Why the End Does Not Justify the Means
Why don't we torture accused criminals in order to find who is guilty? Because the end does not justify the means.
It has become clear that many politicians and lawyers, and a few real people, don’t understand what is meant by The End Does Not Justify the Means.
They act like people are saying the desire to have pancakes cannot justify making batter. But this is more specific. It’s about good versus evil. In their unfortunate perspective, caring about what is right must seem insane.
But the truth is that this phrase sums up one of the most important principles of ethics and morality:
It means that there are certain fundamental principles that are “right”, “good”, et cetera, that are essential to those conditions…and you cannot justify violating them because you have some “right” or “good” goal in mind.
For example, you cannot have justice, unless you adhere to the principles of justice; It’s not OK to do unjust things to people simply because you have a just goal in mind.
This is a basic philosophical rule that is ignored or denied by almost all evil people you will find out there, and supported by almost all good ones. Marxists coined the modern use of the phrase “the end justifies the means”, and naturally they and their socialist spinoffs were responsible for the vast majority of all great evils, for the past century.
Evil Men
Joseph Stalin, for example, justified the deaths of tens of millions of his own people, by saying that the population was too large for (relatively inefficient) Communism to support. The mass death left Soviet society more sustainable. Did the betterment of millions of peoples’ lives justify the murder of millions of other people? According to Consequentialist socialists; yes.
Previously, the Dominican order of Catholicism was an advocate of the idea that the end justifies the means (in spirit), and it just so happens that they went on to conduct, among other great evils, the Inquisition. It was literally claimed that you may be saving the soul of the man you tortured or murdered in the name of God, so it was OK. All the ways the current Pope is less popular than his predecessor appear to center around his being of that Dominican mindset. In fact, the position he held before becoming pontiff was the Head of the Office of Inquisition, I kid you not…it had simply changed its name for PR reasons.
Likewise, when Machiavelli used that phrase in his satirical indictment of the evils and abuses of Feudal government, The Prince, he succeeded in hitting the nail on the head as to what is most wrong and unjust.
Required by Good
In reality, the end does not justify the means, in part because the long-term outcome of ignoring principles in order to buy short-term results is a failure of your own goals.
The idea that the wise principles override the short-sighted goal (a form of Deontology, if you like them thar fancified words) is why courts will overturn convictions on technicalities, one of the few good and just things remaining in the US legal system. Any honest — or as close as they get –prosecutor will tell you that the reason they hate that condition is how it keeps them from breaking rules and simply gambling punishment, in order to convict people they think are guilty. They are restrained from unjust acts, by this absolute enforcement of the principles of justice, even though it may let a guilty man walk in the short term.
When you have a principle, like “do not violate someone else’s property”, it cannot be overridden because you have some end in mind like “but the wealth I steal from his safe will benefit several other people who deserve it more”.
Like setting aside money for bills and emergencies instead of partying all of your paycheck away, sticking to the principles of what is good, right, and just produces the best outcome in the long run. You are investing in your ultimate goal by sticking to it when the going gets tough. When you panic and abandon your principles for a short-term benefit, you end up making things worse in the end.
THAT is why the end does not justify the means.
Are the Muslim Brotherhood Actually Bad for Egypt?
Muslim Brotherhood kicks puppies and eats babies, but they don't have a man-sized safe in their office
Neocons and other violent interventionists keep talking about how bad it would be if the Egyptian people were to gain their freedom, because there is popular support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and if they were part of the government that would, obviously, be a really bad thing…even worse than a dictator like Mubarak who outlaws many religious beliefs and slaughters people for their political ideology.
But wait…it’s not “obvious” that this organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, is any worse than the Christian Coalition in the US. And America doesn’t deserve a dictator just to keep the Christian Coalition out of political power. What’s more, it seems the Muslim Brotherhood is usually more akin to the Salvation Army, except they’re Muslim instead of Christian. Let’s look deeper, and see which interpretation is true.
Who Are They?
What is this group, so ominously touted by the neocon supporters of Hosni Mubarak?
Just like the Christian Coalition, it is a voluntary social and political movement, organized around the idea that followers of their religion should choose to live by the tenets of that religion.
People who think that a religion’s members should live by their beliefs? If anything, that seems like a truism, to me. A “well, no duh” sort of thing.
Also like the Christian Coalition, some of its members, sometimes, want laws passed that happen to support their morality. I don’t like that in either case, but I will fight against anyone who wants to imposing a dictator over people who would vote for such laws. Hopefully, you will too, since the Christian Coalition voters are American.
And let’s be real, it’s not always bad if religious beliefs become law: the Ten Commandments that both Muslims and Christians accept include prohibition of murder and theft. Do I want murder legal because a religion wants them banned?
Of course not.
Everyone Agrees
Before we get into the claims against the Muslim Brotherhood, let’s mention the part that is not denied by anyone:
What everyone agrees about, regarding the Muslim Brotherhood, is that they mostly do community service, charitable efforts, and other good works. I think even the worst neocon would admit this, if you pinned him down on the subject. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people, of diverse cultures and races, who are alive right now solely because of the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood. Again, this is not even disputed.
But what about their Dark Side?
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are charitable, but they still seem evil overall. If the Muslim Brotherhood is like that, I’ll oppose them.
The "Be Prepared" Emblem of Death, replete with the infamous Green Stars of Evil
The Accusations
Many Conservatives and Liberals in the media seem perplexed by the claim that Egypt should remain a dictatorship, but whenever they have a neocon on, or that Israeli ambassador, or some “former CIA officer”, they’re told that it’s because of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is accused of three general things:
Be Prepared
Glenn Beck was shouting, the other day, about how the Muslim Brotherhood’s motto on their website is “Be Prepared”.
Well, yes, I’m not sure you could be more obviously, patently evil than to have the motto Be Prepared. To the right, you can see a variation of this logo. It is for another religious organization, that requires its members to take an oath of obedience to their god much like the Muslim Brotherhood does. Worse, the bearers of that symbol are, unlike the Society of Muslim Brothers, actually members of an openly paramilitary organization.
Surely such symbols should be banned, along with target and sniper scope graphics.
Of course the Boy Scouts will probably object.
To be fair, the thing the Society of Muslim Brothers emphasize that Egyptians to be prepared for, right now, is war with Israel.
Beck seemed to infer that this means they’re planning to attack Israel…which makes me worry about his reading comprehension, because the quotes he read off their own website to “prove” this clearly were saying that the government of Israel might attack Egypt for overthrowing the dictator they’d helped keep in power for 30 years. What they say is that the Mubarak government can be brought down by cutting off the gas pipeline to Israel, which will bankrupt Mubarak’s dictatorship…but that this will cause war with Israel. In other words, Israel will attack, because they want the gas and, the Muslim Brotherhood believes, will even cause the death and destruction of war to get it.
I don’t blame any of Israel’s neighbors for fearing that it will go to war with them. It’s done so before. The people of Israel, themselves, fear this of their own government. The recent threat had been an unprovoked attack against Iran, but now Egypt is the popular target. I join with the people of Israel and the Society of Muslim Brothers in opposing any violent aggression on the part of Israel against any other country.
To be fair, I and most Israelis, Jews, Egyptians, Muslims, Coptic Christians, Protestants, Catholics, atheists, and every other non-sociopath, oppose all initiation of aggression, by any country or person against any other. We’re opposed by the neocons and other self-described Marxists, but that’s another debate.
While we’re at it, Beck keeps mentioning Islamic Socialism, a bizarre fringe movement that goes against the basic belief of Islamic fundamentalism that socialism is evil. As it happens, the Muslim Brotherhood is on the “socialism is evil” side. They believe in voluntary charity, not coercive socialist government like Mubarak and Saddam Hussein imposed.
Sinead O'Conner crazily associating all Catholics with the IRA terrorists
They’re Muslims
Then there’s the claim that the Muslim Brotherhood is evil because its members believe in…well…Islam. If you’re one of the poor rubes who’s fallen for the “Islam is a religion of evil” scam, I don’t think there’s much that will convince you otherwise.
The Koran saying something like “kill any unbeliever who supports tyranny over innocents or Muslims” gets quoted out of context as “kill any unbeliever”, but that contextual lie has been pointed out plenty of times by now, you should have been capable of learning, and responsible enough to do so.
The few craziest, most old-fashioned Muslim rules are no worse than the crazier Jewish or Christian rules. Should we all sacrifice doves when our babies are born? Stone women who have sex out of wedlock? Burn witches? Those aren’t just Islamic rules, they’re old Christian and Jewish rules, too. And the vast majority of followers of all three religions have outgrown such nonsense.
Likewise, like how everyone who’s murdered an abortion doctor is Christian, but it does not mean Christianity is murderous, so it is with Muslims who kill people in the name of their religion. The Catholic terrorists murdering random Protestants because of their religion in Ireland don’t prove anything about their religion, and neither do Islamic terrorists.
But, even more fundamentally than this, it’s hypocritical for anyone to claim that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to govern themselves because of their religion, when so many in the socialist world hate Christianity the same way, and think that Americans, who are majority Christian, are similarly unable to govern themselves. Should we have tyranny imposed on us, to keep Christian mores from becoming law? Again I say “no”, and I’m not hypocritical enough to turn around and deny another country or religion the same right.
It’s also worth noting that the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni, while the Islamic Revolution in Iran is Shi’ite. That’s important because these two groups are oppose each other completely. It’s not like Protestant vs Catholic…they literally see each other as Satanists. There’s never going to be any real collaboration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the current Iranian government. They’re more likely to help overthrow the Iranian tyranny, too.
And they’re also the most spiritual, historically least violent form of Sunni Islam, they are Sufi. To quote a previous article here:
Pretty much all of the terrorist organizations in the world that are focused on the United States are Wahhabi, funded and trained by our allies in Saudi Arabia, and often closely coordinated with our allies in the Pakistani military.
Wahhabism is a crackpot fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam. Think of Sunni as being like Protestantism, a relatively liberal branch of the religion overall, and Wahhabism as being like the Protestants who dance with snakes and talk in tongues.
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the terrorist organizations in the world that are Islamic at all are Shi’ite. This is the second of the three branches of Islam, and the most basic one, with an older lineage than Sunni Islam. Think of that as being somewhat like Catholicism…most Shi’ites are peaceful, but you have the crazies, like the Irish Republican Army is for Catholicism. You can’t really blame the rest for those nutjobs in the IRA targeting other peoples and religions.
And then you have the Sufi. These are a bit like the Mormons are to Christianity. They’re a “third way” sort of group, very peaceful and focused a lot on mysticism and spirituality, not the practical mechanics of the Big Two. No terrorist organizations, in the whole world, are Sufi. Some Muslims say they’re so different that the Sufi aren’t even Muslims, at all.
In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood are in a struggle against the violent, hateful Wahhabi movement, as well as considering themselves the polar opposite of Shia. In fact, the “Jihadi” movement of Al Qaeda and their ilk are excluded from the Egyptian uprising, perhaps because the Muslim Brotherhood are a part of it.
They’re Out to Get You!!!
So that just leaves crazy conspiracy theories: The Muslim Brotherhood secretly wants to bring about apocalypse, supports assassination of people they think are evil, et cetera.
I’ve seen more credible evidence of the fundamentalist Christians supporting those exact same things. In fact, I have personally known wealthy, powerful Christians in the US who are part of the Christian Eschatologist movement, and literally believe that they should try to bring about Armageddon, to hurry Jesus’ return, by supporting evil, oppressive government.
But in both Christian and Muslim cases, I assume that there are fringe elements who are like that, but that I can’t assume the whole group does, since it disavows them adamantly.
The 15 Principles of Egyptian and American Founding Fathers
In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood is so against those things that it has “15 Principles of Agreement” that it wants to institute in Egypt, that you would support, too.
The only disagreement the Founding Fathers of America would have with the Muslim Brotherhood’s 15 Principles is that Thomas Jefferson and friends opposed a standing army and standing police force. Is anyone seriously going to blame the Muslim Brotherhood for implicitly endorsing those two forces, but requiring them to stay out of politics?
The 15 principles could have been written by the Founding Fathers...but they might have pared it down to 10
Here are the 15 principles the Muslim Brotherhood says it wants for Egypt, each one summed up:
- Nobody may govern except at the consent of the people
- Free and fair elections
- Freedom of personal and religious conviction
- Freedom of establishing religious rites.
- Freedom of expression and the press
- The right to form and exercise political parties
- The freedom of assembly, as long as there’s no violence
- The right to hold peaceful demonstrations
- The right to a regularly elected, representative government
- The right of every man and woman to vote
- The right of every citizen to run for election and hold office
- The right to a truly independent judiciary, no special courts except for legitimate internal military affairs
- Prosecutors, public defenders, and criminal investigators must be three independent groups, from each other and the Minister of Justice, and anyone accused should have the right to appeal.
- The military must stay out of politics, only defending the nation’s external security.
- The police must only protect society, and is banned from interfering in politics or with political opposition
Please take a moment to read the full text of the 15 Principles of Agreement of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I wish our own government seemed to believe in these 15 principles.
Let’s make every elected or appointed official in the United States include them in his oath of office. And every government bureaucrat, while we’re at it.
If even a large segment of the Muslim Brotherhood believe at least somewhat in the 15 Principles of Agreement, then they’re probably no worse than our own government. And I see no evidence that they’re any worse. Individuals in that movement, yes…same as every other movement. But not the overall social organization.
Should we, in America, continue our government’s habit of supporting dictators in our name, like Mubarak, just in case the Muslim Brotherhood might be popular there?
Not even if they’d turned out to be “bad”.
It was ironic that I saw the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, the other day, quote Mubarak as paraphrasing Douglas Casey, that American foreign aid is “a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries“. He seems to have been mockingly referring to his own receipt of sixty billion dollars, from US taxpayers, over the past few decades.
This needs to stop.
It’s Not Even an Effing Mosque
The official story…to my puzzlement, not contradicted by even the people against it…is that some Muslims, who may or may not be secretly part of a terrorist organization or something, are building a mosque across from where the World Trade Center was destroyed by some Muslims.
If this were the truth, I’d be sympathetic with the hue and cry against it.
But it’s not. The above story is absolutely false, even in its basic facts.
It’s Not a Mosque
This is the Park51 building, as planned. Does it look like a mosque, to you?
First, the Park51 building won’t be a mosque. It will be a “community center” that will contain, like a Catholic community center, a 500-seat auditorium, theater, performing arts center, fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, childcare area, bookstore, culinary school, art studio, food court, September 11th memorial, and a prayer area. Sounds more like a YMCA, to me.
Now nobody calls a Christian community center a church, of course. Even though it contains a chapel, it’s simply not a church.
And an Islamic community center one is not really a mosque.
The People Building it Are Sufi
Pretty much all of the terrorist organizations in the world that are focused on the United States are Wahhabi, funded and trained by our allies in Saudi Arabia, and often closely coordinated with our allies in the Pakistani military.
Wahhabism is a crackpot fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam. Think of Sunni as being like Protestantism, a relatively liberal branch of the religion overall, and Wahhabism as being like the Protestants who dance with snakes and talk in tongues.
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the terrorist organizations in the world that are Islamic at all are Shi’ite. This is the largest of the three branches of Islam, and the most basic one, with an older lineage than Sunni Islam. Think of that as being somewhat like Catholicism…most Shi’ites are peaceful, but you have the crazies, like the Irish Republican Army is for Catholicism. You can’t really blame the rest for those nutjobs in the IRA targeting other peoples and religions.
And then you have the Sufi. These are a bit like the Mormons are to Christianity. They’re a “third way” sort of group, very peaceful and focused a lot on mysticism and spirituality, not the practical mechanics of the Big Two. No terrorist organizations, in the whole world, are Sufi. Some Muslims say they’re so different that the Sufi aren’t even Muslims, at all.
The people building the Park51 community center across from the World Trade Center are Sufi.
“Muslims” Didn’t Attack on 9-11, Specific Crackpots Did
Remember when those guys blew up a Federal building in Oklahoma City? The OKC Bombing?
They were Catholic. Did “Christians” blow it up?
What if people had then protested that a Mormon Temple couldn’t be built across from the ruins, because “Christians attacked us there, it’s adding insult to injury!”
Associating the Mormons with some Catholics (they were) who attacked America on that day would be insane. Since we understand Christianity here, we see that immediately.
But hey, at least it’d be an actual Mormon temple. This isn’t even a mosque we’re talking about here.
Sinead O'Conner crazily associating all Catholics with the IRA terrorists
So OK, what if it was a YMCA (that’s the Young Men’s Christian Association), being built across from where the Irish Republican Army had slaughtered a bunch of Protestants?
Protesting because the YMCA is Christian like the IRA would be laughable…because we understand the huge difference.
Well, the difference between the Sufi community center and the Wahhabi terrorists is like multiplying the OKC/Mormon difference TIMES the IRA/YMCA difference.
Funny, both of the most obvious Christian Terrorist examples I came up with were Catholic. Does this mean Catholics are terrorists? Hopefully, you have enough sense to realize it has nothing to do with Catholicism, even though the IRA actually believe it does.
The same is true of even the two branches of Islam that have terrorists in them. But it’s triply true of the Sufi, THE ONE BRANCH, of the three, that has NO terrorist organizations at all.
Nobody wanted to build ANYTHING in that spot, from the day it was damaged by debris on 9-11, until these Sufi decided to build Park51, their equivalent of a YMCA, there.
And we’re going to throw a tantrum about it? We should be high-fiving them, instead.
The Big Bang Theory Does Not Represent Science
(Caption: Cut the Creator some Slack)
Anyone puzzled by how some Americans don’t take science seriously need look no farther than how few scientists, themselves, take the scientific method seriously.
There is no better example of that credibility gap than the Big Bang Theory.
And this is the worst possible place for the flaw to occur, because the Big Bang has become the poster child for “science is smart, religion is stupid”…yet it’s not actually science.
Even my favorite sitcom, wherein some producer had the crazy nerve to try to create a show around the situation of INTELLIGENT people, The Big Bang Theory, assumes its name (apparently) as an attempt to show intellectual, potential viewers that it’s for them, not the common proles.
But the Big Bang Theory is pseudoscience, at best.
Bad
By the rules of hard science, it’s not even a theory. A theory can be tested in a way that would be sure to fail if it were wrong. This, with the Big Bang, is impossible so far. So it doesn’t qualify. It is a hypothesis.
For supposed scientists to refer to it as a theory is akin to Catholic priests and bishops referring to a contemporary televangelist as a Saint. There are strict rules for sainthood, and for scientific theoryhood, and if you just go tossing either word around you discredit the whole genre. Saint Tammy Fae Baker would undermine the concept of Christian sainthood exactly the way the Big Bang Theory undermines the concept of cosmogony as a science.
Worse
But it’s worse than that; the Big Bang Hypothesis is not just treated with the unearned dignity of being a “theory”, but even like a fact, despite having failed even the basic test of prediction.
Original big bang-based predictions of the temperature of the universe, its expansion, and the even-ness of background radiation all failed…but, in violation of the principles of science, bureaucrats just turned around and reverse-engineered new predictions that matched the existing observations.
But even if they had not, no theory EVER rises to the level of fact, based solely on its matching of predictions.
To quote Stephen Hawking:
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
You don’t have to go as far as Anthropogenic Global Warming, to find scientists treating failed hypotheses as Settled Science, which is denied by not only Stephen Hawking above, but the Fallibilist roots of hard science.
Laughable
But it gets worse, still, when extreme atheists try to trot out The Big Bang as a solution for the Prime Mover paradox.
See, one of the arguments used by Creationists is that everything in the universe apparently needs to be caused by something else. Things don’t just happen out of nothing, there’s always a “cause and effect”. This means that, if the universe ever had a start at all, HOW it could start seems impossible to explain. There has to have been to be a First Event, that was not caused by anything at all, and that should be impossible.
“Science has solved that with the Big Bang”, the claim is made.
But it’s untrue.
In fact, the Big Bang hypothesis brings focus on the very power of the Prime Mover paradox. It appears to have the whole universe go back to a single point, but then does nothing to explain why it was AT that point in the first place. There is no way to explain why the potential for the vacuum fluctuation that (maybe) produced the Big Bang existed in the first place.
If the Creator of the universe were a timeless Christian god, perhaps that’s what caused the Big Bang. Sadly for science, this makes as much sense as anything the mainstream cosmologists have proposed to start it, so far*.
When people stick to the rules of hard science, they have an absolute right to say “see, this produces sounder results and more verifiable Truth than religion”, when it does. The problem is that modern “scientists” quite often are NOT. They don’t stick by those rules, and therefore earn the disdain that people heap on them.
Oh, and let’s not forget that I’m using the criteria of real science to argue this. Among the people who agree with me are Einstein, a Scientific Realist who opposed the instrumentalist pseudoscience of modern quantum physics, Schroedinger, whose famous cat experiment was intended to mock unscientific physics, and the father of modern hard science, Karl Popper whom Stephen Hawking is paraphrasing in his quote, above.
Next time some horrified Discovery Channel /NPR pundit moans quaveringly that “a majority of Americans don’t even believe in science over religion”, or the downright sneering at global warming claims, remember that this is as much the fault of the supposed scientists breaking their own rules, as anything else.
_________________
Superstring hypotheses say the Big Bang is just the collision of “branes” (think membranes) in a much larger, more complex 10+ dimensional universe. But, while this provides the closest thing to a Unified Theory, it’s mostly ignored by the mainstream cosmologists. And, anyway, it does nothing to explain why the whole multiverse exists in the first place.
Why Don’t We Waterboard Criminals?
The original version of this article, with the horrifying, graphic depictions of neocons in their natural habitat, is here.
The neocons have been making a big deal of how waterboarding and other “psychological” tormenting of prisoners is not actually torture, unless you cause permanant, serious harm or death.
They also say that we GAIN things by using these “harsh interrogation techniques”, so that makes it OK:
The End Justifies the Means.
Well, yes, that is a Marxist/socialist slogan, which has produced millions of deaths and more suffering than any other idea in history.
And sure, real Conservatives spend their lives fighting against the End Justifies the Means philosophy…but we’re talking about neocons, RiNOs. The Neocon movement originates with self-described Trostyites, which is why they still have most of the underlying Marxist mindsets.
Anyway, I’m wondering why we’re wasting this technicality, in our own justice system.
Why Not?
If we can harm suspected terrorists in case it might make us safer, why not suspected criminals?
Protect Us from Criminals
Why not waterboard a possible serial killer, and then flush his bible (don’t ask me why so many psychopaths are strongly religious) down the toilet, in order to find out who he’s killed?
Why not strip an accused child molester naked, have women laugh at him, leave him in a forty degree room (still nude) all night with no sleep, in order to find out whether he did, and to whom?
These things are not torture, and anyway they are justified because we profit from them.
The neocon talk show hosts, and surviving neocon politicians (vote carefully, next primary) will quickly protest “but the 8th amendment bans that”. Apparently, interrogation can be cruel and unusual, yet not be torture, even though many court cases citing the 8th amendment actually bandy about the T-word interchangably.
But then we need only use a constitutional amendment to revoke this man-made priveledge.
Or why even bother…why not pass a law suspending the citizenship of anyone accused of a serious crime? And then rent space in an Indian/riverboat casino to conduct the Harsh Interrogation off of US soil?
Frankly, I need the neocons to answer the question, at that point, because I don’t see how their Philosophy of Cowardice could but DEMAND that we do this, in order to have greater safety from murder and rape.
Why Not
But I can explain why, to an actual Conservative, classic liberal, or any other decent human being, we must not “harshly interrogate” criminals.
We should probably set aside basic human decency versus evil, because if you don’t get THAT reason, then you probably never will.
Rights
Let’s start with that 8th amendment:
Yes, it (and a number of other parts of the Constitution) prohibit “harsh interrogation”.
But they do not grant a man-made priveledge only to Americans, that you can suspend with some Clintonian wordplay, the way the neocons and other socialists argue.
In fact, the 8th amendment protects a Natural Right. You, I, and any other sapient being are BORN with a right to freedom of speech, religion, self-protection, and many other choices, including not to be tortured without our consent.
The Founders knew this, and said specifically they were only mentioning certain rights in the Constitution to keep future sociopaths from finding excuses to violate them…but that ALL natural rights were still to be universally protected.
So using some technicality to violate those rights would not magically make them go away. Torturing the criminal would still be wrong.
And remember, “universally protected”: The Founders did not believe that those natural rights only apply to Americans. That wouldn’t be very “natural”.
They simply did not have the power to force the French government to protect natural rights. But they intended the protections to apply against the Federal government of the US, which was what the Constitution created and limited.
So when the Federal government violates the rights of a foreigner, it is absolutely against the spirit of the Founders. Something, once again, a Conservative understands, but a Marxist-cum-neocon does not. That, obviously, includes torturing them, as well as censorship and the many other violations the Bush administration committed against foreigners, showing themselves not to be Conservative at all, just neocons.
Principles
When people try to justify evil means, because the end is desirable, they are like a child who wants to spend his money on candy now, instead of saving it so they have enough to eat supper later.
This is because the “end” is always something short-sighted. You are giving up the thing that causes more good in the long run, the investment, in order to get a quick fix, the instant gratification.
Short-sighted is not always short-term:
Perhaps you’re going to kill ten million people now, so that in a generation your empire is small enough to feed itself. Ask Stalin and Mao about that. But you’re still abandoning the principles (everyone has a right to determine his own life) that makes society stable and healthy in the big picture. Even “easy way to feed the next generation” is short-sighted, if you’re murdering to do it.
So violating people, no matter what euphamism we use, brings harmful, evil precedents into our society. The REAL, long-term end is violated, even the safety that the neocons pretend to value above all else.
We cannot let government officials torment suspected criminals, because we are setting a precedent of condoning that evil behavior. If it’s OK to non-torture molesters and mass murderers, then why not rapists? How about people who stole, and still have hidden, the life savings of elderly people? Regular investors? Tax cheats?
Not protecting your principles makes the slippery slope, sometimes a fallacy, become real — nearly inevitable.
This is why we throw out ANY evidence gotten in violation of the Constitution or our natural rights.
And it’s why letting our government ever violate natural rights is wrong.
The very minimum standard for how we treat foreigners should be “Would we tolerate treating an American, who accused of a crime, this way?”
Thanksgiving: Happy Conservatism Day!
Thanksgiving, as it exists in America, is very special, right up there with Independence Day, as a celebration of true Conservative principles, and a repudiation of what we now know as Liberalism.
Against Collectivism
For example, what the Pilgrims were celebrating was an abandonment of the collectivist/socialist ideals they’d adopted when they first tried to form their colony.
The first colonists had starved, suffering the inefficiency and laziness bred by a “share the wealth” philosophy, where everything went into a common pool, and everyone got an equal share, much like Europe and the Clintons of the world embrace today.
When they finally started requiring people to take responsibility for themselves, adopting what amounted to a precursor of Reagan/Paul Conservatism, with community property being replaced by private property, and central planning by liberty, they found prosperity, and stopped dying out.
We’ll be in pretty much the same situation, a few years from now, after yet more years of the “share the wealth” philosophy of big government, ultimately not much of a departure from Bush’s stealth Liberalism of the past eight.
Pro-Christian
Not only were the Pilgrims celebrating the abandonment of socialism, and resulting prosperity, but the tradition of having a feast to give thanks was theirs because it was a Christian tradition to do so. Thanksgiving was not a “harvest festival”, as the politically correct in the Establishment media and government schools would have you believe.
It was, in this case, celebrating a bountiful harvest, but the “thanks giving” part was a standard Christian tradition in England, who would do this at any time of year, to celebrate whatever blessing they felt God had given them, or even to remind themselves of what they still had, when things were bad.
Puritans and other devout Christians in England, any time in the previous century or more, might have a thanksgiving feast any time a baby was born, or loved one died, for example.
And, as we all know, Liberalism is very anti-Christian, however loudly they object to that being pointed out, in between rounds of banning voluntary religious expression in public places, unless it’s Jewish, Islamic, or something else not-Christian. In fact, even the Christian nature of Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas, has been stripped by Liberal media, schools, and government, or else I wouldn’t need to be writing this in clarification. 
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
Speaking of tracking:
You can follow But Now You Know here, on Twitter
And you can follow But Now You Know, via our Facebook Page, here.
Share This Article
Words of the Sentient- Tolkien, on Government
- Criminals Are Never Disarmed — Robert Heinlein
- Power Attracts the Corrupt — Frank Herbert
- Under Democracy — H.L. Mencken
- Guard Your Enemies from Oppression —> Thomas Paine
- Your Right to Not Support Evil
- Global Warming Shamanism
- The Squeaky Wheel…May Be Foolish
- Disarming the Victims
- The Inconvenience of Too Much Liberty
Recent Comments
kazvorpal on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Jenny Brewer on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Pater Rolf Hermann L… on It’s Not Even an Effing… Upholding Integrity… on Why the End Does Not Justify t… Alf from Albany on Why Workers Dislike Union… - Pithy Pontifications
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
But Now You Know 