@BillRM,
Quote:So it is your judgment I should wait until it get that bad and once more the government is locking people up for a decade for openly not supporting the government positions such as they did to any number of men in the world war one era?
I think you missed the point Frank was making.
You keep carrying on about the Bill of Rights being ripped up, but the very fact that everyone is now so openly criticizing the government, and it's the government that's on the defensive, indicates how strongly your freedom of speech is being protected. It doesn't take real bravery for you to speak out against the government in our society, to simply voice your opinions about what the government is doing, you do it all the time--and you're able to do it because you don't live in a police state or a dictatorship.
It's your hysterical hyperbole that's unnecessary--you lose all perspective, to such an extent that it makes it impossible for you to participate in a genuinely thoughtful, intelligent
discussion of any multi-faceted issue. And that's happened in numerous threads that involve almost any law--you've decried laws dealing with rape, child pornography, and drunk driving, at great length--yet your own histrionic concern, about the threat of terrorism, had you advocating that we stop enforcing the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans to better protect public safety.
So, you're quite willing to rip up the Bill of Rights, when it comes to some of your fellow citizens, in exchange for better public safety, and your own hysteria on the matter blinds you to how dangerous your own line of thinking is, because
you're the one advocating a police state. Similarly, your own need to walk around carrying a gun, for your own sense of personal safety, blinds you to any awareness that the prevalence and easy accessibility of guns, particularly semi-automatic weapons, may constitute a threat to the general public safety. It's always one-sided with you, and the hyperbole is in the service of defending only that narrow peephole through which you view the issue. And consequently, your logic becomes faulty because you are trying to sustain a basically untenable position to begin with.
Only an idiot would argue that public safety and national security are matters a government shouldn't be concerned with, and concerned with maintaining. Any government that doesn't address such things is worthless.
Only an idiot would try to minimize the dangers of terrorism by comparing body counts from terrorist attacks to yearly deaths on the roads from driving automobiles. Auto deaths do not threaten our quality of life, or our open society, or impact our sense of security when we congregate, travel, and go about our daily business, the way that even a relatively small-scale terrorist attack can do. The insidious effects of terrorism are also psychological and emotional, and that has little or nothing to do with body counts. And it's the threat of more terrorism, and the need to prevent it, that's helping to fuel the stripping away of our privacy with measures like the Patriot Act.
Only an idiot would keep dredging up history to bolster a flawed, one-sided, one-dimensional, anti-government argument, without also recognizing that times change, our government repeatedly changes in its make-up, and our national policies and laws have also changed, and moved in positive directions, to correct our missteps, to address and correct domestic issues of unfairness and inequality, and to rein in abuses by government when these have been recognized. We're not living in the same nation our Founding Fathers did, or even the same sort of world they did, and we don't face the same sort of national problems and national security threats they did, and the road-map they handed us has been supplanted by satellites in our skies.
Dredging up the past, as you continually do, while useful to remember and inform, can also distort the current situation, and hamper the ability to entertain solutions to current problems, because dissimilarities to the past are not being fully recognized or appreciated. We are not in pre-revolutionary colonial states, we are not dealing with the Civil War, or World War I, or World War II, or the Vietnam War. It is 2013, and we are dealing with complex issues of national security and personal privacy because of the electronic methods of communication and commerce we now rely on throughout the world. Our government and national security is no longer threatened just by invading armies, or even nuclear strikes, it now can be threatened by cyber-attacks, by terrorist hackers. And our civilian populace can be attacked, without warning, by bombs, biochemical weapons, or other devices, just about anywhere people congregate, by people who are difficult to identify and stop beforehand.
Only an idiot would place his own personal need for privacy above the need to maintain national security and public safety
for everyone. The Constitution was set down to ensure "the general welfare" and not just the satisfaction of your particular needs.
Only an idiot would fail to recognize that better surveillance has foiled some terrorist plots. And what we have to look at is whether our sacrifice of some privacy is worth that tradeoff, and how much sacrifice of privacy is really necessary to accomplish that aim, and how much more, if any, we're willing to give up, and where we will draw the line, and how we will monitor that line.
Only an idiot would feel the Bill of Rights has been ripped up, and declare the country to be a police state, because of the government's collection of phone metadata without a search warrant, or even because of the other governmental surveillance activities and procedures that have recently become known. That completely ignores the facts that members of Congress--also a branch of the government-- have already begun grilling those in the administration, and demanding answers, and have already introduced legislation to address possible administration abuses, our free press has lambasted both Congress and the administration for what they see as deficiencies and possible abuses, along with demanding greater transparency, and there is a lively public discussion of the entire matter. It seems to me that the Bill of Rights is quite intact--and protecting everyone's right to challenge the government through such discourse.
Only an idiot...and, if the shoe fits, BillRM...
