Canadian telling me not to worry so much about Canada- and Singapore-style measures

[Tim May]

On Saturday, November 3, 2001, at 09:47 PM, Raymond D. Mereniuk wrote:
> Tim, you are getting much too cynical!  The current events are very
> much a knee-jerk reaction to threats many can't understand.  The
> National Guardsman who played the boogieman is probably a local
> good old boy with absolutely no cross cultural experience who
> translates his fears into hate against any person who appears to be
> any threat to what he thinks is important.

This is why we are supposed to be a nation of _laws_, not of _men_. It 
doesn't matter whether these soldiers are country bumpkins or not: the 
Constitution still applies. (Scholars may opine that Bangor 
International Airport has "invited" soldiers onto its property, blah 
blah, or that ordinary search and seizure provisions are waived, blah 
blah, but the fact is that soldiers are now frisking people without 
search warrants. At this rate, the entire Fourth will be mooted.)

>
> After December 7th 1941 the USA and Canada interned all
> residents of Japanese descent and confiscated their property.  At
> the time it apparently was a good idea, today it appears very
> extreme.   What is happening today is still very minor and very likely
> to go away as people realize the stupidity of their current fears.

"At the time it apparently was a good idea"?

You are hopeless. Every one of the guards, judges, and processing 
officials should have been tried for kidnapping and then hung by the 
neck until he was dead.

(One reason I have been cynical dates back to 1969 when a teacher was 
piously explaining the Nuremberg precedent, that "just following orders" 
is no defense. I brought up the imprisonment of Japanese-ancestry and 
Italian-ancestry persons, without constitutional due process. My teacher 
just shrugged and said "We won the war, so it didn't apply to us.")

I never understood why the survivors of the American concentration camps 
didn't track down their captors and quietly kill them during the 50s.



> The airport paranoia is nothing new in a global sense, Americans
> have just not experienced it domestically.  Amsterdam airport has
> many soldier looking fellows with their automatics level and their
> fingers on the trigger.  In Singapore in 1980, the old airport, taking
> a photo would get you arrested.  Much the same in Jakarta until
> they opened the new airport in the mid-80s.  Same in India in the
> 1980s plus the metal detectors were so sensitive the iron in your
> blood set them off and everyone was patted down.

This nation is not one of those shitholes, a point you seem to be 
oblivious to.

We are talking about the Constitution, not what is commonplace in ad 
hocracies like Canada or in police states like Singapore and Indonesia.


--Tim May
"Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose,  is somehow morally superior to a woman 
explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"