Reply to post: Re: This should tell you

Re: This should tell you

@Gordon_11

Re: "You mean it doesn't answer to you. How do you know that the majority of people in the UK don't support this?"

Even were it able to justify what is happening, consent is not sufficient. Consent must be informed and there is simply no way that informed consent could possibly given here. A failure to appropriately inform is one of the points in contention. We cannot be held to a contract we are not allowed to see, that acts against the most basic of our interests, regardless of (alleged) consent.

How sad is it that someone posts a question like that? No reasonable government can respond to mob rule. That is what constitutions and bills of rights are all about. There are fundamental human rights defined by constitutions for the United Nations, the United States, Canada, the EU and many other places besides. Those rights are not up for a simple majority vote and rightly so. In Canada and the United States, at least, multiple separate governing bodies must ratify any shift in these rights. There are reasons for this and one of them is precisely to prevent assaults on individual liberty from a tyranny of the majority. It is necessary that the majority of the body politic agree to abide by a covenant. It is not sufficient. Even significant majority votes cannot render lawful that which is fundamentally unlawful. For there to be peace and legitimate law and order even small groups must be given their fundamental rights or they will rebel and create chaos.

"there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths" -- James Madison -- The Federalist No. 10 1787-11-22

We are in dangerous territory. A slow rot has begun to stabilize into a fundamentally corrupted system. This cannot last. It is only a question of whether we fall into a frightening permanent tyranny, have a revolution or hopefully cure the rot while we still have a chance.

The only legitimacy the state has comes from a covenant between individuals and the collective. That covenant is expressed through constitutions in the United States and Canada. The state has no legitimate business, particularly and explicitly in the United States' Constitution of enumerated powers and bill of rights if it strays outside the confines of the Covenant.

"I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution." James Madison in letter to Henry Lee 1824-06-25

My right to worship as I please, including being an atheist if that is my leaning, is not up for a majority vote. The covenant that mutually binds us -- you, I and the state -- reserves that right to me alone. Similarly, my right to security of my person, including my privacy is beyond the legitimate power of the state to waive, except under very narrow circumstances.

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison

The 'war on terror' is an illegal attempt to claim a narrow circumstance exists, applies without limit and allows the state to do as it pleases. This has been used already to justify universally illegal acts such as torture and the very worst sort of summary execution. At least some strictly illegal and illegitimate acts, be they committed by legislators, executive operatives, the judiciary or even the military in the heat of combat are void of legitimate authority. They are crimes. A claim that an emergent permanent war with no end condition whatsoever is of necessity void and cannot justify illegal acts.

"Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded" -- James Madison, , Letters of Helvidius, no. 1

You do not set a fox to guarding the hen-house.

Some acts that have been committed in recent years have always been illegal and are not subject to statutes of limitations. They can be, should be and I hope in at least some instances will be prosecuted and the perpetrators punished.

You do not have to do something the state orders you to do when it exceeds their legitimate authority. You resist to your peril, but sometimes good men have to rise to such a challenge. Our current liberty, tenuous as it is, was paid for in blood by our forebears. We can expect to pay for it with more blood going forward, but I think we should attempt to do our best with our current liberty to minimize that. So far we are not doing a good job.

Regardless of their presumptive motivation or state of mind, acts by Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are noble, brave and necessary and acts by their persecutors are shameful, cowardly and necessarily opposed.

The state apparatus, no matter the ever more outrageous revelations that continue to pour out from a few whistle-blowers continues to press for ever more advantage against its citizens. Have they, at last, no decency? Have we? When does it become OK, in your opinion, to call demand an end to this?

A majority opinion does not justify wrongdoing anyway, but I repudiate the notion that an informed majority of my fellow citizens in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., other parts of the EU and most of the world for that matter would vote to have a state monitoring and perverting discourse everywhere and committing ever more extreme crimes in the name of protecting the very things they are destroying.