I’m not taking sides, but…
“The key question for Westerners is: do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperilled — or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperilled.” – Bruce Bawer
Alright, I might be taking sides.
Uhhh… Y’think?
Not that I’m taking sides, but I’ve always preferred the O.W.Holmes quote: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
I disagree with Bawer’s framing.
(BTW, Have you been thumbing old copies of “The Advocate”?)
The question isn’t “Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them?”
That’s a straw man argument’s framing.
The question is “Do they really hate our freedoms?”
I think they hate certain freedoms we bestow on ourselves to which perhaps we are not entitled. We in America are free today because we hated Britain’s self assigned “freedom” to tax us without representation, embargo our trade & freely consume our resources & commandeer our property / conscript our citizenry onto military service. These people are not very different. They hate the freedom we have assigned ourselves to be free to treat them like they are all barefoot, ignorant children who need whatever we define as “democracy”. They hate the freedom we have assigned ourselves to destroy their infrastructure & then pay our private sector friends to fix it, but not really fix it, using the US Taxpayer’s money & whatever we can borrow from China before next election cycle.
I hate that brand of freedom too. Does that make me some whacko fundamentalist bent on the violent downfall of the US? Not at all.
I could further ask “Are our freedoms really in peril from agents outside the US?” but that’s another posting.
Discuss.
(and stop reading “Reason” with a flashlight under the covers. It’s messing with your head. Spend your time photoshoping Boston Terriers into Indy4 posters or something.. You only have 11 days left, y’know!)
By my watch we’re about due for the destruction of another North American city, so maybe we’ll pick the conversation up after that. Unless it’s Ottawa in which case I’ll be having conversations at the bar with Sinatra and Belushi.
Did you mention liquor… I love my freedom!