Who exactly is the President today? If we were under Obama, nothing that is happening would surprise me. But the President is Donald Trump, and our rights are being destroyed every day.
Posted on 05/08/2020 5:21:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Who exactly is the President today? If we were under Obama, nothing that is happening would surprise me. But the President is Donald Trump, and our rights are being destroyed every day.
So you blame Trump. Got it.
The Constitution has been shredded.The final blow or rip came when the people in their infinite wisdom ordained obama to rule them and ensconced him in the White House for 8 [to me miserable]years. We have and probably will never recover from this.
Well, that’s pretty clear. Government must control expression of thoughts.
Got news for you “professors.” It already does. It has delegated that action to the social media and cooperates with them. It will not prosecute social media for violating the First Amendment, but instead gives social media a free pass to control thoughts and to punish forbidden thoughts.
“Sounds like the good professor should be hustled off to a reeducation camp to learn farming from the bottom up.”
Can’t think of a concrete example at moment, but the “city slicker works the land and becomes human again” genre has produced a few movie gems.
Not speaking for you. Just reading what you posted. If it wasnt clear to me then it probably wasnt clear to others. What was your message?
I don't "blame" Trump for COVID, or for the tyrannical governors. I don't blame him for the ChiComs deliberately releasing this virus as a bio weapon (and they did). I don't blame him for the economy being destroyed. I don't blame him for the Satanic Globalists who are using this crisis to implement the extremely evil ID2020 that will enslave humanity.
But I do want him to attempt to put a stop to the shredding of the Constitution. Tweeting about it, or saying things at a press conference is not sufficient.
We're talking about BASIC Constitutional rights here. Freedom to worship. Freedom to peacefully assemble. Freedom of speech. Freedom to be secure in our homes.
I presume you read the news, right? You have seen what has happened, and what is going on?
This CANNOT be allowed to continue.
Lots of things to be unhappy about these days. Of course lots of things to be joyous about as well, starting from being healthy enough to wake up each morning.
Trump is only human, and only one man, in an epic good vs evil fight. You dont think he has been ‘attempting’ to make things right by the constitution and the law? Then you havent been paying attention.
Have you forgotten we are a republic and the states are supposed to be the main powers, not the federal government? Now that many states are stomping on rights, you want to fed to come in and fix it? Any other time you would want to fed to stay away.
He has Barr out front (who is also only one man) of a pretty screwed up bureaucracy at DoJ telling that states not to trample rights. Justice is slow, as we have seen in the Flynn fiasco, but Barr is getting it right.
As to “This CANNOT be allowed to continue”, what are you doing about it? I am exercising my freedoms everyday. Are you? Do you “stay at home” or live your life? Do you follow the example of Shelley Luther or Andrew Coumo?
I read and re-read your original post many times. Between the post and the pic you seem to be saying there is no difference between Trump and BHO. I know thats not what you mean, but thats pretty much what your post says. We should all be grateful we are not going through this disaster under HRC.
There are two basic approaches to this question. One is positivism, the theory which affirms the validity of human law provided only that it be duly enacted. The other is a natural-law approach that affirms “there is in fact an objective moral order within the range of human intelligence, to which human societies are bound in conscience to conform, and upon which the peace and happiness of personal, national and international life depend.”
The crucial question is one of epistemology–the theory of knowledge. If man cannot know the essences of things, then there is no objective rightness or wrongness which he can know. If man cannot really know what is just in a given situation, he cannot criticize any particular course of action as unjust. Questions of right and wrong will therefore have to be resolved by the political process. If that process produces a Buchenwald…it cannot be said to be unjust. Describing Nazi Germany, Gustav Radbruch said that positivism “disarmed the German jurists against law of an arbitrary and criminal content.” If one believes that he cannot know reality and that he therefore cannot know what is right or wrong in a given situation, he has to be a positivist.
This is seen in the writings of Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), who has been well described as “the jurist of our century.” The author of the Austrian Constitution of 1920, Kelsen was very influential in Germany between the two World Wars. Kelsen denied the possibility of natural law. He rejected what he called “philosophical absolutism,” the “metaphysical view that there is an absolute reality, i.e., a reality that exists independently of human knowledge.” He felt that the claim that one can actually know reality, and what is right and wrong, leads to tyranny through the efforts of the rulers to impose on the people what they, the rulers, “know” to be for the people’s good.
Instead, he adopted what he called “philosophical relativism,” the “empirical doctrine that reality exists only within human knowledge, and that, as the object of knowledge, reality is relative to the knowing subject. The absolute, the thing in itself, is beyond human experience; it is inaccessible to human knowledge and therefore unknowable.” This philosophical relativism, “in Kelsen’s view, leads to democracy and the tolerance of divergent views, because ‘what is right today may be wrong tomorrow,’ and the minority must have full opportunity of becoming the majority. Only if it is not possible to decide in an absolute way what is right and what is wrong is it advisable to discuss the issue and, after discussion, to submit to a compromise.”
The problem with this, of course, is that when the majority or those who are in control of the political process decide to oppress a minority, there is neither moral nor legal recourse. When the positivist is confronted by Auschwitz, his only objections are those of utility or esthetics. It is not useful to kill millions of Jews, and the tables might be turned on us some day. Or the slaughter is offensive to his sensibilities. He cannot say it is wrong because he does not believe he can know what is right or wrong.
Law, according to Kelsen, is a system of coercive rules called “legal norms.” These rules are prescribed by the legislator in accord with the “basic norm” or constitution of the community. That basic norm may or may not be a written constitution. Moreover, it is entirely up to the legislator to decide what the basic norm is and whether any particular enactment is in accord with it. Nor is there any restriction on the content of legal rules. “Any content whatsoever can be legal; there is no human behavior which could not function as the content of a legal norm.” The only requirement for a law to be valid and binding is that “it has been constituted in a particular fashion, born of a definite procedure and a definite rule.”
The legislator decides what law will be useful and in accord with the basic norm as determined by himself. Once a law is enacted, it is obligatory. There is no higher law of nature or of God, and the ultimate criterion is force. The positive law can do anything. It cannot be criticized as unjust. For justice, according to Kelsen, “is not ascertainable by rational knowledge at all. Rather, from the standpoint of rational knowledge there are only interests and conflicts of interests.…Justice is an irrational ideal.” It is worthwhile to examine Kelsen, because his “pure theory of law” is the most clear-cut form of positivism. All positivist systems, however, are characterized, in greater or lesser degree, by the denial of the capacity of human reason to know objective truth and to know what is right and wrong. They are concerned only with what the law is, not with what it ought to be.
The fruits of legal positivism can be seen in the experience of Nazi Germany. Even prior to World War I, positivism was dominant in Germany. “According to this new positivistic jurisprudence, the legislator, and he alone, creates the law. Everything prior to legislative enactment is at best ‘custom,’ but never true law. Thus, law and right became wholly identified, and bare ‘legality’ takes the place of substantive justice as an ideal.” The Weimar Constitution, under which Germany was governed from 1918 to 1933, did not recognize any law higher than itself. Certain principles of the natural law, it is true, were embodied in Weimar constitutional guarantees, but the constitution could be readily changed and it was often disregarded through the enactment of unconstitutional laws. Moreover, the constitution empowered the president to abrogate basic rights in some situations.
But the greatest obstacle to the recognition of natural law was the doctrine of positivism which equated right and might to begin with and, hence, assigned to the legislator full discretion as to the detailed content or provisions of the law, to the point of injustice, indeed to the point of complete, highhanded arbitrariness. A decision of the Supreme Court of the Reich of November 4, 1927, makes this fully clear: “The legislator is absolutely autocratic, and bound by no limits save those he has set for himself either in the constitution or in some other laws.”
Of course, positivism was totally dominant during the Hitler years, from 1933 to 1945. A 1936 decree of the Reich Commissar of Justice epitomized this condition: “A decision of the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decisions of the Fuhrer, provided that they are clearly intended to declare law.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
Buck v. Bell (1927) U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson, a disciple of positivist trailblazer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was assigned as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg war-crimes trial. Reviewing the evidence, Jackson realized that under prevailing positive-law theory, many of the prosecutions would be impossible because the genocide and other criminal actions had been duly sanctioned under German law.
The most striking example of Nazi positivism was the extermination program. At first directed against the nonrehabilitatable sick and then extended to Jews, Gypsies, and other political undesirables, it began with an order in a Hitler letter of September 1, 1939, to the doctor and administrator he placed in charge of the program. No law or formal order was issued to authorize it. Yet the German doctors, and especially the psychiatrists, complied with enthusiasm because they had long since accepted the notion that the only life worth living is one that is useful. Nor were they, at least overtly, conscious of doing wrong.
For example, Dr. August Hirt became alarmed at the thought that the Jewish race was about to become extinct and that very few authentic Jewish skeletons and skulls were available for study. He decided that science needed a collection of 150 body casts and skeletons of Jews; so the desired specimens were assembled from concentration’ camps, specially killed, and preserved for science. This collection and the correspondence pertaining to it were captured by the United States Army at the end of the war. Dr. Hirt, a professor of anatomy at the University of Strassburg, was surprised that his project was regarded as different from the collection of fossils for the Museum of Natural History in New York. Since the state had declared Jews to be non-persons, that apparently settled the matter for him.
Similarly, when Dr. Waldemar Hoven was on trial in a Nazi court on charges of having murdered some SS men by poison, the judge proved Dr. Hoven’s guilt by feeding the same poison to Russian prisoners of war. When they died with the same symptoms as the SS men, Dr. Hoven’s guilt was proved. It apparently never occurred to the judge that he, was committing murder to prove murder. The judge, acting for the Nazi state, was the law and murder was whatever the state said it was.
After the Second World War, Gustav Radbruch, who had been Minister of Justice in the Weimar Republic and who had advocated positivism, renounced his former view. “Law,” he said in 1945, “is the quest for justice.” If enactments or decrees deny people their rights, “they are null and void; the people are not to obey them, and jurists must find the courage to brand them unlawful.” The German courts, after World War II, freely applied natural law principles in holding the legislature subject to a higher law.
Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961)
In the closing months of the war, for instance, a young German soldier was absent without leave. For this offense, an officer shot him without any form of trial and secretly buried the corpse. After the war, the victim’s mother sought to recover damages from the officer for the death of her son. The officer pleaded that he was justified by the so called Katastrophen order of Adolf Hitler, authorizing any member of the armed forces to kill instantly any coward, traitor, or deserter. As it turned out, the Katastrophen order had not been properly promulgated and therefore did not apply; but the court held that the order could not be a defense even if it had been validly promulgated. The “positive legislative act,” said the court, “loses all obligatory power if it violates the generally recognized principles of international law or the natural law.”
Any legal system that rests on a denial of the capacity of the mind to know objective truth must be described as positivistic. It will ultimately entrust the liberties of people to a political process that is unencumbered by higher moral restraints.
Architecture of Authoritarianism: Jeremy Bentham’s inescapable Panopticon
An example is the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who said the purpose of the law is to achieve the greatest good of the greatest number. The “good” is defined in terms of pleasure. Man’s “only object,” wrote Bentham, “is to seek pleasure and to shun pain.…Evil is pain, or the cause of pain. Good is pleasure, or the cause of pleasure.” Of course, the majority determines what ought to be done to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. And there is no ground on which one can criticize a law as unjust, for Bentham did not believe that man could know objective right or wrong. “I employ the words just, unjust, moral, immoral, good, bad, simply as collective terms including the ideas of certain pains or pleasures.” In his view, “moral good is good only by its tendency to produce physical good. Moral evil is evil only by its tendency to produce physical evil; but when I say physical, I mean the pains and pleasures of the soul as well as the pains and pleasures of the senses.” For the positivist, the principle of utility is the sole rationale for legislation. Man has no intrinsic worth. His only end is the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But if his existence inflicts pain on the community – that is, if he is a nuisance – there is no reason why he must be endured. Ultimately, his value is not in what he is but in what he does. “Producers” are tolerated; “useless eaters” are given a merciful release.
…A positivist will generally be one of two types. One type begins by denying his capacity to know anything beyond an empirical knowledge of individual things. This arid skepticism restricts the mind to the collection and empirical verification of data without coming to any knowledge of the nature of things. The skeptic says, “Nothing is certain.” But this is absurd, because he claims to know at least one thing for certain: that nothing is certain. “I tell you truly that we cannot know what is true.” Or the empiricist will say that, apart from mathematics and formal logic, a statement of fact is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified by observations. But this statement of “fact” is not empirically verifiable. The skeptic….will be a positivist because of his claimed inability to know objective truth.
The second type of positivist begins with materialism. Nothing exists but matter. There is no personal, spiritual Creator; no free will, no free spiritual intellect. “Soul” is a mere label we use for the material activities of the brain. History is the story of the development of matter, explained by one theory or another.
For the materialist, there are no absolute truths. There is no right or wrong, and the idea of justice has no meaning. The state is a wholly natural product of the evolution of social forces or other material elements. The positive law is fixed by the state without reference to any higher standard. Law is whatever the state decrees, and the essence of law is force. He is therefore a positivist.
What did JFK do when Alabama would not allow integration and defied the Federal courts?
As to how that relates to Barr, the civil rights movement was not resolved in 60 days either.
Fair enough. Have a good weekend. And so you know, I pray for the President.
You have a great weekend as well.
FRegards,
There is a tradition known as “libel law.” It was taken for granted when the Bill of Rights was ratified, and when the First Amendment referred to “the” freedom of the press it referenced freedom as it existed and as it was limited in 1788. The Bill of Rights was not a ground-breaking document, it was a profoundly conservative document.The Federalists had their desideratum - a strong national government - subject only to their getting a bill of rights ratified. They had promised it in order to get ratification of the Constitution, and they needed to deliver. In that situation you do not try to institute changes to the rights of the people - and prior to 1964 no court had ruled that the Federalists had done so.
In 1964 the notorious Warren Court unanimously agreed that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”- and announced that public officials henceforth were to be inhibited from suing for libel.Under the aegis of the wire services, journalism has organized itself into a cartel. Journalism propagandizes to the effect that journalists are objective and what they report is important. But since crises are moneymakers for journalism and crises are favorable to big government, wire service journalism naturally propagandizes in favor of big-government party and candidate. Big-government politicians therefore don’t get libeled, and “conservative” politicians do.
A case must be brought to SCOTUS which gives it the opportunity to drastically curtail the Sullivan decision. And since the wire services aren’t essential in the Internet era, the wire services should be convicted under antitrust law and abolished.
Libel law is the only way that facts can catch up with lies which “can travel around the world while the truth is getting its shoes on."
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