Loyola To A Fault

Loyola’s *right on*. Reminds me of we felt about that scofflaw Martin Luther King. If he’d just, you know, obeyed the law.

The right of resistance always trumps obedience to [for] the rule of law.

Just trying to match in wrongheadedness while kinda remaining in character.

I agree with Belle that direct action and the propaganda of the deed are expressive of the American character, from Tea Parties to John Brown to well, getting more recent might generate unnecessary controversy.

This fellow is a knucklehead – Bush and Company have spent lots and lots of energy trying (with way too much success) to redefine “the rule of law” to exclude, say, habeas corpus and so forth. So, not every single American meets his criterion – Bush, Gonzalas, Cheny, Rumsfeld, Yoo, and probably many underlings (to say nothing of minions like Richard Perle whom I heard spouting absolute nonesense on npr this morning) are plenty enough counterexamples to his claim. Is he living in another country?

>Imagine that the Canadians went berserk and occupied Minnesota.

How would we know?

I have to give him credit for raising a hypothetical that gives us the opportunity to talk about a Minnesota-Canada conflict. “minnesotan irregulars”–hah!.

I think every American is waiting for “Red Dawn” to actually happen.

A silly comment on this is that my apartment was broken into on Halloween, and among some other things, all but 4 of my DVDs were stolen. Of those 4 remaining DVDs, one is Red Dawn.

Would any American say that the right of resistance trumped obedience for the rule of law? No, of course not.

Has Mr Hack already forgotten Ruby Ridge, Waco, The Minutemen and the rest of the militia movement? The president has really pushed a number of hot buttons with the militia movement with the recent martial law bill that effectively abolishes the Posse Comitatus Act.

Perhaps if it was just the Northwest Angle of Minnesota, it would be no big whoop. How hard would France fight to hold onto St. Pierre & Miquelon? Cartographers make mistakes.

If instead Mexico had mounted a reconquista of Alta California, and that every taquería from San Ysidro to Santa Ana was a nest of AK-47’s and RPG launchers, would we take that lying down, like just another sunny day at the beach?

No doubt someone so committed to the rule of law has written extensively on matters like the need to impeach Pres. Bush for his violations, yes? No?

…Canadians went berserk and occupied Minnesota. Then imagine that a militia formed to “resist the occupation”…

Interesting use of scare quotes here. It appears that in the current version of newspeak the word ‘occupation’ (and most certainly ‘resisting the occupation’) has no serious meaning. ‘Occupation’ is merely an excuse for bad people to kill good people.

Ok. I’m really, really dense because it seems to me that if the government of the US told its citizens that it had ceded territory to another country then any US citizen should obey. Obviously, Belle is wrong in at least part of her post, because though I disagree with Loyola on almost everything; this is one thing I don’t disagree with him about. BTW, I don’t have any respect for Israeli settlers who have to be evicted by the Israeli army. For what it’s worth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Canada_and_the_United_States

Ok. I’m really, really dense because it seems to me that if the government of the US told its citizens that it had ceded territory to another country then any US citizen should obey.

A better example would be: suppose the US federal government had agreed to surrender the Panama Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty. Would it not be justifiable for people who disagreed with this decision, both in the Zone and in the US proper, to resist this with armed force?

Or, to put it another way: when the Texas Republican Party come to lynch Jimmy Carter, which side will you be on?

The state of Minnesota would welcome its new Canadian masters. We’d give Norman Coleman 24 hours to return to the candidate-farm he was sent to us from.

8 — less posting from Emerson.

Let me get this right: Canadian Berzerkers have invaded Minnesota and are occupying it — but not being welcomed with what flowers might grow that far north — and the US federal government is ordering citizens of Minnesota not to resist the Canadian occupation.

To make any sense of Loyola’s idea you would have to assume that Canada was making no claim of sovereignty over the land it had just invaded and occupied, and that the civil organs of the US federal government were still operating normally — albeit under the supervision of our boreal overlords. In short, that although the Canadians might have been seen to invade they were effectively there at the invitation or with the (for the time being) agreement of the US federal government.

The country whose invasion and occupation most closely resembles that scenario, as far as I can tell, would be Afghanistan under the USSR. Rule of law clearly should have called for the Mujahideen to stand down, and I’m sure Mario would say likewise. Oh, wait.

Canadians have the right to defend themselves.

“one of these cut-rate Canadian or British pundits we keep getting saddled with” …
“the netherlands or some other made-up country”

Belle, I know the provocation, content and intent of this post are nothing but antic comedy, but really, can we cool it with the jingoistic free-fire insults? If foreign pundits are more ‘cut-rate’ that Limbaugh, Hannity et al, it’s only literally: they aren’t paid as highly. If the Netherlands (note cap) is made-up, it is not more so than the US or any other nation (cf. Hobsbawm, Anderson).

…and where are those reparations for Mexico, by the way?

Isn’t the better analogy:

1. Canada invades and takes over Alaska.

2. Russians invade Alaska based on its pre-1867 ownership of the land?

While “true” ownership of Shebaa Farms is obviously in dispute, the facts are that Israel took it from Syria in the 1967 war in which Lebanon was not involved. It is also true that, prior to the 1967 war in which the land was taken from Syria, the Lebanese were not fighting to liberate it from the Syrians.

I don’t know why we need all these analogies when we have the Minutemen diligently working to protect our southern borders. (Unfortunately, they haven’t been deployed in the North yet so they won’t be able to prevent an invasion of Minnesota by rabid Canucks.) I hadn’t noticed a lot of uniformity in Americans’ opinions about this. I wonder what Belle thinks; I wonder what Loyola thinks.

Richard it’s called satire. Thanks Belle for a highly entertaining post.

Just goes to show that a foreign policy that would work perfectly well against berserk Canadians, just like the policy I’ve designed to optimize our societal advantages against any invasion of space aliens made entirely out of yogurt, may not be as useful in other realms as one might have hoped.

Obviously, in Loyola’s world, the Vichy government of WWII are heroes to be emulated…

The “made-up country” is Belgium, not the Netherlands.

Belgium does not exist.

Belgium really does not exist

This & other things makes me think the time’s overdue for a clarifying discussion of the meaning of rule of law. Who here knows what it means?

Comrades, to arms!

Actually, I’d really have to know more about this invasion before I could decide whether to resist or collaborate. If we did get free health care, an generous national film board and more West Indian and East Indian cultural influences, I might have to sell out my Minnesotan compatriots. Of course, if Canada really were invading, that would seem to indicate that a general and severe rightward shift had taken place in Canadian politics. It’s a toughy. Oh, ridiculous commentators of the far right, why can’t you make your bizarre analogies stand up to more rigorous scrutiny?

This & other things makes me think the time’s overdue for a clarifying discussion of the meaning of rule of law. Who here knows what it means?

IOKIYAR?

The “made-up country” is Belgium, not the Netherlands.

Tell that to the Friesians!

It is also true that, prior to the 1967 war in which the land was taken from Syria, the Lebanese were not fighting to liberate it from the Syrians.

Why would there be fighting over it? The Lebanese were farming the land, and paying property taxes on it to the Lebanese government. What about that situation do you think should have led to the Lebanese taking up violent action?

Contrast to the Israeli position of, “There is a technical dispute over whether this land belongs to Syria, or Lebanon, so quite obviously it is desired by a higher power that this land be settled by Israelis of the proper ethnic background for their exclusive use in perpetuity”.

I can see the second situation leading to some fighting. The first, not so much.

The Lebanese were farming the land, and paying property taxes on it to the Lebanese government.

Well, occupation of Shebba farms is certainly a provocation, but let’s not forget that this current generation of Southern Lebanese Muslims (aka Hezbollah) grew up under Israeli occupation (1982-2000), terrorised and looted by the IDF and their SLA helpers. That’s 18 years of terrorising and plundering. There is a documented incident when topsoil was removed off Lebanese farmland and shipped to Israel; the UN had to intervene to stop it.

Yeah, and the next generation is going to grow up with millions of Israeli-American bomblets laying around their gardens and fields, ready to go off – so some time in the next decade we are bound to find out if that helped improve their attitude.