Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 2149 Editor's Choice: 7
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The founders might disagree...
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it remains true that one cannot be free if one thinks his life is in danger
Our nation was founded by people who delibaratly PLACED their lives in danger by asserting their freedom. That their message and sacrifice is being lost in the wisps of history is a sad commentary on out times. The phrase "defending freedom" has always been misused when applied to military adventurism. It would seem that if certain people have their way, it will never again be able to be uttered without tragic irony.
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We interrupt this thread with...
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]this important reminder for the fact impaired...
We were attacked by an organization upset by our cozy relationship to the Saudi regime and by our troop presense on supposedly holy sites. In response we deposed the ONLY secular regime in the middle east thus igniting a firestorm of religious violence that is endangering the entire region. In order to mitigate that damage however it's necessary to allow the FBI to collect phone, internet and library records of any Americans who draw their interest. Unsurprisingly the sort of Americans who draw their interest are the ones who find this whole saga disturbing.
We now rerturn you to the partisan sniping and finger pointing already in progress.
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If fascism is over the top?
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We know that the conservative movement is not genuinely fascist because it has not seized power during a crisis of democracy
I still maintain that the word "authoritarian" while accurate and useful, doesn't have the emotional punch necessary to describe the straits we're navigating here. We have legitimatized torture as a means of intelligence gathering. We are actually debating the pros and cons of snatching people off the streets, flying them to undisclosed locations, subjecting them to simulated drowning in many cases based on nothing more substantial than someone else already in custody dropping a dime on them.
History shows that all the incidents of this sort that were aware of represent a small fraction of what's actually going on.
And the people who are actually performing this sort of work are going to be thanked for their service and returned to civillian life to raise their kids and get on with life while the standards that we once used to condemn banana republics erode into nonexistence.
If that isn't creeping fascism then I don't know what is.
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@Jonathan
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We of course are playing word games here, but I'll give it a shot. Our rights come from the consensus we created when we asserted that we had them. That we put them in our founding documents for easy reference adds to their value. If you doubt the power of consensus then I suggest you burn all the money in your wallet because it has no value save what has been assigned to it by the power of consensus.
You make a valid point about how the lack of ownership of our own bodies is evidence that we have rights that are currently being violated, but if you had no rights beyond what the government grants, then you would have no basis to complain!
When Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence, he did indeed invoke the diety and referred to it as the source of the rights asserted. But he also said, "we hold these truths to be self evident" meaning that he had no reason to think that anyone in his audience wouldn't know exactly what he was talking about.
He also used the phrase "goverments are institued by men". When you refer abstractly to "not having any rights except what are granted by government" then you are allowing 1 useful fiction to trump another useful fiction. Government is nothing more than a collection of people, many of whom are armed, who assert the right to control the behavior of others.
No wonder, when designing a system of government, the framers were very careful to design it in such a way that the ambitions of its participants are set against each other so that the power of law wouldn't become an instrument of abuse.
Opinions vary on how well they did, but it certainly highlights why its important to continue to assert our rights, even when we are among those who would sacrifice them for expedience or safety.
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Close...
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We have rights because we say we have rights.
No, we have rights, because when we say we do, most people nod their heads in agreement.
That's why its important to keep reminding people. As soon as they stop nodding their heads, then all bets are off. (Thats why totalitarianism and anarchy are such powerful words.) They touch on people's fear of the chaos that would ensue if our civil society were to break down.
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Thats why they wrote them down.
[Read the article: Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If there is no true consensus on just what rights we actually have then how can it be said that we have rights at all?
I could really get bogged down here. Obviously if people argue about what rights we have then you have evidence that they are not God-given and absolute and therefore "rights" might not be the best word to describe them. What all humans do share however is a sense of fairness and the emotioons of indignation and anger that are triggered when that sense of fairness is violated. (Evolutionary pshycologists go so far as to assert that we are equiped with specialized "cheater-detecter" circuitry which help guide the process.)
Clearly, as we humans have matured, our willingnes to recognize rights has grown. The declaration of independence is after all only 231 years old - a mere drop in the bucket in the grand scheme. And Slavery lasted an additional 100 years after that.
So I'll repeat. Our rights are granted by the consensus that we created to assert and defend them. It's not by accident that they were put in writing and that all holders of public office swear allegiance to the document that contains them.