“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 17, 2011

Harman on Miitary Detention

Graham has an excellent post about it, viz.:


One of the reasons it bothers me so much is because I already live in a country where this law exists, and I can tell you that it absolutely sucks. Without an independent judiciary watching over each step of the process, detention is one of the foremost powers of tyranny.

It may just be terrorist suspects at first, and maybe you don’t see a problem in that case. All right. But next it will be drug dealers. And then maybe just Muslims who say a few harsh things about Israel in public. And then maybe members of fringe political parties. And then maybe bloggers who swear at at the Army and the President. And then maybe the U.S. reaches the stage of Egypt, where it’s just whoever the hell the government feels like throwing in prison.

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