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Mephistopheles
Filthy Animal
Post #33499
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Posted: Sat 2006-09-30 19:12
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| Politics: Technocratic Syndicalist |
Country: United States |
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| Civil Liberties and Civil Security |
Post Rating: 2.0/4 (3 votes cast) |
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Civil liberties in modern times is something most of us take for granted. We happily quote our various constitutions for addressing civil liberties as being factual and institutional without realizing the cost of institutionalizing the rights we hold dear. We forget how heavily our ancestors paid to achieve the freedoms we have today, while at the same time, dually believing that our rights will remain inviolable for the most part. We believe that although temporary arrangements may lead to despotisms or to a state of security in which certain liberties are curtailed, that despite all of this, our rights, for the most part, will remain intact.
Human history is a history of some six to seven thousand years of bloody and brutal history. We’ve gone from empires to democracies, oligarchies to republics, and monarchies to constitutional monarchies. Human history of one of progress towards libertarianism if we consider both economics and political application of the rights granted to man. While economic capitalism may be the wrong choice and the wrong direction for man, no one can deny it exists and rules the economic life of virtually every single nation on earth. Even those who deny being capitalistic are indeed capitalistic on a statist level.
Throughout this history, the rights endowed to men have grown over the millennia. Once, only basic rights of property and of finances were allowed, but eventually, pressure put on the despots and monarchs ruling at the time by other nobles or by the people caused the rights to grow into political freedoms and religious freedoms. This was not an easy task.
In the civilization known as Athens, political freedoms were first granted to humankind. Granted, slavery still existed then, and granted women were treated like slaves, but the first selective democracy was established, giving power into the hands of some fifty-thousand people, more than just one or fifty depending on dictator or oligarchy.
The freedom to speak has been the hardest to establish because it poses a threat to those in power. Through freedom of speech, the lowest of the low can make complaints freely in most cases against the ruling individuals, criticizing their ways and methods. The first time the freedom to speak was enshrined within a constitution or formal law as being free and mostly non-selective (you can be arrested for using the freedom of speech to say you will kill other people, or cause serious disorder through other ways of speaking) was in the American colonies. Once they achieved their independence, the option to allow freedom of speech became harder to ignore among the people of every oppressed regime in the world. Eventually, the French created their Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the fight for the freedom to speak your mind was victorious.
The freedom to freely worship any religion was one of the hardest rights to establish since it usurped the power of a state religion and proved dangerous as it allowed people to seek their own path in life rather than accept a given order to “thou shall”. Some of the earliest civilizations allowing freedom of religion were ancient Persia and, surprisingly, the Islamic sultanates. Of course, during a time of war these rights always tend to lessen in order to give greater power to those in charge to “protect” us. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, to distract those on bottom from the people on top.
The path towards human progress has been a bloody one. The rights we live with have been established on the lives of men and women fighting to give their children a better future. The greatest insult we could ever make to those people is to support the destruction of due process and civil liberties, one by one. While, during a time of war, it may seem easy to give up civil liberty for civil security, the re-establishment of civil liberties given up is no easy task.
The greatest threat to civil liberty is civil security. Demanding we give up civil liberties to gain civil security, it promises to do away with our rights and replace it with state-controlled “rights”. The right to duty. The right to be watched. The right to be guilty before proven innocent. The right to be declared an enemy combatant. The right to not be reviewed independently. These rights are what will replace our civil liberties if the current trend continues in our war society.
A notable Republican Senator recently said, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” I say, if we have total surveillance, we have nothing to hide from the government, and that in itself is a thought so disturbing that it’s hard to believe there’s people promoting total surveillance in this nation.
The real question is, do we want to live in a society where we are completely safe, where all our enemies are caught and captured, and where stray thoughts no longer exist, but where unorthodox people are caught and captured; or do we want to live in a society where we remain free people, where crime still exists, but is rather a good price to pay for freedom?
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Yippykiaye motherfucker. |
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wyltk75
Junior Spy
Post #33590
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Posted: Tue 2006-10-03 04:02
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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That's one of the great questions of our time. "Where is the balance between freedom and security?" My personal opinion is that we should favor freedom over security. To have "Life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness," we must have enough security to enjoy it. I don't buy into the anarchy thing...
This question also is one of the great contradictions of our time. Repubilcans traditionally favor a smaller government, fewer regulations, less red tape etc. Basicly they "want the government out of their lives." Recently it's been the Republicans who are advocating stronger government authority, more control over citizens. My question is, what happened to traditional "Republican values"?
I personally lean Democrat. I beleive that we need a strong federal government. I think it's neccissary to keep a larger number of citizens safe/healthy. At the same time, I don't think that we need the government in to every part of our lives. I think that things like the Patriot act have good way too far.
I also disagree that "if i'm not doing anything wrong, I have nothing to worry about." We don have something to worry about. The fact that I have to second guess everything I do for fear that I may be labeled a terrorist does not fit the definition of free for me. As it stands, If I chose to go to the library and study terrorism and the methods used, the government could potentially request my library records, decide I am a terrorist, then hold me as an enemy combatant for an indeterminate amount of time.
This is not freedom. But at least you would be secure if that happened to me right? At least until they found you for something...
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War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. |
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Mao Zedong
Committee Leader
Post #33595
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 01:32
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| Politics: Meritocratism |
Country: New World Order |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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If I had to choose between the two extremes best exemplified in the French Revolution (total liberty/ anarchy) vs. Nazi Germany (security/ totalitrian), then I would choose security because I would rather be safe without rights than free with no protection. In order to live in a society, we must have rules and guidlines to styme our rights for a healthy life. If you want freedom, go into the jungle.
_________________
We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.
-Benito Mussolini
Anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head.
-European Proverb |
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Mephistopheles
Filthy Animal
Post #33596
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 01:49
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| Politics: Technocratic Syndicalist |
Country: United States |
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Post Rating: 1.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Confucius wrote: |
| If I had to choose between the two extremes best exemplified in the French Revolution (total liberty/ anarchy) vs. Nazi Germany (security/ totalitrian), then I would choose security because I would rather be safe without rights than free with no protection. In order to live in a society, we must have rules and guidlines to styme our rights for a healthy life. If you want freedom, go into the jungle. |
You're confusing anarchy with anomie. The French Revolution was actually a corporate, with its own directorate, or, board of directors running the show. Granted, one of them was executed (Robespierre), but the others were relatively safe. In the respect of governmental organization, it laid the foundation for the organization of Italian Fascism. It wasn't purely anarchic.
If you have no rights, what makes you think you're safe? You're open to liquidation, repression/oppression, brutality, a random "setting an example", or even to extremes such as State-sanctioned racial genocide. Hardly safe in Nazi Germany or any other totalitarian regime for that matter. And let's not even go into food supply. No totalitarian regime was ever able to provide security from hunger. None.
You can be free with an amount of security. Every society does have a mutual, unspoken social contract where we give up some freedoms for some security. In any event, modern republics have been, historically, the best civilizations if you want maximum possible freedom for the maximum number of people. Yeah, we don't have the freedom to beat people up whenever we want to because we'll get locked away, and yeah, we don't have the freedom to dope up as much as we want to, but the most important rights, civil liberties, are respected and protected, for the most part, in most modern republics.
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Yippykiaye motherfucker. |
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JD-sama
Minister of Truth
Post #33606
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 13:17
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| Politics: Communist |
Country: United Kingdom |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Mephistopheles wrote: |
You're confusing anarchy with anomie. |
deja vu ... ^^.
I contend that one cannot have liberty without security, liberty in my opinion is not just the ability to do something which we possess almost inextricably but the ability to take such an act securely. On the other hand whilst one can have security without liberty but it cannot be ensured for without liberty you can not have power over the very entity that supposedly supplies your security.
The question is about the strength of each theme as you cannot vanquish either from a society in favour of the other. In my opinion it is folly to cast off liberty in favour of security simply because such security is rarely as stable as that which could be achieved through entering a brief period of risk. Democracy is an attempt to remove the risk in maintaining liberty against encroachments thereupon but still sometimes to keep security and liberty in the long term you must sacrifice potentially both in the short.
_________________
"I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I tried hard to get out from the bottom of the well.
I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I climbed up numerous of times despite falling down over and over again.
But then I realized it.
The higher and higher I climb, the pain increases when I fall down again.
When my interest in the world outside of the well began to equal the amount of pain,
That was when I finally realized the meaning of the story to Der Froschkönig."
-Frederica Bernkastel |
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Weapon
Spy
Post #33608
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 14:00
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| Politics: Anarchist |
Country: Mars |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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What is this security you speak of? Who or what causes it? Who is the assessor? When has what been secured, and why? Can you prove that you are somehow secure now? Can you honestly say that any particular act by an outside force can provide you with this security in the future? How will you even know that you are being kept secured and that it isn't just coincidence that you're not being attacked at the moment?
| From Wikipedia |
Security is the condition of being protected against danger or loss. In the general sense, security is a concept similar to safety. The nuance between the two is an added emphasis on being protected from dangers that originate from outside. Individuals or actions that encroach upon the condition of protection are responsible for the breach of security.
[...] When our expectations are met, we can say that quality has been met. When our expectations are met once and again, despite errors, catastrophes and attacks which in principle could prevent our expectations to be met, we can say that security has been met. Security is not falsifiable (Popper). We can prove that there has been a security failure, but we can't prove that there hasn't. Security measures improve the likeliness of expectations to be met, and therefore improve security. With respect to classified matter there is an expectation of the classified matter to remain secret for as long as we wish. A control access system is the security measure that helps this expectation to be accomplished. |
I say security is but the absence of insecurity. Since insecurity is the natural state, security is an impossibility, an illusion, an Easter Bunny inflicted upon the impressionable by a security apparatus that thrives on oppression and paranoia-mongering. |
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JD-sama
Minister of Truth
Post #33618
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 16:56
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| Politics: Communist |
Country: United Kingdom |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Weapon wrote: |
What is this security you speak of? Who or what causes it? Who is the assessor? When has what been secured, and why? Can you prove that you are somehow secure now? Can you honestly say that any particular act by an outside force can provide you with this security in the future? How will you even know that you are being kept secured and that it isn't just coincidence that you're not being attacked at the moment?
I say security is but the absence of insecurity. Since insecurity is the natural state, security is an impossibility, an illusion, an Easter Bunny inflicted upon the impressionable by a security apparatus that thrives on oppression and paranoia-mongering. |
I would define security in the context of this debate as the easiness and obviousness of a path that entails lesser probability of damage to ones life and quality thereof. It's a multi-facted definition so probably not a good one but put simply I would suggest that liberty is about the number of paths forces allow you without exposing you to harm whilst liberty is about the ease and obviousness of at least one harmless path. Utopia is where all paths are harmless and open I guess. Society is when it comes down to it somewhat of a construct of the mind an illusion if you must but words like security and liberty can be useful in it's description.
_________________
"I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I tried hard to get out from the bottom of the well.
I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I climbed up numerous of times despite falling down over and over again.
But then I realized it.
The higher and higher I climb, the pain increases when I fall down again.
When my interest in the world outside of the well began to equal the amount of pain,
That was when I finally realized the meaning of the story to Der Froschkönig."
-Frederica Bernkastel |
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JD-sama
Minister of Truth
Post #33636
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 22:30
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| Politics: Communist |
Country: United Kingdom |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Mephistopheles wrote: |
I don't agree that we have to sacrifice liberty for security. Take Athens for example, they had few laws harming the liberty of the land-owning freemen. You don't need to give up any liberty.
However, I'll try and review your opinion. We need some security for some liberty? I agree. However, I don't agree we have to give up liberty for security. Security from murder? We have the police. We haven't given up liberty to be out late at night to prevent it. What about security from "terrorism"? We haven't given up our civil rights yet to totally prevent it. |
Did I say we did? One certainly can and in certain situations perhaps one must but certainly don't suggest it's an enduring truism. By sacrificing ones liberty one can make a deal with the devil so to speak with a dominant power for security, a tacit agreement between prole and autocrat that providing life remains tolerable revolution will be stayed. Whilst the prole sacrifices most of their power(particularly their power as an individual) to ensure the continuance of that security whilst it remains suitable for the autocrat and as such the majority of proles may find it acceptable when contrasted with an out and out conflict in which their security is put at great risk.
Furthermore I mentioned that one must at times sacrifice liberty and security (potentially) in the short term in order to maintain them in the long term, by this I simply meant that when a rising autocratic power seizes control of any peaceful means of societal reorganisation that may exist ( for example democracy), one may be forced to directly combat that usurper outside of conventional apparatus in order to ensure sustained levels of security and liberty. Such dalliance from traditional bureaucratic power distribution almost inevitably lessens the security of individuals involved and oft the liberty as well, but dare I say the end justifies the means.
_________________
"I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I tried hard to get out from the bottom of the well.
I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I climbed up numerous of times despite falling down over and over again.
But then I realized it.
The higher and higher I climb, the pain increases when I fall down again.
When my interest in the world outside of the well began to equal the amount of pain,
That was when I finally realized the meaning of the story to Der Froschkönig."
-Frederica Bernkastel |
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JD-sama
Minister of Truth
Post #33646
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Posted: Wed 2006-10-04 23:34
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| Politics: Communist |
Country: United Kingdom |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Mephistopheles wrote: |
You mentioned giving up some liberty for some security. |
I don't think I really did ... I talked of their interdependance and that one cannot attain liberty without security or in a lasting manner security without liberty.
| Quote: |
How can you sacrifice something and then hope to get it back in the long-term? The ruling powers would never give back gains they've made. |
The very nature of my proposal suggests that the sacrifice of liberty and security I was discussing is that necessary to combat said ruling class. To remove a veil of abstraction through the most obvious scenario it is the type of security and liberty one loses when one revolts againts the oppression of a ruler and is attacked directly by them by making yourself and open enemy of a powerful foe you have willingly curtailed much of your liberty and your security is most certainly in question yet it is in order to prevent the establishment of a more permenant regime of restricted liberty and conditional security.
_________________
"I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I tried hard to get out from the bottom of the well.
I wanted to know the world that was outside of the well.
So I climbed up numerous of times despite falling down over and over again.
But then I realized it.
The higher and higher I climb, the pain increases when I fall down again.
When my interest in the world outside of the well began to equal the amount of pain,
That was when I finally realized the meaning of the story to Der Froschkönig."
-Frederica Bernkastel |
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One Of The Few
Minister of Truth
Post #34204
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Posted: Fri 2006-10-27 14:22
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| Politics: Just plain NUTS! |
Country: Scotland |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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Civil liberties ARE civil security, in that our governments are not necessarily benevolent. Civil liberties protect the people from the other power bodies of a democratic society, as they give powers of freedom to individuals amongst the people. What the Weimar Republic takes away one year will not be suspended by the rise of the Nazis the next.
Put another way: it's one thing to give the President of the United States the power to suspend Habaeus Corpus if he is as rational, sane and intelligent an individual as George W. Bush. But how will you get the rights back if you end up with some guillible senile twat or amoral authoritarian tyrant? The rights that the American people are giving to the government of today could be the weapons they have withdrawn from their children against the totalitarians of tomorrow.
_________________
If you can't say what you mean then you'll never mean what you say
God holds no fears
Death no worries
And while good is readily attainable
Evil is readily endurable |
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One Of The Few
Minister of Truth
Post #34205
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Posted: Fri 2006-10-27 14:24
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| Politics: Just plain NUTS! |
Country: Scotland |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| JD-sama wrote: |
I don't think I really did ... I talked of their interdependance and that one cannot attain liberty without security or in a lasting manner security without liberty.
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Almost Kantian in a way. One can only attain freedom by order; if freedom is the freedom to do things, one must be in a state of rational order whereby one can do things. It's an appealing idea; it's also one that has used to justify some of the most tyrannical regiemes of human history.
_________________
If you can't say what you mean then you'll never mean what you say
God holds no fears
Death no worries
And while good is readily attainable
Evil is readily endurable |
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vettesky
Prole
Post #42299
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Posted: Thu 2007-05-17 04:37
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| Politics: Anarchist |
Country: United States of Oppression |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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I'll take liberty any time of day, any day of the week. I read all the posts I think and some good points were made. I must say, one thing I missed or wasn't said yet is "no one gets out alive" no matter how safe you feel, how safe you actually are, no matter what economic system you are under, no matter what government, all of us will die. Some sooner than others.
I choose to live my life as free as I can be and experience as much as possible.
If you play odds and terrorism
| From http://www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html |
So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.
Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered. |
Odds of dying from other things
| From http://www.anotherperspective.org/advoc530.html |
1 in 88,000 of a terrorist attack
1 in 1,500,00 of a terrorist-caused shopping mall disaster assuming one such incident a week and you shop two hours a week
1 in 55,000,000 in a terrorist-caused plane disaster assuming one such incident a month and you fly once a month ( 1 )
1 in 55,928 of death by lightening
1 in 20,605 in your clothes igniting
1 in 10,455 of dying in your bathtub
1 in 10,010 by falling from a ladder or scaffolding
1 in 9,396 due to excessive heat
1 in 8,389 due to excessive cold
1 in 7,972 in a drowning accident
1 in 6,842 in a railway accident.
Using odds of dying in a way that Americans can relate to, let's compare the above numbers to the odds of dying during your lifetime to homicide from various forms of weapons.
1 in 197 of dying in a homicide
1 in 299 of dying in an assault from a firearm
1 in 5,330 of dying in an assault by hanging or strangulation
1 in 207,261 in operations of war.
Now, the question that every American must ask themselves is this; am I willing to give up my Constitutional freedoms in hopes of avoiding death by lightening, which is 983 times more likely than dying because a terrorists crashes an airplane? Are you willing to live in a Republican/Nazi police state in hopes that you don't die from your clothes catching fire (2669 times more likely) or falling in your bathtub (5261 times more likely)? Are you seriously asking this regime to protect you from being strangled or hanged when the odds of that happening is 10318 times more probable than dying in a terrorist-caused attack? Are you, at your very core, comfortable with the idea of leaving to your children a world in which Republicans/Nazis/fascists control all American's everyday life? |
So from the country that came and kicked ass during WW I, came in late and weak but got strong quick and helped pound the Nazi's and other Axis powers in WW II, while only suffering one real attack on it's own soil, took down the Soviet Union without really firing a shot. You're telling me we need to give up a heap full of rights to protect us from a few terrorists?
Maybe I missed the point of this debate and if I did, so sorry but
Give me Liberty or give me (a premature) death!
but then again as Gen George Patton said
"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
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Ron Paul in 2008! Life, liberty and a hammer down on the debt! |
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Mao Zedong
Committee Leader
Post #42343
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Posted: Thu 2007-05-17 23:23
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| Politics: Meritocratist |
Country: American Empire |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| vettesky wrote: |
So from the country that came and kicked ass during WW I, came in late and weak but got strong quick and helped pound the Nazi's and other Axis powers in WW II, while only suffering one real attack on it's own soil, took down the Soviet Union without really firing a shot. You're telling me we need to give up a heap full of rights to protect us from a few terrorists?
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I hope you realize how generalized and inaccurate that statement is.
_________________
We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.
-Benito Mussolini
Anyone who is not a socialist before he is 30 has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head.
-European Proverb |
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vettesky
Prole
Post #42350
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Posted: Fri 2007-05-18 05:55
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| Politics: Anarchist |
Country: United States of Oppression |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (2 votes cast) |
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| Mao Zedong wrote: |
vettesky wrote:
So from the country that came and kicked ass during WW I, came in late and weak but got strong quick and helped pound the Nazi's and other Axis powers in WW II, while only suffering one real attack on it's own soil, took down the Soviet Union without really firing a shot. You're telling me we need to give up a heap full of rights to protect us from a few terrorists?
I hope you realize how generalized and inaccurate that statement is. |
It was late and I was tired. I'm assuming you mean the "took down the Soviet Union without really firing a shot." part?
It's late and I'm tired again. Let me know and I'll try and fill in the gaps.
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Ron Paul in 2008! Life, liberty and a hammer down on the debt! |
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carldiesturmer
Filthy Animal
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Posted: Sat 2009-05-30 08:33
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| Politics: Oligarchical Collectivist |
Country: United States |
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| Re: Civil Liberties and Civil Security |
Post Rating: 0.0/4 (0 votes cast) |
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| Mephistopheles wrote: |
Civil liberties in modern times is something most of us take for granted. We happily quote our various constitutions for addressing civil liberties as being factual and institutional without realizing the cost of institutionalizing the rights we hold dear. We forget how heavily our ancestors paid to achieve the freedoms we have today, while at the same time, dually believing that our rights will remain inviolable for the most part. We believe that although temporary arrangements may lead to despotisms or to a state of security in which certain liberties are curtailed, that despite all of this, our rights, for the most part, will remain intact.
Human history is a history of some six to seven thousand years of bloody and brutal history. We’ve gone from empires to democracies, oligarchies to republics, and monarchies to constitutional monarchies. Human history of one of progress towards libertarianism if we consider both economics and political application of the rights granted to man. While economic capitalism may be the wrong choice and the wrong direction for man, no one can deny it exists and rules the economic life of virtually every single nation on earth. Even those who deny being capitalistic are indeed capitalistic on a statist level.
Throughout this history, the rights endowed to men have grown over the millennia. Once, only basic rights of property and of finances were allowed, but eventually, pressure put on the despots and monarchs ruling at the time by other nobles or by the people caused the rights to grow into political freedoms and religious freedoms. This was not an easy task.
In the civilization known as Athens, political freedoms were first granted to humankind. Granted, slavery still existed then, and granted women were treated like slaves, but the first selective democracy was established, giving power into the hands of some fifty-thousand people, more than just one or fifty depending on dictator or oligarchy.
The freedom to speak has been the hardest to establish because it poses a threat to those in power. Through freedom of speech, the lowest of the low can make complaints freely in most cases against the ruling individuals, criticizing their ways and methods. The first time the freedom to speak was enshrined within a constitution or formal law as being free and mostly non-selective (you can be arrested for using the freedom of speech to say you will kill other people, or cause serious disorder through other ways of speaking) was in the American colonies. Once they achieved their independence, the option to allow freedom of speech became harder to ignore among the people of every oppressed regime in the world. Eventually, the French created their Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the fight for the freedom to speak your mind was victorious.
The freedom to freely worship any religion was one of the hardest rights to establish since it usurped the power of a state religion and proved dangerous as it allowed people to seek their own path in life rather than accept a given order to “thou shall”. Some of the earliest civilizations allowing freedom of religion were ancient Persia and, surprisingly, the Islamic sultanates. Of course, during a time of war these rights always tend to lessen in order to give greater power to those in charge to “protect” us. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, to distract those on bottom from the people on top.
The path towards human progress has been a bloody one. The rights we live with have been established on the lives of men and women fighting to give their children a better future. The greatest insult we could ever make to those people is to support the destruction of due process and civil liberties, one by one. While, during a time of war, it may seem easy to give up civil liberty for civil security, the re-establishment of civil liberties given up is no easy task.
The greatest threat to civil liberty is civil security. Demanding we give up civil liberties to gain civil security, it promises to do away with our rights and replace it with state-controlled “rights”. The right to duty. The right to be watched. The right to be guilty before proven innocent. The right to be declared an enemy combatant. The right to not be reviewed independently. These rights are what will replace our civil liberties if the current trend continues in our war society.
A notable Republican Senator recently said, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”* I say, if we have total surveillance, we have nothing to hide from the government, and that in itself is a thought so disturbing that it’s hard to believe there’s people promoting total surveillance in this nation.
The real question is, do we want to live in a society where we are completely safe, where all our enemies are caught and captured, and where stray thoughts no longer exist, but where unorthodox people are caught and captured; or do we want to live in a society where we remain free people, where crime still exists, but is rather a good price to pay for freedom? |
Schizo mephie, you lifted this from the ACLU site, didn't you?
* got link and name?
_________________
What is a Democratic Socialist?
It is a Communist who is cowardly
enough to call himself what he's not, for fear of backlash on the Semantics. It is about the "Speed" of the "Revolution".
Like Hitler said "get them persuaded and us elected"
Caveat Emptor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Socialism
DO NOT USE BIG BROTHER'S LIBERTARIAN POLICIES AND BELIEFS AGAINST HIS HIMSELF AND HIS FORUM |
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trippyhippy420
Ignorant Prole
Post #59373
Joined: 07 Sep 2009
Posts: 4
Total Words: 196
Average words per post: 49
PoliMatch: n/a
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Posted: Tue 2009-09-08 00:56
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| Politics: National Libertarian-Capitalist |
Country: United States |
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Post Rating: 4.0/4 (1 vote cast) |
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| ill take anarchy over facism any day. i figure i stand a better chance agianst some virginia tech wako than a goverment funded group of wakos |
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