Ciao to you, Dick, and to all the friends of Socrates Cafe.
Today i read this and i feel like to tell my opinion, although i am not active participant in SC anymore.
I think that concepts like freedom (or liberty) deserve a clear definition before making any discussion about, just to understand what we are speaking about.
Somebody (was it Andrej Sakharov?) said that one can be free also if chained in prison. Because freedom is firstly freedom of thoughts, and only after of material goods.
What kind of freedom is that one written on the New Hempshire license plates? I am sorry, but i think that freedom is something more serous than that.
It's like ketchup (excuse me for the banality, but simple examples are very useful to me to explain difficult things in a simple way). Do you like ketchup? I guess that somebody reading here would answer "yes", and i bet among them there is somebody that like chocolate icecream too, but (i hope) none of then would appreciate ketchup on chocolate icecream.
What i want to say is that you can also give freedom as you, "in the western world", are accustomed to live, but if you give that freedom to somebody that doesn't have the freedom of thought, or, in other words, the open-mind-ness, more than the "ability", to choose, it's like putting ketchup on icecream. It's like a remote control with 99 programs to choose from but no tv to watch.
The US government made restrictions on citizens freedom for the declared reason of security? How the hell could ever one imagine that a restriction of my freedom is useful to insure my security? I believe that the worst side of this is not just the restriction of freedom, but the fact that most of people accepts this restriction without even thinking to the consequences. That means that those restriction were acceptable to them, which means that they don't need freedom. And that means that they have remote controls but no tv to watch. Take this remote control, i don't know what to do with it.
How can Liberty be regained? A revolution?
But the main thing is that one focuses on the kind of Liberty he has to regain. Liberty to go to an airport with dirty socks? Nah! i am jealous of my freedom to think without somebody else that tells me what i have to think.

PS: my new address is over here:
http://italianroots.blogspot.com/

byebye.

Thanks for commenting my new blog, Dick, please feel free to come whenever you feel like: still i don't have any reader, except you, my wife and myself.

I have some points about this discussion on liberty (the miserable English of mine doesn't allow me to distinguish between "liberty" and "freedom", so i will use indifferently one or the other word). I notice from your discussion, that American (or should i say your?) idea of Liberty is slightly different than what in Italy we mean (or should i say i mean?) with "libertà".
Libertà is more like a collective idea, and it does not speak about individual grants or prohibitions, unless as means to reach collective freedom.
To drive over the speed limit is something that usually is considered against the collective freedom, because it can harm somebody else's freedom.
If instead of Liberty we are speaking about personal freedom, well... why should we consider dictature a limitation of freedom? I believe instead that dictature is the largest example of freedom we can think of. It allows the dictator to be free to do everything, including torturing and killing innocent kids.
Why exceeding the speed limit is so different from dictature? Well, i consider it much more trivial than dictature, obviously, but both of them are examples against (and not for) Liberty.
Liberty is what allows me to do what i want because i believe it is right to do it. Since there is nobody that can say what is right (giving that to do that we need most of times a moral judgement, which is not absolute), we can also speculate that somebody, sincerely, could believe that exceeding the speed limit (or making a coup d'état in order to be a dictator) is right, so it works for Liberty. In that case i still think that speed limits and human rights should be respected, but i also believe that those guys are not so bad, because they work for morality. But, frankly, i believe that world is more easy than that. Theoretically somebody can believe whatever, since moral is individual, but in practice i think that who exceed the speed limit or torture innocent kids does that only for personal interest, despite the social good and Liberty.

I believe that unfortunately it's a common human defect to try to obtain as much as the individue can, despite Liberty principles. It is common to drive faster than the speed limit just because one is late, or for fun. That's why there are laws. But sometimes laws are not enough because somebody or something more powerful than laws (in this discussion we are speaking about US government), can change the laws theirselves (note that this is different to trasgression - as who drives fast - or a coup d'état - as the dictator -, but the result with respect to democracy or Liberty is the same nature).
Since there is always somebody or something trying to do that, society should protect itself against it. And since society is made of us, that means that we have to protect our Liberty. And to do that we firstly should know WHAT is Liberty (or, in other words what kind of Liberty we want). And that, despite the apparence, is a difficult and cultural task, because it does not deal just of our freedom to wear dirty socks at the airport or some trivial things like that, but it deals of morality of everybody, which is something that is supposed to be rooted in the deep of history.
A second thing that we have to do is to understand what we do really believe, avoiding to passively accept a pre-packed moral. Renounce to some of our freedom for the goal of security stinks as something that had been propagandized by "the power" in order to obtain something else. Passively accepting this just because tv convinced you between a commercial and another means to give your freedom in somebody else's hands. And that is wrong not only because you risk to loose your freedom, but because you are not the subject of freedom anymore. You renounce to understand what is Liberty, so you are becoming a slave. Exactly the opposite of the prisoner that is free because nobody can change his thoughts. No, my ancestors gave their blood for freedom, and i would give mine to defend it.
A last thing i would like to say is this. Okay, i don't have The Truth in my pockets, so somebody can also think that it is a right thing to accept to renounce to their freedom for security. But the point is that they are not renouncing only to THEIR freedom, but to EVERYBODY's freedom (infact it wouldn't make sense that i renounce to my freedom to be protected and i don't demand that my neighbor would renounce to his own). Let's say that the renounce is made on majority base. Well, that's not enough anyway, to my eyes. Because if 10 people is given a remote control and a tv set since generations, if among the 10 people there is 6 blind who doesn't know what to do with a remote control, the renounce to remote control looks to me a sopruse even if it is decided by those 6 which are the majority. It is sad to think that somebody gives up his privacy, for example, because he wanted to be assured of his security, but much more sad is to think that somebody else did the same without wanting it.

Sorry for the (as usual) long message.
dario

Now, this is becoming a little difficult, Dick, infact i already wrote several lines without focusing the problem, and i threw everything in the trash bin. So, i will try to put the ideas in a schematic way.
- firstly, let's stop, please, to compare Italian and American system. i am not saying that Italian works, but for sure the problems we have are very different to the ones i am showing you about American system.
- A system like yours severely limitates freedom because it doesn't allow representation of small minorities in the government. A communist party, for example, will never have a seat in the government, although there are, i believe, an amount of people that would vote for such a party, if it ever exist.
- A system in which who wins is the one that made a better electoral campaign, and where private companies are the ones that sponsor electoral campaign in change of favors that the winning party can make for them is a system in which the politics is not driven by the governants, and even less by the people, but instead by who gives that money, so that the big companies. The interests of those big companies are usually very different from the interests of the people, not to count that if a choice of a human being is usually done with an eye on morality, i don't believe that choices of big companies are any moral. The task of companies is to make money, and not to do the good.
- Since it is useful for everybody (companies, government and common people) to continue to define USA a democracy, there must be a way that induce common people (basis of democracy) to accept and continuously choose this system. This way is the power of convincement of the media.
- the conclusion of this is that if politics steals some personal freedom to normal citizens with normal citizens' consent, for fake reasons, but the real target to favor in some ways the interests of the companies, those freedom will be given back only if the interests of the companies will be changed so that it is their convenience to give back those freedom to the citizens. For which reasons the big companies want to control citizens' personal freedoms is pretty obvious, you agree?

As you say, atleast on the paper, US democracy is based on people's freedom. So, when they decided to limit people's freedom to insure security, i bet a cultured minority of americans, including you, thought "what the hell are we doing?!?", being surprised that a free people freely decided to limitate their own freedoms.
Now, how can you ever think that the same people, a little less free, a little less freely would decide to cancel the limitations on those freedoms?
If in the first time the decision was taken because of propaganda, why now, that people is less free, the same propaganda shouldn't have the same power to convince people to keep those limitations? Because now you are voting for Mrs. Clinton? mmmmmh.....