Immigration Another Paris Terror Plot?

[Angela]

Don't get me wrong. I may be ideologically closer to the Democrats on many levels, but I am in favour of tough security measures. As I said above I am strongly in favour of CCTV cameras everything. I am also for the ubiquitous use of biometric ID cards, and I am surprised that countries like the US and the UK that put much more emphasis on homeland security than Belgium do not have compulsory electronic ID cards for everyone. In Belgium has had them for 11 years, even for children. Not everyone has a passport or even a driving licence. And e-ID cards also allow to identify yourself more securely at the town hall, in government agencies, at the bank, while submitting your taxes online, and so on.

Contrarily to most Democrats (and most Europeans) I have always been in favour of death penalty, but only for terrorists, serial killers and war criminals (not "regular" criminals). I am also not opposed to torturing terrorists. I find that most governments are sissies in this regard. Maybe that is because forms of mild tortures were commonly used in primary/elementary school when I was a child, by both teachers and children to other children. The ones practised by teachers (e.g. hitting fingernails with a ruler) were nothing compared to the flogging and caning of the generation before. The worse acts were routinely performed by bullies on the playgrounds, and including hitting a child stuck against a wall with a basketball repeatedly, making them eat worms or insects, and plunging their heads in the toilet (a form of water boarding). So how laughable it is when statute in that same country prohibits raids on a private dwelling between 9PM and 8AM! On the one hand you have teachers condoning violence against (small) children, and on the other you have the government who refuses to disturb terrorists past 9 pm. That's one crazy country. Unfortunately it is not an exaggeration.

Yes, I'm quite familiar with the ruler as a form of discipline, and that was here in the U.S. and by a nun who was teaching me piano. Every time you got a note wrong she'd rap your knuckles with a ruler. It's a wonder I love music and still play. She was the only one though. Well, there was the assistant principal too, who was a holy terror, pardon the expression. When boys would use foul language she'd take them over to the water fountain and wash their mouths out with soap. When she heard fighting in the playground or even in the boys' bathroom she'd jump right in, grab them by the collar and generally manhandle them. To be honest, I was grateful at the time. That only lasted for a few years, though, by high school I was in a girls' school and none of that went on, but a boy I was dating went to a Christian Brothers School, an order from Ireland. He mouthed off and cursed one of them, and the Brother knocked him out with one punch. The parents didn't complain. Things are very different now, though; you can't even yell at them, much less put a finger on them.

Thanks to my constant political arguments with my relatives, I'm aware of how "conservative" American Democrats, even Bernie Sanders is, compared to most European politicians. That's why I posted jokingly once that all Europeans are socialists; it's just that some of them hate immigrants and some don't. I know that's not totally true, but there's an element of truth in it.

The mind set in America is very different as regards things like identity cards. I'm not really opposed to them, but many, perhaps even the majority of Americans are. The feeling is that it's one thing, in the face of a security threat, to be supportive of common sense government attempts to gather information about certain groups or individuals or even to incarcerate an enemy combatant and interrogate him. It's another thing to give the government one easy means of tracking every man, woman, or child in the country wherever they go and whatever they do. I realize that it could make a lot of things more efficient; it's just not worth it to most people. It would strike many people as just as bizarre as the fact that in Italy, at least, you have to register your domicile with the government every time you move. Here, I can up and move anywhere, at any time, and I don't have to inform anyone in a government bureaucracy. Now, if I work on the books, my employer is going to want my Social Security number to make the deductions, so in that case they might find me eventually, but that's about it.

The founders of this country had a profound distrust of government and also of mob rule. That distrust influenced the decision to structure the government into three co-equal branches. It's all about not letting any one branch of government become too powerful. That's why second amendment rights are so important to so many Americans. Whatever the intention of the founders, many people feel that the first thing that a government set on enslaving its people does is to take away everyone's guns. The founders were also worried that democracy could descend into mob rule. That's why regional rights are protected in the Senate, and that's also why for a long time the U.S. didn't really have direct democracy; indeed, given that it still has an electoral college, I suppose it could be argued it technically still doesn't.

It's just a completely different way of looking at government. It's not for nothing that you have founding fathers like Jefferson saying, or at least having attributed to him the statement that " the best government is that government which governs least."

http://www.whatwouldthefoundersthink.com/what-were-the-founding-principles