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#1 |
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missa in h-moll
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: nyc
Age: 25
Posts: 3,983
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Okay, this is my first CT thread, so if it sucks, sorry. Also if it's a copy, I'm really sorry too.
When Franklin Roosevelt was President, he set up Japanese Internment Camps. This was because, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, America was basically afraid that anyone could be an attacker for the Japanese, and an attack from the inside would be devastating. So they took all the Japanese and put them in camps to "prevent" this. When 9/11 happened, some people suggested that they do the same with Arabs. The idea was promptly shot down by Civil Rights groups, but this is just an example. My question is: Do you think, during a certain point, should security supercede the civil rights of an individual or groups of people, in order to protect America (or any other country for that matter). You can find examples of this all over American History such as my example and things like wiretapping. In my opinion, security should almost never come before civil rights, as it is, simply put, "breaking the laws" that this country was founded on. It is outright wrong and should almost never be done. However, I think, in a complete state of crisis where all of America is put at serious risk, we may need to engage in activities such as this. What are your thoughts?
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#2 |
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FFR Veteran
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Retired in the distant land of Canadia
Posts: 1,597
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No, simply because that would be considered racial profiling.
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#3 |
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missa in h-moll
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: nyc
Age: 25
Posts: 3,983
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I completely agree with this, and we should never do anything like that again, but that isn't the only example I am talking about. What about wiretapping or using hidden cameras on a suspicious person or something?
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#4 |
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The Chill Keeper
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No, because if they did this to all the white people every time some hick blew something up, the majority of America would be in these camps.
Last edited by funmonkey54; 10-7-2008 at 06:04 PM.. |
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#5 |
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FFR Player
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Never never never never never.
FDR was a loon for doing it back then. Civil rights are the most important thing man has ever created in the history of man. |
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#6 |
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Very Grave Indeed
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If the government wants to hold a national referendum and ask the population of the united states if it would be willing to consent to such measures for a fixed duration, and they voted in the majority to support it, perhaps.
Of course by the time such a thing happened, the crisis would almost certainly have passed one way or another, so I guess no, the government should simply never have the ability to trump civil rights because it decides it ought to. |
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#7 | ||
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Admiral in the Red Army
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Quote:
How many Libertarian politicians on the national level are able to successfully win elections? Hell, how many Libertarians can even win on smaller elections like on a state or even local level? Quote:
The will of the people wouldn't factor on an issue like this at all. It would be Congress or Mr. Bush (or McCain or even Obama) alone bringing this down, and the only thing that could stop them would be more bureaucratic **** (i.e. Supreme-Court-sup or UNITARY EXECUTIVE LOL) or lobbyists (tell me that's not ****ed up). Oh and "the government should simply never have the ability to trump civil rights because it decides it ought to." That's pretty funny. The government can do basically whatever it wants. What are you gonna do to stop them? All you could do is hope- just hope- that another branch of the government is able to step in and stop them. Good plan!
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#8 |
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TWG Veteran
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With enough justification, yes. Not just because they want to. Not just because they can. If there's an adequate, clean, logical reason, and voted in favor of by Congress, yes, it's fine.
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#9 |
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Sectional Moderator
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National security does supercede civil rights in some cases, but the way that we supercede Civil Rights now is non-invasive. I think on a broader level it is an issue of privacy that we face these days rather than an issue of the attrition of our rights.
The fact is that the amount of your personal data on the internet is enormous and it is quite easy as just another citizen to aggregate data on you if I were to choose to do so. The government aggregates data on you but in a trickier way. Since any sort of demographic profiling and loss of rights is to try and get the few among the many, and since it is about stopping the flow of information because it cannot be controlled, this issue will become increasingly moot over time. The reason being that it is quite easy to gather information about the flow of information, and it is also quite easy to control the flow of information. We won't ever see internment camps again in the United States, but I will venture that our intelligence and counter-intelligence efforts will largely involve government databases aggregating data via the most prevalent forms of communication. We do not have the power to stop threats to national security 100%, but we do know that in order for something to be preventable it must have some sort of signal that it is a threat, and the only signals that we can accurately do anything about are through our lines of communication and through organizational spies (which you probably will never encounter in your life.) Everything else is a false measure to create the "sense" of being safe, like security at airports. Intelligence leads us to believe that the biggest plausible terrorists attack that could happen would happen via the seaports, but our seaports are not very secure at all. And that is because we don't believe they need to be that secure because of the information we are able to obtain about them. Surely they could have more stringent security standards, but this would be at huge cost and the belief is that the return would be very little, even though the chance exists. So we don't. But we do in airports because it creates the mentality of security because many of us use airports, and if we didn't do this we'd feel like the government wasn't doing a good job of making us feel safe. That's a loss of liberty for a sense of security which could be either real or just percieved, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad one. It has negatives, but it also has positives. Can you find both, and which way do you tend to lean in your belief? More importantly and back on point, national security has to do with communication more than anything. Collecting data on certain types of communication, aggregating it, having the computer sort and archive it, and having intelligence officials interpret it. Is this invasive? Not particularly if you aren't doing treasonous things. Some of us have probably had data about us aggregated by government spider-bots in one form or another, and we don't know the difference. The real question is do you trust the government in knowing this information about you? Some people don't trust the government on principle. Some people don't trust the government because it represents a majority of the people, and they think a majority of the people are stupid. Some people don't trust the government because they believe the power vested in it causes it to be inherently corrupt. I don't believe in any of these things a priori. The question moreover is this: do you believe the government should be aggregating data in the same way that google aggregates data, as well as other more secretive methods about private citizens? You can be sure that at this point everything posted on 4chan.org is collected by the government. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? Do you feel your civil rights are being invaded? Does this make you feel more secure? And on another note that is indirectly related, Do you believe complete privacy can survive in a world where I can figure out where you live, what your neighborhood looks like, how many cars park on your street, and what high school you go to just by having you talk with me over IRC or by you posting on my website?
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Last edited by Vendetta21; 10-10-2008 at 03:32 AM.. |
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#10 | |
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Very Grave Indeed
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#11 | |
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Admiral in the Red Army
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But then again, I guess we can't really count on anything. All we can do is just hope that it never gets too bad.
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#12 |
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Sectional Moderator
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Apparently someone hasn't met Americans. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're all crazy as ****.
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#13 |
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Admiral in the Red Army
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Yeah, crazy in the sense that they like seeing government having more power rather than less.
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#14 |
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caveman pornstar
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In a time of global crisis, I think it is fair to sacrifice for our country's survival. If the necessary sacrifice is the suspension of some of my civil rights, then I have no problem with that (assuming the government guarantees my rights will be preserved after the crisis).
The OP uses WWII as an example but I think WWI is just as relevant, when everybody was forced to ration their supplies and waste as little as possible. That doesn't seem like the malignant removal of rights that I think the OP is referring to but it was an unprecedented amount of government control over the average person's life, and it shows how such tactics could be pragmatic. I think if a worldwide conflict broke out (WWIII, if you will) then I would be alright with the government taking away some rights for the good of the nation and her allies. On the other hand, I completely disagree with our rights being sabotaged due to terrorist activities. While I understand that safety is a priority, I think that with any open society things like that are going to happen. You're not going to be able to stop every loony who wants to shoot up a school or bomb an airport or whatever. Until our every action is controlled by the government, these small-scale attacks will be ever-present. The thing is, they are ultimately small-scale compared to a real war and for the sake of democracy must not change our outlook on personal freedoms. They are tragic occurrences but are not worth weakening our liberty.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IREnpHco9mw |
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#15 |
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Sectional Moderator
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Broad oversimplification based on the parties that run the country rather than the people who its citizenry is made up of.
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#16 | |
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Admiral in the Red Army
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Quote:
But either way, a lot of people DO think that government should have more power, and they always cite ideas that are positive (particularly ones that help the economically weak to keep their head above water) and fail to take notice of the things that a big government can do that are bad. I suppose that my stance on it is that if we give them too much power (which, I would say, has potentially already happened), they'll take more and more until we've got 1984 knocking on our door (ala If you Give a Mouse a Cookie). Could even potentially be argued that such Big Brother ideals may already be present in our current society, in the way the war in Iraq has been handled*, or in the ideas over domestic spying. Some people are even of the opinion that thoughtpolice-like tactics can be fundamentally good. It's really troubling to me when someone says something like "people who think about raping children should be in jail"... yes, raping a child is a bad thing, but so is trying to control the thoughts of a person, trying to measure the thoughts of a person, and trying to punish for thinking of a crime but never committing it. * Hasn't it seemed that we've always been "at war" with them, even before we really were? See: the "military strike" during President Clinton's second term or how about the Persian Gulf War of senior Bush's presidency? Older people may remember a time when Iraq was not "the enemy", but it sure seems to have been that way through my fifth of a century.
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#17 |
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Sectional Moderator
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I don't wholly disagree with you, I just thought your oversimplification was your weighing in on whether militias would revolt, and I think they would.
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#18 |
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FFR Veteran
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Retired in the distant land of Canadia
Posts: 1,597
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I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but there something exists in Canada called the "War Measures Act", and it's basically used in a time of crisis or war and it allows the government to supersede (to some extent) our Charter of Rights with this. It has only been used once in history, and it basically gives the government the right to arrest anybody and put them in jail, and prevent them from getting a lawyer or being bailed out and the such.
My opinion on the matter is, if the government were to suspend civil rights to the point where there were "thought-police" or internment camps for specific races or religions, then I'd have to disagree. But if the government uses its power accordingly and rightfully (I use this term very loosely) and implements an act similar to the War Measures Act in order to preserve the safety and interest of society as a whole, then I'd have to agree with national security's power over civil rights in such a time. The only problem with this is as a government gains power, it tends to lead into a domino effect where it keeps gaining more and more power until the point where a country becomes communist or completely controlled by the government. |
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#19 | |
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FFR Player
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 285
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Quote:
You say you'd agree with it if it's "in order to preserve the safety and interest of society as a whole"? This is called "the Greater Good", and it is an ideal that Socialism is often tied to. Sometimes bad things need to happen for the greater good; you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. But look at how this idea has been applied in history. You're familiar with the Holocaust, right? The Nazis called it the Final Solution. It was one of those "for the greater good" type plans. They believed Jews and immigrants to be the cause of the economic troubles they had, or, at the very least, they were scapegoated that way. I guess what I'm trying to say is that people are not justified to make the judgments necessary to choose sacrifices "for the greater good". If I were a religious person, I'd say that only God can judge, but since I'm not, I'll just say that no man has the right to judge another in the way that would occur in a "greater good" situation. Furthermore, communism is an economic policy, not a political one. It is not necessarily true that a Big Brother type of government would have to be communism-based. Things could just as well be authoritarian on top of basic capitalism. |
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#20 |
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Guest
Posts: n/a
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Honestly, who cares if they listen to your phone conversation, who cares if they watch you take a shower, who cares if they know when you drive your car!? People think way too into life these days as if you're going to live forever with never-ending consequences. I for one could care less if the FBI knows what I'm saying to my girlfriend on my cell phone. I mean unless you're planning to end the the world you're fine in that department. Regarding Government power in general... it's extremely opinionated as to was is "too much" power. Me for example, I could care less what they do as long as it's not deeply prejudice to any minority group or any type of mass murder to their own people. Sometimes they may step in a bit too much; but as far as businesses, home life, and city life goes, you have to realize, we're all just dealing with people, nothing is concrete, even the "Government's" decision. After all, the they're just groups of people that other groups of people say have metaphorical power over other's decision as a society, and that can just as easily be agreed that they no longer have those "powers".
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