Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 366 posts

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#351

Post by tsotha »

mindcrime wrote: post #238
it_luddite wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there are significant amounts of people on both sides of any debate, much less this one, with either blinders on or have selective vision. As a strict constructionist, I affirm the right of anyone to burn any flag, anyone to "protest" at a funeral, as well as PRISM being unconstitutional. Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy.…

Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy. So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right? If that's what you mean, then how the heck does a "strict constructionist" get that to jibe with the 9th Amendment? The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny o…

>So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right?

This is why Madison thought the Bill of Rights was a mistake. The rest of the document was written as a list of delineated powers - "this is what the federal government can do". That's much, much more restrictive than "this is what the federal government can't do". He thought the BoR would lead people into thinking the federal government is allowed to do anything it isn't prohibited from doing.

I think history has born him out, too. I'd much rather see courts asking the question "is this on the list of things the federal government can do?" rather than "does it pass muster on 2A or 4A grounds?" Of course if that were the case 2/3 the federal government would go away. Not a bad thing, IMO.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#352

Post by tsotha »

mindcrime wrote: post #310
mtgx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the 4th amendment, and look how much that one is abused. In the end the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper", if not the government , not the judges , not the media , and ultimately not even the people respect it, live by it, and try to protect it as soon as it's endangered by people trying to accumulate too much power. Where are all the street protests?! I also fail to understand people who so viciou…

Where are all the street protests?! Over the digital privacy / 4A issue specifically? I don't know. But protests in general are still quite alive, here in North Carolina.[1][2][3] [1]: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/13/2890544/nc-moral-mond... [2]: http://www.wral.com/-mega-moral-monday-protests-heat-up-outs... [3]: http://www.thenation.com/article/174679/protesters-shake-nor...

It takes awhile for a protest movement to actually mobilize, particularly if you're trying to bring in more than the professional protest group everyone ignores without a second thought.

We won't know for a month or two whether this has legs or not.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#353

Post by nitrogen »

mpyne wrote: post #347
nitrogen wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with "reasonableness" is that there's no single definition of what's reasonable, so you'll get different courts giving different verdicts in similar cases. Instead, couldn't we define things very strictly, but require them to be revised every n years with the current needs and expectations of society?

Dude, I can't even get my computer program to not crash on malformed MP3 files, and the computer program + computer does exactly what I tell it to do. There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it. And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes t…

And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.

Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#354

Post by eli_gottlieb »

marcosdumay wrote: post #312
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are all the street protests?! The people who went to the streets protesting in 2011 got arrested. You're looking at the maturation of a tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal regime.

> tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal One of those adjectives has an almost oposite meaning to the other two. Please, don't just throw "bad" words in a setence if you are trying to make a point. Understand what you are saying, and if you don't completely grasp the meaning of a word, either look it up, or not use it. The way you wrote it, you sound like a South America neofacist (and yes, I just made up a label). And…

It only sounds contradictory. In actual fact, neoliberal regimes everywhere have been "libertarian" only in their business laws, and authoritarian in nearly everything else. The US is becoming rather like Pinochet's Chile: money can do what it wants, everyone else has orders to follow.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#355

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

mahmud wrote: post #350
kbenson wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be remarkably effective at getting attention, but I'm not sure how beneficial to a cause it would be. If the purpose is to disrupt travel or commerce, it would most likely achieve it's goal almost immediately. If the purpose is to bring attention to some other issue and the disruption of the highway system is unrelated (or only tangentially related), then the attention would have to be weighed against the…

This would be a bad idea, tacically and economically. In a protest, at least in the U.S., you can take measures to protect your identity and not carry any documentation, along with the ability to flee on foot in any direction. You also have no tangible assets on you that the government can seize. In a vehicle protest you forfeit anonymity (lincense plates), ability to split since road-blocks can easily stop you, and…

OH it would work. And it's nearly impossible for you to get into trouble. If all the protesters just drove in a circle such as getting on the highway at a specific ramp and getting off at a specific ramp just to get back on. They would create a massive bottle neck not only for those 2 ramps but for the roads that connect to them. There's no law that says you can't joy ride or that you must avoid congested traffic. A group of only 100 people could very easily find a bottle neck on their local highway and exploit it.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#356

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

munificent wrote: post #316
Andrew_Quentin wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Squares or city centres are a good place, the Times Square being probably the best.

Most cities in the US don't have squares or city centers. Even ones that do exist are often empty, or inhabited more by the homeless than anyone else. I believe the culture is improving here, but for a long time, cars were such important symbol of wealth that being a pedestrian gained a small but real social stigma. Large cities that were already thriving and had very affluent people who didn't drive bucked the trend…

This is so sad and true. I've driven all over the US and there's such a lack of community and culture when compared to other places (Canada and other car cultures are the same though). Lots of town without a center, where everyone knows each other but lives a mile away from each other. It' like individuality taken to an extreme.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#357

Post by lightknight »

randomsearch wrote: post #91
newbie12 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right to bear arms is also, explicitly, a protection against tyranny BY the government. Thomas Jefferson: ""When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Interesting. But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military?

How does owning a gun provide protection against meteors? It doesn't; the question itself is invalid.

If you think the US military will deploy against even one million Americans on American ground, for the sake of shredding the US Constitution, well...you may as well believe orange is violet.

The US military has already said, as have the multitudes of its members under its control, that it will not be marching on the US civilian population. They would throw down their arms and join the other side, that of their friends and families, long before they'd betray everything they'd sworn an oath to.

Now, you might find one or two people, with a handful of soldiers who, for the thirty seconds it would take before they'd be executed (not even court martial-ed) with such an intent. And they'd be buried in a common grave, stripped of name and rank, for their actions.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#358

Post by sounds »

mindcrime wrote: post #251
randomsearch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military?

But, how does owning a gun provide protection against the US military? I don't understand why people keep asking this question, and variations of it, or offering up the argument "the 2A is useless for allowing rebellion since you can't defeat the US military". Bands of rebels armed with mostly light weapons have caused superpowers all sorts of issues: See Afghanistan, from the Soviet era through today. And if a full…

The purpose of owning a gun is not to start a war, but to protect the peace.

Anyone with nitrogen fertilizer or many, many other household items can "start a one-man war," but they likely will die just as quickly.

At the risk of quoting Yoda, wars don't make you great. But more to my point: the best offense is a good defense in politics.

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#359

Post by bmelton »

davidcuddeback wrote: post #349
bmelton wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes (this isn't meant to be sarcastic, but necessary because I had to move this post from where it was to where it is, and HN keeps marking it dead). The DHS is not bound by Posse Comitatus[1]. The DHS has been buying massive amounts of ammo[2][3][4], and most recently, the House has voted to get justification on the quantity of hollow points it is purchasing[5]. It looks like the claim that they're buying large quan…

Thanks. I'm not being snarky or anything either. Just genuinely curious and would like to learn more on the topic. That said, I just looked at your first source and it doesn't support the conclusion that the DHS is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act. It says that the US Coast Guard is exempt, and that the US Coast Guard operates under the DHS. But it does not follow from those statements that the DHS is exempt.

I could be wrong, or they could be bound by some other statute, but as I understand it, DHS is not exempt because it is neither a division of the Department of Defense, nor is it an "armed service" like the Marines.

The Coast Guard is not bound by Posse Comitatus despite being an 'armed force' because they are members of DHS, and not DoD.

The ATF and FBI are not bound by Posse Comitatus also, as they aren't armed forces (though both probably have some degree of armament; I know the ATF was playing around with getting a few armored cars the last time I was there, and they already had some 'surveillance' trucks based on ambulances), and that is why FBI, DHS and ATF are able to engage local police in an assistive fashion (or take over a case).

Re: Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

#360

Post by MereInterest »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #355
mahmud wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a bad idea, tacically and economically. In a protest, at least in the U.S., you can take measures to protect your identity and not carry any documentation, along with the ability to flee on foot in any direction. You also have no tangible assets on you that the government can seize. In a vehicle protest you forfeit anonymity (lincense plates), ability to split since road-blocks can easily stop you, and…

OH it would work. And it's nearly impossible for you to get into trouble. If all the protesters just drove in a circle such as getting on the highway at a specific ramp and getting off at a specific ramp just to get back on. They would create a massive bottle neck not only for those 2 ramps but for the roads that connect to them. There's no law that says you can't joy ride or that you must avoid congested traffic. A…

In some places, "Disrupting the flow of traffic" is illegal. For example, driving at 55 mph on the highway is legal. However, driving next to someone, both going 55 mpg, would be illegal, as it disrupts the flow of traffic.
Post reply on HN