The "history" you keep threatening to cite is most probably from your favorite authors, right wing, pro-US-govt sources.
Yet you are denying things which even left-wing histories of the period admit (while claiming them justified), such as the fact that Allende called for and received military aid from Cuba.
you cannot deny that he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost.
... And yes, I deny it, and so do most non-govt historians.
Let me make sure I have this straight: you are denying that (to repeat the line you quote and respond to): `he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost.'? Really?
Castro would do the same if he could.
Are you really claiming that Castro wants to hold democratic elections, but instead, poor guy, is forced to be a brutal dictator who imprisons and tortures thousands of his countrymen? Really? Castro could hold elections any time he wanted to. He doesn't want to, and brutally opresses anyone who does.
Mr. Allende, who suspended democracy in Chile.
No, his own army turned against him, and therefore it was the army that suspended democracy, not Allende. He then reacted in kind.
This is simply untrue, which can be verified by going to primary documents from the period, such as Allende's orders suspending the Chilean judiciary, or the letter of protest from the members of Chile's supreme court, published in the New York Times. Both of these documents date from before the Army made any objection, and were the basis for the army's actions. As in the US, the Chilean army is sworn to defend the constitution, not the person currently in power. If a US president suspended the consitution, the US army would be duty-bound to do the same thing.
Whether the Chilean army proceeded to seize power for themselves, rather than restore the constitution is another debate. In either case, the result is a vibrant, democratic Chile today.
what Kissinger, perhaps the most evil man alive, did to that poor miserable country
Look, you haven't presented any credible cite for your claim of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. Your smear against Kissinger is thus, at best, not backed up by what you have said.
The US also had no problem helping the Venezuelan army tearing up the Venezuelan constitution last month, and ateempting to install some oil consultant in place of the democratically elected President Chavez.
Do you have any credible cite for your claim of US involvement in the abortive coup against Mr. Chavez? Chavez is a thug, who has rewritten his nation's constitution with a free hand, and I'd like to see him go as much as most Venezualans would, but simply asserting that the US is acting against him does not make it so.
You conclude with more assertions, which you do not bother to back up with cites, and finally end with a contradiction which is indicative of your actual position: you assert that the US is wrong because these dictators exist, but then go on to say that the US is wrong if they act to remove them. You cannot have it both ways, and your attempt to only succeeds in revealing your actual position, which would seem to be that the US is wrong no matter what happens...
You practice a better morality than you preach. Leaving aside the ranting of your first paragraph, you certainly seem to be trying to convince the readers of this thread of something. But how can this be? If you believe that there is no absolute truth in matters of philosophy, then you must accept that what you believe is, as you say, subjective. That it is an opinion, which is no more or less right than anyone else's opinion.
If you truly believe this, surely it is the height of arrogance (bordering on megalomania) for you to try to convince anyone of anything at all...
Your 2nd paragraph seems to imply that you think "good" is defined as whatever results in the greatest happiness/prosperity/liberty for the greatest number.
It does not suggest this. I am merely noting that as we have evolved what I would argue is a better and better understanding of our moral ideals, we have created more and more free and more and more prosperous societies. This may be coincidence, and it may not. I would argue that it is not.
This doesn't mean that liberty is an ultimate good or a universal right, it just means you personally find it to be a worthwhile idea.
It would take the greatest arrogance to presume that you have the right to tell people not to have slaves once you believe that your opposition to slavery is just your opinion, and has no more weight than their belief in slavery.
You have now replaced an external ideal which people may, perhaps argue over and never quite achieve, with the principle that no opinion is better than any other. How can you argue that might does not make right once you say this?
Certainly. So why do you make claims which even the Nicaraguan government no longer makes? I'm sorry you bought Mr. Ortega's line, I really am. I'm equally sorry that unlike most people who bought it at the time, you are unable to grow up and admit that it was a line now that Nicaragua has become a free country and has released tons of documents from Mr. Ortega's period in control.
Now you make a lot of claims about Reagan, none of which you back up with cites, and most of which parrot claims which the Nicaraguan government itself now admits were lies. Too bad the cold war is still raging in your heart. The rest of the world has grown up and moved on.
You go on to make some claims which you back up even more loosely, many of which you do not explain why they would be problematic even if true. Let's look at what else you claim:
It minimizes judicial supervision of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities
Nothing in the act in any way changes the requirement to have a judicial warrant to perform a phone tap. What you refer to as `internet surveillance' is `use of google', something which was prohibited to the FBI under absurd restrictions against reading publicly available materials which have now been withdrawn.
It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret searches
Nothing in the bill changes the requirements for judicial review of searches. Want a search? Get a warrant. That was true before, and is true now.
It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country
We are discussing non-citizens here. Visiting the US is a privilege, not a right. It is well within the bounds of the US constitution to non-citizens who are members of groups openly planning attacks on the US from entering the country.
It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial, mental health, and educational records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order.
Cite? Or is this more FUD?
It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "intelligence" purposes
What is `could lead to'? Is this a legal term?
It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence surveillance in the United States.
This doesn't allow the CIA to spy on Americans at all. It allows the CIA to pass to the FBI intelligence information picked up overseas which implicates people currently in the US. What is your objection to this? On what grounds do you feel that this violates the constitution?
It allows searches of highly personal financial records without notice
You're repeating yourself. To repeat myself, this is FUD unless you show that the bill allows anything to be searched without a warrant which would previously have required one.
to put everyone who disagrees with them in jail
Increasingly hyperolic FUD.
It creates a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties.
It doesn't do anything of the sort. It does allow known terrorist groups to be considered in the same manner as known organized crime groups, something that was ruled constitutional forty years ago.
This means they can jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in jail for life without a trial
Huh? How does this mean anything of the sort? What in the act allows anything at all like this? Where do you get this stuff?
So basically, you make a bunch of extreme claims, none of which you back up with cites at all, and none of which make much sense. Assertion is not proof. Show us any reason to believe that the bill does any of the things you claim.
Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.
Again, show us anything in the act which does this. This is not the case at all, much less through the USA PATRIOT act.
Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).
More FUD, unless you can show anything in the act which does this.
Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction).
Likewise. Did you actually read the act?
What the act actually does is extend the same practices which were already ruled to be constitutional when JFK applied them to the mafia forty years ago. Not as exciting as the weird fiction you've cooked up here, I know, but hey, life is like that.
You make some pretty bold claims here, but you don't back up any of them. Let's look at what you're claiming, shall we?
Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, the provision allowing the right to peaceably assemble, and the provision allowing the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
What in the USA PATRIOT act affects these rights at all? Don't assert that it affects them, tell us how it does. Otherwise, this is just FUD.
Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in astonishingly major and repeated ways.... now allows the police, at any time and for any reason, to enter and search your house
Where do you get this? Have you read the act? What in the act in any way allows the police to search your house without a warrant, or otherwise affects the fourth ammendment at all?
Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney General to be threats to national security.
Nothing in the act says anything like this. Where are you getting this? If you are refering to the detention of Mr. al-Muhajir, I would remind you that he is being held as a combatant in service of a foreign power, under precedent stretching back to the earliest days of our republic, and upheld by the supreme court in the 1943 case of Ex Parte Quirin. And even this is subject to judicial review -- even as we speak, Mr. al-Muhajir's lawyer is in a Manhattan courthouse appealing the ruling that he is a combatant.
If we follow your claim, then you have no grounds to try to convince me or anyone else here of what you are saying. If what others believe is just a subjective impression, and is `as right' as what you believe, it would be the height of arrogance to attempt to convince others of anything.
Similarly, it would be the height of arrogance for you to object to the genocide committed by the Nazis, for they believed that what they did was right. Are you brave (or foolish) enough to carry what you are saying through to its logical conclusion? Are you really saying that the Nazis support for genocide was no more wrong than your opposition to it?
Central to your argument is your claim that if beliefs about what is moral change, morality cannot be absolute. This does not hold, any more than we can say that mathematics or physical reality are not absolute because beliefs about them have changed over time. I could point you to an article which appeared in the New York Times almost a century ago claiming that space flight is impossible. Does this mean that our belief that space flight is possible is merely a subjective impression of ours, no more right than that article?
For thousands of years, human society has evolved in pursuit of a moral ideal. That we have never acheived it perfectly does not make it less real.
Even the articles you cite suggest only that as many of 200,000 may have died or fled in the course of the war -- no one claims, as you do, that the government killed this many. For you perhaps, the war is more the fault of the democratic government of Guatemala then it is the fault of the foreign-funded rebels attacking them. If you want others to believe this, you will have to tell us why.
Pardon? What foreign troops?
To repeat, Allende called for, and received military support and troops from Fidel Castro after taking power. A look at any history of the period will verify this.
As for Pinochet, to repeat, I am not defending him, but you cannot deny that he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost. This stands in sharp contrast to Mr. Allende, who suspended democracy in Chile. I note that you also credit the US with pressuring Mr. Pinochet to do so -- so what, exactly, is your complaint about US action?
I know more know the ultimate definition of good and evil than you do. On the other hand, I know more know what happened in the infinitessimal time after the begining of the universe that we have no idea about than you do, either.
The fact that we do not know what the moral ideal is exactly does not mean it does not exist. For thousands of years, humans have been evolving cultures and traditions which attempt to approximate the moral ideal. Some, including ours, have produced greater liberty, prosperity, and happiness for more people than others have.
Likewise, some have endorsed practices, such as slavery or genocide, which are wrong, are evil. If you discard the concept of a universal good, you discard the ability to consider these things to be evil, or even to criticize their existence.
Leaving aside all this talk of `the box' and whether we should think outside it (hint: an idea has to stand on its own merits. Where it is relative to some hypothetical box is irrelevant:-) ), let's look at what you're saying here.
You suggest that because past (and some present) societies believed slavery to be acceptable, our belief that it is not is only an opinion. Yet past societies have believed all sorts of things which we now know to be incorrect. Why should morality be any different? No, the fact that people can disagree on moral issues no more means that there is not an objective answer than the fact that people can disagree on the result of a complex computation means that there is not one right answer. People are fallible. Errors happen.
In your second paragraph, you demonstrate well the problem with your position. You are correct, that were we to accept that ideas of morality are merely subjective, we would have no right to consider what the Nazis did to be wrong, for they believed it to be right. Yet, what they did was wrong, was evil, and in throwing away the only grounds you might have had to object to it, you do yourself a grave disservice.
"Standard lefty drivel", that's rather imprecise. Kindly name some "undocumented claims" from any of the three books I suggested, and I will document them for you.
Okay, how about Zinn's wild claims about shadowy bodies like the Trilateral commision which he claims, without evidence, are in complete control of the US government? Or his claims that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were innocent, something even he must know by now is not true? How about Blum's wild conspiracy theories about corporations, none of which he backs up with evidence?
It has on and off since 1957 been ruled by a majority of elected Communist Party members. What else would you call it?
I would call it a state in a non-communist nation which has from time to time elected communist leadership, but has been limited in what harm it could do by the laws of the larger nation it was part of. Various localities in the US have elected self-proclaimed communists or socialists to head their local governments at various times. Does this, in your view, then make the US a communist nation?
Your analogy of Guatemala fits no better -- the real reason that the leftists in Guatemala collapsed, of course, is that they stopped receiving arms and funding from Nicaragua when Ortega lost power, and from Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed. As these movements never had the support of the population, they collapsed when they lost their outside funding. You make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the government in Guatemala (200,000 people, for example, would be two full percentage points of the population), but even you have to admit that Guatemala is now a peaceful democracy. The leftist rebels, meanwhile, while never in power, were plenty murderous.
Likewise, you keep repeating that Allende was elected democratically, as if this made it okay that he suspended Chile's democracy and called in foreign troops to help suppress his rivals. You offer various theories as to why Pinochet created democracy, but you cannot deny that he did. And you repeat the claim that the CIA was behind Pinochet's coup, even though you yourself posted documents earlier in this thread denying that.
So yes, every single government the world has seen which called itself communist has been murderous. Some, like Allende's, have lost power before they could do too much damage.
This is, of course, a very different position from that held by our Founders, who established the free speech rights we are discussing. They really did `hold these truths to be self-evident'.
More importantly, if you do believe that there is no external moral ideal, then it is the height of arrogance (indeed a form of megalomania) for you to claim that you can still judge others by what you believe is right. Faced with a society like Nazi Germany, all you are left with is the statement that things like the Final Solution, which were consistent with their beliefs and supported by the vast majority of society, are not what you believe is right -- you cannot make any claim that your belief is more right than the belief of those commiting genocide.
And yet, it is more right. Genocide is wrong, is evil, and it would remain wrong even if no one believed it to be.
Now if you admit that you cannot fault anyone for holding a belief, as long as they follow through on that belief, you have thrown away your ability to ever object to someone's actions as long as they `really mean it'.
Nazi Germany, for example, was very consistent in it's enactment of what it believed in. It even had the clear blessing of the majority in doing so. Yet what it did was wrong, was evil -- and you have thrown away any grounds you might have used to say so.
There are two problems with this. The first, of course, is that the fact that people disagree on something in no way suggests that there is not a correct answer, any more than the fact that people may reach different answers for a complex calculation means that there is not one right answer.
Secondly, I would argue that you practice a better morality than you preach: if you really believed that your ideas of right and wrong were purely subjective and internal to you, it would be arrogance of almost megalomaniac proportion to expect others to do what you think is right -- but you do this, nonetheless.
Which misses one key point: every state which has attempted to create Marx's ideal has resulted in tyrrany. Every single one. At some point, you have to start considering the possibility that there are features of Marx's program which inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. If you want to claim that this state is not what Marx intended, fine, but as Marx would say, the `seeds' of this state are present in his program.
Well, I would argue that the ideology of communism, is based on a basic change in human nature which cannot happen without coercion. Now Marx assures us that this coercion, this forced reshaping of what humans desire, along the line of Rousseau's quip about `forcing people to be free', is a temporary stage, and can `wither away' when humanity has been reformed, but I submit that any system which bases itself on the belief that government will voluntarily give up power once it is no longer needed is a fantasy, and a totalitarian fantasy at that.
With that said, if we can agree that communism necessarily leads to totalitarianism while disagreeing on why this happens, we are in sufficient agreement for the purpose at hand.:-)
You need to seperate 'morality' and 'reason,' as they are almost never identical. You could formulate morality using reason, but you don't, so it's not overly important.
You cannot, in fact, formulate morality solely with reason. The best you can do with reason is, as you try to do, decide what behavior maximizes certain ends. But here you run into a chicken-and-egg problem: is not the decision of what ends to maximize a moral decision?
You say, for example, that not allowing women to work denies you economic benefit, but is not the decision that economic benefit is good a moral choice? How do you decide what benefits to favor if you do not compare to an external standard?
Nor is your argument helped by a descent at the end into insults and non-sequiturs.
The problem here is that you are asserting that some people's rights are being taken away based on their race, yet when asked to provide even a single example, you cannot.
So it doesn't make much sense to discuss the `meaning' of something which you have not even demonstrated to exist.
We'll leave aside the books you suggest -- I've read two of them, and they are standard lefty drivel, full of undocumented claims, wild conspiracy theories, and improbable anecdotes.
Nor does Kerala make a good example -- it may or may not call itself communist (I am not convinced that it does), but it is one state in a larger nation which is not communist, and the amount of harm it can do is restricted by the laws of that larger nation. Your other examples are equally flawed, from Guatemala, where for all your complaining the people you name did establish a democracy which is free and strong to this day, to Pinochet, who stepped down peacably when voted out of office in elections he had called -- something your beloved Castro will never do, of course.
If you'd like to list the claims you are making about the other nations you name, I'd be more than happy to discuss them -- but you're not off to a very good start, given the wild claims you've made so far...
No italian governments called themselves communist, although some did include the communist party in various coalitions. I'm amused that you hold the Nicaraguans up as an example though, as they spent their whole time in power brutally repressing dissent, staging guerilla raids into neighboring countries, and otherwise acted par for the course for the last century's socialist dictatorships.
It could also be argued that every single "democracy" has been murderous and totalitarian - including our beloved US.
Yes, it could be argued, but only if you descend into claims as absurd as those you proceed to make:
Murderous US: Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Haiti, Guatemala and Israel to name but a few recipients of US conflict-fanning arms, direct intervention or proxy-warfare!
Amusingly, none of these cases, from Nicaragua where the US helped citizens of a brutal totalitarian regime fight for and win the right to free elections, to Israel, where the US is backing a free democratic society against a neighboring dictatorship which sets of human bombs in the children's area of restaurants in pursuit of Arafat's genocidal dreams, are examples of the US being in the wrong. If you disagree, perhaps you'd care to list what you think we are doing wrong in each of the five countries you name?
Totalitarian US: 1984 style control of media by powerful lobbies, pushing state propaganda and giving US citizens the mistaken idea that they live in some kind of utopia compared to the rest of the world...
I'm guessing (just guessing) that you have not, in fact, ever read 1984. Had you, you would realize how absurd your claim is. And while we're on the subject, the US is a `kind of utopia' compared to the rest of the world -- US citizens enjoy more freedom, more democracy, and more prosperity than citizens of any other nation.
He doesn't have to give real world examples, only has to show that it is possible for the patriot act etc. to be used to violate the freedoms of US citizens.
Right, but to this point, he has not provided a single instance of how the USA PATRIOT act reduces the rights of US citizens. Perhaps you would care to? If you have no specifics, these claims are merely FUD.
If you don't see how the patriot acct basically does away with the 4th amendment right against unlawful search and seizure, then you are really blind
Again, this is FUD if you can't point to how this freedom is allegedly being eroded.
Plus, there are several US citizens being held without trial, without even CHARGES right now. That, IMO, is the most dangerous precendent of all
Simply untrue. There is one US citizen who is being held as an enemy combatant, something which has always been constitutional in the case of those entering the country in the service of a foreign power to commit acts of war. This is not a new precedent at all -- this has been standard procedure since the earliest days of our republic, and has been upheld by the supreme court a number of times, most recently in 1943 in the case Ex Parte Quirin.
Nor is Mr. al-Muhajir unrepresented. Even as we speak, his lawyer is in a Manhattan courtroom appealing the decision to treat him as an enemy combatant. If the judge rules that there is insufficient evidence to consider him a combatant, he will be remanded to civilian custody, where he will be either charged with another crime or released.
Might as well start sending the citizens they don't like of to the gulags right now
Ah yes, what would a civil liberties thread be without absurd hyperbole of this sort? Given that you can't otherwise be bothered to get your facts straight, this hyperbole serves only to weaken your argument.
Slashdot Mirror
The "history" you keep threatening to cite is most probably from your favorite authors, right wing, pro-US-govt sources.
Yet you are denying things which even left-wing histories of the period admit (while claiming them justified), such as the fact that Allende called for and received military aid from Cuba.
you cannot deny that he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost.
... And yes, I deny it, and so do most non-govt historians.
Let me make sure I have this straight: you are denying that (to repeat the line you quote and respond to): `he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost.'? Really?
Castro would do the same if he could.
Are you really claiming that Castro wants to hold democratic elections, but instead, poor guy, is forced to be a brutal dictator who imprisons and tortures thousands of his countrymen? Really? Castro could hold elections any time he wanted to. He doesn't want to, and brutally opresses anyone who does.
Mr. Allende, who suspended democracy in Chile.
No, his own army turned against him, and therefore it was the army that suspended democracy, not Allende. He then reacted in kind.
This is simply untrue, which can be verified by going to primary documents from the period, such as Allende's orders suspending the Chilean judiciary, or the letter of protest from the members of Chile's supreme court, published in the New York Times. Both of these documents date from before the Army made any objection, and were the basis for the army's actions. As in the US, the Chilean army is sworn to defend the constitution, not the person currently in power. If a US president suspended the consitution, the US army would be duty-bound to do the same thing.
Whether the Chilean army proceeded to seize power for themselves, rather than restore the constitution is another debate. In either case, the result is a vibrant, democratic Chile today.
what Kissinger, perhaps the most evil man alive, did to that poor miserable country
Look, you haven't presented any credible cite for your claim of US involvement in Pinochet's coup. Your smear against Kissinger is thus, at best, not backed up by what you have said.
The US also had no problem helping the Venezuelan army tearing up the Venezuelan constitution last month, and ateempting to install some oil consultant in place of the democratically elected President Chavez.
Do you have any credible cite for your claim of US involvement in the abortive coup against Mr. Chavez? Chavez is a thug, who has rewritten his nation's constitution with a free hand, and I'd like to see him go as much as most Venezualans would, but simply asserting that the US is acting against him does not make it so.
You conclude with more assertions, which you do not bother to back up with cites, and finally end with a contradiction which is indicative of your actual position: you assert that the US is wrong because these dictators exist, but then go on to say that the US is wrong if they act to remove them. You cannot have it both ways, and your attempt to only succeeds in revealing your actual position, which would seem to be that the US is wrong no matter what happens...
If you truly believe this, surely it is the height of arrogance (bordering on megalomania) for you to try to convince anyone of anything at all...
Your 2nd paragraph seems to imply that you think "good" is defined as whatever results in the greatest happiness/prosperity/liberty for the greatest number.
It does not suggest this. I am merely noting that as we have evolved what I would argue is a better and better understanding of our moral ideals, we have created more and more free and more and more prosperous societies. This may be coincidence, and it may not. I would argue that it is not.
This doesn't mean that liberty is an ultimate good or a universal right, it just means you personally find it to be a worthwhile idea.
It would take the greatest arrogance to presume that you have the right to tell people not to have slaves once you believe that your opposition to slavery is just your opinion, and has no more weight than their belief in slavery. You have now replaced an external ideal which people may, perhaps argue over and never quite achieve, with the principle that no opinion is better than any other. How can you argue that might does not make right once you say this?
Simply repeating a lie doesn't make it right.
Certainly. So why do you make claims which even the Nicaraguan government no longer makes? I'm sorry you bought Mr. Ortega's line, I really am. I'm equally sorry that unlike most people who bought it at the time, you are unable to grow up and admit that it was a line now that Nicaragua has become a free country and has released tons of documents from Mr. Ortega's period in control.
Now you make a lot of claims about Reagan, none of which you back up with cites, and most of which parrot claims which the Nicaraguan government itself now admits were lies. Too bad the cold war is still raging in your heart. The rest of the world has grown up and moved on.
You go on to make some claims which you back up even more loosely, many of which you do not explain why they would be problematic even if true. Let's look at what else you claim:
It minimizes judicial supervision of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities
Nothing in the act in any way changes the requirement to have a judicial warrant to perform a phone tap. What you refer to as `internet surveillance' is `use of google', something which was prohibited to the FBI under absurd restrictions against reading publicly available materials which have now been withdrawn.
It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret searches
Nothing in the bill changes the requirements for judicial review of searches. Want a search? Get a warrant. That was true before, and is true now.
It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country
We are discussing non-citizens here. Visiting the US is a privilege, not a right. It is well within the bounds of the US constitution to non-citizens who are members of groups openly planning attacks on the US from entering the country.
It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial, mental health, and educational records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order.
Cite? Or is this more FUD?
It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "intelligence" purposes
What is `could lead to'? Is this a legal term?
It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence surveillance in the United States.
This doesn't allow the CIA to spy on Americans at all. It allows the CIA to pass to the FBI intelligence information picked up overseas which implicates people currently in the US. What is your objection to this? On what grounds do you feel that this violates the constitution?
It allows searches of highly personal financial records without notice
You're repeating yourself. To repeat myself, this is FUD unless you show that the bill allows anything to be searched without a warrant which would previously have required one.
to put everyone who disagrees with them in jail
Increasingly hyperolic FUD.
It creates a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties.
It doesn't do anything of the sort. It does allow known terrorist groups to be considered in the same manner as known organized crime groups, something that was ruled constitutional forty years ago.
This means they can jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in jail for life without a trial
Huh? How does this mean anything of the sort? What in the act allows anything at all like this? Where do you get this stuff?
So basically, you make a bunch of extreme claims, none of which you back up with cites at all, and none of which make much sense. Assertion is not proof. Show us any reason to believe that the bill does any of the things you claim.
Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.
Again, show us anything in the act which does this. This is not the case at all, much less through the USA PATRIOT act.
Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).
More FUD, unless you can show anything in the act which does this.
Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction).
Likewise. Did you actually read the act?
What the act actually does is extend the same practices which were already ruled to be constitutional when JFK applied them to the mafia forty years ago. Not as exciting as the weird fiction you've cooked up here, I know, but hey, life is like that.
More on the rest of your claims in my next post
You make some pretty bold claims here, but you don't back up any of them. Let's look at what you're claiming, shall we?
Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, the provision allowing the right to peaceably assemble, and the provision allowing the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
What in the USA PATRIOT act affects these rights at all? Don't assert that it affects them, tell us how it does. Otherwise, this is just FUD.
Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in astonishingly major and repeated ways. ... now allows the police, at any time and for any reason, to enter and search your house
Where do you get this? Have you read the act? What in the act in any way allows the police to search your house without a warrant, or otherwise affects the fourth ammendment at all?
Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney General to be threats to national security.
Nothing in the act says anything like this. Where are you getting this? If you are refering to the detention of Mr. al-Muhajir, I would remind you that he is being held as a combatant in service of a foreign power, under precedent stretching back to the earliest days of our republic, and upheld by the supreme court in the 1943 case of Ex Parte Quirin. And even this is subject to judicial review -- even as we speak, Mr. al-Muhajir's lawyer is in a Manhattan courthouse appealing the ruling that he is a combatant.
Similarly, it would be the height of arrogance for you to object to the genocide committed by the Nazis, for they believed that what they did was right. Are you brave (or foolish) enough to carry what you are saying through to its logical conclusion? Are you really saying that the Nazis support for genocide was no more wrong than your opposition to it?
For thousands of years, human society has evolved in pursuit of a moral ideal. That we have never acheived it perfectly does not make it less real.
Pardon? What foreign troops?
To repeat, Allende called for, and received military support and troops from Fidel Castro after taking power. A look at any history of the period will verify this.
As for Pinochet, to repeat, I am not defending him, but you cannot deny that he held democratic elections, and stepped down when his party lost. This stands in sharp contrast to Mr. Allende, who suspended democracy in Chile. I note that you also credit the US with pressuring Mr. Pinochet to do so -- so what, exactly, is your complaint about US action?
I know more know the ultimate definition of good and evil than you do. On the other hand, I know more know what happened in the infinitessimal time after the begining of the universe that we have no idea about than you do, either.
The fact that we do not know what the moral ideal is exactly does not mean it does not exist. For thousands of years, humans have been evolving cultures and traditions which attempt to approximate the moral ideal. Some, including ours, have produced greater liberty, prosperity, and happiness for more people than others have.
Likewise, some have endorsed practices, such as slavery or genocide, which are wrong, are evil. If you discard the concept of a universal good, you discard the ability to consider these things to be evil, or even to criticize their existence.
Leaving aside all this talk of `the box' and whether we should think outside it (hint: an idea has to stand on its own merits. Where it is relative to some hypothetical box is irrelevant :-) ), let's look at what you're saying here.
You suggest that because past (and some present) societies believed slavery to be acceptable, our belief that it is not is only an opinion. Yet past societies have believed all sorts of things which we now know to be incorrect. Why should morality be any different? No, the fact that people can disagree on moral issues no more means that there is not an objective answer than the fact that people can disagree on the result of a complex computation means that there is not one right answer. People are fallible. Errors happen.
In your second paragraph, you demonstrate well the problem with your position. You are correct, that were we to accept that ideas of morality are merely subjective, we would have no right to consider what the Nazis did to be wrong, for they believed it to be right. Yet, what they did was wrong, was evil, and in throwing away the only grounds you might have had to object to it, you do yourself a grave disservice.
"Standard lefty drivel", that's rather imprecise. Kindly name some "undocumented claims" from any of the three books I suggested, and I will document them for you.
Okay, how about Zinn's wild claims about shadowy bodies like the Trilateral commision which he claims, without evidence, are in complete control of the US government? Or his claims that Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were innocent, something even he must know by now is not true? How about Blum's wild conspiracy theories about corporations, none of which he backs up with evidence?
It has on and off since 1957 been ruled by a majority of elected Communist Party members. What else would you call it?
I would call it a state in a non-communist nation which has from time to time elected communist leadership, but has been limited in what harm it could do by the laws of the larger nation it was part of. Various localities in the US have elected self-proclaimed communists or socialists to head their local governments at various times. Does this, in your view, then make the US a communist nation?
Your analogy of Guatemala fits no better -- the real reason that the leftists in Guatemala collapsed, of course, is that they stopped receiving arms and funding from Nicaragua when Ortega lost power, and from Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed. As these movements never had the support of the population, they collapsed when they lost their outside funding. You make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the government in Guatemala (200,000 people, for example, would be two full percentage points of the population), but even you have to admit that Guatemala is now a peaceful democracy. The leftist rebels, meanwhile, while never in power, were plenty murderous.
Likewise, you keep repeating that Allende was elected democratically, as if this made it okay that he suspended Chile's democracy and called in foreign troops to help suppress his rivals. You offer various theories as to why Pinochet created democracy, but you cannot deny that he did. And you repeat the claim that the CIA was behind Pinochet's coup, even though you yourself posted documents earlier in this thread denying that.
So yes, every single government the world has seen which called itself communist has been murderous. Some, like Allende's, have lost power before they could do too much damage.
This is, of course, a very different position from that held by our Founders, who established the free speech rights we are discussing. They really did `hold these truths to be self-evident'.
More importantly, if you do believe that there is no external moral ideal, then it is the height of arrogance (indeed a form of megalomania) for you to claim that you can still judge others by what you believe is right. Faced with a society like Nazi Germany, all you are left with is the statement that things like the Final Solution, which were consistent with their beliefs and supported by the vast majority of society, are not what you believe is right -- you cannot make any claim that your belief is more right than the belief of those commiting genocide.
And yet, it is more right. Genocide is wrong, is evil, and it would remain wrong even if no one believed it to be.
Nazi Germany, for example, was very consistent in it's enactment of what it believed in. It even had the clear blessing of the majority in doing so. Yet what it did was wrong, was evil -- and you have thrown away any grounds you might have used to say so.
Secondly, I would argue that you practice a better morality than you preach: if you really believed that your ideas of right and wrong were purely subjective and internal to you, it would be arrogance of almost megalomaniac proportion to expect others to do what you think is right -- but you do this, nonetheless.
Which misses one key point: every state which has attempted to create Marx's ideal has resulted in tyrrany. Every single one. At some point, you have to start considering the possibility that there are features of Marx's program which inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. If you want to claim that this state is not what Marx intended, fine, but as Marx would say, the `seeds' of this state are present in his program.
With that said, if we can agree that communism necessarily leads to totalitarianism while disagreeing on why this happens, we are in sufficient agreement for the purpose at hand. :-)
You need to seperate 'morality' and 'reason,' as they are almost never identical. You could formulate morality using reason, but you don't, so it's not overly important.
You cannot, in fact, formulate morality solely with reason. The best you can do with reason is, as you try to do, decide what behavior maximizes certain ends. But here you run into a chicken-and-egg problem: is not the decision of what ends to maximize a moral decision?
You say, for example, that not allowing women to work denies you economic benefit, but is not the decision that economic benefit is good a moral choice? How do you decide what benefits to favor if you do not compare to an external standard?
Nor is your argument helped by a descent at the end into insults and non-sequiturs.
The problem here is that you are asserting that some people's rights are being taken away based on their race, yet when asked to provide even a single example, you cannot.
So it doesn't make much sense to discuss the `meaning' of something which you have not even demonstrated to exist.
We'll leave aside the books you suggest -- I've read two of them, and they are standard lefty drivel, full of undocumented claims, wild conspiracy theories, and improbable anecdotes.
Nor does Kerala make a good example -- it may or may not call itself communist (I am not convinced that it does), but it is one state in a larger nation which is not communist, and the amount of harm it can do is restricted by the laws of that larger nation. Your other examples are equally flawed, from Guatemala, where for all your complaining the people you name did establish a democracy which is free and strong to this day, to Pinochet, who stepped down peacably when voted out of office in elections he had called -- something your beloved Castro will never do, of course.
If you'd like to list the claims you are making about the other nations you name, I'd be more than happy to discuss them -- but you're not off to a very good start, given the wild claims you've made so far...
Your information is amusingly incorrect.
No italian governments called themselves communist, although some did include the communist party in various coalitions. I'm amused that you hold the Nicaraguans up as an example though, as they spent their whole time in power brutally repressing dissent, staging guerilla raids into neighboring countries, and otherwise acted par for the course for the last century's socialist dictatorships.
I welcome you to provide any cite to back up the claim that the police can legally pull you over for `DWB'. Any.
It could also be argued that every single "democracy" has been murderous and totalitarian - including our beloved US.
Yes, it could be argued, but only if you descend into claims as absurd as those you proceed to make:
Murderous US: Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Haiti, Guatemala and Israel to name but a few recipients of US conflict-fanning arms, direct intervention or proxy-warfare!
Amusingly, none of these cases, from Nicaragua where the US helped citizens of a brutal totalitarian regime fight for and win the right to free elections, to Israel, where the US is backing a free democratic society against a neighboring dictatorship which sets of human bombs in the children's area of restaurants in pursuit of Arafat's genocidal dreams, are examples of the US being in the wrong. If you disagree, perhaps you'd care to list what you think we are doing wrong in each of the five countries you name?
Totalitarian US: 1984 style control of media by powerful lobbies, pushing state propaganda and giving US citizens the mistaken idea that they live in some kind of utopia compared to the rest of the world...
I'm guessing (just guessing) that you have not, in fact, ever read 1984. Had you, you would realize how absurd your claim is. And while we're on the subject, the US is a `kind of utopia' compared to the rest of the world -- US citizens enjoy more freedom, more democracy, and more prosperity than citizens of any other nation.
He doesn't have to give real world examples, only has to show that it is possible for the patriot act etc. to be used to violate the freedoms of US citizens.
Right, but to this point, he has not provided a single instance of how the USA PATRIOT act reduces the rights of US citizens. Perhaps you would care to? If you have no specifics, these claims are merely FUD.
If you don't see how the patriot acct basically does away with the 4th amendment right against unlawful search and seizure, then you are really blind
Again, this is FUD if you can't point to how this freedom is allegedly being eroded.
Plus, there are several US citizens being held without trial, without even CHARGES right now. That, IMO, is the most dangerous precendent of all
Simply untrue. There is one US citizen who is being held as an enemy combatant, something which has always been constitutional in the case of those entering the country in the service of a foreign power to commit acts of war. This is not a new precedent at all -- this has been standard procedure since the earliest days of our republic, and has been upheld by the supreme court a number of times, most recently in 1943 in the case Ex Parte Quirin.
Nor is Mr. al-Muhajir unrepresented. Even as we speak, his lawyer is in a Manhattan courtroom appealing the decision to treat him as an enemy combatant. If the judge rules that there is insufficient evidence to consider him a combatant, he will be remanded to civilian custody, where he will be either charged with another crime or released.
Might as well start sending the citizens they don't like of to the gulags right now
Ah yes, what would a civil liberties thread be without absurd hyperbole of this sort? Given that you can't otherwise be bothered to get your facts straight, this hyperbole serves only to weaken your argument.