Justice Department censors Supreme Court ruling discussing dissent

[unixronin]

[Credit:  Various]

In its ongoing legal battle with the ACLU overthe Patriot Act, the Justice Department has seen fit to censor a portion of a freely publicly-available 1972 Supreme Court ruling which calls into question the validity of stifling dissent under the vague justification of "national security".

The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act.  Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations.  But in reality, what did they do?  They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.'  Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

The Memory Hole article includes links to many other documents in which the Justice Department has censored innocuous passages claiming the excuse of national security.  All you liberals who insist that the Second Amendment is unimportant and irrelevant, and it's the First Amendment that really protects all our freedoms, and they could never take that away?  Well, here's another salvo in that attack on the First Amendment that you keep saying could never happen.

Think hard about it, and do your dissenting while it's still legal to do so.

Comments

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

ten thousand, or ten million, at a time? Especially considering the case that in the event of an abuse of government severe enough to bring about an armed uprising, much of the armed forces and the National Guard would likely be on the side of the uprising?

This reminds me of Central America, the lamentable history of which I mentioned already. I'll add to that the examples of Poland and India, which threw off oppressors non-violently, and Palestine, which has not, violently.

The citizenry, together, cannot be outgunned by any government that is not willing to publicly slaughter large segments of its own population. (Granted, this isn't something that has historically given governments many qualms either.)

Indeed. One could just say, "Vicksburg." General Grant won battles, promotion, and eventually the Civil War largely on his willingness to expend more men's lives--including those of his own soldiers--than anyone else.

Under the winner-take-all system we use--which, for some reason, the framers built into the Constitution--we will be stuck with a two-party system. Additional parties thrive only with proportional representation; otherwise, the natural desire of voters to cast their vote for a party that has a reasonable chance of prevailing sweeps them into just-barely-more-than-one party. Instant runoff voting could change this, if widely adopted--and let's hope it is, because I don't like the Democratic Party much more than you do.

Your closing remark reminds me of the creditable old saw, "It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want, and get it." But with all due respect to you and that old saw, I think that attitude is perfect--for the primaries. When the general election comes along, it's time to fall back on Voltaire's aphorism, "the best is the enemy of the good."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of Central America, the lamentable history of which I mentioned already. I'll add to that the examples of Poland and India, which threw off oppressors non-violently, and Palestine, which has not, violently.

Revolution's the national sport in much of Central America, it seems, but all they ever seem to put in power is new strongmen as corrupt as the last, so they just replace one problem with another. I'm not sure what you're referring to with Poland, not knowing much of Poland's history. India is a good example of non-violent resistance succeeding, true; note that unlike, say, Soviet Russia, the British Empire was not willing to slaughter civilians en masse to retain power. Remember, too, not all of India's independence was gained peacefully; there was Mohandas Gandhi, but there was also the Sepoy Rebellion.

Palestine, frankly, is its own worst enemy. Palestine's problem is that the Palestinians don't really know what they want, but they're led by people who are quite willing to have them fight and die for it anyway while publicly deploring and denouncing the actions they ordered them to carry out. We're into the whole Middle Eastern culture issue again.

Looking at examples from the other side, Ireland has succeeded in one struggle after another over the centuries in taking back most of its own land from British control (albeit at great cost), and the Arabs under Lawrence successfully fought themselves free of the Ottoman Empire. And then of course there's America which freed itself of British colonial rule in 1776, Algeria which threw off French rule, and Vietnam which fought itself free of France even in the face of US military intervention. Russia has repeatedly tried to annex Finland, and the Finns have fought them to a bloody standstill every time, with such ferocity that the Russians eventually gave up. Tibet, on the other hand, has yet to free itself from its Chinese occupiers by peaceful protest.

(And on still another hand, there's various African republics which successfully threw off European rule only to impose more tyrannical rule on themselves than the oppressors they threw off.)

There's lots of examples for both sides of the argument; it's just a matter of which examples we pick. I think it's not unreasonable to summarize the situation like this: Peaceful rebellion sometimes works, and when it does, it is much to be preferred to armed insurrection. When it fails, however, the only options remaining are armed insurrection or to submit quietly to oppression. (And to quote Churchill, "It is better to die fighting as free men, than to live in slavery.")

One could just say, "Vicksburg." General Grant won battles, promotion, and eventually the Civil War largely on his willingness to expend more men's lives--including those of his own soldiers--than anyone else.

Indeed. The slaughter in the Civil War was terrible; in a very real sense, it was the first war fought with modern weapons, and the last fought with Naopelonic tactics. That's a bad combination, especially in a civil war, civil wars already tending to be more brutal and bloody than most....

Instant runoff voting could change this, if widely adopted...

Ah, yes! I've been hearing a little about San Francisco's "instant runoff", but I don't know any details on it. I assume it's some form of transferable-vote scheme. What do you know about it? I'd be interested to know how it works.

(As a side note, I presume you heard that Colorado has adopted proportional representation in its Electoral College votes....?)

When the general election comes along, it's time to fall back on Voltaire's aphorism, "the best is the enemy of the good."

I think this is an issue we'll have to just agree to differ on. It seems to me pointless to strive to get the best possible candidates you can in the primary, then return to voting for the second-to-worst in the actual election. If a candidate is worthy of your vote in the primary, they're worthy of your vote in the election. If you're not going to vote for them in the election, why vote for them in the primary?

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

San Francisco's instant-runoff voting works like this (I quote from the San Francisco Chronicle (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/26/SFVOTING.TMP)): "Voters list in order of preference their top three picks for the contested office. If no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is dropped from contention and the second-choice candidates on those ballots are moved to the top spot. The reconfigured ballots are then recounted. That process continues until a candidate gets a majority vote."

Changing your voting rationale between the primary and the general election makes sense to me; in a sense, it's a non-instant runoff. Imagine a traditional election in which four candidates are running. Conveniently enough, I prefer A to B, B to C, and so on down the line (I really detest D). So I vote for A. Unfortunately, A and C are the big losers in the primary; B and D are the winners, in the sense that while neither gets a majority each is put on the ballot for the general election. In that election, if I vote for A, I might as well vote for my dog--none of them will win; if I vote for B, I won't be voting for my top choice, but I'll be increasing the chance of my second choice winning.

Or to take a less abstract and less political example, suppose my family and I are deciding which movie to watch. Proposed are something with Sonia Braga, something with Emma Thompson, and something with Kevin Costner. I favor the Sonia Braga picture, am lukewarm about Emma Thompson, and absolutely detest Kevin Costner. Unfortunately, no one else shares my opinion; the rest of the family is evenly split between Emma Thompson and Kevin Costner. I throw in my lot with the Emma Thompson faction; it's not my first choice, but at least I won't have to witness Costner's brain-dead mush-mouth parody of acting.

I can see that this analysis might fail if there were a sufficient number of candidates, and a huge interval separated your top choice(s) from those capable of winning a majority of the votes--if the choice were not between B and D, but between ZZZY and ZZZZ--or between Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson--I could maybe see sitting out the election, or the movie. But the parties that put up ZZZY and ZZZZ for election don't interpret our staying home as a cue to put up more attractive candidates. They go where the votes are, as both parties' more-moderate-than-thou conventions attest. I think if we want better candidates, we have to take a behaviorist approach: reward the party with our votes when it puts up anyone marginally better than the other guy, even if neither of them's much good. Voting for Kerry isn't as much to my taste as voting for Kucinich or even Dean, but I like it better than letting Bush win without a fight, and after the election I can work with others to push Kerry in Kucinich's direction.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

OK, so it is indeed a single-transferrable-vote system. That's not unlike what Ireland uses, and in fact I have to wonder if they based it off the Irish system. I think the Irish system is the first transferrable-vote system put into national use, so it probably makes a good example for study, and by all accounts it seems to work well.

I see the point of your primary-vs-election example, and I wasn't thinking the primary part through. Clearly if your candidate in the primary does not gain his party's nomination, writing him in for the election is a futile exercise.
However, I'm still not sure the logic is complete. I infer in your example that A and B are of the same party, and likewise C and D.

Now assume a third party with candidates E and F (or maybe the third party doesn't hold a primary, and simply runs E). Suppose further that you prefer E to both B and D, even if (for the sake of argument) not A or C. Do you still cast your vote, come election time, for B?

I follow the Voltaire argument of "the best is the enemy of the good." But I think that in the same vein, "not worse" is the enemy of "better".

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

p.s.: You have me thinking and thinking about the Second Amendment. I'm still inclined to think that the people's-defense-against-government-tyranny rationale was a fantasy even back in 1787--I think at least some of the framers thought so too--but I'm also inclined to think that most gun-control groups' methods of intepreting it into impotence are fantasies too. Like I said, I'm thinking about it, and I owe thanks to anyone who gets this old brain revolving about anything.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think it was a lot more reasonable back then, when the government was small and did not own a standing army and multiple armed police agencies.

That said, I think there's fantasists on both sides of the issue. I've seen some ostensibly pro-2nd-amendment arguments that so obviously don't hold water they give everyone else involved in the debate a bad name.