Here's the newspaper article Too many laws have created a climate of fear, bishop warns I think he's right, what about you?
I'm in total agreement. They churn out new laws every day whether they are needed or not. It's oppressive.
Yeah its not like countries with even more bureaucracy then the USA have even higher standards of living, oh wait some do. Burden of bureaucracy is not a cause of a problem but in some cases it can be a symptom of a problem, the problems the US has are far deeper then bureaucracy, you might as well be complaining about the icing on a shit cake.
I wonder if the Bishop can see the irony that a representative of the church sees rules as creating a climate of fear, given that he represents an organization that has rules, which, if you break them, means you may suffer eternal torture. My second thought is When did we not have a climate of fear?
lol. It's time for a new way of measuring success imo. Maybe a maximum wage, based on a percentage of lowest earner within a company to the chief exec (a proposed system). Combine that with a maximum no. of employees at 2000 individuals and you have the makings of a new world order for the better. :shrug:
It's an interesting article but I disagree with what seems to be his main premise. I don't think that respect for individual rights have increased at all. In fact, it's pretty obvious that it's decreased over the years. It's a refusal to hold people responsible for their actions and life situations that has increased, in my opinion.
For the most part, I agree with the article's author. We, as a people, have become too reliant on the government to become involved with our individual affairs. We not only expect to maintain individual rights and freedoms FROM our government, but also expect a quick and resolute solution be provided BY the same government in times of crisis (no matter the size).
It would seem to me that fear is being initiated by Priests and Clergy by raping children within their Church's. If you can't trust your own Priest or clergy with your children then that is a very big fear that the church has done little about to get rid of. Many churches hide those who rape children in other areas of the world and never let the people know what the Priests did before they were given a new place to rape again.
I've watched a few instances of a climate of fear being created, in real time, on my TV. The laws came afterwards: the Patriot Act and Homeland Security apparatus maybe the biggest example, but various child protection, gun control, and personal behavior regulations (seat belts, life jackets, helmets) come to mind in smaller ways. Right now there's a media campaign to intensify the panic behind the teabag movement. It is being attempted to obstruct and modify, not encourage, more laws.
I believe the media, and its frenzy for ratings, is a major component of public fear. And too often, that fear becomes a reality. I think the recession was not only fueled by the state of the economy, but the constant fear mongering presented to the public by media outlets. I cannot help but think the news media presented doom and gloom to millions who were, at the time, unaware of the state of the economy causing a waterfall effect across the population. Forgive me if this is getting off-topic.
We have many laws so everyone is a criminal. Hence, if you become a problem 'they' can have you detained for a myriad of reasons.
Frightened people buy more news. So it's in the media's own interest to present not just bad news, but scary news. The government is complicit in that. Frightened people are more easily convinced to give up their rights. Look at all the mileage they've gotten out of 9/11. I was once a data security officer and had to study risk analysis and risk management, and the way they're handling 9/11 is pathetic. Well, make that "frightening." In the first ten years of this millennium 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. That's only about three times as many as the number who were killed by lightning! Yet the government has spent a trillion dollars we didn't have, overthrown the only secular pro-Western government in the entire Middle East, destroyed what little stability the region had, given our military a new reputation as a gang of thugs with no honor, become a pariah to our allies, humiliated us in airports, pissed off the world's entire population of one billion Muslims, and, in their crowning achievement, chased Al Qaeda so far that its headquarters is now located inside the borders of a country that is not entirely hostile to it and has nuclear weapons. Oh yeah, and they still haven't caught Bin Laden. In those same ten years, more than one hundred thousand Americans were killed by drunk drivers. For about three billion bucks a year--pocket change--we could install a breathalyzer ignition interlock in every new year and within ten years they'd all have them. At that point drunk driving would be about as important a risk as lightning. We wouldn't even need to find and identify the people who drive drunk, much less make everybody take off their shoes. So which risk has our government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to concentrate on? The really big one that's cheap to fix, or the really small one that's both expensive and impossible to fix? Drunk driving doesn't scare us, even though the probability is .03% that it will be the cause of our death. Terrorists do scare us, even though we're more likely to die in a fall inside our own house. And scared people are easier to manipulate. "Those who are willing to sacrifice a little bit of freedom for a little bit of security will soon have neither. And that is just, because it is exactly what those people deserve." The authorship of this is lost in antiquity, but it's not Ben Franklin, who is usually given credit.
And there is a tendency for the scary news to be about scattered threats rather than systemic ones. The fear is generally fear that seems to indicate one should give up more power to authority rather than question authority. (I realize you go into this in the rest of your post, but I wanted to point out that the content of the scary news has tendencies also.)
