Posted on 07/18/2004 8:51:39 PM PDT by JFD3
This Is No Time For Libertarian Nonsense
By Jim Delinis http://www.freedominion.ca
Of all the tiresome political talking points to emerge post-September 11, the civil libertarians have been by far the most tiresome. Attorney General Ashcroft went to great pains to please this group in the original anti-terror bill (the PATRIOT Act) only be to painted as the Devil Incarnate.
There is a lesson to learn in all of this. The Civil Libertarians are a relic of a time that has long since past. They, in the name of freedom and commerce, continually stand in the way of much-needed measures that aim to insure that every American has the opportunity to live free lives and pursue commerce.
One of the major faults I have with the Bush Adminstration is that while it has made excellent strides, it has not gone nearly as far as it should have to root out terrorists in the mainland United States because it listens to these libertarians. The PATRIOT Act takes some good first steps, but that particular act is badly in need of a supplementary law to complete what PATRIOT started.
If the United States Congress were serious about protecting this country, it would explore:
· A National Identification Card · A Domestic Intelligence Service · Greater video surveillance at major cities and airports · Greater monitoring of international communication done by online methods like e-mail · The monitoring of all news services, news websites, and movies for messages and biases that encourage sympathy with terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
We live in a Hobbesian state of nature, and now, in this time of great threat, is when the citizenry should increase the amount of personal sovereignty it gives to the government in exchange for personal safety. Without personal security, as Hobbes noted, there is no room for Arts or Literature, Industry or Commerce. Without security that can only be granted by the types of measures listed above, the life of Americans will be nasty, brutish and short.
This is not the time to listen to libertarian nonsense that is better suited for a time when men rode horseback. This is the time to recognize the dangers Americans face and take the measures that would respond accordingly.
Papers please...comrade...
"the citizenry should increase the amount of personal sovereignty it gives to the government in exchange for personal safety. "
GAG !! With oxymoronic friends who think like that we will never survive our enemys.
LOL, this must be a joke post.
Welcome to FR, BTW...
Well,Libertarians,whether large or small L,are a peculiar lot.
Sieg Heil!
So are fascists, for that matter.
-Well,Libertarians,whether large or small L,are a peculiar lot.-
We don't invite the government to solve all our problems, much less ensnare us into a police state. Peculiar, you think ? I call it sane, and so did the Founders of our Nation who forsaw this sort of crap coming and demanded a Bill of Rights.
Now, even so-called conservatives find the limits on government to be dangerous to Americans.
Head for the hills, it is not only socialists who wish to destroy America anymore. It is americans.
The United Kingdom has all the measures I advocate except the National ID, yet they are still a free society.
Dammit, I don't want the terrorists to use our own freedom against us to kill us. Urban centres should be monitored by cameras.
"We don't invite the government to solve all our problems"
We can't have a free market economy without protecting the populace, without the Rule of Law. It is a reasonable bargain.
Excellent points. Let's just hope the Republicans aren't out burning any black churches tonight, too!
-Dammit, I don't want the terrorists to use our own freedom against us to kill us.-
and do away with our Freedom is your answer to that ?
Putting cameras in major urban centres, or giving an American M16 the power to monitor sketchy activity by NON citizens is not what you describe.
"Those that trade liberty for preceived security deserve neither liberty, nor security" - Ben Franklin.
-Let's just hope the Republicans aren't out burning any black churches tonight, too!-
Why do you say such a thing as that ?
Dammit, I don't want the terrorists to use our own freedom against us to kill us
I'm more weary of jackbooted thugs than terrorists. Just wait till political opponents are considered 'terrorists' if some nut like John Kerry wins.
Even Tony Blair said in the House of Commons, where I got this phrase, "this is no time for libertarian nonsense."
You think the UK is safer from terrorism than is the US?
You are so right.
You do realize that Tony Blair is a socialist, don't you?
Are there any on FR? I mean for real ones...not those who are REALLY Conservatives,but with whom you disagree. :-)
I'm with you. :-)
Exactly.
That's a simple analysis of Blair. Listen, this Libertarian stuff is nonsense, ok? All of us have entered into a Social Contract since we were born. All this is about is extending that contract to meet new threats.
A DIS is badly needed, and a National ID Card would be nice. Monitoring of Urban Centres would be definetly useful too.
· A National Identification Card ·
Ja, you will be showing me your papers please.
A Domestic Intelligence Service·
Possibly, but I'm not convinced of the need.
Greater video surveillance at major cities and airports · Greater monitoring of international communication done by online methods like e-mail.
Ok, works for me. I see no harm. · The monitoring of all news services, news websites, and movies for messages and biases that encourage sympathy with terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
Ah, you vant ze Gestapo to root out those nasty ideas, no? Sorry pal, but biases are your right as an American citizen. I'm willing to root out those who are working for foriegn powers who mean us harm, but you're free to sympathise with anyone.
We live in a Hobbesian state of nature, and now, in this time of great threat, is when the citizenry should increase the amount of personal sovereignty it gives to the government in exchange for personal safety.
Yes, let's sacrifice the American way of life to preserve the American way of life. It's absolutely frightening that such logic even makes sense to you. Absolutely not, not in this lifetime or the next.
Without personal security, as Hobbes noted, there is no room for Arts or Literature, Industry or Commerce. Without security that can only be granted by the types of measures listed above, the life of Americans will be nasty, brutish and short.
Yeah, and your Soviet sense of order is no damned better.
If the term is used interchangably with authoritarian as is customary? Of course there are.
Run,hide,head for those hills;do,and stay there.
Wrong yet again...as usual.
Thanks...I calls 'em as I sees 'em. LOL
Dawn of the Daddy State
If terrorism has made a global trend toward greater state power inevitable, then it's important to get authoritarianism right. Here's how
by Paul Starobin
.....
ast fall, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, a federally funded agency chartered to spread liberty around the world, President George W. Bush delivered a speech holding out some "essential principles" as "common to every successful society in every culture." The first of these, the President declared, is that "successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military so that governments respond to the will of the people and not the will of the elite." That was what America had learned in its 200-year "journey" on the road to perfecting its democracy, Bush observed, by way of encouraging less mature works in progress—namely, post-Taliban Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq—to follow this tried and true path.
The rhetoric may seem unexceptionable. But in the context of our age—an age in which certain dark forces, most prominently terrorism, confront the state with the elemental task of maintaining security and civic order—the principles Bush named are not just irrelevant but almost precisely the opposite of the ones we should be dedicating ourselves to. Leaving aside the question of military power, the necessary response to terrorism is not to limit the power of the state but, rather, to bolster it, so as to preserve the basic order without which the defenseless citizen has no prospect of enjoying the splendors of liberty. In the wake of Madrid, in the wake of 9/11, in the wake of suicide bombings in Moscow subway stations and Jerusalem cafés, the state is impelled to become even more intrusive and muscular than it already is. How well today's leaders meet this obligation to construct more-vigilant states is very likely to stand as one of history's most important criteria for assessing their stewardship.
An authoritarian push is often seen as coming from above, forced on an unsuspecting public by would-be autocrats. But today's global trend toward what might be called the Daddy State is propelled by the anxious demands of majority blocs of citizens. The Russians recently re-elected Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel, with 71 percent of the vote, handing him a mandate to continue his crackdown on Chechen terrorists. The Israelis are demanding the Fence—envisioned as a sniper-patrolled, electrified national barrier aimed at keeping out Palestinian suicide bombers. Not only do Americans broadly support Bush's Patriot Act, but women—who worry more than men do that they or someone close to them will fall victim to terrorism—tend to view the measure as not tough enough, according to a recent Gallup poll. Europeans are demanding closer policing of their rapidly growing Muslim minority, which now stands at 15 million in the EU.
In short, we are at the dawn of a popularly sanctioned movement toward greater authoritarianism in the domain of what is now fashionably called "homeland security." As Thomas Hobbes explained in his mid-seventeenth-century treatise Leviathan (a work that can be read as a primer on homeland security), there is no real contradiction in the idea of authoritarianism as a choice. In a proverbial state of nature, man willingly gives up some portion of his liberty to a sovereign as the only conceivable protector of his life and property. During times of relative quiet and prosperity it is easy to forget that this sort of bargain exists—but in times of danger, woe to the sovereign that neglects its duty to protect.
o say that we are at the beginning of an authoritarian age is not, of course, to end the conversation but to begin it. The challenge is to get authoritarianism right, and it's important to identify what could go wrong as we try to meet the demands of this new era. One obvious danger, fascism, already lurks at the door of Russia, a humiliated country whose color has shifted from red to brown since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Putin is proving to be a manipulative paternalist, exploiting fears of Chechen terrorists and thuggish business oligarchs to nourish nationalist sentiment and his own cult of personality in the Kremlin.
Nor is Putin respecting the prudent boundaries of a Daddy State. There is no popular demand for an increase in state power over the market or the media—yet the Putin regime is exerting greater control in those areas, too. (All major television stations are now state-controlled.) With democratic institutions so weakly grounded in Russia, there is likely to be no check on Putin's impulses without pressure from Western governments.
America illustrates the hazards of the opposite problem: too many constraints on the Daddy State. In particular, Congress—the body positioned between the executive and the people—is proving a serious hindrance. For example, just after 9/11 alarmed legislators sensibly created a Transportation Security Agency, with broad powers to improve airport security. But since then Congress has hamstrung the agency's effort to develop a computerized profiling system that would help identify potentially dangerous passengers—in part because of pressure from airlines worried that travelers inconvenienced by "false positives" would blame them for missed flights. Such is the classic defect of legislatures, which reliably respond to the will of the majority in emergencies but afterward tend to succumb to the predations of well-entrenched lobbies.
Homeland security in the United States probably isn't going to improve unless those responsible for formulating and administering protection policies are insulated from the legislature. That was the painful lesson taught by a wave of bombings in France and other European countries in the 1980s; after the bombings France improved its counterterrorism capabilities by endowing an elite group of Paris-based magistrates with investigative powers that far outstrip those given to John Ashcroft's Justice Department in the Patriot Act. The former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke recommends establishing an elite unit modeled on MI5, the internal British Security Service, and subject to oversight by a blue-ribbon board of prominent citizens. The United States has its own model of sorts in the Federal Reserve, which is protected from congressional encroachment and is one of the nation's most effective government institutions.
For both Europe and Israel the Daddy State poses a tricky cultural challenge: to extend the bargain envisioned by Hobbes—a partial sacrifice of personal liberty in return for the state's protection —to isolated and distrusted Muslim minorities that have historically been overlooked or discriminated against. Continuing to neglect this imperative for greater civic inclusion is especially dangerous now that Muslim communities are more closely scrutinized for terrorist ties (as they must be). Shorn of the occupied territories by fortified barriers, Israel proper would still have an Arab minority of some 20 percent. Moshe Arens, Israel's hard-line former Defense Minister, has an intriguing suggestion: subject Israeli Arabs to the requirement of military service, from which all except Druze Arabs are currently exempt. If any institution in Israeli society can instill in the Arab minority a sense of belonging, it is the military, which is not only Israel's chief cultural melting pot but also a prime source of contacts for those seeking to build careers in business and other areas.
The French government is trying to promote cultural integration—and to prove itself a caring paternalist—by banning Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in public schools, on the principle that many girls are being forced to do so by religious radicals. But such policies risk being seen as discriminatory. Compulsory civic education would offer a better avenue for acculturating Muslims living in ghettos on the outskirts of metropolises such as Paris, London, and Madrid. Britain has made a good start by insisting that immigrants attend citizenship classes and pass an English-language test as a condition of receiving a passport—a tough-love sort of idea that is a limited, reasonable invasion of personal autonomy.
lthough "Leviathan" denotes a scary sea monster, Hobbes himself was in fact one of the modernizing West's great early humanists. His central aim was to find a formula for ending the civil wars, inflamed by religious passions, that were consuming the England of his time. Today's Islamic jihadis now threaten something like a global civil war, as opposed to a conventional war between states; their transnational armies occupy stealth bases on every continent except Antarctica. Were he alive today, Hobbes might argue not for a planet of Daddy States but for a Daddy Planet—a single Leviathan, or World Sovereign, to which all of us would be made to submit, for our own security. At the very least a modern Hobbesian would be likely to favor the establishment of an EU-wide antiterrorism czar—a step that jealous guardians of national sovereignty have been resisting.
Life in a Daddy State global order promises to be a somewhat mixed affair. Life will be best for majority groups in well-fortified but not overly heavy-handed Daddy States. As ever, life will be rough for anyone under the boot-heel of an unconstrained autocrat. But perhaps the most terrible fate awaits those trapped in the primeval chaos, without any sort of state protection. That condition of extreme vulnerability is borne by, for instance, Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. And should state-building fail in Afghanistan and Iraq, their peoples, too, will inhabit this sort of limbo, in which, as Hobbes memorably wrote, "there is no place for Industry ... no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."
And what will happen as the socialist government takesover more and more of their lives? What will happen if there is tyranny? What will they do? NOTHING, they're unarmed. They live at the mercy of the government. That's not free.
'Putting cameras in major urban centres, or giving an American M16 the power to monitor sketchy activity by NON citizens is not what you describe.'
HUH ?
We would be much better without most of our government, but self defence is another issue.
We can survive terrorism without becoming the sort of government controlled police state that the terrorists seem to want for the world. Your cameras are their trophys, your intrusive, anti-American laws are their victory.
Some, like our liberal and neo-conservative enemys seem to just want more government, whatever the reason, whatever the price.
Since this is your first day, you can be forgiven. Normally, when someone posts something sarcastic like Britain being a free society, we conclude with a /sarcasm off tag.
Still it was pretty funny. Free society, hahahahah. They lock people up there for protecting their own property, or owning the means to do so, but it's a free soceity. lololololol.
Now, how come I'm not really laughing?
OK, forget there draconian gun laws. There just stupid. I'm talking about the cameras and all. How have they negatively impatacted hte average Briton? When is the last time 9/11 happened in the UK? Exactly.
Uh huh.. So, are you trying to say that Tony Blair is a conservative?
Listen, this Libertarian stuff is nonsense, ok?
Oh, don't be silly. That is a ridiculous statement.
In any case, I think all kinds of things are nonsense which others do not. C'est la vie. If it makes you feel better, I have little doubt that we are in the opening stages of a police state in America. If you glance over the polling figures of all the collected freedoms Americans were willing to give up after 9/11 you will see it quite clearly. The American Experiment is in its twilight. It will die with the next 9/11 scale terrorist event.
All of us have entered into a Social Contract since we were born.
In many ways, our Social Contract is a libertarian one by definition. It is predicated by inalienable rights and freedoms, even if they are under assault from every side. Ronald Reagan said it better than I:
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
Ronald Reagan
All this is about is extending that contract to meet new threats.
The expanding government apparatus of surveillance is a fundamental violation of the Social Contract as it has existed for some quite long while in the US. Yes, it will still be a Social Contract of sorts, but it will be a very different one than that which has defined America in many respects to the present date. It will take time of course, but if the institutions of oppression exist there is little doubt that they will eventually be directed toward that purpose. Such has it always been, and such will it always be. The phrase "eternal vigilance" did not arise by accident.
A DIS is badly needed...
We have the FBI. Reform it if necessary.
...and a National ID Card would be nice.
For what? Pray tell..
Monitoring of Urban Centres would be definetly useful too.
Did you know that the average urban citizen already gets photographed or videotaped about a dozen times a day?
"Now how come I'm not laughing."
It's because I am very, very serious.
yawwwnn.. I really can't be bothered with inanity tonight. Sorry.
Then call our therapist,get the asylumn workers to take you back to your room,and/or just stop talking. And yes,your insanity is rather ennui inducing,pet. :-)
You know, you sound very European to me. If you are an American citizen, you should consider emmigration. Your sensibilities are much closer to the average Brit's than our own.
Check out my post #39. You seem to have misunderstood it. Cheerio. Oh, and check out the last line of my profile when you have a moment. Cheers!
No,I didn't misunderstand anything at all;I turned your words back on you.It'as YOU who just don't gwet it;in any more ways than one. :-)
I have never voted non-Republican since 1968 but I am this year due to the un-Patriotic Act and the Campaign Finance law.
We Americans faught a war with Britian to free us of their version of Freedom. And for good reason.
Thank God we won !
Bump!
-All of us have entered into a Social Contract since we were born.-
I don't remember signing that.
Are we government property at birth ?
Is that what you are implying ?
NO to a National ID card, and I'M not a Libertarian.
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