The USA Patriot Act

Linguofreak said:
No. But those same leaders that are driving them into the West will, not as the result of any sinister plot, but as the result of simple opportunism, use the rising Islamic population in the West to fight the west. Get rid of islamofascism, stabilize the Middle East, and then it ceases to matter how many muslims are immigrating to the West. Without islamofascism using them for cover, or as a population base for recruiting, they are no threat. Fail to do so, and things get very ugly.
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That assumes, that most of them are feeling connected to these rulers. Which, in my experiences, applies not even to a majority of the Turkish immigrants (Though the Turkish government does a very aggressive campaign for making sure immigrants stay Turkish).

Well, anyway, my view is, that we punish many, for the crimes of few and we do not even punish the right people. We have maybe no sense of justice any more. We are maybe happy to punish Muslims for pure vengeance. But I think we have to be better than that.

And I think most people come for the very same reasons to the west, many people had to immigrate into the USA once: Freedom and pursuit of happiness.
 
Religions are only what you make them. They are guides on how to live, and for the most part fundamentally sound if they have survived over the centuries (so we aren't talking Scientology here, as wonderful and true a religion as it is). The question is, what do you make of them? Ultimately you can't call a religion a threat, you can only call people threats.
 
I should not come to read and even less to write in the off-topic currently and particularly on pages like those. I still find the sleep easily but I lose a little the appetite. Bomb bomb bomb...
 
Urwumpe said:
That assumes, that most of them are feeling connected to these rulers. Which, in my experiences, applies not even to a majority of the Turkish immigrants (Though the Turkish government does a very aggressive campaign for making sure immigrants stay Turkish).
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Not really. You don't need too many radicals. The Nazi party never won the majority of the vote in any free election. Why should the islamofascists? All you need is a small radical minority and a majority that isn't motivated to stop them.

EDIT: Even so, things will get bad long before it gets to the point of an islamist takeover. I think it's something Europe has to watch out for (not the US so much, I don't think we have quite enough muslim immigration for such a thing), but large scale terrorist attacks and really bloody wars involving Middle Eastern nations are what I'm worried about for the present, and I think the damage can be very much reduced if we nip the whole thing in the bud. That's my $0.02, take it or leave it.
 
The terrorists have already won. By sending three planes into two towers and a military building, they effectively won the war. Look what we have to put up with now with the patriot act, dhs, unruly god-complex flight attendants, over the top patriotism at the now-gone yankee stadium (the whole bathroom during God Bless American thing), warrantless...anything and on and on and on! By causing what 4,000 civilian deaths 7 years ago, they won the war on our rights. Daddy's little boy bush has his "war on terror" while they have their "war on U.S. rights."
 
dougkeenan said:
What's the "bathroom during God Bless America thing?" (I don't follow sports, sorry.)
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I was wondering about that, too. I kinda guessed that maybe they played the song "God Bless America," at Yankee Stadium, and it was piped over the public address system, and people in the bathroom sang along, and this was televised (why there would be TV cameras in the bathroom, don't ask). Anyway, if this is so, I feel motivated to point out that singing in the bathroom, is a fine American tradition (or so I've heard; not that I sing in the bathroom, mind you, but I don't claim to be a fine American traditionalist).

Oh, yeah; if this is all just my mistaken imagination, then never mind.
 
David said:
I was wondering about that, too. I kinda guessed that maybe they played the song "God Bless America," at Yankee Stadium, and it was piped over the public address system, and people in the bathroom sang along, and this was televised (why there would be TV cameras in the bathroom, don't ask). Anyway, if this is so, I feel motivated to point out that singing in the bathroom, is a fine American tradition (or so I've heard; not that I sing in the bathroom, mind you, but I don't claim to be a fine American traditionalist).
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No, some guy got kicked out of the stadium because he left the stands and went for the bathroom during the song.
 
Well, that's a bit over-the-top, isn't it? Besides, I thought people were supposed to stretch, after (before?) the 7th inning, not get their ligaments stretched for them. I wonder if the guy did, eventually, sue; I would expect such gratuitously violent behavior, by stadium officials, to be regarded as a criminal assault.

(Thanks for the link, btw)

Also btw, I went to a Who concert, some years ago. Somebody spilled a drink all over my seat, so I went to the bathroom, to get some paper towels. This huge bouncer-type guy took offense at something, like maybe I was using a wrong door, and pushed me quite hard, away, with otherwise no comment; made me very angry.
 
Liberty is the key to true security

(To tl8: Please don't lock this thread. A heated debate is healthy, as long as we aren't cursing and name-calling.)

rant.gif

I agree with Zat. To think we are so scared of a f***wit like Cat Stevens that we are willing to ignore our own constitution's protections for liberty would be laughable if it did not have such ominous implications.

Greg, all your studying of history, and you overlook the part of history where people pay the price for giving up their liberties in the name of protection from some fear or another. The idea that a bunch of cave-dwelling extremists present such a threat that we must be willing to give our own power-hungry politicians almost unlimited authority to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, is illogical to say the least.

I firmly believe that it is our own fear-driven intervention that strengthens these people. You cannot bomb and kill ideologies or religions out of existence, unless you are willing to commit the most extreme atrocity of total extermination. Even then, the damage you do to your own society will be too great to bear. We are still paying the price today for our forefathers' mistakes of slavery of Africans and murder of the natives.

Nor can you hope to stop religious extremism by suppressing the liberties of your own population; rather the oppression of such an act tends to drive people to more extreme forms of ideology or faith. It also delegitimizes your own government, and in the case of the USA, is an unforgivable slap in the face of everything we believe.

I am not willing to knuckle under to some crazy internal security scheme, to waive my rights as a free man, in order to salve someone else's irrational fears. There are far better ways to secure the country against terrorists, ways which involve exploiting our freedom and citizenship rather than treating it as a threat.

Unfortunately, too many Americans have decided to equate security with patriotism, and buy the propaganda that the only way to save freedom is to lock it away in a closet until some ill-defined conditions change at some hazy, ever-receding day far in the future.

Honestly, Greg, I have lots of respect for you, but this business of giving the government ever more power to protect me is not something I am wired to accept, ever. September 11, 2001, caused me to turn into a staunch libertarian, perhaps once and for all. For some libertarians, it seems to have had the opposite effect, to my tremendous dismay. The key to defeating our enemy is liberty and courage, not subordination.
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Andy44,

Brilliant post, and articulates what many of us think. Thanks for laying it out so well. I think the greatest strength of a healthy democracy is its openness and freedoms. If we give those up, what then are we protecting?

It's probably a genetic thing with me, as there's more Celtic blood percolating around than anything else, but I just don't trust anyone who aspires to power. Period.

I do, however, have a lot of respect for those willing to stand up and provide leadership when it's required. Then, they need to step aside when it's done. What's happened to our Constitution since 2001 is exactly what I was afraid of what was going to happen. It was a perfect opportunity to turn us back in the right direction, but instead the opportunity was totally squandered.

The Patriot Act was the realization of the one Phil Graham and Newt Gingrich had die on the floor back in 1990. Granted, it's not nearly as horrific as the 1990 bill, but I've been on my guard ever since. If anyone's interested, look up 1990 HR 4079 (but avoid the paranoia links that pop up.) Despots are despots, regardless of the pleasantries attached.

Hope it doesn't offend too much, but I'll be voting Libertarian again this year.
 
Linguofreak said:
Not really. You don't need too many radicals. The Nazi party never won the majority of the vote in any free election. Why should the islamofascists? All you need is a small radical minority and a majority that isn't motivated to stop them.
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The Nazis won by becoming the strongest single party in the system. You should not ignore that. They have not become the majority and had been on the decline, but they became attractive for those who wanted power.

Again, they only got power because weaker people assumed, that a smaller and weaker partner will change the Nazis. Instead, the Nazis forcefully assimilated their partner.

Don't trusting the law and a weak and corrupt police was the most important factor. Only very few people wanted to Republic to exist.

You have to ask, if you want the same to happen? You just need to decide that your constitution is not worth the paper it is written on. That was the beginning, fanaticism on both ends of the spectrum had been the catalyst and blind hunger for power of the elites the end.

Linguofreak said:
EDIT: Even so, things will get bad long before it gets to the point of an islamist takeover. I think it's something Europe has to watch out for (not the US so much, I don't think we have quite enough muslim immigration for such a thing), but large scale terrorist attacks and really bloody wars involving Middle Eastern nations are what I'm worried about for the present, and I think the damage can be very much reduced if we nip the whole thing in the bud. That's my $0.02, take it or leave it.
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We have always had immigration here and we get most of our immigrants still from the former USSR. Most Muslims in Germany are Turkish immigrants. Only brain-amputated believe, that all these people come to Germany to change it into a caliphate. We had radicals and we had democracy to deal with it, sometimes with painful decisions (Kaplan was one of the first cases, where Germany decided to extradite a person facing political crime charges).

But in immigration, you have to remember what you sell. Most people come not to Germany, for changing it, but for changing their life to the better. You have to give those a fair chance, who want to become German citizens (and immigrants generally work harder for their dreams as native Germans) and on the same hand give exactly those a hard time, who only come here as criminals. And that is only possible if you take your own laws serious. We have still only very few immigrants in the German parliament, and all of those who are politically active are middle or upper-class citizens (Successful entrepreneurs, lawyers).

Of course, we also have problems with the religion Islam. 99% of the problems are actually caused by Muslims themselves - a lack of a central organization to represent their religion, the problem that all religious organizations represent only 5% of all Muslims in Germany, the problem that the biggest organizations are remote controlled by foreign governments and only on the paper admitted to the German constitution, etc.

But the Muslims are also solving their problems without the religious organizations already, as their patience is running out quickly. Some few will become radicals and possibly turn against Germany. But the majority will just organize themselves into less dogmatic organizations or decide "with their feet", for example by just letting their children take part in government organized Islam classes at school. Which use schoolbooks, that are not fully supported by the religious groups, but waiting until these groups finally agree on something is like waiting for Godot. So, deciding over their heads to solve a real problem is not really bad.
 
I'm very happy to see that there are still people who are very worried by what is going on, governments should serve us, not the other way around... things took really wrong turn. Have someone mentioned this link here before? www.infowars.com
Some of you know it, some of you don't. It is really good to read what's there and get the documentaries they advertise.
 
I'm all but certain that whatever points I might make in this thread will be misunderstood, thus my frustration. I'll try to make a brief statement of where I stand, regardless of the slim chance I can get through the wall of what I consider to be overblown rhetoric on the other side:

Prosecutorial misconduct happens. It's part of human nature and inherent in the adversarial nature of our legal system. That individual people suffer in cases of prosecutorial overzealousness is a price we pay for having an adversarial legal system. There are checks built into the system to guard against it, but they take time to work themselves out.

Legislative overreaching is also part of the system envisioned by the Founders in creating a mechanism of government characterized by separation of powers between the branches of government and checks and balances between them. This mechanism works, but it takes time to work itself out and be effective.

Although it has obviously been communicated in an extremely poor fashion by people who hold political power, a significant number of people really believe that there is a serious threat to our society. Yes, the most vocally violent people who embody this threat are "in caves" -- but there's much more to the threat than that.

One of the absolutely most challenging parts of the threat we perceive is that it is crafted to take advantage of the very elements of liberal social and political order that we cherish so much -- the openness of our societies and the political liberties that guarantee that openness.

The best way I know to explain this view is by analogy to the human body. The police function is analogous to the body's immune system. The basic Enlightenment notion of limited government is premised to a very great extent on placing clear and strong restrictions on the activity of that immune system, so that it does not attack the body's own tissues.

The modern Islamist threat has adapted to this in an evolutionary fashion, generating people like Tariq Ramadan, who have mastered the art of adopting a surface appearance of "moderation" while speaking to Westerners in order to escape response from the liberal polity's limited immune system, while maintaining and expressing their more radical views when speaking to Muslim audiences. The superficial "moderation" of the Muslim Brotherhood in recent years is an example of this, as is the way in which organizations like Hamas have learned to use the Western language of human rights to signal to the West's political and social immune system that they are acceptable.

A situation like this presents an EXTREME challenge to the foundational compact of Enlightenment liberal society and government. To return to the biological analogy, the disease organism has evolved a very effective "protein coat" that works to deflect an adverse reaction from the West's political and social immune system.

Those whose reflexive response to this situation is to oppose a dynamic response from the political and social immune system are effctively crippling it. It is the equivalent of rejecting a course of therapy that has adverse side effects -- "I do not want to take that medicine because, by strengthening my immune system, I will suffer attacks against my own tissue. This will hurt, and has risks. I'd rather have the disease."

Denying the reality of the threat is a way to rationalize the rejection of the remedy.

I do NOT maintain that the adjustments to our political and social immune system have negative consequences. They do. Chemotherapy isn't fun. It hurts. More importantly, it has to be monitored very closely, to make sure that the cure doesn't kill the patient.

But my side has lost this argument. I'll acknowledge that, and also that it has in great part been due to having had a doctor who's done such a poor job of explaining to the patient what the therapy entails, and what the costs and benefits are. Of course, it hasn't helped that there are other doctors who are screaming at the top of their lungs that the diagnosis is incorrect, and that the patient isn't sick at all. A great number of them not only say that, but also say that whatever symptoms the patient is suffering from are the patient's own fault for resisting the benign infection in the first place.

And it also hasn't helped that the doctor's own vocabulary in describing the disease is so limited -- important ways of describing the disease are off limits. The actual name of the disease can only be spoken indirectly, and large parts of its nature can't be described to the patient. In fact, the general disease organism has to be "respected."

So there probably wasn't much hope of treating the disease at this stage of its progress, even if the doctor had had a much better bedside manner. Things will have to get much worse before the patient is ready to consider the unpleasant nature of any conceivable treatment. By then, though, it will be much tougher to deal with.
 
GregBurch: About your disease analogy, do you remember the reasons why we developed our western constitutions and the philosophy of the age of enlightenment? It did not happen just so, it had a reason which motivated such thinking and which finally resulted in the then still innocent nationalism.
 
Urwumpe said:
GregBurch: About your disease analogy, do you remember the reasons why we developed our western constitutions and the philosophy of the age of enlightenment? It did not happen just so, it had a reason which motivated such thinking and which finally resulted in the then still innocent nationalism.
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Yes, I think I know from whence the flower of the Enlightenment sprang. Before I was so rudely interrupted in my project seven years ago, I was working on a book about it. Just two months before that interruption, I gave this speech:

http://www.gregburch.net/progress.html

which was based on the outline of that book.

It really isn’t possible to understand “where I’m coming from” without reading that text, and then understanding that just a few weeks after it was delivered, I came to realize that the situation I described in it was more acute than I had realized.
 
All I can say is wow Greg. I wasn't able to read it word for word, but I read maybe 85% of the words and got the point.
You're absolutely right about the freedoms we need to continue to defend. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that you're indicating that certain groups such as the Marx movement, and now the muslims are gradually wearing away the basic tenents of a free society and trying to force everyone to conform or die. As they work themselves into society, they gradually win-over those in power to the point where the "guardians" are blind to the true nature of these subversives and really capitulate to them under the pretense of looking out for the little guy.
 
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