The President is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt as a feature of the job
Sure he (or she) is. And if it turns out that the president's actions are contrary to law, then you've got good reason to do something about it, or at least simply not re-elect him on his next go around. The whole point of an election season is that it's a chance to decide who you trust to make decisions. In your scenario, where private consultation prior to public acts are impossible, then you're not hiring an executive, you're hiring someone who's good at chairing public meetings. What's the point of having someone who can execute their judgement if you don't trust their judgement? Part of their judgement involves picking the right people to talk to, on occasion, to gain some insight into something that's beyond your experience or foresight. And not all of those people are going to be in the mood to be under scrutiny of political operatives who are paid to take potshots at whoever's in office that year.
Would it be interesting to be privvy to all of Bill Clinton's private ruminations and communications following the attack on the USS Cole and our embassies in Africa? Sure. But regardless of how he came by his thinking, it's his actions (or lack of them) that really matter on the subject. The president is still a citizen. He's a civilian holding an important office, but he's still a citizen just like you and me. The person in that office is entitled to talk with his peers and acquaintences without making those people worry that every word they say (or type) will wind up out of context in some senate political theater.
But you're forgetting the need for people from other parties, idealogies, and even nations to be able to quietly chime in behind the scenes without rocking their own boats. Should Nancy Pelosi really be unable to have a frank, unrecorded, private bit of face time with her political opponent (but none the less, co-worker) in the executive branch? Should a newly elected president not be able to quietly discuss with his immediate predecessor the nature of earlier private conversations that C-in-C may have had with a foreign head of state?
If Obama (for example) is elected, and three years later is in the mood to try for another term, should he be allowed to take off his "president" hat, and have private "candidate" conversations with people counseling him on political matters? Would you deny him the ability to use e-mail for that purpose? If so, why?
The substance is right in front of you. I'm giving you an exhaustive understanding of what I can take away from reading the large, thematic collection of stickers plastered over the back of a car, and telling you how I size up the person who makes the statements seen there (especially in the context of them all, taken as a whole). And despite seeing irrationality on parade, I'm pointing out (again - are you actually reading this?) that my reaction is NOT to want to vandalize the car. Unlike the person to whom I responded, who said that was their instinct upon seeing a politician's name on someone else's car. Do you not see the substantial difference between those two world views? And thus the substance in pointing that out?
I'm all for privacy, I really am, but in this case the individual's need is greatly outweighed by the greater good
You're missing the point. The greater good is served by allowing elected executives to have some privacy as they deliberate over what will become very public policies and actions. Could you go four years while dealing with unimagineably stressful decision making on every conceivable sort of topic, and never once want to have a private conversation with a close friend while hashing things out? Really?
Except the problem is that most people who show up at such protests - certainly the noisiest ones with the most fancy drums, biggest puppets, most on-fire effigies, most well-polished-chain-each-other-across-the-street-routine, etc - are usually spouting the "war is not the answer" or "peace!" lines without any connection between that thinking and the reality of a world that houses entities like North Korea. Or the reality Islamist militants in the Sudan systematically raping their way through entire villages. People who are so married to their sound bites that they refuse to even stipulate that there are hostile people and entities in the world that will never be "loved" out of violently enlarging their territory or putting cultures under the thumb of retrograde bits of mysoginistic misery like Sharia law.
Don't like war? Then stop them, with force if necessary, and deprive those that cause them to happen of the tools and power to conduct them. When you sign a surrender that says you'll agree to no-fly zones over the parts of your country where you've been busy slaughtering people not in your tribe... be prepared for the consequences when you spend the next several years shooting at the coalition planes patroling those no-fly zones. When you use trainloads of Soviet-era weapons to try to rearrange the Balkans in a river of blood? Don't be shocked when your toys get bombed and your leaders get taken out, and your stash of tanks and missles destroyed. Indeed, war is not the answer to any need for constructive activity. But war IS the answer of last resort to aggression on a large scale. Because it's the only thing that reduces aggression back down to the scale that be dealt with pre-emptively, locally, and without displacing or killing lots of people.
Next time you go to war protest, look around. How many people don't make a distinction (based on their cheesy posters) between the war against Iran's proxy fighters in Iraq, the war against the Taliban asshats on the border of Afghanistan, and the Sudanese war against villagers? If they don't like the Taliban's war against women being able to read and write, what exactly is their chosen method of stopping one of those militants from shooting teachers like dogs in the town square? Sending them copies of their anti-war pamphlets, or the URL to their blog? Those issues are too complex to fit in a sound bite, so the protesters just dumb it down... and look the dumber for it.
So, what about it was "true", as you so nicely put it?
Are you really that obtuse?
I responded to someone who said that when he sees a politician's name on a car bumber sticker, it makes him want to vandalize the car. My take on it: when I see witless platitudes such as those I mentioned plastered all over a car, I either shrug it off as silliness, or (given the chance) actually try to talk to the person who - through their printed political messages in public view - is already talking to everyone else. The poster didn't say, "When I see a bumper sticker that says 'Peace Through Strength,' all I can think is what a short-sighted sound-bite that is, and it makes me want to point out to the guy in the car that China will be strong too, and that doesn't make them right or their sort of peace worth having." No, he said that when he sees a person's name, he wants to cost them money by damaging their property, but that he's above that, and "doesn't know how anyway" etc (what a scream!).
So, when I DO see the messages that someone very deliberately goes to the trouble of making sure everyone can see, and I size up their message as being an assemblage of polyanna-ish platitudes or populist nonsense, I call it that. Where's the straw man? Where's the ad hominem? I'm pointing out that my reaction is not (unlike the person to whom I responded) an instant urge to wreck the guy's paint job. Of course, you already knew all of that, and you're just playing dumb so you can feign annoyance and attempt to distract from the actual context.
Window smashing is the providence of thugs, period. I'd like you to actually back up your assertion that the same people who are for peace and harmony are the ones who are smashing windows
Doesn't matter. The people who do that crap, and those that chain themselves across public roads to deny their use to as many people as possible and busy up as many police and rescue people as possible are all of a stripe... because if there were indeed massive numbers of non-thug, thug-disliking throngs at such protests, then they'd go to enormous lengths to not have their events become hosts to such BS. But through the "enemy of my enemy is my friend, or least someone we should tolerate" line of thinking, the groups that organize specifically to disrupt streets and cause some mayhem - who announce themselves in advance, and crow about it on a thousand blogs after the fact! - show up like clockwork and do exactly what's expected. It's not exactly mysterious.
those damn revolutionary traitors dumping all that tea just to make a point
I see, because the local coffee shop is an agent of foreign colonial tyrrany, being run in a country in which you have no representative democracy or constitional checks and balances. Yes, nothing has changed since the founding of our nation! We must still destroy the property and livelihoods of our neighbors in order to show how we must sever ties with the overseas monarchy that sets taxes on which we have no voice, stations troops in our homes, and prevents us from manufacturing goods on our own shores. Yes, I see now that you have a keen grasp on it.
I walk past a car at my work's parking lot that has Bush stickers all over it. I have fantasies about keying the holy living shit out of that car as I pass it.
Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? Your actual desire, when someone else expresses their opinion, is to be violent. My desire, when I see a car loaded up with "random acts of beauty," "peace happens," and "war is not the answer" stickers is to actually talk to the platitude-dealing pollyanna involved and get a sense of how they think, for exmaple, that their random acts of beauty and kindness might change a local Taliban franchise's boss into someone who no longer likes to kill women showing up to work as a teacher and showing young girls how to read. How was "war not the answer" when Germany was rolling over Europe? How exactly was peace going to "happen" in the Balkans as Muslims were being ethnically "cleansed" from their villages with Serbian machine guns?
Unlike you, whose first instinct - however well reigned in for fear of being caught - is to vandalize the property of someone you hate, I'm more inclined to either roll my eyes, or actually communicate. I do appreciate your so nicely illustrating the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the left. It's entirely about rudderless emotions, drama, and cheap, sophomoric, fair-weather outrage that's anything but constructive... and shows that the pretense of disliking partisanship is completely disengenuous. It's true of you, and it's true of the current presidential candidate from the left. Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else. "Change We Can Believe In" is the most empty bit of meaningless rhetoric I've ever heard, since it avoids, at all costs, any actual specificity lest the people that utter it get caught showing the real foundation of their idealogy. No need to of course, since the portrait you painted of how your brain works when exposed to nothing more than the name of a political opponent handily demonstrates the actual nature of most political thinking on the left: it's about actual hate, or about craven pandering to that hate as a way to power.
More often than not, it seems it's the tolerant, freedom loving liberal activists that vandalize and destroy other people's property.
Indeed. Nothing says "peace" and "harmony" and "can't we all just get along" like smashing the windows of a local retail shop during your anti-war rally, and burning giant puppet effigies to show what you'd really do to people you hate if you could get away with it. Yes, hate is tolerated and even encouraged, as long as it's in the name of warm, fuzzy, friendly political correctness anchored in leftist, populist platitudes. Why these idiots - so often theoretically college educated - can't see the fantastic irony of hating in the name of tolerance, and being randomly violent in the name of peace, I'll never know. Unless it's because, most of the time, they're just muddle-headed poseurs with no critical thinking skills and they're actually attending protests to get dates, shock their parents, and come up with something new for MySpace because people are getting tired of just looking at pictures of them being drunk at parties.
Seriously, what if the roles were reversed? The Feds are looking for some HIPAA-related email, and you can't produce it. What would they say??
"You should have had a system in place that you could rely on..."
Well, sure. Because there are actually regulations in place that call for that. It's the law. In the case of people who have been hired by an executive administration to provide research, advice, and political guidance... they aren't subject to that same standard, for a reason. They're not an agency. We're not talking about official communication between, say, the C-in-C and the military people under his command, or between that office and the TSA, or the Dept Of The Interior, or the State Department related to issues overseas. That stuff is all archived, and subject to FOIA. And that's the whole point. You hire an executive to bring their own judgement and the thinking of the people he or she chooses to help in complex judgement calls to the issues in front of them. They then ACT on their judgement, and leave quite a FOIA-able paper trail behind them.
If every conversation that President Obama wants to have with his pastor of the week - in person or by e-mail - as he thinks through an upcoming condition-free meeting with Hugo Chavez is information that you get have by FOIA, then how likely is it that he's going to use such channels for frank communication while arriving at the opinions he was hired to act upon?
Bush isn't content to just let the people be tried as criminals or treated as soldiers
Let's see. We've got trials going on right now. We've got other people who have been cleared, or who were connected to groups that have since been neutralized by other means... but their own countries refuse to let them back in, and no one else wants to give them sanction. Then you've got guys there who very plainly proclaim that they are not affiliated with any organized military, but that they absolutely were trying to kill soldiers in various spots overseas at the behest of (or in the name of) bin Laden, and they come right out and say that if they are released, they will do it again. But since they're not military people, they're not POWs. And since their acts weren't on US soil, but were against US personnel, they're not vanilla criminals that have a slot in our domestic criminal system, either.
There needs to be a new body of law to handle this, if people don't want the military to handle it on a case by case basis, as they're doing now. The democrats aren't having some brilliant new proposal batted down by Bush... they're not even TALKING about how they'd do it. They don't have any brilliant ideas either. The only thing they're doing is keeping it sound-bite-simple, and using it as leverage to complain that they'd do it better, and that their Candidate Of Change will certainly get it all straightened out. But - as has become the embarassing pattern - they have no specific, constructive CLUE as to what they'd do about it, and so all they can do is chant the Evil Bush mantra and the Change We Can Believe In mantra. It's really rather embarassing, actually.
I guess the Republican congress that was making the laws for the first six years of this issue thought it made them look good?
No, they just didn't have the problem of loudly proclaiming that the C-in-C is a criminal, blah blah, so it didn't matter as much. The other camp, who continually trot out the "illegal war" and "war criminal" stuff are the ones who - you'd THINK! - would be very quick, since they have the power - to actually codify how they, in their wisdom, think each of the variations on reasons why people apprehended should be handled in a given way. They won't do so, because it dilutes their simplistic sound bites on the issue.
Either they're murderers (of the British soldiers they killed) or they're soldiers just doing their job
The Supreme Court doesn't seem to think it's that simple, either. They said that the congress needs to address it, because our current civilian and military legal systems aren't oriented around this mix of circumstances.
The moment the words "legislative agenda" enter your language, you are pissing away true freedom because it has been decades since the last freedom was granted by the legislature because they are in the business of taking away freedom, not giving it.
So you should be all FOR legislation that better defines it, shouldn't you? Otherwise, you're leaving it up to whoever was hired for that four years to run the executive branch. Give them some clear definitions so you can stop whining about it.
Then you should be all for a legislative agenda that actually sets out to define how to deal with someone from, say, Yemen, who is in Afghanistan using Iran-supplied weapons to attack and kill British soldiers, and who is captured by US troops with the help of Pakistani intelligence. How would you describe someone like that? Which rules would you apply? Would you simply let them wander back into the fight because you're paralyzed with a legal-standing conundrum? Or would you detain them? And for how long? Are they prisoners of war? If so, which country are they representing? To whom is that person reporting? Which war crimes will you charge that person with if you can't even describe their actions as being part of a formal war effort by a nation-state?
Besides none of your entire statement has anything to do with the judges
Why should it? The judges themselves were the very ones to point out in their opinion that they ARE NOT COMMENTING on the underlying legal issue of whether or why such detainees should be detained. They explicitly said that the legislature has not provided a framework against which the people who actually capture these idiots can operate. The detainees that are in limbo (and not all of them are) are so because the law is in limbo. The legislators have to act. The people who decide which legislative agenda items will come up for consideration and voting are democrats in both houses. Why aren't they acting? Because doing so will make them look bad, and they know it. Much of their rhetoric on this subject will be proven hollow if they have to actually confront on paper the very thing that the administration has been having to confront since 9/11 (when they started capturing Al Queda types and the host Taliban buddies in Afghanistan).
What scares me more is that the ruling was 5-4 instead of unanimous
No, what should scare you is that the political party that's trying its hardest to make the post out of demonizing the president on this subject are also the people who run both houses of congress, and have the obligation to actually form a standard way to deal with this problem. The administration is dealing with it as it sees fit and believes it has to because there is no standard legal framework set down in law. The Democrats are too chickenshit to actually come right out and say that they think that Iranian-backed infiltrators in Iraq blowing up civilians or using shaped-charge explosives to kill troops are either a criminal matter (which makes no sense), or military personnel (which would force them to admit that the problem there is NOT unhappy occupied Iraqi citizens rebelling against evil American overlords, but Iran fighting a proxy war). This is ENTIRELY in Harry Reid's and Nancy Pelosi's laps. They would rather spend millions of your tax dollars holdikng hearings about steroid use in the baseball business, and write farm bills with thousands of pork-barrel earmarks, than deal with issues like the one their own consitituency has been duped into thinking is all Bush's problem.
It's not about teaching skepticism and critical thinking. It's about not squashing those natural talents by teaching kids about the empty power of magical thinking, house-of-cards hollow self esteem disconnected from actual achievement, and the endless wallowing in platitudes about "having faith" and "just believe, and you can do anything!" etc. The cultural institutions that rely on such stuff are always at odds with critical thinking. Kids are natural scientists - they understand the need to test causality, and are always curious. It's a shame that so many people completely misunderstand the nature of ethics, and seem to think that mysticism (the enemy of critical thinking) is required in order to derive a sound moral framework.
Parents are too quick to pass the baton to religion, new-age hokum, or just feel-good Oprah-ness in order to make their kids feel good about the world. They just want things to be easy, and don't have the personal fortitude to usher their kids through the slightly challenging phase of learning to apply their natural reasoning skills to topics that are somewhat less immediately tangible than what happens when you touch something hot. Issues like "what happens when one state taxes high tech entrepeneurs more than the the state next door" or "what happens when you let a gene pool get too shallow" or "what happens when you use GOTO statements in your code because it lets you get to lunch earlier that day" aren't any different than "what happens when you dump a hot oatmeal bowl in your lap," but require a little more discipline to digest.
The platform for rational thought is already there. You have to kill it, though, or slowly suffocate it throughout child development, in order to make it something that it feels like work to wake it back up later. Just keep it alive in the first place, and we wouldn't have such a mixed bag cultural messes to deal with. We wouldn't be seeing the strange, sad dance of a politician twisting and turning while explaining why he's suddenly between churches while running for president... since he wouldn't have been glued to a crazy church in the first place. Think how much less noise and distraction we'd have without all that nonsense.
So then it looks like we're both playing the same game
Not really. They lie about the fact that they're being aggressive in their hacking attempts to uncover communication with people in their own country that they'd like to arrest for speaking out in favor of liberty. We play dumb to lull them into a false sense of security about how well we can detect their aggressive moves to interfere with naval operations as they continue to posture themselves towards their stated goal of forcing the people of Taiwan back under their thumb.
We don't say, "We're too dumb to have a fancy Navy" (which is obviously not true), but we're happy to leave them wondering just how fancy it is. Not telling them what we can do - and not showing, through action, either - isn't at all the same as catching them lying about what we've caught them doing as they hack overseas systems.
that's what the Navy said to convince people like you to give them more money
No, that's what the Navy said to make the Chinese feel overly confident and to underestimate our ability to track them. Classic move... make your opponent complacent enough that you can then later make them completely doubt their ability to do anything when you rip the rug out from under them, as the situation warrants. Nothing makes people doubt their abilities more than the sudden discovery that they've been completely wrong about their own success. We should know (as should the former Soviets and everyone else), since it's happened to us, too.
Funny, that's exactly the bit that I was thinking of. The whole thing is really rather insulting - that someone would trot out a playing-dumb platitude so obviously lame that only a lawyer with a handpicked jury of idiots would try on this side of the Pacific. I always thought that Frozen Caveman Lawyer was one of SNL's best sketches - Phil Hartman died way too young. What a shame.
A year ago, I set up a older woman who has brain damage with a Linux desktop and net access and she uses it just fine
Well, then! Now I'm sure she's all set to vote wisely on issues like the regulation of ISPs, exports of crypto software, common carrier status, internation VoIP that transits US networks, and a host of other hot topics. Now that you have her reading e-mail and download recipes from epicurious.com, why, she's WAY more tuned in to the sort of policy considerations that, back before you set up Linux for her, she was just too last-decade to understand.
I think we'll be far better off with a president who's so high-tech that it never occurs to him that his long-standing membership in a church that streams video of his friend the pastor spewing irrational race-baiting nonsense might, via YouTube, end up causing a little friction. Yes, that shows a real grasp on New Media and technology and how it intersects with modern society.
Yup. I think that such biases are actually stronger in support of someone for irrational tribal reasons than they are, these days, when it comes to being irrationally against someone who's not in your tribe. Classic examples these days would be the small number of people who poll saying they'd vote against Obama because he's black, compared to the huge number who will (and say they will!) vote for him because he's (to whatever degree) black. The folks who completely tossed their reason out the window over Reiser because he's a fellow nerd really do get a chance to stop and think, now. It's very similar to those that tolerate script kiddies and web site defacers because they feel some kinship to them, despite the fact that if the same kids did something similar in meat space (to their car, with spray paint) they'd get all upset.
It was fair to assume Reiser's innocence until the testimony and his behavior started stacking up.
I still don't get why every coffe place doesn't have free, unencumbered wifi access to everyone
For the same reason that the people who DO provide it without any connection to a transaction end up having all of their seats taken up by non-customers, and have to put up notices begging people to limit their use of the system during their peak business hours.
I've had reason to pick sit-down-for-coffee-and-a-pastry places several mornings in the last couple of weeks. Within a couple hundred meters from each other: a Barnes & Noble, which uses AT&T for their $3.99/two-hours deal, Starbucks (which uses the above-mentioned, much more expensive T-Mobile deal), and a Corner Bakery Cafe, which loudly proclaims via storefront window stickers that all of their cafes now have free WiFi. Yes it's free, but it's intermittently wonkly, slow slow slow, and clearly wanders through a laborious proxy (just like the free service at Panera).
There's outside seating at the Corner Bakery. Every morning and lunchtime it all fills up with people from the local office buildings. They walk in to Starbucks for the better cup of coffee, and then walk over to the Corner Bakery and sit down to use the free wifi. If I were managing that store, it would piss me off. As a customer with the decengy to give the Corner Bakera $3 and change for some eggs on toast, it pisses me off to have less use of the pipe because other people are hammering it (this morning, five people sitting outside onlone: one was streaming YouTube, and one was video chatting (badly). But what are they going to do, burn good will with people who might, one day, actually buy a sandwich from them, by running them off? So, the leeches win, and the actual customers they're hoping to attract lose. I guess they could put in six nodes and an OC48.
The same local Starbucks couldn't possibly seat the number of camp-out road warriors who would hog their pipe if it were free to all. At least if you couple the use of the wifi service to the purchase of their served products, there's something redeeming in offering the service... and less of a need to run of the leeches.
So, why aren't you working as a pollworker? If you're truly concerned, get involved.
Because I would have absolutely no way of knowing if the rotating crop of thousands of strangers are who they say they are. With no actual provision for finding out who they are as they state a name on a printed list, I would no means by which to actually act on my concern. We have a highly transient population here. If I did poll work for years, I might be able to help by recognizing a handful of people out of thousands. That's not a system to avoid abuse. Simply having registered voters present an ID is a system.
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The President is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt as a feature of the job
Sure he (or she) is. And if it turns out that the president's actions are contrary to law, then you've got good reason to do something about it, or at least simply not re-elect him on his next go around. The whole point of an election season is that it's a chance to decide who you trust to make decisions. In your scenario, where private consultation prior to public acts are impossible, then you're not hiring an executive, you're hiring someone who's good at chairing public meetings. What's the point of having someone who can execute their judgement if you don't trust their judgement? Part of their judgement involves picking the right people to talk to, on occasion, to gain some insight into something that's beyond your experience or foresight. And not all of those people are going to be in the mood to be under scrutiny of political operatives who are paid to take potshots at whoever's in office that year.
Would it be interesting to be privvy to all of Bill Clinton's private ruminations and communications following the attack on the USS Cole and our embassies in Africa? Sure. But regardless of how he came by his thinking, it's his actions (or lack of them) that really matter on the subject. The president is still a citizen. He's a civilian holding an important office, but he's still a citizen just like you and me. The person in that office is entitled to talk with his peers and acquaintences without making those people worry that every word they say (or type) will wind up out of context in some senate political theater.
But you're forgetting the need for people from other parties, idealogies, and even nations to be able to quietly chime in behind the scenes without rocking their own boats. Should Nancy Pelosi really be unable to have a frank, unrecorded, private bit of face time with her political opponent (but none the less, co-worker) in the executive branch? Should a newly elected president not be able to quietly discuss with his immediate predecessor the nature of earlier private conversations that C-in-C may have had with a foreign head of state? If Obama (for example) is elected, and three years later is in the mood to try for another term, should he be allowed to take off his "president" hat, and have private "candidate" conversations with people counseling him on political matters? Would you deny him the ability to use e-mail for that purpose? If so, why?
Land of the free? Where's that? I've been thinking of moving...
Please. Do.
The substance is right in front of you. I'm giving you an exhaustive understanding of what I can take away from reading the large, thematic collection of stickers plastered over the back of a car, and telling you how I size up the person who makes the statements seen there (especially in the context of them all, taken as a whole). And despite seeing irrationality on parade, I'm pointing out (again - are you actually reading this?) that my reaction is NOT to want to vandalize the car. Unlike the person to whom I responded, who said that was their instinct upon seeing a politician's name on someone else's car. Do you not see the substantial difference between those two world views? And thus the substance in pointing that out?
I'm all for privacy, I really am, but in this case the individual's need is greatly outweighed by the greater good
You're missing the point. The greater good is served by allowing elected executives to have some privacy as they deliberate over what will become very public policies and actions. Could you go four years while dealing with unimagineably stressful decision making on every conceivable sort of topic, and never once want to have a private conversation with a close friend while hashing things out? Really?
Anti-War != Pacifism.
In fact, it usually means Anti-Some Specific War.
Except the problem is that most people who show up at such protests - certainly the noisiest ones with the most fancy drums, biggest puppets, most on-fire effigies, most well-polished-chain-each-other-across-the-street-routine, etc - are usually spouting the "war is not the answer" or "peace!" lines without any connection between that thinking and the reality of a world that houses entities like North Korea. Or the reality Islamist militants in the Sudan systematically raping their way through entire villages. People who are so married to their sound bites that they refuse to even stipulate that there are hostile people and entities in the world that will never be "loved" out of violently enlarging their territory or putting cultures under the thumb of retrograde bits of mysoginistic misery like Sharia law.
Don't like war? Then stop them, with force if necessary, and deprive those that cause them to happen of the tools and power to conduct them. When you sign a surrender that says you'll agree to no-fly zones over the parts of your country where you've been busy slaughtering people not in your tribe... be prepared for the consequences when you spend the next several years shooting at the coalition planes patroling those no-fly zones. When you use trainloads of Soviet-era weapons to try to rearrange the Balkans in a river of blood? Don't be shocked when your toys get bombed and your leaders get taken out, and your stash of tanks and missles destroyed. Indeed, war is not the answer to any need for constructive activity. But war IS the answer of last resort to aggression on a large scale. Because it's the only thing that reduces aggression back down to the scale that be dealt with pre-emptively, locally, and without displacing or killing lots of people.
Next time you go to war protest, look around. How many people don't make a distinction (based on their cheesy posters) between the war against Iran's proxy fighters in Iraq, the war against the Taliban asshats on the border of Afghanistan, and the Sudanese war against villagers? If they don't like the Taliban's war against women being able to read and write, what exactly is their chosen method of stopping one of those militants from shooting teachers like dogs in the town square? Sending them copies of their anti-war pamphlets, or the URL to their blog? Those issues are too complex to fit in a sound bite, so the protesters just dumb it down... and look the dumber for it.
So, what about it was "true", as you so nicely put it?
Are you really that obtuse?
I responded to someone who said that when he sees a politician's name on a car bumber sticker, it makes him want to vandalize the car. My take on it: when I see witless platitudes such as those I mentioned plastered all over a car, I either shrug it off as silliness, or (given the chance) actually try to talk to the person who - through their printed political messages in public view - is already talking to everyone else. The poster didn't say, "When I see a bumper sticker that says 'Peace Through Strength,' all I can think is what a short-sighted sound-bite that is, and it makes me want to point out to the guy in the car that China will be strong too, and that doesn't make them right or their sort of peace worth having." No, he said that when he sees a person's name, he wants to cost them money by damaging their property, but that he's above that, and "doesn't know how anyway" etc (what a scream!).
So, when I DO see the messages that someone very deliberately goes to the trouble of making sure everyone can see, and I size up their message as being an assemblage of polyanna-ish platitudes or populist nonsense, I call it that. Where's the straw man? Where's the ad hominem? I'm pointing out that my reaction is not (unlike the person to whom I responded) an instant urge to wreck the guy's paint job. Of course, you already knew all of that, and you're just playing dumb so you can feign annoyance and attempt to distract from the actual context.
Window smashing is the providence of thugs, period. I'd like you to actually back up your assertion that the same people who are for peace and harmony are the ones who are smashing windows
Doesn't matter. The people who do that crap, and those that chain themselves across public roads to deny their use to as many people as possible and busy up as many police and rescue people as possible are all of a stripe... because if there were indeed massive numbers of non-thug, thug-disliking throngs at such protests, then they'd go to enormous lengths to not have their events become hosts to such BS. But through the "enemy of my enemy is my friend, or least someone we should tolerate" line of thinking, the groups that organize specifically to disrupt streets and cause some mayhem - who announce themselves in advance, and crow about it on a thousand blogs after the fact! - show up like clockwork and do exactly what's expected. It's not exactly mysterious.
those damn revolutionary traitors dumping all that tea just to make a point
I see, because the local coffee shop is an agent of foreign colonial tyrrany, being run in a country in which you have no representative democracy or constitional checks and balances. Yes, nothing has changed since the founding of our nation! We must still destroy the property and livelihoods of our neighbors in order to show how we must sever ties with the overseas monarchy that sets taxes on which we have no voice, stations troops in our homes, and prevents us from manufacturing goods on our own shores. Yes, I see now that you have a keen grasp on it.
I walk past a car at my work's parking lot that has Bush stickers all over it. I have fantasies about keying the holy living shit out of that car as I pass it.
Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? Your actual desire, when someone else expresses their opinion, is to be violent. My desire, when I see a car loaded up with "random acts of beauty," "peace happens," and "war is not the answer" stickers is to actually talk to the platitude-dealing pollyanna involved and get a sense of how they think, for exmaple, that their random acts of beauty and kindness might change a local Taliban franchise's boss into someone who no longer likes to kill women showing up to work as a teacher and showing young girls how to read. How was "war not the answer" when Germany was rolling over Europe? How exactly was peace going to "happen" in the Balkans as Muslims were being ethnically "cleansed" from their villages with Serbian machine guns?
Unlike you, whose first instinct - however well reigned in for fear of being caught - is to vandalize the property of someone you hate, I'm more inclined to either roll my eyes, or actually communicate. I do appreciate your so nicely illustrating the shrill, tantrum-like thought process that drives so much of the politics on the left. It's entirely about rudderless emotions, drama, and cheap, sophomoric, fair-weather outrage that's anything but constructive... and shows that the pretense of disliking partisanship is completely disengenuous. It's true of you, and it's true of the current presidential candidate from the left. Hot air. It's not about getting anything done, it's entirely about how much you don't like someone else. "Change We Can Believe In" is the most empty bit of meaningless rhetoric I've ever heard, since it avoids, at all costs, any actual specificity lest the people that utter it get caught showing the real foundation of their idealogy. No need to of course, since the portrait you painted of how your brain works when exposed to nothing more than the name of a political opponent handily demonstrates the actual nature of most political thinking on the left: it's about actual hate, or about craven pandering to that hate as a way to power.
More often than not, it seems it's the tolerant, freedom loving liberal activists that vandalize and destroy other people's property.
Indeed. Nothing says "peace" and "harmony" and "can't we all just get along" like smashing the windows of a local retail shop during your anti-war rally, and burning giant puppet effigies to show what you'd really do to people you hate if you could get away with it. Yes, hate is tolerated and even encouraged, as long as it's in the name of warm, fuzzy, friendly political correctness anchored in leftist, populist platitudes. Why these idiots - so often theoretically college educated - can't see the fantastic irony of hating in the name of tolerance, and being randomly violent in the name of peace, I'll never know. Unless it's because, most of the time, they're just muddle-headed poseurs with no critical thinking skills and they're actually attending protests to get dates, shock their parents, and come up with something new for MySpace because people are getting tired of just looking at pictures of them being drunk at parties.
Seriously, what if the roles were reversed? The Feds are looking for some HIPAA-related email, and you can't produce it. What would they say??
"You should have had a system in place that you could rely on..."
Well, sure. Because there are actually regulations in place that call for that. It's the law. In the case of people who have been hired by an executive administration to provide research, advice, and political guidance... they aren't subject to that same standard, for a reason. They're not an agency. We're not talking about official communication between, say, the C-in-C and the military people under his command, or between that office and the TSA, or the Dept Of The Interior, or the State Department related to issues overseas. That stuff is all archived, and subject to FOIA. And that's the whole point. You hire an executive to bring their own judgement and the thinking of the people he or she chooses to help in complex judgement calls to the issues in front of them. They then ACT on their judgement, and leave quite a FOIA-able paper trail behind them.
If every conversation that President Obama wants to have with his pastor of the week - in person or by e-mail - as he thinks through an upcoming condition-free meeting with Hugo Chavez is information that you get have by FOIA, then how likely is it that he's going to use such channels for frank communication while arriving at the opinions he was hired to act upon?
Bush isn't content to just let the people be tried as criminals or treated as soldiers
Let's see. We've got trials going on right now. We've got other people who have been cleared, or who were connected to groups that have since been neutralized by other means... but their own countries refuse to let them back in, and no one else wants to give them sanction. Then you've got guys there who very plainly proclaim that they are not affiliated with any organized military, but that they absolutely were trying to kill soldiers in various spots overseas at the behest of (or in the name of) bin Laden, and they come right out and say that if they are released, they will do it again. But since they're not military people, they're not POWs. And since their acts weren't on US soil, but were against US personnel, they're not vanilla criminals that have a slot in our domestic criminal system, either.
There needs to be a new body of law to handle this, if people don't want the military to handle it on a case by case basis, as they're doing now. The democrats aren't having some brilliant new proposal batted down by Bush... they're not even TALKING about how they'd do it. They don't have any brilliant ideas either. The only thing they're doing is keeping it sound-bite-simple, and using it as leverage to complain that they'd do it better, and that their Candidate Of Change will certainly get it all straightened out. But - as has become the embarassing pattern - they have no specific, constructive CLUE as to what they'd do about it, and so all they can do is chant the Evil Bush mantra and the Change We Can Believe In mantra. It's really rather embarassing, actually.
I guess the Republican congress that was making the laws for the first six years of this issue thought it made them look good?
No, they just didn't have the problem of loudly proclaiming that the C-in-C is a criminal, blah blah, so it didn't matter as much. The other camp, who continually trot out the "illegal war" and "war criminal" stuff are the ones who - you'd THINK! - would be very quick, since they have the power - to actually codify how they, in their wisdom, think each of the variations on reasons why people apprehended should be handled in a given way. They won't do so, because it dilutes their simplistic sound bites on the issue.
Either they're murderers (of the British soldiers they killed) or they're soldiers just doing their job
The Supreme Court doesn't seem to think it's that simple, either. They said that the congress needs to address it, because our current civilian and military legal systems aren't oriented around this mix of circumstances.
The moment the words "legislative agenda" enter your language, you are pissing away true freedom because it has been decades since the last freedom was granted by the legislature because they are in the business of taking away freedom, not giving it.
So you should be all FOR legislation that better defines it, shouldn't you? Otherwise, you're leaving it up to whoever was hired for that four years to run the executive branch. Give them some clear definitions so you can stop whining about it.
freedom is my biggest interest
Then you should be all for a legislative agenda that actually sets out to define how to deal with someone from, say, Yemen, who is in Afghanistan using Iran-supplied weapons to attack and kill British soldiers, and who is captured by US troops with the help of Pakistani intelligence. How would you describe someone like that? Which rules would you apply? Would you simply let them wander back into the fight because you're paralyzed with a legal-standing conundrum? Or would you detain them? And for how long? Are they prisoners of war? If so, which country are they representing? To whom is that person reporting? Which war crimes will you charge that person with if you can't even describe their actions as being part of a formal war effort by a nation-state?
Besides none of your entire statement has anything to do with the judges
Why should it? The judges themselves were the very ones to point out in their opinion that they ARE NOT COMMENTING on the underlying legal issue of whether or why such detainees should be detained. They explicitly said that the legislature has not provided a framework against which the people who actually capture these idiots can operate. The detainees that are in limbo (and not all of them are) are so because the law is in limbo. The legislators have to act. The people who decide which legislative agenda items will come up for consideration and voting are democrats in both houses. Why aren't they acting? Because doing so will make them look bad, and they know it. Much of their rhetoric on this subject will be proven hollow if they have to actually confront on paper the very thing that the administration has been having to confront since 9/11 (when they started capturing Al Queda types and the host Taliban buddies in Afghanistan).
What scares me more is that the ruling was 5-4 instead of unanimous
No, what should scare you is that the political party that's trying its hardest to make the post out of demonizing the president on this subject are also the people who run both houses of congress, and have the obligation to actually form a standard way to deal with this problem. The administration is dealing with it as it sees fit and believes it has to because there is no standard legal framework set down in law. The Democrats are too chickenshit to actually come right out and say that they think that Iranian-backed infiltrators in Iraq blowing up civilians or using shaped-charge explosives to kill troops are either a criminal matter (which makes no sense), or military personnel (which would force them to admit that the problem there is NOT unhappy occupied Iraqi citizens rebelling against evil American overlords, but Iran fighting a proxy war). This is ENTIRELY in Harry Reid's and Nancy Pelosi's laps. They would rather spend millions of your tax dollars holdikng hearings about steroid use in the baseball business, and write farm bills with thousands of pork-barrel earmarks, than deal with issues like the one their own consitituency has been duped into thinking is all Bush's problem.
It's not about teaching skepticism and critical thinking. It's about not squashing those natural talents by teaching kids about the empty power of magical thinking, house-of-cards hollow self esteem disconnected from actual achievement, and the endless wallowing in platitudes about "having faith" and "just believe, and you can do anything!" etc. The cultural institutions that rely on such stuff are always at odds with critical thinking. Kids are natural scientists - they understand the need to test causality, and are always curious. It's a shame that so many people completely misunderstand the nature of ethics, and seem to think that mysticism (the enemy of critical thinking) is required in order to derive a sound moral framework.
Parents are too quick to pass the baton to religion, new-age hokum, or just feel-good Oprah-ness in order to make their kids feel good about the world. They just want things to be easy, and don't have the personal fortitude to usher their kids through the slightly challenging phase of learning to apply their natural reasoning skills to topics that are somewhat less immediately tangible than what happens when you touch something hot. Issues like "what happens when one state taxes high tech entrepeneurs more than the the state next door" or "what happens when you let a gene pool get too shallow" or "what happens when you use GOTO statements in your code because it lets you get to lunch earlier that day" aren't any different than "what happens when you dump a hot oatmeal bowl in your lap," but require a little more discipline to digest.
The platform for rational thought is already there. You have to kill it, though, or slowly suffocate it throughout child development, in order to make it something that it feels like work to wake it back up later. Just keep it alive in the first place, and we wouldn't have such a mixed bag cultural messes to deal with. We wouldn't be seeing the strange, sad dance of a politician twisting and turning while explaining why he's suddenly between churches while running for president... since he wouldn't have been glued to a crazy church in the first place. Think how much less noise and distraction we'd have without all that nonsense.
So then it looks like we're both playing the same game
Not really. They lie about the fact that they're being aggressive in their hacking attempts to uncover communication with people in their own country that they'd like to arrest for speaking out in favor of liberty. We play dumb to lull them into a false sense of security about how well we can detect their aggressive moves to interfere with naval operations as they continue to posture themselves towards their stated goal of forcing the people of Taiwan back under their thumb.
We don't say, "We're too dumb to have a fancy Navy" (which is obviously not true), but we're happy to leave them wondering just how fancy it is. Not telling them what we can do - and not showing, through action, either - isn't at all the same as catching them lying about what we've caught them doing as they hack overseas systems.
that's what the Navy said to convince people like you to give them more money
No, that's what the Navy said to make the Chinese feel overly confident and to underestimate our ability to track them. Classic move... make your opponent complacent enough that you can then later make them completely doubt their ability to do anything when you rip the rug out from under them, as the situation warrants. Nothing makes people doubt their abilities more than the sudden discovery that they've been completely wrong about their own success. We should know (as should the former Soviets and everyone else), since it's happened to us, too.
Funny, that's exactly the bit that I was thinking of. The whole thing is really rather insulting - that someone would trot out a playing-dumb platitude so obviously lame that only a lawyer with a handpicked jury of idiots would try on this side of the Pacific. I always thought that Frozen Caveman Lawyer was one of SNL's best sketches - Phil Hartman died way too young. What a shame.
A year ago, I set up a older woman who has brain damage with a Linux desktop and net access and she uses it just fine
Well, then! Now I'm sure she's all set to vote wisely on issues like the regulation of ISPs, exports of crypto software, common carrier status, internation VoIP that transits US networks, and a host of other hot topics. Now that you have her reading e-mail and download recipes from epicurious.com, why, she's WAY more tuned in to the sort of policy considerations that, back before you set up Linux for her, she was just too last-decade to understand.
I think we'll be far better off with a president who's so high-tech that it never occurs to him that his long-standing membership in a church that streams video of his friend the pastor spewing irrational race-baiting nonsense might, via YouTube, end up causing a little friction. Yes, that shows a real grasp on New Media and technology and how it intersects with modern society.
tribal-level prejudice flows in your veins
Yup. I think that such biases are actually stronger in support of someone for irrational tribal reasons than they are, these days, when it comes to being irrationally against someone who's not in your tribe. Classic examples these days would be the small number of people who poll saying they'd vote against Obama because he's black, compared to the huge number who will (and say they will!) vote for him because he's (to whatever degree) black. The folks who completely tossed their reason out the window over Reiser because he's a fellow nerd really do get a chance to stop and think, now. It's very similar to those that tolerate script kiddies and web site defacers because they feel some kinship to them, despite the fact that if the same kids did something similar in meat space (to their car, with spray paint) they'd get all upset.
It was fair to assume Reiser's innocence until the testimony and his behavior started stacking up.
I still don't get why every coffe place doesn't have free, unencumbered wifi access to everyone
For the same reason that the people who DO provide it without any connection to a transaction end up having all of their seats taken up by non-customers, and have to put up notices begging people to limit their use of the system during their peak business hours.
I've had reason to pick sit-down-for-coffee-and-a-pastry places several mornings in the last couple of weeks. Within a couple hundred meters from each other: a Barnes & Noble, which uses AT&T for their $3.99/two-hours deal, Starbucks (which uses the above-mentioned, much more expensive T-Mobile deal), and a Corner Bakery Cafe, which loudly proclaims via storefront window stickers that all of their cafes now have free WiFi. Yes it's free, but it's intermittently wonkly, slow slow slow, and clearly wanders through a laborious proxy (just like the free service at Panera).
There's outside seating at the Corner Bakery. Every morning and lunchtime it all fills up with people from the local office buildings. They walk in to Starbucks for the better cup of coffee, and then walk over to the Corner Bakery and sit down to use the free wifi. If I were managing that store, it would piss me off. As a customer with the decengy to give the Corner Bakera $3 and change for some eggs on toast, it pisses me off to have less use of the pipe because other people are hammering it (this morning, five people sitting outside onlone: one was streaming YouTube, and one was video chatting (badly). But what are they going to do, burn good will with people who might, one day, actually buy a sandwich from them, by running them off? So, the leeches win, and the actual customers they're hoping to attract lose. I guess they could put in six nodes and an OC48.
The same local Starbucks couldn't possibly seat the number of camp-out road warriors who would hog their pipe if it were free to all. At least if you couple the use of the wifi service to the purchase of their served products, there's something redeeming in offering the service... and less of a need to run of the leeches.
So, why aren't you working as a pollworker? If you're truly concerned, get involved.
Because I would have absolutely no way of knowing if the rotating crop of thousands of strangers are who they say they are. With no actual provision for finding out who they are as they state a name on a printed list, I would no means by which to actually act on my concern. We have a highly transient population here. If I did poll work for years, I might be able to help by recognizing a handful of people out of thousands. That's not a system to avoid abuse. Simply having registered voters present an ID is a system.