--- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do we have to have evidence of actual abuse to > believe that it wrongly > undermines the 4th Amendment? Are we expected to > support such a law > without considering how it could be abused, but wait > until it actually > is abused, and then repeal it? The law itself makes > such abuse harder > to discover!
No, but you'd have a much stronger case. Even then I'd want to know _how_ you think it undermines the 4th Amendment, as I daresay our conceptions of what the 4th Amendment does are probably radically different. > And criminals who are released from prison often > commit more crimes. So > is the answer life imprisonment for everything, in > order to prevent > further crimes? A lot of people, myself included, > don't think it's okay > to do away with justice in order to achieve a > desired outcome. Okay, then make the argument. But make it realistically, acknowledging that we're not dealing with ordinary criminals. I'm open to being convinced, but so far I haven't seen anyone even try with anything more persuasive than we shouldn't do this because we wouldn't do it to bank robbers. Well, people we capture in Afghanistan shooting AK-47s at American soldiers are not, in fact, bank robbers, so we might need to treat them differently. > > I hear in these arguments an attitude of "don't > worry about how we treat > the bad people, since we're the good people," or > "ordinary Americans > have nothing to fear from the Patriot Act because > they aren't > terrorists." Very, very disingenous, as it asks us > to ignore the vast > history of institutions of all sorts misusing their > powers. I would argue that you are asking _us_ to ignore the vast history of institutions failing to do their job because they don't have the right powers. Most strikingly September 11th, an attack which could have been halted if the FBI had just been able to get a warrant to search a suspect's computer. You can't argue against those powers without dealing with that sort of incident. > Non-partisanship, in the sense of journalistic > objectivity, isn't > serving anyone well these days, I'd argue. I'll add > that it has seemed > to me sometimes that you demand partisanship, > demanding that I, for > example, take a position on an issue where I'm > undecided, as a > prerequisite to criticizing others' positions. > > Nick Yeah, I'm not saying non-partisan is a good thing. Within certain fairly broad limits, partisanship is a good thing. Political parties are the vital element to a functioning democratic system, and the systematic weakening of them by so-called "reformers" is one of the most important system corrosions of the American government. But being attacked as "partisan" by someone who is _extremely_ partisan, far more than I am, seems to me a little...odd, to put it mildly. I don't describe President Clinton as a "white trash accused rapist", which I guess would be the equivalent of Dr. Brin's "frat boys." It would be inappropriate to speak of any President that way (as note, for example, I generally try to use the title President when talking about President Clinton, even when I'm criticizing him). But when you do routinely do things like that, you (in my opinion) lose any sort of stance from which to attack _someone else_ as blinded by partisanship. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
