[jtfanclub]

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But that has nothing to do with "democracy" as such.  The fact that the rules are democratically created is, to an extent, irrelevant; more properly perhaps is  the ethos that exists in North America believes that every person is important; which leads to both the use of democracy (every person has a say in how the government works) and the dislike of some of the more discriminatory parts of Shar'ia Law (every person should have the same rights).

It's more than that, I think. The core belief in our Democracy is that each individual has the right to determine what God's beliefs are. You have the absolute right to interpret the Bible your own way, including to interpret it as not the Word of God. When we make laws, it's based on the Authority of Man, and therefore can be revoked by the people on a vote.

In contrast, the core belief in Shar'ia is that people do not have the right to interpret the Quran. It's not sufficient that you follow the laws in the Quran, you must follow them according to the interpretation of the Council of Clerics. Laws are based upon the Authority of God, and nobody can revoke them. This is blasphemy to Americans, as much as anything can be said to be universal to Americans.

When Bush first announced that were were attacking Afghanistan, he made a point of belittling the Taliban for punishing people men didn't have beards. I was offended- what's the difference between punishing men for not having beards and punishing women for not wearing tops? But I think the point was that the Taliban declared arbitrarily that God wanted men to wear beards, while we Americans voted that women should wear tops.

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I also disagree with your "if they break the rules, we should too."  My reasoning is in my rant in the other thread, but basically, the terrorists want the US to change.  If you break the rules, you've changed, and for the worse - that's a win for the terrorists.  "The ends justify the means", if it is ever valid, is definately invalid when the means used actually promote the enemy's goals.

Well, certainly, we don't want to turn into them. We don't want to torture prisoners or slaughter civillians. But funding our enemy's enemies in secret and promoting guerilla warfare by them isn't a moral issue- we've certainly done it before (eg. in Afghanistan in the 80's) and we're not ashamed to admit it. This is a war issue, not a case of personal morals/rights. At least, in my mind they're different.

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I'm guessing that the extra deaths due to terrorism would have been what - 2 hours of smoking deaths?  2 hours of traffic deaths?  4 days of murders?

I don't think it would be less than what we had as we did it,but I agree that you have the scale about right.

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"right", "left" isn't the issue.

I just didn't know the sophistication of my audience. Sorry.

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Freedom vs Authoritarianism is the issue.  If you had discussed a country with current US policies with a random American in 1960 - such as Terry stops combined with "fear of violence" searches and anything found in that being considered "in plain sight" for arrest; Hiibel-based identity checks; PATRIOT Act secret searches and monitoring; TIA and TSA monitoring and control of movement - they would have said "yeah, those damn Commies.  I'm glad I live in a Free country."  No?

No. For one example, the Mirandas warnings weren't until 1966. Back in 1960, everything was considered 'in plain sight', and the populace was even more content to give up their rights in order to get the Commies. Ask a Black Panther about that some time.

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P.S. JTF, having read your responses in the rest of the thread, I take back the "wog" comment.  It was explicitly in response to your "Who are YOU to say..." paragraph, and it hit my hackles pretty strong.  But it was an overrreaction.

Yeah, irony doesn't transfer well over the Internet. Sorry about that.

[Winstonm]

mycroft, on Mar 1 2007, 01:53 PM, said:

jtfanclub, on Feb 27 2007, 12:34 PM, said:

Mycroft...go back and reread my first post in the thread.  Not the one about the world's policemen.  I know the propaganda about how we're the good guys and they're breaking the rules is BS, but it must be convincing somebody, or we wouldn't spend so much disseminating it.

Okay. I disagree with your argument that this is a war between democracy and Shar'ia. What I think this actually is is a long topic, and I've done it here before, so I won't repeat. North American society believes that Shar'ia is as unwelcome a law structure as Cromwellian Puritanism or Torquemadan Catholicism; you want to be here, you follow our ideas about tolerance and equality - we'll be tolerant in what you believe as long as you don't try to enforce it on someone who chooses not to believe it. But that has nothing to do with "democracy" as such. The fact that the rules are democratically created is, to an extent, irrelevant; more properly perhaps is the ethos that exists in North America believes that every person is important; which leads to both the use of democracy (every person has a say in how the government works) and the dislike of some of the more discriminatory parts of Shar'ia Law (every person should have the same rights).

I also disagree with your "if they break the rules, we should too." My reasoning is in my rant in the other thread, but basically, the terrorists want the US to change. If you break the rules, you've changed, and for the worse - that's a win for the terrorists. "The ends justify the means", if it is ever valid, is definately invalid when the means used actually promote the enemy's goals.

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What would you prefer - 20 hours out of your life, every year, waiting in security lines, full-time tracking of your movements, your phone records, your spending habits, your library checkouts, for someone's sake - or a 0.0002% increased chance of dying in a terrorist attack?

Hmmm...20 hours a year, or no 9/11? I'll take the 20 hours a year. Not because I care about the terrorist attack more than I do about, say, Hurricane Katrina, but because we go apes**t every time terrorists 'get' us.

Which is, in fact, my point. If the US had responded with "they can try to attack us, and we will stop them, but not at the cost of destroying our freedom or changing our way of life, because that's what the terrorists want", rather than going apes**t, Americans would likely be *more* safe. I would lay any bet you want that without the PATRIOT Act, the TIA program, and all the other police-state innovations, without rendition, Guantanamo Bay, or any of the other questionable-at-best foreign policy innovations, that the US would have lost many fewer lives to terrorism in the last 6 years than they have lost with their actual reaction. I'm guessing that the extra deaths due to terrorism would have been what - 2 hours of smoking deaths? 2 hours of traffic deaths? 4 days of murders?

And the same thing applies to the billions of dollars in tax revenue (as opposed to the money lost due to terrorist action - and that's counting the WTC damage), and the amazing amounts of international reputation.

I think I phrased it in the other rant as "well, everyone knows that the US hasn't been the home of the Brave for years. But now they're losing the 'land of the Free' bit, too."

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As far as tracking our movements, I assure you that we'll get that fixed.  The government is a slow moving ship.  When it gets hit by a big wave, it gets rocked from side to side a bit.  Things like this have happened before.  I wouldn't assume that we've gotten a permanent list to the right.

"right", "left" isn't the issue. Freedom vs Authoritarianism is the issue. If you had discussed a country with current US policies with a random American in 1960 - such as Terry stops combined with "fear of violence" searches and anything found in that being considered "in plain sight" for arrest; Hiibel-based identity checks; PATRIOT Act secret searches and monitoring; TIA and TSA monitoring and control of movement - they would have said "yeah, those damn Commies. I'm glad I live in a Free country." No?

Power is seductive; it is very rare to give it away once someone gets it, very difficult to take it away, and power tends to breed a lust for more power. The US founding fathers knew that, and tried to make it very hard to break down the barriers limiting the government, the army, and the police's power. In fact, they had to resort to a war to get to the point where they could so do.

The current situation in Canada with renewing the sunset clause in our PATRIOT-like acts is evidence of that. From the CBC: "Neither clause has been used by police or prosecutors in the five years the act has been enforced, but..." as far as our Prime Minister is concerned, voting against renewing the powers is being "soft on terrorism". How about "we knew at the time that the powers we're granting are insanely invasive, so we put a sunset clause reqiring us to take a review of whether such invasive procedures are really needed. They were never used, and things didn't fall apart. Maybe they aren't actually needed?"

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The truth is, in spite of what people may whine to the polls, most Americans are happy with the level of government interference in their life, or at least not unhappy enough about it to even write a letter to their local paper.  Tracking our movements etc. is something that most Americans are willing to live with, at least for now.

That I know. And Benjamin Franklin would say that most Americans are getting what they deserve.
Unfortunately, I am not "most Americans" - I am not even an American - but I have to live with it, too.

Michael.

P.S. JTF, having read your responses in the rest of the thread, I take back the "wog" comment. It was explicitly in response to your "Who are YOU to say..." paragraph, and it hit my hackles pretty strong. But it was an overrreaction. mdf

You have stated my beliefs far more eloquently than I ever could.

[mike777]

Not sure are you guys saying Canada was correct to send troops to Afghanistan and correct to send them home now. Why? Your logic lost me.

[Winstonm]

mike777, on Mar 1 2007, 08:38 PM, said:

Not sure are you guys saying Canada was correct to send troops to Afghanistan and correct to send them home now. Why?  Your logic lost me.

No, Mike, it is simpler than that - once the U.S. response to 9-11 substantially altered the very bases of U.S. laws and constitutional freedoms, what happens afterwards is irrelevant because the terrorists have won.

[Al_U_Card]

Canada, in the past, for various reasons, adopted the "Peacekeeper" role for its military. This met with the approval of the Canadian people. Only the fervor of 9-11 dragged us away from that. Afghanistan is a "money-pit" of bloodshed and has been for centuries. Tribal and sectarian violence are just more reasons to stay away from these places........like I said before, we have the greatest weapon available...our society and its attractions...we don't need the sword.

[mike777]

Winstonm, on Mar 1 2007, 09:24 PM, said:

mike777, on Mar 1 2007, 08:38 PM, said:

Not sure are you guys saying Canada was correct to send troops to Afghanistan and correct to send them home now. Why?  Your logic lost me.

No, Mike, it is simpler than that - once the U.S. response to 9-11 substantially altered the very bases of U.S. laws and constitutional freedoms, what happens afterwards is irrelevant because the terrorists have won.

Again Winston this is too simple.

War always changes/alters a country, that does not mean the other side won.
I could not disagree more strongly if you think they won, yet.

[mike777]

Al_U_Card, on Mar 1 2007, 09:40 PM, said:

Canada, in the past, for various reasons, adopted the "Peacekeeper" role for its military.  This met with the approval of the Canadian people.  Only the fervor of 9-11 dragged us away from that.  Afghanistan is a "money-pit" of bloodshed and has been for centuries.  Tribal and sectarian violence are just more reasons to stay away from these places........like I said before, we have the greatest weapon available...our society and its attractions...we don't need the sword.

I think you post says it all, military is for peacekeeping, not winning wars which involves blood, sweat and tears. Sigh.

Again this is the blue jean argument. They will want our bluejeans more than they will want to kill/convert us.

[Winstonm]

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War always changes/alters a country, that does not mean the other side won

What makes you think this is war? 17 Saudis and a couple of Egyptians used the dreaded boxcutter threat to hijack three airplanes and crash them into three buildings....this is an act of war from all of Islam? Is this the best they could do? They are going to slay the Great Satan with 19 fools and 3 airplanes?

Give me a division of Syrian troops landing on the beaches of San Diego and I'll buy there is a war - don't forget that the neocons claimed "we create our own reality." The global war on terror? I, for one, have not forgotten the litany of increasing rhetoric to justify each escalation - first, we had to find and punish the perpetrators of 9-11, so we invaded Afghanistan with the reason of finding and bringing bin Laden to justice - but, oops, we couldn't find him.

Then, oops, we forgot that Saddam is going to give these terrorists nukes, so the "next time" it will be a mushroom cloud over Manhatten, and so we invaded Iraq. Then there weren't any WMD, no nukes, no truth to the claims - so we had to justify Iraq another way, by creating an Axis of Evil and"if you aren't with us, you are with the terrorists" came to be.

But we couldn't win in Iraq, either, so we had to find another reason to keep on sending troops into the region and the worldwide, global war on terror was born as the greatest threat to civilization ever to crawl out of a cave.

How did we go from finding a single man responsible for single terrorist act to fighting the entire world in a war to end all wars due to ideological differences? Where was this war prior to 9-11?

Besides, war does not alter the basic foundation, the very principles upon which a nation is founded - unless you lose.

Have you studied the Homeland Security Act, the Military Commissons Act, and the John Warner Defense Act?

The Homeland Security Act removes the protections against illegal seaches and seizures and the rights to be secure in our persons and papers.

The Military Commissions Act eliminates habeus corpus.

The John Warner Defense Act eliminates the rule of posse commitatus.

Looks to me like the U.S. constitution is also a victim of 9-11. Or maybe the constitution wasn't "with us" so it was "with the terrorists".

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another...after the war is on."

~Senator Robert M. La Follette

[jikl]

Someone please charge GW with War Crimes. When the US defied the UN and attacked anyway, they basically became a dictatorship.

You ****ing signed the UN charter, now it is inconvenient for you to follow it? Please.

Sean

[helene_t]

Winstonm, on Mar 2 2007, 04:24 AM, said:

mike777, on Mar 1 2007, 08:38 PM, said:

Not sure are you guys saying Canada was correct to send troops to Afghanistan and correct to send them home now. Why?  Your logic lost me.

No, Mike, it is simpler than that - once the U.S. response to 9-11 substantially altered the very bases of U.S. laws and constitutional freedoms, what happens afterwards is irrelevant because the terrorists have won.

The terrorists certainly succeded in destroying the political dignity of the U.S. (which was probably their main goal) but I'm less sure if they acchieved the same with respect to Canada and the rest of the Western civilization. (Some would point to U.K. but I think that driving Tony Blair insane is not quite the same as uprooting the British political system as a whole).

[mike777]

Winston as you well know, of all posters, I claim we are in are real full war.
If we are not then I agree the USA is insane.

I repeat that the post of comparsions is ugly, wrong, insane and horrible. Those that agree with that post, I do not respect.

[the hog]

mike777, on Mar 2 2007, 07:21 PM, said:

Winston as you well know, of all posters, I claim we are in are real full war.
If we are not then I agree the USA is insane.

I repeat that the post of comparsions is ugly, wrong, insane and horrible. Those that agree with that post, I do not respect.

I am really curious, Mike. With whom is the US at war and who started it? On what date was war declared?

[helene_t]

Mike: Who is at war? A Texan golf club in war with the rest of the World ("if you're not with us you're against us"), particularely traitors like Colin Powell? With whom would you otherwise agree that "USA" is insane? I for one, don't think US people (outside beforementioned golf club) are insane.

Maybe it could be said that the U.S. is involved in a war in Iraq. But this depends on ones definition on the terms "war" and "involved", which is a purely sematic issue and hence cannot be related to any conclusion with respect to the mental health of GW (let alone the mental health of the U.S. people as a whole).

Finally, it's not clear to me what "comparisons" you're talking about.

[mike777]

The_Hog, on Mar 2 2007, 04:50 AM, said:

mike777, on Mar 2 2007, 07:21 PM, said:

Winston as you well know, of all posters, I claim we are in are real full war.
If we are not then I agree the USA is insane.

I repeat that the post of comparsions is ugly, wrong, insane and horrible. Those that agree with that post, I do not respect.

I am really curious, Mike. With whom is the US at war and who started it? On what date was war declared?

1) radical islam
2) radical islam
3) do not know exact date, many years ago. More than 13 years ago, did you miss it?

[Winstonm]

Mike, I know you to well educated, as are many other posters on this thread, so I do want you to know that I respect your opinions on these issues - you could be right.

I respectfully disagree with your position - but I could be wrong.

[hrothgar]

[quote name='mike777' date='Mar 2 2007, 01:14 PM'] [/QUOTE]
I am really curious, Mike. With whom is the US at war and who started it? On what date was war declared? [/QUOTE]

1) radical islam
2) radical islam
3) do not know exact date, many years ago. More than 13 years ago, did you miss it? [/quote]
I think that the whole war versus "radical Islam" was manufactured as a replacement for the great War against Communism.

Back in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. By 1991, Yeltsin had been elected President of Russia.
The far right needed a new boogie man to manipulate folks like Mike. The "War against Radical Islam" is a frame mechanism that the far right dragged out of the close post 9-11 and is being projected backwards in time.

Please note: I don't dispute that fundamentalist Islam exists as a political force. However, I do dispute that its all that special. I think that the zealots that are attracted to this movement are motivated by forces other than religion. I think that issues like economic opportunity and political repression are the engines driving this movement. Today, these folks are migrating towards Islam as a means of protest, however, 20 years ago these same individuals who have gravitated towards secular movements like Ba'athism (or, for that matter Communism).

[Al_U_Card]

It certainly takes two to tango...let's see

christian right vs radical islam....................probably

shia vs sunni............................................definitely

terrorists vs whoever they are told to.........undoubtedly

neocons vs everyone or else.....................uh oh


every week on 24 I expect to see the blurb "torn from todays headlines" as all of the crazy paranoid government types seem to be less scary that the actual real-life wackos.

[mike777]

Ok I think we are at war with radical Islam. I know Bush and Lieberman, Guiliano(sp), and McCain think so.

I have no quotes about the leading Democrats. Winston do you know where Mrs. Clinton, Edwards or Obama stand on this issue? Do they just think it is phony or manufactured? I am not sure.

[pbleighton]

"I have no quotes about the leading Democrats. Winston do you know where Mrs. Clinton, Edwards or Obama stand on this issue? Do they just think it is phony or manufactured? I am not sure."

Your clear implication is that either someone agrees with Bush on "we are at war with radical Islam", or thinks there is no threat or a minimal threat. This is nonsense. You are trying to put your ideological opponents in your (poorly considered, IMO) linguistic box.

Peter

[Winstonm]

mike777, on Mar 2 2007, 01:25 PM, said:

Ok I think we are at war with radical Islam. I know Bush and Lieberman, Guiliano(sp), and McCain think so.

I have no quotes about the leading Democrats. Winston do you know where Mrs. Clinton, Edwards or Obama stand on this issue? Do they just think it is  phony or manufactured? I am not sure.

Mike, I really don't know either. I am pretty much apolitical, having no affiliation or interest in either party, so I don't watch these items closely. It is hard not to know what Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Lieberman believe as it makes all the headlines.

My beliefs are in keeping with Richard's last post. I think it will not change anyone's mind, these debates, yet they are productive as it is always good to listen to opposing views - truth often lies in the middle of opposing views.

It is interesting to me that we both are of the approximate same age, thus both of us are products of the 1960s and 1970s, yet I emerged from those times with an absolute distrust of government and its power; time has done nothing to dissuade me from those beliefs.

I believe that power is a tantalizing drug, that after a small taste it is so intoxicating that only more of it will satisfy; I believe a relatively small group of like-minded individuals in seats of power are more dangerous to civilization and the American way of life than any foreign threat; I believe the ideological war in which we are trapped is whether we will sacrfice the basic tenets of our country to obtain a misguided sense of security; I believe that drunk on power, leaders will lie and deceive to justify their ambitions, and if that means creating a boogeyman as an enemy then one is created.

It seems I am not alone in my views. Consider these quotes:

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
~General Douglas MacArthur


What an immense mass of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.~Leo Tolstoy

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.

~General Smedley Butler

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

~Voltaire