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]

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".