Quote of the day

"The very same people who have been demanding for years that Muslims be imprisoned for life, tortured and killed with no trials or charges of any kind suddenly become extremely sensitive to the nuances of due process and humane detention conditions -- they start sounding like Amnesty International civil liberties extremists -- the minute it's a Christian, rather than a Muslim, who is subjected to such treatment." - Glenn Greenwald

It really is quite a spectable watching people who champion the chargeless/trialless indefinite detention and torture of Muslims by Americans complain of lesser human rights abuses committed by other nations against Americans or Christians.

It's kind of like how Abraham Lincoln put it in his letter to Henry Pierce.

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

In other words, if you don't want to be held without charges and tortured, you shouldn't consent to have others held without charges and tortured; furthermore, to do so violates the spirit of universal human rights which was the bedrock principle of the Declaration of Independence, i.e. "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

The hypocrites who believe in rights for some but not for others seem to prefer the maxim of the ruling pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."