Sunday, March 19, 2006

Leaving the world of the concrete for a moment, I'm not sure there is anything else that I detest the Bush administration more for than increasingly making me long for the days of the hegemony of liberal pluralism.

I offer two links in support --

The Federalist #47:

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system."
And second, a developing story in our democratic Afghanistan...Like father, like son.

An Afghan man who recently admitted he converted to Christianity faces the death penalty under the country's strict Islamic legal system.

3 comments:

post tot discrimina rerum said...

Well the first point is right enough. The second, however, can't really be atttributed to them copying us, can it? The Taliban certainly wouldn't have hesitated to impose such penalties. It's just that before, the US wasn't bombing the country and so, we didn't have to necessarily feel so responsible for it. Though, of course, the Taliban and the mujahadeen are in large part a result of anti-Soviet foreign policy from the Carter and Reagan administrations. I blame capitalism.

post festum said...

Perhaps your right -- No doubt the Taliban would have done the same thing. But then again the Taliban never claimed (nor had Western powers claiming for them) any pretense to be following the road to people-power.

And yet, this is kinda like an abortion, eh? And while we may view the penalty as extreme, the constitutional state of Afghanistan certainly may claim that it is doing everything it can to also build a "culture of life". After all, a theocratic state defines life in its theocratic terms. Is "life begins at conception" really all that different from "life begins with the acceptance of Allah"?

post festum said...

Oh, and I blame capitalist imperialism.