Snatchoff the bible belt and spank the conservative fucks that try to dictate my life

The BBQ Pit
61

Yes . . .

Once again: You don’t have that right. That’s not a right. The end. **
[/QUOTE]

Just because everything is a black or white legal issue with you Jodi does not mean that we all have to think within these same contructs. Whether it is constitutional or non, whether it is written in the Marietta city code or not that I can’t watch naked people dance while drinking in a public place does not change the fact that I feel that I should be able to, regardless of how other people (conservative tight asses) feel, what you think, and regardless of the fact that I may not have that “right.”

Why do I feel this way? Because I can. And if none of that makes any sense to you, then I am sorry. I am tired of explaining myself when I would rather spend my time griping. As I said earlier, my griping gives me the inspiration I need to challenge local and state laws that I disagree with . . .

You wrote, “What, you think you just get to decide what rights you have?”

Actually, I do. I think I should be able to decide how I want to live my life, as long as what I do does not hurt another individual in the process.

You wrote, “And then, sure, you can claim it’s a right and get all pissed off when it’s violated, but then why not claim the right to be given a nice new car and a million bucks, and then be pissed when no one coughs them up?”

Sorry but that last statement of yours was not only ridculous to read, but irrelevant and out of context with the subject of of this thread.

62

Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? What exactly constitutes “harm”? A law like this one is intended, in part, to discourage sexually-oriented businesses by making them less profitable. Now, even if you’re the most open-minded free-love kind of guy, if you live in the vicinity of a proposed strip club, you might rightfully fear that its opening will hurt the value of your property. That’s a harm. And if you’re in local government, you might fear that too many of these establishments might lead to a red-light district in your town, with all the prostitution, drugs and street crime that entails.

In other words, the building of a strip club entails potential harm to others beyond the souls of its patrons. You don’t need to be a religious fanatic to oppose them.

Of course, the fears expressed above and others like it can be debated – how hard will property values be hit? to what degree, if at all, will vice and crime increase? – and alternative solutions proposed. But at the end of the day, each community will decide for itself, democratically, what balance of solutions will work the best.

And that is for the best. I don’t think every town in America should be Mayberry, but neither do I think every town in America should be pre-Disney Times Square, either. There is room in this country for the Mayberries, and the Times Squares, and for the vast swath of possibilities in betweeen.

63

If prostitution and drugs were legal, there would be a lot less crime where those things were concerned.

You wrote, “In other words, the building of a strip club entails potential harm to others beyond the souls of its patrons.”

Oh boo hoo. Someone’s property values are more important than my individual (human) right to do with my life and my body what I choose. If that is the case, fuck those people that feel that way. Their priorties are more than a bit off IMO.

The bar where I work had to cancel an all male review which we were all looking forward to for various reasons other than having a few drinks and looking at hot, bare, male bodies because of the anal retentive laws here in Marietta. I don’t like it and I am not going to start liking it. I believe that everytown should have at least one church, one bar and one brothel to cater to the needs of everybody. With people living together respecting everyone else, there is not a lot of worry about crime and other such things as have been mentioned on this thread.

64

AladyLikeNoOther

I begun to cry after I read the first 10 posts or so.
I believed I have it hard, but You seem to live in 1984. I mean the book.

What can I do for You?

  • I can put in my good night prayer and pray for wet dreams for You.

  • I can also make You a certificate that life in Siberia is much nicer, the freedom is guaranteed better, than in Marietta.
    Here You can buy a Kalashnikov legally if You wish.
    Then You send The Certificate to those bitches and dickless morons that are ruling Your town…

What You can do:

  • Move to Siberia. The town will sponsor Your trip, just to get rid of a person that says that even Siberia is better than Marietta.
    Here half of the population are girls!!!
    Half of them are without a guy. (The guys are on booze without the girls).

The girls walks in summertime almost without clothes, because they like to show what they have.

In wintertime they have much clothes and they still want to show what they have. They like vodka (2 USD/bottle) and music. They usually bring the food. That is all requirements for a party.
Nothing else is needed and You can have 3 - 7 girls at the same party, depending on how big Your flat is.
And the girls are crazy about foreigners and patiently waiting…

Well, I am ripe for Viagra, and Siberia needs younger blood.

Henry, an outdried foreigner.

65

An arguable proposition at best.

Consider New York City: for years, minor crimes (like graffiti and the squeegee guys) were de facto legal – people were hardly ever prosecuted for those offenses. And New York was a crime haven. Enter Giuliani and the “broken windows” theory – the more a society tolerates minor infractions (like broken windows), the more it encourages serious offenses. By cracking down on minor offenses, New York became the safest big city in America.

Now the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle – legalizing drugs and prostitution wouldn’t remove the social stigma of those activities; I suspect, even if technically “legal,” you’d still have something of a broken windows effect in the areas where they were legal. But, of course, a measure of street crime is also directly attributable to drug/prostitution criminalization, so some reduction may in fact occur in those places that already have red-light districts.

Of course, in our example, we’re dealing with a community that doesn’t yet have a red-light district and is trying to prevent one. In that circumstance (and assuming the community is in a drug/prostitution decriminalized area), the addition of a red-light district increases crime, even if that increase is less than it would be if drugs and prostitution were illegal.

**

Boo Hoo indeed. For most people, their home is their single largest asset. It is frequently used as a source of secured debt – say, to send little Johnny to college – and its eventual sale is a retirement asset. So yeah, I can understand how someone might see your desire to see exposed penii as less important than securing a lifetime of hard work and savings.

And, BTW, it’s a bit ironic in that you’re taking a libertarian stance regarding your own rights, but apparently care not for the property rights of your neighbors.**

Well, if you’re looking forward to it for reasons other than drinking and ogling, why on earth would you have to call it off? If there was a rule forbidding beer at a tailgate party, I wouldn’t stop tailgating…I’d just bring soft drinks.

66

You’re joking there, right?
I don’t consider a city where an innocent black man has to worry that the police will “mistake” his wallet for a gun and kill him. Call me weird, but the idea of a bathroom plunger up the ass doesn’t sound too appealing either.

67

LIB –

How are you defining “authoritarian”? Are you are giving it the enerally-accepted political definition – “absolute obedience to authority,” as in “an authoritarian regime,” as in a dictatorship or fascism? If so, why do you think I would know any better than you how authoritarians define “rights”?

LADY –

Jeez, I wish; life would be so much easier if I did think in terms of “black and white legal issues.” Unfortunately for me – and, in the context of this discussion, for you – I don’t. I do, however, tend to construe discussions about “rights” to mean overarching principles of human rights that may implicate the strictly legal (like Miranda), or the strictly moral (the right to “the pursuit of happiness,” whatever that means), or both (freedom of speech and religion). If you want me to discuss “rights” under some other rubric, then you’ll have to help me out regarding which one we should use. In other words, if you don’t like my “constructs,” then let’s use yours. So tell me: How do you define the term “right,” as you are using it when you say “I have a right to have a drink and watch naked people dance.” I ask again: Which right is that?

[quote]

LOL! :slight_smile: Why explain when you can gripe, huh? Okay. But surely you see that I in turn can “gripe” that your rant doesn’t make any sense.

As has been explained about six times now, there is a legitmate argument to be made that having strip bars does “hurt others,” in the form of lowered property values, greater transient and/or criminal traffic through a neighborhood or town, and the establishment of a culture based on the exploitation of women. So, yes, you can “decide how you want to live your life.” But if enough of your neighbors disagree with you about whether your actions are “hurting” them, they may democratically limit your ability to do whatever you want, by having their representatives pass laws just like this one. That is not an infringement on any “right” of yours – so far as I know, but then I don’t know what you mean by “right.”

You wish. It is totally relevant, in that it underscores that if you think you can just make up your rights, then why don’t you make up ones with a greater and more immediate payoff? If you don’t think you’re just making them up, then you should be able to define the term. But wait – that would cut into your valuable “griping” time by asking you to explain yourself.

68

In my home state it is illegal for two men to have sex.
This law is wrong. I have a “right” to suck cock no matter what the fucking law says.

“rights” are yours as a person, the law cannot change them. All they can do is choose to punish you for enjoying them.

69

It seems like every proposition is, especially on these forums . . .

Now has for the “broken window” theory. Have you considered that breaking a window, unless it’s yours, is direct infringement upon another person or their property? Part of my anger lies in the fact that how I want to live does not direcly infringe upon another’s rights. And even if the presumption that it will, is just a theory. There are so many other factors that will lead to crime in an area and as was mentioned even by you, a lot of the sex and drug crimes are committed simply because these things are illegal.

I would also like to add that I do believe that people should not go without being punished for acts that they commit directly against other people and their property, i.e. allowing someone to break a window or someone’s arm for that matter with no repercussions.

I am not sure exactly why the law prohibiting sale of alcohol at adult entertainment esbalishments in Marietta was passed. It was that for several years it was legal and there were no big issues with it, none that I was aware of as a resident and as a former employee of said establishment. I am researching it as we speak as now I am curious as this happened when I moved away. I have only within the year moved back into this area from another town in Georgia and not too far away. I am also researching what is being referred to as the Pap’s decision, a supreme court ruling that other cities and counties nation wide are using to in their argument to ban adult entertainment . . .

You wrote, And, BTW, it’s a bit ironic in that you’re taking a libertarian stance regarding your own rights, but apparently care not for the property rights of your neighbors."

Denying me or others, including business owners our indivdual righs is a direct infringement. And by not denying me this right will a property owner be directly affected. Actually, all parties could work together to ensure that property values do not lower. the best communities are those where people are wokring together towards the same goal. Business owners do not want to see the property value of of the residents go down and neither do they want their businesses affected by an increase in crime, turning away the decent law abiding customers that do frequent their establishment.

You wrote, “Well, if you’re looking forward to it for reasons other than drinking and ogling, why on earth would you have to call it off?”

When I wrote, " The bar where I work had to cancel an all male review which we were all looking forward to for various reasons other than having a few drinks and looking at hot, bare, male bodies because of the anal retentive laws here in Marietta.", I did not exclude the other two reasons. Perhaps I should been a bit clearer when I wrote what I wrote. And did you somehow miss the fact that I wrote I work in a bar? The bar would have made less money paying for entertainment even with a cover charge and not selling alcohol than it would cancelling the show all together. It’s not just about fun, it is about business. We are in the business of letting our hair down, entertaining, making sure people have fun and stay safe. Nothing wrong with a little, eating and drinking and making merry if a person sees fit to do it. That’s MY opinion anyway . . .

70

Grendel, whatever you think of the Diallo and Louima cases (and, FWIW, I think the former is an understandable tragedy, the latter a disgusting example of police brutality), the fact remains that New York is, on a per capita basis, the safest big city in America, that it got that way during the Giuliani administration, and that much of that improvement came about because of policies underpinned by the broken windows theory. There is a reason the man was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term. Nobody misses the squeegee men.

At any rate, what you or I think of Giuliani has nothing to do with this thread. What does have something to do with this thread is the broken windows theory, as I outlined above. Kindly keep your eyes on the ball.

Thus endeth the hijack.

71

When you say it is safer for “the people”, you are ignoring a large number of people who have reason to feel less safe now.

“Rights” are not given by the law, they are taken by people. You insist on an idiotically legalistic definition of the word, do you think that if you were a peasant living in a feudal state you would have fewer rights? NO, the law might respect fewer of them but that doesn’t make the law right.

If you are not doing anything to harm anyone else you are fully within your moral rights to do anything.
You mention broken windows, that’s funny I thought vandalism was already against the law.

72

Actually, IIRC, some of New York’s greatest crime reductions under Giuliani came about in minority neighborhoods. Regardless of how a handful of media-frenzy stories make them “feel,” they are actually more safe than they used to be. **

A right that cannot be exercised is no right at all – there can be no right without a corresponding remedy, as one academic puts it. Anything else is just something you want to exist – a wish, a dream, a goal perhaps. But nothing more.

Or, as Phillip K. Dick put it, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” **

Well, if you read my initial post on broken windows, you’d see that I was appealing to the underlying logic of the theory – namely, that disrespect for small laws can lead to more serious crimes. It is possible that, on a more general level, disrespect for societal mores – such as having a strip club in a community – might lead to similar breakdowns. Of course, it might not as well. My point was not to prove or disprove broken windows theory, but only to show that it represents one possible legitmate rationale for opposing strip clubs in one’s community.

Which brings me back to my overriding point about the beauty of decentralized government: all these individual communities are free to experiment and see what solutions work best for them. One size most certainly does not fit all.

73

I had a reply all set up for this last night with a full trace through the Kennesaw code and a brief tutorial on how to use online services that index municipal code. I traced Chapter 34 Section 1 of the Kennesaw code down through Chapter 34 Section 31 where the enforcement for violations of provisions in Chapter 34 was passed off to the general penalty ascribed in Chapter 1 Section 11. I had quote sections and lots of links too. I previewed it, everything looked good, then I closed the browser.
:smack:

Short answer. Yes there is a penalty for not keeping a firearm in Kennesaw. You need to get and keep a gun and ammo, get an exemption, or face the consequences outlined in Chapter 1 Section 11 of the Kennesaw code.
http://fws.municode.com/CGI-BIN/om_isapi.dll?infobase=12813.nfo&record={1A6}&softpage=newTestMainnonFrame

Enjoy,
Steven

74

I have never understood this line of reasoning, DCU, and I suspect that you can clear it up for me.

To my mind, respecting the property rights of my neighbors means not damaging or somehow appropriating their goods. Such property rights are already protected by the government, obviously. If I am caught burgling, I will go to jail.

Why exactly should I care, from a purely rights-analysis perspective, about protecting their high property values? They have a right to the goods they acquired lawfully, sure. But do they have a right to have said goods be valuable?

If the real estate market bottoms out, do these people have a right to complain that the government wasn’t sufficiently protecting their property rights? If they don’t like the way the neighborhood is turning out, then perhaps they should be enjoined to relocate, life savings and all.

I do not see how their desire to possess valuable property should infringe on the freedoms of others. They may have very good reasons to desire to protect their property values by legal means, but perhaps it is a self-delusion do believe that this is anything other than naked self-interest masquerading as “public good.”

75

If you get snatchoff any belt, bible or otherwise, somebody probably needs to pull their pants up.

76

Actually, Maeglin, that line was a bit of a throwaway; I wasn’t trying to make a big philosophical point or anything. I just think the OP was long on “me me me” without considering that her neighbors might just have some legitimate concerns of their own.

To (somewhat) address your point: I’ve got a strong libertarian streak in me. I agree with a lot of what you say. I believe, for example, that when the government infringes on individual property rights – be it through zoning or whatever – it should compensate the owners of the property in question. Sadly, that 5th amendment protection has been whittled away over the years.

But saying that regulatory takings should be compensated is a far cry from saying regulatory takings can never take place. At some level, you have to respect democratic institutions as well. People ought to be able, within some basic contraints, to shape their individual communities to their liking. If a community wants to be like Mayberry save for a handful of Times Square-o-philes, that community ought to be able to so shape itself. Times Square man can just deal with it or move somewhere a little more amenable to his tastes.

77

I largely agree, Dewey, I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t arguing something that you in fact were not.

I also agree that freedom entails a certain amount of voluntary self-restriction which can vary from community to community. And that people largely cannot live in perfectly utopic communities, in which there is no crime, fine schools, and live girls on every corner. So you make sacrifices based on your priorities.

Of course, just how much local governments can restrict the relatively small-time civil freedoms of their citizens is, and should be, a matter of considerable dispute. I tend to fall rather less on the law-and-order side. Unsurprising, considering that I am a godless New Yorker. :slight_smile:

78

If people don’t complain about bad laws and demand their rights they will never be granted them.

Listen, what I see here is someone bitching about a law. You complain that their use of the word “right” doesn’t match yours, saying she is complaining about the infringement of a right that isn’t recognised. Rights will never be recognized without people complaining about bed laws. The framers of our constitution realised that rights exist whether or not the law recognizes them, hence the word “inalienable”.

79

Which I realise is in the DOI not the constitution.

80

Jodi . . .

How is it that Grendel can make sense of what I’ve posted and you can not?

Let me ask you a question? Do you think that both genders should have equal rights or do you think one should have more than the other?

(ignoring the majority of your other post because I am exhausted at this point . . . )
You wrote, “But if enough of your neighbors disagree with you about whether your actions are “hurting” them, they may democratically limit your ability to do whatever you want, by having their representatives pass laws just like this one”

No shit . . .

You wrote in other post that "sure, you can claim it’s a right and get all pissed off when it’s violated, but then why not claim the right to be given a nice new car and a million bucks, and then be pissed when no one coughs them up? That makes about as muchsense, which is to say none. " In which I posted that was ridculous, irrelevant, and out of context.

Do you think it is ridiculous for someone to demand a nice new car and a million dollars?

I felt your comment was irrelevant because the issue here is adult entertainment and what I feel is my right to adult entertainment. Now it may not be out of context according to individual rights but again, this thread was about specific rights was it not?