TakeYouToTasker

Now it gets interesting.

No, we don't need to empower the Center for Diease Control to explore gun control as science. "Shall not be infringed"

Yeah... That's a Very Bad Thing (tm). Delta Airlines is a private entity which is entitled to associate with whomever they wish; and the State Government of Georgia is the State Government of !@#$ing Georgia and has zero business applying ideological litmus tests to it's tax policy.

Agreed.

From the Department of Redundancy Department.

Problem solved.

War and carnage against slaveholders you racist!!! Are you saying that it's unfortunate that those Republican Southerners didn't all deserve to die for enslaving black people??? SAD!!!

No, Grant, it's that I'm actually exceedingly well read, and have allowed the contents of my library (a term I'm using broadly) to shape my world view over the duration of my adult life. As such I can pull from a myriad of borrowed ideas (most of the concepts being discussed here aren't new), and I can combine them, discard them, expand on them, or lend them to any argument I'm making. Unlike say, you, for example, I don't get into drawn out discussions on topics where I have no expertise, because it's the height of idiocy to argue from ignorance. When someone is arguing using the techniques of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, having read the book, I am able to identify it. Further, pointing out where your style of argument comes from isn't an insult, it's an observation. If you, and others on the left, don't like being associated with Alinsky, then stop using his techniques. As for your new go to, which is charges of plagiarism (personalize the argument, Saul!), my posting history proves you wrong, and once again names you either lazy or liar. At some point one would think you'd actually be compelled to make a real argument.

What, exactly, about the prior four (forty? ) years of Democratic election maneuvering makes you think they want an honest contest?

Actually, Bob, that's just another intellectually lazy position you've decided to take up. A search of my posts on this website would show you multiple examples of me having my mind changed through compelling argument. You shouldn't even need to conduct that search though, Bob. I told you of a very specific example of this in another ongoing thread. I supposed you may have killed off the brain cells where that information was being stored though.

No, Grant, we're talking about the institutional protection of natural rights, which has been eroding for a few hundred years. I'm making the case as to why that erosion is wrong and dangerous, and drawing my personal line in the sand saying "this far, no further", and in the process of doing so I'm explaining the history of our Constitution to address your absurd argument that "we have no idea if the founders wanted that infant to be raped or not!"

Actually, no. They've been doing it since day 5361. The Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, then, 14 years, 8 months, and 4 days later, Marbury v Madison was decided.

Any changes to the Document from it's original interpretation, from an origionalist position, require Amendment. So no, their "destructive hobby" would not be "legalized". It would be made illegal by the individual states, except maybe New York and California.

The Founders explained their intent to us in the supporting documents, which while not legally binding are crucial elements in understanding the "why", and intentionally wrote the Document in plain English at what qualified as a 5th grade reading level. It is uncontested that the Founders wrote the Second in response to gun control imposed on the colonists by the British Crown. They realized, in that moment, how essential the ability to defend their liberty against their own government was. Further, several amongst the most prominent Founders were inventors. They knew technology wasn't static. And they know that a free people required weaponry sufficient to keep them free. The entire purpose of the Constitution was build a cage around government, and protect liberty for "themselves and their Posterity", which means they clearly intended future generations to have protections on their rights as well. It is also uncontested that the Founders wrote the First Amendment in response to infringements of their rights imposed on them by the Crown. What we now call "the Freedom of religion" was put in place because the English King claimed his authority from the State religion which placed him at the head by the Divine Right of Kings. Likewise, the Freedom of Speech, and of the Press, was because the British Crown criminalized their political dissent. It is not difficult to understand the Founders intentions, directly spoken; anything not directly spoken to went to the States and the People. This is not to say that the Federal government could never have this authority, only that an additional amendment would have been required to grant them that authority. This is not an exploit. This is by design. This is the Document working as intended. Remember, the Founders described our rights as inalienable.

He's not trolling, he's just wrong.

It's illegal.

What? No it isn't. What you're suggesting is illegal. Especially if the President does it.

What's truly laughable is that I've made that same argument, with the same sort of phrasing here, on this website. I'd be surprised if I haven't made it in this thread; but once again, lacking even a shred of intellectual honesty, and knowing you're losing badly on merits, you're reading from Alinsky and are attempting to personalize and distract. You haven't countered a single argument against your position with facts. You just get louder and more offensive, and are substituting mud slinging and logical fallacy for argument. Here, again, you attempt to disparage an argument by attributing negative connotations to people and organizations you personally dislike, then attempt to dismiss an entire opposing argument, skipping debate, by announcing "Your position mirrors that of X, and therefore you're stupid. I win." This is the dumbest debate tactic I've ever seen. I again reject your entire premise. That's not an argument grounded in logic. It's literally a logical fallacy. Now, back to dismantling your argument. No, the Founders would not have considered pornography of any sort to be speech. On what grounds would they do so? The purpose of the First Amendment was to protect political speech, and was a direct reaction to the British Crown restricting political speech, just as the Second Amendment was a direct reaction to the British Crown's 1774 import ban on firearms and gunpowder. The Founder's were primarily men of their home states rather than men of their new country, and outside of the few very specific enumerations of power, they intended for nearly all of the laws they lived under to be local to them in their home states. This was the purpose of the Constitution. And while inanimate objects not representing political speech would certainly not stand up to the Founder's qualifications for speech, and would be regulated at the state level; given that they had just needed the arms available to them to overthrow an existing tyrannical government, including a private navy, they certainly did not intend to restrict future generation's ability to do the same when they wrote the words "shall not be infringed". Your bare assertion that anyone supporting the Second Amendment in it's origionalist intent necessarily means that they support the general population have access to claymore mines, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction is a poor one which betrays your lack of understanding of your opponents position, which is another reason you're getting your ass kicked. You don't bother to understand the argument your opponent is making. Do you know what they call lawyers who engage in that practice? Dishwashers. It's a terrible practice which causes you to lose every argument you're having on every topic by default, because every argument you make becomes a strawman in practice. I have made my argument against those types of weapons being unConstritutional under a constructionist understanding on this website as well, and again, if you weren't such a lazy and boring "debater" you'd know that. The largest problem with your argument, however, if your insistence that Second Amendment advocates are being "selfish" about not being "inconvenienced"; and is the reason one is easily able to understand your real motives in regards to going after guns: You are an admitted leftist who wishes to use the force of government to actively pursue leftist dogma. As such, you do not believe in natural rights. Natural rights pose a massive problem for your ideology in which authority is centralized, autonomy is limited, and privilege is granted. You dismiss the entire notion of freedom having any importance because you don't value it. You believe it is OK to separate individuals from their right to defend their freedom because freedom is an impediment to your larger political goals.

... LOL That's hilarious. You think those sentiments originated with Wayne LaPierre over the past few days? That's been a consistent critique of people holding your belief set for just about as long as it's been in existence. LaPierre was echoing those sentiments as was I because it's a common and accurate argument against your position. If you were better read, or more aware of anything outside of your neo-Marxist bubble, you'd know that already. Good grief.

And now in addition to calling me a pedophile, you're calling me a plagiarist? Sources now, or GTFO.

No, Grant, it's because you're crude, and unnecessarily insulting, and I don't enjoy engaging people who behave like that in conversation, especially when they make poor and boring arguments. Again, you can't simply will "facts" into existence; which seems to be your "go to". You create preposterous strawmen, then dance them out to the most absurd lengths, then insist they must be true in place of reality, then scream GOTCHA at the top of your lungs. Watching you do it over and over again is tiring. It's a very lazy way to argue, what with not being reliant on information. Your most recent example involved positions I've never taken attributed to me in your creation of a caricature, followed with a bare assertion that the Founders considered child pornography to be speech, and then attributing the conundrum to me; all while carefully taking the time to be a truly ****ty person in regards to direct character attacks. The Court has, over the years, legislated from the bench creating law through carve-out of ruling. Speech has been attributed to many things that are not speech in order to grant them special favor of the government. The Founders would not have considered child pornography, or any for of pornography for that matter, to be speech; and as such it would have been an issue for the states, with no federal authority to get involved. And I am confident that the several states, by 2018, would have individually outlawed it. So again, Grant, I'm done. This is tiring, and you're rude and boorish. I'm sure your parents are quite proud.

He's nothing but an Alinskyite. Which is fine. He's lost every round of the argument on merit, and is now doing nothing but engaging in libel. I don't think the moderation team here thinks very highly of people making charges of pedophilia in place of an argument.

Quoted for posterity. We're done here.

Remember kids, social justice warriors always lie.

No, they did not "give citizens the right to own people". What they did was fail to protect the rights of certain people, allowing their rights to be trampled by unjust law. The Founders did not believe they had the authority to bestow rights on anyone. They believed people were born with their rights fully intrinsic to their being, and that the only just function of government was to protect those rights. Being men of their time, they did not recognize the humanity of slaves, and therefor failed to institute protections their rights. It should not go without saying, that this is the very reason that slavery is wrong. It is the moral priori we appeal to when we condemn slavery as an abomination. Slavery is nothing more than the forced abrogation of rights of another human being. If rights are mutable, as you say, then so is the immorality of slavery. This demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding surrounding the arguments both for and against the Bill of Rights. Not one single founder, not one, expressed the idea that the Bill of Rights was added to bestow rights on Americans. The argument against the Bill of Rights was that it was unnecessary, as the Constitution was designed as a cage on the functions of government, and the government was only permitted to do the things the Document expressly empowered them to do. As such, of course American's possessed those rights; and of course the government was not permitted to infringe on them. Further, that the government Leviathan would grow over time, and that future despots would argue that Americans possessed only the rights specifically enumerated rather than their full liberty. The argument for the Bill of Rights was that while that was understood in that day, the raw power of government seeks to grow and impose itself over time, and that despotism would creep into the system, and that if individual rights were not enumerated, future tyrants would deny them completely. The second argument won out, with the compromise being the inclusion of the Bill or Rights, with the Tenth Amendment left to alleviate the concerns of the first camp. Again, no one expressed the idea that the citizens did not possess these rights in an absolute sense. There only argument was over how best to protect them against the arch of time. Save face? Save face from what? I am casting your post in this way because that what the words you are choosing to use imply. That's not my fault. I have demonstrated for you, using your own words, and the meaning of those words, that is the idea you have communicated. If that's not the idea you wanted to convey, then I suggest developing more skill with the language. Of course they did. They had just fought a war to escape the despotism of a tyrant who denied them their natural rights. The items included in the Bill of Rights expressly addressed rights violations the British Crown had imposed on the colonists. My point was that the notion that individuals might not actually have the right to bear arms never entered into their minds, and that it's inclusion in the Bill of Rights, specifically enumerated, speaks directly to how important they believed that fundamental human right to be. I am trying, very hard, not to insult your intelligence. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you leapt immediately to an emotional argument without comprehending what I had written. Again, of course the Bill of Rights had to be included for the Constitution to be ratified. And again, for exactly the reasons I listed above. Again, giving you the benefit of the doubt, I'm going to ignore the first portion, and address the second: You interjected, into a conversation about the Second Amendment, the protection of natural rights, and the just role of government, the notion that the Founders intended their protection of rights to be mutable. The arguments, for and against, made at the Convention betray your argument: The rights of all people are inalienable. Cannot be separated from the people. The whole purpose of the establishment of our country is staked directly to that absolute truism. The only debate was over the best way to permanently hard code the protection of rights by government into the Document. This is the reason they advised vigilance against exactly the ideas you are proposing, noting that it was each successive generations job to safe guard the Constitution. I don't want to bog down here, but it is not a "living document" in the sense that term means today. "Living document" implies that the Document's meaning was intended to shift over time through interpretation, which is incorrect. The document was intended to be static, with a fixed meaning, which could only be changed through the prescribed process. The Founder's view was that the document should mean today exactly what it meant when it was written with the exception of the changes made by the 17 additional Amendments. This belies the entire purpose of the Document. Again, the Founder's did not believe that just government had the authority to grant rights; but rather that it had the absolute duty to defend rights already intrinsic to the People. Jefferson articulated this idea well: "A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man" Again, I've mischaracterized nothing. I'll respond to this last bit by quoting myself earlier in this thread: "The purpose of the Amendment process was not to eliminate of modify the rights of Americans. The purpose, in relation to the natural rights, is carefully spelled out in the Document's pre-amble. The first words of the Document, which tell's you of their importance to those writing it: "...to...secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..." This "Liberty" outlined in the Declaration of Independence is defined as not coming from government, but instead being inborn, intrinsic, and inalienable (meaning inseparable from the holder). The Founders never intended the Amendment process to remove rights from it's citizens. They quite clearly didn't believe that any just form of government even had that authority. The had, in fact, just fought a war for the very purpose of establishing that fact. The Amendment process was included for three reasons: 1) the compromise over slavery was untenable, and they knew they needed to leave room for changes as liberty grew, 2) the were creating a new form of government structurally, and had the desire to make if possible to reform roles, duties, and checks and balances as became necessary, and 3) they feared the expansion of government over the People it intended to govern, and wished to leave the ability to add to the list of enumerated rights in the likely even that government grew to bold."