Police Stops: Constitutional

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='rkwright' timestamp='1286675586' post='2178842']
I don't think claiming the state is a mental illness works well with ICE or immigration judges.[/quote]

Of course it doesn't. One cannot reason with irrational men. Still less with irrational men who subscribe to the heresies of pragmatism [i]and[/i] consequentialism.

[quote]Not sure why you would want to be excommunicated or why anyone would be happy to be excommunicated. Sounds delusional to me.
[/quote]

If excommunication is an expulsion from a community, and the community in question is a group of people who believe that violence other than defensive violence is moral, being happy about no longer being numbered among them is the only sane response.

It is delusional to believe that initiating aggression is moral. It is delusional to believe that an individual, or a group comprised of individuals, has the right to rob another individual at gunpoint in order to provide for his own physical well-being, or the physical well-being of the group. A good end does not justify evil means.

~Sternhauser

Edited October 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[rkwright]

[quote name='Sternhauser' timestamp='1286678347' post='2178852']
Of course it doesn't. One cannot reason with irrational men.
[/quote]

I should have remembered this when responding to you at the beginning.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='rkwright' timestamp='1286678601' post='2178853']
I should have remembered this when responding to you at the beginning.
[/quote]

An insult. Not classy.

[url="http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml"]The Reluctant Anarchist[/url]

Take and read.

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people." [url="http://whitelightblacklight.blogspot.com/2007/06/tolkien-anarchist.htm"]J.R.R. Tolkien[/url]

"What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. . . .

If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these institutions, it is boldly said that "You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a subversive; you would shatter the foundation upon which society rests." If you lecture upon morality or upon political science, there will be found official organizations petitioning the government in this vein of thought: "That science no longer be taught exclusively from the point of view of free trade (of liberty, of property, and of justice) as has been the case until now, but also, in the future, science is to be especially taught from the viewpoint of the facts and laws that regulate French industry (facts and laws which are contrary to liberty, to property, and to justice). That, in government-endowed teaching positions, the professor rigorously refrain from endangering in the slightest degree the respect due to the laws now in force."

Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law.

Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general. . . .

God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." [url="http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G715"]Frederic Bastiat, [i]The Law[/i][/url]

"'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause) ''Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!'

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said." [url="http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html"]from Mark Twain, [i]The War Prayer[/i][/url]


You can either continue to simultaneously hold and believe two contradictory ideas about the morality of aggressive violence, or you can travel along the road of sequential logical conclusions.

~Sternhauser

Edited October 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[rkwright]

[quote name='Sternhauser' timestamp='1286678863' post='2178855']
An insult. Not classy.

[url="http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml"]The Reluctant Anarchist[/url]

Take and read.

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people." [url="http://whitelightblacklight.blogspot.com/2007/06/tolkien-anarchist.htm"]J.R.R. Tolkien[/url]

Saner men than you or I have trod the road of sequential logical conclusions.

~Sternhauser
[/quote]

"and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!" Because they want a state???

I thought you preached that it was immoral to initiate aggression.

Honestly, I can't take your viewpoints with any sincerity or seriousness after you stated that you were happy to be excommunicated.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='rkwright' timestamp='1286679421' post='2178857']
"and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!" Because they want a state???

I thought you preached that it was immoral to initiate aggression.[/quote]

He was joking about executing them. The humor on that point is consistently lost on pragmatists, who actually do perceive death as a just penalty for not believing something.

[quote]Honestly, I can't take your viewpoints with any sincerity or seriousness after you stated that you were happy to be excommunicated.
[/quote]

Why don't you go back and read what I [i]said[/i] I was excommunicated [i]from[/i], Wright. I did [i]not[/i] say I was excommunicated from the [i]Church![/i]

Despite the fact that you now know what I actually said, I believe you will find other, equally untenable excuses to refuse to give consideration to my arguments. Chief among them is probably the fact that your intended career [i]depends[/i] upon you [i]not[/i] giving them any consideration.

I know I had my excuses.

~Sternhauser

Edited October 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[rkwright]

[quote name='Sternhauser' timestamp='1286680930' post='2178861']
He was joking about executing them. The humor on that point is consistently lost on pragmatists, who actually do perceive death as a just penalty for not believing something.



Why don't you go back and read what I [i]said[/i] I was excommunicated [i]from[/i], Wright. I did [i]not[/i] say I was excommunicated from the [i]Church![/i]

Despite the fact that you now know what I actually said, I believe you will find other, equally untenable excuses to refuse to give consideration to my arguments. Chief among them is probably the fact that your intended career [i]depends[/i] upon you [i]not[/i] giving them any consideration.

I know I had my excuses.

~Sternhauser
[/quote]

Yes you did.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='rkwright' timestamp='1286721013' post='2178920']
Yes you did.
[/quote]

Did what?

~Sternhauser

[Axias]

I'm trying to find the crux of the disagreement, this tacit consent issue and our obligations to social contracts.. pretty complicated stuff.

Your differences seem to evolve from what our conscience directs us to do in the face of imperfections in our social contract. (Is that the point of argument?)

A few things occur to me: We should render unto Caesar and such, but the limit of this command clearly ends at any decree to do what is against our conscience of faith. Primacy of conscience can dictate otherwise of course (Joan of Arc?), and we should also not forget our inherent rights as men (esp. rights of casus belli) as we decide to what point we should engage for or against the administration of any law against one another. The church seems to support disobedience and war only as a last resort (ultima ratio).

From the legal viewpoint, we can argue on both sides of this 'imperfect social contract' and the degree of resistance which is appropriate all day, it's overcomplicated and right or wrong is based on too many factors. Often great social misdeeds conducted by the state leave us powerless to convict any wrongdoing, while the good the state brings is easy to overlook.. The heart of the matter is that our social contract is imperfect and we need to exist in some harmony to have any choice of evolving it. The correct manner to improve this contract is really the center of this argument I think..

Very complicated.. I don't see any solution except in a new social contract which we find positive involvement in (and as much as it falls short from perfection, we'll just see more disagreement)..