Slashdot Mirror
Some Rights May Have To Be 'Eroded' For Safety
Turn-X Alphonse writes "The BBC is reporting on a speech given by the head of MI5 in the UK. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller claims in the future some civil rights may have to 'erode', in order to keep everyone in the country safe from terrorism." From the article: "MI5 has recently let it be known that it is in favour of making telephone intercept evidence admissible in court. Previously the intelligence and security services had expressed concern such that evidence might reveal operational details. Meanwhile, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has been calling for EU states to keep mobile phone and e-mail records for longer, to help fight terrorism and crime."
For example, if murder were legal, you'd have the right to kill people that threaten you.
This all boils down to one thing: lack of personal responsibility.
:-(
What ever happened to it? So many of our problems are rooted in everyone's attempt to pass the buck: the populace's willingness to give up civil liberties in order to get a nanny state in return, the abundance of frivolous lawsuits, corporate scandals, twelve step programs, people who constantly bitch about politicians but never vote, people who bitch about their jobs being offshored but don't do anything to increase the value of their own career, Karl Rove, etc, etc.... I just don't understand what has happened in my lifetime.
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life and your family's welfare, admitting your mistakes, and genuinely trying to be honorable/noble. If we had more personal responsbility in this world governments wouldn't be able to get away with attitudes like this.
Where's Sartre when you need him?
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
In the US (I'm unfamiliar with the UK), our rights are not granted by King nor State edict. They're inherent ("God-given") to every human born, US citizen or not. Our Constitution provides our government certain specific powers to appropriate certain specific rights of ours onto them.
Reducing inherent rights is an impossibility in the States. It is tyranny to trample on our right to be secure in our person and property when no warrant has been issued for a specific investigation into a specific crime.
Letting government infringe on our inherent freedom from witch hunts is scary. I know it is happening, but I'm not understanding how it protects us. Real criminals know the law and can get around all these government intrusions. That leaves only 'innocent' citizens as the target. With so many vague laws criminalizing behavior, you may be committing a crime without realizing it. Let your elected officials keep a log, just in case you forget to notify them of the crime you unknowingly commit.
It is unjust and unacceptable, and I am unwilling to be part of it. Should I mimic criminals now to keep myself safe from [i]government[/i]? Disposable phones, anonymous mailers, and all that?
Be sure terrorists already are safe from these injustices.
It may be very hard to stop someone who wants to blow up a train and is convinced it is the will of their God to do so. Security should be increased and anything in the power of public utilities like train stations and airports should be done to prevent terrorism.
However, I urge anyone reading to fight the erosion of their civil liberties in a so-called trade for their "security". I'm especially worried about the UK putting forward an equivalent of the PATRIOT Act because if they do, it sets a precident for all of their allies and will likely put pressure on them to do the same (which includes Canada, where I live).
I know I'm preaching to the converted here on Slashdot, but I wish there was a way I could make people see what we do: that the PATRIOT Act in the US allows the Government can monitor an individual's web surfing records, use roving wiretaps to monitor phone calls made by individuals "proximate" to the primary person being tapped, access Internet Service Provider records, monitor the private records of people involved in legitimate protests, spy on suspected computer trespassers (not just terrorist suspects) without a court order, and most concerningly, allows law enforcement to issue search warrants that do not force them to tell the subject that he was searched. (Source: EFF)
The word needs to be brought out to the streets.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Technology changes the balance between victim and attacker. Fact. Occasionally, it is prudent to create new laws to redress the balance. At first, breaking into a computer wasn't a crime. The laws in many countries decide (rightfully, imo) to make this an offense.
The problem comes when the law makers don't really think through the consquences of the laws they write. The start with the assumption that criminals are dumb. Most of the time this is actually a fairly good assumption. However, it is a mistake to right off all criminals as being stupid. The people behind 9/11 were certainly not dumb and it's these type of people we are drafting laws to stop.
. The first question a legislator should be asking themselves when faced with a security decision is "How could an attacker make this law useless". On the subject of wiretapping the first thing that springs to mind is encrypting the connection. How can you wiretap an encrypted connection? Of course, they could try and use RIPA to get the keys off you but RIPA is badly drafted (as I discuss here) and can be circumvented easily provided you use a signed Diffie-Helman key exchange to determine the session key.
Give the fact that the law can be dodged completely it only serves to make us all less secure. It removes a check and balance from our society and opens up to abuses by the Police and other government organsiations. (As an aside, Law should be drafted in that they should fail in the safest possible way when being used by a corrupt Police force).
I'll finish this comment with a point I feel is important. In July, fifty or so people were killed by terrorists. That was the first major terrorist attack since the IRA declared a cease-fire and it was alost the biggest terrorist act in (recent) British history. As much as it is a tragedy that those lives were lost, is it worth changing the relationship between citizen and state for the sake of fifty dead? The same can also be said about 9/11 or the madrid bombings. Yes four thousand people were killed in 9/11 but four times as many die per year in US due to gun fatalities. In terms of a threat to the average citizen of any particular state, the threat posed by terrorism is right down in the noise level. It is my belief that a greater threat to our liberty is posed by the onerous legislation being passed worldwide than by terrorism.
Simon.
negligence..
Look at the patRIOT act of all things. It gives government carte blanche for whatever they want, AND your not allowed to even know about the laws. How can this prevent terrorism? Eroding away liberties and personal rights of privacy and general freedoms will never solve terrorism, it wont even make a dent in it.
Lets start with the rights of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller...
You know, there was a crazy american towards the end of the 18th century that seems to have been quoted about this...
Then again, his countrymen don't seem to take him seriously, so why should anyone else?
And each of the accused will be taken captive via SWAT team, then made to pay for their own information collection, right?
They might declare English food to be a terrorist act, and erode the rights of British pubs to serve crap.
It is sad how easily people in the government concede defeat to the terrorists. One of the things that define modern, western democracies is the freedoms it gives its people. When the terrorists see that they have succesfully destroyed those freedoms, they must feel very succesful.
I admit that governments need to make a compromise, but they shouldn't so easily show it off.
You know, there IS a dichotomy between freedom and equality (which in this case safety, ie, and equal right to life). Technology increases the abilities of an individual. Way back in the day when the country was founded, the most that one person could do was load up his musket and shoot one or two people. The government/law could easily crush him. But now, one person could make a virus or a bomb that could kill thousands of people. And the ONLY way to prevent that is to give the government more power, which means letting them do things that decrease personal freedom. So just think a little before shouting "FREEDOM!!!1!" all the time, that's all I ask. It has to be a balance (obviously we dont want the other extreme (an ultra-powerful, dangerous government) either)
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -FDR
That's what they've always done for years.
And this Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller? Is she... M?
Yet another great one from Alan Moore, soon to be a disowned waterdown hollywood lackluster (he's already disowned it). However the actual comic is exactly what this so-called erosion of rights is all about. If your going to allow this in the UK or anywhere else you need to do two things;
Bring your own KY Jelly.
Grab your ankles really really tight.
and I want you to know speaking as a life long leftist, I have NO SYMPATHY FOR YOU.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The price, it seems, of liberating oneself is that some innocent people will have to give up their rights so that others may live as they choose.
i -0509100027sep10,1,5918883.story?coll=chi-newsnati onworld-hed that even citizens can be held on suspicion ..there isn't even a criteria on degree of suspicion). These are people who have no problems holding people for years or lifetimes without determing whether they are guilty or not. "If you aren't planning on giving me a trial, execute me and get it overwith I'd hate to be a burden."
People are not longer interested in truth or real justice. They are not interested in determining if a person is guilty or innocent. Conviction on mere suspicion or circumstances of birth is enough for them. They don't care how many innocent people are killed, they don't bother to suspect that authority itself could be blind or corrupted. People just want a sense of security.
If you are going to believe that the fourth amendment was invented for no reason and is a hindrance to the cause of survival, there is nothing I can do.
But, if you are going to record people's convictions, at least allow people trials to defend themselves. (I'm referring to the ruling http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ch
If we're run by those who believe in God, why do they believe that God requires us to torture people without assurance of their guilt, give up our belief in trials, truth, and justice in order for us to survive?
For liberty, there are those willing for any price to be paid as long as it's from someone else's pocket.
"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"1984" could be a reality. "Brazil" could be a reality.
Don't people realize that part of the cost of freedom is by definition risk of being hurt.
Fear is what drives us to give up liberty, and it is only fear that we have to fight. Fear is worse than death, beause it traps us in our minds, afraid to move, afraid to live.
If we want to represent freedom to the world, I believe we ought to stop being afraid and stop lashing out in fear.
If we give up our freedom, doesn't that mean the terrorists are winning?
Why can't anyone see the truth here?
The truth is: we must do our best with the knowledge we have, defend ourselves as best we can, and let go of our fear.
Raydude
But we are more intelligent than those evil terrorists.
Instead of letting them destroy our way of life, we destroy it ourselves.
Thanks for your insightful comments Dame Edna...
People used to die all the time. And they still do, in car crashes and victims of poverty or drugs. It was 3k people that died here and what a couple hundred in britain? It's small potatoes. Maybe that offends somebody that knows somebody who died but people die all the time regardless.
An exploding subway is annoying and scary, but it's not a serious threat to our way of life. But taking away our democracy is a serious threat to our way of life. The only actual solution to a biological or nuclear threat is to restructure our society into islands with less interaction. Kinda like a jail with a village in each cell. You might know your neighbors too and you wouldn't even have to rat on them! It might be a good thing, if only that's what we were talking about instead of more politburos.
it was the terrorists job to create FUD.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
If you have no freedom at the end of the day, who cares if you are 'safe'.
But of course no government would think that way, by design they are out to control the public and absorb their rights and freedoms.
Our founders here in the US knew this all too well, and tried to prevent it from happening *again*.
They failed of course, but they were right.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Even though nearly everyone on /. is against this erosion, at least there is some high official somewhere thats being honest about this. Since the governments probably arn't going to listen to rights advocates, I would much prefer to have somebody being straight honest to us. So kudos for that at least.
I think we've lost the plot somewhere along the way. People have no clue what a government is supposed to do and not do. The government is not here to babysit your children and make sure they don't hear naughty words or see a boob. The government is not here to enforce your religious views on everyone who doesn't subscribe to your religion, whether you're a majority or not. The government is not here to guarantee a right to profit for corporations. The government is not here to keep track of what everyone does day and night in order to prevent any possible crime or terrorism. In general, IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S JOB TO CATCH CRIMINALS! That is a SECONDARY function to what governments should be doing. A government is supposed to protect the freedom of the people. i.e. life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. A government is supposed to protect the people from external threats, i.e. terorrism, war, but not at the expense of the freedom of its people. A government is supposed to maintain order, and prevent chaos from threatening people, i.e. catch criminals, prevent theft, prevent murder, etc. A government is supposed to ensure basic quality of living and services, i.e. infrastructure: roads, electricity, water, sewage. All this nonsense about giving up civil liberties to "prevent terrorism" is counterintuitive. You are there to ensure liberty, not remove it. Removing liberty all the time to prevent terrorism some of the time is not a positive net change for the people. Ensuring liberty is your primary function, if you are working against that, there is a problem with the plan or the execution. There needs to be another solution. Restricting freedoms of people who are not themselves the threat IS NOT AN OPTION. Restricting freedom of people to live, marry, immigrate, visit in hospitals, raise families, and be happy because your religious beliefs do not agree with it is not a valid action. There needs to be a threat to others in order for freedoms to be taken away. Claiming it is a threat because "think of the children" is a fallacy. You are responsible for your children. The government is not here to impose your moral values on others. It is not the government's job to instill morality in your children, that is your job as a parent. Try living up to your end of the bargain. If I had one wish in all the world, it would be for an empty habitable space to found my own society, based on reason instead of stupidity, with a design towards reducing corruption. The mult-branch thing was a good idea but didn't cut it. Plurality vote gravitates towards fewer parties. Lifetime politicians who have more interest in their private finances and companies than their jobs is a problem. We need to fix this but the systems around have sunk in and fossilized. There's no way to actively remove them, not even by force anymore. Revolution is virtually impossible in the age of modern weaponry. There is nowehre else to go. Any initiative that makes serious progress will be sabotaged by some existing faction in power, either political, religious, or corporate. I've really lost hope, so I guess do whatever you want.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
your right to arm bears.
some civil rights may have to be 'reinforced', in order to keep everyone in the country safe from government.
This is an extremely common attitude among people. And they have absolutely no idea as to why that argument is wrong on so many levels.
An independent film maker I know once told me that people:
Don't want to take responsibility for themselves.
Want to be told what to do and how to live
in other words, many people want to be slaves. They just won't call it that. I poo-poo'd it. But now, I' m being to see that maybe he was right.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
The BBC has a Have Your Say section where people can talk about news stories. This is a comment on this one:
"Western countries' obsession with individual rights has often been seen as a strength, but in the modern world it has become a weakness. When these rights were developed over the preceding centuries it was never envisaged that they would be exploited to shield those who wish to annihilate those very rights and the society that gave them birth. We should wake up and curtail some of the more excessive freedoms, in order to preserve those that are more fundamental."
What a complete idiot.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Ben Franklin
Maybe it's just sour grapes.
With friends like the Bush administration running things into the ground, who needs enemies?
8==8 Bones 8==8
"We are fighting a war on terrorism to protect our rights and freedoms, right and freedoms we must give up, to help fight the war on terrorism, to protect our rights and freedoms." - Source Unknown
Wrong. The purpose of a government is not to protect our 'rights' - We elect leaders, not puppets. All this rhetoric about personal freedoms looks nice on paper, but at the end of the day a government that is afraid to do anything that the people might not like is nothing more than a talking shop.
Incidentally, everything you've said about religion makes me assume that you're posting from the U.S. - there is no power in this country, be it Parliment, the Royal family, or Her Majesty's Courts, that tries to enforce or coerce any religious view. Hell, we've got too many people from too many backgrounds for anything like that to work in the first place.
"Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither". He should have added that they will also get much less of both.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
---- William Pitt, 1783Joanna Baillie, Basil (act III, sc. 1, l. 151)
"Fear is not the natural state of civilized people."
Aung San Suu Kyi
"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
First, I think that there are few that would argue that we don't need a government. Even Thomas Jefferson ("That government governs best that governs least.") obviously believed in some form of government, and our national structure owes much to his writing.
IMO, we need a strong government, but we also need strong civil liberties. These are not at odds with eachother. Only a weak government would feel the need to infringe upon these liberties.
A strong government exists to build a strong social infrastructure. This can include such things as commercial infrastructure (highways), information infrastructure (my county owns a fiberoptical network through which I get telephone and internet service provided by my choice of private companies, and besides, what else do you call the public school system), economic infrastructure (protecting the freemarket from the likes of Microsoft), etc. We also need a strong judiciary, and many other portions of the government.
Whether we need wealth distribution programs is a subject for another debate. Personally I think we do need some form of wealth redistribution even if it is only an attempt to help make sure that everyone has the opportunity to get a quality college education and narrowly scoped to achieve that end. But that is beside the point.
When government starts to infringe on our civil liberties as a way of keeping us safe, we are sliding back to the circumstances which spawned our great republic, where fundamental rights (habeas corpous, trial by jury) were suspended in the Colonies in order to help maintain security. Already, the case of Jose Padilla threatens to at least partially overturn the right to a jury trial and the right to habeas petitions.
Welcome to the world of 1770.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
One blatant example of poverty causing death just came up last week: Hurricane Katrina. The majority of the men, women, and children who didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. The poverty rate there is 2-3 times the national average and many people in that group don't have cars.
Now, we're trying to bus them out of the hurricane area. But, where were the buses before the hurricane? We certainly knew well ahead of the time that level of a storm would devastate New Orleans. If leaving the area was the best option, then why wasn't this option given to the poorest citizens before disaster struck? The answer has everything to do with money and the fact that they don't have it. Certainly, the city, state, or federal government could have spent a little money to use local school buses and move those people out. I have a sneaking suspicion where that money actually went...
Karl von Clausewitz is perhaps best known from his statement: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." This oft quoted statement was part of a dialectic argument set forth in Hegelian terms to examine the properties of war. IIRC von Clausewitz also was the first to characterize an oppresive, desparate state as insidiously furthering their power by pointing to an enemy without. Declaring war on the enemy without allowed a state to cast blame on the enemy for the shortcomings of the state within. In our present case the war on terrorism allows the state to truncate our civil liberties.
The interplay between the rights of the individual and the security of the collective is an ancient argument. In the west Jeremy Bentham presented the struggle in terms of Utilitarianism, "the greatest good for the greatest number". (I've had a fondness for Bentham since, as a schoolboy, reading he was stuffed and sat at the entrance to his club.) At the other end of the stick were the Romantics, best known, perhaps, in the writings of Jean-Jacuees Rousseau, a Calvin in Rebellion (and in my opinion a second rater), and F. Nietzsche.
The argument is ancient and each of us has to reexamine it to find our own place.Good luck with that.:)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi -0509100027sep10,1,5918883.story?coll=chi-newsnati onworld-hed
Shows that the US is not that far behind, as an appeals court says it is legal to hold US citizens forever without trial, as part of the Presidential powers.
I think the courts and our political leaders need to pick up a dictionary.
Fascism: A social and political ideology with the primary guiding principle that the state or nation is the highest priority, rather than personal or individual freedoms.
I believe we had a world war over this.
As the old saying goes, those who trade in liberty for security deserve neither.
How many times will the governing officials tell us this old lie that our liberties are blocking their jobs and they get away with it? Could they post examples rather than ringing the old fear mongering bell?
Would the tragedy on 9/11 not have happened? I thought the whole impetus and sudden motivation for increased airport security was 9/11 itself. Not a sudden decrease in liberties (fuck the so-called Patriot act).
How about the London Bombings? How would decreased liberties have stopped them where over 15,000 cameras in London couldn't?
It is easy to hold up Liberty when in good times, but how in the world are we to "teach" the rest of countries Democracy/Liberty when our goverments perservere to constantly restrict ours?
Now, this is going to be the most cold-hearted assessment of all to most people - but how many people died in the London Bombings (or even 9/11) versus how many people die of heart attacks each year?
Should we outlaw McDonalds now? Wouldn't outlawing fast food save more lives?
Because restricted freedoms affect nearly 100% of the population minus a lucky few at the top of the hierarchy.
You do realise this is an attempt by the government's sneaky arm(pit) to extend its powers to the equivalent of those already granted in the USA by the PATRIOT act, don't you ?
Oh, and as for "Reducing inherent rights is an impossibility in the States", two words: 'Guantanamo Bay'.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just shut down immigration and provide incentives for those hostile to the nation's culture to emigrate. This is where eminent domain can be used with justification.
Seastead this.
Facist crap. The UK security service always says we must erode liberties because it is convenient for them to know everything about peoples activities. Then its just a fishing trip with key word searches or voice recog of keywords to try to get leads. Simpler than real security work, cheaper too. In the end no security service really trusts the population it watches and so becomes more desperate to know everything about you.
Just when thousands of Americans are considering defection to the EU... heh.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
The word "erode" doesn't appear in TFA, except in the subheadline. It does appear in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=361911&in_page_id=1770&i n_a_source=&ct=5
i.e. the Dame didn't say that, it just appears in the dailymail writeup (then, of course, in slashdot, as "Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller claims in the future some civil rights may have to 'erode'")
The actual text is like this:
"In a speech made in the Netherlands on 1 September and put online by MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said 'Okay, people, we tried this whole guaranteeing-civil-rights thing but it's just not working out. We're ready to come back to the bargaining table and try and find a more solution-oriented solution that will add value for consumers while protecting the innovation of our industries.'"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It's right, if it's to stop terrorism, everything is right!
Stupid leaders, stupid people. Don't you guys get it already? How far will he have to take things "in the name of the war against terror"? Open your fucking eyes already!
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
Here is a case where the Administration argues that an American citizen, detained on American soil far from combat operations can be held indefinitely without any sort of trial, and the 4th circuit just agreed.
This means no trial by jury, no habeas petition, no access to a lawyer, merely because the government says so. Furthermore the 4th circuit stated that they were going to apply the Hamdi standard here and state that anyone accused of being an enemy combattant might have the burden or proof in proving that he is not, perhaps against a military tribunal. This is very scary indeed.
To see where this leads, I would direct everyone to read Scalia's dissent in Hamdi (in which Stevens joined). He states that the Hamdi standard would lead to an attrition of our due process rights as American citizens. And after reading the 4th circuit's opinion, I have decided that Scalia and Stevens are clearly right here...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
still funny, though.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
>>The only actual solution to a biological or nuclear threat is to restructure our society into islands with less interaction. Kinda like a jail with a village in each cell. You might know your neighbors too and you wouldn't even have to rat on them!
Sorry, but Unabomber can claim prior art. That was his thoughts, exactly, in his Manifesto. See for yourself.
http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm
A Federal appeals court just ruled in the Padilla case that it's ok for the President and his forces to declare an American citizen to be an "enemy combatant" and hold him indefinitely without trial. It's still possible for the Supreme Court to reject that and affirm that we do have fundamental rights, but Bush's nominee for Chief Justice, John Roberts, has previously ruled in favor of the Administration on several similar cases. It's possible that he'll nominate Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who believes that anything done by American forces isn't torture so whatever they were doing to prisoners in Gitmo wasn't illegal - and the main opposition to him are right-wingers who think he isn't "conservative" enough.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That is a very good question. I am sick and tired of the stranglehold these greedy vermin hold over the country. I think it is a conflict of interest for a lawyer to serve in any legislature, writing impenetrable laws to help his crooked cronies extort money from honest citizens.
In addition to thorough tort reform, putting a large percentage of lawyers out of business, I'd also make it illegal for them to sit in the Federal or state legislature.
We also need to sweep away the accumulated detritus of the legal code. Every law that a person needs to know ought to fit in a 50-page pamphlet studied in the senior year of high school. If it doesn't fit, abolish it. I would remove about 95% of our current legal system, just tear it to pieces and throw it in the trash and make all the blood sucking attorneys find decent honest work. They have been a plague on mankind since the time of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
The rest of the program involves setting up counterorganizations and infiltration of non-elected governmental positions. Jailers aren't elected, and if you can convince the government to put your people in a jail you have control of, well then, Bonus!
In "Generation Gap" by Mack Reynolds, there was a good demonstration of such an implementation. I read it in a collection of SF stories called "Future Kin" edited by Roger Elwood and published by Doubleday & Company Garden City New York, 1974.
I have it sitting in front of me due to the fact that the New Castle Henry County Library of Indiana discarded it.
GP: An exploding subway is annoying and scary, but it's not a serious threat to our way of life.
You: And neither is a collapsing skyscraper?
No.
A collapsing skyscraper does not fundamentally change our lives. Our reactions after the fact changes our lives. The current administration have done everything in their power to convert America from a free democracy to a police state. Just this morning, I read that Bush has been given the right to arrest a US citizen and hold them indefinitely without actually charging them with a crime . My god, that does more damage to 100% of our democracy than the downing of one building and the deaths of 0.001% of our population.
I propose that cannibal child molestors not be arrested nor prosecuted. After all, children die all the time. And canibals only eat a few every year. What the hell? It's not a serious threat to our way of life.
The problem with that statement is that you assume the grandparent post is saying that we shouldn't go after terrorists. That's not what I read at all. What I read is that we shouldn't be going around, removing freedoms from average citizens, and completely restructuring society for the worse over such a small threat.
To use your example above, it'd be like addressing cannibal child molestation by saying that only robots can take care of children because robots can't molest them or eat them. Screw all the normal people who want access to their children. They could be cannibal child molesters. Better to be safe than sorry!
If you don't think that radical islamic fundamentalists will take away your precious freedoms, then you're sorely ignorant of modern and recent history.
So far, no radical islamic fundamentalists have taken away any of our freedoms. The people that have been taking away our freedoms are American citizens that we've elected to high offices in the Presidency and Congress.
One needs look back no further than Afghanistan circa 5 years ago to find evidence of the hideous brutality of the terrorists' intent.
And now we are replacing our democracy with a police state. The Republican's view of America's future doesn't look that different from the terrorist's view.
The sore of islamic ignorance has been allowed to fester for forty years, unchecked and fueled by proceeds from drug trade and oil sale. Now, they've brought the fight to the Western World and we can either respond with fight or surrender. Radical islam is a threat to our way of life, even if cowards and fools such as you choose ignorance over courage.
The sore of republican ignorance has been allowed to fester for thirty-five years, unchecked and fueled by proceeds from drug trade and oil sale. Now, they've brought the fight to the middle east and we can either respond with fight or retreat. Radical christianity is a threat to our way of life, even if cowards and fools such as you choose ignorance over courage.
While I agree with you that Poverty contributed tremendously to the severity of the disaster, I feel the need to express (in a reply, rather than with the mod points I've got right now) a couple thoughts on poverty.
First: People couldn't leave because they didn't have cars? If as a last resort people had to walk to safety, most people had ample warning to exercise that mode of transportation!
Society had better be careful that the measures we take to address the problem of poverty don't continue to further debilitate the poverty stricken by increasing their reliance and dependence on The State to run their lives for them. As an earlier poster asserted: much of the problems we face as a society boil down to a lack of personal responsibility. Many people who were fully capable of taking care (or at least better care) of themselves and those around them opted instead to thrust the full weight of responsibility for their survival, upon the government! And then complain bitterly (or, sadly -- die) when the state fails to handle the enormity of the burden placed on it.
This is getting off track, so I'll finish by stating that WE need to be careful of surrendering our liberties, freedoms, and responsibilities to a state that may or may not (as we've seen time and again) be qualified to take on those responsibilities.
In times of chrises, freedoms need to be maximized, not minimized. For example, what if every airplaine seat had a 6 inch knife strapped to it, do you think for a minute there could be a repeat of 9/11? What if people were encouraged to posess guns resopnsibily for personal protection, do you think Columbine could have even started? What if peacfull people were able to cross borders freely, do you think it would be easier for terrorists to use established routes to smuggle themselves in thru the back country, in fact all our "security" didn't stop them from getting in with letitimate visas. What if drugs were legalized, do you think gangsters and drug lords would get the opportunity of making millions on the black market, while driving the problem underground?
The fact is, individuals can take measures to protect themselves from all these problems, but it is 1000 times harder to protect yourselves from a government that is out of controll. In times of chrises, freedoms need to be maximized, not minimized? Individuals don't need safety, they need controll - when the later happens, the former takes care of itself. Without the later, the former can be revoked at any time.
We have a series of laws that systematically strip away privacy and tear down many of the protections of the Bill of Rights including some that stand up to Martial Law. But we stupid fat soccermom Americans happily give away all those freedoms and rights in exchange for being terrorized by our government.
all politics never protest when they get extraordinary powers...
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
What about the Disarming of American citizens in New Orleans?
New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes
New York Times | September 8 2005
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here.
No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.
But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.
Nearly two weeks after the floods began, New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers. While armed looters roamed unchecked last week, the city is now calm. No arrests were made on Wednesday night or this morning, and the police received only 10 calls for service, a police spokesman said.
The city's slow recovery is continuing on other fronts as well, local officials said at a news conference. Pumping stations are now operating across much of the city, and many taps and fire hydrants have water pressure. Tests have shown no evidence of cholera or other dangerous diseases in flooded areas, though health officials have said the waters contain unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria and lead.
Efforts to recover corpses have also started.
But there were still signs of confusion and uncertainty over government plans. FEMA's director, Michael D. Brown, had said his agency would begin issuing debit cards, worth at least $2,000 each, to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies for immediate needs. More than 319,000 people have already applied for federal disaster relief, and many evacuees began lining up at the Astrodome, in Houston, early today in hope of getting cards.
"The concept is to get them some cash in hand," Mr. Brown had said, "which allows them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about what they need to have to restart their lives."
But this afternoon, FEMA announced that it no longer planned to issue the cards. An agency spokesman, David G. Passey, said that he did not know why the program was scrapped but that now "we believe that our normal methods of delivery - checks and electronic funds transfer - will suffice."
In Washington, the House an Senate overwhelmingly approved $51.8 billion for relief efforts, the second disbursement since the storm devastated the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. The funds include $50 billion for FEMA, $1.4 billion for the Department of Defense and an additional $400 million for the Army Corps of Engineers. The request follows a $10.5 billion package that President Bush signed on Friday and that is intended to address the immediate needs of survivors.
Hundreds of miles to the east, Ophelia, a tropical storm off the Florida coast, was upgraded to hurricane status this afternoon after its winds reached speeds of 75 miles per hour. Forecasters have predicted that Ophelia will turn east into the Atlantic Ocean during the next few days, although its path remains unclear.
With pumps running and the weather here remaining hot and dry, water has receded across much of New Orleans. Formerly flooded streets are now passable, although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.
A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, Dan Hitchings, said 37 of the city's 174 permanent pumps were working this afternoon, removing about 11,000 cubic feet of flood water per second. The city's 174 pu
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if you read the statements from politicians and Law enforcement officials carefully .. when they are pleading their case for decreasing civil liberties in the fight against terrorism .. they always add .. and to help fight "CRIME" ..
ie. those pesky civil liberties that make their job of fighting crime more difficult .. ie. tracking software piracy etc.
for right wing politicians who think that it is their job to enforce the law and punish sinners .. the war on terrorism is a blessing in disguise ..
i have looked for it many times .. but have been unable to find the speech that Bush made shortly after 9/11 in which he said something like "and let us forget the opportunities that this event provides" with his cheshire cat smile ..
Admittedly there are differences - most of the struggle against the IRA was carried out in Northern Ireland and occasionally the Republic, and they did things there like death squads and imprisonment in inhuman conditions that they didn't do much of in England, whereas now the threat is dispersed around the world in places that are no longer British colonies, so they're doing more in England itself. But it's still appalling dishonesty on the part of the politicians.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So, I don't get it. I'm an American. I admit I don't know a whole lot about English government. However, growing up, I heard countless stories on the news about terrorism in Ireland and England. They dealt with it. Never once did it occur to me that England was a bad place. After all, I also grew up with stories about gang warfare in LA. When 9-11 happened, I looked at England and thought "England has been dealing with terrorism for decades and they still have a nation they are proud of. The US will be the same". In stead, our own government did more damage than the terrorists. Now England wants to copy our mistakes? If anything, the US should have copied England when 9-11 happened. I just don't get it. Anymore than I get the paranoia that's currently spreading around the world. Despite centuries of terrorism, it's only now a threat that requires we give up our freedom? Why is the world only now unsafe? How is this new?
It's not just terrorism. I see this trend growing in all areas. The US space program is an example. We lose a space shuttle and suddenly space is so unsafe that we cancel our maned space program? Despite losses in the past and decades of speculation on how dangerous space can be? New Orleans is another example. A hurricane takes out New Orleans and people suddenly realize Mother Nature is dangerous? What is this sudden obsession with absolute safety? I just don't get it.
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We have lost already more than enough civil liberties and that is certainly not what we have voted for.
Stalkers, burglars, and other creepy elements will welcome the tools the government provides them with. Sorry, but I value my consitutional rights to privacy don't want anyone to intercept my personal and intimate conversations.
If you value your privacty it is time for encryption. Fortunately there are plenty of easy-to-use tools available now.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller claims in the future some civil rights may have to 'erode', in order to keep everyone in the country safe
So true, so true. To keep "everyone in the country safe" I would suggest:
1. Confinement in a sturdy, block structure outside a tornado, hurricane or earthquake zone.
2. Mandatory curfew for a good night's sleep
3. A calorie-restricted diet based on the best current food pyramid
4. An hour of mandatory treadmill per day
5. Perhaps a daily glass of wine but no other alcohol, smoking or drugs.
6. In-cell employment. Commuting kills.
7. Structured and highly enforced local social activities
8. Frequent mandatory medical examination and testing
9. In light of these restrictions, elimination of all suicide promoting devices.
With proper diet, exercise, rest, medical attention and security, much can be done to promote lifespan of the stock.
(Which is all to say that these politico demagogues rely heavily on the population's statistical innumerancy to tell them horror stories about why they must give up their freedoms for threats _way_ down on the list of what will actually kill them.)
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
-- Benjamin Franklin (allegedly)
parasight.de
I think it's sad that you were modded flamebait. I totally agree that those who think the "war on terror" is about reducing death are completely wrong. It is about reducing murder. The seemingly increasing inability to distinguish the two in everyday practice is, frankly, baffling to me.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
All laws should be written in plain language.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
First: People couldn't leave because they didn't have cars? If as a last resort people had to walk to safety, most people had ample warning to exercise that mode of transportation!
New Orleans is a large city. You could easily walk 5 miles and still be in... New Orleans. You could walk 20 miles and be in the suburbs of New Orleans. Either way, you'd be screwed since you'd be out in the open with a hurricane on the way!
That also doesn't address the elderly, sick, and families with children. Heaven knows they aren't walking anywhere in the 90-100 degree heat.
Society had better be careful that the measures we take to address the problem of poverty don't continue to further debilitate the poverty stricken by increasing their reliance and dependence on The State to run their lives for them. As an earlier poster asserted: much of the problems we face as a society boil down to a lack of personal responsibility.
Bullshit. Libertarian philosophy is complete nonsense in the wake of Katrina. Here we've seen anarchy, lawlessness, death, and neglect because of Libertarian prattle like this. Federal and state governments are the only organizations that are equipped to deal with problems on this scale.
Speaking of "personal responsibility"... While you may not like giving money to the federal government, you should consider it your "personal responsibility". Although the government may not always use your money wisely, they are the only group that can take care of huge problems like hurricanes and grinding poverty. While it may seem like a waste of money to you, they'll be the first to step up when a natural disaster hits your neighborhood. And there is nowhere in this country that is invulnerable to some sort of natural disaster.
I'll finish by stating that WE need to be careful of surrendering our liberties, freedoms, and responsibilities to a state that may or may not (as we've seen time and again) be qualified to take on those responsibilities.
I couldn't agree more.
All these changes are being done in the name of keeping me safe from terrirists supposedly. But no one has ever told me the chances of being killed/injured was before the changes and now after them. The chance was so tiny before the changes and now I suspect the chance is even higher with the way Britain and the US are now targeting specific groups and further alienating those who apparently want to harm us. And it is the old problem of how do you prove a negative. You can't say since another 9/11 hasn't happened the changes must be working. Everytime something does happen such as the underground bombings the people who want to control us simply say obviously the new laws weren't enough so we better toughen them up. Then we'll be safe. We have a famous set of advertising billboards down here in NZ - "Yeah, right".
Hmm .. you are being hostile to this nations culture of being accepting of immigration and welcoming to immigrants.
Perhaps you should emigrate?
I think that it is extremely important to extend our public school system to ensure that every American of every social class can afford a quality college education. This is the primary form of wealth redistribution that I speak of. Personally, I think that affirmative action is a crutch that gets in the way of this goal and so I think it needs to go. The reason for both positions are the same.
30 years ago, when affirmative action was still new, the US economy was primarily a manufacturing economy, and the separation between white and blue collar workers was often one of education. Trying to help stir up the pot made sense at the time in terms of building a just social system.
However, today the economy is different. The use is leaking manufacturing jobs to just about everywhere in the world, and those that are left are increasingly automated, and our economy is now a tech economy. The difference between an entry level job and a career is now the difference of education, and our economy needs a highly educated work force. Merely saying "we want people to have the same shot at an education regardless of race" is counterproductive here because we should be saying "We want *everyone* to have the opportunity to have a quality education." This is the only way our economy will continue to grow.
That is what's happening to the US. You have to do it backwards, so that you afford people choice of the laws while maintaining citizenship.
I am all for federalism but I think that there need to be limits and I think that the federal government needs to have some authority to handle common problems, such as air pollution. I think that there needs to be a mechanism in place for the states to work together to come up with solutions to these non-local problems. These powers were originally laid out in the Constitution, but since the industrial revolution a hundred years later, we need additional powers. These powers should include some environmental regulatory powers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If I were poor and worked my ass off for decades, had a house but no car. If I lived paycheck to paycheck. All of my stuff in that house with no way to take it with me. I think I would stay with my house and stuff becuase having nothing and having to work from scratch for decades would not be worth it to me.
The majority of voting voters in the US have swallowed this. Please, UK, don't let it happen again.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
You're quoting a man who introduced laws restricting the reporting of the press and outlawed disloyal talk.
Not that I disagree with what you've quoted however. I just think that if you know how Pitt developed later in his political life, it provides a nice example of how you should value what is said over who has said it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
during the 200/2001 holiday season I was goin thru europe, back from Paris to Utrech but at one stop the train was delayed.
after about 10 minutes they announced that a bomb had been reported to be on the tracks ahead. That they were waiting for it to be checked out and cleared.
A few minutes later we left, but instead of going first thru Utrech we looped aound Amsterdam and back down.
And before we pulled into Amsterdam they announced that a bomb was found and defused.
The event was never reported to the news media, but the lady I was with, having herself grownup in the Netherlands, explained to me what she believed to be the bombers motive.
It seems the Dutch Governmet made some sort of land promise to some group of people in another country in exchange for their help during World War II. The Dutch Government reniged on the deal.
She also explained to me that the law against such a wrong is as such:
To place a bomb and not report it, if people are injured or die and you get caught, its the death sentence, no if ands or buts about it.
But if you report it in a timely manner and people still get injured or killed the worse you can get is life.
This I understand is something of public knowledge.
The points are:
You do others wrong, then don't NOT expect Revenge. So don't do others wrong!
And law should support efforts to make a statement, when it is regarding a wrong. But two wrongs don't make it right.
BTW, effort was made to report the Olympic park in atlanta 1996, but that effort fell thru due to technical difficulties in communication. Specificall the forgetting to give the Park an Actual Address that the new Police dispatch software required before sending the dispatch.
It fell back on the old walkie talkies radios with the limited number of authories who had them and could receive the dispatch.
Eric Rudolph said he was sorry for that bombing, but not the abortion clinic bombings.... And his logic was what "kill those who kill?" Maybe he should have applied that to himself...away from others.
No civil or human rights should ever be suppressed.
There is a city in Georgia USA that to live there you must own a gun. Openly displaying them is not a problem wit the law, as its a bit encouraged.
That city, though small, as a low crime rate, perhaps the lowest in the country.
Given teh amount of money budgeted for the militaries of the world, it would only take 1/3 of that to genuinely and in proper means, honestly address the real problems in the world (this has been researched).
Remove the reasons for revenge and you shall have peace without a sacrificing of human and civil rights..
A recent article in the Economist pointed out the similarities of the Jihadists, IRA, and anarchist.
Bomb throwers one and all. 100 years ago the same curtailment of freedom was deemed as neccessary to control them. It didn't seem to do much. ditto IRA. But it will work this time , right?
items; No politician will say "there is nothing he can do".
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
I see why you want public education, but I don't like the way it seems you are proposing it. I definitely don't think it should be Federal. If you mean to have local governments do most of it, then you would have my support.
We certainly agree about affirmative action. I've always held that it was just more discrimination. It needs to be abolished. If we're going to do public education, then there can be no limitations or encouragments on who can have it; it needs to be all or none. This is coming from an equal rights stance, so that is in addition to what you said about the economic necessity.
Pollution controls are for something that effects more than just the state the pollution is created. In that regard, it is appropriate at the Federal level. This is one of a small number of things that it is true for. Another example would be the spectrum allocation function that the FCC serves. I think we agree on this one, too!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
"People should not be afraid of their government, government should be afraid of its people." Never thought I would receive wisdom from a comic book.
or Kerry; do you really think his administration would have behaved differently? Especially given that they'd have essentially the same senate, congress, and supreme court to deal with? Guantanamo Bay is the fault of every citizen who was stupid enough to fall into the two-party trap.
It just seems like an excuse for the government to do some things that they've always wanted to do, just like 9/11. Suddenly we're expected to give up rights- in spite of a resolution to stay strong in the face of terrorism.
Read my blog entry on eminent domain.
Seastead this.
First let me give you my perspective on Israel.
For the record.... I think you have to step back from these pronouncements by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (Fatah and Tanzim have generally not made these types of anouncements). I think that every reasonable poll has shown that the Palestinain people as a whole do not endorse such views.
Tanzim is the militant organization with the most support simply because they limit their attacks to settlements and the IDF. The goal should be to strengthen their support at the expense of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Fatah is somewhere in the middle. They claim that this is a dispute about land, resources, and borders, but they orchestrate bombings inside the green line. Many Palestinians feel that they go too far. But those that support them are largely fed up with the lack of progress from (arguably legitimate) military resistance from Tanzim.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad make bold pronouncements, but their only real support comes either from the political fringes or from their charitable works (not that the latter excuses their violations of international humanitarian law, however).
Until the Arab world is willing to accept that Israel exists (in some shape or form), and control those that refuse to accept it, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
What Arab World are we talking about? Egypt? Jordan? They have full diplomatic relations with Israel. While Turkey is not Arab, they have full diplomatic relations with Israel. While Pakistan is not Arab, they have just begun high-level discussions with Israel.
If by the Arab World, you mean Islamic Jihad and Hamas, then I would reply that the American people (by which I mean Pat Robertson) have not come to accept the right of the Venezuelan people to elect who they choose...
Now as to Israel's existance. There is nobody who can look at the current demographic data and conclude that Israel will cease to be a predominantly Jewish state sometime this century. The Arab citizens of that country are not well integrated, they are often impoverished, and like most impoverished ethnic groups in other countries, they have a high birth rate. Within 10 years, it is estimated that more Arabs will live west of the Jordan than Jews, and if we consider current demographic trends, within 40 years, the majority of the citizens of Israel will be Arab. Absent the illegal options of genecide or transfer, there is no way that Israel will exist as a Jewish state in 40 years.
BTW, most of my harsh critism of the Israeli government should be understood to be directed at the executive branch. In the legislative branch, things are far more complex. And the Judicial branch has tended to be fairly decent. And there is a certain influential (though hardly mainstream) influence from such parties as the National Religious Party (and Effe Eitam) which seems to sponsor state terrorism in both the legislative and the executive branches, but these have been largely been absent from the judiciary.
Now for the connection with Terrorism.
I am reminded of an incident when the IDF was demolishing large portions of the Jenin refugee camp. Well, in Northern Ireland, the Republicans (PIRA, Sinn Fein, and friends) decided that they identified with the Palestinains and began to fly Palestinian flags at a time when the international community was condemning Israel for their heavy-handed tactics (which BTW, included illegally using Internation Committee for the Red Cross employees as human shields). This turned out to be a major political win for them because the images of the images of the destruction in Jenin resolated with a population who saw themselves as having lived under British occupation for centuries.
If Israel is allowed to do whatever they want in violation of every standard of International Humanitarian Law, then our alliance with Israel places us at the receiving end of the outrage that inevitably results. This doesn't mean that Israel should not be allowed to defend the
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes you should have financial liberty, but liberty comes at a price, and profit should be a privilege and not something people feel they are entitlted to by birth. Too many people have an sense of entitlement to profit.
I suppose the ability to profit, but I think we have to profit in ways which are sustainable. We should focus on corporate responsibility, fiscal responsibility in government, and financial responsibility for consumers. We all must be responsible as humans.
This means there needs to be some rules, and no I do not think we have to give up civil liberties. Most of the time people give up civil liberties to the nanny state along with their financial liberties because both are connected. If you lose freedom of speech in some cases you lose the freedom to profit off your speech. If you lose your civil rights then the result in the long term becomes a monarchy.
If this is going to be the case, get rich now while you still can and prepare for lords and surfs, because we are headed straight for the dark ages.
for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither." -Thomas Jefferson
I see why you want public education, but I don't like the way it seems you are proposing it. I definitely don't think it should be Federal. If you mean to have local governments do most of it, then you would have my support.
I never said it had to be federal. I just think that it is important to really look at doing.
Unfortunately, whatever party is in power seems to think that the Federal Governemnt should be expanded to meet their objectives. I don't see any hope for reversing this trend.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
In the USA we are losing our constitution as well. The constitution is a piece of paper which has the value of toilet tissue. The real constitution is money.
A perfect example can be found here U.S. Can Confine Citizens Without Charges, Court Rules
Face it, the USA and the UK are a monarchy, or at least a monarchy of sorts. They always have been, voting never had anything to do with who wins or loses elections except perhaps on the local levels. He who controls the voting machine controls the elections, he who controls the money controls the voting machines, and the banks control the money.
If you want freedom, become a banker, become a stock broker, major in economics or business, get your MBA, and join the workforce. If you want to be a surf or a peasant, then keep losing your job and looking for new ones every few years.
Times are changing, and civil liberties are dead, accept it or move to another country.
The price of eternal vigilance is half an hour of your time, a newspaper, and pen and paper. If you are British, please, please, write to your local MP. Do it now. Then write to MI5, and 10 Downing Street.
Again, humans have blithely missed the obvious (though long-term) solution. Avoid foreign and domestic policies which create terrorists in the first place.
The US providing unquestioned financial and weapons support to Isreal sure isn't making the nearby countries like us very much. The Iraq War has undoubtedly created thousands of America-hating militants who otherwise wouldn't hate us.
If we would just stay out of people's business, perhaps they wouldn't have a reason to attack us.
Wait, cancel all that, I forgot, that would mean admitting a mistake, something that we're unable to do.
Unless you have the millions required to hire body guards to protect your freedoms, you arent free. Nothing stops the government from sending in the troops to take all your property and kicking you out of your home.
Now I admit, you can buy your freedom and money does buy freedom, but how many of us here at Slashdot are millionaires who can buy freedom? Are you?
Property rights are fine if you can actually afford the property and afford the manpower to protect that property using the private sector. You will not be able to rely on the public sector for anything. Every man/woman/child for his or herself, it's social darwinism, get used to it.
-- Benjamin Franklin
I believe that these words ring true today and should be considered before blindly giving up any freedom.
In the united states, we have witnessed the government take away our freedoms in the name of protecting us from terrorism. We've spent billions of dollars on securing ourselves; setting up organizations to protect us and rescue us from tragedy and evil doers. Yet, after spending all of this money and losing our personal liberties, we're at a point where we're no better off than we were before. In fact, we've gone further down the rabbit hole and are in a worse place than where we started. A case example is the ineffective response to a national tragedy (ie Katrina). What use was the tax payers' money put to?
It certainly didn't help us to help the people in NOLA within a reasonable time frame.
"Speaking of "personal responsibility"... While you may not like giving money to the federal government, you should consider it your "personal responsibility". Although the government may not always use your money wisely, they are the only group that can take care of huge problems like hurricanes and grinding poverty. While it may seem like a waste of money to you, they'll be the first to step up when a natural disaster hits your neighborhood. And there is nowhere in this country that is invulnerable to some sort of natural disaster."
I call bullshit. From what I've heard of the federal government's reaction, the people of New Orleans would have been better off if the government had just stepped aside and let everyone else do the work. The only government agency that appears to be doing any good is the national guard which resembles more of a state militia than a standing milititary in organization anyway. All I've heard about government agency's are case's of them getting in the way. I would wager the non-government relief efforts would have been even more effective if FEMA hadn't blocked all media coverage to cover their asses. Instead of maximizing sympathy, empathy, and Charity through graphic visuals of the devastation, FEMA is trying to minimize outrage by keeping a lid on the images of what resulted because of their incompetence. If a hurricane hits my community, I'll put my money on anyone but the government being the first to respond.
Do you know how far a person can walk in a few days, carrying food and water ? Far enough to escape a hurricane ? Especially a sick or elderly person ?
I don't, so if I was threatened by a hurricane and had to either escape by foot or stay in my home, I'd spend the days fortifying my home as best I could, rather than risk being caught in the open.
Your livelihood, no matter what it is, depends on the government maintaining order and enforcing laws, to keep all those poor from simply killing you and looting your corpse. You depend on the government for your very survival, so don't berate others for doing the same.
There is something strange here. You claim that these people are capable of taking care of themselves. You also claim that they die when the state fails to help them. Why would they die without help if they didn't need it in the first place ? If you die when deprived of something, then you obviously needed it...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Taxes feed authoritarian governments. Without taxes of some sort a state has no way to get resources. Activist governments need power and resources to be activist. That power and those resources will eventually be used against the people, and the activist, progressive government will turn into an authoritarian one. Just remember: Nazi stands for "National Socialist.
And just how the hell do you define "financial parity"? Sounds like a way to take from the successful and give to the losers. Yeah, that'll work. Let's create a whole population of people raised under a program of nothing but disincentives for success.
And if all you want to do is "tax the rich", eventually you will wind up catagorized as "rich" by someone. FWIW, I've never seen a poor person give anyone a job.
The relationship between the US and Israel is completly strange, even to the point where the US Government will put Israeli interests ahead of those of US Citizens.
What Israeli interests? These policies aren't getting them any security either, you know....
I actually think that a big part of it is that there are those who support Israel for reasons which are fundamentally antisemitic. I.e. that the Second Coming will occur and the Jews who don't convert will be destroyed......
Now, there is something you need to understand about Israeli politics. Antisemitism is no bar to an alliance with Israel or the admiration of influential Israelis. Distant antisemites are often seen as potential friends as long as they don't get too close. Consider for a moment the relationship between Yitzak Shameer and the ELHI brotherhood on one hand and the Axis powers of WWII on the other.
The ELHI brotherhood sought to achieve independence for Israel from Britain and establish a dictatorial system. Their literature was full of propaganda regarding how Churchill was the real danger to the Jews, and that Hitler might claim to hate Jews but was really harmless. They even went so far as to praise the ghettoisation of the Jews in Warsaw as the beginnings of Jewish self-governance.
This admiration reached its peak when, after Italy ceased to be a major contender in North Africa, the ELHI brotherhood began to petition the Third Reich for an alliance against the British (via their embassy in Beiruit). These contacts continued through the better part of 1942.
How did the Israelis punish Shameer (a senior leader in the ELHI brotherhood at the time) for his involvement in trying to aid the Nazis? Some 40 years later, they elected him Prime Minister of Israel....
That should say something about Israeli politics...
Apply this to Ariel Sharon and the settlement movement and you will see odd similarities.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The right of an unarmed Brazillian man (whose only crime was to jump a turnstile in a subway) to not be shot to death by UK police was already "eroded" about six weeks ago.
It's not the governments job to protect your civil rights. It's your job to protect your civil rights. It always WAS your job to protect your civil rights. If your government does not respect your civil rights its because you do not respect your civil rights. You are your government, you bought and paid to put these people in office. It was your corporations who funded them, it was your businesses who decided they don't want to protect the rights of the middle class. If you don't like this, then start your own businesses, and compete in proper forum, because thats how changes are really made.
Voting is just a way to convince the middle class that they have the power. In reality, your boss controls who you vote for, your boss controls your salary, your boss controls if you have healthcare or not, your boss controls when you can retire, your boss controls your life until you decide to be your own boss its always going to be this way.
People want others to rule over them and tell them how to live their lives. If people did not want this then people would by the millions be starting their own businesses. If you dislike your boss, choose another or become one yourself. The government only serves the interest of greater society. The top 1% of society decides on the laws because the top 1% of society creates all the jobs. If you disagree with their laws in the least you'll lose your job or even put in jail on some trivial charges.
If you want to defend yourself, get rich while you still have time, otherwise enjoy being a peasant.
of course she would say that.
This is getting out of hand.
Terrorism is influencing the actions of a people through fear and terror.
I consider losing my civil rights to be something which I fear and I would consider an attempt to usurp my civil rights as terrorization.
The head of MI5 is proposing that in order to protect the people from terrorists, the government must terrorize its populace? Seriously, pardon my french here, but what the hell kind of crazy fucked-up shit is that?
I think Benjamin Franklin put it best, nearly 250 years ago: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
The state government should control all the laws of the state and handle the response. Why would you expect or even want the feds to come in and declare martial law?
It's one thing to have police officers you know, from your community telling you to get out of your house, its another thing to have federal officers who who knows where and soldiers from Iraq telling you to go into a shelter or a dome somewhere.
Just shut down immigration and provide incentives for those hostile to the nation's culture to emigrate. This is where eminent domain can be used with justification.
.. because there are still plenty of things people can disagree on .. health care, economics .. etc. And then there will still be criminals .. I mean look at the amount of crime in Romania and former soviet countries ..white people can do crime as well. So then, the remaining 51% will find reason to disagree with each other.
.. in its "survival of the culturally advanced" pursuit the society has not benefitted from diversity of ideas and thoughts, not to mention division of labor, and so ultimately the one person left will have a pretty crappy quality of life.
.. what happened to the anti immigrant and/or racist candidates?
Seems the point of this "solution" of yours is to preserve civilization and an order of things? Since you seem to believe in eminent domain, you are of the view that a government or people can decide to take actions against individuals or entire classes of people, regardless of the suffering inflicted, in order to advance their own objectives?
Ok, you can get rid of 49% of the people this way in one cycle, applying your "majority rights first" rule.
Unfortunately, getting rid of those hostile to the culture hasn't addressed the root cause
So then you will need to do another "eminent domain" solution.
Over and over.
Until finally there are two or three people left.
Also, to borrow an argument for those who don't advocate treating people with genetic illnesses for the sake of evolutionary benefit to humans,
Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for you), a majority of people believe in the pursuit of happiness and friendship rather than diabolical schemes to rid themselves of people different than themselves. Last I checked both Kerry and Bush believed in legal immigration and they both got a lot of votes
When you give up freedom you also give up power. You are giving power to the government to protect you from the power of the terrorists. This has nothing to do with safety, its a power transfer and it should be obvious to anyone with a brain or a college education.
If you give all your money to the neighborhood bully, or to the police officer, the result is the same. You are giving all of your money to somone else.
What people should be asking for is a tax cut. Tax cuts = more security. Tax cuts = financial liberty. Tax cuts will allow private citizens, corporations, and families to protect themselves. Tax cuts will allow you to hire your own politicians and to organize your own local governments to protect your local community from terrorism. It's impossible to use the government to protect yourself from terrorism.
Look, the mafia has existed for thousands of years in various forms. Many times people would think that if they just had more police officers they'd catch the mafia criminal, or the gang kingpin etc. You can only catch the stupid criminal with the police, because the really smart criminals will simply pay off the police officers, or worse become police officers themselves.
So this entire debate about freedom or security is really a debate about freedom from security. Do we want to make ourselves less free while also making ourselves less secure?
If you want to make yourself more secure, join the police force and use your badge as protection, otherwise you won't be more secure unless you have money to hire police officers.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So why not stop TODAY?
You defeat stupid idealism with BETTER ideas not by giving up on rights and freedoms that millions have died to protect.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller (MI5 boss) is supposed to be protecting UK society. After what she has said, she should be fired, arrested and prosecuted for treason.
For good measure there are a couple of others in the UK government who seem to think that 1984 is a text book on good government and might benefit from a few years in an actual jail.
"it provides a nice example of how you should value what is said over who has said it."
Indeed it is. Ideas can be much more important than the people who express them. I like the GP's quote. I think it's an important message, nomatter who uttered it.
Well, that wasn't always the prevalent attitude on your side of the atlantic. Elsewise, you'd still be ruled from London.
And somehome I doubt it's the prevalent attitude now.
Tell me, what is it with this corporate fataism? You know the sort of thing:
It's tempting to dismiss it as astroturf, but that is too way easy. So, what is it with posters like you that you're so keep to sacrifice your (and everyone else's) liberty? Is it some weird psychosexual kink?I really want to know.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
If I have to choose between being safe or being free; I chose to be free. Continual erosion of our civil liberties leads us towards a police state, which is far more frightening than any terrorist organisation. If you divide the number of civilians killed by terrorists by the number of civilians killed governments, you get virtually zero. Yet we are supposed to be afraid of terrorists, not governments. That has to be the biggest propaganda coup in history.
Of course it is fashionable to talk about individual rights and to rally against the state with regards to the "War on Terror", but for most people it is pure hipocracy.
Most people who hate the "War on Terror" agree with just about every other authoritarian policy modern governments take... whether it is economic central planning, "hate speech" laws or "decentcy laws", campaign finance reform, gun control, public schooling, national health care, whatever...
The idea that citicens must give up their individual rights and hand over power to the state in order to bring collective security and safety is the fundamental ideal of collectivism and socialism. How is the government taking your money by force, and then taking all individual choice out of healthcare and giving it to the state, somehow different that the basic ideals of the "War on Terror"? If you support government survailence and control of speech to protect people from being "offended", then how can you really be upset if the government curtails liberties to protect people from being blown up? Why were leftist giddy and cheering when the ATF blows up a church with 100 kids inside inside because "they might have guns", but are outraged when they are searched at an airport. The think Castro is the greatest guy in the world, even though nothing in the Patroit Act or the "War on Terror" even matches the police state of Cuba.
Don't get me wrong. I am not defending the police state... but then again, I am not a socialist or collectivist. I beleive individual rights are more important that collective safety. So it is consistant with my worldview. But socialists and collectivists need to realize that the police state is the ultimate outcome of their ideology.
some more rights would have to be eroded. I mean, if your farmland was eroding as fast as your civil rights, you Brits would be suffering a nationwide famine right now.
... hypocritical.
Not that I'm being critical of you, please understand. Given what we've gotten ourselves into here in the United States, that would be
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Would it make you feel better if he were just summarily executed for high treason?
...I took out Canadian citizenship. Sure Canada has it's own problems and it's own civil libertie erosions but it's not as bad as the UK and you can g hide in the mountains without too much trouble. Seriously, the general population needs to start taking an interest in their own government or everybodies going to get royally screwed.
Replace "national guard" (who didn't show up for days) with "Coast Guard" (who were in place almost immediately after the storm had passed, rescuing people), and I'll agree with you.
Look, have a register. If you're innocent, or a terrorist, sign to say they can't monitor you. They'll clearly only monitor people who've said they don't want to be monitored so... hang on...
No, right... if you don't want to be monitored, say you do. They'll only monitor people who don't want to be monitored, because they'll want to avoid stuff, unless they realise that they won't monitor people who don't care about being monitored, so... ooo - hang on...
No, right... say you want to be monitored when you don't, then use a silly voice... they'll only monitor silly voiced people who want to be monitored without a silly voice but with a spoon-shaped microphone and a... oh, bugger...
England already has enough video surveillance to record an
individual hundreds of times per excursion, disarmed every
law abiding subject and tagged automobile licenses with RFID.
The English government can add restrictions any time they
want. There is no way for the subjects to fight back.
Civil rights and democracy are only at stake when something in the process goes wrong. Normally, it's the Information Agencies that write the law when it comes to terrorism or international espionage.
Recently, there was a stir in the Netherland about the pakistan atomic spy "Khan" (or something) who got all his knowledge from Urenco in the Netherlands. He walked freely, because the CIA wanting him to walk. Then much later, the assistent of court in Amsterdam found out that all the records about him were gone. Just vanished.
He used the information in creating the pakistan atomic bomb. He is believed to have sold his knowledge to Iran and North-Korea. The CIA thought it would be better to let him do his job, so that is what happened. Against all the aplicable international and national laws.
Only when something gets into a civil court, those "civil rights" can kill the prosecution. Normally, the civil court wouldn't be involved at all. MI-5 might just be sharpening their civil knives with this one.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
As usual, when you listen to "intelligence" and law "enforcement" guys, all you hear is various levels of "let's jail everyone, for their own good".
They've already lost the right not to be shot eight times in the head (well OK they missed once)) while being restrained by police, so does it matter?
Lets review the neocon rhetoric, shall we:
- "The terrorists hate our freedoms."
- "We will not bow down to terrorism."
- "You must give up your rights to stop terrorism."
Basic incompatible propositions. Seriously, someone needs to teach these idiots how to think. (If they can't even think through their lies and spin properly, what chance do they have of actually resolving the real root causes terrorism.)I think you made a good point, will the mods browse this low?
And suspended habeas corpus too, out of "necessity" of war with the French.
I'm reminded of something my uncle told me, which was "don't trust anyone in government, particularly the police". What made his words much more compelling was the fact that he spent many, many years of his life serving as a U.S. Marshal.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I am not at all suprised with this statement, as fear is an excellent way to gain power. My only statement is that I am now going to have to change my original idea of moving from the corrupt America to England, and now seeing these last few years that it is no better, I am considering New Zeland. Maybe Canada.
Any suggestions?
The hysteria about terrorism just makes no sense to me. Even if the security services were 100% effective and stopped every terrorist attack, the risk of me (and every other citizen in Britain or the USA) dying of non-disease or age-related causes in the next year would be virtually unchanged.
AFAICS, the terrorists have already won in the UK: our freedoms are being eroded, our free society is weakening, Muslims are coming under increased attack. FFS, dark-skinned people with backpacks are being treated like terrorists on the Tube by other passengers. What happened to tolerance and the stiff upper lip?
Would it make you feel better if he were just summarily executed for high treason?
You mean like Jean Charles de Menezes in the UK?
No it wouldn't make me feel better. But it is not that much worse than holding someone indefinitely in prison without the liberties that our Constitution guarantees will not be infringed upon.
I am *very* concerned about this ruling and how it could effectively turn our country into a military dictatorship. I am watching the Supreme Court appeal very closely.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"New Orleans is a large city. You could easily walk 5 miles and still be in... New Orleans. You could walk 20 miles and be in the suburbs of New Orleans. Either way, you'd be screwed since you'd be out in the open with a hurricane on the way!"
Except there was morethan ample warning, allowing for nearly THREE DAYS of time to evacuate. Don't act like this storm came as a surprise.
"That also doesn't address the elderly, sick, and families with children. Heaven knows they aren't walking anywhere in the 90-100 degree heat."
Except we're discussing the poor, not the elderly or invalid. Stop constructing fake arguments and address the point.
Those people who really tried to get out before the storm did so easily. Those who stayed are looking for someone to blame other than themselves, but there isn't anyone. They had plenty of warning, they just chose to ignore it.
From the referenced blog entry on eminent domain:
Thursday, June 23, 2005
SCOTUS Eminent Domain Decision Subtly Revolutionizes Geopolitics
The Washington Post reports that:
Cities may bulldoze people's homes to make way for shopping malls or other private development, a divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday (Kelo v. New London), giving local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue.
Aside from the fact that it is big news anytime the Federal government forgoes a chance to wrest power from localities, this particular ruling has subtle but profound geopolitical ramifications. There is a fundamental tension in geopolitics between two competing principles:
1. Self-determination vs
2. Territorial integrity
Recent geopolitical fashion, driven largely by the US Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, has subordinated self-determination to territorial integrity. Specifically, territorial boundaries may not be changed in service of self-determination of minority groups or even majority groups. Self-determination has been limited to mean the ability of residents of a territory, whatever their background, beliefs or preferences, to impose their will on other residents of that territory. To address the objection that this results in tyranny, a long, ambiguous and, in practice, selectively enforced list of "human rights" has been declared by the United Nations -- rights that are supposed to prevent tyranny. Part of the rhetoric for this sort of territorial integrity is the prevention of forced migrations.
By allowing eminent domain compensation to eject residents from their homes in service of other private uses, Kelo et al v. City of New London states that civil authorities may find it necessary to force the migration, with just compensation, of some of their private citizens, for the benefit of other private citizens, so long as the greater public good is served.
The logical consequence of this is that pressure will build allow changes in borders to support the self-determination of displaced peoples. If this happens, it will dramatically reshape geopolitics for the better since self-determination will no longer be an empty phrase hiding tyranny of the majority beneath a sophistic laundry-lists of so-called "human rights" -- territorial boundaries will be changed to uphold self-determination of those displaced with just compensation, as well as those who stay.
Seastead this.
Nice straw man.
Nobody is proposing not arresting terrorists. They are proposing that sacrificing the hard-won human rights that are the foundation of Western society in order to fight a fairly small threat is not a good idea. Terrorists are not going to destroy our free society - hysteria might.
Say, to carry on your example, somebody proposed that in order to protect children from cannibals, the police should be allowed to arrest and detain indefinitely anyone they think might be a cannibal.
"...allowing for nearly THREE DAYS TIME"
As it takes the average person over two hours to walk only 6 miles, I highly doubt any person is could have walked far enough away from New Orleans to escape the Hurricane.
"Except we're discussing the poor, not the elderly or invalid."
Onto the elderly and families w/ children, a majority of the elderly and families w/ children were poor. Yes, they were poor.
The poor are not just a bunch of men and women who don't work. They are also people whose jobs do not pay enough. They are working single parents supporting kids. They are elderly who are supported by the good nature and pocketbooks of their children.
All your post says is that you are ignorant of the diversity of the poor, and you are a
blame-the-victim type.
"You are an idiot."
Yup. That's it right there, the typical Neocon response: namecalling. No counter-argument, no facts, just abuse. I mean really, what's the point of even bothering to try to talk to you people?
Being a Muslim effectively excludes any loyalty to the US, regardless of any delusion said Muslim may have otherwise. That is why people like myself want them incarcerated, killed, expelled, and purged by the creation and enforcement of appropriate laws.
Ok you are technically mostly correct in your post, however you seem to overlook one thing.
In order to affect change via democracy at least 51% of the population must be intelligent enough to vote so as to actually affect that change.
My experience of my fellow human beings does *not* support this as a realistic possibility.
Most people, well over the 51% they require, are sufficiently docile, sheeplike suckers that they actually believe the advertising in the media which very effectively instructs them on how to spend their vote-money.
If the 'collective media' wanted to direct the vote one way or another, they could.
What we see happening, however, is increasing numbers of elections being almost dead heats. The elected governments look increasingly weak. Weak government helps oh lets see now, corporations?
As things stand, voting by intelligent people who actually think about the issues is so ineffectual that there have to be better ways to affect change in the system.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Many peoples/ethnic groups in the world are displaced and are fighting for homelands .. their "host" countries refuse to provide it.
.. you're claiming to have found a valid excuse for moving people? You think it's new? The world has had many many of these tried. Stalin tried it with efficiency with people such as the Chechens (that worked out well didnt it). And right here .. "Trail of Tears" ring a bell? Clearly, people have different opinions as to what "just compensation" is.
..have you discarded the concept of human rights? You dont believe every human has them?
Also a lot secessionist wars are fought in various countries currently by ethnic groups claiming they want self determinancy (Kurds in Iraq is one example). I don't get it
Forced migration is plain evil, and wrong. How do you deal with the situation of one person in one group being friends with or married to a person of another group (who is being forced to leave)?
You seem to lack a basic fundamental understanding of human nature, and your ultimate objectives seem to be useless. Also, and I hate to go ad hominem here, you wreak of being a racist. Another question i have is
Being a Muslim effectively excludes any loyalty to the US, regardless of any delusion said Muslim may have otherwise. That is why people like myself want them incarcerated, killed, expelled, and purged by the creation and enforcement of appropriate laws.
Come to think of it, you are right. Who needs an antiquated set of civil liberties (freedom of religion, speech, habeas corpus, trial by jury) and so forth when we have this new threat. Why not just include summary execution of political opponents while we are at it?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hundreds of them. Sitting in New Orleans. Unused to evacuate the city.
According to the State of Louisiana's Emergency Operations Plan:
5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.
Think those poor folks left behind in New Orleans are going to be stupid enough to vote for Nagin and that dumbass governor again?
Your examples are kind of frightening tradeoffs.
Sure if most people had lethal weapons handy all the time, the occasional shocking anomaly of a single person or small group of people killing many people because no one was equipped to stop them.
However, at the same time, the huge number of altercations that given a handly lethal weapon would become homicide would take a horrid turn for the worse. Even mild fear that normally pass without incident may result in violent escalation from people getting weapons ready, 'just in case'.
The sad truth is that, by large, individual people just can't be relied upon to handle overtly lethal weapons responsibly. If you compare the number of people killed in Columbine and 9/11 circumstances to people killed in violent altercations where lethal weapons were convenient in the heat of the moment, by far people should be more cautious of omnipresent weapons.
9/11 happened not because the terrorists were able to have particularly lethal weapons and that the passengers were ill-equipped to handle them. It happened because the people aboard the plane had no idea of the plan or the stakes, or even the possibility of the plane being used on a suicide mission. Before then, people hijacking planes were seeking to use them to get themselves to safety. With that perceived plan in mind, the most safe plan was to acquiesce to their demands. Same situation occurs today, some passenger/passengers will react with less conservative responses and a plane full of people unarmed will not let a handful of blade-wielding people succeed anymore.
Columbine happened, in part, due to ready availibity of firearms. If they had been only able to acquire, say, knives, they would've accomplished a much less sever atrocity. Granted, people determined in such a way to commit such an atrocity may not have been stopped by gun control laws, but in acquiring them they might have been caught earlier. I'm not saying they obtained the firearms legally, just that they legally got much closer to them and made them more accessible than they might have otherwise been with much less visibility to law enforcement agencies.
Anyway, the reduction in freedoms as spelled out in the PATRIOT act and in the UK are particularly intrusive and ineffective against the puported target, so your point is in general valid. It is just that encouraging universal lethal wepon proliferation is not a net good idea for ensuring better security.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There was an amendment to the Constitution, #13 (not to be confused with the slavery one that passed), that didn't allow anyone with a royal title to be in the U.S. government. This included Esq., a title given to...lawyers! Too bad it didn't pass. I can count on one hand the number of Senators that aren't lawyers.
> pink flamingos on their lawns, I can prevent it by living on 100 acres away from nutcases.
And if you can't afford 100 acres?
If your system only works for the rich, it's not a very useful system.
> Before I enter into an agreement with you, I'll want a contract. We'd
> agree on an arbitration system and a neutral mediator. Why is government needed?
Enforcement.
If we enter into a contract, agree on Bob the Arbitrator, and then I break the contract and tell you and Bob to go screw yourselves, what do you do?
What do you do if I'm a huge company, and effectively beyond the reach of your local volunteer police force? Or just willing to shoot you all and cover everything up? (Something that has been happening with some regularity to Amazonian tribes in remote, relatively lawless regions.)
Somebody is always the biggest, toughest group around, able to enforce their will by sheer power. Isn't it better if that (inevitable) ruler is one who needs to show at least the pretense of working for the good of the people, rather than it being an out-right dictatorship?
Why keep on enacting laws when we already have more than we can break. -Unknown
Slashdot = Sarcasm
You know, there comes a time when you have to say Give me Liberty or Give me Death.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
We've been bent over here in the USA by our government and that big government dick is heading straight for our asses...sad part being that most people don't even see it coming or care
FDR took away more Freedoms than any Repub ever thought about.
If americans can infiltrate and spy on the most hardcore commy nations in the 70s with uber control and draconian laws. Then how can they honestly expect a 'safe' society if they make our own countries like the 70s soviet days.
You cannot, and they know it, they just are faking it all because they feel helpless and it feels good to pretend to do something. Atleast it keeps em in the job.
I rather live in slight fear than in total control like a 5 year old.
Where are the aliens to take over earth when you need em. Give us a nano virus that can kill any one that is psycho/powerhungry/insane.
The paranoid will not survive, they will KILL all the people that are NOT paranoid then they will kill each other.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
When you get a normal home mortgage loan at your bank, they don't have that full amount just sitting there waiting for you to borrow it. It is nothing like if your neighbor wants to borrow your lawnmower, or even 100$ cash from you. They only have a small fraction of it to loan you, and you will not ever see any suitcase of cash. Most of that "loan" they create out of thin air (follow the economic food chain upstream to find that out), then you pay interest on this amount that was just data entried into existence.
Really nice deal for those guys! Don't you wish you could just create money out of thin air and loan it at interest to people? You can't, on a small scale this is called fraud and buncoism,and you can be arrested for it, on a national scale it's "business".
That is a simplistic overview, but you can learn more about it by googling fractional reserve banking. Also google the actual historical origins of the so called "federal" reserve act and the con and scams around it.
It's a scam basically. Uberrich doods get much richer. The same guys control politics. Your vote is mostly a joke. They have decimated the dollar to the point it is worth slightly less than 2 cents of when this system first got foisted on the US people.
And check debt rates now, highest ever in our history, personal, governmental. If this scheme was so great, the dollar would be worth MORE, not less.
These chickens are soon coming home to roost, too. Fair warning if you think this system will remain viable far into the future. Because it will not, and is showing serious signs of cracking right now. All phony currency schemes in the past have eventually and utterly failed, ALL of them, because they have been based on lies, fraud and vapor.
Vendetta
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
And it can't just be me.
So by allowing "them" to you "our" words against us, "they" are basically encouraging us to make it hard to overhear.
This just makes it more difficult to "protect" by us hurting us... When everyone starts being paranoid -- for good reason.
~ Nonsanity
Extreme cluefulness.
This kind of Government over-reach is exactly why we have founded the Open Rights Group - read the detailed analysis and rebuttal of Clarke's proposal there.
Join the 800+ of us already supporting ORG by signing the pledge to fund it.
I know the obvious observation is that I seem to be confusing Habeas with due process rights.
However, Habeas depends on due process rights to have any effect at all-- the two are intertwined in a way which makes them hard to separate except to say that Habeas provides a mechanism for ensuring that the other rights are protected by initiating due process of law.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"A marshal nobility and a stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, are the only defense of a free constitution against the ambitions of princes."
Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Quoted from memory so maybe not precisely accurate.
But the sentiment holds: individual human beings in power always, always, always seek more power. No matter what they call themselves: socialist, conservative, whatever...they will always claim "exceptional circumtances".
But the circumstances are never exceptional. Are western democracies more at risk from external threats today than they were in 1953? I don't think so. So why should we grant powers that weren't available at the height of the Red Scare?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Typical public safety bureacrat. If they cant do their job it's the law's fault. She said in the article that they stopped many terrorist acts from occuring. A batter never bats a thousand, no matter how totalitarian the laws are. One thing dummies like her dont mention is the public cost of their bs. But then why should they worry? It's not their money "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state."- Touch of Evil by Orson Welles
And It's Government-Approved as well! How swell.
The guy in Shockwave Rider was right, just "Opt Out" of society.
Tag lost or not installed.
If you let people self-assess their assets and tax them on their assets its trivial. You pay them what they demand to leave and they pay tax on what they demand to stay.
Seastead this.
And I couldn't agree more.
But at least they're honest in admitting the representation of the loss of freedom that they believe is required.
Here in the U.S., we would call rights-deprivatation "increasing liberty" or something ridiculous and pseudo-"patriotic" like that...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Complaining about how they'll miss what they don't use!
Typical!
> Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller claims in the
> future some civil rights may have to 'erode',
> in order to keep everyone in the country safe
> from terrorism.
Hmmm, well the first intelligent step you might
take to protect the REAL British people would be
to stop letting in the hordes of NON British
people into your country. If you don't let them
in they can't setup networks that allow them to
carry out their operations. But that you be oh so
non PC, and we just can't have that, now can we.
After all we just must all get on that Diversity
Love Train. The safety of the REAL British people
will just have to come second. Until you start
taking sensible and realistic steps, and cut
out the Diversity crap, I can't say I really
give a damn about your plight.
Erode this. And the horse you rode in on, bitch.
As a taxpaying citizen, if my hired protectors can't protect me without infringing my rights, then they're fucking FIRED. The People can find someone else who will. These assholes forget who they're working for. The government is for the people, by the people. Their right to govern comes from MY consent to be governed. Do the job you're given, or get the fuck out of the way for someone else who can.
This just pisses me off. Some rights must be eroded? Bullshit!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
And when you have a choice between Dictator 1 and Dictator 2 then voting just says, "hey, I agreee with your repression of me!"
I don't know where this came from, well in a sense I do as instead of voting for who I wanted to vote for in 2000 I instead specifically voted against Bush. I didn't fall into that trap in 2004 though, instead I voted for who I wanted, Michael Badnarik. There were a few others who ran as well. You can either speak up and vote or you can lay down and roll over. Personally I prefer fighting. Actually if I didn't fight I'd be dead, seeing as how the docs told my family it'd be a miracle if I lived after I was hit in an accident. A few of the therapists I saw said I lived because of stubbornness.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Right on! Mod parent up. The biggest threat
to England's (and Britain's) freedom is "hate
speech" and other "anti-hate" laws. The second
biggest threat is the large influx of non English
peoples into the country (which is why they made
critcism of immigration policy an act of racism
punishible by law).
Say what you will about the whole "judicial activist" canard, and originalism, and all that garbage. I hear a lot of fellow liberals give Scalia a hard time, but I read his dissents, and I can only conclude that this guy's on our side. We need more Scalias. (Roberts is no Scalia - unfortunately. Neither is Thomas.)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
For three decades or so, Britons stood in the shadow of IRA terrorist attacks. Did they let the IRA win by surrendering their way of life ? No. They went on with their lives as they always had, and in time it became clear, even to the IRA, that their attacks were not helping them achieve their goals.
Now the terrorists have changed. Does Britain's new generation of leaders stand up to them and refuse to sacrafice freedoms, as in the past ? No, they make compromises - big compromises - which will encourage this generation of terrorists and future ones when they realise that their attacks are making a difference.
Much as it saddens me to write this, perhaps Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job of standing up to today's breed of terrorists. In spite of all her other faults, her one strength was that she wouldn't compromise.
(Geez, I can't believe I just said something good about Maggie Thatcher).
Thats broadly true, but even in New Zealand where we have a decidedly non-duopolistic MMP system, the elections *still* come out too close to call and it can take months to form a government from the post-election mess.
That's the good thing about parliamentary governments, with it taking so long to build coalitions, that means governments have less tyme messing things up. Government is good at two things, preventing things from happening that should happen, and making things happen that shouldn't.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The SCOTUS ruling is that increasing tax revenue is justification for eminent domain exercise. If you undervalue your assets you are decreasing tax revenue and the government can simply call your bluff by buying your asset out from under you and selling it at a profit.
Seastead this.
That depends: Do you believe that the person you elect will change things for the better? If the new boss is the same as the old boss, it doesn't matter which party he represents. It's all a shell game. Americans are being similarly oppressed, yet many of the provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act were things the Clinton administration fought very hard to get, yet never managed to win. So am I now to believe that a vote for the Democrats is a vote against black bag searches? Of course it isn't. They both suck, so there's no point in voting for either of them. If the voter turnout is too low the election becomes illegitimate. The leadership looses its authority without popular consent.
The Democrats and Republicans weren't the only parties that had candidates running for offices, and I didn't vote for eithe Scary Kerry or Dubya Bush. My support went to Micheal Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate. He didn't win but he didn't get much media attention either, actually Dems and Reps did what they could to stop him from being at the debates and getting the message out. Both him and David Cobb, the Green Party candidate, were arrested when they tried to go to debates. This is a problem the LP has, getting the message out. What I'd like to see is something like the online activity for Dean in 2003/4.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Say what you will about the whole "judicial activist" canard, and originalism, and all that garbage. I hear a lot of fellow liberals give Scalia a hard time, but I read his dissents, and I can only conclude that this guy's on our side. We need more Scalias. (Roberts is no Scalia - unfortunately. Neither is Thomas.)
I actually agree with you. He gets flack for some of his views on some issues (most notably abortion). But his overall judicial philosophy is good and he has a strong sense of preserving civil liberties in general. In Hamdi, he and Stevens were alone in attempting to strike down the application of Ex Parte Quirin.
As for Thomas, he was the *only* justice in Hamdi who thought the government should be able to detain Hamdi indefinitely without a trial.
The Hamdi case is actually quite interesting. It is anyone's guess what they will do in Padilla when it gets there. One gets the impression that you had a 4-4-1 split in the court where 4 felt that Hamdi had limited Habeas rights and limited due process rights, 4 who felt that the detention was unlawful, and 1 one was willing to hand the gov't a blank check (that was Thomas) in the matter. The middle 4 eventually split 2-2 with Suiter and Ginsberg joining the plurality but stating that they did not think that the detention was legal.
In this case, we only have 8 remaining justices at the moment, and if Sandra Day O'Connor abstains, then the 4 which held that Hamdi's detention was unlawful could hold the day in Padilla, seriously weakening the precident. Furthermore it is unclear how Roberts (if he is confirmed) would vote.
I am hopeful that Padilla will be overturned, but not entirely optimistic. With two vacancies, such a complex decision could turn quite quickly. The fact remains that our remaining civil liberties are directly threatened at the moment, and we must wait to see what happens at the Supreme Court level.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Civil liberty absolutely *must* come before financial freedom. If you cannot do what you want, then you cannot do what you want with your money. Without civil liberty, the government can just take your money at whim, they can force you to prison for nothing, they can implement massive taxes and you can't do anything about it. Without civil liberty, you have no money, and you have no property.
China belies this. Financially Chinese are making more and more money but they don't have much civil liberties.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The timing on this is interesting. We currently have the regular Arms Fair running at the Excel exhibition centre in London.
This is a time when companies from all around the UK gather in London to sell weapons to countries who can't afford them so that they can keep on killing each other. It's a time when a small % of the UK population get to pay for a massive police operation that doesn't actually create any new jobs in London.
Every time this event is held, my neighborhood turns into a yellow zone. All I can see is police in their shiny yellow jackets all over the place. Cars are randomly stopped, roads are narrowed from two lanes two one so that police can inspect vehicles as they pass, and it's generally a real pain in the ass to live here for the next week.
And with this, we get the protestors. Most of these people are involved in legitimate protest against something they feel very strongly about, and they protest peacefully. Every year we have some nutjobs who take it a little too far and chain themselves to the DLR, but it's never really anything serious.
And yet the UK Terrorism act has been used to remove protestors from the event on a number of occasions now. Police abuse at the event is a common complaint, and open protest is actively discouraged with permission for certain marches / gatherings denied.
No matter what M says, we've already given up so many of our civil liberties in this country that we may as well just hand the others over and have done.
I'll tell you, the first thing I would do if they ever managed to tear the government down is find myself a nice big house owned by a libertarian and go kick him out of it and take it at gunpoint. The only thing that is keeping me from doing it right now is the government with their troops and guns.
Try it and you may not wake up. A friend's dad has a sign in the window by his door with a smoking gun that reads, "Anyone found here at night will be found here in the morning." He has, I don't know how many, but he has a bunch of guns and rifles and is an expert shot with them. He is also a light sleeper. Though I'm not much of one now I used to be a light sleeper as well and though I was an expert shot when I was in the army, as it's been many years since I shot anything I don't how good a shot I am now but I'd bet I'd pick up again if I went out target shooting like I used to. And though it's been years since I've seen any of them as I moved I used to know quite a few that were the same.
An armed populace is a safe populace.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Unfortunately, they are in the end backed by Ultima Ratio Regum... or become moot.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Yeap, central planning worked wonders for the Soviet Union. Not!!! They lived through that and had enough of it. It didn't work in China either.
Then when he asks why I did it, I can tell him that I consider one of the essential characteristics that motivates my desire to see laws protecting my fellow man is that we are all in this together and that we have a social responsibility to each other, but that because of his political views he is not a part of my society but merely a self-centered interloper no more deserving of those protections than a rock in my driveway. Then, having gotten that off my chest, I could spit on him and quickly walk away whistling a cheerful tune before the authorities arrived.
Guess, no I don't need to guess as you said it yourself that you never met a libertarian, but then you don't know about them then. More than likely if you tried that you'd find yourself spitting out your teeth, self defense is very important to libertarians.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Oh, and spitting might not be sophisticated or intellectually stimulating, but it's one of the most effective and degrading ways to communicate your utter disgust with a person to them. It's something I generally reserve for provoking an attack from someone I want to give me an excuse, but I think I'd make an exception if I met someone face to face who actually purported to believe in this idiotic selfish antisocial crap.
Let's see who's antisocialist... You, you want to spit on and hit people who've done nothing to you.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's because people like her run around like headless chicken after an attack that the terrorists are winning: they are achieving their goal of creating terror. In reality, even if we did nothing to combat terrorism, your risk of dying from a terrorist attack is still lower than your risk of dying from that truly terrifying weapon of mass destruction, the automobile.
I'd rather take a chance of 1:100000 of being blown up by a terrorist than the near certainty of having "Dame" Eliza dig around in my personal life. Her call is particularly inappropriate because when the UK government killed that innocent Brazilian, they had all the information they needed, they just mishandled it and drew the wrong conclusions from it. We have no reason to believe that the same institutions would handle other personal information more responsibly; maybe they'll start shooting everybody who makes a suspicious phone call to an Islamic country, or maybe just any country with dark skinned people?
It's not even so much that I think the sky will fall if governments introduce those measures; I won't be affected, and neither will most other people. Who will be affected are minorities and people the government already doesn't like. But it's the mindset that produces such proposals that is so scary.
In fact, rather than defending against terrorism, the current US and UK governments are complicit in it: they create an atmosphere of fear and terror to justify eroding civil liberties, redirect funds towards their business buddies, and increase chances for reelection through "the national security issue". Don't get taken in by them; spread the word and elect a government next time that puts civil liberties and democracies first.
Of course, the UK is already at the end of the rope, given that these people already represent the supposedly "liberal" government. Looks like 1984 was just a couple of decades late.
Loans do little more than cause inflation. If loans weren't available, your tar-paper shack wouldn't even cost $1,000 usd. Hell, for that kind of money, I can put on a second floor AND put up a satellite dish. Oh, and there are institutions that provide financing without charging interest [financeinislam.com], but I'm sure present day zenophobias will prevent many people from consulting them.
Yea, we mustn't forget Islam condemns charging interests for loans. Maybe someone such tell Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Citigroup's biggest shareholder.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Perfect timing for the US and UK citizens right now, with a quagmire in the middle east and what not.
Well, maybe the uk citizens are out of luck... harder to fight the good fight with no firearms i guess. Maybe they should hook up with the IRA. (just kidding)
Seems we are also heading ever faster towards a point where we will absolutely be incapable of reversing the damage. who knows, maybe it will never be turned around. perhaps i am too cynical. perhaps im just realistic. Maybe we are already in that point, having been pacified with petty luxuries to the point where we don't care what happens as long as we get our fucking big macs, SUV's, and reality shows. Political parties? They're all in it together. I don't think that I am going to far in saying that at least 90% of people in office do that for a career, for their own financial benefit and glory. The major theme of all parties ultimately is for the same goal, the only difference being a number of hot topics that are quite petty in comparison to the bigger picture. Ultimately this is just a device to divide the people so they won't even think about standing together against all the "much more important in the larger scheme of things" bullshit that is going on.
Ah well people are too fat and lazy and complacent at this point anyways perhaps. Too brainwashed to care.
sigh.
The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood: The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's liberty! Are you free?
--- Andrew Ford
. . . History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own fall.
--- Adolf Hitler, Edict of 18 March 1939
Without either the first or second amendment, we would have no liberty; the first allows us to find out what's happening, the second allows us to do something about it! The second will be taken away first, followed by the first and then the rest of our freedoms.
--- Andrew Ford
I love boobies!
The first income tax I can find reference to came from Lincoln in 1862 also to pay war costs during the Civil War, though he apparently had no constitutional power to levy it. It was very unpopular and was repelled in 1867. From 1867 until 1913 when income tax rear its ugly head again, 90% of Federal revenue came from taxes on liquor and tobacco. Of course the government was much smaller and spent a lot less then.
And the thing is is that the tax Lincoln started was only 4% to 5%. They would of thrown an absolute hissy fit if they had to pay taxes now. Everybody may of joined the South.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Yes, instead of our rights being "eroded", we should erode a few heads gere and there and we should be done with it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Why does a brick labourer get more $$$ than a low-end programmer? ANy programmer can learn to be a bricky in 4 hrs, but any bricky would need 4 years to become a entry programmer.
While some programmer might be able to lay some bricks I'd bet most couldn't work full tyme doing it and do it well. Once upon a tyme I worked in construction for a concrete and masonary contractor For the most part my crew did concrete work laying out columns, footers, slaps, and solid concrete walls we also worked with masons and neither job is for the weak of body or mind. Even though I was in the infantry, mostly stationed at Fort Benning, GA when I was in the army that was easy compared to working with concrete or bricks.
If ratest must be 7-15% because of "RISK" then ok charge me 15%, but once I finalize the loan and its paid for, the risk is ZERO, so payback the difference. Why should I pay 15% to cover your 1% losses of bad loans? Maybe the 'extra' for the risk should be 1% higher, not double.
Because just like you they are in it to make money and aren't charities unless you feel the same about money you deposit, if you have an account, in the bank and don't want to get paid interest either? Most people expect something in return for lending either money, tyme, or skills otherwise most wouldn't work.
FalconShould there be a Law?
... depends on eroding YOUR rights. This may sound Soviet Russia-ish, but the best way to ensure your safety is to erode the state's "rights"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
"Government is the only enterprise in the world which expends in size when its failures increase." --U.S. District Judge Janice Brown
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The Nazis invented jet aircraft. They also murdered millions of innocents.
Not to belittle the Holocaust but at first the NAZIs tried to get millions to move. NAZIs signed two contracts with Jewish groups to allow Jews to emmigrate from Europe. Though it doesn't give much detail the Simon Wiesenthal Center does mention them some, 26. What efforts were made to save the Jews fleeing from Germany before World War II began? This provides more detail on one, The "Haavara Agreement". Here's a translation of the text of the second, Rublee-Wohlthat-Agreement. Basically the "Haavara Agreement" encouraged Jews to emmigate to Palestine and the Rublee-Wohlthat-Agreement had them emmigrate anywhere else that would accept them.
So while what the NAZIs and Third Reich did was horrendous at first they tried to get Jews to leave Europe. Also it wasn't just jews that were persecuted, Sinti or Roma, also called gypsies along with Slavs and others were persecuted as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Luckily the US Constitution provides for the means to remove them if they refuse to go. Something about the right to bear arms....
This is why I support the idea of US citizens owning weapons - not because I think they are good in general, but for that one occasion when they may need to use them to defend their soil against a corrupt government that refuses to obey the people that put them there and tries to marshall the armed forces against its own population.
Good luck America, you're going to need it in the years to come, if not sooner.
Visceral Psyche Films
I'm reminded of something my uncle told me, which was "don't trust anyone in government, particularly the police". What made his words much more compelling was the fact that he spent many, many years of his life serving as a U.S. Marshal.
Reminds me what some police officers did in my neighborhood where I grew up, when they caught someone with the weed they'd just grab it and go smoke it somewhere else. The good ones would make you empty the baggie on the ground.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Everyone needs to take a long, hard look at exactly what they feel "safe" is. Safe from what? From who? For how long? By how much? How much of your freedom are you ABSOLUTELY willing to give up into order to keep yourself "safe" from something that MIGHT happen? Is it worth it?
From what I see there's not many who choose freedom over "safety" whereas I love my freedom. And I'm more afraid of government than I am of terrorists. In some cases it's government that created the terrorists. The US government supported the Taliban and bin Laden when they were fighting the Soviets. Even as late as 2001 when Bush entered office he supported the Taliban and gave them millions of taxpayer dollars, all while they were blowing up monuments hundreds of years old and beheading people on a soccer field financed and built by the international community.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Our pal, Bin Laden, apparently has some rather (to my mind) irrational reasons for declaring war against the US
And the US supported bin Laden when he went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. In a sense it could be said the US created bin Laden. And Bush supported the Taliban, even giving them millions of taxpayer dollars.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I don't know how to quote the parent post as well you did. Hopefully readability doesn't suffer too much.
I don't know how far a person can walk in a few days, but I'd imagine pretty far. People used to do it all the time. Food and water would very likely have been available (at least to some degree) in nearby cities and towns that weren't constructed below sea level. I concede that realizing your home is below sea-level and doomed to disasterous flooding during a hurricane, is easier to do in hindsight.
Our livelihood depends to a large extent on the government's smooth functioning. I agree. *How large* an extent is where we likely differ, but I hope you won't disagree that we should not depend entirely upon the government -- or even mostly on the government! I strongly believe the poor, in general but especially in disasters like Katrina, surrender far too much responsibility for themselves.
And I was implying that the people dying because of the government's inability to care for them were dying in spite of their own abilities to care for themselves. They relied too heavily on the government instead of helping themselves, and some paid the ultimate price for it.
BTW, it's occured to me that I should mention, I have donated a small amount to the Salvation Army for Katrina relief. I understand that people in a disaster often NEED (and deserve) the support of others, and I gladly gave to help the victims. But I still strongly believe that they relied and depended far too heavily on "someone else" to save their skin.
I've been appalled, but not surprised, that the British Government has been calling for radically reducing civil rights to deal with Muslim terrorism, given that the current levels of civil rights are what they had left after dealing with Irish terrorism for decades. It's not like this is a brand new threat they've never had before.
If you rtfm, er rtfa, it said there should be a debate on whether there should be any resrtictions or not.
Now on the part about the IRA I agree they should have lots of experience dealing with terrorists. Other than the Black Panters, the Weathermen, and other radical groups or Waco and Oklahoma City more recently, the US hasn't really had the deal much with terrorism. But much of Europe has.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Walking speed is, what. . 3mph? So you've walked just over 1.5 hours to get your 5 miles. Let's take the day off work - and spend the next 7 hours (1 hour for lunch): walking. Congratulations! We've covered over 20 miles. (were the suburbs completely flooded?) There were days of warning. My point is that people who found evacuation distastefully difficult and decided to rely on the government for their safety if things got really bad, were exercising a reckless disregard for personal responsibility.
I would expect that most people who actually took to "hoofin' it" out of town would have been picked up by someone else more fortunate. But even if they had to walk all day, they could have made it to another town of relative safety. So I maintain that the majority of the victims of Katrina were not stuck, stranded, or unable to evacuate because of their poverty.
If everyone who could have walked (or evacuate in any other manner of their choosing) DID, maybe the burden of evacuation for the truly less fortunate (elderly, disabled, very young children and their single mothers, etc) would have been much more manageable for the state.
I'm almost flattered to have been pegged a libertarian. I'm not. For the record, I'm a registered and active member of the Republican party. I looked into libertarianism, but most of it just didn't fit me. I fully agree that it is the government's role to assist and protect its citizenry in disasters (like Katrina) - but I don't believe each individual's personal safety is the responsibility of the government. That remains an individual (and family) responsibility. We can not, and should not, expect or even allow the government to take full responsibility for our lives in this respect.
As I stated in another response, I now feel the need to state that I did donate a small amount to the Salvation Army for Katrina disaster relief. I understand that people need and deserve help from others. But they should not depend and rely solely upon that help or the expectation of it! Whether it's from the government, or any other institution.
Our government's ever-expanding role in the personal lives of everyday americans is lulling many people into an alarming complacency concerning their own personal responsibility for themselves, and Katrina demonstrated some of the worst-case scenarios of how bad it can get when masses of people wait for the state to ride in on a white horse and save them.
I'm done.
And now out of curiosity if you're reading this Vicissidude, how is Libertarian prattle (or even action and policy-in-place) causing anarchy, lawlessness, death, and neglect?
Which then brings us back to the question: terrorism, in terms of the threat to the average individual, IS pretty tiny.
So really, what drives the erosion of personal rights is the manipulation of the public by the mass media. I'd wager that if all the news organizations in the country started focusing 50% of their print space/media time on reporting stories on a SINGLE CAR ACCIDENT, that you would immediately see a reduction in congestion on the road within the week, due to people being afraid to get in their cars. For heaven's sake, people were afraid to swim in SWIMMING POOLS after Jaws came out.
So I'm not sure what the solution is. On the one hand, we have a media culture that permeates every facet of our lives, and which thrives by obsessing over the 'crisis du jour', consequently blowing it all out of proportion in terms of perceived risk. On the other hand, we have a deeply ignorant general public who live lives like dimwitted sheep, running obediently away from whatever they are told to. In some ways we almost deserve the governments that we've given ourselves.
I don't think the erosion of personal liberties is the cause here, it's a symptom. When those liberties (using the US Constitution and BoR as an example) were conceived, there were a concomitant burden of moral and ethical RESPONSIBILITIES by wich everyone was tied together. Now we have a society which is almost entirely duty-free, responsibility free, and morality free. So you have a nasty conflict between the ever burgeoning list of 'rights' to which everyone's entitled (ever read the laughable EU constitution? Listed as 'human rights' include: education, a free placement service, paid maternity leave, social security benefits and social services, housing assistance, preventive health care, services of general economic interest, and high levels of environmental and consumer protection).
So in that vein, I guess the Europeans are ok: they've assumed such a ridiculous number of 'rights' to which their citizens are entitled, they can spare a few.
-Styopa
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No, as a matter of fact people didn't use to walk between towns all the time. Walking from one town to another took days. What people used to do was use horses, but of course these people had none. And even if they had, the roads were designed for use with cars, not horses; horses are a lot slower than cars, so there would have been very heavy congestation.
It was only the advance of cars that removed horses from widespread use in getting around. There's a reason for that.
Getting to nearby cities on foot would have taken days. You cannot go for days without water, especially if you're walking all the time.
Even if you do realize this, it still doesn't change the fact that your best bet is to use your home for shelter against the hurricane and, if neccessary, leave only after the hurricane passes.
You wouldn't stay alive without the government, because the society would descend into civil war without it, and if you didn't die from bullets you would die when the infrastructure - water and electricity - stopped working.
Urban, technological civilization is completely and utterly dependent on order - if the infrastructure dies, you die. It is simply impossible to get food and water without it, unless you happen to live in a completely self-sufficient farm - in which case in the event of government collapsing your fate is to die in the hands of a desperate mob trying to get food and water from said farm. Therefore, your livelihood - in fact your whole life - is completely dependant of your government.
I repeat my earlier claim that governments wouldn't be tolerated if we could survive without them.
Yes - it seems that their trust on the government was quite misplaced. But I still must say that, in my opinion, the carless people who stayed in NO made the best choice they could under the circumstances and with the available information.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It is sad that human rights are being eroded before new scientific discoveries are being applied to the problem of terrorists. New discoveries on how the human brain works can be directly applied to disempowering terrorists. We could start this process right now.
The new science approach is aided, not harmed, by open discussion yet no one is talking. The press is largely incompetent on technical maters and is only looking for the next sound bite. The authorities are taking their direction for action from the press and public opinion polls.
I have a popular science level paper on this approach at: http://www.charm.net/~jriley/book.html#Terror
How about the UK government (and the US) taking "personal responsibility" for creating the jihadi army that is now fighting us? Why does "personal responsiblity" apply only to the minor, inconvenient daily screwups that civilians live with our whole lives? While the people creating these catastrophic errors, that start with killing thousands "for the right reasons", and continue to kill "the wrong people", retire rich, powerful, safe, and crying (through their brainwashed civilian proxies) for more "personal responsibility"?
I don't blame the Romans for the current jihad, but the Romans created their own "German insurgents" by outsourcing jobs in the Roman Legion to Germans. Who took their training and access and turned it against Rome. They destroyed a thousand-year-old civilization in a couple of hundred years. With a rabid Christian Emperor at the helm, I might add. Things move a lot faster now that we've got powered machines, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
--
make install -not war
The problem is not really with the ability to have access to all this data - the problem is controlling who has that access and how that is protected against abuse.
The UK Regulations of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is a classic example of the Government acquiring rights without bothering to implement balancing controls to go with it (secrecey is such a nice mechanism to hide abuse behind). And *THAT* is a development we can do without.
Insert
Hey, don't try to attach your views to the arguement for freedom. While the freedom loving persons should despise hate-speech laws because they are really designed to censor and limit political debate... restricting immigration is also an authoritarian act. While I respect your right to critize immigration, free immigration is an important part of a free society. Restricting how/when and where people can live is just as bad as restricting free-speech.
:)
Could you imagine how bad food would suck in England if it wasn't for immigration? Give me a curry over tra and scones any day!
Walking speed is, what. . 3mph? So you've walked just over 1.5 hours to get your 5 miles. Let's take the day off work - and spend the next 7 hours (1 hour for lunch): walking. Congratulations! We've covered over 20 miles.
You're a moron. These people weren't just worried about themselves, but their families as well. Try walking a mile, let alone 20, with your 5 year old son and 80 year old grandmother with her walker. Try doing it in 90-100 degree weather. You're not going to get very far.
On top of that, you don't know exactly when the hurricane will hit. So, it might hit when you're 5 miles out, maybe when you're at 10. You could be in shelter, maybe not. Maybe you'll be in the middle of the road, trying to drag your 5 year old and your 80 year old grandmother with her walker another 5 miles to the next town. All the while, it's raining and the weather is getting worse.
My point is that people who found evacuation distastefully difficult and decided to rely on the government for their safety if things got really bad, were exercising a reckless disregard for personal responsibility.
Again, you're a moron. The people who stayed in New Orleans stayed not because it was "distastefully" difficult, but because they couldn't leave for the reasons I pointed out above.
The civil authorities said the Superdome was safe. It's interesting that you Republicans want people to listen to the authorities regarding looting or the fact that the hurricane is coming at all, but not listen to the authorities when it comes to safety.
The only thing "distasteful" in this whole argument is you wanting to blame the victims in this whole tragedy. Had the president actually done his job, then help would have come immediately instead of 4 days late. But, this particular president is never wrong, never makes mistakes, and never at fault for anything, so it can't be his fault.
Makes me wish Clinton was back in office. He would have actually responded on time since he actually worked instead of taking 5 week vacations (in the middle of a damn war). And the only complaint about his lies were over a BJ from an intern.
I would expect that most people who actually took to "hoofin' it" out of town would have been picked up by someone else more fortunate.
Right... I can just see the old, rich, white republicans driving their $50,000 SUV stopping to pick up some young, sweaty, black couple and their 2 year old in diapers walking on the side of the road... I can also see that nice, old black woman with the walker getting into the back of that beat up truck of that bald white boy with his confederate flag tattoo... Riiiight...
And now out of curiosity if you're reading this Vicissidude, how is Libertarian prattle (or even action and policy-in-place) causing anarchy, lawlessness, death, and neglect?
Because it's Libertarian prattle that says big government is bad, nothing good comes of it, and must be removed at all costs. (As a side note, no, the Republicans do not believe this. The Republicans only said they believed this at a time when they did not control the purse strings. Bush has not vetoed any spending bills that have landed on his desk. And Bush has expanded the government enormously over his rule.)
So, big government is bad. Spending money to prevent grinding poverty is bad. Spending on levees and emergency preparedness is bad. Spending money to bus people out is bad, better to save a few bucks and put them in the unused Superdome. Spending money to send in the National Guard and Coast Guard is bad - we only want to do that when it's absolutely necessary... say, when black people start looting Wal-Mart for food.
"Furthermore the 4th circuit stated that they were going to apply the Hamdi standard here and state that anyone accused of being an enemy combattant might have the burden or proof in proving that he is not, perhaps against a military tribunal. This is very scary indeed."
If you ever wondered how Padilla ended up in a Navy brig in South Carolina its precisely so he would be in the jurisdiction of the 4th circuit. It is the most right wing circuit in the U.S. which is why the Bush administration does everything it can to get all its cases heard there. They are using it and will continue to use it in their attempt to eviscerate civil liberties in this country and to continue to expand the powers of the executive to near dictatorial status.
For whetever reason the Supreme Court has consistently avoided making a definitive decision in Padilla's case and let Padilla rot in jail, each day setting precedent for abandoning an American citizens most basic right to due process. Padilla may be a complete low life, and a terrorist, but if he is the way this country works is you file charges, you make sure he has access to a lawyer, you give him his day in court with a presumption of innocence, and you let a jury of his peers decide, not a stacked military tribunal.
Unfortunately when this outlandish 4th circuit decision reaches the Supreme Court on appeal, this time, it will be a court with two new Bush appointments both of which will probably be right wing. This time they may well uphold the 4th circuit opinion and effectively turn the U.S. in to a police state and give the executive dictatorial powers. One can only hope that the 2 people Bush appoints will end up being true conservatives, and not far right Fascists, when they are actually sitting on the court. A true conservative would never never allow this savaging of basic due process civil liberties. A far right Fascist will think giving these new sweeping powers to the executive will be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
@de_machina
England is a sovereign nation that can decide
:)
who it wants in its country and who it doesn't.
It also has the right to not let *anyone* in.
Their is no global entitlement to free movement
to and from the country of your choicing. The
purpose of immigration policy is to serve the
people of the sovereign nation, NOT the people
who wish to immigrate there.
> Could you imagine how bad food would suck in
> England if it wasn't for immigration?
Nice try but that's a hollow argument. Are you
(or are your implying that English people) are
to stupid to follow a recipe?
> Give me a curry over tra and scones any day!
Then move to India!! Oh, what's that, you really
prefer England to India? Destroying your country
so you can stuff your face with ethnic food is
pretty shortsighted. And BTW, most ehtnic food
absolutely sucks. Give me European fair over so
third world slop anyday.
Everyone! Here's a real internet tough-guy!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
IANAL but it is anyone's guess what the Supreme Court will do. The language of the plurality opinion in Hamdi leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
There is hope though. Both vacancies occur among those who sponsored the plurality opinion (written by O'Connor, with Rhenquist, Breyer, and Kennedy joining). 4 other Justices seemed to think that Hamdi's detention was in fact illegal. Suiter and Ginsberg looking to a broad reading of Endo, and Scalia and Stevens seeking to overturn Quirin. Ultimately Suiter and Ginsberg joined the plurality despite their objections and filed a concurring opinion. Thomas was the *only* Justice who felt that Habeas and due process did not apply in this case and he limited his ruling to those captured in combat operations.
My own reading of Hamdi (IANAL) is that the Plurality (and certainly Suiter/Ginsberg) certainly implied that the ruling would be limited to those captured via military operations, not transferring people from civil court proceedings.
My point is that unless justices change their minds (as well they could) or unless they choose to read their precident differently, they will have to reverse the 4th circuit's ruling.
Finally, I would hardly consider the 4th Circuit ruling conservative. The most commonly looked to Justice for conservative legal theory is Scalia whose blistering attack on the Plurality in Hamdi is well worth leading (he claims that the Plurality is allowing the attrition of basic constitutional rights). If however, this ruling is maintained, then we have begun down a slippery slope which will at some point lead to military dictatorship here in the US.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Oh yes, we need our gov't in their infinite wisdom to take our rights away so they can defend us against terrorism. Yeah, and if they did that, then who's going to protect us from the government? Anyone? Beuller? Anyone? No answer? I thought so. See, without the freedoms that we cherish, we are nothing as a nation. There is no valid excuse to erode freedom for security, and there never will be one. No excuse at all, and anyone that thinks otherwise doesn't give a damn about the people, just their sick agenda.
"Finally, I would hardly consider the 4th Circuit ruling conservative."
I studiously avoided using the term conservative for precisely this reason. I used the term right wing, though a more appropriate term would be Fascist. Unfortunately the term Fascist has been conveniently cleansed from our vocabulary in general, and on the net by Godwin's law, so there is no usable term to accurately describe the ideology of the new Republican party and the Bush administration. It is certainly not conservatism, though some of it is neo-conservatism though that is a poorly understood, overly polite term and accurately describes only some people in the Bush administration.
Conservatism, theocracy and Fascism all reside in the same right wing of the simplistic linear left/right political model. The new Republican party is obviously right wing but only in the Fascist and theocratic sense. They're massively authoritarian bent puts them completely at odds with political conservatism, as does their propensity for foreign interventionism and imperialism.
Bush attempted to nominate Claude Allen to the 4th circuit to push it even further right. Allen is an Uncle Tom, far right winger, and protege of Jesse Helms, the Fascist icon of the Republican party. I'm not sure where his nomination ended up at this point though I think he was working in the White House campaigning against abortion, birth control and for abstinence as the only allowable form of sex education. The Democrats were blocking his nomination because he was barely qualified and an obvious idealog who would have made his decisions based on his ideology and not the Constitution.
The Republican's are trying to pack all the courts but to achieve their goal of seizing power they really only need to pack one circuit court and the Supreme court. The 4th is clearly the one they are going to run with for circuit courts and is where they will file every case they where they are seeking to eviscerate civil liberties, undermine democracy and expand the powers of the executive towards dictatorship.
Its hard to say how the Supreme court will swing with the two new appointments but all indications are Roberts is very Fascist leaning, based on the tone of the documents he wrote in the Reagan and first Bush administration. He is also completely in the pocket of big business. As much as the left despises Scalia, often deservedly so, his true conservatism runs counter to and obstructs the Fascist agenda of the Bush administration.
@de_machina
We certainly live in scary times.
For a couple of years after Sept. 11th, I was optimistic in that our country had eventually come out of the kinder, gentler Stalinism found in McCarthyism. I figured that the right cause of liberty could not but prevail.
Today I am not so optimistic. Hamdi itself was not a massively new ruling. However, the way it is being applied in the 4th Circuit is. I.e. unlike in Ex Parte Quirin, Padilla was transferred from civil custody to military custody during the criminal procedings. The ruling which grants the government the ability to short circuit the due process rights during proceedings is a very dangerous ruling indeed. While I still think that there is a good chance that at very least Suiter, Ginsberg, Scalia, and Stevens will seek to have due process rights restored in this case, I am entirely unsure about Thomas (who may very well suggest leaving this sort of decision to the executive), and I am not entirely sure where Kennedy and Breyer stand. It would only take one of them to pull a majority, but you never know.
As for Roberts, I don't even think Roberts knows what his judicial philosophy would be on the Supreme Court. This is scary primarily becuase he is being nominated for Chief Justice not merely an associate justice.
There are other troubling signs too, such as the 2nd circuit ruling that the US is not legally bound to the Geneva Conventions. While this does not directly threaten civil rights of American citizens, you can bet that a failure to follow international humanitarian law will result in less safety for Americans both at home and abroad. The increase in such risk may also eventually be used to justify further erosion of our rights.
The Padilla ruling has caused me sufficient concern to look to options for leaving the country if the situation degrades.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yes, we had to support the SU during WWII but if Western Europe and the US hadn't allowed Hitler to rearm Germany dispite an agreement signed at the end of WWI disarming Germany then we wouldn't of needed to support the Soviet Union. Now we're occupying Iraq with Saddam behind bars. Yet the Reagan and Bush Sr admins supported SH throughout the 1980s, it didn't matter that he was using chemical weapons against other Iraqis and massacring villagers. Rumsfeld even shook his hand and placed his arm on Saddam's shoulders. Back then he couldn't do no wrong. Bush Sr stood in congress and said sanctions against Iraq congress was debating in 1988/89 would harm trade. And we know trade is more important than lives.
In other words, the US bought and paid for the trouble they got after the war. But what was the alternative?
Stop supporting monsters. If you support them don't be shocked if they turn around and byte you in the ass.
So what would have happened if we had let the Afghans keep their Soviet-imposed dictatorship?
Eventually the SU probably would of been driven out of Afghanistan though it would of taken longer. And I'm not saying the US shouldn't of aided Afghans, what I do say though is that the US needs to be choosy about who we support so we don't end up getting bit by what we supported. And it the case of Afghanistan if we had sent in aid workers to setup an interim government and help establish a democracy after the SU left then things might not of gotten so bad.
But such thinking doesn't come to those with your attitude I guess.
Falcon FalconShould there be a Law?
So then, he knew what he was talking about. It's kind of like studying Nazi propaganda. Sure it's the Nazi's and they were evil incarnate. But they knew what they were talking about.
Exactly. Then after all of the muslims have been executed, they can kill all the blacks. Then after that, all the atheists who won't say "under god" in the pledge of allegience....
Pocket Constitution? WTF is wrong with you Americans? Stop treating your 1) Constitution 2) Founding Fathers as gods. They are man-made, erodable, and not so superior to everything and everyone else if you just care to take a look. They were Gods...they were the foremost thinkers of their time. For instance... would you be able to sit here and read this if Ben Franklin hadn't been a Founding Father? I don't care where you are in the world... you haven't NOT been touched by the works of the United States Founding Fathers in some way. Our revolution begat the French Revolution - ending the horror that was the National Razor. Or maybe we should bring it back?? *shudder*
n ce/charters/declaration_transcript.html
m l
And as for treating our Constitution like 'Gods'.... why don't you check out some of the review that John Roberts is going through to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (of the United States)? His entire LIFE is going to hinge on how he interprets, how he applies, and how he believes the Constitution of same said United States. Every person who holds a political office, serves in any branch of our military, including the Reserves, must swear an OATH to uphold, protect and DEFEND same said Constitution.
The United States Constitution IS the rules and laws that govern this land. That is why it must be upheld, defended and protected at all costs, to include the life and limb of America's great citizens, no matter their generation.
Please do take a look over these two documents, and tell me what is manmade and erodable about a person's indellible right to be free?
http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experie
http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.ht
And then, I want you to tell me who else on this planet guarantees such freedoms in their government. Very very very few. For all you liberal democrat weinies, this is a good refresher to remind you of just WHO AND WHAT was sacrificed to make sure you can speak you mind today. NEVER FORGET THAT!
Jho -- who's ancestors carried the Declaration of Independence from New York to Philadelphia and back and forth for review, signing, and ultimately introduction.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
A couple of destroyed buildings serves as a very visible symbol.
I guess you haven't seen the satellite photos and news coverage of New Orleans then.
nt
Support the FairTax
Banking with CitiBank supports terrorism?
In a sense you can say Citigroup does support terrorism, state terrorism. Citigroup is a leading financier of the Three Gorges Dam China is building and China has used the military to forcibly relocate millions of people who are being displaced and will have their land flooded by the dam. The flooding will also destroy valuable archeological sites. Yet according to this news item from CNN there's already problems with the dam, cracks found in Three Gorges Dam.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Makes me wish Clinton was back in office. He would have actually responded on time since he actually worked instead of taking 5 week vacations (in the middle of a damn war).
How stupid do you think people are? Do you really think that when a president (any president, including Clinton spending weeks hanging out with showbiz buddies on Martha's Vinyard, or cruising overseas - doesn't matter) is ever "on vacation?" Every day, 365 days a year, the president is surrounded by briefers, communications people and other staff. He is still involved in intel briefings and "findings" every day, is on conference calls with DoD and cabinet people, and is on the hook to make any number of diplomatic and other decisions. This is just was true of Clinton as it is of Bush.
The main difference between Bush and Clinton, in that regard is that Clinton didn't actually own a house or have anyplace that he would normally have gone to for any longer period of time. Prior to his 8 years in office, he was living in the Arkansas governer's mansion. Other presidents (Carter, Reagan, Roosevelt, etc) had homes they more traditionally visited, and the White House (along with all of its responsibilities) went there with them. Bush is no more "on vacation" when in Crawford than John F. Kennedy was when spending time on the family compound in Hyannis Port. A key difference now, though (as opposed to, say, when Kennedy was in office - or even Carter or Reagan) is that we now have sophisticated enough communications gear that makes where you sit pretty much of a non-issue. The C-in-C can do, and does the job from anywhere on the globe.
As for "responding"... what did you have in mind? The president signed emergency condition paperwork and orders before the hurricane hit. The responsibility for turning the problem over to the feds lies with the governor of Louisiana (who didn't even authorize her own guard troops to do things like use busses for transportation until two and half days into that mess, and on who's orders truckloads of Red Cross food and water were prevented from being delivered to the Superdome because the thinking was that it would slow down evacuation if people didn't have as much incentive to leave). The governors of the states hold (as they should) enormous responsibilities for first response to emergencies that happen on their turf. The feds aren't supposed to muscle in until expressly asked to. If the people that work in the many structures under the White House's influence could push aside the lines that are drawn between state and federal rights/responsibilities just because they think the state's governor is being incompetent, then I suppose all we'd hear from you is how Bush is disregarding the constitution, etc. You can't have it both ways.
Spending money to prevent grinding poverty is bad
No, but keeping people in grinding poverty by simply handing them a meager living, generation after generation, with no expectation that they can or should be self-sufficient is the height of cruelty and condescension, as polished to a fine art by liberals ever since FDR's time.
Spending money to send in the National Guard and Coast Guard is bad - we only want to do that when it's absolutely necessary... say, when black people start looting Wal-Mart for food.
Why do you think that your credibility will be improved by just simply making stuff up? The Guard troops work for the (in this case, Democrat) governor in situations like this, until she expressly turns that authority over to the feds - which she didn't do. The feds, though, were immediately on the scene in the form of the Coast Guard - which was allowed to operate in that coastal area as part of their mandate. Technically, though, flying into the city as they immediately started doing was actually outside of their normal authority. The Red Cross was waiting, with truckloads of supplies, that the state of Louisiana would not let into the Superdome
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The president signed emergency condition paperwork and orders before the hurricane hit... The governors of the states hold (as they should) enormous responsibilities for first response to emergencies that happen on their turf. The feds aren't supposed to muscle in until expressly asked to.
...keeping people in grinding poverty by simply handing them a meager living, generation after generation, with no expectation that they can or should be self-sufficient is the height of cruelty and condescension, as polished to a fine art by liberals ever since FDR's time.
...how is Libertarian prattle (or even action and policy-in-place) causing anarchy, lawlessness, death, and neglect?
You are confusing the facts. The governor of Louisianna declared the emergency on the Friday before the hurricane started. The president didn't respond until the Friday after the hurricane. The governor of Louisianna told Bush to send "everything you got" the Saturday before the hurricane. What did Bush do? He got into a plane and flew to... San Diego.
This idea that the feds didn't have permission to go in is an outright lie. The idea that the governor didn't ask for her National Guard troops is outright deceiving. The troops are included in the "everything you got", which the president failed to respond.
Bush's appalling incompetent response was so public that he had to take responsibility for his errors, which he did yesterday. You coming in after the fact and saying that he wasn't responsible collides with Bush's statement. But then, facts and reality aren't Republican's strong suits.
Bush himself negates your whole argument.
There are ways of spending money to prevent poverty other than just handing the poor money which, by the way, is exactly what Jesus did. So, this "liberal" idea is at least 2000 years old. And given what most Republicans think of Jesus, you don't have a leg to stand on calling it "cruelty and condescension," unless of course you want to argue with Jesus.
Fixing education and making sure elementary and high schools have enough money is one way to reduce poverty, something Bush has failed to do with his "No Child Left Behind" policy. Increasing student loan amounts is another way to decrease poverty, which Bush has failed by actually reducing student loan payments. Increasing the minimum wage is another. Securing our border and thus reducing competition for low-skill jobs with illegal immigrants is another. Shall I continue or do you get the point?
Previous:
Me: Because it's Libertarian prattle that says big government is bad, nothing good comes of it, and must be removed at all costs... Spending money to send in the National Guard and Coast Guard is bad - we only want to do that when it's absolutely necessary... say, when black people start looting Wal-Mart for food.
You: The Guard troops work for the (in this case, Democrat) governor in situations like this, until she expressly turns that authority over to the feds - which she didn't do.
BS. As I mentioned above, the governor already filed the emergency paperwork the Friday before the storm and specifically spoke with Bush the next day for him to send "everything you got". The failure lies with the president, which he admitted himself when he took responsibility for the lack of a response.
Me: You're a moron...
You: Doesn't much help deflate your holier-than-thou, only us smart people, un-hindered by Bush, could know how to help those poor dumb people in New Oleans profile. Do you realize how patronizing you sound?
I hope I sound patronizing to you Republicans. Because of your president's stupid policies we've had far more deaths in New Orleans than would have otherwise occurred. A smart person should have been elected president, not some moron like Bush who can't tell his head from a hole in the ground.
The governor of Louisianna declared the emergency on the Friday before the hurricane started.
Declaring a state of emergency has nothing to do with passing off command of Louisiana's guards to the federal government. It's a funding mechanism, and gets the larger federal support wheels turning. That doesn't mean squat in terms of what support you'll see in the form of bottles of water in 24 hours. That's a local issue - always has been, always should be.
What did Bush do? He got into a plane and flew to... San Diego.
So, let me guess... you really think that the president has no way of communicating with the agencies under him, or with the governors of the states involved in the storm, other than by flying to those places, and what... personally opening up MREs and heating them for people? Where do you suppose Bill Clinton was in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Fran in 1996? That storm displaced hundreds of thousands of people, cost many lives, and many tens of billions of dollars. Clinton was not there personally to tell the governors of the Carolinas or Virginia what to do, or when/how to request specific FEMA or military support - but he was there for the see-the-damage photo ops several days into things, like all officials do. Of course, those people of those states don't maintain large swaths of subsidized housing below sea level, either, and generally do a great, well-rehearsed job of evacuating their coastlines when something like Fran comes washing in.
This idea that the feds didn't have permission to go in is an outright lie.
We're not talking about permission. We're talking about who tells the existing, already-there, local first responders what to do. That's the governor's job, until she expressly passes that responsibility off to someone else. Sure, by the time it was clear that levies broke (making a big mess much worse), the governors for the three states covering the 90,000 square miles already clobbered by the storm had done most (but not always all of) everything they were ultimately supposed to do to get the federal ball rolling, and it was.
Bush's appalling incompetent response was so public that he had to take responsibility for his errors, which he did yesterday.
Of course, he had to say something. What was he going to do, give a lecture on federalism and the laws of physics? The media painted a distorted picture of things, and it sure didn't help that the FEMA director (at the time) couldn't concisely explain the scope of the situation or diplomatically explain that his people didn't tell anyone in New Orleans where to go without their food and water in expectation of a ride out on a city bus. Even beginning to talk frankly about Louisiana's failures in this whole mess would have just been one more thing for the Bush bashers to hang their hat on. So, he took responsibility for things that, to the extent they were within his administration's turf, didn't go well. That's not to be confused with apologizing on behalf of Mayor Nagin, who was in totally over his head, or the governor, who really blew the storm prep and the first 24 hours following, setting the stage for the worst of what we saw.
Bush himself negates your whole argument.
No, he didn't. See above.
And given what most Republicans think of Jesus, you don't have a leg to stand on calling it "cruelty and condescension," unless of course you want to argue with Jesus.
Why should I care what "most Republicans" think about Jesus? Giving people fish (rather than fishing lessons) 2000 years ago was just as stupid then as tolerating/encouraging third-generation food stamp families is today. Argue with Jesus? Too bad he's dead, because if I could, I would.
As I mentioned above, the governor already filed the emergency paperwork the Friday before the storm and specifically spoke with Bush the next day for him to send "everything you got".
You'r
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I heard: I once met this armored knight on horseback. Boy did I hate him, so I fought 'em. Man, did I hammer my fists against his impenetrible armor untill the bones were broken, the skin was ragged and blood poued from my hands... Didn't scratch him, but damn did I fight!
In general, pounding your fists against sheet metal isn't likely to break your bones. In any event, it's probably the absolute worst combat tactic you could think of. If you really fight that way, you deserve to lose.
1) Armour isn't "impenetrable". It's designed to come off after the battle. Pull off his helmet instead of just hammering your fists against it. Then jab him with a nasty pointed stick! (Or engage in a civil discussion instead!)
2) The horse is a bigger threat to you than the knight. Knock the horse over, and the knight probably won't be a threat anymore; few people fight well after falling three feet in armour, and if the horse lands on him, he'll have a broken leg if he's lucky. A thousand pound horse is a bigger threat than a two hundred pound knight.
3) In Japan, the legendary samurai Myomoto Musashi was defeated only once: by a peasant farmer with a wooden staff. Rank doesn't mean much in combat: skill does.
4) Why are you attacking a knight who isn't trying to hurt you? By your own account, he didn't even fight back when a madmad with hate in his eye began pummeling him...