Rollerball

I don't remember who said it, but I remember hearing a phrase that covers all this bullshit. Bush wants a world defined by terrorism. Because that's the only problem in the world you know.

So you can't complain when the stormtroopers bust down your door, knock you to the floor and step on your head, because it's for your own good! They're protecting you from the terrorist! You don't want the terrorists to win DO YOU?

babylonDon

I've been watching with a little dread, the after the fact persecution of people convicted in sex crimes. Hardly a group one wants to go to bat for. But they make them register everywhere they go, in some instances refuse to release them after completion of sentence, and they are freely harrassed by local media.

Getting what's coming to them? Maybe. But if you allow civil liberties and normal justice applications to be excepted for one group, you're just opening the door for the practice to become more widespread.

Establishing precedents is one of the ways laws change.

And the tactic seems to be to do it, where either nobody cares, or to people who appear to deserve it.

__________________
"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia

Rollerball

I get your point, and I totally agree.
And not meaning to defend sex offenders, but your example reminded me of a running news story in New Mexico a couple years ago. A sex offender served his sentence and was released from prison. He had a small trailer/RV to live in but everywhere he went the media followed him, broadcast his location on the evening news and that was followed the next day by a local protest to get him out.

After about a week of this he relocated to a public camping area out of town, it was totally legal for him to be there, but the media again set up camp and filmed his every coming and going. There were more protests but he was not braking the law so they couldn't kick him out, what they did do was post a 24 hr cop near his trailer.

Two weeks of nightly reports hounding this guy brought a bit of sympathy from a local rancher who offered him a place to park the trailer on his land. The rancher explained that he didn't condone the man's crime but he had paid for it and didn't deserve the treatment he was getting.

Well that lasted a few days before the rancher's neighbors mounted a protest. I can't say what happened after that, we were only there for two weeks. But I think this is such a perfect example of what you were talking about.

babylonDon

Yeah. It's commonplace. There were a group of people living under a bridge in FL....Same kind of thing. They literally couldn't go anywhere else.

And the people up in arms about them. The political grandstanding.

But in the meantime, a long-standing rule about how our justice system works gets eroded.

The foot's in the door.

And to anyone who feels these fears are draconian, 10 years ago, the U.S. would never have publically condoned torture, or taken gov't wiretapping as a natural daily occurrence.

__________________
"America, the greatest, best country that God has ever given man, on the face of the Earth"- Sean Hannity, professional broadcast journalist.

“To the contrary, has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.”-Antonin Scalia