Out of Many, One!

There is no beginning and ending of rights. Yes, that is a hard one to get into everyone's head. Many do believe there are clear limits to rights. How do we talk about this with those people?

nicely said.

ooooooohhhhh! i'm borrowing that one!

nice. =)

How do you ask a person who out right hates another person because of their color,sex,religion,whatever to equally apply human rights?

how do you mean?

One reason the supreme court exists is to protect the minority from the tyrany of the majority.

Do you think Southerner's would have ever voted to get rid of Jim Crow? Or to allow Blacks to vote. LOL Considering the way the majority of them think now, they would try to go back to what they think is the good ole days.
And if lots of them had their way, they would install a theocracy too. LOL I live in the deep south, and most of the people here are ignorant and poor, and religiously insane. Of course that is different in the larger cities.

carmalite, "religiously insane" LOL...I like that.

twodee, in all honesty I must admit I stole "religiously insane" from Mike Malloy on novamradio.com, who hosts the Mike Malloy show from 8 to 11 CST.
He has some good ones. But I invented rePIGlican.

So what are you suggesting we need government for, other than protecting us from an outside invasion and from killing one another?

For one, we have a system where we trade currency for stuff and labor. That needs to have a set of rules so that it functions properly and fairly.

anarchy is a phase most people grow out of after their sophomore year in Uni

A government for the sake of governing is not a bad thing. A 'government' for the sake of ruling is. The difference being that a government that simply governs uses its influence to disseminate the satisfaction of needs for all in a broad sense to better mitigate the tendencies of those more inclined towards harmful procurment of goods via harm to others. A government that rules simply enacts its will for the benefit of those within the government and/or those in collusion with said government. If we were all part of the government that would not be a bad thing, but that would mean we would all have the right to govern for ourselves... a free world. Or, if we were all in collusion with the government it would have to be a government all could agree upon... something that can only be found in Utopia.

P.S. Utopia is a reference to no place. It means a place that doesn't exist. When Thomas Moore wrote it, he was apparently attempting to explain his personal ideal with the implicit belief that such a place could not exist in this realm of reality. Basically, Utopia is what Moore though of to describe the Kingdom in reference to, "When Kingdom comes." Unless you believe in the Rapture, don't anticipate such a place coming to Earth. If you do believe in the Rapture, keep on keeping on and maybe the thought of such a thing gives you a little bit of peace. If so, good for you. We all deserve a little bit of peace for ourselves right?

Do you really suggest that the rights of the individual are not being infringed upon by the consistent growth of our law system? There is a difference between a "living" law system in which the laws are adapted to the present, and an engulfing law system that encompasses all of human life in the United States. We have law to govern very literally every part of our lives all the way from pre-birth to death.

I was always taught in history that it is a representative democracy.
But it does not matter because the end result is the same.

I bet you would have told MLK to leave, too...

you must hate America then since that certainly wasn't the idea our Founding Fathers had for this country.

If it were simply majority rule, would we have a constitution? A Bill of Rights? Read some Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Rand, and Tocquiville for some thought on the rights of man. Then, read your Marx and Engel and we can discuss. Good?

pwn'd..

lulz!... Gosh you guys broadened my reply too much. I'm no white nazi, MLK hatin, communist. I only was talking in the present. But I guess you can still hate me for that, and tha's alright.

I agree

to me it's like

watching an old lady being mugged and not standing by and be willing to using deadly force

watching life grow and be willing to nurturing it

since the yes and no buttons do not have such drastic consequences and are transparent..

I'd say Al did OK

"since the yes and no buttons do not have such drastic consequences and are transparent.."

Um...so it begs the question...Why are they there? In the beginning there was only a vote up button, called a "green light."

The fact that liberals outnumber conservatives, and thereby dilute their voices on Current.com, is hardly a comparison to the issue of a majority voting to remove a minority's rights under the law.

That's what prop 8 did. It was wrong.

If you want more conservatives here, invite your friends, but I doubt we'll be petitioning the webmasters to delete all conservative members' accounts...

I dont see that liberals out number conservatives Dabne its more that you are so far to the right that you are vastly outnumbered by the rest of us.

....as long as someone is willing to fight for the individual. If not, it gets swept under the rug, forgotten, and passed down through oral tradition....

If Non Equal Rights exists
..Equal Rights CAN exist

The only way to develop said absolute would be to cull any dissention. Would you not agree that if a herd were running off a cliff, to have one say, "Maybe we should go the other way?" would be a good thing? True, an oversimplified analogy, but the point being that there is no evolution of thought without the seperation of ideas. Unless you mean an absolute majority of people who are accepting of the individuality of its constituents, and encourages the allowance of individuals to explore their own paths with the careful protections of the other individuals to prevent harm, then such an absolute majority cannot exist without the removal of individual consciousness.

Liberalover,I don't agree with first half of what you say. I do agree with this that you say:
"Unless you mean an absolute majority of people who are accepting of the individuality of its constituents, and encourages the allowance of individuals to explore their own paths with the careful protections of the other individuals to prevent harm,"

I do not agree with this last part:
" then such an absolute majority cannot exist without the removal of individual consciousness."

You don't agree that it is a good thing to have one in the herd say, "Lets go the other direction," versus running off a cliff, and you don't agree with an absolute majority without the ability of the individual to act freely with regards to their own pursuits excluding harm to others is impossible without removing the individual consciousness? To say that you don't agree that absolute majority can't be possible without removal of the individual consciousness is ignoring a significant point in my comment. We can all cut and paste arguments to fit our own purpose... It is called the strawman argument. It is to setup another's argument in a false way to better suit our own attempt to disable it. I mentioned earlier to someone else to read Mill. That was in reference to John Stuart Mill. He has something called the Harm Principle. It has made for some good discussion since then. Perhaps it would be worth a study.

We do not have a direct democracy, but a representative government... we appoint our leaders to make our laws and protect us from one-another.

I don't see why people still argue about this; it's very simple: our government must protect the minority from the majority.

If it was put to majority vote, women never would've been granted suffrage, blacks would be slaves, there would be no interracial marriage, etc.

And as we've seen, "majority rule" currently denies rights to LGBT Americans. But that won't always be the case, thankfully...

"majority rules" is how you get atrocities against minorities. You realize the Nazi party was voted into power in Germany? That is why the full saying goes, "Majority rules, minority rights." People tend to forget that inconvenient part at the end because everybody wants it their way without concern for the other.

very true... and the NEEDS of the many outweigh the NEEDS of the few in most cases. But i whole-heartedly agree that it is a significant drawback to a demos that certain individual groups are laid to the side.

Maybe democracy isn't the ultimate form of government, but who is willing to make a better one? Who I ask you, WHO?! and will it work?!!! so far, this has (with major evident flaws) and what ain't broke, don't need fixin'

but if this is broken, then it needs fixing! Problem there is doing away with the old in a way that doesn't cause too much interlay.

[ I am totally in favor of revolution and positive change for all; bloodless preferably, but if we have to break a few eggs to get there, so be it! ]