rs_al

We've been here before. The correct reply to this statement is:

"When have you personally been attacked by terrorists."

Personal impact shouldn't be required to voice an opinion. But if you think it is, could you tell the rest of the south so they'll stop complaining about people they don't know gay marrying?

I wish I could say we shouldn't need the government to protect us from ourselves. Unfortunately, protecting people from each other is the very reason we have government in the first place.

The reason it's easier to blame terrorists for our woes rather than the homicidal murders (or drug dealers or bad drivers) out there is that terrorists are easier to seperate from the rest of our society, and they're less likely to be anyone we know personally, making them easier to persecute.

We will discriminate against terrorists because, for the time being, they are easiest to identify. Combing the population to weed out any person who might commit murder is not feasible at the present. Though they may share some dark ambitions and murderous intent, in the end it's a lot easier to spot an Osama Bin Laden than a Timothy McVeigh.

Lumping firearm deaths together is very deceptive. It could be cops shooting robbers, hunters suffering fatal shots to the toe, who knows? It's like citing some statistic on people who have died from asphyxiation- they could have been fell in a pool or were given a nice pair of cement shoes or choked on a piece of candy. Sweeping trachea law reform, if it were even possible, would not help.

Steeler

It is, and we are.

You must spread some reputation around before giving it to rs_al again.

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Wulfyn

I feel the real step in logic was you trying to equate motor vehicles to guns. Why have a gun if you don't plan on shooting someone? Why have a car if you don't plan on driving someone over? But you are right to say "at what level do we have the right to interfere with our ctizens liberties for their own protection?". My point is that terrorism is heinous in its actions, but don't place it over other things which are just as dangerous. I fully contest your statement that you need to take more extreme measures for terrorism (a real war as you put it) than for drug or gun control.


But whilst we're talking about the infirngement of liberties, I'll remind or tell people here of a story that happened in the UK that Beatnik's last post reminded me of. In the UK they have passed some very strong anti-terrorist laws. You can now be held in the UK, for up to 3 months, with no reason and no charge, and without needing approval from a judge just the home secretary. This is a powerful tool to detain those suspected of terrorist incitements whilst you collect evidence on their actions in order to make a conviction. All well and good until a 70 year old man was held under these exact charges for heckling a politician at a party political conference.



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I should probably have quoted the passage I was referencing rather than expect people to follow the link and read 2 paragraphs. As you can see I did not lump all 29,573 deaths together, but selected the 11,348 homicides. I assumed that things like 'cops shooting robbers' would be covered by legal intervention statistics.

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rs_al

Oh, those are interesting statistics. I guess by homicide they are referring to the illegal variety, since the word by definition covers legal intervention also (though now that I think about it, you can't really apply it to someone shooting themself, either intentionally or by accident, as I suggeted).

As far as that suicide statistic... wow. I don't even know what to think about that.

leejo

are you guys suggesting that we ignore or tolerate terrorism until we knock down vehicular deaths such that they are less frequent than terror attacks?

In any case, that's like the argument that swimming pools kill more children than handguns. Swimming pools kill more children than handguns because parents tend to take great care not to let their children frolic around the gun pile all summer long.

I suggest that it's possible that terrorists could kill many more Americans pretty quickly if we simply adopt the priorities you seem to suggest and drop our guard a tad. Also, how would you run for office as the candidate who'd realign our national priorities to crack down on traffic deaths or handguns by trimming this bloated anti-terror effort we have right now?

Steeler

But we DO have a bloated anti-terror effort. That's the problem. We have funds going every which way under the rubric of fighting terrorism and only a small fraction of it is doing any bloody good. We're spending millions on anti-terror training in small towns in Kansas while cutting back on their public education. We have bio research departments scrambling to find ways to link curing cancer with anti-terror because thats the only way they can get grants.

All of these should be priorities that we can work on simultaneously. But when the hype and fear and mania surrounding terror appropriates every resource for itself, that hurts our society in other ways.

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leejo

That's you opinion - what the appropriate amount to spend on these effort is, where, and how.

That's a political opinion. Others do not share you opinion.

Steeler

I think that fact is implied by the very existence of the sandbox.

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leejo

So don't state those as facts, dingus. The "hype and fear and mania" you see is pretty spot-on-prudent to me.

Steeler

From now on, we can save a lot of time and rancor if you just assume that every single post begins with "IMO."

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munchkin

Not to turn this into a "how has Dubya corrupted your country?" thread, but in addition to having similar legislation to what Wulfyn mentioned, we also now have laws targeting "sedition". Great, and so much for free speech.

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Diceman

Fair enough. Let's see if the EFF case really provides the substance for your claim. We open with:Looks good so far; SCOTUS has acknowledged the President's special authority. Congress concurs. Let's move on.
The stage is set. So what happened? It turns out that the government used illegal wiretaps to gain some of the intelligence used in the case. Obviously, the defendants applied to have the evidence made inadmissable and the government tried to defend its actions.For the skimmers, let me repeat the last two sentences:Can you please outline for me how this validates your idea: It looks to me like SCOTUS flatly denied the exact claim that you are making.

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[drill][medic][conduct][tg-c1][tpf-c1]
[ma-c2][taw-c1]

Addict

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10891444/from/RS.2/

As I'm sure everyone expected eventually, lawsuits have been filed by two groups(ACLU et al, and some detroit group) in federal court. As defendants, one suit includes both the President and the NSA, the other just the NSA.

I would think that one potential problem is proving standing to make the suit. But then, that *is* the problem with unsupervised secret surveilance of US citizens, isn't it.

leejo

The Supreme Court determining that information gathered using warrantless wiretaps cannot be used as evidence against someone in a criminal prosecution does not mean that it is illegal or unconstitutional for the President to authorize such wiretaps for national security purposes.

That's an important distinction. It's THE distinction toward which Cing, others, and I have been trying to draw your attention.

With regard to the lawsuit, I expect it will be dismissed. The first thing one has to show in a lawsuit is damage.

Wulfyn

leejo, seriously, try reading the thread mate and your questions will be answered. But hanks for trying to subvert my argument by brining in the lovely story of the real scourge of our species: swimming pools. A more cuddly image is hard to capture at the moment.


The point was that infringement of civil liberties does not apply to things such as "the war on drugs" which is a danger to your country, so why should it apply to "the war on terror".

The counter to this was that "the war on terror" was a real war, whereas the "war on drugs" was a squishy non-war. As the "war on terror" was real then extra standards would be allowed to be taken in order to combat it.

This argument was countered on both accounts. Firstly by the proposition that you could not term "the war on terror" as a real war and "the war on drugs" as not a real war because in fact far more people are killed by drugs than by terrorism, and thus it is a greater blight. Secondly because guns kill more people than both of those reasons, and thus to remain consistent witht he idea that you could break the constitution for one reason allows the precedent (see I'm catching on with american law here) that the constitution can be overlooked when you feel like it, and thus guns could be banned from your country to "protect the innocent" despite it breaking the constitution.


There have since been a number of half-efforts to derail this argument, mainly by trying to take it too far (the domino effect) to ridicule it (as in the swimming pool and road vehicle arguments) which I think were both neatly put down by asking what would you do with a gun or car if you didn't want to kill someone with it (guns having no function after this, and cars having a fairly obvious one). The drug side of the argument was also attempted to be put down by stating that drugs are a choice in the mainstream. This was something that was not only not backed up by any evidence at all, but in fact is contrary to the gestaltic evidence I have.

So I pose the question to you leejo - if you weren't using you swimming pool to kill children, what use would it be?

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