Quoting Case <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > [Case] > > What you do find is social democracies whether both are blended. > > [Platt] > Well not in North Korea, China, Cuba or Stalinist Russia. > > [Case] > None of those are social democracies.
That was my point. You said examples of pure communism were rare and that today we find social democracies. I noted the exceptions. > [Platt] > I agree accusation is not enough, although any foreign group who threatens > us and demonstrates a clear and present danger to our way of life doesn't > qualify for due process of our law. > > [Case] > Groups are not subject to due process in our system. They are covered by > civil law which has lower standards of proof on one hand but no jail time on > the other. I wish you would tell that to those who want to give the group of terrorists at Guantanamo the due process of our system. > [Platt] > Agree. I think the influence of Christian ethics was expressed in the > Declaration that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable > rights that belong to us as individuals and cannot be taken away by > government because our Creator outranks government. This idea of individual > rights stemmed I believe from the Protestant reformation which promoted the > concept that individuals could relate directly to God with the necessity of > church intermediaries. > > [Case] > I doubt it the founders were unaware of the difficulty in proclaiming God > the author of freedom. It was not the Lord who freed the colonies or the > slaves it was armies. Nor do I think that individual rights are exclusively > revered by Protestants. As Pirsig points out the founders were also heavily > influenced by the example of the Iroquois Nations. I doubt about "heavily influenced." Old Ben Franklin may have said something about the Iroquois, but I how much it influenced the others is highly debatable. > This strikes me as an example of Dawkinseque memetics, where the colonial > populations brought memes from the old world to the new. These became to a > certain extent geographically isolated from the parent group and were > influenced and changed by the memes in the new environment. Well, since I never saw a meme and wouldn't know how to measure one if I did I find them highly unscientific and thus, by your standards, probably nonexistent. ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/ moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
