justified
moral outrage to others.
This is scary shit. It shows clearly where harper wants to take us, and some of those who back him.
It shows what we stand to lose, and it shows the utter contempt and disregard those people who want to take us there have for our civil rights, human rights, and privacy rights.
At what point will more people start asking what, exactly, are we protecting? Certainly not our rights, as they are considered small sacrifices for this vague, ever-broadening term called national security.
Just a brief bit from the article which talks about some of what has comme out of Wikileaks this week:
The dispatch goes on to state that Judd "derided" recent Canadian court judgments that threaten foreign governments' intelligence-sharing with Canada. "These judgments posit that Canadian authorities cannot use information that 'may have been' derived from torture, and that any Canadian public official who conveys such information may be subject to criminal prosecution," the cable says.
Guys! Do you really think there are witches? Do you really believe all those guys (including her own brother) slept with Anne Boleyn? Hey, it must all be true. They confessed, under torture.
Even if these vicious animals who think that torture is just an ok fine tool for us but totally barbaric when others do it, information obtained through torture is unreliable. So Judd can be as full as contempt as he wants for us bleeding hearts who really believe that when we signed agreements opposing torture, we really meant it. You can't win hearts and minds by torturing people as part of a plan to stop those you are torturing from...torturing people.
Judd credited Prime Minister Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government for " 'taking it on the chin and pressing ahead' with common sense measures despite court challenges and political knocks from the opposition and interest groups," according to the document.
Sure, let's just ignore a couple of centuries of carefully, thoughtfully designed law and use that good old fashioned Tim Horton's crowd common sense. I mean, when your goal is to protect rights, fuck rights, eh?
So I ask again: what is it that our rights are being sacrificed to protect?
3 comments:
Their right to carry our rhetoric? This is how police states are created. The people are driven to fear the world around them until they accept the "safety" that their state provides in order to hide from the big bad world. I wonder how well that will work for them in the end.
What IDE said.
Then again - the majority of us simply shrug such things off, because in the end what truly matters is that we feel safe.
And we don't bother about our rights and whatnot because it is "always" some "others" who gets trampled upon by our growing authoritarian security/surveillance state.
Sadly enough - that is the way it goes ...
you write a lot about this, Mentarch and have been doing it for years. Many people won't pay attention until they finally find themselves seriously, directly, personally affected. But we keep writing about it, as we should.
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