Whether you personally agree with the ethics of it, a person gives up several of their constitutional rights when they join the military.

A person has no constitutional rights, he has natural ones. In other words, a piece of paper does not grant anyone any rights, not even the right to extort people (ie. to tax them).

Call them whatever kind of rights you want, but when Manning and everyone else (myself included) signed up for the Army, we waived them.

What kind of things you can voluntarily, bindingly agree to is another matter. I just wanted to point out that the constitution has nothing to do with our rights as human beings, and can't remove or grant any. It's wrong to think about rights as something the government gives you - actually the government only violates them.

A total absence of government would be just as destructive to your natural rights as a government with too much power over its citizens. The government didn't grant you the rights, but in some situations its very capable of preserving them.

There are two main problems with the United States, the first is that too many of us are ready and willing to trade personal freedom for economic and physical safety. The second is that we allowed money to control politics.

People don't actually have natural rights, if you're using the common definition of "natural".

The only thing that's natural are the laws of nature, otherwise known as physics, and there is no law of physics that prevents me from torturing someone.

> The only thing that's natural are the laws of nature, otherwise known as physics, and there is no law of physics that prevents me from torturing someone.

Good thing I didn't imagine the idea of rights would physically prevent you from torturing someone. Basically, rights are an idea meant to help us in drawing boundaries between what's acceptable behaviour and what's not. But it's got nothing to do with the government, and everything to do with reason, logic, consistency and common sense. A government or a piece of paper can't grant any rights or take any away, and in fact, governments only violate our rights.

We live in such comfortable times indeed, when a person can actually believe that, absent government, he would have any rights at all.

We all grow up getting brainwashed to fear freedom, and that right there, is the fear talking.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Oh I do. You have no idea that your stance on this matter is rooted in brainwashing.

This is completely untrue and speaks to a complete misunderstanding of what rights are to begin with.