angry planet wrote:House Committee on Un-American Activities: Not my area of expertise, but I don't see this as a consistent policy of the right because McCarthy was a Republican any more than censorship is a 'policy' of the left because Tipper and Al Gone and the rest of the PMRC were democrats. Assholes are assholes, not policy.
The only people to object to the HUAC were from the Left. Its target was the Left. People lost their livelyhood for it. Of course it was a policy position of the right to continue. It is currently defended by brain-dead lying whore Ann Coulter.
Slavery and Jim Crow: Again, I am certainly not an expert on the civil war, but I can not for the life of me see how slavery was a policy of the right.
Because it protected a status quo that held entitlements for the rich, the land owners and the industrial base. Abolitionists were the equivalent of peaceniks in the 1960s and communists in the 1920s.
And let's not forget that it was the right (the republicans) that ended this practice at the cost of a bloody civil war. I am not sure you can assign the policies to the right, but if you must, you must also give them the credit for creating one of the first movements to eliminate it.
The Republican party was not the Right at the time. The Democrats were the "State's Rights" advocates, the equivalent of the anti-evolution, abstinence-education crowd, except for worse, for taking as their cause the buying and selling and then owning human beings like farm animals.
Beyond that, I suppose it is indicative of the current state of left in our society that they would define criminals, repeat offenders and terrorists as "innocents".
Punishing criminals makes sense. Punishing them (and by extension everyone in their circle) to ridiculous, arbitrary extremes for the sake of appearances is socially destructive. It creates a hateful caste of people who have literally been told by the system that they are less than any other man, and deserve to be punished more. Unreasonable leverage provides avenues for corruption among police men, prosecutors and the politically-connected. The death penalty creates the potential for irreversable error, and if our government owes us one thing, it is not to kill us intentionally.
Terrorists? No, no, no. I think they're probably assholes. But the rest of us who are pre-emptively put at risk in the hopes that one of us will turn out to be a terrorist, we're not. We're Americans. We Deserve Better.
And what makes Americans better than other people is that we don't abuse people. We don't lie to people. We allow everyone a fair trial and a presumption of innocence. That's why we're worth being defended. When we stop behaving like that, and excuse ourselves by saying we're "defending" ouselves, then we are no longer worthy of defense, as we are no better than any other bunch of assholes.
We are only better than other countries when we stick to our most noble principles, which is easy, until the pressure is put on us. How we act under that pressure is what we are as a nation, not how we act when everything is rosy.