100%
Posted on 06/23/2013 9:53:57 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
Edited on 06/23/2013 9:55:17 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Only after years (generations) of government brainwashing. Some people will have to be shocked back to reality. But realty is inevitable.
Obviously not. The constitution does not allow it.
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Even though he never met the half of our 2013 population who see it the other way around he had their kind pegged two and a half centuries ago.
Agree.
BTTT!
Sadly this means nothing to the criminal residing in the WH and his lapdog running the Department of Injustice.
100%
I’m just now rereading some of Iain Banks stuff, given that he just croaked. He and China Mieville are collectivists, and even if their space opera stuff is amusing as heck it all comes down to genocide for the good of the collective. Always.
If we can’t get the leftist turds - (and that includes the proto-socialists, the muslims) - under control, none of us are going to survive.
So keep up the outstanding work, Jim. And bless you.
The proper balance might be achieved if terrorist wannabees were kicked out of and kept out of the US. Why should I lose my rights because Chechnyan radicals have been granted residency, even citizenship here and students overstaying their visas could blow up airplanes and buildings? (etc)
Our Forefathers would be shooting by now...
My basic position on this issue....and “rights” in general is...only US citizens should be afforded all the rights enumerated (or suggested) by the Constitution.If you’re not a citizen you’ll still be treated by the US government in a civil,reasonable,fashion (unless you’ve shown yourself to be our enemy).Two tiered justice I say...the upper tier being noticeably broader and deeper and being reserved for citizens.
We know that politicians from either tribe will always want more power and control, nor do they act in our best interest.
Yet the majority of US choose to be with one of those pathetic tribes. Nor do we hold anyone accountable.
We let one group do something because they are the 'right' party, but we would have never allowed it if it was a Dem.
Amnesty, bailouts, warrant less wiretapping, not securing the border, etc.
ping!
In fact they did. They didn’t much care for King George’s general warrants or heavy-handedness.
“If the Islamists wish to conduct war against our people on OUR soil, then they had best bring their lunch and a lantern, because it’s going to be a long day for them. Americans are armed to the teeth and we aim to defend ourselves, our families, our property and our nation. “
Exactly!! The little weasels eager to surrender their freedom because they piss in their pants in fear of the muslim savages make me sick. In times of greater moral clarity they would be the ones shot first.
Government bureaucrats won’t protect them. Government is only interested in protecting itself. The borders are wide open and muslims have no restrictions at all if they want to come here.
By Benjamin Wittes
Friday, July 15, 2011 at 6:53 AM
Here’s an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all.
I started looking into this quotation because I am writing a frontal attack on the idea that liberty and security exist in some kind of “balance” with one another–and the quotation is kind of iconic to the balance thesis. Indeed, Franklin’s are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship. A version of them is engraved on the Statue of Liberty. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten ever to upset. Every student of American history knows them. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government–that we empower governments to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run.
Very few people who quote these words, however, have any idea where they come from or what Franklin was really saying when he wrote them. That’s not altogether surprising, since they are far more often quoted than explained, and the context in which they arose was a political battle of limited resonance to modern readers. Many of Franklin’s biographers don’t quote them at all, and no text I have found attempts seriously to explain them in context. The result is to get to the bottom of what they meant to Franklin, one has to dig into sources from the 1750s, with the secondary biographical literature giving only a framework guide to the dispute. I’m still nailing down the details, but I can say with certainty at this stage that Franklin was not saying anything like what we quote his words to suggest.
The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.
What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
Against a Crude Balance:
Platform Security and the Hostile Symbiosis Between Liberty and Security
“The answer is in the constitution.”
Yes, but the nanny statists won’t read it because that would make too much sense-and so many people are too lazy to provide for their own protection, trusting an inept big brother-if it all goes to hell, I doubt they can survive...
I believe personal access to firearms is a good way to balance those two things out in a cost-effective fashion.
“Government bureaucrats won’t protect them. Government is only interested in protecting itself.”
Well said! I’ve often remarked that when the SHTF those same bureaucrats and their families will not be able to safely stop for a loaf of bread or to fill their cars up with gas.
The violence of those oppressed at their hand will be upon them with a quickness.
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