Give me freedom or get the hell out of the way!

[MadRat]

A decision has to be made, do we want a welfare state, police state, or a military state? Al Gore would have made us decide between welfare state and police state, too, so lets not hear about this "its the republicans" crap.

I am all for leaving ourselves open to vulnerabilities. The whole idea of terrorism is a relatively small number of attacks have maximum effect on the population. The problem today is that the federal government thinks it can always spend itself out of a bind. Well, save the money and relax. Eventually the crap will subside.

The American welfare state is paranoid and cannot sustain itself under duress. The welfare state eliminates the political power of wealthy middle-class Americans by sedating the artificially poor welfare recipients and empowering them to vote for more self-interest pork. The American police state cannot save anyone from terrorism, but it sure makes it easier to demolish the little guy who gets in big interest's way. We had a police state in the 50's through 70's and it did not work. The American military state cannot save you from terrorism, either, since its function is to destroy on the large scale. Never send the military in when cultural diplomacy is in order.

Heck, I've yet to hear anyone in government get on the Taliban where its weakest, and that is how its treats its own people. If we are the leader of freedom then lets show off our freedoms, and be happy to be martyred when terrorists attack us because of those freedoms. We cannot simply turn over control to the federal government to solve this problem. Rather we can be more nosy about our neighbors ourselves and collect this information without super-double-secret wiretaps and Echelon and Carnivore.

Be patient for the conversion of Afghanistan. If we simply help their Northern Alliance to build a westernized society then the threat of Osama Bin Laden will lessen. Lets export western ideas into these societies of fundementalists; even Iran converted from a harsh fundementalist society to a westernized society! It only took Russia seventy years to convert to a free society, why not give seventy for Afghanistan?

Sorry, but my forefathers died for freedom, not for a police, welfare, or military state. I want to fight Osama Bin Laden by keeping my freedoms on public display. Give me freedom or get the hell out of the way!

 

[Geekbabe]

I'm all for displaying my freedoms proudly,but lemmie ask you,how in hell are we to export our ideas into a country where you risk being executed simply for flying a kite ? Somehow,I think a little more direct intervention is called for.

 

[MadRat]

We export them by educating the people. The Northern Alliance is built on a model closer related to our people than the Taliban. If we make life comfortable (in a philosophical way) for the Northern people then the word will spread to the oppressed masses in the south. The Taliban is only in power because the people under them feel they are better than the alternative, not because of fear of just death. These people have no reason to live, let alone to revolt. We need to give them a reason to live.

Was the French Revolution unique!?! No. Was the Russian Revolution unique? No. Both were to free people from backwards-thinking political regimes. The Soviet Union only came about because of the threat of outside enemies, not because there was a natural movement of communism to totalitarianism. The Soviets, being oppressive, were just as bad as the government it had displaced. The Chinese were just as bad at an earlier time, but don't hold near the executions they once got away with out in the public eye.

The secret to their demises is communication. When you look at China today it is a mere shell of what it was just ten years ago. From a societal standpoint it is fracturing apart at the seams. Sure they have a unified goal to take back Taiwan, but after that there really is nothing.

Terrorism by an outside invisible enemy puts the state in danger of being oppressive. (Oppression is the opposite of what needs to be done to solve the probem. The false sense of unity only harbors scoundrels!) Oppression of freedoms leads to terrorism of its own people by the state. (The group in power, unable to meet the challenge, becomes frustrated and rather misdirects itself at control of its own people.) Terrorism by one's own state leads to a revolution. The revolution is a new cooperation or coalition of internal forces to destroy the outside enemy. The death of an enemy leads to a void where unions become fractured apart when the outside threat subsides.

This wicked cycle of totalitarianism/revolution has been a cyclical effect since the beginning of time. America has always been strong because it is a loose coalition of free states, not because of its strong centralized government.

 

[Aelus]

The northern alliance is a group of warlords, who only united because they were getting overrun, this happened because most of their soldiers changed sides. The warlords only care about their personal power, not about the afghanis. Before the taliban arrived, they fought their little wars all over the country, and the afghanis were the victims of it. I'm not sure about the opinion of the average afghani, but i'd rather be opressed than be caught up in a war for years. They are not the right people to govern a country in a rightful way.

Aelus