X-Message-Number: 22099 From: Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 21:12:10 EDT Subject: Last thoughts on Libertarians and cryonics --part1_99.39eb164a.2c2f96ea_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From Steve Bridge June 27, 2003 Sorry about the lateness of this response. There is always a lot going on in my life. And my last attempt at sending this had a base64 flameout, it appears. Thank you to Bob Ettinger (#22065) for listing the safeguards CI has built in against take-overs. They seem reasonable. We could probably build in scenarios for which CI would have better protection and others where Alcor would. Let's hope we've both chosen ways to protect against whichever real-world problems might occur. For Jerry Searcy in Message #22066 (Value of the Constitution): Jerry said: >Steve, in one of your previous messages you indicated that some > libertarians Libertarians)...I still don't know the difference >between the "l" and "L" kind, place too much value on the >Constitution...or something to that effect. I don't remember your >exact words. When my ex-wife was applying for citizenship, I.N.S. >gave her a long list of questions to study. I only remember one: > "What is the U.S. Constitution?". Ans.: "The supreme law of the >land". Apparently the Federal Government (or at least I.N.S.) thinks >this document is something to take seriously. My "exact words" are quite important here, and I believe you have interpreted them as a slight against the US Constitution when they are not. I said: "There are the Constitutional libertarians who take the U.S. Constitution as the Ten Commandments, inviolate and carved in stone -- where it suits them. Often they are also strong-jawed American nationalists (they prefer "patriots") who don't need to believe that personal liberty should extend to whomever the U.S. is bombing at the moment or to any American citizen who might disagree with them." I greatly admire and respect the US Constitution. My comments were meant as a slight against people who use the Constitution and the government created by it as a hammer to reduce personal liberty, when it was originally written and amended to increase both liberty and security. The Constitution is a document that has many internal conflicts when applied to real-life situations (e.g. the most basic conflicts between liberty and security. We could all list dozens of examples but "The Patriot Act" will do for today.). The Constitution can be interpreted in many ways, which change from person to person, judge to judge, and decade to decade. A good example is yesterday's Supreme Court decision, which struck down sodomy laws in many states. The justification was that nothing in the Constitution gave Congress or the states the right to legislate against private sexual conduct between adults. This is a complete reversal of the Supreme Court's decision of only 17 years ago. The Constitution did not change I would also point out that while the US Constitution is indeed the "supreme law" of THIS land, it is not the "supreme law of the world," and there is no reason we should be forcing our legal interpretations on other countries merely because we are currently the biggest bear in the woods. Finally, like others on this list, I was using Libertarian with a capital "L" to mean people who identified themselves as members of Libertarian Party in the US, as opposed to "small l" libertarians who are people that label themselves libertarian in general, no matter what variation on libertarianism is meant. And to David Stodolsky (#22068): It is more apparent now that David was adding ideas to what I said more often than he was opposing them. That's a hazard of the condensed style of communication David was using. And I did misunderstand which organization was meant by his comment about "meltdowns." Thanks for clearing this up. And it looks like we may now be at the end of this thread. Steve Bridge --part1_99.39eb164a.2c2f96ea_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22099