241–250 of 276 posts
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Granted, guns have serial numbers and there is a list of registered owners. My argument falls apart there.
In most of the US, no registration or license is required to legally own a gun, and the Federal government is barred from attempting to create a registry.
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I don't know if you're being deliberately obtuse, but I'll humour you: > It sounds like she wants targeted spying to be cheaper, and restricted by the judicial system. The cheaper that spying is, the more spying gets done - this has been repeatedly shown in many countries, even supposedly free ones, so lets not pretend this will result in the government saving a few bucks on security. It will result in (continued) da…
> First, pointing out that there are harms and she's aware of them, despite not addressing them, because she refuses to disclose her communications. Though I'm skeptical of how much a 3m42s interview can be said to represent the entirety of her views, I'd say she alludes to the harms by referring to such access as "warranted". That is, authorisation is restricted [because of the costs of unrestricted access]. > Secon…
What warrant? How naive are you, there wouldn't be such a thing.
Using crypto makes you stand out, and doesn't really complicate traffic analysis.
Corollary: not using crypto makes it easier to look like hay in a huge hay pile, even if you're a needle.
Ad-hoc-but-disciplined plaintext comsec for small committed teams is not that difficult to establish and master, and can work very well for them.
But for the rest of us, plaintext comsec just doesn't work. And defending privacy relative to state actors, foreign and domestic, is a legitimate activity within the bounds of due process (e.g., your affairs can get searched with a legal warrant, and so on).
It's important to understand that when the State wins the crypto wars, not only does it ensure for itself access to people's data pursuant under Due Process, but also without Due Process at all. It's like making all houses and walls out of glass just so people can't hide from the police: it's insane.
And worse than that: the State winning the crypto wars does not make it easier to prevent attacks. If anything it can make mounting attacks easier for terrorists, depending on the particulars of the crypto war outcome.
There is a growing misconception that it is the role of the government to "keep their citizens safe". Although that it is often the intention of legislation to prevent behaviour which may lead to unsafe situations. For example, making it illegal to drink and drive. You can arrest someone for breaking the law, but never can you arrest someone right up to the point of breaking the law. For example, You cannot arrest so…
Attempted murder is criminalized, but that's a weak counterpoint.
Criminal conspiracy, however, is exactly the crime you're claiming can't exist.
This is absolutely horrific. The path the UK is on is terrifying. On the bright side they are quite far ahead down this road compared to other Western countries, so when the UK inevitably collapses first, other governments can learn their lesson.
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> Next they take your car. But cars are useful and, on average safer, for many / the majority of people that use them. Guns are, on average, not so useful / safe. Note that I'm averaging this across the planet, not just across one small (5% of global population) country with a lot of strong opinions on the matter. > Why? Cars kills way more people than guns. I know it's a pithy aphorism, but in the same way that guns…
> Guns are, on average, not so useful / safe. To be fair, I don't think many people are killed by toy guns . One thing I'll never forget from the land of Orwell is this from 15 years ago (virtually to the day, ironically enough): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2168430.stm Three 12-year-old children were arrested by five police officers who then fingerprinted them and took DNA samples, after the youngsters were se…
It's the normalising of 'playing with guns' by handing over toy guns to children that I suspect is something a healthier society could happily eschew without losing much in the way of civil liberties.
In Australia accurate replicas are illegal IIRC - toy weapons are necessarily brightly coloured, to reduce the risk of being mistaken as a real weapon.
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I was just about to mention this. For anyone interested Professor David Nutt[0] was fired from his role as the government's chief drug advisor after claiming ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/oct/30/drugs-advis...
The comments from Alan Johnson, then Home Secretary, are rather telling: > He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy. [...] As for his comments about horse riding being more dangerous than ecstasy, which you quote with such reverence, it is of course a political rather than a scientific point.[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/nov/02/dr…
> it doesn't actually help clarify the very real public health issues associated with drugs to make distracting comparisons in this way.
Almost like he's managed to put his head up his rectum and it doesn't seems distracting for him to have it there.
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Why do you think this social contract persists to this day, or if it ever did? Locke and Rousseau were theorisers. Do you really think governments, least of all the UK government, is founded on the ideas of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness? Even those which claim to be in some way like the US seem to be doing nothing toward these principles. So I think GP's point stands. What relevance does this social contract…
> What relevance does this social contract have when we see it is violated all the time? You cannot understand the notion of natural rights without understanding why they are fundamentally theologically based rights. That doesn't necessarily mean religious theology - which is where it was rooted from ("that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" etc.). In an atheistic context, these rights…
This seems fair enough, I can understand this, but only from the point of view that if you want rights at all then you need to start somewhere, and there is no position I can see that does not involve some kind of hand wavy "that's just the way that it is", not that I am faulting you on that, but it's how I see the idea, anyway.
>the liberating power of free markets.
Heh, I needed a good laugh today :)
"We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger." -- Peter Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread.
>The social contract does not only bind our government in its treatment of us; it binds us in how we treat each other, because our culture is not narrowly limited to our political beliefs but rather defines how we treat each other.
I'd rather have the social contract detached from government; if it must be attached then I view it as illegitimate, as illegitimate as I view the state which does not seek consent of the governed. It is material conditions that give rise to new concepts of rights, morality, justice and freedom. As Marx said, the Communist views the current bourgeois institutions of rights and morality as a facade, and behind those lurk even more bourgeois prejudices.
>To reject the social contract is to be an anarchist.
I would say, it is to be a certain kind of anarchist. The contracts we have today carry the threat of force to legitimise them; however there are contracts between friends which do not. This kind of contract is in my opinion possible at a larger scale in a stateless anarchist (non-proprietarian) society.
>Yes, it is rather laissez-faire, but it still firmly binds us to treat each other with mutual respect for our lives, our freedom, and the fruits of our labor.
Kropotkin wrote that this is exactly not the case, lamenting how the worker must surrender one third to the capitalist and middleman and one third to the state in the form of tax. The material conditions that influence the creation of these social contracts will also influence the creation of our interactions between each other.
I am no defender of the Soviet Union, but to me it is entirely possible for the USSR's conception of rights and freedoms to be just as valid as those of the US. The wall was a short sighted and silly idea in my opinion. And yet I feel as though behind Raegan lurked his own prejudices as to what rights should prevail, even if his intentions may be noble and in desire of freedom (which I don't believe so much).
It is interesting to me to see the difference between what is moral, what should be legislated, and indeed whether there is any morality and legislation at all (i.e Stirnerist egoism),
She's as evil as she is hideous.
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I'm sorry, but you are absolutely misinformed. If I am a citizen of a country that does not, for example, recognise the right to vote then there is no higher authority I can go to in an attempt to obtain redress, both because there is no higher authority, and because the vote is not a right in this legal system. No rights have been violated, they are simply not extant in this system.
I think you misunderstand fundamentally, GP is saying that no matter the position of the current government there are absolute inalienable rights which is a common position to take (outlined in the founding of the US, for example) and that there is indeed a higher authority than government, morality/religion/philosophy/humanism. Some consider, e.g. the UN declaration of human rights to enumerate rights which can be v…
Case in point: in a thread broadly pertaining to the law in the UK you bring up the US Constitution, and its enunciation of rights in the first batch of amendments (otherwise known as the Bill Of Rights). No such analogue exists in UK law because (despite being a constitutional monarchy) the UK has no explicit written constitution (at least not a single specific document whose amendment or modification requires special supermajority in parliament).
The US Constitution's Bill of Rights famously proclaims US citizens' rights to bear arms. No analogue exists in UK law. What is a natural rights proponent to make of that? That the UK has implemented less of the natural rights than the US has? That bearing arms is not a natural right? That the US allows rights that are not natural rights? These would all be spurious conclusions because rights need not map across legal systems and certainly do not ”inherit” from one golden standard of ”natural rights”.
I think it is easy for us technologically-inclined people to think of various legal systems as differing implementations of a ”natural rights specification”, and come away with a feeling that there are various levels of correctness or preferrability. That's the wrong mindset, though. A better one would be that each legal system is a formal system built up from different and sometimes incompatible axioms, so that some support some theorems and others don't (but support other theorems).