I simply don’t know. There could be. The ones who get the publicity might not be at all representative of the ones who don’t.

How can anyone concerned about liberties worry more about Jose Padilla than the millions who pass through U.S. prisons on drug charges?

The drug war is bad and bipartisan. It appears to be waged by the bad rules that were publicly set out for it. It might be intensely corrupt, so that people get framed for drug offenses they didn’t do, and some drug cartels bribe police to destroy their competitors—maybe the police serve to protect monopolies rather than actually reduce sales beyond what monopoly prices would do. But the rules are public. You could for example get a list of the people imprisoned on drug charges, apart from the minors. Police who intentionally frame victims for crimes they don’t do are committing a crime, and they know it. They might do it anyway secure in the belief they’ll never be discovered, but there’s no question it’s criminal behavior on their part.

The federal government has argued that it is not responsible to anybody about what it does to people accused of terrorism. Not to courts, not to congress, not to voters, not to big business, not to anybody. Have they acted according to their beliefs? How would you find out? They think it’s none of your business. They say they’d be doing all right and proper to lie to you about it.

Again, I’m not defending the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, but we’re talking about two men. And their cases were widely publicized even before they got their days in court. Or do you think there are hundreds or thousands of unknown U.S. citizens who have become Desaparecidos as in the Argentine dirty war?

The war on drugs, on the other hand, has destroyed and continues to destroy the lives of not just hundreds or thousands, but millions, through corruption, violence, prison sentences, criminal records. The effect of the U.S. war on drugs are as bad or worse outside the U.S. than inside—look at what it has done to Mexico, to Columbia. How can anyone concerned about liberties worry more about Jose Padilla than the millions who pass through U.S. prisons on drug charges?

If a murderer gets away with murder, that’s bad. If a murderer very publicly gets away with it, if he further gets a lot of people thinking that sometimes murder is appropriate—say if you kill your adulterous wife and her paramour—that’s worse.

No civil liberties? Of any kind?

Well, I never got it completely clear how far the new laws went. Like, you don’t find out until specific cases get argued out in court, right?

So if it isn’t clear whether they can lock up a US citizen for an indefinite time with no access to anybody about anything, no trial, no publicity, etc, then it won’t get clear until we have a US citizen who manages to go to court over whether they can do it or not.

To my way of thinking, if you can’t keep them from locking you up indefinitely without charges, you don’t have any other civil rights either. And there’s no way to really tell whether they can legally do that unless they try and it goes to court, which it can be argued it would not. And there’s no way to tell whether they are actually doing it unless somebody gets out and tells the tale.

The sexual issues are a bad example; what you do with your sexual organs is a pretty big deal to the left.

No, but my reading of lefty sites is that while they do take note of these kinds issues from time to time, the passion is just a fraction of what it is for any Bush-related issue. And also that, for paternalistic reasons, lefties are generally more tolerant the state restricting liberties with the goal of protecting people from themselves (drugs, porn, booze, tobacco, fast food…) My sense of the last time drug legalization was discussed on CT was first that it was some time ago (which is never the case for Bush-related, possible-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it items), and second that there was quite a lot of ambivalence about ending the war on drugs (because of a need to protect people from themselves). But that’s just my sense of the lefty zeitgeist—YMMV.

Also, with regard to the short-livedness of the post-9/11 civil liberties restrictions, why did they seem likely, ex ante Obama’s election, to be short-lived? Had they been conditioned on some status that is soon to end?

Yes—status soon to end was Republican control of the White House. A single-party’s hold on the U.S. presidency is, historically speaking, always soon to end. Two to three terms is about it. By that time, the party in power has worn out its welcome and Americans are ready for a change. So from this point, you can now figure on 4-12 years of Democratic control.

That was Lindsay Beyerstein at HuffPo you linked about the pop-ups, right? Did either Beyerstein or HuffPo cease to be “lefty” while I wasn’t looking? I don’t think my fellow liberals left me the only one to take up for Genarlow Wilson and to argue against the ridiculousness of Georgia’s laws and prosecutions.

By international standards, the civil liberties restrictions after 9/11 weren’t even as bad as much of Europe before 9/11. It is one thing to correctly note that Bush inappropriately curtailed traditional and legal US civil liberties, and it is another thing entirely to treat them as unprecedented in the world (or even in the 1st world).

What?!!? You don’t care about either the extent of the spying or the targets and (potential terrorists vs political opponents)—you only care about whether or not it was successfully kept under wraps (because if people don’t know about it, it’s not so bad)? That just strikes me as a truly bizarre attempt to start with the conclusion (that Bush was the worst ever) and then work backwards to try to find justification (which just isn’t there).

Bush made the case that we don’t deserve civil liberties while we have a permanent war against a nonstate, and a big part of the public went along with him.

No civil liberties? Of any kind? By historical standards, the civil liberties restrictions after 9/11 were pretty mild and are very likely to prove short-lived (unless you all have badly misjudged Obama). No, that doesn’t make them OK—but let’s have a little perspective.

And then, IMHO, the worst civil liberties problems we’re facing now have nothing to do with Bush and the war on terror and won’t be fixed by Obama—the war on drugs along with the no-knock, middle of the night paramilitary SWAT raids, for example, or the sex-offender list insanities. I’m no fan of warrantless wiretaps, but it doesn’t suck 1/10th as much as this kind of crap:

“Woman May Lose Her Home Because of Decade-Old Blowjob”

And it ain’t just the bible belt:

“Connecticut Teacher Facing Jail for Porno Popups”

The biggest problem I have with lefties on civil liberties is that if a particular issue can be blamed on Bush, they blow it completely out of proportion (The worst ever! A fascist coup is coming!), and if it can’t be blamed on Bush, they have a hard time even seeing it as a problem.

Bush made the case that we don’t deserve civil liberties while we have a permanent war against a nonstate, and a big part of the public went along with him.

But maybe in the future our standards might change. Like, once we permanently give up the idea that we have civil rights we might not mind that Bush got rid of them. When we forget they were ever important we won’t mind that they’re gone.

But it’s trivially easy to come up with not only presidents who have been worse on war (Johnson, Nixon), but far worse on civil liberties. Domestic spying was routine under a series of presidents, for example:

L.B.J., Hoover and Domestic Spying
Shortly after Johnson took office, the transcript and tapes of Martin Luther King’s bedroom activities were spirited to him. He read the accounts, which an aide described as being “like an erotic book.” He listened to the tapes that even had the noises of the bedsprings.

When a Johnson assistant once defended King’s antiwar activities, L.B.J. exploded: “Goddammit, if only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually.” The aide tried to joke. “Sounds good, Mr. President,” he said. A huge grin appeared momentarily on Johnson’s face, but he quickly caught it and returned to his threatening self.

Or we could go back to the interment of Japanese Americans or Wilson’s Sedition Act or the Red scares of the 1950s. Bush really doesn’t come close to measuring up to these ‘standards’.

Have a look into the circumstances of cocoa production in the Cote d’Ivoire for instance.

Magistra, where exactly have I equated slavery and wage slavery? My point was to weigh the continuation of slavery against mass death. This was serious philosophical question. Of course slavery is terrible, I’m a rather uncompromising human rights advocate and have gotten into trouble on this blog several times becuase of that. But the right to life, as it is defined in the ICCPR, is also a human right and obviously a fundamental one. Now if you want to argue that depriving 600.000 people of this right was worth it, because it led to the abolition of slavery you can, but simply pointing out that slavery was terrible is to my mind not a strong enough argument. Killing people in the name of human rights or societal progress is an inherently problematic proposition. That’s all.

Sure, and the USA has seldom shown interest in regulating the stock markets, instead letting them make a show of pretending to self-regulate. It’s hard to get governments to exercise power over entrenched economic interests. There’s hardly a nation in the world where banking is illegal, for example. Even china—founded on the idea of protecting people from capitalists—now allows private banks.

I claim that if the south got an adequate financial system—even with the burden of legal banking—then they would find that large-scale slavery was not cost-effective. And without the profits driving it, the rest would have a chance to unravel.

Not a sure thing. Not something that could possibly satisfy abolitionists, who were out for blood. And of course it made a difference that they thought it would be a quick and easy war. March in, kill a few people, arrest the leaders, free the slaves, go home satisfied with a job well done and at that point it’s over, everything’s fine.