Pile-On for "Needs of the Many"

I just had to follow-up on this last post if only to use this pic... (Anybody that got the Bene Gesseret reference, will find this funny).

Also had to, because I'm a huge ACLU freak that is constantly frustrated by people not learning from our mistakes. What we are dealing with in today's "struggle against terrorism" is nothing more then business as usual in this country.

As was even the case in early 1900's America, the foreign policy of this country (as well as domestic control) is dominated by Corporate interests. Thankfully people with some balls (Upton Sinclair, Roger Baldwin, Samuel Gompers, etc etc) stood up for individual's civil liberties and the actual concept of free and open ideas traversing without limit (actually, that was a founding principal, though people forget these things in times of stress).

Today instead of being able to blame the Vanderbilts, or Rockefellers of the world, we instead have multi-national corporations capable of writing our laws for us and then paying off the appropriate lawmakers to make it happen (its called Lobbying). The differences you might think are in how these situations are portrayed in the media, but in reality things have not changed all that much. Newspapers in the day had their agenda set for them by wealthy magnates spending heavily on preventing unionized (ie, more expensive) labor, and successfully labeling any that did set out to change the status quo "Communists" or "German Sympathizers".

Blah....

I could go on and on about this, but the central issue here is that if we all agree that there needs to be limitations to freedom of speech, or what you can or cannot do without a picture ID as well as another document to secure your identification (ie, Nazi Germany "Ver are your Paper???"), we are admitting that this whole experiment we call "Democracy" (even though we live in a Representative Republic), has failed.

The idea that we are all free to do whatever and say whatever, provided it does not restrict another person's rights or civil liberties is long dead. And with it, the idea of Democracy in its most basic form.

Are we more free then China? Well sure. Is that a valid argument? Hell mother f'n no!

That is all...