Recently, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas took to the floor of the House to talk about Wikileaks, transparency in government, and the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the 
Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times. He spoke about how the Iraq War was based on lies. He asked how the U. S. government should prosecute a citizen of Australia for publishing classified U. S. documents that he did not steal. Paul also said the following: “Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.”
Paul posed a number of questions at the end of his talk:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Source: Huffington Post
– Elaine Magliaro
Tony,
Play semantic games all you like, the underpinning of your philosophy is that you owe at least a portion of your time to the collective, however you define it.
Ownership is not a philosophical masturbation. It is neccessary to determine the allocation of scarce resources. Your body, and your time are scarce resources and determining who in fact, owns them and determines how they will be disposed of is fundamental to every event that has transpired throughout history.
“I am not saying they owe everything to society; but I am saying what they do owe is not zero.”
In this context, who determines the amount, time, and specifics of what you owe? If it is you who decides the terms then you are, in fact, the owner because you are exercising your rights to decide when and what to do with your time. If you grant anyone else even partial ownership of your time, by asserting that you are in fact obligated to contribute to society, then what actions can you take without first consulting the other partial owners? How can you have any right to determine their “fair share” of your time individually and without their considerations unless you assert that you and only you are the rightful owner of your time? If you do not have such rights then you are at the mercy of the collective will and have no such self determination as you believe.
@Bob: No it isn’t.
Bob,
So far, so good. I’ll find out at 4:00 CST.
Buddha,
How’s the six million dollar cat?
Can they rebuild him? Do they have the technology?
Tony,
What you propose is tantamount to rejecting the medical axiom that unclean hands spreads disease.
@ekeyra, Chan: Apparently you are illiterate, or you would have read what I wrote before misinterpreting it.
Nobody owns me, including me. The state does not own me, no man owns me. I am a human, and no human is property. That is MY axiom.
I do have the right of self-determination, and of self-control. It is not a “property right,” it is a HUMAN right.
ekeyra,
Thanks. If you’re cat people, there is hope for you yet.
Chan,
“If I think no man has a right to another’s life and by extension his property why would I think I have a right to another man’s property without just compensation?”
Because you want no regulation of business – an inherently unjust proposition that intrinsically allows for the abuse of individuals for the sake of profit. No rules will always equate to abuses by the unscrupulous and the mentally defective. History is replete with examples. Your stated wishes belie your words to the contrary.
“Individual rights work both ways.”
Unless of course its a consumers right or a workers right to be free from the tyranny of business . . . because that’s the inevitable result of what you want. You can say you care about the rights of others all you want. Again, your desires concerning business regulation indicate otherwise. A disregard for social norms and laws. Repeatedly lying to others and to yourself about the damage your selfish nature causes others. Hmmm. Your patterns appear and appear consistently.
Do they teach history at Hillsdale? I mean actual history too, not politicized right wing nonsense? Because you clearly know nothing about the history of industry in this country if you think deregulation doesn’t eventually lead to economic disaster and undemocratic and unconstitutional oligarchy.
“I am not an engineer but I am a student in mathematics and philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan.”
Not a very good student either judging by the poor quality of understanding you display and your willingness to make up meanings for terms to suit your premise that your property rights trump others rights. That’s simply a form of lying and intellectual dishonesty. Unless your specialty is the philosophy of self-rationalizing bullshit. If you try to make up terms the way you have in real academics (which Hillsdale isn’t) and if you have quality instructors (which Hillsdale doesn’t), you’ll get eaten alive. If you were attending another private school without the biases of Hillsdale, you’d be failing miserably. Then again, you do go to a school that’s about as right wing as they come. And proud of it and their racist origins and traditions too. From their own website: “Hillsdale’s modern rise to prominence occurred in the 1970s. On the pretext that some of its students were receiving federal loans, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare attempted to interfere with the College’s internal affairs, including a demand that Hillsdale begin counting its students by race. Hillsdale’s trustees responded with two toughly worded resolutions: One, the College would continue its policy of non-discrimination. Two, “with the help of God,” it would “resist, by all legal means, any encroachments on its independence.”
Uh huh. A “policy” that has no legal weight or consequence provided the school stop taking Federal money. A policy isn’t law, but a self-policed suggestion.
“Following almost a decade of litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against Hillsdale in 1984. By this time, the College had announced that rather than complying with unconstitutional federal regulation, it would instruct its students that they could no longer bring federal taxpayer money to Hillsdale. Instead, the College would replace that aid with private contributions.”
My. That is something to be proud of. And a load of bullshit. Anti-discrimination policies tied to the receipt of Federal money is perfectly constitutional. The power of Congress to dictate such terms is rooted firmly in the Spending Clause, the Supremacy Clause and the 14th Amendment. Despite the right wings continued attacks on Title IX programs and Reagan’s promise to veto, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1987 specifically to address issues like those raised by Hillsdale’s “policy over law” stance. The CRCA is the law of the land and quite constitutional.
So you go to a school that would rather be able to continue racist admissions policies in fact rather than comply with the law required to receive Federal monies from programs designed to provide equal access to higher education for everybody. Anti-affirmative action. But Hillsdale can be trusted to do the right thing! Because of their corporate “policy” *cough*cough*bullshit* cough*cough. Your very institution says a lot about your weak foundation and distorted rationales.
“Happiness is not the acquisition of property, happiness is being free to do what you want with your life in a country which considers the individual sacrosanct and has a set of objective, codified laws which protect the individual from the caprice of mob rule as he lives his life.”
Really? Like objective laws that regulate business to prevent abuses of individuals for profit? The laws you are so adamantly against? That’s some outstanding backpedaling there, sport. Justice and equity are not the equivalent of mob rule, no matter how many times or different ways you try to say it.
“Obviously you and I want to live in different societies. Your post has clearly indicated to me that you really, truly do not understand the principle of individual liberty.”
No. They demonstrate that I understand them from the legally factual standpoint that individual rights are always counter-balanced against the rights of others. The 14th Amendment provides that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Unless of course they aren’t white and want to go to Hillsdale, in which case the right wing school will just privatize to circumvent laws designed to insure equal protection and the civil rights of potential students who receive Federal aid.
“That you are unable to take advantage of the blessings of a free society, does not make those who can greedy sociopaths.”
You’re just full of assumptions, aren’t you sport?
Full of something else too.
And it rhymes with “sit”.
Tony C:
“@Bob: You are right, we shouldn’t’t argue, because you cannot tell the difference between a ‘certain fact’ and your misguided beliefs. I am a scientist that deals in facts and logic and observation, you are an ideologue, a fawning acolyte of a primitive man living in a world completely different from your own. I suspect you are right, we have no common ground.”
Actually you are the one in favor of primitive man. Primitive man did not believe in man as an individual but as part of a tribe. Primitive man is what gave rise to slavery and the divine right of kings.
Locke and other enlightenment thinkers proposed the “radical” idea that man was an end in himself and did not “belong” to a king or a tribe or another individual or the state.
Our revolution was the concrete reality of the proposition that men own their own life. The DOI was the philosophical underpinning of our legal system.
From your posts I take it that you are against homosexuality, abortion, for unreasonable search and seizure, and against just about every other legal construct in our Constitution. All of these are only valid within the premise that the individual owns himself.
Tyranny is where your ideas lead. Freedom is always at risk with people around like you and Bubbha.
You really need to give up that Marxist/socialist/fascist ideology. And become a member of the enlightenment sect.
There are no human rights only individual rights. Individual rights protect individuals, human rights protect the collective which is the tribe, the king, the state.
You promote the primitive.
That should read “you lack sufficient authority”
Tony,
You defeat your own argument simply by stating it, because, in choosing to use persuasion instead of force to have me agree that I am not sovereign over myself, you implicitly grant that I have a right to disagree. If I have a right to disagree, then I have legitimate authority over myself. Your attempts to convince me otherwise lead me to believe I am free to accept or reject your ideas as i see fit, without consulting anyone else before I make my decision. Therefore self-ownership is self evident even when you attempt to argue against it, for if it was otherwise, you would have had to recieve agreement from everyone else before being allowed to employ your resources to put forward that argument. The fact that we are even dicussing this shows that there was no such consensus and, by your logic, lack sufficient authority to make such an agrument.
ekeyra:
if Tony C does not own himself then he is property of the state, since you and I and others make up the state we own Tony C.
Tony C:
get your ass to making money so we can tax your life er labor.
No slacking now, big brother is watching.
Bubbha:
“This statement contradicts with your stated desire for unlimited acquisition at any cost and without social or legal consequence. You want the ability to have another’s property without any social or legal restraint at all on how you get it. All because you desire to create your happiness – at their expense – without fear of reprisal or paying any fair cost.
If no man has right to another man’s property?
Then neither do you.
Even if that is what makes you happy – the acquisition of their property without rules or consequence.
It is not your right to take without cost.
It is not your right to be a free rider.
The universe does not revolve around you.
That is a lie your ego tells you.”
If I think no man has a right to another’s life and by extension his property why would I think I have a right to another man’s property without just compensation? Individual rights work both ways.
I wish to live in a society which values the individual and the rule of law. Obviously you and I want to live in different societies. Your post has clearly indicated to me that you really, truly do not understand the principle of individual liberty. I have at every turn told you what I believe and you have at every turn called me a greedy sociopath.
Happiness is not the acquisition of property, happiness is being free to do what you want with your life in a country which considers the individual sacrosanct and has a set of objective, codified laws which protect the individual from the caprice of mob rule as he lives his life.
That someone is able to acquire great wealth is icing on their cake of life. And typically when an individual acquires great wealth, many people are made wealthy in the process. Think Google or any number of high tech companies whose employees are made wealthy through stock options.
How many wealthy people donate time and money to charity or to their church?
That you are unable to take advantage of the blessings of a free society, does not make those who can greedy sociopaths.
Tony if you do not own your body, then by what right are you even employing your mind to argue? By what right do you employ your fingers to type? If you do not own your body shouldnt you be waiting for the rest of society to decide how you should be spending your time? By your own logic, you owe them at least some of it? What if they wish to collect right now and you are depriving them of their justly deserved resource of your time?
If it is up to you to determine how you use your time then you de facto, own it. If you do not own your time individually, you have no right to employ it without first consulting the other co-owners, the rest of society.
I will also point out that the first definition of axiom is “a self-evident truth that requires no proof.”
Self-ownership is not self-evident to me; I find the phrase meaningless. Self-determination, self-control, those have meaning to me. Owning my time? Yes, most of it, but I do recognize that I have responsibilities to the society I live in that make my time and work valuable.
@Bob: I have no doubt you’d be amazed.
Rejecting the Euclidean axiom that parallel lines never meet leads to a whole new geometry used by physicists to describe the universe and behavior of gravity.
Rejecting the axiom that all waves require a medium of transport, which demanded space be filled with an ether, led physicists to a new description of matter and energy, and proved the facts of relativity and led to the modern (but still flawed) Einsteinian theory of gravity.
Rejecting the axiom skin color or physiology or gender determine intelligence, courage, or propensity to crime has led, if not to absolute equality, at least a far better approximation of it.
Rejecting the axiom that ‘bad blood’ is the cause for disease, or demons were, and the prejudice that something too small to see could not be responsible for sickness, which included the prejudices that all blood was the same and a little filth on a surgeon’s hands never hurt anybody, rejecting all of these ‘certainties’ of men in th past has led to better medicine and saved countless lives.
If it were not so common it would be amazing to me to find people so cowed by authority that they are **proud** to simply accept as facts, without thought or question, ‘principles’ that are actually nothing more than the poorly justified opinion or musing of a person past, even when these principles will have profound effects upon their lives and the lives of others.
I should find it astounding if I did not see it so often.
Bubbha:
I am not an engineer but I am a student in mathematics and philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
I am working on a senior project that integrates both my math and philosophy coursework. I am trying to write an algorithm to track ideas on the web to see if I can determine if there is a “single” source for these ideas. In other words does some organization send them to a few others and then those to a few each, etc. Rather like the spread of a virus, or at least that is my hypothesis, there is a patient 1.
I am pretty confident that I can track conservative/tea party ideas but wasn’t really sure about liberal/progressive ideas since I tried to stay away from the modern philosophers (I know a failing on my part but I will probably study them in grad school). You and others on this site have given me a wealth of information with which to work.
My project is due at the end of April.
Tony: “I am a scientist through and through; a claim must be either self-evident or proven by logic I find self-evident applied to axioms I find self-evident. The claim of self-ownership is not self-evident to me, and neither you or anybody else makes any attempt to justify it. You accept it as an axiom, I reject it as an axiom.”
I find it amazing that you can just reject an axiom from the study of law and simply make things up as you go along.
Imagine what other convincing arguments we could come up with on the fly by simply simply ignoring whatever axioms we disliked in other fields of study; e.g. medicine or physics.
@Bob: I believe I can argue against Locke’s assumptions, prejudices and logical errors and omitted cases. I believe I do not have accept anybody’s pronouncement of what is right and certain.
I am a scientist through and through; a claim must be either self-evident or proven by logic I find self-evident applied to axioms I find self-evident. The claim of self-ownership is not self-evident to me, and neither you or anybody else makes any attempt to justify it. You accept it as an axiom, I reject it as an axiom.
Since I believe the law is imperfect in the extreme, how it became that way is only of consequence in discovering the logical errors that have led men astray. As to facts of which I have no knowledge, I am sure they are legion, but understanding the emotions that motivate me and my fellow humans to both acts of good and acts of evil is not something completely alien to me.
Tony C., Bob,Esq. et al.
Thanks for keeping the most recent posts mostly civil. As long as you all can devote time to argue/reason/contend, then there is always something learnable and your time expenditures are not wasted.