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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices

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To: tejek who wrote (228737)	4/12/2005 11:40:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 1573809

Privacy has no direct connection with democracy. Of course it does. Only in a democracy is one's privacy respected. Privacy against the government has more to do with freedom than democracies. Democracies tend to be more free so they will also tend towards more privacy against the government but it is possible to have freedom and/or privacy without democracy, even if it would be unusual. This is nonsense.......again, right to privacy is an essential part of a democracy. In practical terms privacy can be useful in a democracy or anywhere else but there is no requirement for privacy to have a democracy and theire is no requirement for democracy in order to have privacy. "I appreciate privacy, but not a non-existent constitutional right to it." Its inferred. It other words it is made up. It is not part of the constitution. People can infer whatever they want from it but it isn't there. You tell the IRS how much you made; not how you made it. Actually you do have to tell the IRS a lot about how you made your money. I can't just tell them I made X dollars. They want to know how much I made in wages, how much in different forms of capital gains, how much from dividends and interest ect. And you have to back it up with documentation of the specifics so I do have to tell them not just what I made in wages but who paid the wages, not just what I made in capital gains but what stocks I bought and sold and what prices I bought and sold them for. I didn't say the right to privacy was exclusive or the only law of the land. On abortion "privacy" is supposed to be a fundamental right, trumping all other law federal or state. But in other areas its just fine that privacy is not "exlusive or the only law of the land". Just goes to show how Row vs. Wade is not about a supposedly constitutional right of privacy, but rather the judges desire for a "constitutional right" to abortion. They did not change "the meaning" of the right to privacy. They simply expanded the right to include things that not been included previously. Expanding a term to mean things it didn't mean before is changing the meaning that you apply to that term. If you were not able to expand our rights to accommodate changes in lifestyle and mores, then you would have a static and ineffective Constitution. We can apply the existing rights to new circumstances. (ie. freedom of speech and the press includes the same protection against government censhorship of bloggers or posters on SI) We are also able to amend the constituion. And if collectively we think that protection of a certain idea or real or alleged right is important we can vote against anyone who violates it. But if the court can instead just invent what it sees as new rights unfettered by the actual constitution it can create limiations on democracy or freedom that it calls rights. "...and the amendment process (which trumps everything else in out system of government in the rare cases when it is used)..." Tell me something I don't know. Apparently I just did. You still insist that the amendment process doesn't trump court decisions and that an amendment (for anything not just the special case of an amendment to make the numbers of senators each state has unequal) can be unconstitutional. It really worries me that you think the democratic concept is complete because everyone has voted on a particular law. The democratic process in abstract would be complete. The particular legal and political process that our country follows would not nessiarily have been completed. The process that was followed would be democratic but it not not be acceptable under our system for constitutional or other reasons. It is doing its job. Poorly in a number of cases. You just don't like its rulings because they fly in the face of your own positions. I don't like the rulings because they aren't supported by the constitution. I also wouldn't like ruling that would support my ideas but that aren't in the constitution. I can think of a number of court decisions where the result was favorable to my opinion but where the decision was constitutionally questionable. Its very unlikely the right will get the kind of courts it wants. That's because the courts can not be undemocratic. The courts are now and should be undemocratic. They make decisions based on the constitition not on democracy. They help preserve the system in our particular democracy but their methods are undemocratic. Tim

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