>> ^Mysling:
>> ^NordlichReiter:
Now, here is where it is different: Fuck you and your point of view. That is an expression of my distaste for your position on the matter at hand. Had I said, Fuck You! Then you can construe that as fighting words. That is not, under the law correct free speech. You must put context with the situation.

I see your point, but in my opinion both the examples you use should never be used in a debate, or publicized. By anyone, no matter what viewpoint they are representing.
I see neither "fuck you!" or "fuck you and fuck your opinion" as arguments. They are meant purely to provoke, and bring nothing to a discussion. In that respect, I see Fitna as a giant "fuck you an fuck your opinions" with incredibly little rational discussion or debate. Bringing that into the public arena is an extreme lapse of judgement as it creates much more emotional harm than rational discussion.
While you may be technically right that Fitna can be considered as freedom of speech, I don't feel anything deserves that label if it doesn't take itself seriously enough to atleast compose its arguments in a rational manner.


But, once again it is in your opinion that they mean to provoke, that is why there is a Judicial system in place, to solve these conundrums. Hence the reason that Philidelphia supreme court protected David Hackbart right to give the bird to a citizen, and a peace officer, because he was expressing his distress with his current situation.

http://news.aol.com/article/pittsburgh-city-council-awards-david/786635

In fact the city gave him 50,000 to settle the matter.

If curse words were not freedom of speech then men like George Carlin would still be in prison.

But I think we are arguing two different things, however related. Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression, which are invariably tied. You cannot have one without the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin

An example of Carlin's thought process. This argument is exactly why the Wilders is in court in the first place.

>How very astute of you, you're right, tasering some little scrote is the perfect way to stop them from doing something this stupid ever again.
Till you just tasered the wrong guy by accident. That's why we let the law dole out our justice. Innocent till proven guilty.
I await your stupid reply, my spider senses are tingling and i know you're gonna come back with one.


HELLO! Are you BLIND?! The guy's black. He's BOUND to be guilty of SOMETHING. Tasering him is the only way to make sure he learns to stop hating whitey. </sarcasm>

But, honestly, he had to know something was gunna happen. You don't stand around ON TOP OF A PLANTER looking suspicious as all hell as a brick flies at a cop car from his direction. We also don't know the whole story. Was anybody else even around to point the finger at? He could have been talking back to the cop, and the situation was more heated than the video shows. He was probably warned more than once. I'm sure there is a reason the video leaves out the part leading up to this incident.

Also, when was the last time you heard of some white crackhead, who just got beat down by the cops, suing the police department for "violating their civil rights?" Either it's racist black people, who damn well know they're guilty of something, throwing down the civil rights defense, or it's racist white people only violating the civil rights of black people. Either way, SOMEBODY got pissed off, and SOMEBODY overreacted.

If some fool threw a brick through my window, you better damn well believe the last thing I'm concerned about is his motherfucking civil rights. The prick gave up that right when he damaged my property and put my safety in jeopardy. However, if this guy wasn't the one responsible for the brick throwing (and he probably was), it's still pretty god damned suspicious to be 18 years old, and standing on top of a planter on city property, outside the police headquarters.

I just get the image in my head of some young punk listening to too much cop-hating rap music, glaring at every cop car that passes by. Finally, he reaches the boiling point and just chucks the nearest heavy object at some white oppressor. When he gets beat down for it and handed his well-deserved punishment, it's "Oh HELL nah!" And now we get to see the judicial system being exploited once again, in the name of 'civil rights violations.'

Ah....."modern, westernised, african culture". That burst of fresh air that produced black people disappearing during apartheid, people tortured in tanks of sulphuric acid. School children being massacred, Steve Biko, Sharperville--really wanton killing. I am also reading a book about the great job the british colonial judicial system did in Kenya called, "History of the Hanged". Among the British civilizing accomplishments there was forcing thousands of Kikuyus into concentration camps. Thousand were massacred in Nyadzonia in Mozambique, Chimoio, Zambia, innocent refugees including women and children.

Yeah, western values practiced in Africa can be called anything but brutal and inhumane. Not to mention rape. The right of a white man to rape a non-white was as sacrosanct as you say it is in "traditionalist" cultures. A good portion of the mixed population is testament to this indulgence.

It seems to me that if we want to reduce crime as well as the violent and inhumane attitudes in South Africa, western culture is the last place Africans should look.

The west institutionalized brutality against black people and de facto made rape against black women a right. Shaka didn't have anything on the British and the Dutch.

Go ahead and destroy America... I don't want to live in a country with a worse judicial system than North Korea. We need to rebuild this bitch. Fuck off Newt have a heart attack.

I'm wondering if this should even in the law channel since the judicial system has been bypassed altogether.

Oh look. An incompetent judicial system, that doesn't understand current technology. Allowing warrants without the full information, leading to a situation where it 'may or may not be'. Along with the how, and when it is abused by people, criminals, and other unsavory elements of the population.

Maybe, just maybe, people shouldn't be shocked at this. On the other hand, perhaps they should be pressing that their judicial system be held accountable to massive failings, and screw-ups like this. I await the time when patriot act is used, and it leads to a printer in an office building. After all, the proof of concept has already been proven.

It's a title, it's supposed to catch your attention.. and I would say it worked.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
Yeah, why is "cute" in the title? Who really cares if she is (was?) cute?


Anyway, let's not judge the whole police force on his actions. And let's let the judicial system deal with him, not a lynch mob.

I see what you are saying, however, I'm afraid that is not necessarily the way hate crimes are viewed in the public eye today.

Also I DO know that majorities such as whites or whatever are victims of these offenses too.

Often times i'm not very eloquent with words. I found this in the wiki entry and it sums up some of my viewpoints on the matter:

In the United States, federal prosecution is possible for hate crimes committed on the basis of a person's race, color, religion, or nation origin when engaging in a federally protected activity.

that being said,

Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced. Some have argued that if it is true that all violent crimes are the result of the perpetrator's contempt for the victim, then all crimes are hate crimes. Thus, if there is no alternate rationale for prosecuting some people more harshly for the same crime based on who the victim is, then different defendants are treated unequally under the law, which violates the United States Constitution. To try to isolate motivation in cases such as rape and murder to fit into one of two categories is ridiculous. The victims in either case suffer the same result. To legislate different penalties based upon a changing definition of what constitutes hate criminalizes thought and not actions. In a free society, one's thoughts and ideas should be protected even if they offend the sensitivities of other groups. It’s when a physical crime is perpetrated, regardless of the motivation, that the same punishment should be enforced.


And just to put it out there:

hate crime
 
–noun
a crime, usually violent, motivated by prejudice or intolerance toward a member of a gender, racial, religious, or social group. Also called bias crime.

Not at all like how you defined it

and from http://public.findlaw.com/civil-rights/more-civil-rights-topics/hate-crimes-more/ ,
A civil rights violation may become a crime if it involves the use (or threat of use) of force. Hate crimes are intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religious, sexual orientation, or disability.

"someone" could be argued to include a group of people or community.
I am not confused. What I think is relevant, however, is how it is defined by the People and by the Judicial Systems.


I'm at a point where I'm not entirely sure what I think about it anymore. I DO know that it makes me uneasy. Benjamin Franklin once said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I love liberty. I love it through and through. I think liberty in addition to love are the ONLY things worth fighting and worth dying for. I fear that these laws are giving up our liberty just to obtain a little safety.

I dunno, perhaps I'm seeing things that aren't there. Perhaps my worst fears ARE true. Just wanted to express my concern =)

There's an article in Foreign Affairs this Jan/Feb issue about whether autocratic states can be sustained in a free market economy, which argues that for the most part freer markets will necessitate at least in the long run, movement towards democratic reforms. I can't recall all of it, but some of the arguments it makes were:

As this video suggests, free market business will require the upholding of contract law, copyright and the like, and an independent judicial system to support these laws impartially, thus encouraging investment from abroad in the confidence that your property and corporate ownership will not be expropriated as in Russia.

It also suggests that through free markets, an enlarged middle class develops which will demand representation, and accountability, particularly in cases of corruption. This contrasts starkly to in an autocracy, where government officials are not accountable to any constituents. Arguably you can see this happening in China already. Whereas national level elections are unimaginable, elections are being held at the lower levels of governmental office and there have been massively backlashes to the toxic milk and ongoing cases of state expropriation of land for redevelopment. Additionally, communist party members are allowed to have dissenting opinions, although not directly able to form competing groups or parties. Movements towards free market also encourage a decentralisation of business into multiple industry sectors. This necessitates corporate representation and creates competing interests. I guess what you could say would be a parallel to the last point in the business sector.

>> ^MrFisk:
The U.S. judicial system is broken. The U.S.A. incarcerates more people than any nation per capita, surpassing China and The Soviet Union.



That isn't a judicial system issue, it's a legislative issue. Personally I think the courts work better than the other two branches of government in most cases.

Weed being illegal and mandatory minimum sentences are things that the courts cannot control. They have the power to declare laws unconstitutional, but even then it requires a supreme court case... judges can't just decide that on their own.

The U.S. judicial system is broken. The U.S.A. incarcerates more people than any nation per capita, surpassing China and The Soviet Union. The onset of all anti-drug laws in this country stem from racism and profit; i.e opium in California and marijuana in the deep South.
Nixon made drugs Public Enemy #1 in an effort to hoodwink the population from focusing on Vietnam. The 80s saw a drastic increase in resources to combat a ghost problem. Minimum mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws ushered in the prison-industrial complex nation we live in today. Fortunately, minimum mandatory sentencing and three-strike laws are unraveling.
The waste of money to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders is staggering and shameful. Something must be done hastily.

Purely a perversion of the judicial system.

http://93days.com/

So this is the story:

Ian Owns a property, the tenant of that property has a musty old couch on the property. The city clerk filed a complaint, Ian asked to face his accuser.

This is the city in which he resides in trying to cover there asses, and using the law to do so. Which is a misuse of judicial power. And frankly a waste of the judicial systems time.

The judge presiding came into this case with his mind already made up as you could see by the way they acted when he did not sit down. As far as I know this is Civil Court, and there was no need to arrest him.


The People who run the Court there are incompetent.

In reply to this comment by bamdrew:
Aha! You feel that the role of government is solely to protect the individual, while I feel that the purpose is not even individuals first, it is the community first. Its a huge philosophical difference, and I can see now why we disagree so strongly about what Bill was talking about.

Precisely. I derive my entire philosophy from "the right to life" (defined in my bio)--be it my stance on free market economics or my stance on a limited government and voluntary taxation. So at its core, that is the fundamental difference between our viewpoints.

A problem facing a community naturally requires a community's choice (investing collected funds into updating national power grids), while a problem facing an individual requires an individual's choice (changing from Duke-Cinergy to Green Mountain Energy).

So given that statement, I can see why you are placing an emphasis on the community--but how does that mesh with individual rights in cases where the community at large is not involved? Or is this bypassed by the notion that rights must always be an agreement between two men (and thus always form a community, in effect)?

You give the role of delivering justice to the group of individuals,... a strict individualist would argue that laws would naturally be a byproduct of a free market.
I am a strict individualist, but I derive it the other way around--I view the free market as being a byproduct of individual rights. That is, each person's individual right to choose to buy and sell goods, and thus enter into voluntary cooperation and trade with others is what forms for basis of the free market. Likewise, laws are derived from the principle of individual rights which forbids the initiation of physical force on others (theft, fraud, assault, murder, vandalism).

You concede your point here, as you recognize that individual human beings will make choices that contradict what other individuals may otherwise prefer happen and see how a group of individuals can sort out these problems without waiting for the problem to become economically problematic to the individuals causing a ruckus. You go so far as to say that the group of individuals restricting the amount of smog a power plant can put out to 'dirty your shirt' (which I read as "poison your lungs and environment") is compatible with a free market economy! BUT, for whatever reason that is as far as you're willing to recognize that we are a group of a few hundred million people with a shared problem that should be solved with shared solutions.

You are correct in your interpretation of the phrase "dirty your shirt". If you look at pollution from the perspective of individual rights, you see that one group is initiating force on another--that is, they are imposing costs (lung cancer, dirty shirts, etc.) which both parties did not agree to. Now, normally when one person initiates force on another they would take it to court, but it is almost impossible to determine just who is affected and to what extent by a company emitting pollution 10, 100, or even 1000 miles away. Nor is to practical to have millions of people filing civil suits for impossible-to-determine sums against each polluter. For this reason, it becomes necessary for the government to impose the costs directly when and where they are emitted--hence my suggestion of an effluent tax. However, as with the cases above the basis for this is in an individual's "right to life."


Again, my take-home-point here was that a free market economy is how a group of individuals chooses to engage in trade;

I agree with you there

its not the United Free Market of America, we are more than our goods and services, we are more than our laws, we are more than our individuals, we are a community of individuals who agree to be governed by very specific rules and regulations, agreed upon locally by vote or by representatives of sub-communities, and more broadly by general rules set forth a few hundred years ago by some rather spectacular community representatives.

I think I agree here, but I am a little confused. In the system I envision there would still be congress, a president, and a judicial system. There would still be a national defense, fire fighters, police force, and legal system. Fraud, theft, rape, murder, vandalism, and assault would all be illegal and strictly enforced. However, the distinction I make is that the government has no right to initiate the use of force--only to respond to the initiation of the use of force (e.g. arresting a burglar). I agree there is a role for government, and even a role for government in the market--but I firmly believe that no human, government official or otherwise, has the right to initiate force against another human.

Who here has any right to any knowledge enough to decide if Biden is healthy or not?

Not a single one of us, that's for his personal medical doctor to decide.

Now, who here has sufficient proof that Obama is going to replace him with hillary?

No one. Except some random sites and rag tag rumors.

>> ^Fjnbk:
Sounds silly. The media would be talking about how Obama flunked his first executive decision and his candidacy would be over. Biden seems fine.


He is not an executive, therefore it is not an executive decision. Now, they would say its a bad tactical decision on par with bumbling McCain choice in palin, and would use that to pull the heat off of that subject.

But it would be a choice on health, so he has to choose the right person to replace.

I think that is bad for us constitutionalists, because they sell our liberty for a little bit of security. In which we deserve neither.

Small laws on 2nd amendment(bans on certian guns, and laws against defending ones house), free speech zones, patriot act, FISA amendments, and the expatriate act (That's the one that says you have to pay taxes if you want to move to Canada and be a Canadian). All of these serve eat our liberty alive, and make it so that they Judicial system doesn't have any teeth against the executive and legislative branch of the government.

EDIT: I don't need to list the republican parties transgressions on the constitution because we already know about that.

jeremy1967 worte:
It's a little more than that. What use to society does the serial killer serve? Why should we provide a life for someone who freely chooses to take it from others? It costs you and me money to keep these people locked up in prison where they get 3 meals a day, free medical care, TV, etc. If we are sure of the guilt of a mass murderer, then what is the point in keeping them alive? They are a cancer to society. You don't try to co-exist with a cancer. You eradicate it to the fullest extent possible.

1. Do you really think that "we" "provide" "you" with a life?
2. Murdering people is a burden for any society that must be avoided. How can murdering be illegal for an individual but legal for a society?
3. Cancer is not a self aware being.

Fact a: In a "normal" judicial system, the death penalty with all associated costs is far more costly than life imprisonment.
Fact b: Murderers who killed in the heat of the moment are far less likely to kill again than other persons are to kill for the first time. Who should you imprison to protect society?