Re: Drones, privacy and private property
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gunfighter14e2</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Make no mistake, lines are being drawn, and sides are being chosen, just like when this nation was first founded. Strange, it's the same issue that started it back when.</div></div>It always is.
Thomas Jefferson said that if we do not exercise our ethical muscle it will become soft from lack of use and fail us when we need it most. There has always been this tension between the normal and the difficult: We see it our legal system, in the conflict between what is legal and what is moral. Of course, it would be naïve to assume that it is possible to avoid the necessity of politics within a system or a society.
After World War II, Albert Camus was asked why he had chosen resistance to the Nazis over collaboration when so many of his countrymen chose abdication and personal survival. He replied that the question made no sense because he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else. He added: ‘I understood [about myself] that I detested less the violence than the institutions of violence.’ Camus was not a contrarian. He never disagreed for the pleasure of it. For him dissent was not an end in itself, but the mark of deeper values.
But unlike Camus, ordinary people who don’t have the stomach for the occasional nasty realities of politics retreat into themselves and choose not to exercise their ethical muscle. When they do this they act to the detriment of the system and all its participants.
And unlike Vichy France, our system has checks and balances which, although flawed, are designed to work together to achieve justice. Those of us trying to achieve justice within a politicized system must realize that it can be a tricky game with murky rules. But the system does not require that we always win, only that we participate. Because when its leaders are not the nice people they appear to be, those who cannot defend themselves in virtuous terms erode their power by earning the disregard of the people.
Meanwhile, today everyone continues to struggle with the same old question, one that has been with us since Gregory the Great in the sixth century, of whether or not to obey when an order is unjust.
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Gunfighter14e2</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Make no mistake, lines are being drawn, and sides are being chosen, just like when this nation was first founded. Strange, it's the same issue that started it back when.</div></div>It always is.
Thomas Jefferson said that if we do not exercise our ethical muscle it will become soft from lack of use and fail us when we need it most. There has always been this tension between the normal and the difficult: We see it our legal system, in the conflict between what is legal and what is moral. Of course, it would be naïve to assume that it is possible to avoid the necessity of politics within a system or a society.
After World War II, Albert Camus was asked why he had chosen resistance to the Nazis over collaboration when so many of his countrymen chose abdication and personal survival. He replied that the question made no sense because he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else. He added: ‘I understood [about myself] that I detested less the violence than the institutions of violence.’ Camus was not a contrarian. He never disagreed for the pleasure of it. For him dissent was not an end in itself, but the mark of deeper values.
But unlike Camus, ordinary people who don’t have the stomach for the occasional nasty realities of politics retreat into themselves and choose not to exercise their ethical muscle. When they do this they act to the detriment of the system and all its participants.
And unlike Vichy France, our system has checks and balances which, although flawed, are designed to work together to achieve justice. Those of us trying to achieve justice within a politicized system must realize that it can be a tricky game with murky rules. But the system does not require that we always win, only that we participate. Because when its leaders are not the nice people they appear to be, those who cannot defend themselves in virtuous terms erode their power by earning the disregard of the people.
Meanwhile, today everyone continues to struggle with the same old question, one that has been with us since Gregory the Great in the sixth century, of whether or not to obey when an order is unjust.
