End well, this will not…
According to the 5-4 split US Supreme Court ruling, refusing to answer questions and remaining silent can indeed be used as evidence of guilt in a court of law, if you have not had your Miranda rights read to you prior to the questioning.
Gee, how could this possibly go wrong?
I am speechless (no pun intended)!
This, again, is a method of coercion.
Perhaps this is why the big-government leftists and Islamists get along so well…
What was that about government coercion?
Particularly important now…
As the one branch of the US government that actually listens to its people – the NSA – collects information about everyone, many people are saying that if a person is not doing anything illegal, they have nothing to fear from the loss of privacy. If you read this blog regularly, you know my contempt for this mode of thinking, because…
The more you know about someone, the more you know what is important to them and how they make their decisions – the more easy it will be for you to coerce them.
Knowledge is power…always was, always will be. And, even the most innocent things, strung together in certain ways and presented in a spun way, can make a person look guilty of something if the government decides they don’t like the way they are complaining about something.
Milton Friedman has it right – freedom is being free of coercion.
Dependency on government for services – from public transport to medicare to food stamps – opens one to easier and easier coercion, as does the loss of privacy. That is why totalitarians always foster dependence and erode privacy.
And that is corruption of freedom!
When I was about 14 years old, my parents hosted a dinner party. One group of their guests was a family much like ours: mother, father and a daughter, an only child. Except that the other family’s daughter was about 5 years my senior and, while I was in High School, she was already attending University.
During the meal, the matriarch of this guest family, with an indulgently patronizing smile, responded to something my dad had said with: “How can you say that, with two fine young feminists sitting at the table?”
Well, that got my hackles up!
I immediately responded with (loosely translated to English): “I am no such thing as a feminist! Please, don’t insult my intelligence by calling me one!”
Which seemed to puzzle my parents’ guests (both of whom [the parents] held doctorates in Physics): they could not possibly imagine a young woman who isn’t driven by her immature teenage rebellion into the foolishness that is ‘Western feminism’. Their own daughter was, indeed, a full blown feminist and a Marxist to boot – and, to the best of my knowledge, has remained so till now…
OK, it was one of my Aspie moments, I had embarrassed my parents and all that. Jaws dropped all around – perhaps due to the passion with which my statement was delivered – and, looking back, my parents had a hard time getting the conversation back into the ‘safe’ zone.
Yet, even at the age of 14, I recognized and despised – to the core of my being – the hypocrisy of modern-day Western feminists who, far from attempting to create a ‘level playing field’ where every individual is treated equally, regardless of where they fall in the demographics game, were all about a power/money grab for a specific snotty elite…a corruption of an ideal if there ever was one!
I, for one, considered myself ‘an equalist’ – someone who despises special privileges for anyone. for any reason. The rules of life (aka ‘the laws of the land’) had to apply to everyone equally!
After all, that is why we came to Canada: so my family would no longer be persecuted because of my father’s beliefs (not actions, just beliefs). Where teachers would not regularly single me out because of my pigmentation, my pale skin and hair and eye colour – ‘just the king of kid the Nazis would have liked – unlike the rest of my classmates, whom they would have gladly have exterminated’: a statement my grade 3-5 homeroom teacher made, in class, several times week, and which inevitably led to a school-yard beating for me…at least, until I learned how to fight back…
So, I guess I learned the hard way to wish for the rules to apply to everyone equally – even to pale freaks like me! And, I had expected that immigrating to a country with a heritage of liberal democracy, like Canada, would provide that!
How very Aspie of me…
The Cultural Marxists – led/bullied by the ‘feminists’ – had corrupted the spirit of liberal democracy in Canada long before I got here.
It saddens me to see so many smart people fall for their scam.
Yet, I am glad Thunderf00t is not one of them!
UPDATE: The ever-eloquent Mark Steyn explains why it does, indeed, matter.
Of course reality matters…
And a bit of the testimony here:
It would be simply sad if it were not so dangerous…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 