Letters to the Editor
prunes
Published Letters: 784
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Foreign policy games
[Read the article: The foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can't even mention those names on television without getting your mike cut. The whole "serious" thing is just a ruse to keep certain ideas from ever being mentioned.
Sort of reminds me of a game called "The Game" where the object is to not think about the existence of the game.
http://www.savethegame.org/wiki/The_Game_(game)
Unless the tinfoil hatters are right, the game our foreign policy makers play was never formulated, it evolved. There is a complicated, manifold dynamic that has arisen between our arms industries, government structures, media, and corporate leaders.
Affirming the dynamic without acknowledging it's existence scores you a point. This is "being serious".
Criticizing the unspoken rules that have evolved or pointing out the existence of the dynamic loses you a point. People don't like to be reminded of the existence of the dynamic, because then they themselves lose points.
Points can confer positions of privilege in the foreign policy game dynamic. You accumulate enough points, you get to be the banker, the referee, own Boardwalk, etc. You get to make up new rules, as long as you never acknowledge that's what you're doing, preferably even to yourself.
And these people have been playing their entire lives!
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My Guess
[Read the article: The foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My guess is that no matter what happens in American politics or the rest of the world, shooter242 will continue his retarded campaign of snotty, unthinking snark.
If he cared even a little bit about what happens in America or overseas, you'd see him change his schtick up at least once in a while.
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Habeas Corpus
[Read the article: The brutal, uncivilized Libyans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws…are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any [the Constitution] contains.
- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 84
To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.
-William Blackstone, quoted by Hamilton
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa84.htm
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Dear Anonymous Coward:
[Read the article: The brutal, uncivilized Libyans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Torture is always, always wrong.
Torture conducted by the United States is paid for with my taxes.
Torture fundamentally implies that human rights are not universal, as is asserted in the Declaration of Independence.
Anyone who excuses, mitigates, or in any way condones institutionalized torture is no real American.
If you like government torture so much, maybe you should move to Libya, you have much more in common with their government than Americans.
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Replying to wilfully ignorant asses who won't read.
[Read the article: The brutal, uncivilized Libyans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]@Anonymous: Where is it carved in stone that this American exceptionalism you pine for exists or have ever existed? Who told you that for some timeless and abstract reason the US is somehow above all this stuff forever and ever and always has been?
Nobody said that. America got it's big economic start from slavery, which necessarily involves torture and mistreatment of humans.
Nevertheless, the ideals of the Declaration and Constitution have always been the aim of Americans. If you no longer even try to fulfill that responsibility, then you can no longer be said to support the Constitution or universal human rights.
And if after you stop trying, you stop even pretending that's what you want, then you have become an enemy of the highest ideals of all Americans.
You say in one breath that the country is awful has always been awful and at the same time splutter that we've 'lost our ideals'.
Nobody said that. Read.
Gee... another Salon article drawing moral equivilancy between the U.S. and a dictatorship/terrorist. What a surprise.
Either explain how a universal, categorical denouncement of institutionalized torture in any way draws a moral equivalency between two torturing regimes or go kill yourself for being so bloody stupid.
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One thing I notice...
[Read the article: The brutal, uncivilized Libyans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... in real life, people are much more reticent about their enthusiasm for hooking car batteries up to people's genitals.
Possibly due to social pressures, possibly due to the vein throbbing in my forehead whenever the topic comes up, but it sure seems like most of these creeps are too chicken to let their inner thoughts out anywhere but on the safe ol' internet.
Which, frankly, I think is a good thing. That seems to indicate that deep down, they know they are completely, utterly, inhumanly wrong, that what their government is doing is wrong, and that they themselves have failed their own dignity in defending it.