Right here is the crux of the whole matter, namely that you, unless I'm missing something, believe that no level of government, even in the midst of a public crisis, is authorized to limit, to any extent, any of the rights enshrined in the Constitution; myself, while not exactly an accredited scholar on these matters, in the same manner as my reaction to absolutist Second Amendment views find it exceedingly difficult to believe that this is truly the sort of nation the founders had in mind, especially when recalling government efforts, some of them much farther-reaching, but somehow infinitely less controversial, than anything we're likely to see now, to combat other major causes of death from car accidents to opioids. Heck, even ignoring (which, of course, you have) my aforementioned citation of certain types of speech which are expressly prohibited under the law, you could go right to the Declaration's most famous phrase and argue whether, in our current situation, one's right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness trump the accompanying right to life.ED-057 wrote:They never had this authority.
And here's the other thing; the Constitution being written as it is, there has been ongoing back-and-forth as to its precise meaning, very much including the limits of both individual rights and governmental authority, happening non-stop since before it was ratified, and will continue to happen as long as the nation exists (that's kinda the reason we have a Judiciary branch in the first place). By all accounts, however, you seem to think, or are at least willing to declare, that the debate is all but completely done and dusted; you accuse me of "want[ing] to remove those limits" placed on the government's power as if the matter was ever settled in the first place, or ever will be. Out of one side of your mouth you say I have the right to question "the nation's founding principles" (which, again, is a massive semantic thumb on the scale right at the outset), but out of the other side of it take the de facto position that any such inquiry is by its very nature invalid; this is precisely why and how I sent your previous complaints about "thought crimes" back in your direction.
Something tells me that nothing I or anyone else says, whether on the subject of law, history, health, sociology, whatever, is likely to ever make you or your cadre give so much as an inch on this, for reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with the validity of any of those arguments, but while I'm here, a few things I find it difficult to simply leave hanging:
I hope you realize what an abrupt and downright radical departure this is from literally everything you've said up until this point; at the very least, based on your aforementioned position when it comes to issues like these it'd be reasonable to expect that just on principle you'd have something to say about this; all of a sudden, however, you're somehow willing to take a "wait and see" approach before passing judgement.Trump is considering something. Not much to be said without knowing what that 'something' is.
Even more incredulously, this measure is, even devoid of details, openly declared from the outset to be unabashedly intended to favor a particular side of the ideological aisle (on the pretext that it's being treated "unfairly", which is very much its own debate to hash out), which, judging by your oft-voiced distaste for partisan food fights (notwithstanding your willful misunderstanding of who I meant by "these folks"), should stick even more uncomfortably in your craw.
So, why doesn't it?
See, but you do advocate for them when the circumstances suit you, even if you either genuinely don't realize it (which I doubt) or are just hoping nobody notices: your opinion on what should or shouldn't be done in response to this outbreak, the same as mine or anyone else's, is unquestionably influenced by your political views (I would simply love to see you try to argue, especially at this point, that it isn'tSo your answer is no then, which was already obvious based on your repeated attempts to have me answer for random positions which I never advocated."
), among countless other things, and as such your continued insistence to limit discussion to "individual issues" is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous on its face, and little more than an attempt to bar keenly relevant offshoots from the discourse as soon as they become inconvenient.On a completely unrelated note, I notice that discussion of the administration's "open the churches" edict has been quietly dropped.
The thing is, you can't impart knowledge, or thus utilize it on anything greater than an individual scale, for good or ill, without speech, so when you're deciding how to treat one, you also have to figure out how to treat the other - this is what I mean when I say that, like it or not, issues like these are inextricably linked. But again, you already knew that.It's shocking that at this point I should even have to say this: knowledge and speech are two different things!
Sorry, but that's outright pathetic; I stated plainly why I viewed today's "liberate" protestors differently from the Civil Rights figures of decades past, and it had nothing to do with whether or not I agreed with them. Read the post again: the sole distinction I cited was that Gandhi et al were willing to take a measure of discomfort and risk onto themselves as they sought their desired outcomes, while the "liberate" crowd is only willing to shift the ongoing perils of the pandemic onto others in order to make life immediately more convenient for themselves. I also made sure to note that this does not mean that "liberators" don't have the right to say what they want, but that it does give the rest of us a frame of reference when judging just how deeply-held their convictions truly are.So you imagine the people who you favor to be more thoughtful than the ones you don't favor.
To put it plainly, your response to what I said was completely fabricated out of whole cloth; the same, by the way, goes for your continued insistence that I "essentially" (:roll:) want more corporate control over published content (once again, totally consistent with my posts going back years
) and more of that control to be automated...at the same time, it doesn't seem to register with you that the people most loudly supporting, and in some cases directly funding, the "liberate" protests are the ones most feverishly working to make corporations ever less accountable to the rest of us. And, to expound upon what I said just above, that gives me, and anyone else masochistic enough to try to keep up with this, a pretty clear window into just what caliber of "argument" is being made here.I'll readily submit that the "forbidden fruit" angle is a part of the popularity of such screeds, but the other, and in my view far more important, part is that they tell certain people what they want to hear - you say that the only workable solution to quackery is to just keep putting "good" information out there and letting it work its magic, but even if you ignore (which, once again, you have) the fact that nonsense is a lot easier to churn out than verifiable facts, how much of the target audience for the former will even bother to read the latter at all (especially if someone somewhere is foolhardy enough to label them a "group" of some kind, and thus completely justify their abject refusal to listen?There are many ways to build confidence, censoring dissent is not one of them. The assertions made by the author of 'Plandemic' are laughable to the vast majority of people, but after goog decided to censor her she is now a best-seller.
), let alone be able to understand the more jargon-laden points unless additional effort (and time, and resources) are devoted to breaking them down to an elementary level, while the snake oil salesmen come up with a dozen more immediately-pleasing storylines to explain it all away?I'm pretty sure that nobody has disputed the notion that the lockdown will have adverse health effects; the thing being debated is whether the best or only way to deal with those effects is to ditch lockdowns completely...or whether that's the only viable option under the Constitution, as you've posited, thus rendering any medical viewpoint on the matter moot from the get-go (there's those pesky "individual" issues sticking their noses where they don't belong again!).Are doctors that disagree fake news?
No, you said, verbatim, when it comes to employees suing employers, "It [the country] is lawsuit-happy, and this has consequences" - moreover, since then, you've said that this, in your view, does not apply to libel/slander/etc. laws as applied to online speech, as you find such provisions notably less problematic. You clearly see a difference here: what is it?No, I just pointed out how you were wrong to say that there are no checks on online speech.
I guess all those meat packers and warehouse workers must have cash to burn. Y'know, unlike their employers.I would say it's not so much about being a 'bad actor' but about who has a pile of money. My point was also not how this would be bad for businesses, but how it could have unintended blowback on workers.
As for corporate shit rolling downhill, that's hardly a secret, but hell, even the mess that was the CARES act included provisions (over furious "pro-business" objections, naturally) to encourage businesses to use their allocated funds to keep workers on, as opposed to buying back stock or the like; if memory serves similar measures in some European countries have gone even further to that end. Or is that sort of action also beyond the Constitutional scope of the government?
Again, this is better-suited for the "general" politics thread (notwithstanding the choking miasma hanging over itPosessing a billy club and using it are two different things.
), but I'd be willing to propose that, independent of any hard-and-fast legal definition of the term, merely brandishing a weapon, especially under certain circumstances, is itself a "use" and serves a definite purpose. I imagine that folks from Britain and other places with mostly-unarmed police forces would probably have a viewpoint on that...though absent such input I find it more than entertaining enough to just strike my best Willy Wonka pose and casually wonder why the NRA doesn't allow firearms at its own conventions. Happy Memorial Day.
