If you want to get particular about what are natural 'rights', tell me how and where do you obtain these "rights" in nature? Does a does an African doe have a 'right' to life over the lion that kills it? Or does the lion have a 'right' too to kill the deer for food? Should we find some means to "arm" all prey to rightfully have an equal chance to defend themselves against their predators? If this seems absurd to you, then where do you propose this "right", or any one for that matter, comes from?
Natural rights refers to rights that an individual enters into society with that governments are not supposed to deny. They do not generally apply to animals.
Also, how do you figure that a gun is a means for personal "defense"? Shouldn't you be investing in bulletproof vests instead? In fact, without having to check, I'm pretty certain that the sales of bulletproof vests are somewhat insignificant to those of guns.
How would bulletproof vests allow a person to defend themself? And that's assuming the vest even stopped the bullet and the person wasn't shot in the face or the leg or something.
Quite a few places, starting off with your first response when you asserted that, "...you do not “re-interpret" the meaning of it, because then it becomes a free-for-all."; Or, "...if you try to structure the Constitution to be up-to-date, you’ll find it will be outdated within ten years. ...", "Our constitution, by contrast, is timeless...", among others. Although you mentioned that you recognize an amendment "process", you clearly emphasized the futility of ever trying to change it or even to redress the issue in any meaningful way.
Pointing those things out is not saying that the Constitution should never change, but that when you are interpreting the Constitution as written to see if existing laws are in line with it or not, you are supposed to interpret it as written. Regarding about restructuring it, that is in reference to those who say that the Constitution as a whole is outdated and needs to be re-written to bring it "up-to-date." I was pointing out that the Constitution covers basic timeless principles. You can update it here and there via the amendment process, but trying to bring it "up-to-date" specifically regarding modern issues will result in a Constitution that is outdated within a few decades or shorter. And it is not a futile exercise to amend the Constitution, as it has been done multiple times before.
Regarding multiple interpretations problem:
And where does your authority come from to be the wiser? What assures you that anybody who interprets it different than you, must not "know anything about it"? And in respect to scholarly controversy, you seem to believe that everyone is on the same side of all issues which is very naive. See: Constitutional Controversies] for example.
Because the people who "interpret it differently" usually show a complete lack of knowledge of the other arguments on the issue. And I never said that everyone is on the same side of all issues.
If you can't come up with a precise formula to determine the good from the bad, every gauge of estimation is useless and an insufficient reason to just allow people arbitrary powers to decide when it is right to assert a bad government and a right to overthrow it.
It isn't useless or insufficient. But it can be a bit arbitrary.
Then I can assure you that you seriously lack an education yourself with respect to politics and governments in general. Hussein was communistic, not national socialist [Nazi]. In fact, the United States is the only government that comes close in comparison to Hitler's conception of government, if any should.
Hussein was not a communist. His regime was modeled on the Nazi party. And the United States is about as far to the opposite of Nazism as one can get. Nazism was not a case of capitalism mixing with government. That is the classic, and wrong, claim of what fascism is. Fascism is a variant of socialism, where the government directs the economy. That is how the Nazi economy functioned and how the Italian government under Mussolini functioned. A really good book on the Nazi economy is
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze. A book to check also is Friedrich Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom.
What we are all aware of is that Hussein had 'supposedly' though likely, used chemical weapons. So did all countries in World War I, including the United States. It is also played down that he attacked Iran, a country that the U.S. doesn't like and overthrew their very government causing even more deaths than the few thousand that Hussein was ever guilty of. And again, what is your reasoning that the U.S. should be the police of other countries maintaining nuclear materials? It is this very fact that the U.S. holds the dominant power on world destruction that gave it its 'superpower' status.
The U.S. nuclear arsenal is not what gives it its superpower status. I'd say it's the opposite, the arsenal is more a result of its superpower status. It's superpower status comes from its economic and military power overall and political influence. Regarding policing, nations that are virulent dictatorships that only seek a nuclear weapon to be able to bully other nations, should not be allowed to possess such weapons if anything can be done about it. Countries like the United States do not possess nuclear weapons for bullying purposes, they possess them for defensive reasons.
George Bush is a tyrant too! The only thing that saved his ass from being impeached is that he immediately created a secrecy act to protect all Presidential conversations from being able to be legally heard or used for fifty years past his term in office. And nobody stopped him or seemed to want the possibility of a stain on American pride.
George Bush was not any tyrant. Far from it. You didn't see all of his critics in the government and the media getting thrown into prison or anything. Nor did Bush some how become a king. As for impeachment, he wasn't impeached because there was nothing to impeach him on. If anything, he had the least scandal-wracked administration of any recent president (including Reagan and now Obama).
Granting Saddam's cruelty, the U.S. was not in any threat from him and your President and staff among other supporters around the world (including ours, Canada), knew this. The U.S. was wanting to finish their war with Saddam from the early nineties but he pulled back and gave no one justification to continue. 9/11 was a convenient excuse but they tried desperately to try to find a natural connection which wasn't happening. The lying and innuendos was their strategy. And though they did a dumb-ass job about it, half of our populations (that includes Canadian and UK opinions) are either really stupid or just willing to pretend they are.
They didn't lie. Outright lying would never have made it past the Congress.
When you say, well, "he was really bad anyways", the logic is no different to the emotional play that a prosecution makes to sway the jury by pointing to the horror and nature of a crime and then associating the fact that the defense did something else that was bad in their life, even if they have no connection.
The logic is different. Because Hussein was being invaded for all of those reasons. He wasn't on a man on trial with the jury having to consider whether he was guilty solely over one thing.
To begin with, conservative politics believe in what they claim is "smaller government". But to their reasoning, it should be passed to preferential corporate interests for the nations sake: that is, they spend money on corporations to do what is lost in government. [This, by the way, is what National Socialism did in Germany.] One of the things that Bush did was to encourage war in order to create economy for the military machine and particular favored corporate interests (like Halliburton, for instance) The loss or cost of the debts of the war are passed on to the common people through lives, taxation, and loss of rights to privacy and securities at home. But these are not incurred by people like Bush. If they could, they would bankrupt the government as is to make it impossible to exist (smallest government). All those he wanted to gain personally, are and have been secured.
You starting to sound like a left-wing caricature about what the right supposedly stands for. Conservative politics is not about mixing big business with government (though some corrupt Republicans seek to do this, but they are not being conservative). And no, that is not what Nazi Germany did. Nazi Germany's businesses didn't have a say in what they had to do. They were commanded by the government. Also, you need to provide some proof regarding your claim that Bush pushed for war to "create economy for the military machine" and "favored corporate interests."
Perhaps. I do still think that the media in most places, including the States, is still significantly fair considering the variety of sources. It is not news reporting that I'm referencing this attention to though. Bush first clearly stated that he would favor those countries, businesses and people if and only if they support his agenda for war with Iraq. He wasn't speaking to your public when he said, "You are either with us or against us." It was a threat and a promise. Anyone can clearly see that that is bullying and blackmail. We all know who has the biggest gun (Nuclear threat to every other country).
Bush was not talking about nuclear bombing other countries. He was saying that the United States would go after any nation that harbored terrorists. It was perhaps an oversimplified form of wording, but he wasn't saying either you are with the United States regarding whatever it wants to do or you are with the terrorists, he was saying either you are with the United States and seek to undermine terrorism or you are aiding the terrorists, and thus against the U.S.
America, contrary to your propaganda, was not the determiner of the break of the U.S.S.R.. There are a lot of factors that went into it. Italy, I'm sure is amplifying the fact that it was the new Pope from Poland who initiated the fall. We have also learned through recent times that the Soviet Union's people had more just reasons to fear the Americans throughout the cold war due to their paranoia.
The only reasons the Soviet peoples had to fear the United States was from the aggression of the Soviet government itself towards the free world. The United States was not the sole cause of the Soviet Union's collapse, I agree. But the United States was the main power that stood as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and global communism throughout the Cold War. And although the U.S. wasn't solely responsible for the Soviet Union's breakup, it did play a major role nonetheless.