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
Long live the Republic-k. -- Major General J. Golding Frederick (tSCoSI)
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