Re: Yes.. this would never have passed Nuremburg!

Post #20,103 by gtall 12/3/01 3:30:08 PM Reply	Re: Yes.. this would never have passed Nuremburg! I pretty much take Thomas Friedman's view on Ashcroft's ideas. Yes, they are abhorent, but there IS a war on and a lot of people want us all dead. I do not think anyone knows what is the right level of surveilance given the threat or even what the level of the threat actually is. I find it wonderful people have this so worked out in their minds that it is all black and white to them. But they aren't me. Gerard Allwein
Post #20,122 by Ashton 12/3/01 4:34:12 PM Reply	Not much quarrel with that - for a very brief time period I agree that no one Knows! exactly how best to proceed. I have cut A. a fair amount of slack - only returning to previous worries about his mindset as.. seem to have been legitimate worries. Watching him speak: is an exercise which calls upon all one's past recollections of watching countless humans 'speak'. Hardly quantifiable in those popular numbers thingies - the impressions are just as valuable as whatever level of discrimination has been earned. (Naturally each of us believes we discriminate Masterfully. Natch) We'll have to look at what America is like, some months from now. No? A.
Post #20,180 by gtall 12/4/01 6:29:34 AM Reply	Re: Not much quarrel with that - for a very brief *time peri I think it will won't do to see what America is like a few months from now. It must be under constant scrutiny from now on. That is going to be difficult for the pols to get right. We could nail bin Laden and his 70 virgin boys and the threat recede for a few years. But that would only make the next strike bigger and most costly. And there will be a next strike, we just walked over there and took their country away from them...Allah will demand retribution...I can hear the voices speaking to them now....as I'm sure those loonie toons already do. Those bastards are trying to get ahold of dirty nukes. One of them set off under NYC would kill millions. Then there are our own right wing religious nuts...I wouldn't mind some extra scrutiny of those bozos. I think there is a big difference between surveillence and McCarthy trials. It is the latter that is loathsome, the former is merely bothersome. It would be nice for the U.S. to blissfully ignore surveillence of suspect groups. But I do not see where that is possible anymore. Billy Graham's son had an editorial in the Wall Street Journal explaining his recent statements about Islam being evil. To read it in his own words is much better than the spin the media put on it. His premise is that Islam is not really a peaceful religion, it is exclusionary and promotes an us vs. them attitude. He contrasted that with Christianity's precepts, I'll ignore for the sake of argument some of its adherent's policies since they are misuses. Salman Rushdie made a similar argument, Thomas Friedman made a similar argument, a unnamed editorial letter to a Pakistani newspaper made a similar argument. I think that given there is a whole religion devoted to annihilation of "kafirs", and that is exactly the implication Islam points to, means that these fucks are going to be with us for a long, long time. Our only recourse right now, it seems to me, is to push over the stupid regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and let the light back in on those festering swamps. Gerard Allwein
Post #20,221 by Ashton 12/4/01 2:52:17 PM Reply	Caveats noted. Your trouble is.. (My trouble is..) We imagine (and it really IS just our imaginations) being ~surrounded by mostly.. sentient beings. No? I submit: an honest survey (though manifestly impossible, we see) of just what detritrus Actually floats around in tens of millions of minds, masquerading as er thought - would scare the BeJeesus/BeMohammed out of the few 'sentient' ones, anywhere. ("AI" is not about 'robots' - but describes merely: effective 'conditioning'.) IMhO: one must earn humanhood potential, via hard work - mainly in the de-conditioning process. This is Not a popular pastime IMlengthyExperience. Overall - as daily talking-head and other utterances display abjectly - we be a sorry excuse for a sentient species. The utter hubris! of naming ourselves "Homo sapiens sapiens". It Is To Laugh. (The better response - 'we' are not often worth taking 'seriously'. That path leads to madness) Ashton
Post #20,223 by wharris2 12/4/01 3:25:59 PM Reply	This ain't gonna be brief The problem is that they're pushing through laws loaded with stuff that the FBI/police/USAG/(insert your own alphabet-soup) have been drooling about for years and which are mostly unrelated to anything that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. And has been reported elsewhere, most congresscritters didn't even have time to read the bill(s) before they got ramrodded through Congress. These laws are going to be on the books forever. (Yes, I know some of them are subject to sunset provisions. Want to guess how long it actually takes the sun to set on these laws? And what about those laws that don't sunset?) That's the big problem. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #20,229 by Ashton 12/4/01 4:04:09 PM Reply	Ya gotta ask yerself a Question - Old: The Thousand Year Reich New: The Millennium [fill in next despicable] 'Act' ??
Post #20,231 by a6l6e6x 12/4/01 4:16:50 PM Reply	Hopefully, some of these laws will be subject to... US Supreme Court review as well. That means, however, they have to be challenged by someone first. Alex Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Post #20,234 by gtall 12/4/01 4:28:29 PM Reply	Re: This ain't gonna be brief It isn't important that they pass laws preventing the 9/11 attacks, it is important they pass laws helping prevent the next attacks. We can argue about this or that law, but I think what remains is that it will take a lot of time and trials, as in Supreme Court cases, to get it right. This is an entirely new ballgame, to think that we can rely on current constitutional guarantees to remain fixed I think is not being realistic. I'm not necessarily arguing that constitutional guarantees should be given up, or that the accumulated law built up around them should be given up, but I do believe we need to bang on the nuts and bolts ask ourselves what makes sense. Freedom of religion is good case in point, when does freedom of religion cross the line into freedom to kill Americans in Allah's name. That's freedom of religion in some circles. So, do we write a law saying thou shalt not use Allah in justification for killing Americans. Uh, probably wouldn't pass constitutional muster. So the administration is saying just because you have freedom of religion doesn't mean you have freedom from surveillence. But what does that really mean to freedom of all religions? Do some get special scrutiny, or only the ones the government doesn't like? Should the gov. be an equal opportunity peeker? I do not think any one of these or other issues the administration is dealing with are easy, and I do not think they think they are easy. I do think it will take a lot of time to sort out the bad laws. And Americans can vote in people who will get rid of laws the Americans do not like. And they get to do this every 2 to 4 to 6 years. Gerard Allwein
Post #20,240 by inthane-chan 12/4/01 4:50:52 PM Reply	Somebody already defined that one... ...your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Or, you have the right to do and say as you please, as long as you don't hurt anybody by doing it. As soon as you cross that line, you'd better have a darn good reason for doing so, or else you'll be held liable. See also the "yell fire in a crouded theatre" argument. We already have the basic framework in place - that can be applied. Freedom of religion IS protected, but threatening people, and then those threats being carried out, is not protected. I just wish we'd apply that standard to some of our own fundamentalists... "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #20,617 by gtall 12/7/01 6:43:55 AM Reply	Re: Somebody already defined that one... We already have the basic framework in place - that can be applied. Freedom of religion IS protected, but threatening people, and then those threats being carried out, is not protected. But that isn't the issue, the issue is how far and using what methods does the U.S. choose in order to stop mega-death. If a religious organization in the U.S. is preaching death to all Americans by any means, and no law enforcement agencies know of it, then one could (and I would) argue the government is failing in one of its primary missions, to protect Americans. How to do that protection is the hard part. Gerard Allwein
Post #20,248 by wharris2 12/4/01 5:15:25 PM Reply	Re: This ain't gonna be brief It isn't important that they pass laws preventing the 9/11 attacks, it is important they pass laws helping prevent the next attacks. I disagree, conditionally. The exact modus operandi of the 9/11 attacks will probably never be used again; indeed, short of stuffing the plane full of terrorists-posing-as-passengers, I don't think it can succeed again. However it is, at least, a useful measuring stick. Telephone taps, for instance - how would adding the ability to tap telephones of suspected terrorists without a warrant have prevented this or any other attack? Well, it wouldn't - it's hard to tap a phone if you don't suspect anything. (I'm trying to avoid 9/11-specific examples - apply the example to the Federal Building bombing.) OK, so you say "Well, okay, but what if we do have good suspects?" - in this case, if you have something to make you think they are terrorists, surely you can convince a sympathetic judge to give you a warrant. One of the purported problems was that being a suspected terrorist wasn't one of the wiretap categories before. Well, okay, provisions that would allow you to tap suspected terrorists with a warrant would seem to me to be reasonable. Likewise, tapping all the phones of an individual rather than a wiretap on a particular telephone seems reasonable in this age of sixty-zillion telephones per person. But a wiretap just on the sayso of an attorney general or one of the other "approved" law enforcement officers? No, no, no. It's this kind of ill-thought-out hastily executed sweeping power that is the problem with the bill. I believe this example is one of the sunsetted provisions. That's good. But the dang bill is hundreds of pages long. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth

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