| Home of the free? |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|02:08 am] |
I'm always getting accused of "going to bat for sex offenders". That's funny, I was never accused of "going to bat for terrorists" when I was opposed to The Patriot Act - I wonder what the difference is.
Let me say this though, it has nothing to do with sex offenders, it has to do with freedom. These are just the ones that people in Amerika feel comfortable with stripping away those rights. The restrictions placed on sex offenders read like an Orwellian/fascist's wet dream. We snapped out of it with the Communist thing - will we be able to snap out of it this time around?
People are comfortable with this witch hunt/protections based under the assumption that it will never affect them. I think people who support these types of laws in innocence are under a few delusions:
1. They believe that the laws will never be misued
2. They believe that everyone who has been convicted of a sex crime truly deserve no rights
3. They don't seem to realize that a seemingly minor offense, including victimless crimes can land you on a sex offender registry
Let's cast aside the effectiveness of the following, the fairness to true offenders and speculation on misuse of these laws, even though an exploration of any of these would be sufficient for me to reject these laws. No, let's say - do you want to be one false accusation away from the following?
1. Reporting your residence at all times - and have it publicly available. Not being able to sleep anywhere else without special permission.
2. Explicitly waive all rights of confidentiality
3. Submit for polygraph tests at one's own expense
4. Specific social interactions must be reported
5. Swimming pools, shopping malls, theaters, festivals all require advance permission from an agent
6. Cannot work with 1000 feet of an establishment which sells sexually explicit material or device
7. Cannot own or use a computer without prior permission
8. Unlimited warrantless searching of one's property
9. Arbitrary Curfew at discretion of "agent"
10. Cannot drink alcohol and can be tested at any time for any reason (Results of alcohol test cannot be contested)
11. If determined appropriate by your agent, a GPS tracking system will be installed on your person, at your own expense.
I couldn't make this shit up - this is from the law code for South Carolina Sex Offenders.
You shouldn't sleep well at night in this country. There is a good 3% of the population, the Sarah Palins, who truly do not believe in the value of humanity and like to exploit fear for the purpose of furthering their own agenda and when at least 50% of the population welcomes or is ambivalent to discrimination against a minority from the shouts of their neocon leaders, it puts us all in a precarious situation.
One of my biggest fears is that an organization exists now to ensure that everyone has a vice or a distraction, whether it be running a business (accumulation of wealth) or just trying to survive. Those who are on the defensive are going to be fighting for their own rights, selfishly, not the rights of others. Things like the pointless attacks on gay marriage and insistence of denial of health care to the middle class and the like seem to me to be a distraction to take care of the masses. The remaining "rebels" can be discredited, disgraced, wrongly accused or disabled (probably not killed - I imagine a more subtle and undetectable means of 'taking out' dissidents exist). Sex offender is for all intents and purposes an irrefutable title which can be accredited to anyone on the account of a supposed victim. And it exists because cable news and talk radio have succeeded at convincing the public that they are under attack.
I don't think this is some sort of pre-thought out conspiracy or anything like that (no Illuminati or other silliness). Just Right wing shortsightedness; they choose a particular problem and then select from a list of ways to address the problem: Make it illegal, kill em all, shut em up. The main problem is that they are often not honest and up front about what problem they are trying to solve. So they could easily see that people are scared of pedophiles, and create legislation to protect people from sex offenders claiming that it is to keep them safe and resolve their concern. But what if their motivation from the beginning was the elimination of dissidents, or maybe simpler than that even, just making sure they get re-elected?
I don't consider social conservativism a unified belief system so much as an opposition movement containing every disparate case against a logical liberal basis that centers on the value of freedom and the human. And while the individual arguments themselves may have merit, they do not represent a consistent stance. The arguments against health care reform could be used in favor of abortion. The arguments for abortion could be used against the death penalty. The arguments for right to own guns could be used to eliminate FCC regulation. This aspect of conservativism as delivered by Fox News to millions of people doesn't seem to be noticed by anyone else. I consider conservatives to be the opposition to logic and progress, almost by definition, in what is essentially a power grab from the people who can be manipulated by nonsensical ramblings. Those are truly freethinkers don't have much particular desire to rally behind causes that don't affect them so long as causes which do affect them are being constantly invented by The Right who is so quick to ensure that their position is always on the offensive, no matter the cost.
I don't doubt the intentions of certain conservative citizens; it is specifically the policy makers that I have an issue with. I've heard reasonably intelligent conservatives argue that people need to die for the good of the system and if we let the government take over health care they are going to let people die that they don't feel are worthy of living. This is not two separate subjects, or even two separate correspondences . . . this is their defense of the opposition to health care reform - they can't even make sense from one sentence to the next - do people need to die or not?
I think that what I perceive as them not making sense is actually a bit more of a failure to communicate, though it has taken some time for me to realize this. In retrospect, I was able to conclude that what this individual really meant was that merit-based distribution of health care is beneficial and the basis for that distribution is itself wealth. Since he intends on himself being wealthy, it shouldn't matter if anyone with less money is made to suffer by a defective system. This type of selfishness seems to be prevalent in all humanity, not just conservatives - though I've found many "ultra liberals" like myself to be generally charitable. The problem is, that without the drive and belief that money is the ultimate good in the world, the ultra-liberals are not much of a force to be reckoned with, particularly in the eyes of people who have found a way to base the merit of an individual almost entirely off their monetary value.
And I don't give a shit. Me and 40 million others that think like me, I just wanna study Japanese, teach my daughter to read and be left alone. The last thing I wanna have to worry about is Freedom; we are supposed to live in a free country. THIS ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE AN ISSUE.
But when everybody is passive about freedom, they don't care about domestic spying, domestic troop deployment, internal border control checkpoints (just an excuse to search your car without a warrant), politically motivated dispersals of rallies and modern day Scarlet Letter treatment - you don't need 50.1% of conservatives to be opposed to actual freedom . . you just need 1, and shitload of trusting, or scared, dumb or complacent people to go along with it.
The day that it inconveniences you, there will already be a mechanism in place for shutting you up and by then it will be too late.
I don't care about sex offenders, perse. I care about people and freedom - and I think many others don't.
I wanted to leave this damned country, to somewhere that they do not condemn their leader for not being arrogant, to somewhere that we do not cheer the dissolution of freedom, to somewhere that people who care about their fellow man also vote, to somewhere where shows about civilian initiated entrapment schemes are not tolerated, to somewhere that thinks it's worse to show someone be beaten to death (a snuff film) on Glenn Beck than seeing a nipple shield during half time. You know . . . somewhere that things make sense.
I write one letter about freedom to a judge, and it gets mentioned on the news? Do I really stand out so much? Maybe the country is already gone.
There's a part of me that has hope though. I'm not impervious to patriotism, I just need to feel like the entire government isn't run by a bunch of assholes. And Fox News can bitch about Obama's apologetics, but it was long overdue. If the world loses confidence in the dollar, we're shot as a world power. And people were fed up with Bush, and now in less than 1 year 20% of all people who called themselves Republican have stopped doing so.
I like Obama. And as much as it scares me, Amerika is and always have been my home. So long as I have family here, I cannot leave.
I want what all people [should] want - to make the world a better place.
In the words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I've got to say about that." |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
luctheperverse's journal
tired
angry
calm