Welcome to the Post-American Century.

We have a problem in America. And it's a real problem -- not one of those cooked-up-for-the-news-cycle problems like Libya or Iran. It's an existential threat to our way of life in a much, much bigger way than Al Qaeda ever could be. It's more insidious than Fascism, and more subtle than Socialism. It's a combination of all the worst possible outcomes for our Nation and it's breeding like a wildfire through a dried out forest. This evil seeks out our children and corrupts them. It targets grown men and women who stand up against it and tears them down. It comforts us with lies broadcast to tens of millions. It has gained a permanent foothold in our schools, in our churches, and in our sports. It has crept up like a thief in the night and even now, with the dagger in our backs, we don't even realize we have been attacked. As our nation's blood runs down to the gutter we will soon occupy ourselves, we go on as if nothing is wrong -- maybe a little tired, maybe a little irritable -- but unaware.

What is this creeping menace? Is it the Government? No. Is it guns? No. Is it drugs? China? The "economy"? No. Corporations? The Military Industrial Complex? No. It is none of these, because all of those problems have one thing in common not shared with this present and invisible threat: Those problems all have solutions. The problem I'm talking about is without resolution, and it stalks us day and night just biding its time, knowing that we are powerless to defend ourselves against it.

The truth is as simple as it is horrific: Americans have ceased to believe in America. It is we who are the worst enemies of this Republic. We have contracted a full-blown case of national auto-immune disorder, and soon there will be no time left to find a cure. We are on our last legs as a free Republic, and I'll give you a few concrete examples why this is true.

Liberty. This word is repeated so often that we are almost completely desensitized to it. When we think of "liberty," what do we imagine? Flags. Parades. Wars of defense. National heroes. Acts of valor. Uniforms. I tell you that these things are not Liberty, clothed in the vestiges of freedom though they may be. Liberty is something else entirely. It is the right to live your life as you wish -- free from hindrance and obstruction by anyone, including your own Government. But liberty also means the good sense to stay out of other people's way, too. It means fighting to the death to defend a man's or woman's right to do something you detest, on principle.

You cannot know the meaning of Liberty until you have chosen to defend the Liberty of someone you hate. You cannot be both a Freedom-Fighter and a Freedom-Denier. You cannot blow the trumpet of Freedom while inhaling the poisonous fumes of hatred and fear. You cannot claim to love your rights while you clamor for the end of the rights to anyone who challenges your views and beliefs.

And you cannot claim that you have fought to defend Liberty, or that our soldiers have fought to defend Liberty, when you are unwilling to afford Liberty even to those who contradict this claim.

Privacy. Your life is your own. What you do is your business. This is supposed to be a revered and self-evident truth for Americans. We have a right to privacy; to the reasonable expectation that no one can stick their nose into our business. And, yet, even as we send tens of thousands of soldiers overseas -- ostensibly to defend our "Rights" -- we are losing our rights faster every day here at home! We no longer have the right to communicate with our friends and relatives without some Government snoop listening in. We no longer have the right to freely associate with whom we choose, or to post what we like to whomever we please on the Internet, without falling into some watch list. We do not have the right to peacefully assemble, wherever and whenever we please, to air our grievances. We no longer have the right to come and go into and out of the country -- or even to travel a highway near the border -- without inspections and checkpoints.

These rights we have given up in the name of Security are the same rights our fathers fought and died to secure and defend in generations past. But we are content with Reality TV and pop music; we are happy to sell out our nation's heritage for the bold-faced lie of "Security." We have no privacy -- what is ours is theirs, and what is theirs is secret. Our money, our lives, our very identities are merely variables in a program and we are counted as statistics.

Civility. No nation can last long with every Citizen at some other Citizen's throat. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln said. Well, we may not be in the violent throes of a second Civil War today by military standards, but by civil standards we are hardly far from it! Our nation was built on the assumption that people may reasonably disagree on the issues, but can nonetheless count each other as brothers and sisters in this Republic. But today, that is no longer true. A disagreement about healthcare, taxes, or the military inevitably leads to accusations of treason, and demands for someone to "Love it or Leave it." And what higher form of love can one have for his country than the desire to perfect it?

Americans no longer believe in the America that our founders created. We do not want a nation that minds its own business; we do not want a government that knows its place; we do not want to be civil to one another. We do not WANT to be FREE. And so, the government gives us what we do want, because that is what it was designed to do.

Have a pleasant 21st Century, America.

 

outside forum :daisy:

 

That's me on that forum, jackass.

lol

 

Well isn't that special...:coffee:

 

Between what I've seen on my thread and on this one, I'm beginning to get the idea that there's no point actually writing content for this board.

 

Yeah it seems like these people don't really have the right kind of itch.

 

It seems most believe they are entitled to having their itches scratched by someone else.

 

Yeah, pretty sure we're fucked. I sincerely doubt we'll be restoring any kind of liberty or freedom via the political channels that are provided. Regardless of whose elected we'll just get much more of the things we've been getting thus far. Which is more government, and less freedom.

 

The thing is, sometimes less government means less freedom. It's too easy to say "get rid of government, get rid of the problem." That's a lazy man's philosophy. Pin it all on a scapegoat and walk away like the job is done. The scapegoat could be the government, or it could be immigrants (read: brown people), or poor people (read: black people), or it could be the Jews, or whatever else. Scapegoating is for the intellectually dead. Ask the average black man in Mississippi between 1950 and 1970 whether his problem was "too much Federal regulation."

Sometimes government has to step in and regulate in order to promote freedom. A prime example of this is Net Neutrality regulations, which would be the government stepping into the ISP business and telling them they're required to carry all content with the same priority regardless of its source. Sure it's "government manipulation," but without it we're going to have Verizon blocking access to Netflix, or Time Warner telling people they're not allowed to read your blog -- unless somebody pays extra.

The problem in this country is too many people have decided that their oversimplified go-to arguments are the only arguments that need to be made. Nobody wants to work on the issues, because everybody's too busy talking about how right they are. Well, give it ten or twenty years, and the issues are going to start working on us.

 

I got an itch,, but I thinks its fleas..

 

That’s the country that we’ve become. Secret trials, secret evidence, indefinite detention. That’s one thing. But when a country actually allows tortured confessions to serve as evidence in a trial, that country has slipped so far down the fascist rabbit hole, there may never be a clear way out.

From this:

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/201...mentioning-the-torture-in-court-is-forbidden/

 

Oh, please forgive me for polluting your thread with my intellectually dead, lazy man's ideas. I didn't realize I was in the presence of a clear intellectual superior who is beyond reproach. In my opinion, using pejoratives like calling people's ideas "intellectually dead", is whats actually "intellectually dead", but then again, it's the opinion of a lazy man, and so is probably not worthy of your consideration.

And you'll have to forgive me yet again, but I disagree. The best regulator is individual consumers making informed decisions. I don't like the idea of people restricting what people can and cannot do with their businesses, that to me sounds like LESS freedom anyway my intellectually dead mind looks at it. In the case of internet providers, you have a choice which company you contract with, as does everyone else. If any one company is found to be restricting content, there will certainly be a company who would love to steal their customers by offering less restriction. You should have the liberty of running your ISP anyway you'd like, and I should have the liberty of choosing which ISP I contract with. Where is the evidence that this is taking place anyway? It sounds to me to be a convenient excuse for government to get their foot in the door of the internet. Look at the history of government regulation, the intentions they advertised and the results they actually produced. A good example would be the federal governments first foray into regulating, the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 (Some articles). Which was sold to the public as promoting "fair competition" amongst railroads, but was used simply as a way to price fix and cartelize the industry. They'd tried to form cartels voluntarily, and after they were unsuccessful, they decided to use the federal government to do it by force.

And if you really think after having passed, that regulation of the internet would just stop there, I'd ask you to once again look at history. Every regulatory agency the federal government has created has done nothing but grow in power and influence. Why am I to believe it would be different with the Internet? You'd like to give bureaucrats the power of dictating what "content" is displayed, and you'd like to do it in the name of Freedom!? I enjoyed your original post when you were vaguely promoting liberty and similar such principles. Closer scrutiny has robbed me of that enjoyment.

 

Most Americans only have one or two ISPs to choose from, and the way the networks are set up there can't be many more than that. And I'd rather the government regulate a corporation than the corporation regulate what information I'm allowed to access.

The Internet itself would not exist if it had not been for Federal investment in infrastructure, technology, and expertise. The Information Superhighway should be regulated like any other highway, with clear rules on who is allowed to block which exit, why, and for how long.

This idea that government is some foreign parasite is one I'll never understand. We are the government, and its intrusions into our freedom is directly proportional to our laziness in forcing it to behave. The extent to which it should intervene where is a fair debate to have, but I'm not interested in discussing it with anyone whose position is "no interference in anything ever, period," because you've made up your mind at the extreme end of the argument and you're unmovable. It's pointless to debate you -- it's pointless to even pretend you have an argument worth discussing.

 

Fuck yes. :2thumbsup:

 

I have several ISP's to choose from, at least 4. But again I'd ask, where is the evidence of this happening? What content is being restricted? I see a greater incentive for a company to offer a quality service than to restrict content. A company is simply a group of people, much like our government. The only difference is that a company offers a service that you can voluntarily choose to use or not, where as everything the government does is by force.

And how are "we" the government? Because there are elections? Adolf Hitler was elected, so were the Jews the government murdered under his rule a part of his government? If 8 out of 10 people vote to kill the other two, does that make it right? Or maybe the 8 people who voted were just "lazy". You seem to like to quickly blame things on being "lazy". Perhaps you're being "lazy" by just instantly declaring things that don't fit your world view as being "lazy".

Federal "investment" is another topic altogether, and does nothing to back up your original spiel about regulating. But it is one that equally infringes on peoples "liberty and freedom" that I thought you were promoting.

 

Godwin's law wins out by page 2.

 

ISPs have openly stated they would like to restrict, throttle, or completely block certain types of traffic (BitTorrent, competitors' entertainment services, etc.). Of course they use nonsense excuses like "too many users" but that's just a smokescreen for turning the Internet into a one-directional content medium like TV.

Despite your tiresome reference to Hitler, I'll try to approach this in a sane manner. We are the government because we hold the power. Did you think the Declaration of Independence was just a political statement? It was a declaration: an exposition; a definition; an out-loud proclamation of the Way Things Are.

Did you think the Self-Evident Truths mentioned in that document stopped at Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? If so, read it again. They continue with:
- That ... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...

If our government does something, it is because we have consented to it -- either by direct election, or by referendum, or by failing to stop it from happening. The idea that just because they have "the big guns" they are somehow untouchable is a cop-out. The People always hold the power. Whether they choose to exercise that power or not has no bearing on that fact.

Throughout history, power has always rested with the People. It is not the government's fault if the People fail to rise up and use that power, in one way or another. Hopefully, that power can be exercised peacefully.

I am promoting liberty and freedom. Perhaps you are mistaken in believing that your ideas about "liberty" and "freedom" are the only valid ones.

 

Its directly proportional to how much tax money we provide for it.



:beatdeadhorse5:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t1u9gSTw3I

 

Since Hitler's too tiresome, how about Japanese internment camps? Were the Japanese consenting citizens wielding their god granted power of government to intern themselves? Despite your attempt to approach this in a sane manner, you've said a rather insane statement. You've basically signed your stamp of approval to everything our government has done since you've been alive. I'd suggest you go back through and do a bit more reading about the Declaration of Independence, the founders, and the constitution. The whole idea behind it was to limit the powers of government in order to prevent it from infringing on those individual liberties that you're touting. If what you say is true and "We" are the government, why then did the founding fathers think it necessary to limit it's power?