The Arab Winter

The events we have seen in Egypt and a swatch of other countries that is popularly called the Arab Spring is viewed as a disappointment by those who embrace the Liberal Democratic (or Neoliberal democratic) perspective across the world. My friend Mohamed Zeeshan, such a person from India, on his blog commented about the fate of the Arab Spring:

There are reasons why the Arab Spring didn't quite work out as well as it should have. The foremost reason is the goal of the Spring itself. In the Information Age where people from all parts of the world are connected with each other merely by the click of a button, ideas spread fast. Democracy was one such idea that traveled to places it had never been to. What makes democracy so attractive to the millennium youth is the fact that it is the only political system under which one has the power to script his own destiny, no matter who his father is or how much gold he possesses. It delivers power to the people and denies unilateral control to the hands of any individual, thereby making society a more level playfield and creating a whole world of untold opportunities. Well, that's in the ideal.

I Respect Mohamed as a young aspiring scholar but his youthful observance mistook the Arab Spring for something new, and mistook it as a sea change in the broader Dar Al Islam for a positive political change. He is hardly alone in this but the Arab Spring is not a spring but is in fact a fall, and we are coming onto the dawn of an Arab Winter.

One begins to see it as a winter when we began to follow the Breadcrumbs of the conflict between those who seek a broad coalition democracy (which ends up becoming pluralistic and free) and those countries like Iran and the Patron of many of these countries Russia which has pioneered small coalition democracies (where outcomes are democratically achieved but they are achieved by focusing on a smaller subset of the population)

You can look back at Ahmadinejad and his two elections: The monitors show no irregularities but you have areas where 90 percent of the population turns out for one candidate. This irregularities show a potamkin sort of democracy. We look at the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, the Iraqi Elections where Pro-Iran and Pro-Islamist candidates became players in the system, We look at Putin's Presidential Terms ending so he moves all the powers to the Prime Minister's office and when the laws are changed he moves all the powers back to the Presidency. We look at the actions of Hugo Chavez as well as his knock offs in Latin America who are following the same trend.

These Autocrats learned what Democracy really means:

The term originates from the Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) "rule of the people", which was coined from δῆμος (dêmos) "people" and κράτος (kratos) "power" or "rule" in the 5th century BCE to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens; the term is an antonym to ἀριστοκρατία (aristocratie) "rule of an elite".

The greeks refer to who rules, and not who governs. As governance and rule are very different things as some of the latest issues with the IRS in the united States shows us. The civil society and those features of it that touch the state are how we are governed. The Code Inspector besets the businessman and homeowner with the Governance of the State. The City Councilman rarely meddles in how the building code is set up unless their are extreme issues (Such as Hurricanes or Tornados). This rule in turn is developed into governance. Or the Rule of Law vs the Law of Rules.

In the middle east a civil society is mostly non existent. So those at the top of the political order are not constrained by the needs of shop keepers to keep their business orderly. And what elements of a civil society DO exist are those that are advocating the excesses of the Arab Spring from the power of the state now.

The Arab Spring didn't fail: It did what the people pushing for it on the ground (who are not the Middle Eastern and other Neo-Liberals) wanted. It gave them the state where they had the political power to achieve their dreams

When Speech is silenced

I thought it was bad and an abuse of our first amendment. It appears however this sort of moral cowardice is not unheard of

At least one newsman was alarmed, however. And on the day of the 1933 elections, he gained a brief audience with the future Fuhrer. That man was Cornelius “Neil” Vanderbilt IV, great-great-grandson of the railroad tycoon. Fed up with the malaise of his privileged peers, Vanderbilt had moved to journalism from his position as a driver during the First World War. His name gave him access to Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, whose impending Reich became the subject of Vanderbilt’s documentary film, called Hitler’s Reign of Terror, released on April 30, 1934, a short portion of which you can see above.

The New Yorker obtained the clip from Brandeis University professor Thomas Doherty, who rediscovered the film in a Belgian archive while researching a recent book. Vanderbilt’s documentary might well be the first American anti-Nazi film, but its contemporary reception speaks volumes about how criticism of the new Nazi regime was suppressed in the mid-thirties; the film was censored across the U.S., denied a license, and banned.

People say things like "Never Again" but we miss out on one of the great evils of civilization. Civilization makes us averse to violence. We abandon Hobbes right to "War" in exchange for more peaceful and productive avenues. But when we hide from evil some times evil comes to rise, and we must take action against it.

Before a patterned curtain, the newsman asks the correspondent what he thinks of Hitler, and Vanderbilt replies: “Unquestionably he is a man of real ability, of force. But the way I sized him up after interviewing him is that he is a strange combination of Huey Long, Billy Sunday, and Al Capone.” He goes on, “I had never heard a man so able to sway people. He said Germany refused to forget her two million war dead. In the hour and a half that Hitler talked to that packed audience that night, he was as effective as a barker in a sideshow travelling with a circus. The German people had suffered so long that they were ready to accept the promises of anyone who held out some hope for the future.”

Hill’s newsman wonders, “Is it your belief that Europe is getting ready for another world war? Has she forgotten the horrors of the last World War? Is she trying to force another such war on humanity?”

Vanderbilt answers with a touch of sorrow, noting the clear desire for revenge.

“It all seems a ghastly, incredible nightmare,” Hill says.

Vanderbilt, in his boarding school pronunciation, “Yes, I agree with you.”

I wonder if we are facing the same sort of storm clouds waiting for as Hitler called himself "the man of the hour, not because he has been appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg but because no one else could have been appointed Chancellor instead."

The War on the First Amendment Continues

So our President and his administration continues their assault on our constitution and on the relationship between the state and the citizen.

Special speakers for the event will be Bill Killian, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Kenneth Moore, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Knoxville Division.

Sponsor of the event is the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee — a 15-member board formed two years ago when the General Assembly was considering passing legislation that would restrict those who worship Sharia Law, which is followed by Muslims.

Killian and Moore will provide input on how civil rights can be violated by those who post inflammatory documents targeted at Muslims on social media.

This is how policies change. Small little interpretations are spoken by US Attorneys and people in a place of political power, and they become part of the background discussion of the living constitution. As speech takes on a new form speech is not respected as the right of all free men (who are the sovereigns of the country) but a right doled out by the state that identifies it as the new sovereign. Eventually these ideas form a doctrine that everyone accepts.

But just as with the famous broccoli doctrine question we are faced with a parallel on the most fundamental of all constitutional rights. If what some weirdo in his pajama's can post on the internet so long as it does not promote -criminal- conduct, what speech can the state not stop online or offline?

Their was a line drawn in the sand (called the Brandenburg test)

The Brandenburg test (also known as the imminent lawless action test)

The three distinct elements of this test (intent, imminence, and likelihood) have distinct precedential lineages.

Judge Learned Hand was possibly the first judge to advocate the intent standard, in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.N.Y. 1917), reasoning that "[i]f one stops short of urging upon others that it is their duty or their interest to resist the law, it seems to me one should not be held to have attempted to cause its violation." The Brandenburg intent standard is more speech-protective than Hand's formulation, which contained no temporal element.

The imminence element was a departure from earlier rulings. Brandenburg did not explicitly overrule the bad tendency test, but it appears that after "Brandenburg", the test is de facto overruled. The "Brandenburg" test effectively made the time element of the clear and present danger test more defined and more rigorous.

If a post on facebook that is rude, crude, inappropriate, and wrong: Does it meet this clear standard of law to cross the line into violence. Short of the sort of conduct that people only commit in isolated and hidden parts of the internet there is no speech on the internet that meets this standard of law.

Killian referred to a Facebook posting made by Coffee County Commissioner Barry West that showed a picture of a man pointing a double-barreled shotgun at a camera lens with the caption saying, “How to Wink at a Muslim.”

Killian said he and Moore had discussed the issue.

“If a Muslim had posted ‘How to Wink at a Christian,’ could you imagine what would have happened?” he said. “We need to educate people about Muslims and their civil rights, and as long as we’re here, they’re going to be protected.”

Except their are innumerable posts of that sort of nature by Muslims on Facebook and other places on the internet. And when confronted with such conduct in the past we have British law enforcement officers saying that they can't monitor every crazy post by a Muslim Imam on the internet.

So instead of monitoring the law abiding, we should monitor the law breaking