Love it or leave it, right?

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa...an-ever-2011-12

"It turns out that destroying the American democratic republic was easy to accomplish, historians will write someday. Simply get the three major cable news networks to blather on about useless bull**** for a few days, while legislators meet in secret behind closed doors to rush through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), and its evil twin sister, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is a clever name for an Internet censorship bill straight out of an Orwellian nightmare."

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Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On I meant that the NDAA, itself, has existed for almost 50 years; I wasn't exactly responding to your point. Because I don't think it's an invalid point to think that the authorities can find a way to do just about anything they want these days. The importance of these recent amendments, which as of today, our President rescinded his threat to veto, is that nobody can contest them in the court of law. Ever. If you are accused of being a terrorist or of supporting terrorist, our government will now be able to send their military police after you to hold you until the "end of hostilities". That is, until America wins the war on terror. Apparently, nobody deserves their day in court.

Yeah, it's disgusting. I don't even necessarily think we'll see them using this quickly and to the extent a lot of alarmists are hinting at, but just look at the Patriot Act; shit like this is abused and extremely hard to get rid of once it's made law.

Pretty much. Look, I'm not disagreeing with you that this legislation in thoery violates the rights of certain individuals who belong to this society. The fact of the matter is, that this legislation is not meant to protect the individual, but to protect the society. I wholeheartedly understand the points you're trying to make, but the fact of the matter is, that although these laws may interfere with the occasional individual's rights, they do in fact protect the rights of the masses. If 100% of terrorist attacks on airline travel in the US were enacted by Arabs, do you honestly think it is so unspeakable to pass laws which restrict free passage for all Arabs? I mean most Arabs are okay, so we should let them all pass through without restriction just because their specific ideology has been found to be increasingly high risk for terrorist activity.

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Originally posted by OrangestO This isn't about physics, this is about waves.

Bleeding heart liberals really need to take a step back and take a look at the rights of the 150+ citizens who are boarding their flight, and not the 1 Arab who is detained for 5 minutes to investigate more thoroughly.

When a 21 year old white university student from Indiana hijacks a plane and slams it into a skyscraper in NYC, then you can talk about individual freedoms when detaining white passengers from mass air transit.

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Originally posted by OrangestO This isn't about physics, this is about waves.

This isn't about racial profiling though. Take it a dozen steps farther. This is about our government, through enforcement by its military, to detain these very Arab suspects and never, ever assess the evidence that lead authorities to suspect them in the first place. To lock them away and throw away the key.

I know this is dramatic as fuck, so I don't blame your tone in the least, but we pulled our troops out of Iraq in order to turn every city in our country into Baghdad. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

quote:

Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On This isn't about racial profiling though. Take it a dozen steps farther. This is about our government, through enforcement by its military, to detain these very Arab suspects and never, ever assess the evidence that lead authorities to suspect them in the first place. To lock them away and throw away the key. I know this is dramatic as fuck, so I don't blame your tone in the least, but we pulled our troops out of Iraq in order to turn every city in our country into Baghdad. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

That's because it is ridiculous. Obviously I know fuckall about the intelligence practices of the US government, but I really don't think they're picking random Arabs off the street and holding them indefinitely just because they're Arab.

It's not like the US military are going door to door and rounding up all Arab Americans and shipping to Guantanamo Bay just because they don't like their turbans.

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Originally posted by OrangestO This isn't about physics, this is about waves.

THANK YOU 6079

It's the precedent that's the most shocking and disturbing thing at this point. Yeah, there's a lot of out there pumped up talk about the government turning us into a police state overnight, but if that gets other people aware of what's happening in their own government I'm all for it.

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Originally posted by enydo It's the precedent that's the most shocking and disturbing thing at this point. Yeah, there's a lot of out there pumped up talk about the government turning us into a police state overnight, but if that gets other people aware of what's happening in their own government I'm all for it.

Right, but that's a drastic exaggeration of the truth.

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Originally posted by OrangestO This isn't about physics, this is about waves.

As for the either loving it or leaving it, the fucking point of a constitutional republic - or any form of democracy for that matter - is in absolute contradiction to loving it or leaving it. The point is that the people can change it; They can form it to their will. Do you legitimately believe that the majority of American citizens believe it is fair to hold other US citizens without trial in their own country? I know our abysmal electorate voted in favour of it, but you are a fool if you're convinced that's representative of the citizenship. I refuse to believe the majority of Americans are in favor of this, and people should be very, very angry. Next month, that is, when it's finally reported on major news networks.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.