Civil libertarians are slaves to notions of ‘rights’. They like rights because they are individualising claims and seem to give us a protective sphere. But rights of the absolute type which are spruiked by civil libertarians are nonsense.
The key to rights is identifying the circumstances in which they can be limited and extending them to all people equally, while maintaining a distinction between the innocent and wretched.
Civil libertarians dish out rights to the guilty and innocent alike and suffer from moral short-sightedness. They focus only on the immediate person, as opposed to wider consequences and the likely effect of policies on other individuals.
via 2012 – time for civil libertarians to grow up or fade out – On Line Opinion – 3/1/2012.
The Germans trusted their government in the ’20s. The Japanese trusted their government in the ’30s. I’m sure many wrote apologies, like the one cited here, for the aggressions and ‘temporary restrictions’ that were needed to counter external bogeymen.
One point here is vaild, however: We do need laws. But which ones?
The financial disaster we are now living in occured because laws were repealed of ignored. However, these laws did not restrict citizens — these laws protected citizens from governments and their crony financiers.
The bogeyman is not Iran, or China, or terrorism. It is our own governments. Rome wasn’t conquered, it disintegrated when its citizens no longer tolerated the corruption and financial repression. The iron curtain fell because the citizens (even the party members) living behind it no longer trusted their repressive governments.
The first world governments have accomplished more repression and destruction, in the name of ‘protecting freedom and spreading democracy’, both at home and abroad, than bin Laden could ever have imagined in his wettest of dreams.
Mr Bajaric is looking for bogeymen in all the wrong places.
I agree. One of the greatest challenges we face in the 21st century is to revise our Westminster-style democratic system to:
But I do think that the rights of individuals (whether privacy or to bear arms) cannot be looked at in isolation — one has to consider the impact on others.