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The Constitution is the source code of our country. It literally describes what rights we have (edit: it is not an exhaustive list to be clear), thus why we hav

The Constitution is the source code of our country. It literally describes what rights we have (edit: it is not an exhaustive list to be clear), thus why we have a document called “the Bill of Rights” which is a set of constitutional amendments that enumerate a set of rights that the government does not have the power to infringe. So, respectfully, I actually see your confusion as a non-American; most countries don’t treat the concept of a constitution with any seriousness. > but I don't really see "because it was decided so a long time ago" as particularly good reason to ordain something as a sacred right. That is, again, literally how it works. For example, that is why here in the United States it is not illegal to deny that the holocaust happened, whereas in Germany or France you will get fined and thrown in jail. Specifically Supreme Court decisions rely on precedent from previous cases; this is called Stare Decisis. Precedent is only to be overturned when clearly the wrong call was made (for example the SCOTUS decision permitting Japanese internment camps) —- To summarize, the genesis of America lies in the notion that we have inalienable rights that are not granted by the government but rather given by God (I think of this metaphorically since I don’t believe in a god). Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights. So in conclusion, despite the implication of your “Quran” question...yes, it really is a sacred document. Not just bevause it is the source code for our country, but because the ideas contsined within it are revolutionary and beautiful. For evidence of how revolutionary they are, I submit your (good-faith) incredulity with the entire concept :P

maxerickson 6y ago
The constitution is written to enjoin the government from infringing on certain rights. To say that it describes the rights we have is a fundamental misunderstanding. It even says as much, in the 9th amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. I mean, you could at least try to argue more clearly, and not trip over something so obvious.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  The 9th amendment is saying "just because we said we have rights X and Y explicitly, doesn't mean that we don't have Z just because we didn't say it". That's what it's saying. All I'm saying is the bill of rights describes rights that the government cannot infringe upon (with the exceptions established via judicial precedent, for example guns can be taken away from violent felons, etc) I never said that the Constitution was an exhaustive list of our rights so your snarky dismissal doesn't strike me as fair.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Your exact words are It literally describes what rights we have. The US constitution doesn't do that, it enjoins the government from infringing certain rights. If you are going to endlessly bloviate about it, do it with some clarity.
enjeyw 6y ago
Thanks for engaging with this, I really appreciate the insight, and definitely see the merits of the position. >Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights. This in particular makes a lot of sense to me, and kinda what i was getting at with the comment about stability, though perhaps introducing the word precendent was a bad idea given its existing judicial meaning. There's a certain protection that this provides against governments implementing whatever happens to be "in vogue" at the time (abuses of ethnicities that are currently associated with "the enemy" for example). For the record, I wasn't trying to imply anything negative with the "Quran" question - I respect the decision to use religion as the fundemental basis for law (well to the extent that it doesn't violate what I'd consider more fundemental human rights, such as the right not to be raped, but that's a different discusion). Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change? For the record, considering it myself, if I think i were to reptriate to america, I think my position WOULD change, and I'd be against public gatherings, on the grounds that the long term damage caused by violating 1a is far worse than the short term harm by allowing further spread of COVID (once again in a hypothetical world where the only thing that I have against the ban is 1a), but I'm not sure.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  > Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change? Great question. My reasoning would change, but my position would not. The issue is that the research I've done has convinced me that SARS-CoV-2 is literally the worst possible virus to lockdown over (and furthermore there's really not a virus out there where lockdown makes sense anyway). BTW, the way we've done it in the USA is the worst of both worlds because we ate all the costs of containment, yet are actually practicing mitigation. It's like the opposite of the pareto principle. Before I get into the health stuff, since we do have the 1A here, I will always argue the 1A over the health stuff, because arguing the merits of the policy on public health grounds means implicitly ceding the first amendment argument. Anyway, let's begin: The reason I would still be against it if I were in, say, Europe, is because from a public health standpoint, I believe these measures worsen mortality over the long-term (and indeed the medium-term, and possibly even the short-term). In short, this is because universal lockdown increases the proportion of at-risk people that must get sick before we hit herd immunity. Additionally, lockdown is going to reduce a population's sunlight exposure (Vitamin D is INCREDIBLY important for respiratory pathology, but nitric oxide is important too), it's going to reduce the amount people exercise/sleep, it's going to increase fear/anxiety, and it's going to decrease social interaction. Each of those individually are bad for the immune system, but taken together it's disastrous. Severe COVID-19 seems to be an immunoregulatory disorder. You don't so much die from the virus as you do your immune response to the virus. A virus like SARS-2, which is adapted to spread well (for example, it suppresses interferon in the early stages of infection which creates a ~2 day window of pre-symptomatic spread where viral load is high enough to transmit and yet there are no visible symptoms), but it is a very poor killer (even the CDC estimates a .65% IFR, and the CDC has a vested interest in using the worst numbers possible). Furthermore the population targetted by SARS-2 is almost exclusively the very old or the very sick, which means the average years of life lost (YLL) per death is much lower than for Influenza, which actually does kill children in real amounts. So in conclusion: - the measures to slow spread don't seem to work to slow spread (this applies to universal masking btw) - but insofar as those measures do slow spread, that's a bad thing, because it increases the number of high-risk individuals that will get sick over the long-run, and - of those who do get sick, if they've spent the last 3 months locked down they are more likely to die BTW, since pre-existing exposure to non-SARS human coronaviruses produces T-cell cross-reactivity [1], we could have produced a pseudo-vaccine already by just dosing people with live non-SARS human coronaviruses. [1] ["SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z) - Published: 15 July 2020 - Here, we first studied T cell responses to structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP. - Surprisingly, we also frequently detected SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with SARS/COVID-19 patients (n=37)

maxerickson 6y ago

The constitution is written to enjoin the government from infringing on certain rights. To say that it describes the rights we have is a fundamental misunderstanding. It even says as much, in the 9th amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. I mean, you could at least try to argue more clearly, and not trip over something so obvious.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
The 9th amendment is saying "just because we said we have rights X and Y explicitly, doesn't mean that we don't have Z just because we didn't say it". That's what it's saying. All I'm saying is the bill of rights describes rights that the government cannot infringe upon (with the exceptions established via judicial precedent, for example guns can be taken away from violent felons, etc) I never said that the Constitution was an exhaustive list of our rights so your snarky dismissal doesn't strike me as fair.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Your exact words are It literally describes what rights we have. The US constitution doesn't do that, it enjoins the government from infringing certain rights. If you are going to endlessly bloviate about it, do it with some clarity.

enjeyw 6y ago

Thanks for engaging with this, I really appreciate the insight, and definitely see the merits of the position. >Thus the constitution just makes it explicit to the government that we have these rights and always did; as opposed to the government graciously extending these rights. This in particular makes a lot of sense to me, and kinda what i was getting at with the comment about stability, though perhaps introducing the word precendent was a bad idea given its existing judicial meaning. There's a certain protection that this provides against governments implementing whatever happens to be "in vogue" at the time (abuses of ethnicities that are currently associated with "the enemy" for example). For the record, I wasn't trying to imply anything negative with the "Quran" question - I respect the decision to use religion as the fundemental basis for law (well to the extent that it doesn't violate what I'd consider more fundemental human rights, such as the right not to be raped, but that's a different discusion). Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change? For the record, considering it myself, if I think i were to reptriate to america, I think my position WOULD change, and I'd be against public gatherings, on the grounds that the long term damage caused by violating 1a is far worse than the short term harm by allowing further spread of COVID (once again in a hypothetical world where the only thing that I have against the ban is 1a), but I'm not sure.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
> Hypothetically, if you were against banning of public gatherings to protect against COVID only the grounds that it violates 1a, if you were to repatriate in a country that didn't enshrine 1a, would your position on this policy change? Great question. My reasoning would change, but my position would not. The issue is that the research I've done has convinced me that SARS-CoV-2 is literally the worst possible virus to lockdown over (and furthermore there's really not a virus out there where lockdown makes sense anyway). BTW, the way we've done it in the USA is the worst of both worlds because we ate all the costs of containment, yet are actually practicing mitigation. It's like the opposite of the pareto principle. Before I get into the health stuff, since we do have the 1A here, I will always argue the 1A over the health stuff, because arguing the merits of the policy on public health grounds means implicitly ceding the first amendment argument. Anyway, let's begin: The reason I would still be against it if I were in, say, Europe, is because from a public health standpoint, I believe these measures worsen mortality over the long-term (and indeed the medium-term, and possibly even the short-term). In short, this is because universal lockdown increases the proportion of at-risk people that must get sick before we hit herd immunity. Additionally, lockdown is going to reduce a population's sunlight exposure (Vitamin D is INCREDIBLY important for respiratory pathology, but nitric oxide is important too), it's going to reduce the amount people exercise/sleep, it's going to increase fear/anxiety, and it's going to decrease social interaction. Each of those individually are bad for the immune system, but taken together it's disastrous. Severe COVID-19 seems to be an immunoregulatory disorder. You don't so much die from the virus as you do your immune response to the virus. A virus like SARS-2, which is adapted to spread well (for example, it suppresses interferon in the early stages of infection which creates a ~2 day window of pre-symptomatic spread where viral load is high enough to transmit and yet there are no visible symptoms), but it is a very poor killer (even the CDC estimates a .65% IFR, and the CDC has a vested interest in using the worst numbers possible). Furthermore the population targetted by SARS-2 is almost exclusively the very old or the very sick, which means the average years of life lost (YLL) per death is much lower than for Influenza, which actually does kill children in real amounts. So in conclusion: - the measures to slow spread don't seem to work to slow spread (this applies to universal masking btw) - but insofar as those measures do slow spread, that's a bad thing, because it increases the number of high-risk individuals that will get sick over the long-run, and - of those who do get sick, if they've spent the last 3 months locked down they are more likely to die BTW, since pre-existing exposure to non-SARS human coronaviruses produces T-cell cross-reactivity [1], we could have produced a pseudo-vaccine already by just dosing people with live non-SARS human coronaviruses. [1] ["SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z) - Published: 15 July 2020 - Here, we first studied T cell responses to structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP. - Surprisingly, we also frequently detected SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with SARS/COVID-19 patients (n=37)