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Should Laws be enforced?

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Fri 09 Jan , 2009 3:15 pm
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Cenedril_Gildinaur wrote:
Areanor wrote:
Oh, and government always knows where you are ;) .
There's a REALLY good reason to not implement this. And nobody can tell me they won't because even if they don't have the technology installed now that doesn't mean they won't later.
If you have a cell phone, *they* already know where you are. When our youngest daughter was having issues a few years ago, we activated a function on her cell phone so that we could use the cell phone company to locate where that phone was at any given time.

We only used it a week or so, because it was rather inaccurate, but I'm sure they've improved the system by now. If the government wants to know your whereabouts, all they have to do is lean on the cell phone company. Or get a warrant, whichever is easier. ;)

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Cenedril_Gildinaur
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Fri 09 Jan , 2009 4:00 pm
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TheEllipticalDisillusion wrote:
Alatar wrote:
TheEllipticalDisillusion wrote:
With the socialist trends that the US economy is taking right now, I don't see the arguments against this kind of intrusion as paranoid. Is there something wrong with favoring liberty?
See this is the sort of thing I object to. Are you suggesting the rest of us don't favour liberty? America is supposedly the land of the free and the brave, bastion of democracy. That means you get to pick the people who make your laws. You elected your government, let them do their job. And part of their job is enforcing laws for the overall good of the country.

Liberty is not "I can do what I damn well please", although that seems to be the American translation of the word.
I'd like to keep America the bastion of democracy, land of the free and the brave. Those words all translate to not legislating away my right to privacy.

Yes, my elected officials write and enforce laws, and I expect them to write laws that do not contravene the idea of liberty. Liberty is "I can do what I damn well please so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's liberty." Also, the freedom to break the laws--which then is the job of my elected officials to enforce my law breaking with a punishment. Do you dislike that I have an American-centric view of liberty? I am an American. It is the only country that I have known.
Hear hear.

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It is a myth that coercion is necessary in order to force people to get along together, but it is a persistent myth because it feeds a desire many people have. That desire is to be able to justify hurting people who have done nothing other than offend them in some way.

Last edited by Cenedril_Gildinaur on Tue Feb 30, 2026 13:61 am; edited 426 times in total


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Cenedril_Gildinaur
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Fri 09 Jan , 2009 4:01 pm
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MariaHobbit wrote:
Cenedril_Gildinaur wrote:
Areanor wrote:
Oh, and government always knows where you are ;) .
There's a REALLY good reason to not implement this. And nobody can tell me they won't because even if they don't have the technology installed now that doesn't mean they won't later.
If you have a cell phone, *they* already know where you are. When our youngest daughter was having issues a few years ago, we activated a function on her cell phone so that we could use the cell phone company to locate where that phone was at any given time.
But, unlike this device, the potential for cell phones being mandatory combined with tracking is rather low.

_________________

It is a myth that coercion is necessary in order to force people to get along together, but it is a persistent myth because it feeds a desire many people have. That desire is to be able to justify hurting people who have done nothing other than offend them in some way.

Last edited by Cenedril_Gildinaur on Tue Feb 30, 2026 13:61 am; edited 426 times in total


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sauronsfinger
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Fri 09 Jan , 2009 4:59 pm
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Regarding "liberty" TED and the historical foundations for it in the USA - I would highly recommend the work of Pauline Maier which sheds lots of light upon the subject.

Pauline Maier, born in 1938 in St. Paul, Minnesota, is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A popular scholar of the American Revolution, the preceding era and post-revolutionary America, she holds a bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College, 1960, was a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics the following year and holds a Phd from Harvard University.

She has published a number of critically acclaimed histories, including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972), The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980), and The American People: A History (1986).

She has taken the idea expressed in the Declaration of Independence - "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and has done exhaustive research on it. She traces the idea of liberty and its impact on US laws and politics over the decades and centuries. Anyone who wants to use that phrase of the document to support their own 21st century idea of liberty should read her work and they may be in for a surprise or two along the way.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. - John Rogers


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sauronsfinger
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Fri 09 Jan , 2009 7:18 pm
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Technology does not necessarily have to be viewed as the friend of Big Brother and the enemy of the People. I saw this on the news today

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZTbJH6BNaU" target="_blank

Its film from a handheld cell phone of a Oakland. California BART officer killing a man on the ground in handcuffs surrounded by several other officers. It has turned into quite an incident. The ability to place technology such as this in the hands of tens of millions of people could well be very good for protecting peoples rights.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. - John Rogers


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TheEllipticalDisillusion
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Sat 10 Jan , 2009 12:26 am
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Does my view not jive with hers, sf? I will definitely jot her name down, though I can't guarantee that I will check her out any time soon as I have some other in needing of tending. Can you give me a quick abstract of her findings, or point me to one?

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sauronsfinger
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Sat 10 Jan , 2009 2:59 am
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TED
her point is that the Dof Ind meant little beyond a birth announcement for at least twenty years. It mattered little in writing the Constitution. The whole "liberty" issue took on a life of its own based on the issues of the day. Originally it simply meant being free from the bondage of England. People who use it today to mean "i can do whatever I want to do as long as it does not hurt anyone else" are not basing this on what was written in the founding documents but on a historical eveolution of the concept of liberty which has been continually redefined over the past 200 years.

The libertarian of today would be considered as an alien from Mars if he/she could go back to 1776.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. - John Rogers


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TheEllipticalDisillusion
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Sat 10 Jan , 2009 4:07 am
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Thank you for the summary, sf.

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sauronsfinger
Post subject: Re: Should Laws be enforced?
Posted: Sun 11 Jan , 2009 6:42 pm
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You are welcome TED.

There is also an interveiw she did with Brian Lamb of CSPAN up on the net also. If you put in her name and that of Lamb you should get it. She summarizes much of her own views in it. But her books give you much more of course.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. - John Rogers


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