1) And our ever increasing gun rights have gotten us....what? We can shoot muggers/rapists/murderers? yet my kids can't have a lemonade stand? I must pay tens of percents of my income to the government? If my kids miss too many days of school I go to jail? I can't fly to LA without getting my balls fondled by government stooges? The NSA is collecting my phone data just because?
The laws on self defense are generally well established. They differ from place to place, like those laws about kids and lemonade stands. That problem is addressable as well. We didn't get our ccw laws altered without a fight and if your kids' inability to sell lemonade offends you, make a big stink with your local authority.
Our founders knew that when they established America it would be a "forever war" to maintain our freedom. Ben Franklin told a lady, who'd asked him what they'd done, "we gave the people a republic ....
if you can keep it." I believe it was Jefferson who once stated his belief that we'd need a bloody revolution every twenty years to keep our freedom.
Getting tired of fighting for your rights every time you turn around? Tough. You don't get to rest; the men who govern you may be Mr. Nice Guys but
THEY DO MEAN TO GOVERN. And they all have these wonderful ideas about some new social program or entitlement that will make you so much happier so long as you just fork over a little bit more $$ -- just a few pennies -- to make it happen. You'll be nickel & dimed to death but hey, you WILL die HAPPY! Wanna stop that from happening? You don't get to rest. Every day of your life you will spend attacking windmills like Don Quixote, or fighting off City Hall, or writing some letter to your kongresskritter in D.C. where some aide will file it in a circular file aside her desk.
You still don't get to rest. Because you need to find a way to make those Washington libtards and repukes LISTEN.
There's "no rest for the wicked," as they say. Stay awake or wake up as a pod person.
You worry about the NSA collecting your phone data. Have you heard of echelon, a program to collect phone & internet data a generation prior to 9/11's resultant "Patriot Act.?" It's been going on longer than you might think, and without a terorist war to justify it.
Are you willing to prevent NSA and others from collecting data even if it hogties them with regards to fighting ISIS/Al Qaeda? Are you willing to see a terrorist act that could have been prevented had the NSA been able to interdict it kill your wife or children? Just asking ... and making it personal, since a lot of people will happily sacrifice the lives of unknowns. There's no right answer though,
Just remember the lengths we went to in WW2 to collect the communications intel on our enemies -- even within this country. I don't recall too many complaints about it. Had I the willingness to go into it I can relate one helluva nasty SNAFU with regards to it which
could have cost us dearly, had not both our side and the Japanese not responded with other equally unbelievable SNAFUS as well.
2) The federal government spends over 15 Billion a year on the "war on drugs". States spend combined more. And we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Speeding is illegal, yet we're not wholesale tossing people in jail for driving 10 over. Just because it is or should be (another debatable topic for another time) illegal doesn't mean that we should turn our country inside out fighting a "war" against it. ......
Speeding is not, in itself, a violation punishable by incarceration.
I will be blunt; I don't give a ****** about whether we incarcerate fewer people than other nations, the same as other nations, or more than other nations.
That's right. I do not care. Period. Don't like it? Too bad.
Look, we have a population of > 300 million. Do you think we might naturally jail more people than, say, Belize? What's Belize's population? An account of prisoners as opposed to the % of population might be a better indice ... but we're also a more mixed society than Belize, or many other nations and that often accounts for more social instability and thus more criminality.
I've already said I don't have a great solution to the problem of illegal drugs. I know there is a libertarian ethic that states as long as they don't hurt others, then why shouldn't they be able to inject, swallow, inhale whatever they want?
The problem is, they DO affect others. "No man is an island" -- an old canard. But people on drugs (yes like alcohol too) cause traffic accidents and kill people. People turn themselves into drug zombies and wind up unemployed & unemployable, and on the public doll, and from there, into medical facilities where they drain monies from the public treasury --- where your taxes go. You know, those monies removed from your wallet under threat of force by Uncle Sam and his subordinate nephews in local state governments.
You want the drugs legalied? OK.
Prove to me that won't result in even more drug zombies, and let's see the laws then changed to prevent them from being sent to medical facilities to drain off our tax dollars. I want to see you do that. You may be hard hearted enough to. Hell,
I'M "hard hearted" enough. I'll stand right next to you while you argue your case. But now let's get America to buy that hard heartedness. Heck, the Chinese once solved their heroin problem by outright execution of heroin users and pushers; it ought to work here, we're NOT ACTUALLY arguing to KILL them .... just let 'em die out in some gutter somewhere.
You know that's not going to happen.
I will admit that perhaps incarcerating them might not be that good of a solution. Perhaps confining them in a treatment facility to get them off their poison will work, with the qualification that you only get three times up at bat and the forth time, back to the whoosgow you go.
I am open to other ideas....I'm just not very hopeful.
Because, IMHO, as humans, I think we are, in general, a pretty f****d up kind of species.
