Questions
Posted on April 29th, 2008 by Kip
–Is it a proper function of the Border Patrol to conduct “spot checks” on a ferry servicing islands in Washington State (i.e., running exclusively within the United States)?
–Is it a proper use of government anti-terrorism surveillance cameras to spy on violators of littering and pooper-scooper laws?
–Which supposedly free nation is allowing one of its local subdivisions to make unlicensed religious conversions a crime?
–Which supposedly free (super-)nation has banned loud bagpipe playing ?
Special Follow-Up Question: Does this amount to a ban on all bagpipe playing? (“You can’t play the pipe quietly; they haven’t got a volume switch.”) (Via Lowering the Bar.)
–Who said the following, and in what context?
“If we don’t have some semblance of order, we’d just have a libertarian society where anything goes.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
From the WaPo article:
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: if there are no absolute rights, there are no rights, period. To be sure, some absolute rights have been limited over time, but that does not make those limitations any more valid. Also, last I checked there aren't a whole lot of "buts" in the Bill of Rights. Not that our freedoms are derived from the Constitution, of course- the Bill of Rights could say that there is no such thing as a right to free speech, and the right to free speech would still exist.
Botetourt is an interesting place. It's in southwest Virginia, where, apart from the college community in Blacksburg, it's very much God, family, country, and guns. They're not bad people, blah, blah, blah. But this view of "libertarianism as anarchy" doesn't surprise me. On a purely anecdotal note, the neighbor of a friend of mine who lives in Botetourt believes that Jesus is an American.
And now I'm an elitist.