Are the Democrats any better at preserving our freedom as the founders intended?
I don't know... who was the last Democratic president to unambiguously repudiate the very idea of checks and balances? Was Clinton claiming executive authority to imprison anyone for any length of time without the need of legislative license or judicial oversight? Who was the last democratic president to authorize torture? Who was the last democratic president to want to re-define torture once the supreme court said that he couldn't authorize torture?
So yes, I guess the Democrats are better. Not great, but better. I know that isn't important to you, because you aren't the one being tortored to death. But I care about torture, and who is better and worse does matter to me. Maybe you're okay voting for an apologist for torture, but I'm not. Are you? I'm stuck on the basic idea that torture is wrong. Can you help me get over that basic moral failing?
Yes, you make perfect sense. But Bush's core constituency thinks "a change has happened." They don't see this as just a couple of elections in the broader context of back-and-forth Democratic and Republican administrations. They cannot fathom that Americans could, the very next election, vote for the other party. Despite the low turnout and relatively thin advantage in the popular vote (overall) they see these elections (well, the second one) as a fierce, unequivocal mandate. A sign from God, in many cases, is not ruled out.
The evangelicals think that Bush was chosen by God to lead the USA, and the reasons are far wider than terrorism. "Culture of faith," "Christian country," "returning God to our public lives," "returning God to the schools," "fighting secularism/humanism/filth" etc. Absurd and surreal as it is to the rest of us that anyone could look at the Bush administration and see the Hand of God, many do, and their worldview does not include the possibility of losing the next election. If they do lose, they will consider it stolen by the forces of darkness.
A vote for the Republic Party is a vote for God, and a vote for anyone else is a vote for Satan. You don't like Satan, do you? No not everyone is like that, but the dominant theme is very much present.
I doubt than anyone, ever, has seen where anything was leading. People usually have distrust of government they don't like, but when 3 branches are controlled by one party, and that party has managed to fuse a caricature of the dominant religion with a caricature of populism while galvanizing the electorate over "moral" issues like abortion and gay marriage while funneling wads of cash towards big business, then all the forces are leaning in the same direction. People have no innate skepticism of power. That "power corrupts" mantra, while true all the time, is only seen as true part of the time, namely when the other party wins an election.
The 4th Amendment, while generally a great and noble idea, was written with a pre 9/11 mentality. The world has changed. Power doesn't corrupt any more--now it's necessary, even beneficial to freedom, to confer as much unchecked, unsupervised power on the Executive branch as we can, as quickly as we can. Now you can trust government! The old way of thinking required a suspicion that power, once achieved, would be abused, but we don't have to believe that anymore, not unless you want us stuck in a pre-9/11 way of thinking. Don't you get it? Everything is different now!
The only way things could ever change back to the way they were, the only way we would have to be cautious about how much power we give government, is if a Democrat is elected. Then, yes, it follows that power corrupts, and is inimical to freedom. But until that day, don't get stuck in a pre 9/11 mentality. If you need me to repeat it a few more times for effect, I can. Sorry about not being good enough at HTML to have a flag waving in the background as you read this.
They are not the same. Indeed it is a love of liberty that inspires citizens to give the federal government the powerful tools they need to wipe it out completely.
The funny thing about powerful tools is that once they're given, they're used for any damned purpose the government wants. Rome and Germany both come to mind as good examples of populations that voted to give their leaders "powerful tools" that transcended accountability and oversight. I'm not a professional historian, but I think those powers, once conferred, were abused.
And let's not forget that fewer than 3,000 Americans died from the 9/11 attacks. The flu kills about 36,000 Americans a year, according to the CDC. The flu. So we're giving these "powerful tools" to government, exempting the Executive branch from judicial oversight, enabling that branch to define anyone as an enemy combatant and forever preclude that person from seeking any judicial review or redress of their detention (the detention which shall require no charges or trial), all to fight an "islamo-fascist" movement that is so dire, so dreadful in nature that 5 years ago it killed less than 1/10 as many as are killed by the flu every year? That's the plan? Wow, that isn't stupid at all.
I immediately see how a problem that, over a 5 year span of time, was less than 1/50 (that's less than 2%, mind you) as deadly as the damned flu virus warrants a watering-down of habeus corpus, a precedent of selective exemption from judicial review, and the steady erosion not just of old-fashioned civil rights, but of the very idea of checks and balances that was intended to keep us free. Who needs any of that outdated crap? Oh, wait, I forget, our forefathers were thinking with a pre 9-11 mentality! Now it all makes sense! To follow what the forefathers wanted would be to give in to the terrorists! Am I doing okay here?
Conversely, you associate other news sources (e.g. CNN, BBC) with language used to inform.
I never said that. At all. In any way. Did you read someone else's post and mistakenly reply to mine?
Please show proof of Room 101
People who get nitpicky about technicalities when it comes to torture really warm the cockles of my heart. It's torture. That this doesn't bother you says more about your decency, your basic morality, than it does about mine. Your conscientious "what exactly are we saying here" act carries very little weight when you happen to be an apologist for torture.
You do not have freedom to convert dissent into violent action.
I never said I should. Were you reading someone else's post? If I didn't respect you more, I might think that you were throwing out strawman arguments on purpose. You keep objecting to things I never said.
"Yes, they listen to our phone calls without a warrant . .."
Yeah---no. Much of the phone call stuff was blown out of proportion.
Yeah.... yeah, what, again? Are they or are they not tapping phone conversations without a warrant? You seem to be saying "no, they aren't doing it, and there's a darn good reason why they're doing it." I get it that you approve--I sort of expected that. But why do you pretend you're correcting me, but then just go on to justify why the government is doing the very thing you told me the government wasn't doing?
You expect that the U.S. government should not be allowed to use any means necessary to root out foreign agents and allies hostile to our country.
No, I don't. I expect the government should use any legal, moral means necessary. "Any means necessary" would justify totalitarianism--a complete lack of checks on government power. I'm a conservative, and conservatives don't trust government. Power corrupts, and all that. I want the powers of checks and balances limiting goverment power. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of safety to keep freedom. Freedom isn't free, as they say. It's not that I don't respect your totalitarian views... okay, I'm lying there. I really don't respect your totalitarian tendencies at all.
You contemplate that because the Republicans are in power, then government usurpation is only possible through the Repubicans.
Once again, you must have been reading someone else's post. Either that, or you are just dishonest and want to pretend I said something that sets you up with an opportunity to pontificate. I didn't say jack about Republicans, nor did I ever credit the Democrats with being better. Your problem is that you can't seem to fathom integrity. I was just as irritated by Clinton, though not for the same reasons as the Republicans. I actually care about runaway government power, though many (perhaps most) of the "conservatives" who I found myself agreeing with then have suddenly forgotten about their distrust of government. Strange, that.
I put it to you that power corrupts
Then why do you think the President should not be subject to the law? Why do you think he should have no checks, no oversight, over his authority? Why do you say "power corrupts" only in a sentence about the Democrats, but you instinctively give a Republican President the benefit of the doubt when he brazenly repudiates the very idea of checks and balances, when he brazenly authorizes surveillance on American citizens without the warrant so clearly demanded by the Constitution? If you think power corrupts, why do you support that? Or do you just mean that it corrupts Democrats?
2 different evolutions--don't confuse them!
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Except that "evolution" in this sense in no way applies to non-biological things. If you use evolution just to mean "change," then yes, computers and software have evolved, as in changed. But despite the word looking the same and seeming so convenient, you can't transition and make an analogy with biological evolution, because the word in that context doesn't mean anything even remotely like what it does whe talking about the "evolution" of Windows. So your analogy not only doesn't work, but does damage to the scientific theory you're trying to analogize Windows to, not only via guilt by association, but because your murky reasoning will be taken by some people to mean "aha! evolution doesn't make any sense! it's just like with computers..."
With 20 in^2 of film area and a flatbed scanner capable of 2400dpi, I get 115 megapixels
You can scan anything at that DPI. I can scan a dollar bill or the photo on my driver's license at 2400, 4800, or at any available resolution and get a huge file. I can also play a 128kbps mp3 file and record it at 320kbps, netting a larger file. The size of the file doesn't mean you got that much information. The resolution of your scanner does not have much to do with the resolution of the original film. Canon's 1Ds camera, and perhaps the 5D as well (can't remember) have already been shown to capture as much or better detail than medium format cameras. I'm not saying "film is dead" or "digital is better," only that your file size doesn't prove, or even indicate, the amount of actual visual data in that image.
We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence.
What you're seeing is this:
We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders.
The people "who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence" also happen to be "bible-thumping do-gooders." I was complaining of a subset of A that also meet condition B, but you're offended because you ingored the qualification of condition B, and thought I was sliming all of set A.
you seemed offended by these people's combination of faith and arrogance. I will leave you with this question: are these compatible, or does one put the lie to the other?
That just has to be a rhetorical question. Are you implying that all arrogant people with faith in God don't really have faith in God? If you follow the line of the No True Scotsman fallacy, then no "real" Christian never does anything wrong, because at the very moment they did something wrong, they weren't a real Christian. But yes, I have found faith in God to be very compatible with arrogance.
Take the attitude towards science--I'm not a professional scientist, but I can see the fruits of the scientific method all around me, I know how much education and expertise go into that field, so I respect the scientific theories, even those I don't fully comprehend. But many religious people reject evolution, geology, environmental science, and pretty much all theoretical science because they, after expending a minimal effort in reading a creationist web-page, don't find them "credible." They actually want to re-define science to disprove what scientists consider science. Yes, that's arrogance. That's "I find evolution improbable after reading a Creationist web-page, so evolution must be false." Who cares about people who have spent decades going to school and doing original research? Yes, that's arrogance.
That I criticize the effects of religion on some (or what is done in religion's name) does not make the religion itself the foundation of the criticism. I was clearly, unambiguously faulting them for megalomania, for the incapacity for self-doubt that in turn leads to cruelty and torture, not for faith in God. I did not say "they believe in Jesus, and that makes them bad/stupid." It is, however, a common trick to pretend that someone is painting all people of faith with the same brush, while ignoring the specific, explicit criticisms that were made.
I never said, implied, or intimated that all people of faith were alike--you reached that conclusion either because of a persecution complex, or because pretending to do so suits your purpose. There are those in whom faith is manifested by humility, compassion, and decency. There are others whose faith galvanizes them with a self-confidence, to me arrogance, that allows them to drop bombs on people, or to torture them to death, with a clean conscience, because they think of themselves as instruments of God's providence. If you choose to think that I'm offended by their faith in Christ, rather than by killing and torture, then you are more interested in defending the honor of religion than in maintaining a basic level of human decency.
But what you've described is largely the present. Yet here you are. Hmm. Yes, there are ways around some, perhaps most, but there will always be workarounds. So there is no magic point in the future where it will be clear to you that now is the time to break with technology. They get you incrementally, not all at once. If they developed crack-proof DVDs and CDs tomorrow, and if all TV signals were record-proof, would you just walk away? As someone who listens to pretty much no contemporary music, watches no TV, and watches very few movies, I can tell you that walking away from popular culture makes connecting with those around you pretty difficult. There just isn't as much to talk about if you haven't seen the same TV shows (however crappy), listened to the same bands (however crappy), and so on. I wish you luck, though. I'm inherently misanthropic, so the cultural isolation doesn't bother me, but most people just aren't cut out for it.
Oh, just stop already. I love that book, and I do think that civil liberties have taken a severe beating, but we aren't even close to being in a world like the one Orwell described. We have surveillance, yes. I do mentally associate much of Fox News with the Two Minute Hate. I concede the doublespeak angle, the use of language to mislead rather than inform. And yes, there is the equivalent, many equivalents, of Room 101.
But we don't have telescreens in every room that can listen and watch us. Yes, they listen to our phone calls without a warrant, but no, you don't have to guard your facial expression for fear of being tortured in Room 101. Saying that our situation is that bad trivializes the suffering and deaths of those whose situation is that bad.
I detest the rantings of O'Reilly and Coulter as much as the next thinking biped, but they do not consitute the Thought Police. Morons may impugn your patriotism for being skeptical of the President's policies, true, but no one, even Coulter, is saying you should be tortured for doing it.
There is no boot in the face, forever and ever. We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence. They don't think of themselves as power-hungry. That is why our world is so alien to Orwell's fictional one. I'm about halfway done with Orwell's essays, and basically he thinks that people are good, except for those who are bad. But the world really isn't that way. The bad things are done not by inherently bad people, but by people who think they are doing good, but lack the capacity to doubt themselves, their convictions, and their methods. Mix in political conviction with religious faith, bind them together, and you get borderline megalomania, which I think characterizes Ashcroft, Perle, Cheney, and Bush pretty well. They aren't evil (well, maybe Cheney--he's scary), only immune from self-doubt, because they think that the ultimate arbiter of good, meaning God, is firmly on their side. If you are on God's side, then there is only one other side, really.
But this sort of megalomania is seductive even to non-religious people. I'd bet Pol Pot and most other Communist leaders just thought they were doing what was right, they lacked the capacity for self-doubt, and they were surrounded by those who told them what they wanted to hear. There aren't that many authentically bad people in the world. I think Orwell actually gave human beings too much credit, because being rational himself, he assumed that, a few stupid people aside, most people were rational. So even his "bad guys" are rational--they want power, and will use "the boot in the face" to get and keep it. But in reality we have clean-cut, Christian soldiers torturing people to death because they think they're fighting for freedom and democracy. People will do horrible things for noble words, and still sleep like babies at night. Evil is more complex and insidious than Orwell made it out to be.
Anyway, rambling aside, our world is not like the one Orwell created in his books. There are similarities, yes, but ours differs from his in nature and degree. If you use up all your superlatives now, if you shout "tyranny" now, what words will you use when it gets worse?
I've found that anything mentioning "virtual reality" can be counted on to be vacuous crap. This isn't 100% crap, but you don't lose 100% of the bets in Vegas, either. This list is a collection of the obvious interspersed with, yes, vacuous crap. Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" was much more interesting and eye-opening, actually scary. This piece is one small step above the writings of the Gartner Group.
The future is already here for the developed world. Ubiquitous surveillance, networking, "dangers and dependencies" not recognized "until it is impossible to reverse them," and so on. Our future will be more of the same, mixed in with diminishing oil reserves, rising energy costs, rising environmental problems, rising religious wacko problems, better/deadlier biotech, and so on. I'm especially thrilled about the juxtaposition of a rising worldwide tide of religious fundamentalism and the affordability of biotechnology. No, I'm not in the field, so I don't know the right lingo, but I know people are tweaking viruses and bacteria right now, and that doing so is becoming cheaper/more prevalent/etc. How long before a group of eschatologically-minded Allah/Jesus/FSM/IPU/whatever Freaks fund and operate a lab? That is our future. Human fallibility is more dependable than human decency. And even if you assume we're too incompetent to make a killer bug, evolution keeps churning out new and better microbes. Nature really is trying to kill us. I don't think everyone will die within my lifetime (though why it would matter after I'm dead is beyond me), but I do expect a rather scary plague to kill off a few million or so in the next few decades. But I'm a cynical, pessimistic jerk, so I really prefer a world where I'm often wrong.
I actually can't tell your political bias from the selection of legistlation you've cited. Could you please be more one-sided in the future, so I can know whether or not to give credence to what you've written without having to actually think about it? There's a lot to read out there, and I don't have time to waffle over actual nuance. Thanks in advance for your help.
Just more proof that creationiss are idiots who don't know the difference between science and superstition:-)
Not true, grasshopper. Michael "Darwin's Black Box" Behe redefined science in the Dover trial so it does, in an "Intelligently Designed" world such as the one the original poster lives in, include astrology. It doesn't include the voluminous peer-reviewed research into the evolution of the immune system, but it does include astrology. Natch, astronomy, geophysics, etc also have to go, because they contradict a literal reading of the KJV, but at least we get to keep horoscopes. And I ask you, isn't that enough?
Are you kidding? There is sea life that not only mates under 1 year of age, but sometimes actually changes gender! I'm expecting a Focus on the Family talking paper any day now. Don't tell them that some frogs are transexuals as well. It all started with Janet Jackson's nipple. I don't remember any of this crap happening before we had aureolas on the boob tu... well, on the television.
1. So it happened earlier in recorded human history?
He didn't make that implication, though he could have been more clear. You leaping to an inference he didn't make is as much your fault as his. Read what he wrote, not what he would have written if he was as stupid as you'd like to make him out to be.
2. There was technology throughout most of human history that recorded Arctic ice cover?
I have no technology in place to verify that the contents of my home continue to exist when I'm not there to witness the fact. I have no technology in place to verify that the stars are really stars. What if I'm being lied to? This sort of selective "skepticism" is getting a bit tiresome. Earth is getting warmer, and ice at the north pole is melting. There is every reason to think that human activity is exacerbating that trend. Get over it. This is not an exercise in epistemology--we know what we know, and we don't start to question the nature of knowledge just because the knowledge challenges our worldview or poses an "inconvenient truth."
Not too far down the line you will start hearing stories about cops in LA, or even in some small podunk town, using this on suspects, troublemakers, etc. You will see people on the news saying "my confession was tortured out of me" but there will be no physical evidence. This police department will have purchased these non-lethal weapons for, of course, purely humanitarian reasons, but they will be abused. You have something that causes intense pain, but leaves no mark. Gosh, well, hmm, what might happen?
These things will be bought by every police department in the country, and soon every crime will be solved via confession. The courts will allow the confessions, since there will be no evidence of torture. With one of these devices and a bit of time, I could make you confess to every child murder, every rape, every sick deed known and unknown, even those that are anatomically impossible. Given enough pain, any human being will confess to absolutely anything. If all else fails, interrogate his children, or his wife. Again, you're leaving no physical marks, which means you're not "really" harming them, right? Can you think of a reason this wouldn't be used for interrogations?
People abuse power. If you give them the ability to abuse the power with perfect impunity because what they're doing will leave no trace, then they'll abuse their power with more frequency and enthusiasm. People like abusing their power--they get off on it. To me, this issue and others like it largely breaks down into two camps--people who understand that people will abuse power, and those who don't. Maybe they don't get it because they're too optimistic, or perhaps they want the abuses to take place, or maybe there's another reason.
Either you are willing to concede on a deeper level that people will abuse the power they have, in which case you do consider this a "big deal," or you aren't willing to concede that point, in which case you roll your eyes and dismiss the "power corrupts" contingent as alarmist loonies. Which camp are you in?
Optimal for the company isn't always optimal for the consumer. Gas prices are a good example. Exxon recently gave an executive $400million as a parting gift, I believe, so they're doing fine. Us, not so much. Also, I've read that the "brownouts" in California were largely deliberate, and certain companies were making money off of them. This isn't to say that capitalism is bad, but the best interest of the company is not identical with the best interest of the consumer. No one wants to sell you a perfect product that never breaks and continues to serve your needs forever--they want your money, and it is in their best interest to sell a slightly shoddy product that will give the illusion of quality, so you have to come back and buy another and another, ad infinitum.
Another thing to keep in mind is that companies do not want capitalism per se--they want monopolies for themselves. Companies do want big government, but they want it not to provide service, but to keep others out of thier field so they don't have to contend with competition. Cable companies are a great example of this. Our patent system is inundated with companies patenting as much as possible, even prior art (when they can get away with it) for the specific purpose of preventing competition.
It's not that I'm anti-capitalist. I do believe that capitalism generally sucks less than the alternatives. But I'm ambivalent about public utilities being entirely private. A necessary service like electricity or water shouldn't be entirely for-profit, unless it is heavily regulated with extensive oversight. Government may mean red tape and inefficiency, but I prefer that inefficiency to the cost-cutting measures that the drive for profitability always creates. The drive for companies is not safety or service, but profit, and when that comes first then things get cut or made "optional" that people need. I realize that many people think "I don't want to subsidize some poor person's electricity/water/mail/whatever just because they choose to live in the boonies" but I think society is better off if we pool the expense of certain services. I don't want to pay for nuclear weapons and cluster-bombs, but I don't get a line-item veto for my taxes. If we share the expense of "security" then we should be able to share the expense for necessary utilities.
If the point of school is just to impart knowledge and skill, then I think that podcasts would be great, and attendance should be largely optional. Post the information, give a test, and let the grades fall where they may.
But many, including many potential employers, view school as a screening tool. They want to see if you can go through the process of getting the degree, and passing tests is only a small part of that process. Consistently arriving for 8 A.M. classes in subjects for which you have no interest, doing lame projects that impart no knowledge, working and playing well with others, and all the rest of what makes school frustrating can be seen as screening tools to see who can and who cannot put forth the consistent effort that would identify a potential employee. The person who skips every class but aces all the tests may not be the one they want, because she would not have demonstrated the ability to work around someone else's schedule, follow through on mundane assignments, or work as part of a team towards a common goal.
I'd rather view the nature of education as the former option, because I've always wanted a "classical" education. I hate viewing college as just a glorified trade school used to prepare you for a life of cubicles and casual Fridays. But I hail from the upper working class/lower middle class (I could never figure it out) so perhaps my ideals are a bit, well, idealized. I wanted "an education," not just a piece of paper that will get me a job. I know a person with a Master's degree (in nursing) who did not know who Stalin or Freud were when I asked her. Really. But I do realize that our education system (speaking of the United States, granted) must serve the needs of the society we have, which largely revolves around getting and keeping a job, not around a familiarity with Plutarch and Nabokov. That damned "reality" is always putting a kink in my aspirations.
I am a little appalled by the reaction of many/.ers. This was a guy with a family
This is a guy with a family, true, but also a guy who chose to engage in dangerous activities that eventually killed him. He may have done what he did as safely as possible, but if you're juggling flaming chainsaws on a tightrope over a vat of sharks, you may end up getting hurt, family or no. We can't un-kill him by refraining from jokes. He chose his path, and I for one am not going to act all somber as if this were an unforseen, appalling tragedy. People who play in traffic get hit by cars. This is not exactly unexpected.
Ah, you haven't heard of McKinnon, Dworkin, et al. I cut my political teeth when many feminists were very pro-censorship. You are reading too much into what I'm saying because you think it has to be all-or-nothing. Yes, there are feminist (even lesbian) porn studios, and what's interesting about that case is that they are the only ones the laws influenced (written? I'm not sure) by McKinnon were used against.
And what proof would you like? I'm going on what I've seen in the past 20 years or so. I'm not saying "man the barricades! we're doomed!" but that there is and has been a consistent, deliberate effort to dilute the 6th Amendment. Rape Shield laws, for example, were pushed heavily be feminists, and actually hide evidence from the jury that could be exculpatory. "Learned helplessness," "battered women's syndrome," etc feed into the idea that a woman a) is not in any way responsible for her situation, and b) can take the law into her own hands, and still isn't responsible. There have been many stories over the years about wanting to pre-identify "potential" sex offenders with penile tumescence tests and similar profiling tools, and some of that conversation has extended to advocacy of preventive detention. There has been other talk of detaining an offendor past the end of his sentence, again for preventive reasons. I'm not going to "prove" anything to you--this isn't a math class. Do some reading. Stop obsessing over a generalization you may or may not have seen, and just move on.
The feminists I'm speaking of are, in fact, liberal in the dirty-word sense. And there is a strong element in that demographic that finds it objectionable that, to achieve a conviction and put someone in jail, evidence must be gathered, the accuser questioned, etc. Many people do actually think you should just take the woman's word for it. Your hysterical reply is a bit over the top. By putting the word "feminists" in parentheses, I was identifying a particular political group/movement/entity, not painting everyone who disagrees with me on any subject as a dirty, eeeviiillll liberal. Not all liberals fall into this ideological group, nor do all feminists (Paglia, for example, does not). You acting as if I was making a wall-to-wall generalization doesn't actually address what I was saying.
There are, to summarize, people who want you to take a woman's (or child's, I suppose) word for it that they were molested/raped/assaulted/groped/whatever, and either detain/jail/imprison the accused, restrict their movements, put them on a "bad" list, etc, without the pain (to the alleged victim) of a trial. It doesn't have to be called "prison" -- "preventive detention" is a useful euphemism. My point was that elements of the "liberal" movement, whom I refer to as "liberals," will work in concert with conservatives to erode or redefine our 6th Amendment rights. It may have escaped your notice, but politics makes strange bedfellows. If this alliance seems improbable to you, look at the constant efforts to censor pornography. There again you have an alliance between liberal feminists and conservatives to eat away at our rights. Is what I'm saying really that new to you?
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So yes, I guess the Democrats are better. Not great, but better. I know that isn't important to you, because you aren't the one being tortored to death. But I care about torture, and who is better and worse does matter to me. Maybe you're okay voting for an apologist for torture, but I'm not. Are you? I'm stuck on the basic idea that torture is wrong. Can you help me get over that basic moral failing?
The evangelicals think that Bush was chosen by God to lead the USA, and the reasons are far wider than terrorism. "Culture of faith," "Christian country," "returning God to our public lives," "returning God to the schools," "fighting secularism/humanism/filth" etc. Absurd and surreal as it is to the rest of us that anyone could look at the Bush administration and see the Hand of God, many do, and their worldview does not include the possibility of losing the next election. If they do lose, they will consider it stolen by the forces of darkness.
A vote for the Republic Party is a vote for God, and a vote for anyone else is a vote for Satan. You don't like Satan, do you? No not everyone is like that, but the dominant theme is very much present.
The only way things could ever change back to the way they were, the only way we would have to be cautious about how much power we give government, is if a Democrat is elected. Then, yes, it follows that power corrupts, and is inimical to freedom. But until that day, don't get stuck in a pre 9/11 mentality. If you need me to repeat it a few more times for effect, I can. Sorry about not being good enough at HTML to have a flag waving in the background as you read this.
And let's not forget that fewer than 3,000 Americans died from the 9/11 attacks. The flu kills about 36,000 Americans a year, according to the CDC. The flu. So we're giving these "powerful tools" to government, exempting the Executive branch from judicial oversight, enabling that branch to define anyone as an enemy combatant and forever preclude that person from seeking any judicial review or redress of their detention (the detention which shall require no charges or trial), all to fight an "islamo-fascist" movement that is so dire, so dreadful in nature that 5 years ago it killed less than 1/10 as many as are killed by the flu every year? That's the plan? Wow, that isn't stupid at all.
I immediately see how a problem that, over a 5 year span of time, was less than 1/50 (that's less than 2%, mind you) as deadly as the damned flu virus warrants a watering-down of habeus corpus, a precedent of selective exemption from judicial review, and the steady erosion not just of old-fashioned civil rights, but of the very idea of checks and balances that was intended to keep us free. Who needs any of that outdated crap? Oh, wait, I forget, our forefathers were thinking with a pre 9-11 mentality! Now it all makes sense! To follow what the forefathers wanted would be to give in to the terrorists! Am I doing okay here?
I never said that. At all. In any way. Did you read someone else's post and mistakenly reply to mine?
People who get nitpicky about technicalities when it comes to torture really warm the cockles of my heart. It's torture. That this doesn't bother you says more about your decency, your basic morality, than it does about mine. Your conscientious "what exactly are we saying here" act carries very little weight when you happen to be an apologist for torture.
I never said I should. Were you reading someone else's post? If I didn't respect you more, I might think that you were throwing out strawman arguments on purpose. You keep objecting to things I never said.
Yeah.... yeah, what, again? Are they or are they not tapping phone conversations without a warrant? You seem to be saying "no, they aren't doing it, and there's a darn good reason why they're doing it." I get it that you approve--I sort of expected that. But why do you pretend you're correcting me, but then just go on to justify why the government is doing the very thing you told me the government wasn't doing?
No, I don't. I expect the government should use any legal, moral means necessary. "Any means necessary" would justify totalitarianism--a complete lack of checks on government power. I'm a conservative, and conservatives don't trust government. Power corrupts, and all that. I want the powers of checks and balances limiting goverment power. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of safety to keep freedom. Freedom isn't free, as they say. It's not that I don't respect your totalitarian views... okay, I'm lying there. I really don't respect your totalitarian tendencies at all.
Once again, you must have been reading someone else's post. Either that, or you are just dishonest and want to pretend I said something that sets you up with an opportunity to pontificate. I didn't say jack about Republicans, nor did I ever credit the Democrats with being better. Your problem is that you can't seem to fathom integrity. I was just as irritated by Clinton, though not for the same reasons as the Republicans. I actually care about runaway government power, though many (perhaps most) of the "conservatives" who I found myself agreeing with then have suddenly forgotten about their distrust of government. Strange, that.
Then why do you think the President should not be subject to the law? Why do you think he should have no checks, no oversight, over his authority? Why do you say "power corrupts" only in a sentence about the Democrats, but you instinctively give a Republican President the benefit of the doubt when he brazenly repudiates the very idea of checks and balances, when he brazenly authorizes surveillance on American citizens without the warrant so clearly demanded by the Constitution? If you think power corrupts, why do you support that? Or do you just mean that it corrupts Democrats?
Except that "evolution" in this sense in no way applies to non-biological things. If you use evolution just to mean "change," then yes, computers and software have evolved, as in changed. But despite the word looking the same and seeming so convenient, you can't transition and make an analogy with biological evolution, because the word in that context doesn't mean anything even remotely like what it does whe talking about the "evolution" of Windows. So your analogy not only doesn't work, but does damage to the scientific theory you're trying to analogize Windows to, not only via guilt by association, but because your murky reasoning will be taken by some people to mean "aha! evolution doesn't make any sense! it's just like with computers..."
The people "who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence" also happen to be "bible-thumping do-gooders." I was complaining of a subset of A that also meet condition B, but you're offended because you ingored the qualification of condition B, and thought I was sliming all of set A.
That just has to be a rhetorical question. Are you implying that all arrogant people with faith in God don't really have faith in God? If you follow the line of the No True Scotsman fallacy, then no "real" Christian never does anything wrong, because at the very moment they did something wrong, they weren't a real Christian. But yes, I have found faith in God to be very compatible with arrogance.
Take the attitude towards science--I'm not a professional scientist, but I can see the fruits of the scientific method all around me, I know how much education and expertise go into that field, so I respect the scientific theories, even those I don't fully comprehend. But many religious people reject evolution, geology, environmental science, and pretty much all theoretical science because they, after expending a minimal effort in reading a creationist web-page, don't find them "credible." They actually want to re-define science to disprove what scientists consider science. Yes, that's arrogance. That's "I find evolution improbable after reading a Creationist web-page, so evolution must be false." Who cares about people who have spent decades going to school and doing original research? Yes, that's arrogance.
Watch it, bucko. I have an ex-wife, not a wife. A very important distinction, in which much happiness and peace of mind has been invested.
I never said, implied, or intimated that all people of faith were alike--you reached that conclusion either because of a persecution complex, or because pretending to do so suits your purpose. There are those in whom faith is manifested by humility, compassion, and decency. There are others whose faith galvanizes them with a self-confidence, to me arrogance, that allows them to drop bombs on people, or to torture them to death, with a clean conscience, because they think of themselves as instruments of God's providence. If you choose to think that I'm offended by their faith in Christ, rather than by killing and torture, then you are more interested in defending the honor of religion than in maintaining a basic level of human decency.
But what you've described is largely the present. Yet here you are. Hmm. Yes, there are ways around some, perhaps most, but there will always be workarounds. So there is no magic point in the future where it will be clear to you that now is the time to break with technology. They get you incrementally, not all at once. If they developed crack-proof DVDs and CDs tomorrow, and if all TV signals were record-proof, would you just walk away? As someone who listens to pretty much no contemporary music, watches no TV, and watches very few movies, I can tell you that walking away from popular culture makes connecting with those around you pretty difficult. There just isn't as much to talk about if you haven't seen the same TV shows (however crappy), listened to the same bands (however crappy), and so on. I wish you luck, though. I'm inherently misanthropic, so the cultural isolation doesn't bother me, but most people just aren't cut out for it.
But we don't have telescreens in every room that can listen and watch us. Yes, they listen to our phone calls without a warrant, but no, you don't have to guard your facial expression for fear of being tortured in Room 101. Saying that our situation is that bad trivializes the suffering and deaths of those whose situation is that bad.
I detest the rantings of O'Reilly and Coulter as much as the next thinking biped, but they do not consitute the Thought Police. Morons may impugn your patriotism for being skeptical of the President's policies, true, but no one, even Coulter, is saying you should be tortured for doing it.
There is no boot in the face, forever and ever. We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence. They don't think of themselves as power-hungry. That is why our world is so alien to Orwell's fictional one. I'm about halfway done with Orwell's essays, and basically he thinks that people are good, except for those who are bad. But the world really isn't that way. The bad things are done not by inherently bad people, but by people who think they are doing good, but lack the capacity to doubt themselves, their convictions, and their methods. Mix in political conviction with religious faith, bind them together, and you get borderline megalomania, which I think characterizes Ashcroft, Perle, Cheney, and Bush pretty well. They aren't evil (well, maybe Cheney--he's scary), only immune from self-doubt, because they think that the ultimate arbiter of good, meaning God, is firmly on their side. If you are on God's side, then there is only one other side, really.
But this sort of megalomania is seductive even to non-religious people. I'd bet Pol Pot and most other Communist leaders just thought they were doing what was right, they lacked the capacity for self-doubt, and they were surrounded by those who told them what they wanted to hear. There aren't that many authentically bad people in the world. I think Orwell actually gave human beings too much credit, because being rational himself, he assumed that, a few stupid people aside, most people were rational. So even his "bad guys" are rational--they want power, and will use "the boot in the face" to get and keep it. But in reality we have clean-cut, Christian soldiers torturing people to death because they think they're fighting for freedom and democracy. People will do horrible things for noble words, and still sleep like babies at night. Evil is more complex and insidious than Orwell made it out to be.
Anyway, rambling aside, our world is not like the one Orwell created in his books. There are similarities, yes, but ours differs from his in nature and degree. If you use up all your superlatives now, if you shout "tyranny" now, what words will you use when it gets worse?
The future is already here for the developed world. Ubiquitous surveillance, networking, "dangers and dependencies" not recognized "until it is impossible to reverse them," and so on. Our future will be more of the same, mixed in with diminishing oil reserves, rising energy costs, rising environmental problems, rising religious wacko problems, better/deadlier biotech, and so on. I'm especially thrilled about the juxtaposition of a rising worldwide tide of religious fundamentalism and the affordability of biotechnology. No, I'm not in the field, so I don't know the right lingo, but I know people are tweaking viruses and bacteria right now, and that doing so is becoming cheaper/more prevalent/etc. How long before a group of eschatologically-minded Allah/Jesus/FSM/IPU/whatever Freaks fund and operate a lab? That is our future. Human fallibility is more dependable than human decency. And even if you assume we're too incompetent to make a killer bug, evolution keeps churning out new and better microbes. Nature really is trying to kill us. I don't think everyone will die within my lifetime (though why it would matter after I'm dead is beyond me), but I do expect a rather scary plague to kill off a few million or so in the next few decades. But I'm a cynical, pessimistic jerk, so I really prefer a world where I'm often wrong.
That's my ex-wife, you insensitive clod.
I actually can't tell your political bias from the selection of legistlation you've cited. Could you please be more one-sided in the future, so I can know whether or not to give credence to what you've written without having to actually think about it? There's a lot to read out there, and I don't have time to waffle over actual nuance. Thanks in advance for your help.
Are you kidding? There is sea life that not only mates under 1 year of age, but sometimes actually changes gender! I'm expecting a Focus on the Family talking paper any day now. Don't tell them that some frogs are transexuals as well. It all started with Janet Jackson's nipple. I don't remember any of this crap happening before we had aureolas on the boob tu... well, on the television.
These things will be bought by every police department in the country, and soon every crime will be solved via confession. The courts will allow the confessions, since there will be no evidence of torture. With one of these devices and a bit of time, I could make you confess to every child murder, every rape, every sick deed known and unknown, even those that are anatomically impossible. Given enough pain, any human being will confess to absolutely anything. If all else fails, interrogate his children, or his wife. Again, you're leaving no physical marks, which means you're not "really" harming them, right? Can you think of a reason this wouldn't be used for interrogations?
People abuse power. If you give them the ability to abuse the power with perfect impunity because what they're doing will leave no trace, then they'll abuse their power with more frequency and enthusiasm. People like abusing their power--they get off on it. To me, this issue and others like it largely breaks down into two camps--people who understand that people will abuse power, and those who don't. Maybe they don't get it because they're too optimistic, or perhaps they want the abuses to take place, or maybe there's another reason.
Either you are willing to concede on a deeper level that people will abuse the power they have, in which case you do consider this a "big deal," or you aren't willing to concede that point, in which case you roll your eyes and dismiss the "power corrupts" contingent as alarmist loonies. Which camp are you in?
Another thing to keep in mind is that companies do not want capitalism per se--they want monopolies for themselves. Companies do want big government, but they want it not to provide service, but to keep others out of thier field so they don't have to contend with competition. Cable companies are a great example of this. Our patent system is inundated with companies patenting as much as possible, even prior art (when they can get away with it) for the specific purpose of preventing competition.
It's not that I'm anti-capitalist. I do believe that capitalism generally sucks less than the alternatives. But I'm ambivalent about public utilities being entirely private. A necessary service like electricity or water shouldn't be entirely for-profit, unless it is heavily regulated with extensive oversight. Government may mean red tape and inefficiency, but I prefer that inefficiency to the cost-cutting measures that the drive for profitability always creates. The drive for companies is not safety or service, but profit, and when that comes first then things get cut or made "optional" that people need. I realize that many people think "I don't want to subsidize some poor person's electricity/water/mail/whatever just because they choose to live in the boonies" but I think society is better off if we pool the expense of certain services. I don't want to pay for nuclear weapons and cluster-bombs, but I don't get a line-item veto for my taxes. If we share the expense of "security" then we should be able to share the expense for necessary utilities.
But many, including many potential employers, view school as a screening tool. They want to see if you can go through the process of getting the degree, and passing tests is only a small part of that process. Consistently arriving for 8 A.M. classes in subjects for which you have no interest, doing lame projects that impart no knowledge, working and playing well with others, and all the rest of what makes school frustrating can be seen as screening tools to see who can and who cannot put forth the consistent effort that would identify a potential employee. The person who skips every class but aces all the tests may not be the one they want, because she would not have demonstrated the ability to work around someone else's schedule, follow through on mundane assignments, or work as part of a team towards a common goal.
I'd rather view the nature of education as the former option, because I've always wanted a "classical" education. I hate viewing college as just a glorified trade school used to prepare you for a life of cubicles and casual Fridays. But I hail from the upper working class/lower middle class (I could never figure it out) so perhaps my ideals are a bit, well, idealized. I wanted "an education," not just a piece of paper that will get me a job. I know a person with a Master's degree (in nursing) who did not know who Stalin or Freud were when I asked her. Really. But I do realize that our education system (speaking of the United States, granted) must serve the needs of the society we have, which largely revolves around getting and keeping a job, not around a familiarity with Plutarch and Nabokov. That damned "reality" is always putting a kink in my aspirations.
And what proof would you like? I'm going on what I've seen in the past 20 years or so. I'm not saying "man the barricades! we're doomed!" but that there is and has been a consistent, deliberate effort to dilute the 6th Amendment. Rape Shield laws, for example, were pushed heavily be feminists, and actually hide evidence from the jury that could be exculpatory. "Learned helplessness," "battered women's syndrome," etc feed into the idea that a woman a) is not in any way responsible for her situation, and b) can take the law into her own hands, and still isn't responsible. There have been many stories over the years about wanting to pre-identify "potential" sex offenders with penile tumescence tests and similar profiling tools, and some of that conversation has extended to advocacy of preventive detention. There has been other talk of detaining an offendor past the end of his sentence, again for preventive reasons. I'm not going to "prove" anything to you--this isn't a math class. Do some reading. Stop obsessing over a generalization you may or may not have seen, and just move on.
There are, to summarize, people who want you to take a woman's (or child's, I suppose) word for it that they were molested/raped/assaulted/groped/whatever, and either detain/jail/imprison the accused, restrict their movements, put them on a "bad" list, etc, without the pain (to the alleged victim) of a trial. It doesn't have to be called "prison" -- "preventive detention" is a useful euphemism. My point was that elements of the "liberal" movement, whom I refer to as "liberals," will work in concert with conservatives to erode or redefine our 6th Amendment rights. It may have escaped your notice, but politics makes strange bedfellows. If this alliance seems improbable to you, look at the constant efforts to censor pornography. There again you have an alliance between liberal feminists and conservatives to eat away at our rights. Is what I'm saying really that new to you?