jivatmanx

8 ms·

1.
by jivatmanx 13y ago
I really don't think asking too much of our presidents to try an instill in the public the value of Liberty and Democracy; nor is this some Herculean task. It costs nothing, nor does it require a PHD from Harvard to explain, but it&#x2
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
The USSR had dozens of nuclear ICBM's pointed at every major European city, and, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. city. They also had massive armies. If war had occurred, The U.S. could have been completely annihilated, utterly de
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
A useful anecdote is that Sensebrenner, the substantial author of the Patriot act, seemed shocked and almost entirely unaware how it's provisions have been interpreted and used. If the intelligence community can't even have a reas
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
The Telecoms have long given total cooperation in exchange for monopoly privileges in cable and internet. Carrot before stick.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
This, the Parallel Construction story, and the Patriot act having been principally used for the War on Drugs than terror... has made me consider that the War on Drugs may actually be more dangerous to Liberty than the war on terror. No doub
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Vietnam is a communist tyranny that simply applying existing laws and policies to a new medium, so this isn't really a change. Economists prefer percentages to absolutes, and trends to isolated incidents. 9/11 has not only halted
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Indeed, the current threat from terrorism has no significant differences from that of 19th century violent anarchism. Those who argue that "9/11 changed everything" play upon an ignorance of history to achieve their own purpo
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Furthermore, there a large number of cultural precursors that existed from before Hitler was even born. Hitler didn't invent antisemitism. Martin Luther clearly envisioned a genocide of Jews, in what was one of Hitler's favorite b
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
The police are the executors of the state's monopoly on the use of force, and where a state exists by the consent of the governed, it is uniquely important that the police are, without exception, held responsible to the people. Any phi
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
>Wiretaps were tolerated when we could trust in processes that would guarantee that they would not be abused. They were abused for a long time and we did nothing. The difference was you had to physically tap the line while the call was t
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
>Still, the spending, even on stuff that was just junk, got us out of The Great Depression. The U.S. was the only major country with cities and factories left standing, that weren't hit by wave after wave of bombers, so rebuilding y
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." -Benjamin Franklin
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
You should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is going after drug crimes.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
I wonder what logic Karp has used to convince Peter Thiel that he's still a libertarian? I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance. “If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger Fourth Amendment protections
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalist
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Thanks Rhizome. I'd like to add, The Gulf States are already under Sharia, and have been since their founding almost a century ago. The Taliban copied Saudi Arabia, even using the exact same names for bureaucracies. [2] Relations with
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Keith Alexander believes that terrorists live amongst us, trying to implement Sharia and create a Caliphate. To fight this, he needs to "Collect it all". It's just as important to understand his motivation as it is to underst
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
>The same could be done to bring creative works like books into the public domain. This is a great idea. Unpopular works would be inexpensive to acquire rights for, so dedicated fan communities could try this. Some out of print works mig
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
He's not really an African-American in the strongest sense of this term, he doesn't have black American ancestors who lived through slavery, or even the civil rights movement.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Great post. I think my central point is that it's dangerous for a democratic society to believe that nine robed Brahmins are the only people qualified to interpret it.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Congress must take seriously the idea that upholding the Constitution is a central duty, and that the existence of the Supreme Court does not in any way eliminate that duty.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
We now know that the DEA has been using laundered NSA intelligence. That's relevant to the Drug War, where primarily minority communities are routinely terrorized by soldiers, and imprisoned en mass at the world's highest rate.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Many countries have more powerful and interventionist Supreme Courts. Notable, Germany[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Constitutional_Court_of...
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
There's a big gap between the philosophies of "Everything is public by default" and "Secretly giving all of your private communications to the NSA". The former is utopian, though naive. The latter is just old school
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
At a point in our nation's early history, we decided to trust Constitutional interpretation to the Supreme Court. There were cons to that decision - the Constitution is our social contract and thus it's interpretation is ultimatel
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
I think the writing is already on the wall in favor of that movement. The biggest civil rights movement left is the War on Drugs, with soldiers routinely terrorizing minority communities, putting them in chains en-masse, taking their right
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
The goal of Al-Qaeda's internationalist effort has been achieved, the image of the "Shining City on the Hill", of the U.S. as a beacon of liberal democracy and thus liberal democracy itself, has been tarnished, not to mention
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
Prohibition succeeded because they formed an alliance with the Women's Suffrage movement.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
The primary qualification is now ideological purity.
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by jivatmanx 13y ago
With "Parallel Construction", we see an explicit attempt to avoid Judicial Review, with the DEA mysteriously dropping charges whenever a case goes to court. Which is bad, as we've now trusted the constitution entirely to Judi

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