I'm now a temporary conservative.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that. No matter how snide you find it I will never be interested in discussing the finer points of cut and paste with you.

As to insipid I urge you to point out any fallacies I hold, I love to divest myself of them.

If you are not just hurling insults for the sake of it I'd love to hear you attempt the constuction of a point. Otherwise you just come across as angry and resentful.

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I couldn't possibly be as angry and resentful as your last few posts exhibit of you.

And for the last time would you care to offer anything to the topic?

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I am not at all angry with you, I am simply disinterested in playing cut and paste. No need to get all worked up over it. There are others who will play CTR C/CTR V with you. You don't need me to play.

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Great. See ya later.

Still on the topic of eroding civil rights, then:

Quote:

Pulling the FBI's Nose out of Your Books

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This is an interesting one when viewed reasonably dispassionately - as I can do from here, since my government was unable to pass its version of the patriot Act through parliament.

I can see what the watchers are getting at - but it would seem to go too widely. I can imagine that, in a country which has lived through McCarthyism and targeted murder of trade union organisers, for instance, people would see good reason to be very concerned.

I wonder if you think a reasonable compromise might be to have an alert system for books about bombs, for instance? - (though the net is replete with instructions for such) - or that such records can only be obtained if a person is formally made a suspect?

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I think that there is simply no place whatsoever for any government entity to be compiling a list of what books are being checked out by whom, no matter the book, no matter the person.

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The article you give us, PDiddie, comments about the need to prevent terrorism and the need to preserve liberties.

The hard part seems to me to be endured by the people who really have to try and work out where the boundaries actually are - as well as to determine the actual level of risk involved, since I would argue that lower risk validates less interference with liberty.

I would be interested to hear what people would actually be putting into law about this - if you were both making the laws and carrying the can for the consequences - both to the fabric of the society if the laws restrict freedom too much, and for any preventable carnage.

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Ok PDiddie - that is clear.

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D, the article I linked (just so everyone who won't be clicking on it will know) is written by a United States Congressman.

Which goes more to the value of adding it here, and not just that I agree with it.

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PDiddie - yes, I realised that - I would respect it more - (and I think it a perfectly reasonable article) - if it suggested a course of action.

Perhaps the writer agrees with you that no record of what is read should ever occur, under any circumstances?

(This is off topic, but I guess as a mental health worker, I would be interested sometimes if a person in some mental states was reading material about how to kill or harm people - but I have no power, of course, to find out by any but persuasive means.

This may affect my view of this topic to some extent - since a couple of times I have discovered a person was intending to kill a number of people, and was able to prevent this. Some colleagues have not been so lucky.

Sometimes, too, discovering that a person was viewing kiddie porn on the net was enough to alert to abuse of real children in their care - again, this concentrates the mind wonderfully as to people's reading material - but irrelevant, as I say, to all but my view of such knowledge.)

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Wow and I mean Wow! Shocked

First, let me explain the protocol that used to be in the public schools system. That may have all changed, so I can no longer speak with authority.
1. If a teacher is alarmed at the remark of a student, the teacher immediately reports it to the principal.

2. The next step would be to hold a consultation with parent, child, principal and teacher.

3. Those avenues having been exhausted, and the situation still seems volatile, then and only then are the authorities contacted.

John Malvo, the young man who was the Maryland sniper, is an unknown quantity, and all the concerns and planned interventions would possibly have made no difference whatsoever, but for a teacher to go straight to Federal authorities, without exploring other possibilities, is still a matter of grave concern to me.

As for the religious symbols, I have no qualms with any of them unless they are forced on every individual regardless of their beliefs, or lack of them. My students were always shocked when I told them at prayer in the schools did not just mean Christian prayer.

Good morning A2Kers.

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Yes Dlowan -
Similarly, I wanted to make the point to PDid that something must needs have changed since 9/11. Maybe not to the high levels of profiling paranoia some would advocate, but something.

If we agree on that, then the only thing to debate is what, and to what degree.

A list of books on a personal reading list might be useful, if the list was all about making bombs and such, y'know?

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PDiddie wrote:

fishin' wrote:
... and reported a threat they they are required to investigate...

What threat and what requirement are you referring to?

You'd be OK with this if it were your children, I take it?

The threat the teacher reported to the USSS and the legal requirement that the USSS investigate any/all threats they are made aware of concerning persons they are chartered to protect. The teacher reported the threat. The USSS responded and did exactly what they've been doing all along.

What I may or may think of it if my child were involved is irrelevant.

Craven de Kere wrote:

Craven de Kere wrote:
But the lack of parents suggests that this is not a steadfast requirement.

As long as the SS doesn't use any of the info they got from the kids to try to imprison them then they were just bluffing and the law was followed (I think)....

I don't see the foul as being a very illegal one...

There's the erosion you were missin', fishin'.

To be an "erosion" there has to be something in place to begin with. The tactics used by the USSS are the same tactics they've been using for decades. What "erosion" is there in this story due to the Patriot Act as you originally stated?

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Letty wrote:

Wow and I mean Wow!

First, let me explain the protocol that used to be in the public schools system. That may have all changed, so I can no longer speak with authority.
1. If a teacher is alarmed at the remark of a student, the teacher immediately reports it to the principal.

2. The next step would be to hold a consultation with parent, child, principal and teacher.

3. Those avenues having been exhausted, and the situation still seems volatile, then and only then are the authorities contacted.

Under a Federal Law passed in 1917 anyone who is aware of any threat to the President (since then it's been expanded to include teh VP and Foreign Dignitaries..) is required to report that threat to Law Enforcement authorites who are required to notify the USSS of that threat. There is no provision that gives teachers or school administrators the freedom to determine the credability of any threat. That is the function of the USSS's National Threat Assesment Center. The USSS is REQUIRED to personally contact anyone who makes a threat and determine the credability of the threat. 99.8% of them are determined to be baseless but that doesn't negate the requirement created by the Congress.

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Gorsh, how many people have said, "Damn. I'd like to kill that man". I confess that I do not know the exact words that the student/students said. Oh, well, Letty. Stay out of the political stuff from now on. Thanks for reminding us, fishin'

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Letty wrote:

Gorsh, how many people have said, "Damn. I'd like to kill that man". I confess that I do not know the exact words that the student/students said. Oh, well, Letty. Stay out of the political stuff from now on. Thanks for reminding us, fishin'

Thousands say it every year Letty! I don't know what the students said either but the USSS has to check it out because the teacher reported it. When I worked for the USSS this was the biggest PITA job there was because there were very few real threats. Most people are just blowing off steam.

Don't stay out of the Political stuffs. Your input is always welcome! Very Happy

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Well, fishin, I have the knowledge of a text book, the soul of a fisherman, and the heart of a lion...but the lamb is the persona I most covet....anthropomorphism...Legislatures try every way they can to purge the poet. ...I think there might be a wee bit of the stream in all of us...I have never been in the trenches, but I know those who have.

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Conservative Craven wrote:

It can easily be argued that it is. The heathen are making a mockery of this nation's values.

My read of the Constitution leads me to believe that the heathen have a right to make a mockery of the nation's values. Others also have the right to be upset about this, and to attempt to reassert those values.

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Quite right. I am now a temporary secular Conservative (a religious conservative was too much of a stretch) and think the heathen are stout fellas.

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As long as we're on the topic of "church and state", my reading on the topic suggests that the founders' intent was to keep "the state" (federal government) separate from entanglement with any one specific religion. This reasonable intention seems to have been twisted so that today it is used to decry any interaction between government and religion in general. This latter, newer interpretation seems not only unfounded historically, but poorly considered, in that it effectively injures religions in much the same way that establishing one religion would injure all others.

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I'm now a temporary conservative.

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