Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Hey, Am I About To Get Put On A Watch List?

In the U.S., the right to privacy is not an enumerated right. It's presumed to come in under Big #9 of the first 10 amendments ("The Bill Of Rights").

That's a very funny Amendment, by the way! If you haven't ever perused it, you should look it up. Guaranteed giddy grin material. At least, for me it is - every dang time! You can read it, and read it again, and think about it for several minutes straight, and just shake your head and grin - if you're of a certain mindset. It is a masterpiece of understatement. The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States raises the obvious to performance art - and centuries before Marcel DuChamp, thank you very much.

Wouldn't that have been awesome if Marcel DuChamp had been a legislator? And born about centuries earlier? And a rebel American - part of the Continental Congress? Well if he had been, he would have written the Ninth Amendment. (What cheek there, by the way - "Continental" Congress! Did you catch that? The party line on manifest destiny is that it didn't start really grinding and whirling its scythes and gears until Jacksonian times or so, but bullshit I assure you: Jefferson, Madison, Franklin. Okay, Washington could have given a shit, but everyone else on that shit-stripe of land was already convinced they owned it all plus everything Westward! Fuckers)

(Well, come on - they did fuck. They must have! Or whence the Daughters of the American Revolution, elsewise? No insult to patriotism, there. Fuckers)

Where was I? The Right to Privacy, so-called. Well, let's look at it on the face of things. Let's examine it on merit.

I put it to you: hard would it be indeed, the job of the government which undertook to show sufficient cause to deprive or infringe upon the privacy of a constituency of free citizens. Hard going. Very easy, on the other hand, to say "well we have not specifically granted you that right." But so what?

I support violence. Bloodshed. And revolution, in one case and one case only: the case of a government which denies citizens their due human rights without being able to show just and sufficient cause. And shut your yaps, ye Libertarians! Just and sufficient cause, in any actual and literal case of real people and actual actions that comes before you, is the easiest, plainest thing in the world to show. It ain't hard. You lay it right out, and any 12 people picked at random will agree with you. That's the definition.

That's how you know.

Human rights are not granted at a government's leisure and discretion. They are denied at a government's peril.

You'd consider me a reasonable person, wouldn't you?

1 comment:

dogimo said...

Endnote: 123 years rounds up, to "Centuries." I don't count from when the dude is born, I count from when he became, which I'd say with some justification would be 1912.

Side note: Bill of Rights dates from Jersey Standard Time. We were #1 on that one.

Assnote: yeah, I capitalize the "C" in his name. It's a mark of unsolicited, incorrect respect. Blow me, DuChamp.