The real price of freedom is that you give it to others, even those who disagree with you.
Most people aren’t willing to grant that. Even in America, this has always been controversial.
John Adams signed a Sedition Act, criminalizing political criticism. Abraham Lincoln arrested a Democratic Congressman, Clement Vanlandingham, who called for peace with the South. Germans were harassed in World War I, Japanese in World War II. There were Red Scares in the 1920s, the McCarthyism in the early years of the Cold War.
And so it is today. Once again we are faced with this key question. Will we pay the price of freedom?
Newt Gingrich, who seeks to become President of the United States, says no.
Newt Gingrich will not pay the price of his own liberty. Freedom for me but not for thee. He does not deserve his freedom. Neither does anyone who follows him.
To my eye, they are not Americans. They are just people who live in America.
This is a basic question, one which defines who we are, one I hope we all give the serious consideration
it deserves.
The real question is whether freedom really
works, or whether it should just be a flag we use to mask our national
self-interest.
Mr. Gingrich is going with the flag theory. Many
conservatives believe strongly that we won our great conflicts of the 20th
century despite our freedom, that we won them through military
force.
I think they’re wrong. I think we won because of freedom, because
freedom enabled the creativity that built our economy, our technology, and
our culture.
Ronald Reagan didn’t destroy the Soviet Union with Star Wars.
He tapped it with military spending, and it promptly collapsed out of its own internal contradictions with
human nature.
Now there are evil people out there. There are technologies
available now that can do severe harm to all life on this planet, if
unleashed by people with bad intent. (Or merely a profit motive. Or fear of The Other.)
But the answer is not to
restrict freedom. It is to embrace freedom. Those "evil people" are people.
They have children. They want to live, and want those children to
live.
The idea of a non-human, sub-human "other" who will "stop at
nothing" and whom we must protect ourselves from at all costs is a strawman,
designed to send us scurrying from freedom the way cockroaches scurry from
the light.
The strawman has always been invoked, throughout our history, by those who wish to turn freedom into its opposite, and transform America into a dictatorship of their own making. These were, and are, small-minded men, and profoundly un-American in their outlook. If you have principles you live by them.
Ultimately this is a question of how you view human nature. Gingrich and his ilk are like preachers who expect others to obey God while they go out and have a good time. The comparison is apt, because most of these preachers, like Ted Haggard, find their own souls to be evil. There was no contradiction in Haggard preaching against homosexuality on the one hand and committing homosexual acts on the other. He was always preaching against himself, seeing his own innermost self as evil, and thus quite willing to see evil in everyone else.
Freedom at its heart is the assumption that given freedom men and women will use it wisely.
So I say, go toward the light. Trust freedom. Don’t be afraid. Believe in your own
humanity, and the humanity of all people. Have faith. Without faith in
ourselves and our values, we have nothing.
Let Newt Gingrich and his ilk have absolute freedom of speech. But leave the rest of us free to ignore them. To be ignored, forgotten, unheard, unbidden — that is the fate men like Gingrich deserve.
These colors don’t run from freedom.
The one thing that is remotely appealing about The Open Source Thesis is that before offering an opinion on something, somebody could, presumably, go to the source rather than react to another’s filtered interpretation.
You can read the actual relevant remarks in context here and pretty quickly realize that Newt did not say anything like what you paraphrased above. Additionally, he cited an actual real-world event where the terrorists behaved like complete savages, not like human beings. It happened Dana. If you want to accuse the British government of making it up and the British media of being complicit, fine, but let’s be clear that that’s the argument, not that Newt erected a strawman.
Furthermore, the “offending” comment (as erroneously paraphrased, read it yourself) was in the context of discussing an extension to the Geneva Convention that would better address “irregulars” like we’ve encountered in the past 15 years. You may disagree with the proposal, but it’s the right way to try to handle (or not handle) the issue for the long term, as opposed to The Patriot Act or Roberto Gonzalez offering opinions about who is covered by the current Geneva Convention and who isn’t. My bet is that Western Europe will take a much more active role in clarifying such differences than we would given the opportunity.
But back to The Open Source Thesis… As a software developer, I often have my clients and customers ask me if some feature might be possible or bug might be fixable. A lesson I learned very quickly was to offer two opinions, and tell them they’ll get two. The first is off the cuff, based on my whole current hands-off understanding of things at the moment. The second is based on a thorough review of the relevant source. The second often differs from the first, so I tend to be very conservative in offering off-hand opinions.
I suspect that after actually looking at the source in this case(Gingrich’s speech), you may find a lot to disagree with, but you won’t reasonably conclude that he’s trying to turn us into Nazi Germany. I’d be quite interested in seeing your second opinion.
The one thing that is remotely appealing about The Open Source Thesis is that before offering an opinion on something, somebody could, presumably, go to the source rather than react to another’s filtered interpretation.
You can read the actual relevant remarks in context here and pretty quickly realize that Newt did not say anything like what you paraphrased above. Additionally, he cited an actual real-world event where the terrorists behaved like complete savages, not like human beings. It happened Dana. If you want to accuse the British government of making it up and the British media of being complicit, fine, but let’s be clear that that’s the argument, not that Newt erected a strawman.
Furthermore, the “offending” comment (as erroneously paraphrased, read it yourself) was in the context of discussing an extension to the Geneva Convention that would better address “irregulars” like we’ve encountered in the past 15 years. You may disagree with the proposal, but it’s the right way to try to handle (or not handle) the issue for the long term, as opposed to The Patriot Act or Roberto Gonzalez offering opinions about who is covered by the current Geneva Convention and who isn’t. My bet is that Western Europe will take a much more active role in clarifying such differences than we would given the opportunity.
But back to The Open Source Thesis… As a software developer, I often have my clients and customers ask me if some feature might be possible or bug might be fixable. A lesson I learned very quickly was to offer two opinions, and tell them they’ll get two. The first is off the cuff, based on my whole current hands-off understanding of things at the moment. The second is based on a thorough review of the relevant source. The second often differs from the first, so I tend to be very conservative in offering off-hand opinions.
I suspect that after actually looking at the source in this case(Gingrich’s speech), you may find a lot to disagree with, but you won’t reasonably conclude that he’s trying to turn us into Nazi Germany. I’d be quite interested in seeing your second opinion.