From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Sun Aug 31 2003 - 06:44:36 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Samantha Atkins
> Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 12:11 AM
>
> I am sorry but as long as the discussion remains civil I thought it was
> perfectly fine to discuss political issues especially if they have some
> bearing on our abilities to accomplish our goals and retain our
> freedom to
> work toward those goals.
>
> Are you now requesting that I don't reply to your question asking
> for details
> of where these laws are in fact dangerous to some of our
> fundamental civil
> liberties? I am confused by your getting so riled up
Let me see if I can make my ideas clear. The *tone* of the original piece
in this thread was grossly partisan. As others pointed out, the first part
of it was waaay over the top in ascribing problems with the economy to
George Bush. Yesterday morning I heard an interview with an economist on
fairly left-leaning NPR (can't recall his name) in which the economist
pointed out that the over-all performance of the economy was a much larger
factor in the current recession and projected federal government budget
deficits than the Bush tax cut. The recession was well under way when Bush
was elected and had so much more to do with the bursting of the dot-com
bubble than Bush fiscal policies that the kind of rhetoric in the original
piece was just silly. The problem is that to those for whom a Republican
administration isn't automatically offensive, such silly rhetoric is
offensive and sets off partisan alarm bells.
The parts of the original piece about foreign policy are, as I said
yesterday, simply rehashing something that has been deeply problematic here.
To extreme partisans on both sides, it doesn't seem possible that a
reasonable person of good will could disagree. Thus U.S. military action in
the Middle East gets called "Nazi" by one poster and people on the extreme
of the other side consider opponents of military action Chamberlain-esque
pollyannas. As I wrote last night, I honestly don't think it's possible to
have any kind of meaningful dialogue between the extremes on these issues.
(As an indication of where meaningful dialogue *is* possible, I give as an
example a group of my close personal friends who maintain a mailing list.
The list includes newspaper publishers, academics, state officials and many
lawyers. I've known most of the people on that list for over 30 years, and
most of them are members of the Democratic party -- some very active in
politics. We've discussed U.S. foreign policy without interruption for most
of those 30 years, the last two years no exception. There's been
disagreement, but no lack of civility. Interestingly, the majority of the
left-leaning Democrats on that list wholeheartedly supported -- and continue
to support -- U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, but opposed action in Iraq.
What I've never seen on that list of extremely well-informed people are
accusations of "Nazism" against the Bush administration, despite some pretty
powerful unhappiness about the 2000 election.) The bottom line is that I
thought the original post was so extremely partisan that it *began* the
discussion in a way that discouraged civility.
I responded to your posts about the Patriot Act for three reasons. First,
it happens to concern a subject about which I have some professional
expertise, so I'm genuinely curious how it is that my perceptions are so
different from yours. To restate, I see the day-to-day workings of the U.S.
justice system all the time, and I don't see signs of a significant erosion
of civil liberties. (To give one example, I'm working on a case now that
federal prosecutors have an interest in and that is "high profile,"
generating a lot of pressure on prosecutors to *get results*. I don't see
prosecutorial misconduct or infringement of civil liberties, despite the
fact that the U.S. Attorney's office wants convictions *very* badly.)
Second, I specifically suspect that much of the "attitude" to the Patriot
Act derives from the draft of the terrible so-called "Patriot II"
legislation. If I thought there was a chance that that legislation would
pass, I would be upset, but I don't. As I said in my reply to Barbara
Lamar, I think the justice system in the U.S. is just beginning the
deliberate process of reacting to the first Patriot Act, and I expect some
significant limits to be placed on that legislation. Finally, I also
suspect that much of the negative reaction to post-911 legal matters derives
from a failure to distinguish between the civil rights of citizens versus
those of non-citizens. In responding to your post, I was trying to
determine to what extent opponents of the law were arguing that the full
Bill of Rights should be applied to non-citizens, a novel legal theory and
one I'd be interested in seeing arguments for, if they exist.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
My Blog: http://www.gregburch.net/burchismo.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Aug 31 2003 - 06:55:44 MDT