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Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 3:49pmSanction this postReply
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Terrorists tried in civilian courts will be entitled to the whole panoply of legal protections accorded Stewart or any American charged with a crime, such as the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, the right to exclude evidence obtained in violation of Miranda rights, the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront one's accusers, the right to a change of venue, the right to examine the evidence against you, and the right to subpoena witnesses and evidence in one's defense.

Members of Congress have it in their power to put an end to this lunacy right now. If they don't, they are as complicit in Mohammed's civilian trial as the president. Article I, Section 8, and Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution give Congress the power to establish the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts and to create exceptions to that jurisdiction.

Congress could pass a statute limiting federal court jurisdiction to individuals not subject to trial before a military tribunal. Any legislator who votes "nay" on a such a bill will be voting to give foreign terrorists the same legal rights as U.S. citizens -- and more legal rights than members of the U.S. military are entitled to.

In the case of legal proceedings, diversity actually is a strength.

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Friday, November 20, 2009 - 10:10amSanction this postReply
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There are probably quite a few americans in prison right now who would argue from personal experience that if the terrorists are accorded the same legal "rights" that they had, the terrorists are screwed.
(Edited by Steven Pilotte on 11/20, 10:16am)


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Post 2

Friday, November 20, 2009 - 10:17amSanction this postReply
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Didn't get more than a couple sentences into Coulter's article before I ran across some utter bullshite:

Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem.

Diversity is a strength and a blessing. Anyone who has studied farming or biology knows that a monoculture is unstable and susceptible to crashing, and can be taken down by a single parasite that exploits a common weakness. Different viewpoints, different abilities, complementing strengths and weaknesses -- these lead to a vibrant culture and economy.

That being said, radical Islamic terrorists are one bit of diversity that we should have no compunction about eliminating. Not all diversity is good. A diverse array of parasites is undesirable. But to use the example of terrorists to attack the virtue of diversity -- that's either disingenuous or intellectually lazy.

And lumping all individual Muslims with the fringe terrorists -- that's collectivism.

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Friday, November 20, 2009 - 10:31amSanction this postReply
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That's called argument by non-essential, Jim. Coulter is talking about the problems of ethnic diversity for a human polity, not ecological diversity. Ecological diversity works because predators keep the population in check. Is that what you think would be a good thing for a human society?

If you go into reading a column with the attitude that you don't like the writer so you are going to object to the first thing you can plausibly object to, that's fine. But it's not intellectual honesty. Her argument may indeed be wrong (I have lived for years in multicultural areas like Spanish speaking neighborhoods in New York.) but reading her ungenerously doesn't serve the purpose of objective discourse.

(Edited by Ted Keer on 11/20, 12:02pm)


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Friday, November 20, 2009 - 10:57amSanction this postReply
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Coulter doesn't help herself here by unwittingly accepting her opponents' definition of "diversity".   THere's nothing "diverse" about the collectivization of over 300 million individually uique americans into a mere dozen or so groupings based on race, gender, age, income, etc...   It would be nice to see the diversity proponents challenged this way in the media once in a while.

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Friday, November 20, 2009 - 3:34pmSanction this postReply
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Ecological diversity works because predators keep the population in check.

Tail wagging the dog. Ecological diversity within a species works to combat the predators (in the case of humans, almost exclusively bacteria and viruses (and other homo sapiens, of course), since we've neutralized all the visible non-human threats) AND to fill available ecological niches. Ecological diversity OF species happens as life struggles to fill every conceivable niche. While predators cause some of this diversity, competition for resources keeps populations in check even in the absence of predators.

A monoculture may be very good at filling a really big niche, but when conditions change that monoculture can collapse catastrophically.

The Irish Potato Famine is a prime example. A poorly diversified variety of a single species used as a primary foodstuff worked well, right up to the point where it failed on a massive scale.

That's called argument by non-essential, Jim.

That's called not understanding the relevance of the argument submitted, Ted.

If you go into reading a column with the attitude that you don't like the writer so you are going to object to the first thing you can plausibly object to, that's fine.

Glad you think you can read my mind, Ted. I went into article with an open mind, ready to accept what she said if it made sense, and almost immediately ran into a false statement that grossly overgeneralized reality.

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Friday, November 20, 2009 - 5:59pmSanction this postReply
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You are talking about a division of labor, not multiple mutually incomprehensible languages and belief systems such as Judaism, white supremicism and mohammedanism which may even hold that other races or religions are inferior and not to be accorded full rights.

Are you arguing that the problem in Ireland is that they didn't have enough languages and religions?

Evdiently it is you, not Coulter, who knows what is meant by diversity.

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Post 7

Saturday, November 21, 2009 - 10:08pmSanction this postReply
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Are you arguing that the problem in Ireland is that they didn't have enough languages and religions?

No, I'm saying that the problem in Ireland was a poorly diversified food system based primarily on a single starch, and with none of the massive diversity of potato strains found in the South American region where potatoes originated, making for a near-monoculture susceptible to collapse when a disease cracked the code for the potatoes and wiped out crop after crop.

I wasn't directly talking about languages and religions there, I was talking about the danger of having a monoculture of ANYTHING, be it potatoes or religions or culture or ethnicities.

My point was to rebut Ann Coulter's idiotic statement that the particular type of diversity she was talking about was always and invariably bad, throughout history, without exception. Rather than just address that single obvious fallacy, readily disproven (the U.S., for example), I generalized and said that diversity is usually a good thing.

And it is. The richest U.S. states, with the highest GDP per capita, are largely the states with a diverse array of ethnicities and cultures and everything else. This is no accident. If you have a bunch of different people with widely different backgrounds looking at a problem from a wide array of POVs, you're more likely to get someone who discerns an optimal, or at least better, solution.

Yes, there are some horrendously evil Muslims out there. But we would be worse off if we could somehow evict each and every Muslim from the U.S. -- or every Jew -- or every Mormon -- or every Catholic -- or ...

I was born to a Protestant mother and an agnostic father, I was a Mormon for a while and am now an agnostic, and I married a Catholic, and so I take it kind of personally when someone argues that a diversity of religions is bad for America. It doesn't comport well with the objective reality that I have observed.

Yes, some places like Ireland have had some huge problems touched off by religious differences, but the problem with radical fundy Muslims is that they are incredibly in favor of the sort of religious monoculture that Coulter advocates. They want the entire world converted to their precise strain of Islam, and are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way of imposing that upon us.

And that sort of monoculture religious thinking, whether by fundies like radical Muslims or fundies like Coulter, is precisely what the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom is meant to guard against.

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Post 8

Saturday, November 21, 2009 - 11:01pmSanction this postReply
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Well, I am glad you have realized what you said made no sense.

(And I inadvertantly left out a "not" in the last sentence of my last post.)

(Edited by Ted Keer on 11/22, 5:39pm)


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Post 9

Monday, November 23, 2009 - 9:49amSanction this postReply
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Well, I am glad you have realized what you said made no sense.

I think we can agree that it made no sense to you. It apparently made sense to the people who sanctioned my posts.

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