Another blog!

I want to live in a free society, but if you believe letting the provisions of the Patriot Act expire and therefore allowing Osama, Al-Zarquari and there clan to more freedom to repeat a September 11th sized attack, you are strongly mistaken.

How free do you think Londoners will be after these events? Not considering any restrictions the government puts into place?

Sorry, I'd rather be alive and have someone peering at my bank accounts and doctors than be free and dead.

Others thoughts?

It's actually this that bothers me more:


No, I'm sorry, Congressman. We are not going to give up our Big Brother-esque powers once the world is safe again.

The difference lies in whether you wish to act as a police organization (catching criminals after the fact) or act as an intelligence organization (catching them before they do something). That really is the basic issue.

Oh, so the world is safe again now? Whew, that's a relief. I'm going to call my friend Tom in London and tell him.

What is that supposed to mean? Have we had other attacks in the United States since 9/11?

By your argument, if people are still on drugs in America even after our continuing efforts to stop illegal drugs use, we should stop our anti-drug efforts. Or, there are still murders in America after we have had a police force in effect for a few years, you would probably want to abolish the police force.

Listen, it's easy to bash after the fact. I'm not saying I am in love with the Patriot Act, but what would your bright idea have been to get the nation under control after 9/11?

While I sympathize strongly with what has happened in London, I think that bringing up the London attacks in reference to the Patriot act is possibly the most irrelevant thing ever.

The Patriot act specifically applies to intelligence and surveillance activities IN THE UNITED STATES. That's as in, "on US citizens or residents". What does that have to do with what British citizens are doing in their own country? There are provisions that affect overseas intelligence-gathering too, but those aren't the provisions that most Americans don't like (apparently it's fine to spy on everyone else, but if the guvmint knows you were watching Seinfeld last night, that's bad).

I stand by my statement above - it is a question of whether you want to clean up the mess or prevent it from happening. Obviously no amount of surveillance is going to prevent all attacks - but I would think that we should at least try to minimize the likelihood of more attacks.

And one more thing... (interestingly unquoted by CJO)



Why attack something before it has done anything wrong? Find me some direct empirical evidence of the horrors of the Patriot Act instead of giving the infamous liberal line, "we can't give them too much power."

Wirehead, I was about to make the exact point you made about London being irrelevant before I saw you had. It's not "making the world safe" as much as "making the US safe."

ss13, the first paragraph you quoted was quoted by CJO. But here's my question: if a law was passed that temporarily took away certain freedoms, shouldn't the burden fall on those who must show proof that the law was effective and is still needed? And don't tell me that it is because we haven't had another 9/11, because before then (when there was no Patriot Act, of course) there was never any attack like it in the US.

You know, I really do believe that our country is still the greatest country in the world. The reason it is still great is because it is still running off of the ideas and intentions of the American patriots in the 1770's.

I remember in fourth grade when the teacher had us read something about the American patriot Patrick Henry. I remember how surprised I was when I first read his famous declaration, "Give me liberty or give me death." Damn, I thought, that's brave. I still think the same thing. I don't know if I could say the same thing. I mean, what do we hear nowadays?


You know, I think Ben Frankin and co. would be ashamed of us. "What? We worked how long so that you could come along and trade your civil liberties in for government-ensured safety?!"

Look, the problem really isn't what the government can do now. If you could plot of graph of American freedom since our country's inception till the present, you'd see a sharply down-trending graph. The point is that I'm afraid where this is heading. For Christ's sake, when I'm forty and I have a teenage son, I want Orwell's 1984 to shock him. I don't want him to look at me after finishing the book and say, "What's your point?"

ss13, I'm sure you've heard about the frog and the pot of water. If you drop him into it while the water is already boiling, he'll jump like hell to get out. If you put him in while the water's cool, and slowly raise the temperature, he'll boil to death without noticing a thing.

Now, I don't know whether that is scientifically accurate, but it's an apt analogy. I have to say, buddy, your face looks a little flushed.

Interesting that you disregarded my key challenge to you:



Remember you are arguing for changing the status quo. If you can't find this, all of the above arguments are not valid here.

Aside from that, your frog argument was quite interesting and clever.

lidge_34:



This is an argument. Stats: 1990-2001: 3 terrorist attacks on America citizens. 2002-2005: 0

What majorly changed? The Patriot Act.

ss13, I'm sorry but I don't have the time to find a lot of examples at the moment. I did a quick google search and found these: this from CBS and there's a whole section here on wikipedia.


I'll say it again, it's not the fact that there have been a lot of abuses already. It's that we're setting a terrible precedent for the government of the future. You know, the one our children will be governed by.

I heard an interesting anecdote the other day.

It was told to me by a friend of mine who has an interesting political stance. He claims he is a blue-state liberal, but will defend the US action in Vietnam war for hours. He is in the Israeli border guard reserves and patrols at Masada once a year.

But anyway. A couple of months ago he had to drive a car from Portland to Virginia and advertised on Craigslist for a riding companion. He ended up with a 20-something Goth anarchist (one of the organizers for the WTO protest in Seattle a while back), and told him he was good to go except that for the last half of the trip the rider would have to listen to some Thomas Jefferson book-on-CDs.

They did the trip, listened to the tapes, had some fascinating conversations. The anarchist's main comment after listening to all that Thomas Jefferson had to say was, "I thought those were MY ideas!"

Side note: Does anyone besides me find it quaint that the anarchists have an organizing committee?

Uh, no. If your argument is that the Patriot Act is the status quo, you're terribly mistaken. Remember, it was passed as a temporary law. It was never intended to be the status quo. (Well, at least not publicly...)

My point is that the Patriot Act is NOT the status quo, nor should it be, so those wanting to pass it should bear the burden of proving that it is needed and works and justifies the abuses and possible abuses it brings about.

I'm always weary of the government expanding its powers because you rarely see them shrinking their powers. If you looks at US history, from Lincoln during the Civil War to FDR during WWII, the government has expanded due to war or the like, and then never returned to what it was like previously. So any time we're talking about "temporary" powers, I'm suspicious of it.

Three attacks in 11 years is not that much, compared to overseas (see Isreal, Ireland, etc). And might it be that the terrorists put so much time and planning into 9/11 that they weren't set up for another one, or simply planned to go after another Western power (England)? I'm not trying to say that the Patriot Act has had no results. We really won't ever know. But I am saying that it doesn't seem to justify itself against the loss or potential loss of freedoms across this country.

Well - I hate to put a damper on a spirited debate, but here's the problem with this discussion:

1. We all know the Patriot act has done SOMETHING to combat terrorism, but we have no quantifiable data on it, and likely never will, as many of the things it stopped from happening would never have made the news since, you know, they DIDN'T HAPPEN.

2. It's a matter of differing viewpoints that aren't going to change no matter the argument - some people feel that thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties are "worth it" when weighed against the possibility of making the whole region somewhat safer, even some Iraqis. Some people feel that the Patriot act or laws like it don't make any obvious difference in the way they live their lives, so what's the big deal? Other people hear those people express these views and gnash their teeth and pull out their hair, and never the twain shall meet.

I understand the objections to the expansion of governmental power on the basis of "this could be really bad down the road", but in my opinion, refusing to deal with CURRENT circumstances because you're afraid that the handlings you perform may cause trouble in the future when you don't have a better idea is just fear speaking. Being paralyzed from action by the fear of possible future consequences never got anyone anywhere.

It is true that in VERY few cases has the government relinquished power that it managed to grant itself. The problem is not necessarily the government having too much power - obviously, since it IS the government, it is fully capable of having as much power as it damned well pleases. It's a case of ensuring there is adequate oversight to keep abuses to a bare minimum. Notice I do not say "eliminate" abuses - that's impossible in an organization with (essentially) 285 million members. Statistically, there WILL be abuses. We just have to make sure that the cure doesn't become worse than the disease - and that is a responsibility that some people feel the American people apparently can't live up to.

I also sympathize with this viewpoint. The majority of the American public seem to want to get the government "right" and then never think about it again, like it's an automobile engine or something - i.e. that there is some perfect setup which, once reached, is an optimum state of performance and will never have to be tweaked again. The government has always, and will always to remain viable, change with the times. The Patriot act is just more of the same.

Generally speaking, I'd probably have preferred that rather than being made permanent, some sort of longer-term sunset provisions were implemented simply because it FORCES a review of the law at some future date. The thing is, I don't restrict that to the Patriot act specifically - I think that, in a perfect world, practically every law on the books should be reviewed now and then, even if it's only every 25 years or something. In practice that would be impossible due to the sheer, unimaginable weight of the laws already passed, but it would be nice to include something like that in most new laws.

Anyway, doesn't it seem a little backwards to anyone else that Gator network probably knows more about you than the CIA and FBI? Most advertisers and retailers have databases on your activity that make the average intelligence dossier look paltry by comparison. If SOMEONE is going to be tracking my movements and activities, I'd much rather the information have at least some possibililty of saving some lives somewhere, rather than more effectively marketing X10 webcams.

Lidge, A few points:

End of debate

This datum is not relevant. If I'm not mistaken, we are talking about the USA PATRIOT ACT. USA stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America".

Come on, buddy, don't just debate to debate, buckle up with some facts.
:D


CJO,

Interesting that the only two sources you linked were a source from over two years ago and a source that could easily have been written by you.



Enforcing the law and the law itself are too different things buddy.

Analogy time: If, at a boarding school, there was a new rule that you couldn't be in unlit areas, and the faculty at the school began roaming the school at night to enforce. Let's hypothetically saw, that the instant a student walked in a unlit area and was caught by the faculty they would make him work hard manual labor for a week and dismiss him from school, you wouldn't be blaming the rule, you would be blaming the enforcement of it.

If you have a problem with our Justice Department or Police Department, change that, or move to Canada, but don't blame the "apparently horrific" statutes of the USA PATRIOT ACT.

Wirehead,



It's worth a shot. And, I more just trying to get these kids to see that what the learn from the Liberal media and from ACLU press releases isn't actually always the truth.

Kids?

Wow, that was pretty arrogant, yet not blatantly so. Good job.