On 30 July 2013 Matt was interviewed on Shine TV about the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment (“GCSB”) Bill. The discussion on the issues of civil liberties, spying in times of threats against citizens is very good. The video is here:
Tags: GCSB · MandM on Video · Rights and Freedoms · Shine TV2 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Today's New Atheists proclaim themselves our culture's party of reason. It is a claim they cannot sustain. Reason is the New Atheists' weakness, not their strength and in fact, the Christian faith is a far better place to look for True Reason. Making their case accessible to the first-time inquirer as well as the serious student, this top-flight team of writers presents a sound defense and a strong introduction to the true reason uniquely found in Christianity.
The book begins by examining foundational philosophical approaches to the Bible as well as the methodological challenges those philosophies create for interpreting the Bible. It then addresses textual and historical challenges and how to deal with them. Finally it looks at ethical, scientific, and theological challenges demonstrating the Bible's moral integrity in relationship to contemporary moral emphases.
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1) A tree is known by its fruit, and the fruit of the state is theft, murder, and loss of freedom.
2) Choosing to trust a government is like choosing to walk between a lioness and her cubs.
3) In the interview you mentioned the post-9/11 security situation. The state always has an enemy du jour: Communism, Saddam Hussein, and now terrorism were and are all more-or-less manufactured enemies (e.g. Saddam Hussein was no military threat whatsoever to people living in the USA) used to keep people scared and begging for “protection”.
4) There is a close parallel between the false-flag Reichstag fire and 9/11. The empirical evidence is that on 9/11 three buildings came down as a result of controlled demolition, and the prima facie evidence is that it was a false flag operation (most notably, the government “investigation” was essentially a work of fiction that ignored inconvenient facts: the same goes for the Pentagon and Flight 93. The state’s lackeys say “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to hide” while hiding so much themselves.).
Both 9/11 and the Reichstag fire were used to increase power and tyranny. As always, the pertinent question is “Qui bono?”.
5) If you like empirical evidence you’ll like these on 9/11:
2hr version (and well worth the time) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgVCj7q49o
1hr version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddz2mw2vaEg
http://www.ae911truth.org
Hi,
I agree with your overall concerns Matt – at least what you outlined in the interview. My observation is that Government do pass laws o rmake executive order (OIC etc) because they ‘have the power too’, even if the law is manifestly unjust (e.g. the ‘anti-smacking bill’) or a clear majority of the voting body want it repealed. Our Governments seem only to listen to the election results (not necessarily what is said in an election campaign by voters) which is all they have to listen to. But is it all they need to listen to? I would answer no, and while our media exert some pressure they are only a part of society.
The reason I said that is to illustrate why I agree with your broader point.
However, being in Goivernment often presents difficult choices when it comes to governing. As you well know, the basic function of a Government is to protect its citizens and people within its jurisdiction to be able to function as a human being (e.g. the right to life being an easy case). While successive NZ Governments have failed on that score (witness the unborn child) it nonetheless remains the Governement’s main function. Put another way, you could never privatise defence or the law making function and make them the realm of competing entities.
Hope you agree with that.
To bring that function into the current debate around the GCSB Bill, while I agree that it is not Government’s function to gather everyone’s data because of the salient points you raised, there is another scenario to consider: who watches the watchers? In the context of our intelligence services, we rely on the Government to watch them. As you said, there needs to be protections in law to make sure a Government of the day is not a power unto itself when it exercises its oversight on, for example, the GCSB.
But there are other watchers. And they have come about largely from the advent of the internet. As you probably know, overseas state entities have tried to hack, and, monitor our communications, including the internet. In other words, they are collecting the metadata and all of our private communications within NZ and from NZ to/from other countries. Who watches them? There is only one body which can fulfill that task, but in fulfilling that task you run ito the issue we are talking about: because to know if country X is doing a mass surveillance operation on NZ our Government would have to have the interception capability to detect that, which means they [the NZ Government] will collect our data.