By which point I’m dead. Your philosophy is the sort that leads to massive death tolls. The time to demand worker safety, environmental protection or well designed buildings is before the workers get killed, before the land is laid waste, before everyone in the building dies from fire or collapse. Someone else suing them after the fact won’t raise me from the grave.
Actually, they were operating under strict government charter and protection. But this digression could go on for a while.
That’s funny, because what you said was:
Which seems to imply (or rather outright state) that the issue is that we are no longer as following our original principles. The big issue with that is that for some very small minority, there was more liberty in 1778 then today, but for most of people living in the United States, there was less. Before anyone tries to contest this, remember that half the population was female, and a significant slice was black, native, or the wrong religion.
Is a law banning beating wives an unwarranted intrusion into a man’s liberty or a necessary protection for a woman’s liberty? There are many questions like that must be answered by we the people through government action.
There will always be many cultural differences. There is not now, nor has there been in most times and places a cultural war. That term is used to drive viewership and support partisan politics.
It’s not the government’s job to make life risk-free. People need to be free to manage their own risk tolerance. Workers can unionize to protect their interests. Environmentalists can monitor factories’ emissions. Insurance companies can ensure safety standards.
The state prosecuting someone for murder doesn’t bring the victim back to life, either. That doesn’t mean it’s not a remedy to the harm.
I guess I wasn’t clear. My issue is the clause emphasized by the colon: “letting people live their lives as they want without government interference”. My support for that statement was the paragraphs following that statement, not any reference to history. I’m not interested here in how poorly that ideal was followed in the past.
Is the spouse being harmed? Yes; then prosecute and sue the spouse causing harm.
I think most people would answer the same way. It’s usually clear cut if someone is harmed or not.
I don’t know how old the OP is but tenstions in the USA are a LOT less than they’ve ever been, in my life time. We don’t have the riots that we used to have. We don’t have the blatant unequality we once had in race and sex. Oh it’s there but it’s nothing compare to what it used to be. Even as a gay male, I can’t believe the progress we’ve made at being accepted. I’d never thought we’d achieve even half this much in my lifetime.
The political divide has always been their. Look at the Andrew Jackson campaign for presidency and you’ll see the name calling and outright lies and stress was as bad as it is now.
No, it IS the job of the government to make life less risky. That’s a major function of the government. And people aren’t capable of managing their own risk tolerance. We see that all over the world; where government doesn’t impose good safety standards, environmental regulations and so on, you see disasters and piles of corpses. We don’t see headlines about “X disaster kills thousands” here in America on a regular basis because of those kinds of regulations.
I have no wish to die for your theory of “good government”.
No bruising, he just slapped her around because she burned the roast and then he locked her in her room so she could think about what she had done. Isn’t it his right to discipline his own wife? Next you will tell me that he doesn’t have a right to sex from his own wife, even if she isn’t feeling like it. What happened to the concept of personal liberty? Why are you trying to take away his rights?
Point being that one of governments roles is to designate were rights begin and end. My right to operate my motor vehicle without a license, registration, or insurance ends at my property line. My right to own and control property begins when I turned 18 and ends when I die or a court finds me unfit. Government determines and enforces those standards at the direction of the people.
So, there always has to be a culture war going on, at any given time, in a country this size? There have been periods when no culture war appeared to be going on in America.
Straight Dope technical correction:
The religious members of the Mayflower immigrants were not Puritans and, while the Mayflower Compact was, indeed, an effort to ensure that that group had a dominant role in the Plymouth Colony, they were not, (particularly under Bradford), that much of a theocratic dictatorship.
The Puritans landed later in what became Boston and environs, bringing all the “puritanical” theocracy that one would expect of them. Around the time that Bradford died, the Puritans had, through increased immigration and breeding, overwhelmed the culture of the Plymouth settlement, so that the Bay Colony remained a theocracy for many years, but it was not the original Mayflower settlers who brought that curse to these shores. (The settlers of Virginia and the Carolinas were not Puritans, but Established Church men, however they also brought a remarkably theocratic system to these shores, going so far as to launch raids and massacres on the Catholics of Maryland until the Lords Baltimore switched allegiance and abandoned Catholicism.)
I disagree.
So what theory of government do you wish to die for? 
Is the spouse being harmed? Yes; then prosecute and sue the spouse causing harm.
There is no right to harm another. Do you really believe there is?
I’m not sure what this paragraph has to do with the topic. I don’t think anyone here is against the government enforcing rights.
One for which dying for it is unusual, instead of the norm.
The state has the power to compel; workers and environmentalists and insurance companies do not, short of violence, and the history of unions (how and why they came to be) should be a good indication of why we don’t want to return to that type of system.
I do not want Labor and Business conducting civil wars in the streets, or environmentalist ecoterrorists blowing up chemical factories because we’ve gelded and defanged the state and no longer have recourse to the law.
There is a happy (or at least content) medium we can reach between freedom and the needs of a secure society.
In plain English, you want to establish a totalitarian state which will suppress everyone who deviates from your ideology.
But during those periods America was much smaller in terms of population than it is at present. A uniform culture can be imposed on a large population only with totalitarian repression–and even then with great difficulty.
So obviously they must have enlightened progressive intellectuals like you to run their lives for them, right? Damn peasants better learn their place.
No, the side that wants to reduce people to serfdom and abuse them is yours. The point isn’t “enlightened progressive intellectuals”; the point is that individuals don’t have the resources of a government to discover the facts and enforce the rules. The Right wants the protection of the government stripped away or never applied in the first place, in order to manufacture an endless supply of helpless victims.
I agree with living and letting live when it comes to private morality, but in other aspects of social organization it can be harmful. Allowing people to build whatever they want, wherever they want, without regard to environmental impacts can lead to traffic headaches and water shortages. The center-right core of this country, which never fails to pull us back from the brink of social progress, seems to persist in this delusion that the space and resources at our disposal are endless, that continued population growth is desirable, and that any kind of ugly commercial or residential development is just super, if people can make money off of it. We will not address AGW because there is nothing in the Bible about it.
In my opinion this is not a good time to be an urban American with liberal values.
No shit. I’m about ready to sew the blue donkey on my overcoat and wait to be forcibly resettled to Brooklyn.
And if someone dumps carcinogens into my water, do I have to wait till someone is actually harmed (my child gets fatal cancer 10 years later, for example) to sue them and stop the dumping? It might be difficult to prove causation and even if I could win my child still dies.
Isn’t it better to have laws to stop them from dumping to begin with?
You get over it times three. Get over yourself times three.
That’s exactly what I want!!!
And, in plain English, you want to establish a totalitarian state where people have to eat waffles with boisenberry syrup for breakfast every day!
I like this game! Just making up random things!
Unless, of course, you genuinely think that fighting for…
… can only be done through the establishment of a totalitarian state. In which case there’s really not a lot I can say to you here.
The culture war, like the class war, has been going on for ever. People like you, though, only think its a war when people start to fight back rather than put up with oppression. Well tough titties, to be honest.
I’m not looking for a uniform culture. I kind of like the idea of diversity, a dirty word to you. It’s people like you who want uniformity, and want to enforce it. You want a white ruled, wealth dominated, Christian monoculture.
It’s the right that wants to stop women from having abortions - I support letting people choose whether to have one or not.
It’s the right that wants to stop gay people from marrying - I support letting people make the choice as to whether they get married, and to whom.
It’s the right that wants every greeting to be Happy Christmas - I support letting people wish each other a Happy Christmas, a Blessed Channukah, a Delicious Diwali, a Contemplative and Solemn Kwanzaa, or a Ripsnorting drunk couple of days off work.
Diversity is a good thing - it’s the goal and intention of those of us on this side of the Culture Wars. Hell, we’ll even let you live your desired lifestyle. We’re just going to put our foot down about you keeping slaves to pick your cotton.