| | Jim:
Re this: "I never once said I wanted to pick and choose when the Constitution [should] appl[y]."
To which John said: "So then you are for forcible taxation, including taxes on income since that's also in the Constitution as well?"
I am against the concept of involuntary confiscation of income. I believe that all government services should be offered on a subscription basis, with citizens having the right to decline any "bucket" of services, or all such services, along with declining to pay the fee for those declined services.
I support using the amendment process specified in the Constitution to amend or repeal the amendment allowing the income tax, thus bringing it into line with this philosophy.
OK fine. Then I support amending the Constitution if it needs it to use coercive interrogations against terrorists.
So your appeals to the Constitution does not morally repudiate waterboarding for terrorists.
Do you understand the point of my argument now? I'm not trying to denigrate the Constitution, I'm saying it is not without its flaws, so it can't stand on its own for a moral argument. All moral arguments for them to be valid must correspond with reality first and in accordance to life, and then the Constitution must be written to fit that ideal. If it doesn't, then as you say, it ought to be amended. So your appeals to the Constitution don't convince me that waterboarding terrorists is immoral.
It won't EVENTUALLY lead to torturing of innocent civilians -- our government already HAS tortured innocent civilians. Do you really believe that no one at Gitmo is an innocent civilian, despite ample evidence that some folks wound up there due to political payback or intertribal rivalry that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism?
I don't believe any assertion without proof. But if that was the case, then as I have argued, there ought to be a system of due process to protect the innocent, just as we have for our current justice system. And as I understand it, a system of due process is in place for determining the status of gitmo detainees. Maybe it's not as good a due process as it should be, and reforms should be made to better protect the innocent or give more transparency, I won't argue against that. But that doesn't mean errors are never made even in the best system one can devise, innocent men even with our Constitution, even with our checks and balances, even with our justice system, have been wrongly convicted of crimes in our civilian courts and sentenced to long prison terms. But you don't throw out for example "trial by jury" because sometimes juries don't make the right call. The crucial distinction here is whether throwing innocent people into prison is institutionalized or not. That means, is it the intent and the policy of a government to throw innocent people in prison like Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany routinely did? Or is it one of honest error, that occasionally even with the best information possible, and the best of intentions to protect the innocent, sometimes, some of the innocent are harmed but that every reasonable effort is taken to protect against that? You don't morally judge people by holding them up to a standard of omniscience and omnipotence. What is moral is only what one can choose given the best information that is available. So you can't point to errors like this and then just presume we are no better than any totalitarian shit hole and expect to be taken seriously in that argument.
U.S. citizens are watching their words more carefully, wondering where exactly the line is where they could be tossed into such a hellhole for speaking out against the politically powerful?
So scared is the citizenry, that they openly protest against the government with signs in the streets over Gitmo any chance they get.
Hasn't the history of the gutting of the Constitution and the incremental growth of the power of the federal government shown that once the government takes on new powers, they will continually seek to expand the boundaries of what is permissible, and that only a vigorous resistance by the citizenry can prevent or roll back these usurpations?
What has Obama done to roll back all the new powers that Bush II seized? Anything substantial?
Name one president in the last century that left the federal government smaller and less powerful than when he took office.
Do you really trust our government to do the right thing, John? Or do you only trust them to do the right thing if "the right people" get in office? Because here's breaking news -- the right people almost never get in office, and when a few slip through the cracks, like Ron Paul, they never compose anywhere near a functioning majority of officeholders.
Jim, I can only view the above as a disjointed rant. I don't like Obama and obviously I don't like everything the government does or else I wouldn't call myself an Objectivist. But that doesn't mean I dislike everything the government does either, sometimes, they do get it right. And many times, they do honestly protect my freedoms. I have the intellectually capacity to recognize when the government defends my freedoms and when they don't, and understand it's not an all or nothing thing, and I think you can recognize that too. I also think in some areas, we have much more freedoms today than we've had in the past, yet in other ways, we have less freedom. So asking if I really "trust the government" is something that comes across to me as being a cheap trick, because it begs the question, is it "blind" trust you are referring to, i.e. trust on faith, or rational trust? I don't trust it implicitly, but I do trust we can devise a system that protects our freedoms as best as possible given we do not exist in a Platonic Ideal.
(Edited by John Armaos on 5/15, 7:53am)
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