Last edited by MisterVeritis; 01-11-2019 at 04:19 PM.
Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.
My rights are an inherent property of my existence. It is axiomatic. Any right that requires at least two individuals, for example, the right to assemble, is a "collective" right. My individual rights cannot be separated from my individual existence.
Can the speed of light be separated from a photon?
Last edited by MisterVeritis; 01-11-2019 at 06:31 PM.
Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.
Your rights are an inherent property of your existence in society, a society, a people. Your rights cannot be separated from your social existence. Rights are not mere abstractions, as such, they are meaningless as a teenager insisting he is free from all responsibility. Rights are responsibilities to act with in a society, a people. As such rights are the same as morals which are also social in nature.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Mister D (01-11-2019)
My rights are an inherent property of my existence. It is axiomatic.
You err.
You err consistently.Your rights cannot be separated from your social existence. Rights are not mere abstractions, as such, they are meaningless as a teenager insisting he is free from all responsibility. Rights are responsibilities to act with in a society, a people. As such rights are the same as morals which are also social in nature.
Rights are not responsibilities.
Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.
Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.
Last night opened Nisbit's The Quest for Community to a chapter that begins with this long quote from Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy In America, "WHAT SORT OF DESPOTISM DEMOCRATIC NATIONS HAVE TO FEAR." and found it appropo to what I was trying to say earlier in the day.
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.