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| Re: Case Dismissed!!! Deputy doesn't show! (334019) | |||
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Re: Case Dismissed!!! Deputy doesn't show! |
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Posted by JPC on Sun Nov 5 01:34:55 2006, in response to Re: Case Dismissed!!! Deputy doesn't show!, posted by Broadway Lion on Sat Nov 4 21:58:07 2006. BTW: Our ambulance service just got 10 new encrypted digital radios through Homeland Security funding.Very cool. We've gotten turnout gear and new helmets. Homeland security pork. Mmmmm. I agree with you that Homeland Security shouldn't have anything to do with restricting liberties. I'm not a terrorist. You're not a terrorist. Neither are any of the hundreds of people I know. Any truly effective security measure will focus its efforts on the guilty; therefore the innocent will experience little of these measures. Now, some have bastardized the concept. There is security theater (the phrase that security consultant Bruce Schneier has coined - google his name for lots more info). This includes airport security, subway bag searches, etc. The idea of security theater is you perform what looks like security, but aim it at the (overwhelmingly innocent) general public. The general public sees what, in their untrained opinon, looks like security, and it makes them feel safe (like safe little sheep), and it makes them think their elected officials are doing a good job protecting the Homeland (when in actualty such security theater only detracts from the real job of finding terrorists). So security theater is popular among the sheeple (because they think it keeps them safe), and popular among elected officials (because it makes the sheeple happy). Does barely more than zero to stop any attack from occurring, but if you don't think too hard about it (which is how you have to treat all of politics nowadays), it makes sense. Then there are the authoritarians among us who've been getting morning stiffies for years thinking about how they can introduce new laws to curtail freedom. I find these people abhorrent. Yet many of them are behind the Patriot Act (c'mon, you don't think they wrote all 700 pages of it immediately after 9/11, do you? It was all boilerplate, ready to go but waiting for a trigger, and 9/11 provided it.), the Military Commissions Act, and so on. These authoritarians exist both on the right (arguing for laws against consentual sodomy, flag burning, medical marijuana, subway photography, limits on political free speech, limits on sex/health education, etc.), and on the left (gun control, limits to free speech, and often, albeit generally to a lesser extent, what the authoritarians on the right are pushing). Then there are the overzealous cops, who combine the above and we have what was discussed in this thread. So you're right, homeland security shouldn't require us to give up our rights (and as Mr. Franklin has said, those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither), but in practice it does. When the sheeple wake up and realize security theater is just theater, and vote the authoritarians out of office, then we'll have our signals clear and it'll be smooth sailing. |
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