Chuck,
You've effectively managed to change the point of my whole story.


Gould 0738 wrote:
Huh? You summed up your story with a comment about how wonderful it was that
the Patriot Act was being used as a domestic law enforcement device.

I thought the whole point of NOBBY's story is that 1- he's a weenie who
cannot simply go and break the thief's kneecap... 2- he is really
longing for a tyrannical dictatorship instead of a constitutional democracy.


Why not just remove all the restrictions from the police? Give them unlimited
discretion to behave any way they want.

Well, in reality, that's the case and always must be. Police officers,
marshalls, gov't enforcement agents, etc etc, all can pretty much act as
they please. They have guns, they have authority, they can order people
around.... BUT our system has a set of checks & balances that reward
them for acting responsibly & in the public interest (much of the time)
and punishes them for acting tyrannically (much of the time).

Much of the Patriot Act is about removing those checks & balances. Is
this a good idea?

Why should we burden them with silly ideas that evidence needs to meet any sort
of standards? Let's just go to "guilty until proven innocent", that should make
the court system run a lot more efficiently.

Let's get rid of the courts. Just let the cops beat the snot out of
anybody they think is a criminal or might become one. In fact, let's
take people rumored to be terrorists and/or criminals and do something
really cruel to them, like cut their hands off... maybe we could tie
them to a post and get everybody in town to throw rocks at them...

DSK