Supporting the Troops

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, War in Iraq  No Responses »
Jan 242006
 

Check out this article by Joel Stein. To summarize, Stein argues that those who are against the Iraq war (as am I) should stop claiming to support our troops, for four reasons:

1) Hawks (and many others) are likely to misunderstand your comments and parades as actually being pro-war instead of pro-soldier, anti-war.
2) Most of our support is actually just misplaced guilt, for sending them off to fight a bad war.
3) Soldiers bear some responsibility for their decision to join and to fight, knowing full well that they are likely to be sent to a place like Iraq and won’t really be defending the United States.
4) Soldiers don’t need parades or ribbons, but instead “hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return”.
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Home of the Brave?

 Posted by  Judicial System, Legal Philosophy, Oceania  5 Responses »
Jan 242006
 

My time in Australia will soon come to an end, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Sydney is a beautiful city; I highly recommend it. I thought I might spend a moment commenting on the cultural differences that I’ve noticed during my month here.

I think the most prominent of them, is that Australians don’t fear risk like Americans do. At the Sydney Harbor, the railings are small and somebody could easily fall in if they leaned over the edge. When I went to the Tarronga zoo, I was surprised by how close visitors could get to the animals (one emu came inches from a woman who turned her back on the enclosure and sat on the wall). I chatted with one of the workers on the Sydney Harbor ferries, and apparently several people each year fall overboard into the harbor from the ferry! Over and over I found myself commenting on the fact that in Sydney you can do things that you could never do in the USA.
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The Acceptable Bias

 Posted by  Racism  9 Responses »
Jan 242006
 

Northerners are un-Christian, liberal, tree-hugging elitists. Southerners are gun-loving, ignorant, Bible-thumping racists. You’ve heard the stereotypes before, and maybe even said one of them. I know I have. But it’s time for us to bridge the North/South divide and start talking about our neighbors with respect.
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Liberty and Security

 Posted by  Foreign Policy, Judicial System, Middle East, Terrorism  1 Response »
Jan 202006
 

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
— Benjamin Franklin

One of the apparent goals of the Bush Administration has been to convince the American people that there is a natural conflict between a people’s liberty and a nation’s security, and that the latter must always trump the former. This has been the primary justification behind the NSA wiretapping directive, behind the USA PATRIOT Act, behind the thousands of material witness warrants issued in the weeks after 9/11, behind the policy of ignoring the Geneva Convention when it suits them, behind the policy of denying legal access to those suspected of terrorists, etc. Each one of these issues represents a substantial increase in federal, usually executive, power, at the expense of the rights and personal liberty of individuals (be they citizens, prisoners, or both). There are two problems, however, with this philosophy. First, Benjamin Franklin was fundamentally correct; that any attempt to sacrifice liberty in the name of security will usually have untended consequences that will deny that society both. Second, the idea of a dichotomous, zero-sum relationship between liberty and security is, in almost all circumstances, false; in fact there are usually other alternatives that allow a society to increase security without sacrificing liberty, if it only the imagination and the money.
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Onward Christian Soldiers

 Posted by  Bush Administration, Religion, U.S. Politics  3 Responses »
Jan 192006
 

I’ve often thought that the response (or lack thereof) by the Religious Right to the various prisoner abuse, wiretapping, and corruption scandals pouring out of the White House and Congress lately were a sign of pure hypocrisy. After all, these are the same groups that revelled in exposing the Clinton shenanigans. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Paul Weyrich all vehemently supported the Clinton impeachment, and Jerry Falwell even helped produce and promote a tape which, among other things, accused the Clintons of systematically killing those who exposed his sexual misdeeds. And yet when President Bush is caught in a lie, is accused of breaking wiretapping or anti-leak laws, or actively promotes his own administration’s right to ignore the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention whenever it suits him, the same people are either deafeningly silent, or even rush to the defense of the administration. And so I asked myself, how can a group of people who are so concerned with a President’s sins against his own family show so much apathy towards a President’s sins against the American people? The only answer that made sense to me was that these people were really just partisan hacks; that they were intent on securing power for themselves through the vehicle of the Republican Party, and that they actually cared nothing for real, honest, Christian leadership.
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