Let's run this cliche up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes.

Schumer's remark, itself, is beneath discussion.  Now, if we should want to discuss the forms of political speech -- well, that's another thing all together. 

Hmm, so... if you increase the liberty of the CIA (so that they are free, e.g., to torture suspects), that will decrease security. QED.

A trade off between liberty and security is not necessary. It's just imposed by people who want to limit your liberty and pretend they've improved your security.

Liberty is a sort of mean between excessive freedom allowing you to violate the rights of others on the one hand, and limited freedom to act, think, and chose as you wish on the other.

Security is 2 parts actions taken to ensure safety and 1 part leading indicator or post hoc saftey. You're secure if, after the fact, you survided intact. You were more or less secure based on how intact you are at the time of the question. It doesn't make sense to say you're more secure if you've survived by luck. And it doesn't make sense to say you're more secure if you're less likely to survive but have taken lots of steps you said would make you safe.

I think it comes down to whether Americans want to be either safe or free.  And I have always been partial to New Hampshire's motto...Live free or die.  A tradeoff is not on the table as far as I am concerned.

Schumer is wrong on his views.  And dj moonbat's citing of Ben Franklin's words is the beginning and end of the freedom vs. security debate in my mind...I wonder if Schumer is familiar with Mr. Franklin and his writings.

But Schumer isn't as bad as Bush who seems to say that we must limit our liberties to protect our freedom.  That is Orwellian double speak if I have ever heard it.  Just like we are waging wars to keep the world free...war is peace?  Here is another Franklin quote...

 

"There is no such thing as a good war and there is no such thing as a bad peace".

Think, for example, of the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi

I don't think this is a very good example. Even if I believed Ron Suskind - and I don't, since he was proven to be a liar in the Paul O'Neill book - you can't take a single person and extrapolate his experience to everyone else. Perhaps what we did with al-Libi wasn't all that helpful to our security - but maybe when we did the same things with other people (say, oh, I dunno, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) it WAS helpful to our security. You can't know ex ante whether any particular technique is going to be successful in any particular instance.

Matthew's argument would be the same as saying, after I walked through a metal detector at the airport and they didn't find anything, "look at that - they restricted Al's liberty by making him walk through the metal detector, and there was no increase in security; therefore, let's do away with metal detectors." Yet, when stated that way, Matthew's argument sounds asinine, doesn't it?

You need to look at the overall effect of a a particular technique - the cost in liberty to all, as opposed to the gains in security to all.

I've been wondering whether this means that we aren't taking seemingly common-sense security steps such as better securing ports/containers/chemical plants/loose nukes because we've decided that there's less than a 1% chance of such occurrences.

I appreciate seeing things like this, as the chemical industry is one of those things that gets ignored. Now, we do have headlines about an al-Qaeda plot to release hydrogen cyanide gas in the NYC subways. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show this isn't terribly plausible, unless even New Yorkers don't notice terrorists carrying drums of potassium cyanide into a subway station.
Couple of points of reference: while the specific state protocols varied, a gas chamber execution took about a pound of potassium or sodium cyanide. A gas chamber is tightly sealed and -- what, the volume of 3-4 telephone booths? Note that there are many reports of it not killing instantly. Condemned prisoners were advised to hold their breaths until they saw fumes, and then take a deep breath.
Nazi gas chambers were a good deal larger, about 30 feet squate. Again, they were tightly sealed. Zyklon B is chemically more efficient than the reaction used in gas chambers. Still, they used kilogram lots.
Now, think of a subway station. A good sized space, plus, and very important, trains rushing in and out and moving lots of air with them. The station certainly isn't sealed. Depending on the station, it may have street exits, or stairs to lower level. In other words, a lot of volume.
Not the easiest thing to do, is it? Now, consider the terrorists going to where the toxic chemicals are located and triggering a release or reaction. Can anyone say Bhopal? From the standpoint of industrial chemical explosions, how about Texas City or Halifax?
Another example was the first large-scale military gas attack, which used 160 tons of chlorine, from over 5000 cylinders, to attack an 8000 yard front.
Hazardous material shipments run through major cities. In DC, there's a tunnel very near the Capitol, and, just south of the Mall, there's an overpass. Commercial tank cars for industrial chlorine are usually either 55 or 90 ton capacity. What would be the effect of derailing these, or hitting them with a hand-held antitank weapon from the steet below?
One of my other pet peeves for vulnerability of critical national infrastructure is the electrical power grid. Interconnection became much more common as a consequence of deregulation, making what had been a convenience to be a critical resource. The older alternating current (AC) grids are far more prone to blackouts, even from accidents, than the more modern DC ultrahigh voltage interconnects. The 2003 Ohio Valley Blackout was caused by a combination of weather accidents, a computer worm in a control system that should be totally isolated from the Internet, and old AC switching equipment.
OK, let me get this straight. We've had major regional blackouts every several years, with some fatalities. It would cost $20-30 billion to harden the electrical grid. Coincidentally, that's about the amount that's been put into the national ballistic missile defense system in Alaska and Canada. Which of these events is closer to 1%? -- Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Economic freedom is not "liberty".

Property right, money -- these are conventions, Conventions are needed to assure that two individuals do not collide trying to occupy the same space etc. Freedom or liberty makes sense only in a network of such conventions. Otherwise the life would be "short, violent and brutish".

A tax rate or a minimum wage regulation are not inherently abridging our freedom, no more than, say, speed limits. By the way of contrast, torture is quite inherently adbridging freedom. It is not a price to avoid nasty, short and brutish life, it _I_S_ nasty, short and brutish life.

The problem with your approach, is it takes necessary evils, like taxation, and decides that the necessity abolishes the evil.

And having thus decided they're not evil, you're freed to resort to them when they're not necessary...

Yes, taxes, minimum wage laws, speed limits, these all inherently abridge our freedom. That's a cost of them that needs to be taken into account, when deciding whether a specific use of them can be justified.

....the more modern DC ultrahigh voltage interconnects.

 

Would you expand on this or provide a link. It is interesting if only for the fact that I haven't heard of it at all and I didn't find anything with a quick google search.

Maybe I get it. When two sources of current, which is always produced and used in AC form, are combined to provide more power in a grid, they are first converted to DC at the interconnect point, they are combined, and then reconverted to AC for transmission throughout the grid?

Yes, taxes, minimum wage laws, speed limits, these all inherently abridge our freedom.

Speed limits? Traditionally, traffic laws have been safe from the morality debate. Lately, the Dominionists and Reconstructionists have been trotting out their 'morality', but those guys have been known to accuse tree branches of free riding in a stream's current.

And so, I'm curious, what are the costs of speed limits?

Click here for the Users Help Forum.

"The minimum wage does not decrease liberty...The minimum wage, like every regulation and tax imposed on corporations, is a voluntary condition of the privileges, protections and limited liabilities that the government has granted that corporation."

What's wrong with this sentence?

Please, spare me the Orwellian talk about taxes being "contributions". "Required" "contributions" is an oxymoron.

How are taxes evil? Is this a serious question? If the budget were in ballance, and there wasn't anything else that needed to be paid for, would you raise taxes just for the hell of it? No, because taxes, taken in isolation, are BAD. We tolerate them only because there are things that can't be paid for otherwise, which going without would be WORSE.

And this is important, because once you've got a system of taxation in place, the temptation is to use it even for things where the taxation is unnecessary, because voluntary funding is feasible, or for things where the taxation necessary is a bigger evil than the failure to buy them.

And refusing to admit that taxes have that downside, that has to be overcome by the benefits being purchased with them, only exacerbates that tendency.

And so, you get people defending the institution of taxation on the basis that otherwise little children would starve, and then taxing people to pay for bridges to nowhere, or even Piss Christ.

All because they feel more comfortable pretending that taxation is morally neutral or good, than with recognizing it as an evil which can be justified only in some instances.

***apologies for irresistable in-joke. Engineer humor; what else needs be said?***

Including engineers that, when asked to how they would deal with a hysteresis problem, replied: talk soothingly, but if that fails, slap the victim's face.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Exactly. He tells you what you want to hear. While it still gets done, I haven't seen a military or civilian document, open or classified, that suggested torture was routinely effective.

The one nasty variant that was noted was a favorite of the fUSSR Spetsnaz. When they wanted immediate tactical information, and had two prisoners, they'd decide which prisoner was more likely to have the information. They'd kill the other, in the sight of the knowledgeable prisoner, in as messy and brutal a way as possible.

They'd then turn to the other and say "You will die. Your choice is what you've just seen, or a quick bullet or injection. You get the reward if you tell us what we need to know. You have no other options."

Ugly as it may be, that's the only approach I've ever seen that is thought to work, and variants in the "ticking bomb" situation. For other interrogation, the constant experience over decades is that it has to be fundamentally psychological, although disorientation can be a part. Pain to the subject is not productive, although pain to others may have more effect.

Torture is simply not a good way to get strategic information.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

A bunch of things distinguish economic freedom over personal freedom.

One is the obvious--one is freedom over my person, the other is freedom over my stuff. The former is obviously a lot closer to all of us than the latter.

Another is that the government prints the money and issues the deeds to your land. The American marketplace exists as an artifact of the American government. Your claim to your property only holds true because the American government has defined it to hold true. The same is not true of my control over my own body or over my own words. Civil liberties are intrinsic to our nature as persons, property is a creation of the government. Human beings can cooperate or compete without property, it's only that we deem it more convenient to do so with property so we got together in a government to declare property.

A third is that economic liberty is transferable. If I take money from Peter and give it to Paul, Peter has lost liberty while Paul has gained it. If Peter had vastly more money than Paul, than by diminising marginal utility I'd expect the overall amount of liberty to increase. That sort of analysis simply makes no sense in civil liberties.

A fourth is that civil liberties are vital in evaluating all of our other liberties. Here you are arguing for economic liberty using your right of speech to do so. Without civil liberties I have no way to determine whether the particular trade off between liberty and security is actually sensible. It is for that reason there is a base level of liberty that I'm not willing to give up--because how else can I evaluate the sensibility of taking away my other liberties? Take away my base level, and *I* become the security problem.

Anyway, you wanted to know why we don't object as loudly when economic liberties are taken away, and I think I've given you more than enough reason. They are neither philosophically nor pragmatically as important as civil liberties.

Yes, I've mentioned this before: the only effective "torture" is one where the threat is actually immediate death - or a really messy death vs a quick death. And being able to demonstrate that you mean it.

You are reading a whole lot into my words that I never said. Apparently your mission here is to spew rightwing bile at any provocation, not engage in a reasoned discussion.