Certainly not perfect (especially not if you were black, Japanese, gay or communist), that would be a silly claim, but freer.

I'll agree with you that the civil rights movement beginning in the 1960s was necessary for the United States to extend the benefits of freedom to all its citizens. But universal suffrage for women came significantly earlier in the United States than it did in Switzerland, for example, and black people in my state (Minnesota) have always been able to vote and to own property and to marry whomever of whatever race and so on since before Minnesota became a state (which, indeed, was one of the points of the Dred Scott case, in which a slave tried to become free by claiming that his passage through the free territory of Minnesota should end his condition of slavery). The Civil War was a necessary reaction to totalitarian denial of basic human rights by the Confederate states, and the civil rights movement after World War II was a necessary response to the deplorable segregation that still occurred in those states long after the Civil War, but everyone in some regions of the United States has long recognized that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were both aberrations, gone in some states from the beginning, and always contrary to the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (and the bills of rights in various state constitutions).

I do hope that we can make a better future, but it is not like the past was the greatest thing either.

It's as if Mother Liberty was the Goddess herself: for whenever two nations come into a fight, people in both are always saying that "God is on our side"...

This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion?

I think there are more concepts where we have it the wrong way around like this.

I feel like free will doesn't have much to do with the kind of freedom we're talking about, though. If some other human being (or group) has the ability to make you do something you don't want to do, that's a problem of freedom, not free will. (After all, you could decide not to do that thing and suffer the consequences).

Free will is much more about things that you have no ability whatsoever to actually make that decision in the first place, whether because of the manipulative hand of some supernatural force, or via some radical rationalist explanation of decision making.

I understand the distinction you're making between freedom and free will; I mentioned it because the compatibilist notion of free will is what you're calling freedom here. But yeah, it's probably not too relevant to the original discussion.

Edit: thanks for the clarification, koningrobot,

By 1930, of course, the KKK had a significant political presence in Indiana, and at this point, white rural Hoosiers hate blacks with the best of them, but I was surprised to learn that that attitude came well after the end of the Civil War.

Point is, it's always been a fight.

What's especially depressing is that the commitment to paranoia and the dismantling of due process, civil rights, etc., is 100% bipartisan; there are no serious political voices taking a stand against it. Bush was of course bad; Obama -- my last great hope -- has extended and amplified everything that Bush did. And Obama's opponents are essentially unified in their position that Obama's chief failure has been to not dismantle due process and civil rights quickly enough. At this point, I think that Obama is probably still the lesser evil, but that's too damned evil for me to vote for.

I don't see any prospects for this reversing itself. Carry this trend out another decade or two, and it means the end of the American republic. There's nothing extraordinary about this thought: over long enough timeframes, great nations collapse all the time, and this is more or less the blueprint they follow when they do it: increasing paranoia about being beset by enemies both external and domestic; dismantling of internal political apparatus and centralisation of political power with a single individual; increasing inability to balance a budget, tolerate dissent, maintain infrastructure, etc. I fear that the present era will be remembered alongside Rome in the late 4th century, Spain in the early 1930s, etc.

I hope I'm wrong, and that those who stay can somehow turn it around. But at this point I'm glad I left.

In any case, a belief in civil liberties shouldn't even be a discrete political position; it should be the bedrock on which all political positions are founded. When one candidate defines themselves as "pro-liberty" -- as opposed to all those other guys -- the game is already lost. Should they win power, they'll need to claim extraordinary powers in order to reinstate "liberty" -- undermining democratic institutions in the process, and thus the actual mechanisms that guarantee liberty.

In fact this is more or less exactly what happened with both Bush and Obama, and I'm pretty sure that the same thing would happen with Paul. His message is: "I will give you liberty" -- not "I will ensure that the institutional checks and balances which act as guarantors of liberty are maintained and reinforced". In fact he rarely shows anything other than contempt for those institutions. Therefore I do not believe he would be a friend of liberty.

There is no reason to assume that Paul will turn evil as soon as he gets the Presidency. This is a different question from whether he will be able to be effective or not, and my belief is that he would not be able to do almost anything he wants to do, and that a Paul presidency would accelerate our plunge into chaos and anarchy, but I don't believe Paul himself would be corrupted and start ignoring the Constitutional stipulations on executive power.

[citation needed]

You are way off base on this one and have nothing to back this up. Ron Paul has consistently been for every American. He is for repealing Roe v. Wade and allowing states to decide on abortion rights, he has been outspoken on the bias of prison sentences and the death penalty on minorities, and is against a federal mandate on marriage. Those positions are exactly contrarian to the ones you are attempting to assign to him.

I'm not sure why you think his understanding of economics is "loony" as he is the ONLY member of congress that predicted the housing collapse YEARS before it happened (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnuoHx9BINc)

Neither Bush nor Obama ever championed liberty. Ron Paul is a completely different animal. He isn't promising to GIVE you anything — he's promising to reduce government to get OUT of your life. Big difference.

Abortion rights... well from this side of the pond we think it's nutty that anyone in your country can want abortion to be illegal, literally crazy. But whatever your view, pro-choice can argue that they're fighting for woman's rights, pro-life cannot - you can argue you're fighting for the rights of babies, meaning it's an issue not relevant to whether Ron Paul is good for women.

In the past he has somehow tried to blame those sexually harrassed in the workplace for being sexually harrassed - something that is far more a women's issue than not.

Overall he's a far-right (shockingly not the furthest right thanks to batshit teapartyers) Republican. I get that there are Americans who agree with his views, but don't try and argue that his views on these topics are universally considered correct - even in America.

Whether abortion should be legal or illegal is another discussion I guess.

No candidate (actually, no party) really gives a f* if you "happen to be female, non-white, or gay". It's just a market niche they are milking, with the Democrats appealing to the "progressive" masses and the Republicans to the "conservative" ones.

In actuality they could not care less. Blacks, hispanics, women, gay, is not where the money (contributions, under the table, campaign funding, post-congress job waiting, etc) come from.

People voting with those issues in mind (either pro or against) are sucked into this false dichotomy.

I'd rather people voted for the ACTUAL issues, which mostly amount to FREEDOM, the ECONOMY, and FOREIGN POLITICS.

(Using tinyurl because the "real" url ends in a colon, and HN has a problem with that).

You get used to it.

It sucks, very very badly. I wish I could stop going back. But all of my people are there, almost without exception.

The US may be far from perfect, but it's important as a country founded upon the right ideas. If it crumbles, we all lose, regardless of where we live.

There's no un-ratcheting the loss of freedoms there. It no longer has basic liberties or the rule of law, and it's actively dangerous to anyone trying to bring about changes to that status.

And then there was perception --just not being aware of what was allowed and not. I do recall people telling me that mocking the president was not allowed. Anyhow, I'm back and I feel ok. It could be better, idealistically, I suppose, but it's not as bad as it would seem, vis a vis other places.

Good luck getting rid of stupid when stupid has a budget.

I love that line. Catchy.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Upton Sinclair

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair