Berkeley City Council Doing Its Anti-Democracy Bit

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I am not lying, and I'm clearly a better Constitutional scholar than you are -- you're wrong on at least five of your six points and you've proved a total of none. Permit me to serve you notice that I am not buying your fantasy, nor your misanalysis. You seem to be confusing your "should-bes" with what is actually written in the Constitution, which is hardly an approach you can sustain.

If I can't persuade a rock, I can make him a laughingstock. Would you like to become a laughingstock with all six of your points destroyed by merely quoting the relevant text of the Constitution at you?

1. The language of Article I, Section 8-11 through 8-16 detail what the legislative branch ought to do in military matters. The only defensive thing even implicit is calling out the militia in the cases of invasion and insurrection. Nowhere in the Section is there any declaration of the military being defensive solely, in the sense you seem to mean. The Constitution isn't trying to restrict us in dealings with foreign powers that may go badly sour, you'll note.

2. Those same sections of Article I specifically mention Congress having the power to declare a state of war, and DO NOT restrict the Executive Branch in the person of the Commander in Chief from sending in troops -- also advisedly, and in considerable measure this was NOT an oversight. Historical precedent as well as legal precedent is firmly against you here, no matter how quixotically you may rail about it: the United States has been in about 150 shooting conflicts of various scopes, with its first not-declared conflict being the Quasi-War of 1798-99, and Congress declared a state of war in but five of these. The proof, I think, all runs to disprove you.

3. Where you're getting this one from I have NO idea, and don't think there's a real idea to have. That is where you run into difficulty trying to explain it. Perhaps you're looking among your should-bes for a rule against doing anything of the sort, and there isn't one.

4. Well, here you're not being Constitutional, but rambling over into foreign-policy desiderata. Reduction of antilibertarian regimes does not, it appears, fit into your notion of libertarianism (which I find inconceivable for reasons I've made clear elsewhere) but here's a hint to something a bit more real, offered gratis: absolutist isolationism works only in the complete absence of foreign states, and is not sustainable in a global economy anyway, but only in a much-reduced feudal one.

5. Here you have the possiblity of being right, and in any case I'd have to table it until I fully understand the Act and judiciary findings on it, as well as other analysis. If you'd like to show me some material you found persuasive, I'd be glad to give it a look.

6. Is as defective as the first four, for the same reasons as the first four.

I take the moral and the intellectual high ground from you: I can defeat you because my moral and intellectual high ground are better than yours. I stand ready to demonstrate this as many times as the Cellar can stand. If you boast, boast sweetly, in case you later need to eat your words.

In spite of some protestations, nobody here's really saying it would be wrong for freedom to defeat unfreedom however comprehensively this needs to be done: all I'm stating is some slavemongers can be converted, while others need to be shot. There really just isn't a way for freedom to be in the wrong killing unfreedom. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you there shouldn't be a limit to bloodthirstiness. You do however have to recognize that slavemongers often start out bloodthirsty and don't improve. A prudent understanding of damage control, at the very least, dictates shooting back at such in preference to running away and taking your promise of liberty with you.

You're telling me, several times in one post and phrased in various ways, that you don't have much of an appetite for global liberty, global libertariansm, or for that matter the global prosperity those two things would facilitate. Well, I recommend you get out of the way, Paul, insofar as you can't lead and won't follow. Let those with my kind of appetite for these things get them done.