You have rights of course. But do you really want to exercise those rights in a manner that makes it very difficult for people protecting those rights to do their job? Why would anyone who value their right practice it that way? Again the phrase ‘spoiled children of liberty’ comes to mind. You do not need to prove to the police that you have rights. They already know that. That is probably the first thing they are taught. You need to prove it to the terrorists. And one way you can do that is by supporting and empowering those that actively work to put down the terrorists and by making it easier for them to protect your rights.

Whether the Loyalists were defending freedom or not is highly relevant to whether the rebels were acting justly by opposing them.

The loyalists where acting to suppress freedom and the rebels to defend it. Without understanding that, everything else becomes nonsensical as it is in your case. And the fact that you use polished words does not change that fact.

The only point you have made is that “were” is a different word from “where”. But that was never your original point.

Actions taken to dismantle institutions that are responsible for the suppression of freedoms are not violations of freedom. Actions taken to suppress or take out people who violate freedoms are not violations of freedom in themselves. If you imply otherwise, you are implying that the whole concept of freedom is meaningless. This is so fundamental, it is laughable that it was overlooked by you. Actually, I stand corrected. You did not overlook it. You declared it to be irrelevant, precisely because it undermines the fiction that you where trying to generate.

To state the obvious, only people who do not violate the freedoms of others are equally free with respect to each other. The rest enjoy an abridged freedom at most, till their capacity to violate and suppress free people have been fully exhausted.

Whether the Loyalists were defending freedom or not is highly relevant to whether the rebels were acting justly by opposing them. But that is a different question, and praying it in aid is a bait and switch.

It is utterly irrelevant to the point I was trying to bring out, whether the methods used against the Loyalists (and slaves et al) involved repressing them, seizing their property and/or persons and/or labour, exiling them and massacring them, while also denying that this was not (their) freedom. The fact of the matter is, the rebels did just precisely that, including talking the talk of freedom to cover it, which means that the U.S.A. indeed has a tradition of it – and it is that very sort of thing that is being done now. It is not something that needs a break with the foundations of the U.S.A., it is entirely in keeping with how things were done then. Whether those things were justified (then or now) has nothing to with it; even if we stipulate that they were, the fact remains that the approach in use now is just precisely the onet that was used then – so there isn’t any break with the past from using it now.

Oh, and by the way, “were” is a different word from “where”.

It is irrelevant whether the Loyalists were defending freedom (though you might like to consider the points brought out by this recent Counterpunch article). What counts is whether the rebels were harming the freedom of the Loyalists (and the others I mentioned, which includes the slaves joining the British to fight for their freedom). They did, with such things as massacre, exile, acts of attainder and so on, and they used the sort of hypocrisy that claimed it didn’t count if they harmed other people’s freedom when they were doing it for their own freedom. It does count, if only on the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right.

And what you didn’t absorb was the point I made, that the rebels didn’t come out and do it visibly without hypocritical denial. If they had, they wouldn’t have built up the tradition of resorting to repression while talking freedom – the very same tradition that is at work now, just as it was when Lincoln did it.

Anyway, the 1800s was relatively laissez-faire for the West. The 1900s saw large-scale war and the rise of the Welfare State the West. The 2000s see acts of terrorism and the rise of stricter surveillance for the West.

Gee don’t you mean “freedom-fighting attacks” or “comeuppance”. If the blowback is caused by undeserved American interference then it’s quite justified and doesn’t qualify as “terrorism”. It’s like a fellow harrassing an innocent man until he received a just-deserved punch in the nose – it would despicable and wrong for that fellow to claim self-defence.

Here is an idea, how about going back to first principles? Organized fighting forces live and die with the strength of their ideology. What is the ideology that drives the fighting force of the United States? And what is the ideology that drives the fighting force of their enemies?

You cannot know that by asking the foot soldiers. They fight for personal reasons. Their leaders too are fruits of the ideology, so their reasons too may not properly know what the ideology is. I think going back to primary documents helps to find the first principles, but that is only the beginning.

… how could America, a nation with deep roots in individual freedom, so quickly slide into a police state?

Simple – it does not have “deep roots in individual freedom” at all. Rather, it started out by viciously suppressing freedom for anybody who wouldn’t go along, like Loyalists, under the hypocritical pretense of defending freedom (it wouldn’t have been hypocritical if they had admitted its necessity for their purposes – and then it would have been visible whenever it was tried again). And that approach has been close to the surface throughout its history, with a cover of denial.

When you are defending freedom, you should wear the hate of its enemies as a badge of honor.

Plenty. FDR basically set the precidence that the United States government is obligated to engage in interference with foreign affairs, utilize political, military, and economic means to benefit the local population at expense of a foreign nation, and station military bases in every empty plot of land in the known universe.

So, what do we have here. I think we can call it the “inexorable process fallacy”. You say “there’s a mysterious ratchet mechanism whereby this process is never fully scaled back”. Then, when I show an instance where the process was fully scaled back, the “precedent” comes to the rescue. Yes, the process was scaled back, but some decades later the process was triggered again by some other, unrelated event. So, the first time was a precedent, so the process was not fully scaled back after all, QED.

Terror acts always target large organizations and places of significant importance to the organization (either psychologically or practically).

So there are no random acts of terror in unremarcable places to scare the general population, right? Tell that to the Israelis.

Referencing the general piracy of the late 1700s in the Mediterranian as a counter-example will only make you look foolish here.

Ha, ha, preemptive rebuttal. No, that’s not terrorism, that’s ordinary crime. But they reportedly claimed they were just following the Qur’an.

No powerful monopoly force, no target or incentive for terror attacks.

So, America should have bombed and impoverished itself to end up like Europe after WW2, so that it wouldn’t call attention and envy from other countries and criminal gangs. Brilliant logic.

America was the richest country in the world for some 50 years before anyone took notice

From a military POV, Spain took notice already in 1898. But of course, Britain was playing the role of present-day America in the late nineteenth century (the Pax Britannica). Nature abhors a vacuum.

We were even outright loved in the Middle East until we decided that the purpose of the CIA was to install a dictator in Iran.

Oh, yes, the Barbary pirates loved to loot Americans. Seriously, relations may have been a bit less tense, but “outright love” seems excessive, given America’s early recognition and support of Israel.

Terror attacks are a direct result of our government doing something outside our borders.

Like protecting America’s allies and preventing proven enemies from becoming too powerful while there’s still time. It may well be true that “they are here because we are there”, but maybe America SHOULD be there. Oh, and maybe America shouldn’t let the Islamists come, in the first place.

FDR created the behemoth state that is a giant target painted on this nation, and is therefore ultimately responsible for every terror attack on America since.

That’s rigth, who is attacking Haiti, after all? Get over it, someone country has to be the big guy who takes all the heat.

I will deal with the terrorism risk fallacy in another post.

There is no ‘if’ about it. Give the government power they will use it for political means. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s like trying to give a alcoholic 20 dollars to buy a 75 cent candy bar and then telling them not to use the change it for vodka or beer.

You are just thinking of the government’s incentives to abuse the legislation, but you forget about the disincentives. Politicians cooperate with each other to some degree, but they also compete against each other. If the opposition party can present a compelling case to the public, that the goverment is abusing anti-terrorist legislation, the incumbent party may lose the next elections, or the president may have to resign.

Just because other countries are worse off does not justify making our own country worse. This is not a contest to see who has the shittiest government.

An example of a real, present day totalitarian country is in order for comparison, when people are losing perspective.

You have to accurately rank threats and work on them.

Exactly. But dogmatic anti-government pacifists get their ranking wrong.

‘They’ are like everybody else. They are human.

Exactly. Most government employees are just like you and me, neither saints nor monsters, neither geniuses nor complete fools. They look after they self-interest, but they also have their moral values, like all normal people.

Illegitimate actions are ones which violate property and use violence and threats to force other human beings to do what you want against their will. This is what the government does, this is why it exists, this is the purpose behind it.

t is easy to argue that the government is a necessary evil. This is probably true, possibly false. But like anything if it is a necessary evil then it should be kept to a absolute minimum.

This is where I think you are wrong. Whose purpose? Who really keeps the government in place? The citizens do, with their taxes and general cooperation against its enemies. The reason behind government is that organised force is stronger than individual force. As soon as they have enough common ground and joint popular support, militias unite to form larger units. It’s not a conjecture, you can see it happen in Africa and the Middle East.

The theory that people used to live in peace and harmony in ancap utopia until someone came up with the evil idea of the State is absurd and contrary to all historical evidence. The population supports the State because they see it as a way to avoid social chaos (anarchy, in the colloquial sense), to minimize theft, murder and other crimes, not to enact them.

I don’t think government (by which I mean the State) is a necessary evil, I just think it’s a lesser evil compared to social chaos. Also, current Western governments are incredibly better, closer to the peaceful cooperative dream, than virtually all non-Western ones. It’s good and healthy to criticize their shortcomings, but you need to step back, see the bigger picture and value what you have. Yes, government power should be kept to a minimum, but protecting citizens from terrorism and crime in general is part of that minimum if there’s any.

The fact that month by month hundreds of new laws are being passed, taxes are being raised, and we are being more and more militaristically involved in affairs that are none of our business. We are losing our freedoms, losing our liberty, losing our capitalistic system. The debt our country if facing is growing almost exponentially.

Bah, America survived two world wars and it bouced back better than anyone else. It was in far worse shape in the seventies. And now, you have the Tea Party keeping an eye on Obama. Yes, sometimes Americans forget their core values to some degree, but you know what, I wish the populations of most other countries could learn a fraction of the wholesome values American can afford to forget.

The police state is expanding massively and we have more people in prison then any other western country. We have a higher percentage of people in jail or prison then Iran or China does.

The “police state” is not about the incarceration rates, it’s about the reasons for incarceration. China and Iran are police states, America is not.

In fact, the sentence rate is similar to those of European countries, but the lengths tend to be higher, which I think is a good thing for violent crimes, where many European countries are shamefully lenient. Don’t sell drugs and you will be OK.

We are NOT going in the right direction. As time goes by and society evolves we should be gaining more freedoms and more liberty. We should be fine tuning our government and finding ways to reduce the amount of ‘evil’ we need to maintain ourselves.

Courtesy of Al-Qaeda.

We have not been involved in a truly defensive war since the 1800′s. WW2 can be argued to be defensive, but WW1 certainly not. It was our involvement in WW1 which lead (in a substantial way) to WW2, unfortunately.

Refute this:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/america_and_world_war_one.htm

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/unrestricted_submarine_warfare.htm

Right now innocent people are having their livelihoods destroyed, are threatened under a daily basis, and a huge number of people that did no violence and carried out no action that harmed anybody else are rotting in prison.
This is a serious problem.

What livelihood, selling drugs? I’m all for drug legalization, but that’s got nothing to do with the war on terror. Who is threatened? I hope you don’t mean the shameless whiny Islamists. Terrorism, rising crime rates, rising support for Marxist policies and other effects of uncontrolled immigration are far more serious problems for America.

Please excuse me for citing myself, but I’m tired of this terror statistics fallacy.

From the comments in:

http://blog.mises.org/14999/fear-and-control-the-tsa-case/

“Remember that lighting is 20 times more deadly than terrorists, so the argument above is actually relevant to more people then the one you used.”

Where is your source? I’ve found this one:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-world/2008/05/30/scientists-calculate-odd-ways-to-die-115875-17495916/

300,000,000/1 SHARK ATTACK
250,000,000/1 FALLING COCONUT
9,300,000/1 DYING IN TERRORIST ATTACK
10,000,000/1 KILLED BY LIGHTNING
3,500,000/1 DYING OF A SNAKE BITE.

So, should we be afraid of snakes in big Western cities? Can we swim in shark-infested waters without fear? Statistics can be twisted in many ways. The risk of dying in a terrorist attack in a small village may be small, but in a big city they are much higher. And, as you see, terrorism is now more of a threat than lightning.

More to the point, terrorists act, which lightning doesn’t. If they find a security hole and we don’t plug it, they will do more and more of it. You don’t cut the electricity of an electric fence just because few people tried to cross it. That’s the main difference.