
Good for you. You should never have trusted the government in the first place. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t trust government either. That’s why the Bill of Rights is in the Constitution. Government should be treated as a sort of necessary evil to be kept on a tight leash. But that’s not how it has evolved since 1776. Today there are millions upon millions of citizens whose very existence is dependent on the government and some say that’s just dandy and what government is supposed to do. No it’s not.
This is why the second amendment is so important, without that we have no way to protect the rest of the Bill of Rights. It does make you wonder why Obama is so he'll bent on gun control.
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It’s pretty much too late for us now. All this outrage over privacy and government snooping will NOT translate into ANYTHING at the ballot box. The same actors will be re-elected. Why? Because too many of us are beholding to that same government for food, housing, jobs, education. We are not the same “people” we were 200 years ago. We are no longer self-sufficient, we are no longer industrious, we are no longer independent. We are now the slaves to the government we swore we would never be.
I see some hope here but it may require a minor revolution to fix things. One thing that absolutely must happen is that the welfare system must be terminated.
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So go ahead and rage, complain, decry the evil government, anonymously on the Internet. Then turn around and gleefully accept your government benefits and demand even more of them.
That is a problem in some circles. However many are very much aware of how dangerous the security apparatus of the federal government has become.
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The government doesn’t care how many guns we have in our homes.
Obviously they do. In fact the far left is scared to death that they might be held accountable by the masses.
Quote:
They don’t need to. They have us right where they want us, totally dependent on them for survival.
Some are and that is why we need to start with the woe fare system and totally eliminate it.
May I suggest that in terminating Welfare you seriously consider time travel backwards 200 years or so and voluntarily forego all advances made since the Declaration of Independence and creation of the Constitution? By advances I'm meaning food production, application of medical knowledge (I think deaths from IHD, Cancer and simple infection would hit 100% mortality) industrial production and weaponry (that leaves you with muzzle loading muskets and Cannon btw). I'm not convinced the rest of the world is likely to follow you.
Having said that just removing advances in medical science would result in a severe population from, just like that! Add in famine/starvation great, call the four horsemen. You won't last long.
Doesn't The Apple License Agreement prohibit the modification of existing source code/apps? If so, the Federal Government would be in violation of their license agreement and could lose access to the software, especially if they have a cracked version of Xcode.
HERE’S THE KICKER, BUCKO. This is your textbook nonsense that means nothing to anyone. The point is that the rights WERE VIOLATED. Period. End of sentence. Half (it’s not half; it’s all of us) of the country IS NOT GUILTY OF A CRIME.
Congress has passed bills that were signed into law and later ruled to be unconstitutional. Does that by itself prove that Congress as an institution is trying to oppress U.S. citizens? No. The same is true of an organization like the NSA. Yes, the FISA court ruled that they had likely violated Constitutional rights back in 2006 regarding the setup for a CIA/FBI database, but that doesn't prove anything regarding an intent to oppress U.S. citizens. In fact, since it was the NSA's own audit that provided the proof of the violation, it really doesn't make much sense to claim the NSA had a deliberate intent. It's more a competency issue than a conspiracy issue in that case.
You're indulging in conflation: a constitutional violation does not prove conspiracy to oppress.
I'm starting to develop an intense distrust toward any government.
A healthy skepticism is often the first sign of real intelligence
It's really too bad more people don't read the writings of the American founding fathers and heed their advice. Having just thrown off an oppressive government that marginalized and took them for granted, they had some surprisingly relevant thoughts on distribution of power and limiting government to those functions that are only absolutely necessary. Including concentrating power in multiple local governments (states) that are close to those being governed and warned repeatedly about the dangers of faceless, non-caring powerful central governments far removed from their constituencies.
In the words of Tim Cook: (this interview was covered by AI a couple of weeks back)
“None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn't give it up. We shouldn't give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details.”
“History has taught us that privacy breaches have resulted in very dire consequences. You don’t have to look back too far or be a historian to see these things. They are readily apparent.”
“Terrorism is horrible and must be stopped. All of us must do everything we can do to stop this craziness.... these people shouldn’t exist. They should be eliminated."
Yet he doesn’t accept the view that privacy needs to be compromised to combat the killers. There is no trade-off in his view because the terrorists already use their own encryption tools, which cannot be controlled by the UK or US. So forcing the likes of Apple to make their consumers’ data freely available to the authorities would do nothing to protect the public in the West.
“Terrorists will encrypt. They know what to do. If we don’t encrypt, the people we affect [by cracking down on privacy] are the good people. They are the 99.999pc of people who are good.”
“You don't want to eliminate everyone’s privacy. If you do, you not only don’t solve the terrorist issue but you also take away something that is a human right. The consequences of doing that are very significant.”
We need to disband the CIA and create a new law that states that our privacy must be protected.
>Implying that very law won't be violated by the trampling of a combat boot and pointing of a rifle barrel.
LOL at this leftist logic. "please government, protect me from you!"
What you need to understand is that politics attract sociopaths and sociopaths are also the ones who can weasel their way up the ranks in the military. When the two meet, you get degenerate alphabet soup organizations.
Your ONLY defense is anonymity. To be so unremarkable as to be lost within the masses. To conform so well to the herd that they can't differentiate you from another. It is this very anonymity they are now trying to destroy.
It's really too bad more people don't read the writings of the American founding fathers and heed their advice. Having just thrown off an oppressive government that marginalized and took them for granted, they had some surprisingly relevant thoughts on distribution of power and limiting government to those functions that are only absolutely necessary.
The oppressive government that they threw off was a feudal monarchy that based political power on wealth and land holdings. So the founding fathers were likely opposed to the new government catering to the rich at the expense of the average citizen, correct?
Whatever happened to the "government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth" being a guiding and unifying value?
Sadly we ended up with "the government by the people".
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
The problem with democracy (or peace) is that it takes everyone working together - instead never before has the "what's in it for me" been in more vogue. Religion or aspiring to higher ideals are derided, moral relativism rules the roost.
We were founded as a representative republic rather than a true democracy for a reason. I fear we have shifted more towards the true democracy side of things. That people should be surprised at the results is what's really annoying since none of this is new.
In the words of Tim Cook: (this interview was covered by AI a couple of weeks back) “None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn't give it up. We shouldn't give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details.” “History has taught us that privacy breaches have resulted in very dire consequences. You don’t have to look back too far or be a historian to see these things. They are readily apparent.” <span style="line-height:1.4em;">“Terrorism is horrible and must be stopped. All of us must do everything we can do to stop this craziness.... these people shouldn’t exist. They should be eliminated." </span>
Yet he doesn’t accept the view that privacy needs to be compromised to combat the killers. There is no trade-off in his view because the terrorists already use their own encryption tools, which cannot be controlled by the UK or US. So forcing the likes of Apple to make their consumers’ data freely available to the authorities would do nothing to protect the public in the West. “Terrorists will encrypt. They know what to do. If we don’t encrypt, the people we affect [by cracking down on privacy] are the good people. They are the 99.999pc of people who are good.” <span style="line-height:1.4em;">“You don't want to eliminate everyone’s privacy. If you do, you not only don’t solve the terrorist issue but you also take away something that is a human right. The consequences of doing that are very significant.”</span>
Tim is exercising poetic license when he talks about "human rights". What exists to protect one's human rights? Is there a world Constitution? Is there a "Citizens of Earth" Bill of Rights? Of course not. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unique to the US and only applies to US citizens. That these guaranteed protections no longer protect, nor are they guaranteed should have caused an immediate response from Americans. That there has been no substantive response is evidence that most people are ignorant of their actual rights and the real LIMITED function of government.
The oppressive government that they threw off was a feudal monarchy that based political power on wealth and land holdings. So the founding fathers were likely opposed to the new government catering to the rich at the expense of the average citizen, correct?
Yes, they were - which is why our country was set up the way it was - weak central government with limited and clearly defined roles.
And they would be opposed to the strong federal government that we have today too since they warned repeatedly against letting such power consolidate at the federal level for the reasons we are discussing in this thread. What we have today barely resembles what was originally set up. That the Interstate commerce clause is so often perverted and cited for just about everything the federal government does just underscores the lengths that are still being sought to pervert the original intentions for the federal government to be fairly limited with the states responsible for the bulk of governing.
The constitution even with amendments is pretty short, yet how many people have bothered to read it or even ponder on it's meaning or intent? It's short for a very good reason. That the US Code has become the hegemony that it has is yet another symptom of the fundamental problem. If only the book "Three Felonies a Day" was a gross exaggeration done for dramatic effect
EDIT: and calling England a feudal monarchy, especially at that point in time, is a gross exaggeration. Ideas like the Magna Carta had already been well established (and indeed formed the basis for much of our governmental framework), parliament was in ascendency and the monarchy was already well on it's way to being more symbolic. England wasn't near as crude as I think you are attempting to intimate. Cruel? Sure!
Yes, they were - which is why our country was set up the way it was - weak central government with limited and clearly defined roles.
And they would be opposed to the strong federal government that we have today too since they warned repeatedly against letting such power consolidate at the federal level for the reasons we are discussing in this thread. What we have today barely resembles what was originally set up. That the Interstate commerce clause is so often perverted and cited for just about everything the federal government does just underscores the lengths that are still being sought to pervert the original intentions for the federal government to be fairly limited with the states responsible for the bulk of governing.
If the central government had really been intended to be "weak", then how do you explain the central government buying and/or conquering such large amounts of territory following the original revolution? Or the fact that the Constitution has always said that federal law supersedes state law? Or the Civil War for that matter?
If the central government had really been intended to be "weak", then how do you explain the central government buying and/or conquering such large amounts of territory following the original revolution? Or the fact that the Constitution has always said that federal law supersedes state law? Or the Civil War for that matter?
The Constitution is a restraint on government, make no mistake. Any historian worth their salt (for that matter, a simple reading of the document by anyone with a high school education and an ability to think) understands this.
Tim is exercising poetic license when he talks about "human rights". What exists to protect one's human rights? Is there a world Constitution? Is there a "Citizens of Earth" Bill of Rights? Of course not. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unique to the US and only applies to US citizens. That these guaranteed protections no longer protect, nor are they guaranteed should have caused an immediate response from Americans. That there has been no substantive response is evidence that most people are ignorant of their actual rights and the real LIMITED function of government.
Sure. I don't think TC spoke about 'human rights' as per written in law. I think he expressed his opinion and in so doing laid out Apple's stance and as such his points are valid. People try and make this a left v right kind of issue and there is a lot of knee jerking going on on both sides of the fence. I think Tim was trying to steer clear of party politics when he referred to privacy as a human right, and yes, I am pretty certain most people consider their privacy their 'right'.
The Constitution is a restraint on government, make no mistake.
Correct. But you can't determine all of the specifics of restraint simply by reading the Constitution. You also have to read the laws that have been passed and upheld. Plus, many of the aspects of the Constitution that people like to quote today are from amendments, meaning that the original Constitution did not include them.
Correct. But you can't determine all of the specifics of restraint simply by reading the Constitution. You also have to read the laws that have been passed and upheld. Plus, many of the aspects of the Constitution that people like to quote today are from amendments, meaning that the original Constitution did not include them.
Yes, once precedent has been set with a bad ruling, the bad laws that follow are like a quickly rolling snowball that grows to a dangerous size.
Comments
Only if the other woman is wheeling a rack of designer dresses.
So what do you call the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act? I call both unconstitutional because their only existence is a conspiracy against "its own citizens." They have been chartered to do anything it takes, including suspending a person's constitutional rights, all in the name of protecting the country.
As for Snowden, he broke the law by releasing classified documents. I don't care what they showed, he still broke the law.
(I had to sign the same type of document he did saying I wouldn't disclose classified information, which doesn't end even though I retired.)
Even if you don't care for the Department of Homeland Security, they have such a wide range of scope that it's hard to see the overall department as existing as a conspiracy against U.S. citizens. IMO, the main problem is that it doesn't really seem to be an obvious improvement on the systems that existed before, at least not to the average citizen. The Patriot Act has always had a lot of problems, but it's also a publicly available document and a law that was passed by Congress and signed by the President. It's also been modified on numerous occasions, and most of the time in the direction of increasing limits on government powers, not reducing them. Congress should replace it with something better, but it's not exactly a front-burner issue right now.
Good for you. You should never have trusted the government in the first place. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t trust government either. That’s why the Bill of Rights is in the Constitution. Government should be treated as a sort of necessary evil to be kept on a tight leash. But that’s not how it has evolved since 1776. Today there are millions upon millions of citizens whose very existence is dependent on the government and some say that’s just dandy and what government is supposed to do. No it’s not.
This is why the second amendment is so important, without that we have no way to protect the rest of the Bill of Rights. It does make you wonder why Obama is so he'll bent on gun control.
I see some hope here but it may require a minor revolution to fix things. One thing that absolutely must happen is that the welfare system must be terminated.
That is a problem in some circles. However many are very much aware of how dangerous the security apparatus of the federal government has become.
Obviously they do. In fact the far left is scared to death that they might be held accountable by the masses.
Some are and that is why we need to start with the woe fare system and totally eliminate it.
May I suggest that in terminating Welfare you seriously consider time travel backwards 200 years or so and voluntarily forego all advances made since the Declaration of Independence and creation of the Constitution? By advances I'm meaning food production, application of medical knowledge (I think deaths from IHD, Cancer and simple infection would hit 100% mortality) industrial production and weaponry (that leaves you with muzzle loading muskets and Cannon btw). I'm not convinced the rest of the world is likely to follow you.
Having said that just removing advances in medical science would result in a severe population from, just like that! Add in famine/starvation great, call the four horsemen. You won't last long.
Just a friendly reminder where U.S. tax dollars are going this tax season.
Congress has passed bills that were signed into law and later ruled to be unconstitutional. Does that by itself prove that Congress as an institution is trying to oppress U.S. citizens? No. The same is true of an organization like the NSA. Yes, the FISA court ruled that they had likely violated Constitutional rights back in 2006 regarding the setup for a CIA/FBI database, but that doesn't prove anything regarding an intent to oppress U.S. citizens. In fact, since it was the NSA's own audit that provided the proof of the violation, it really doesn't make much sense to claim the NSA had a deliberate intent. It's more a competency issue than a conspiracy issue in that case.
You're indulging in conflation: a constitutional violation does not prove conspiracy to oppress.
A healthy skepticism is often the first sign of real intelligence
It's really too bad more people don't read the writings of the American founding fathers and heed their advice. Having just thrown off an oppressive government that marginalized and took them for granted, they had some surprisingly relevant thoughts on distribution of power and limiting government to those functions that are only absolutely necessary. Including concentrating power in multiple local governments (states) that are close to those being governed and warned repeatedly about the dangers of faceless, non-caring powerful central governments far removed from their constituencies.
Those that fail to learn history and all that...
In the words of Tim Cook: (this interview was covered by AI a couple of weeks back)
“None of us should accept that the government or a company or anybody should have access to all of our private information. This is a basic human right. We all have a right to privacy. We shouldn't give it up. We shouldn't give in to scare-mongering or to people who fundamentally don’t understand the details.”
“History has taught us that privacy breaches have resulted in very dire consequences. You don’t have to look back too far or be a historian to see these things. They are readily apparent.”
“Terrorism is horrible and must be stopped. All of us must do everything we can do to stop this craziness.... these people shouldn’t exist. They should be eliminated."
Yet he doesn’t accept the view that privacy needs to be compromised to combat the killers. There is no trade-off in his view because the terrorists already use their own encryption tools, which cannot be controlled by the UK or US. So forcing the likes of Apple to make their consumers’ data freely available to the authorities would do nothing to protect the public in the West.
“Terrorists will encrypt. They know what to do. If we don’t encrypt, the people we affect [by cracking down on privacy] are the good people. They are the 99.999pc of people who are good.”
“You don't want to eliminate everyone’s privacy. If you do, you not only don’t solve the terrorist issue but you also take away something that is a human right. The consequences of doing that are very significant.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/11441265/Terrorists-should-be-eliminated-says-Apples-Tim-Cook.html
We need to disband the CIA and create a new law that states that our privacy must be protected.
>Implying that very law won't be violated by the trampling of a combat boot and pointing of a rifle barrel.
LOL at this leftist logic. "please government, protect me from you!"
What you need to understand is that politics attract sociopaths and sociopaths are also the ones who can weasel their way up the ranks in the military. When the two meet, you get degenerate alphabet soup organizations.
Your ONLY defense is anonymity. To be so unremarkable as to be lost within the masses. To conform so well to the herd that they can't differentiate you from another. It is this very anonymity they are now trying to destroy.
The oppressive government that they threw off was a feudal monarchy that based political power on wealth and land holdings. So the founding fathers were likely opposed to the new government catering to the rich at the expense of the average citizen, correct?
Sadly we ended up with "the government by the people".
"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."
- Benjamin Franklin
The problem with democracy (or peace) is that it takes everyone working together - instead never before has the "what's in it for me" been in more vogue. Religion or aspiring to higher ideals are derided, moral relativism rules the roost.
We were founded as a representative republic rather than a true democracy for a reason. I fear we have shifted more towards the true democracy side of things. That people should be surprised at the results is what's really annoying since none of this is new.
Tim is exercising poetic license when he talks about "human rights". What exists to protect one's human rights? Is there a world Constitution? Is there a "Citizens of Earth" Bill of Rights? Of course not. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unique to the US and only applies to US citizens. That these guaranteed protections no longer protect, nor are they guaranteed should have caused an immediate response from Americans. That there has been no substantive response is evidence that most people are ignorant of their actual rights and the real LIMITED function of government.
Yes, they were - which is why our country was set up the way it was - weak central government with limited and clearly defined roles.
And they would be opposed to the strong federal government that we have today too since they warned repeatedly against letting such power consolidate at the federal level for the reasons we are discussing in this thread. What we have today barely resembles what was originally set up. That the Interstate commerce clause is so often perverted and cited for just about everything the federal government does just underscores the lengths that are still being sought to pervert the original intentions for the federal government to be fairly limited with the states responsible for the bulk of governing.
The constitution even with amendments is pretty short, yet how many people have bothered to read it or even ponder on it's meaning or intent? It's short for a very good reason. That the US Code has become the hegemony that it has is yet another symptom of the fundamental problem. If only the book "Three Felonies a Day" was a gross exaggeration done for dramatic effect
EDIT: and calling England a feudal monarchy, especially at that point in time, is a gross exaggeration. Ideas like the Magna Carta had already been well established (and indeed formed the basis for much of our governmental framework), parliament was in ascendency and the monarchy was already well on it's way to being more symbolic. England wasn't near as crude as I think you are attempting to intimate. Cruel? Sure!
Yes, they were - which is why our country was set up the way it was - weak central government with limited and clearly defined roles.
And they would be opposed to the strong federal government that we have today too since they warned repeatedly against letting such power consolidate at the federal level for the reasons we are discussing in this thread. What we have today barely resembles what was originally set up. That the Interstate commerce clause is so often perverted and cited for just about everything the federal government does just underscores the lengths that are still being sought to pervert the original intentions for the federal government to be fairly limited with the states responsible for the bulk of governing.
If the central government had really been intended to be "weak", then how do you explain the central government buying and/or conquering such large amounts of territory following the original revolution? Or the fact that the Constitution has always said that federal law supersedes state law? Or the Civil War for that matter?
The Constitution is a restraint on government, make no mistake. Any historian worth their salt (for that matter, a simple reading of the document by anyone with a high school education and an ability to think) understands this.
Tim is exercising poetic license when he talks about "human rights". What exists to protect one's human rights? Is there a world Constitution? Is there a "Citizens of Earth" Bill of Rights? Of course not. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unique to the US and only applies to US citizens. That these guaranteed protections no longer protect, nor are they guaranteed should have caused an immediate response from Americans. That there has been no substantive response is evidence that most people are ignorant of their actual rights and the real LIMITED function of government.
Sure. I don't think TC spoke about 'human rights' as per written in law. I think he expressed his opinion and in so doing laid out Apple's stance and as such his points are valid. People try and make this a left v right kind of issue and there is a lot of knee jerking going on on both sides of the fence. I think Tim was trying to steer clear of party politics when he referred to privacy as a human right, and yes, I am pretty certain most people consider their privacy their 'right'.
Correct. But you can't determine all of the specifics of restraint simply by reading the Constitution. You also have to read the laws that have been passed and upheld. Plus, many of the aspects of the Constitution that people like to quote today are from amendments, meaning that the original Constitution did not include them.
Yes, once precedent has been set with a bad ruling, the bad laws that follow are like a quickly rolling snowball that grows to a dangerous size.