Just because….
A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.
-Alexander Hamilton
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Two thumbs up!
I never thought that there might be a suitable replacement for “In God We Trust,” but if there is, that might be it. If only it would fit on a coin…
To quote Thomas Jefferson – “The man who would choose security over freedom deserves neither.”
That was Ben Franklin that said that. And Lincoln said “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
You can flip this coin however you like. But if you’re going to sit there and not do anything about terrorists infiltrating this country and trying to do harm just for the sake of civil liberties, you’d better find a nice, quiet, out of the way place to live in such as the Dakotas or Montana or something like that.
Joel,
What makes you think the rural areas of the Dakotas or Montana would be sufficiently far enough away to ensure civil liberties.
I was talking about moving there to ensure your personal survival.
Look, like I told a friend of mine awhile back, I’d stay away from moving to New York or DC or LA for the next couple of years. I honestly, sincerely believe that one of these cities will be the target of a WMD, probably a small nuke. Probably sooner rather than later.
We can prevent it if we pull out all the stops. But, when we lawyer ourselves to death, then we lose. Our greatest strength, the Constitution, is also our greatest weakness. The enemy knows this and has, in addition to a wide variety of weapons, the money to acquire the finest defense lawyers in the country.
Me personally? Tap my phone… read my mail… I don’t give a shit. If it means me not having to worry about my family getting incinerated in a 500kt nuclear blast, you can have at it. That ridiculous Ben Franklin quote was made when the biggest weapon available was a barrel of gunpowder and a fuse.
This is a different time. Different age. We either adapt or our legacy will be “getting used to” terror.
Bob….have we trade any security for freedoms?
Historically this has been a pretty low-impact war, as far as the sacrifices of the American people are concerned.
John, you once again show that you are the master of understatement…
See, I would say it has been zero-impact for most folks. In my regular job, no one even thinks or talks about the war, despite my best efforts to educate them. OK, a few do, but not many. No impact. No hardship. No pain. No desire to serve.
Sometimes, it pisses me off…
To paraphrase Heinlein, the moral difference between the soldier and the civilian is that the soldier sacrifices for the body politic and the civilian does not.
The civilian population who has never served or does not sacrifice in the way of giving up an immediate family member to service is another America to me. It’s apolitical to me. Conservatives I know will say, “yeah, go kick their ass” but not give up their banking and investment jobs to go serve. Liberals just continue to be willing to roll over and play dead for the sake of peace.
I’ve shown that I’m the master of the understatement before???
Ha, so Joel are you a member of the Robert Heinlein book club or something?
No, but let’s just say that Heinlein and I see eye-to-eye on some things. You want my treatise on citizenship? Read (not watch… the movie was an absolute embarassment) the book, “Starship Troopers”.
I also read Thomas Ricks’ “Making of the Corps”. That was back in the nineties, where there wasn’t a whole helluva lot going on and Ricks illustrated the divide between the armed services (using the Marines is, of course, an extreme example, but still…) and the American populace.
With the war on and the sacrifice being borne solely by the servicemembers and their families, I think that divide has only widened and deepened.
heh I’m just busting balls.
Actually I totally agree, Heinlein’s theories on service and the Republic were fascinating stuff, I *believe* they were a topic of discussion at VMI philosophy club meetings.
The book, not the movie :)
Bob – please look up the actual quote before posting butchered versions of it around. According to Wikipedia, the real quote is:
“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
(I don’t trust Wikipedia much but I see so many different versions of that quote, I suspect this is more accurate.)
I think the adjectives are rather important. Obviously there are times where you have to give up some liberty to attain security. We all do it. For example, we give up the liberty to drive at any speed we want (unless you live in Germany) in order to gain reduce the chance of getting involved in a catastrophic collision. That’s a tradeoff between liberty and security which most people happily make. It’s when you give away important liberties, or give up minor ones for insubstantial gains in security, that you’re a fool.
Personally I tend to err on the liberty side of the equation, but it’s obviously not an absolute so you need to get the nuance of the original quote.
ha! leave it to the Aussie to bust out the classic Hobbesian trade-off.
A trade-off, I might add, that I think is guiding most libertarians these days. It certainly guides me..
I almost said Calvinist, btw….but that would be way, waaaaay wrong.
Nicholas beat me to it, but I thought I would post the ACTUAL Ben Franklin quote again, not the one the bleeding hearts like to misuse:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
As Nicholas mentioned, the adjectives are important to put the meaning into proper context. Which is of course why the bleeding heart leftists *always* leave it out and bastardize the quote. Typical. Also typical that “Bob” did not even attribute the quote to its proper author.
After thinking about the original quote some more… it reminds me of some thoughts I had about the way that I feel there’s actually something of a “survival of the fittest” going on at a tribal/state level. Especially in relation to Israel.
In a sense, those countries or groups of people who are the “fittest” are going to survive and eventually dominate. It seems to me to be orthogonal to the moral dimension. However, I would like to see us be both superior morally and in the survival stakes. I don’t think those things are necessarily exclusive.
It just means we have to be aggressive enough to survive, but still remain “liberal”. Perhaps you could think of it as “live and let live – but mess with us and that will change”.
On a side-note, relating to Bob’s quote – Michael, I wouldn’t be so quick to ascribe motives, he may just have been unaware of the original quote and its author. But also, thinking about that has given me a fairly succinct way to state some of my personal philosophies. I believe “when there is a trade-off to be made between liberty and security, the default position should be liberty, and liberty should only be sacrificed when there is good reason”. I suppose that’s a fairly “libertarian” point of view?
Nicholas, Ben Franklin meant that there are no good reason to to prefer security over liberty – if you do, you deserve neither. Just as simple as that. But Ben Franklin had balls. So did Jefferson. Todays democrats have none.
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