Things are getting interesting with our southern neighbours. For example, Clear Channel refused to air this patriotic ad:
It is the obligation of citizens to arm themselves with as effective weapons as their governments’ armed forces posses, in order to be able to depose any government that turns tyrannical. That is the meaning of the US Constitution’s 2nd amendment and that is the legacy of the Magna Carta.
We must never forget that with the privileges of citizenship come the responsibilities of citizenship.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
February 22, 2013 at 12:13
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Are you getting even stupider over time? Please explain how the above language “obligates” citizens to purchase tanks and rocket launchers. The provision applies only to restrict government action. Citzens don’t have obligations just because a violent, bigoted fanatic like you tells them they do. How about you get your nanny-state bullshit the fuck out of everyones face?
February 24, 2013 at 01:35
Xanthippa:
Modern mechanized warfare is very different from the way war was waged when the American Constitution was written. In those days, all it took to keep a people free was possession of firearms. Today, firearms are just not enough.
However, even today, weapons as simple as shoulder-fired anti-tank or anti-aircraft missiles, in the hands of a few resolute men, can prevent a well-equipped high-tech military from overrunning a country – much to the chagrin of the US Army in places like Afghanistan.
That is why the right to bear arms must never be construed to apply only to small firearms.
Right-thinking men have always understood this. Here are two examples:
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
Thomas Jefferson, 1776
(italics mine)
Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. … The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms. … The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’
Justice Antonin Scalia, June 26, 2008
District of Columbia v. Heller
(italics mine)
This reasoning is so plain, so simple, and so obvious, that it’s hard to imagine how clueless a person would have to be to misunderstand it.
Xanthippa says:
Yes, Codeslinger: the 2nd Amendment is clearly a re-statement of pre-existing rights that existed under common law. This is why I explicitly mention the Magna Carta, because in it, the language is even more explicit in affirming that under common law each and every person has the right to carry arms, without any infringment.
February 24, 2013 at 21:02
Xanthippa:
Absolutely right.
And this ramifies into the whole issue of the source and nature of rights and morals.
By claiming that rights are conferred by the state and morals are a matter of consensus, the neo-liberals utterly destroy the concepts of rights and morals. They reduce rights to the status of mere privileges, and they reduce morals to the status of mere laws.
In this way, neo-liberalism is no better than the religions it denigrates. Neo-liberals claim that rights and morals are handed down by the state, while religious people claim that rights and morals are handed down by God. They do not recognize that a man has rights simply by virtue of existing, nor do they understand that right and wrong are determined solely by what kind of creature a man is.
A man is a living creature capable of reason and compassion. From this it follows immediately that his inalienable rights are life, liberty, privacy, property, self-defence and self-expression. It also follows directly that whatever causes a man harm by violating his rights is wrong, and whatever is not wrong is right.
Recognition of these principles places strict limits on the rightful power of the state vis-à-vis the individual, much the same way that the American Constitution was intended to do, only more so. It leads to the understanding that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to equally protect the equal rights of each and every individual. Everything the state does beyond that causes more harm than good.
And, of course, this flies in the face of everything the neo-liberals want, which is why they hate the Constitution and the principles of inalienable individual rights and universal morality on which it is based.
These principles give them freedom to do as they please, but also burden them with responsibility to take care of themselves — all without violating the rights of such others as have not violated theirs.
But neo-liberals would rather give up their rights and freedoms and bow down to the state, which they want to make all-powerful, because they foolishly think an all-powerful state will take care of them. This desire is hopelessly unrealistic and childish, and it is exactly what religious people want from their God.
Thus when neo-liberals call themselves citizens of a state, they mean exactly the same thing that religious people mean when they call themselves children of God. In this regard, religious people are more honest than neo-liberals, because they acknowledge that being taken care of be an all-powerful entity reduces them to the status of children — or chattel, which they acknowledge when they compare themselves a flock of sheep.
Neo-liberals seek to spare themselves this admission by secularizing their beliefs and values. But a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
The cultural Marxists who created neo-liberalism, complete with its politically correct self-sacrificial secular Edenism, were highly accomplished psychologists and sociologists. They knew perfectly well that this would happen. If they tore down traditional religious and family values and created widespread conditions leading to arrested emotional development, there would be only one possible replacement that could meet the subconscious psychological needs of the resulting post-modern tribe of hopelessly lost adult children: the apotheosis of the totalitarian state.
That’s right, neo-liberals worship the totalitarian state, even while they fancy themselves to be oh-so-sophisticated and secular.
This is what really underlies their rabidly relentless attack on the Constitution and the principles it is based upon.
February 25, 2013 at 13:10
Hahahah….. I never get tired of your pseudo-intellectual bullshit codeslinger. There is nothing funnier than a person with a grade 6 understanding of politics who thinks they are a serious intellectual.