Stupid Americans (10 comments)
I found an interesting weblog entry linked from Jay's page. It's a criticism of the techniques used by our law enforcement agencies to track down the infamous Washington DC sniper. To summarize, lots of different agencies passed information back and forth without any judicial permission to do so. That's illegal (in some cases -- see the comments). The big problem with this is that the American public won't care. The ends justified the means. So what if our rights as citizens were overlooked? They got the bad guy. This goes hand in hand with the popular opinion that "the First Amendment goes to far" and the public's happy forfeit of their rights so long as it helps the big strong men fight terrorism.
I'd like to see a license required for voting, to require people to have a minimal understanding of how the country is supposed to work before they can voice their opinion on who would be best. Of course, that's unconstitutional. In a democracy, everyone gets a vote, even if it's not really a democracy and the republican system isn't required to honor their vote in any way. Also, the semi-educated people would think it to be a sign that we're re-instituting slavery. I'd also like to get rid of parties and have each candidate evaluated on his or her own merits. It'd never work, but it's fun to think about a goverment chosen by informed voters. Of course, the current government was made with a two party system, so they're not going to let it die, but it's nice to dream.