San Bernardino

Have our rights as citizens changed?

 

Yes.

 

How?

 

Now, not begging the question ... just committing the fallacy of hasty generalization.

 

Off the top of my head, homosexuality is now protected by law in many ways, privacy has become a significant issue with legal protection, one person/one vote, the right against self-incrimination has been significantly expanded, significantly more protection of freedom of expression and association (some pretty nasty anti-Communist laws were still in effect 50 years ago), individuals are allowed to form corporations and extend their freedoms to the actions of that corporation.

 

Sounds like we're not governed by the same document that was in effect in 1965.

 

Men, that's one of the informal ones that's subjective enough to be impossible to prove or disprove.

 

One of the things often criticized about conservative and the tea party is how over-the-top paranoid they are, railing on about how the Democrats want to "come after their guns" and trash the Constitution, or that liberals have contempt for the general population and believe they're so much smarter than everyone else that they can make decisions for you better than you can for yourself.

In this one thread, Rick, you have come right out and said pretty much all of them.

 

We are, we've just learned to be functionally practical occasionally at ignoring it when we have to, because it's so outdated that it can no longer effectively govern the country as written. It's a kludge, a workaround, and an inefficient one that we use instead of the much more practical option of rewriting it every generation or so as envisioned.

You may learn to get along on a broken leg and not be completely motionless, but it'd still be better to fix it.

 

They're over the top paranoid about brown people doing bad things to them. They're right to be afraid that smarter people are actively working against them to keep them from screwing up the world any more than they already have.

 

Yes. See the PATRIOT Act.

 

(in before someone points to the 14 victims of this as proof that the paranoia about brown people isn't over the top)