Never thought I'd see a time in my life when wanting to manage my own health choices, eat quality food that doesn't come from a factory and living in peace with my neighbors and friends would make me a "far right extremist". WTH
I’m reminded of last Christmas. Wanting to get my partner in crime a pocket version of the Constitution, I asked an acquaintance to pick one up for me at Barnes & Noble. She did and told me that the clerk was so surprised to see her buying it because only right wing nut jobs read the Constitution.
I look at the Constitution as a lifetime warranty against a defective government and am baffled by the fools that want to trash it! Stunning stupidity!
I didn't wanna be the first to say it, but now that I know this is a safe space -- mine is also signed by Ron Paul :) Maybe we'll use them in the future as a not-so-secret signal! :)
Let me go on record--in keeping with the fact that this is a safe space--I bought my pocket Constitution over a decade ago, and am considering getting, "Right-Wing Nut Job" tattooed across my butt. That way they can kiss it while they read. A two-fer! #YMMV
Is that hashtag #WeAreSoScrewed a thing? (Never used one before in my life. No social media. A time and soul suck imo.)?
Is it a no-no to flip to something more positive? Affirming? This is an honest question. (You already read I’m behind the times, not in the thick)
#NoInFactYouDontOwnMe
Off the top of my head. Probably pretty lame but ew, wouldn’t want to sign up to an emotional and mind f. I have no clue on parameters. Don’t pay such much attention as you might guess.
Thanks for any upgrade. And if you have a guffaw at my expense I’m laughing with you.
That hashtag is something I started using. Mine alone, AFAIK. It is more a lament that the inmates are subletting the asylum than anything else. Social media is the environment of rotten-toothed Capital One rejects, and people (like me) who cannot help but poke fun at them amid posting way too much. In other words, you ain't missing much!
Subletting!? More like they took over. Prison riot. It’s out of control. Wresting it back is the only way out of this nightmare. My copy of The Devil’s Chessboard is waiting for me at the local independent. A topo map? Dunno.
Oh you wascaly wabbit you. Yeah, no inclination whatsoever to waste energy on (imho) trivialities. Or maybe my disinclination has less to do with “trivialities” and more with avoiding increased splintered attention. The Devil’s Chessboard, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao, I got my hands, uh, brain full. Funny how you, ok me, shift toward wanting to get something “right” as you (I) get closer to the finish line. Heck, that moment lives in obscurity for most of us anywho. Social media? Designed to addict? Have at it wabbit. ;^) Thanks for the upgwade!
I think it's sort of a strange irony that the party who is comprised of the 'victims' is so keen on abolishing the concept of individual rights. When we're all forced to conform to the whims of the state, what do you think happens to purple-haired justice warrior lesbians? What do you think happens to men who dress up like women and go into changing rooms?
As always, these people have zero long-term vision and simply assume they'll hold the whips forever -- a strange assumption considering their backgrounds.
It was those purple-haired justice warrior lesbians who birthed, essentially, the ethos that would lead to men who would dress up like women and be welcomed into women's changing rooms.
Sure. But turning sexual attraction into anything more than mere sexual attraction, and creating a whole alternative universe around it, was the beginning of the apocalypse.
As she glorified herself and lived in luxury, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning, since in her heart she says, ‘I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and mourning I shall never see.’
“When we're all forced to conform to the whims of the state, what do you think happens to purple-haired justice warrior lesbians? What do you think happens to men who dress up like women and go into changing rooms?”
Usually end up in a ditch face down mumbling “but I supported you” and then the boom and eternal darkness.
The ease with which one makes this assumption is the definition of "privilege." And the degree to which they can convince the underprivileged of its validity is predicated on the complete ignorance (and, I daresay, unreasoning stupidity) of both parties.
You had me at "NPR". Had me pulling my hair out that is. Just the worst--the worst self satisfaction, tax money teat sucking, predictable Leftie moralizing and insipid sophistication there is.
I tried many times to listen to NPR because my smart SF Bay Area friends were always talking about it. I always hated it. Little did I know my friends were lefties and I wasn't.
I had that same experience. Friends suddenly began calling me a conspiracy nut and I said, "But I've been saying these exact same things ever since you've me!"
I find it shocking but important to realize that we live in a time where exercising our free speech is at the heart of being ungovernable, and the regime is dead set on preventing us from doing so.
We may be lost already. Note the heavy hand the government used on the J6 defendants, the weaponized IRS, the railroading of Derek Chauvin, the excessive sentences handed out in the Ahmad Aubrey case, the lack of prosecution for the perps in the BLM riots and now the Trump raid. Speak out, and you may get a visit from the FBI and IRS. This is meant to intimidate and create fear in people.
It might instead engender an attitude of righteous indignity. This is what can happen when you turn up the heat on the frog too fast. Especially if the frog liked the way things were, before.
The common good. I'm beginning to think those are the most dangerous 3 words of our time. It is such an innocuous concept, who wouldn't support what is good for everyone ?
Except, as you point out there is no way to define common good, no way to prove it. Our constitutional rights guarantee we can pursue our own definition of what is good for us and our common, or communal, group of peers. That's it, expanding beyond that, enforcing definitions from outside of our circle, will always lead to conflict.
I hope discussion around "the common good" gains more visibility. I think it is something that is deceptively easy to just accept. Maybe we'll realize that while we do indeed want good for everyone, that definition is not only "not common" between us all, but different for everyone.
Just take the vaccine! What are you selfish? You only care about yourself! You don't care about the greater good? Just have pfaith in "The $cience" - the same $cience plandemic profiteers used to make themselves many billions of dollars. Paid for by Joe taxpayer. It's a double whammy. They are fleecing people of their health and finances.
Common good can almost be thought of as lowest common denominator. Here's the basics, you want more good, more commonly, in your own life ? Then make it happen, we (society) are done.
Think we need to go back to Ethics///individual over the collective. The hardest thing is to determine bewteen two goods.
I have determined...we are the only country founded on the Individual over the collective/community. The Common Good. Becaue every other society on the face of the earth has chosen the common good. And they led to massacres.
I’m not a libertarian, but our government needs to be massively reduced. Some things need to be completely crushed, like the FBI, CIA, DoEd, DHS. Chop, chop, chop.
The fact that so many people are saying things like this out loud gives me hope. I don't know how this will all play out, but it is starting... and gathering strength.
RG, where’s the round table? My gross inadequacies will surface on strategizing but I’m willing to look the fool. Maybe discussion will stimulate something useful from the ol’ gray mare?
What I got is heart.
There’s a way through. Not pretty I’m thinking but it’s my hour. Well, I don’t claim it exclusively as mine. Round table.
I’m-a sceert but only a little. Going home at the end o’ this trip whenever that is. By gum this feisty ol’ gray on’y have jus this li’l time lef any way you cuts it. Using my dash. ✊💪
I’m with you. And every other soul called to the purpose.
God (loaded word) the Good, the Light in contrast to evil, the dark we know is in play here, is at the core of our survival. So thank you for the thought energy and God bless YOU Ryan Gardner!
Can I ask if I got this one right?
Is security, such as it exists or can be found, a priority in any nascent effort at coordination and expansion?
I am remembering a mind/heart that posted in comments here? at Sage’s? maybe earlier this summer? who apparently switched his/her (not a woke pronouns thing, I promise!) posted email (-?! okie doke) to a proton mail account (better than big tech scrape-happy but publicly posted nonetheless. Hm. I never saw the first address) inviting I don’t know exactly what, organizing? deliberating?
I think somebody tapped the mind/heart on the shoulder? My point is my question.
Personally I’m security sensitive but tech illiterate.
Should moves get shipped outta here? For security? Even as life goes on as ever, here and elsewhere?
Sensitive.
Illiterate.
NSA may have a bug on every single device/ unit. Around the world! What do I know?
"The common good." "The general welfare." These things are fine motives for good policy. Their mere presence in discourse does not, however, *define* good policy nor stand in for genuine argument.
the common good or general welfare can only be pursued from the bottom up by free choice that imposes pareto optimality.
as soon as one uses such "motives" for top down policy, it goes bad in a hurry. there is no way to know what the common good is and the bet that by forcing the people to do X we can raise them to higher valences of utility that they could find for themselves is implausible and unmeasurable.
i would argue that their presence in any discourse on top down diktat is always an inevitable harmful as either deluded or disingenuous.
I don't disagree. I see them as highly disposable flowery words.
I wasn't thinking of the context of top-down diktat so much as the general welfare clause of the US Constitution, which lives nestled within tightly enumerated powers and privileges.
But obviously that hasn't stopped it from being used as its own power and privilege in and of itself. I wonder if the framers might have simply omitted the phrase had they seen its use as a bludgeon by statists.
well, that sits in the preamble and is laying out a rationale for having a constitution and enshrining rights therein.
it seems more an indictment of top down imposition of power than an endorsement.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
There is also Section 8 which begins "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States..." still not carte blanche but easy for an activist judiciary to take and run with, like a child and a pair of scissors. Or like an entrenched bureaucrat and a gain of function research grant.
In both cases, the Constitution is careful to *define* what may be done by Congress toward the "general Welfare" — as opposed to modern-style delegated bureaucracy which says "anything the agency director thinks may be necessary, and he'll suffer not the peasants to place limits upon him."
NOT that I have any faith in the justice system in the current strangling atmosphere, but a tiny ray of hope recently on WV v EPA? Tiny. Hardly decisive across the breadth of executive per agency directors. Plus seems slightly counterintuitive blithely going about litigating a long list of lesser (?) issues in this hour of, dare I use the word being it is wielded so callously against us, crisis, for the very existence of our country. But hey, what is intuitive anymore? Might be my trauma and heightened anxiety talking. Is business as usual a cover, theater like the show in legislative? I don’t have answers but I sure see the battering ram at every front door. ...I’m all over the place. Need some sleep. Wonder if I made any sense. Apologies if my tangle is too tangled.
Protection against the tyranny of government isn’t enough, there also needs to be protection against the tyranny of prevailing opinion / views, and against the tendency of society to turn its ideas into "practices" and later "rules of behaviour", and then try to impose them, by legal or other means, on those who don't even subscribe to them.
There should be hard limits on how much the prevailing/collective opinion can impose itself on any individual.
And as John Stuart Mill counselled us, finding and defending that limit is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as is protection against political despotism.
I got out of remodeling homes in part because the State Labor Dept fined me for not having a Contractor's License. I went and got the license, am still paying the insurance required, I will have to pay soon to renew the license if I want to keep it.
As I contemplate installing a front door for my sister without applying for a permit, it occurs to me, none of this is to protect clients. I have defrauded no one, my clients love me and I would have more work than I can do. But not playing by the state's rules, I have offended the State and am treated like a criminal and a mere thing to take money from. The rules exist to protect the State far more than me or my clients.
Is it written into the federal code that established NPR that they are not allowed to publish a story without a quote from a bedwetting SPLC neurotic? I say just once we stage some rowdy "right-wing" rally outside some candypants blue statehouse, but instead of carrying flags and patriotic bunting we all carry NPR tote bags. And then call up the SPLC for a comment.
The battle begins and ends with a solid sense of identity for the individual. If you know yourself well enough to be able to be reviled, shamed, shouted down, villainized and punished for doing or saying what you believe is true, and yet remain strong and proud of who you are and what you’ve done, you’ll give others courage as well. Moreso, if you can do this and not villainize your accuser/oppressor but simply stand firm, you may demonstrate the validity of your belief to them.
Depressing to realize that intellectual discourse of any value to human society reached its peak in the 18th century and we been hurtling downwards ever since.
It seems that things are devolving at an ever-accelerating pace.
The Dems have always used the "justice" system to persecute their foes, but this might just be a bridge too far. When even leftist turds such as Andrew Cuomo are calling foul, you can be sure that this latest outrage is nothing more than an attempt to disqualify Trump.
If the utterly corrupt and partisan Garland & Co. proceed with prosecution, and there is little doubt that they will, that might put us over the edge of the precipice.
If so, all of us on the side of liberty should remember that we are the voice of reason and the adults in the room, and behave accordingly.
I really hope I get to meet you, if not in this life, in the next. Your words are so intelligent and inspiring and cut to the core of the issue(s) we face. Thanks for being here for us bad cat!
Never thought I'd see a time in my life when wanting to manage my own health choices, eat quality food that doesn't come from a factory and living in peace with my neighbors and friends would make me a "far right extremist". WTH
"Far Right Extremist" is more or less saying "there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who agree with me, and those who are evil."
I’m reminded of last Christmas. Wanting to get my partner in crime a pocket version of the Constitution, I asked an acquaintance to pick one up for me at Barnes & Noble. She did and told me that the clerk was so surprised to see her buying it because only right wing nut jobs read the Constitution.
I look at the Constitution as a lifetime warranty against a defective government and am baffled by the fools that want to trash it! Stunning stupidity!
Mine is signed by Ron Paul!
I didn't wanna be the first to say it, but now that I know this is a safe space -- mine is also signed by Ron Paul :) Maybe we'll use them in the future as a not-so-secret signal! :)
Let me go on record--in keeping with the fact that this is a safe space--I bought my pocket Constitution over a decade ago, and am considering getting, "Right-Wing Nut Job" tattooed across my butt. That way they can kiss it while they read. A two-fer! #YMMV
Don't go believing this is a safe space; it probably isn't. Think about wiping your presence from the internet. Read this: :https://time.com/13002/this-infographic-show-how-to-completely-erase-your-identity-from-the-internet/
Lucky you!
The Alinskyites have to give us what they think is a spooky label in order to keep their band of useful idiots in line!
Preach. "Leave me the hell alone to make my own decisions" is apparently a sign of deep-rooted selfishness and psychopathy. #WeAreSoScrewed
Ok, my illiteracy is showing.
Is that hashtag #WeAreSoScrewed a thing? (Never used one before in my life. No social media. A time and soul suck imo.)?
Is it a no-no to flip to something more positive? Affirming? This is an honest question. (You already read I’m behind the times, not in the thick)
#NoInFactYouDontOwnMe
Off the top of my head. Probably pretty lame but ew, wouldn’t want to sign up to an emotional and mind f. I have no clue on parameters. Don’t pay such much attention as you might guess.
Thanks for any upgrade. And if you have a guffaw at my expense I’m laughing with you.
That hashtag is something I started using. Mine alone, AFAIK. It is more a lament that the inmates are subletting the asylum than anything else. Social media is the environment of rotten-toothed Capital One rejects, and people (like me) who cannot help but poke fun at them amid posting way too much. In other words, you ain't missing much!
Subletting!? More like they took over. Prison riot. It’s out of control. Wresting it back is the only way out of this nightmare. My copy of The Devil’s Chessboard is waiting for me at the local independent. A topo map? Dunno.
Oh you wascaly wabbit you. Yeah, no inclination whatsoever to waste energy on (imho) trivialities. Or maybe my disinclination has less to do with “trivialities” and more with avoiding increased splintered attention. The Devil’s Chessboard, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao, I got my hands, uh, brain full. Funny how you, ok me, shift toward wanting to get something “right” as you (I) get closer to the finish line. Heck, that moment lives in obscurity for most of us anywho. Social media? Designed to addict? Have at it wabbit. ;^) Thanks for the upgwade!
“Welcome to the party Pal.”
I think it's sort of a strange irony that the party who is comprised of the 'victims' is so keen on abolishing the concept of individual rights. When we're all forced to conform to the whims of the state, what do you think happens to purple-haired justice warrior lesbians? What do you think happens to men who dress up like women and go into changing rooms?
As always, these people have zero long-term vision and simply assume they'll hold the whips forever -- a strange assumption considering their backgrounds.
It was those purple-haired justice warrior lesbians who birthed, essentially, the ethos that would lead to men who would dress up like women and be welcomed into women's changing rooms.
Oh, there were plenty of males with the easy liberal chicks and the activists "gays," too.
Sure. But turning sexual attraction into anything more than mere sexual attraction, and creating a whole alternative universe around it, was the beginning of the apocalypse.
And industries.
In college in the 60’s word that the girls were burning their bras was like bears knowing where to go when the salmon were running!
As she glorified herself and lived in luxury, so give her a like measure of torment and mourning, since in her heart she says, ‘I sit as a queen, I am no widow, and mourning I shall never see.’
Revelation 18:7 ESV
“When we're all forced to conform to the whims of the state, what do you think happens to purple-haired justice warrior lesbians? What do you think happens to men who dress up like women and go into changing rooms?”
Usually end up in a ditch face down mumbling “but I supported you” and then the boom and eternal darkness.
If only Comrade Biden knew of this! There's surely been a mis--*BANG*
Last sentence. Perfect!
I thought you were a superhero, if you had whips, mask and handcuffs in your closet?...:)
Pretty sure that's what the purple-haired social justice warriors think?
The mask is permanently on.
It's necessary for them to wear a perma-mask, because their eyes have been surgically attached to their assholes.
Aaand…I used to call that ‘navel gazing.’ Duly replaced 😆
Ha!
😂😂
😂😂😂
The ease with which one makes this assumption is the definition of "privilege." And the degree to which they can convince the underprivileged of its validity is predicated on the complete ignorance (and, I daresay, unreasoning stupidity) of both parties.
you know what happens to them- the minute they have served their purpose, they are axed
You had me at "NPR". Had me pulling my hair out that is. Just the worst--the worst self satisfaction, tax money teat sucking, predictable Leftie moralizing and insipid sophistication there is.
NPR: national propaganda radio
I tried many times to listen to NPR because my smart SF Bay Area friends were always talking about it. I always hated it. Little did I know my friends were lefties and I wasn't.
I am guilty of deluding myself that my "friends" and acquaintances thought like I did. BIG lesson.
I had that same experience. Friends suddenly began calling me a conspiracy nut and I said, "But I've been saying these exact same things ever since you've me!"
Be glad you don't live in Canada. The CBC is worse, and entirely funded by the taxpayer.
All for "the greater good!"
But the people who constantly listen to NPR are sophisticated like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Very sophisticated!
And they deliver their bullshit in such a soothing self-assured tone, they must be smarter than us.
I wonder if Joe Biden actually believes he's smarter than anybody? And I do mean anybody, lol 🤣
To be fair, for a mediocre piece of crap, he's gotten everywhere he ever hoped to go.
Fair point. The corruption runs deep.
À la @CMCM, my first reaction was “mediocre” is a cut above his grade.
Correction: sub-mediocre.
Certainly not considering he considers his still living son as the smartest person he knows...
Its hypnosis. They drone for a reason.
I'm concerned you are holding back, there?
GREAT comment. Exactly!
Exceptional essay, brilliant memes. All that plus Bastiat. Thank you, Gatito, from my heart.
I take deep gulps of the air of freedom when I am here.
I find it shocking but important to realize that we live in a time where exercising our free speech is at the heart of being ungovernable, and the regime is dead set on preventing us from doing so.
We may be lost already. Note the heavy hand the government used on the J6 defendants, the weaponized IRS, the railroading of Derek Chauvin, the excessive sentences handed out in the Ahmad Aubrey case, the lack of prosecution for the perps in the BLM riots and now the Trump raid. Speak out, and you may get a visit from the FBI and IRS. This is meant to intimidate and create fear in people.
Check it out, I just hearted my way on to a watch list.
The Bad Guys already executed the coup, most are finally waking up to it.
It is a foregone conclusion in my mind that all of us are on the naughty list.
I simply don't care.
I think you feel the same way.
I'm typing this on an Android phone without a vpn, doesn't matter if I care or not. Even with a VPN, would it really matter?
I'm just glad the "mask" is coming off the tyrants, ironic, really, given what got us into this mess.
So true.
only one watch list? those are rookie numbers
It might instead engender an attitude of righteous indignity. This is what can happen when you turn up the heat on the frog too fast. Especially if the frog liked the way things were, before.
The common good. I'm beginning to think those are the most dangerous 3 words of our time. It is such an innocuous concept, who wouldn't support what is good for everyone ?
Except, as you point out there is no way to define common good, no way to prove it. Our constitutional rights guarantee we can pursue our own definition of what is good for us and our common, or communal, group of peers. That's it, expanding beyond that, enforcing definitions from outside of our circle, will always lead to conflict.
I hope discussion around "the common good" gains more visibility. I think it is something that is deceptively easy to just accept. Maybe we'll realize that while we do indeed want good for everyone, that definition is not only "not common" between us all, but different for everyone.
Yes! I hated the pro-vaxxers saying the jab was for the common good without ever giving a second thought to the vax injured.
Just take the vaccine! What are you selfish? You only care about yourself! You don't care about the greater good? Just have pfaith in "The $cience" - the same $cience plandemic profiteers used to make themselves many billions of dollars. Paid for by Joe taxpayer. It's a double whammy. They are fleecing people of their health and finances.
Amen.
Have you ever seen the common good of a public restroom?
Those waiting outside are desperate to get in and those who are inside are desperate to come out.
If you think about it, it could make you appreciate cleaning your own bathroom...gross...but seriously.
Ughhhh, yeah.
Common good can almost be thought of as lowest common denominator. Here's the basics, you want more good, more commonly, in your own life ? Then make it happen, we (society) are done.
Common Core. 1+2=orange
Hilarious and 12 different "strategies" to arrive at that answer!
exactly. well said.
Think we need to go back to Ethics///individual over the collective. The hardest thing is to determine bewteen two goods.
I have determined...we are the only country founded on the Individual over the collective/community. The Common Good. Becaue every other society on the face of the earth has chosen the common good. And they led to massacres.
I’m not a libertarian, but our government needs to be massively reduced. Some things need to be completely crushed, like the FBI, CIA, DoEd, DHS. Chop, chop, chop.
The fact that so many people are saying things like this out loud gives me hope. I don't know how this will all play out, but it is starting... and gathering strength.
Yeah. We need to become finishers though.
I don't think this is a spectator sport anymore.
Well said.
RG, where’s the round table? My gross inadequacies will surface on strategizing but I’m willing to look the fool. Maybe discussion will stimulate something useful from the ol’ gray mare?
What I got is heart.
There’s a way through. Not pretty I’m thinking but it’s my hour. Well, I don’t claim it exclusively as mine. Round table.
I’m-a sceert but only a little. Going home at the end o’ this trip whenever that is. By gum this feisty ol’ gray on’y have jus this li’l time lef any way you cuts it. Using my dash. ✊💪
I think the round table is here and amongst a few other Stacks'.
And we need to discuss how best to coordinate...and expand.
God bless you Heterodox!
I’m with you. And every other soul called to the purpose.
God (loaded word) the Good, the Light in contrast to evil, the dark we know is in play here, is at the core of our survival. So thank you for the thought energy and God bless YOU Ryan Gardner!
Can I ask if I got this one right?
Is security, such as it exists or can be found, a priority in any nascent effort at coordination and expansion?
I am remembering a mind/heart that posted in comments here? at Sage’s? maybe earlier this summer? who apparently switched his/her (not a woke pronouns thing, I promise!) posted email (-?! okie doke) to a proton mail account (better than big tech scrape-happy but publicly posted nonetheless. Hm. I never saw the first address) inviting I don’t know exactly what, organizing? deliberating?
I think somebody tapped the mind/heart on the shoulder? My point is my question.
Personally I’m security sensitive but tech illiterate.
Should moves get shipped outta here? For security? Even as life goes on as ever, here and elsewhere?
Sensitive.
Illiterate.
NSA may have a bug on every single device/ unit. Around the world! What do I know?
Yes! And the FDA and CDC!
Are you SURE you’re not a libertarian?
(“Come on in - the water’s fine!”)
"The common good." "The general welfare." These things are fine motives for good policy. Their mere presence in discourse does not, however, *define* good policy nor stand in for genuine argument.
the common good or general welfare can only be pursued from the bottom up by free choice that imposes pareto optimality.
as soon as one uses such "motives" for top down policy, it goes bad in a hurry. there is no way to know what the common good is and the bet that by forcing the people to do X we can raise them to higher valences of utility that they could find for themselves is implausible and unmeasurable.
i would argue that their presence in any discourse on top down diktat is always an inevitable harmful as either deluded or disingenuous.
I don't disagree. I see them as highly disposable flowery words.
I wasn't thinking of the context of top-down diktat so much as the general welfare clause of the US Constitution, which lives nestled within tightly enumerated powers and privileges.
But obviously that hasn't stopped it from being used as its own power and privilege in and of itself. I wonder if the framers might have simply omitted the phrase had they seen its use as a bludgeon by statists.
well, that sits in the preamble and is laying out a rationale for having a constitution and enshrining rights therein.
it seems more an indictment of top down imposition of power than an endorsement.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
There is also Section 8 which begins "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States..." still not carte blanche but easy for an activist judiciary to take and run with, like a child and a pair of scissors. Or like an entrenched bureaucrat and a gain of function research grant.
In both cases, the Constitution is careful to *define* what may be done by Congress toward the "general Welfare" — as opposed to modern-style delegated bureaucracy which says "anything the agency director thinks may be necessary, and he'll suffer not the peasants to place limits upon him."
NOT that I have any faith in the justice system in the current strangling atmosphere, but a tiny ray of hope recently on WV v EPA? Tiny. Hardly decisive across the breadth of executive per agency directors. Plus seems slightly counterintuitive blithely going about litigating a long list of lesser (?) issues in this hour of, dare I use the word being it is wielded so callously against us, crisis, for the very existence of our country. But hey, what is intuitive anymore? Might be my trauma and heightened anxiety talking. Is business as usual a cover, theater like the show in legislative? I don’t have answers but I sure see the battering ram at every front door. ...I’m all over the place. Need some sleep. Wonder if I made any sense. Apologies if my tangle is too tangled.
You know I sang this. Miss those Saturday Schoolhouse Rock shows
Please continue. It needs to be defined and not the way the courts ruled.
What do we do, in the future, when the state relies on AI for the common good?
arggh...thar she blows!...
Protection against the tyranny of government isn’t enough, there also needs to be protection against the tyranny of prevailing opinion / views, and against the tendency of society to turn its ideas into "practices" and later "rules of behaviour", and then try to impose them, by legal or other means, on those who don't even subscribe to them.
There should be hard limits on how much the prevailing/collective opinion can impose itself on any individual.
And as John Stuart Mill counselled us, finding and defending that limit is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as is protection against political despotism.
Oh that friggin General Welfare clause i the constitutionn gave our rulers the right to income tax us, to regulate our commerce., etc.
I hate that Clause, the General Welfare.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
It is from the Christian Bible. Book of Isaiah (in the Old Testament). Chapter 5.
FYI, It doesn't end well for them.
I got out of remodeling homes in part because the State Labor Dept fined me for not having a Contractor's License. I went and got the license, am still paying the insurance required, I will have to pay soon to renew the license if I want to keep it.
As I contemplate installing a front door for my sister without applying for a permit, it occurs to me, none of this is to protect clients. I have defrauded no one, my clients love me and I would have more work than I can do. But not playing by the state's rules, I have offended the State and am treated like a criminal and a mere thing to take money from. The rules exist to protect the State far more than me or my clients.
Is it written into the federal code that established NPR that they are not allowed to publish a story without a quote from a bedwetting SPLC neurotic? I say just once we stage some rowdy "right-wing" rally outside some candypants blue statehouse, but instead of carrying flags and patriotic bunting we all carry NPR tote bags. And then call up the SPLC for a comment.
The battle begins and ends with a solid sense of identity for the individual. If you know yourself well enough to be able to be reviled, shamed, shouted down, villainized and punished for doing or saying what you believe is true, and yet remain strong and proud of who you are and what you’ve done, you’ll give others courage as well. Moreso, if you can do this and not villainize your accuser/oppressor but simply stand firm, you may demonstrate the validity of your belief to them.
Depressing to realize that intellectual discourse of any value to human society reached its peak in the 18th century and we been hurtling downwards ever since.
It seems that things are devolving at an ever-accelerating pace.
The Dems have always used the "justice" system to persecute their foes, but this might just be a bridge too far. When even leftist turds such as Andrew Cuomo are calling foul, you can be sure that this latest outrage is nothing more than an attempt to disqualify Trump.
If the utterly corrupt and partisan Garland & Co. proceed with prosecution, and there is little doubt that they will, that might put us over the edge of the precipice.
If so, all of us on the side of liberty should remember that we are the voice of reason and the adults in the room, and behave accordingly.
I think we just arrived at the precipice. The "raid" is just one variable.
Psychologically it is worse to feel useless than to feel exploited.
Danger lies between that distinction imo.
I don't think there are any more crumbs they can throw at the people...if you know what I mean.
We shall see...
well...cuomo really only cried foul because the raid could damage the j6 prosecution
I really hope I get to meet you, if not in this life, in the next. Your words are so intelligent and inspiring and cut to the core of the issue(s) we face. Thanks for being here for us bad cat!