OK, all you anti-gun liberal types out there

[unixronin]

(Not meaning to imply that all liberals are anti-gun, by the way.  I'm just talking to the "Ew, Guns Are Icky" set here.)

Remember all the times we evil gun-totin', NRA-decal-displayin' gun nuts have said that the Second Amendment is the most important of all the amendments, because it protects all the rest?

Well, having become one of the most strictly anti-gun states in the US, Massachusetts is now going after the right of peaceable assembly.

Yeah, yeah, I know; it says it's only for use against gangs and only in "safe zones".  But as metahacker points out, the devil is in the details.  Surely you folks remember "designated free-speech zones", right....?  Remember the first rule of legislation:  Any law, no matter how clear its original intent, sooner or later succumbs to "mission creep".

"Yeah, I know this law was passed for X.  But we're already using it for Y.  Why don't we use it for Z as well?  I bet we could, especially in front of Judge J."

Speaking of which...

mazianni found these two articles on the 9th Circus's ruling that US border agents can search laptops and other personal electronic devices for evidence of crimes without a warrant or cause.  Once again, "security" trumps liberty, and another little piece of the Fourth Amendment is whittled away.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."  ...Unless we want to.

Comments

[koyote.livejournal.com]

"Finally, the theory that widespread firearm ownership is going to protect us from the loss of our rights so far doesn't seem to be passing muster."

Well, I think that a lot of that is a fairly direct result of the way the 2nd amendment debate has been propagandized and how we are educated on the issues of liberty, government, protection of rights, and citizen duties.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Perhaps so. The fact remains that so far--and it's been six, seven, or 27 years depending on how you count--widespread personal firearms ownership does not seem to have prevented the erosion of our civil liberties.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

One could argue that it's possibly delayed it. But it's perhaps more to the point to discuss what's enabled it.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Probably. But I think that's already known. A number of radical reactionary constituencies: religious, nationalist, racist, sexist, and the corporatists formed a coalition and took over. The specific path was through the Southern states--the "Southern strategy"--and the main reaction there was due largely, though not exclusively, to the outlawing of the system of segregation. The attack exploited a number of flaws in our system: the undemocratic character of the US electoral system, the tendency of a centralized mass media to focus attention on one figure, giving the President imperial authority, and the weakness of our anti-trust and, especially, anti-media centralization laws.

I suspect conservative and libertarian readers are gnashing their teeth at this point, and wanting to complain about liberalism, or even socialism. But US liberalism doesn't seem to have had much to do with it. The complaint that liberals worked to expand central government authority seems to me unreasonable; the main things which led to that were, in succession: a major depression, a major war, and the conflict with the Soviet Union.

In any event, I think we know enough about what went wrong. I badly want to know what to do about it, and that answer is a much harder one.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

In any event, I think we know enough about what went wrong. I badly want to know what to do about it, and that answer is a much harder one.

Yes, I agree. In part it's much harder because I think an essential first step in fixing it has to be a change in the electoral system to correct that "undemocratic character" you note. But any such change, under the present system, would — to my understanding — have to be initiated by exactly the people who benefit from keeping it the way it is.

Interestingly, there was a recent article on exactly this subject in New Scientist, which had a substantial sidebar talking about one particular vote-reassignment system that is apparently being pushed fairly hard by the group backing it. But I found it interesting that even that system was slanted; I believe its design criteria are wrong. The creator of the system proudly stated that "It will never elect a candidate who doesn't have broad popular support", by which he meant that it won't elect a candidate who isn't the first choice of a large number of the voters. But given the choice of electing a candidate who's the second choice of eighty per cent of voters, out of a pool of say six candidates, or one who's the first choice of forty percent, I'd say the second choice of eighty percent was the better choice. But his system will almost certainly pick the person who's the first choice of forty per cent. (The sidebar also pointed out that the system can yield paradoxical results where voting for your preferred candidate can actually reduce his or her chances of winning.)

Don't know if it'll ever get published, but I wrote them back a letter pointing out that the criterion of selection should not be to pick the candidate favored by the largest percentage of voters, but rather to pick the candidate least unacceptable to the largest possible percentage of voters. Better to pick a candidate that 90% of the electorate are OK with but not necessarily overjoyed about, than a candidate who leaves 60% of the electorate cheering and the other 40% feeling disenfranchised.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I recommend (you may already have seen this from me) Poundstone's book, Gaming the Vote (http://us.macmillan.com/gamingthevote). He ends up advocating range voting, a weighted ballot system. It's hard to say, really, what system would work best in practice without experimentation, and any system can be gamed. But I'd place choice of voting system below media reform (decentralization and requirements of non-partisanship on the part of centralized media) and raising turnout. If people aren't informed, no amount of work on the voting system will help. I have also come around to the view that we need to make voting a duty of citizenship--a situation in which one gets the votes from a self-selected sample of a minority of citizens is inherently undemocratic. The candidates pick many of the voters, the media pick more, and the rest are the minority with strong policy opinions. We would not accept that for an opinion poll--why do we accept it for the poll that picks the actual officials?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I am generally in agreement with decentralization and required non-partisanship of the media, although I question how feasible a requirement it is. I am entirely in agreement with making voting a duty of citizenship. I also tend to agree to a large extent with Heinlein in making voting not only a duty, but a privilege that must be earned — before you get a say in the future course of the nation, you should demonstrate sufficient sense of responsibility to serve your nation in some tangible manner. It would tend to be another protection against the masses voting themselves bread and circuses.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

[...] and how we are educated on the issues of liberty, government, protection of rights, and citizen duties.

Or, more to the point, how these days our kids are conspicuously not educated on those things....