Liberal Road Blog Individual Freedom and Equality

As I surfed on the web this weekend I ran into this interesting video: Busted - The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. It describes well the rights you have when confronting the police (applies only in the USA) and what you should do.

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The video has been made by Flex Your Rights.

I think it’s important that everyone has rights against the police for privacy reasons. The privacy should be limited only to a reasonable extent as necessary to guarantee the individual freedom of others (for ex. to reduce crimes that violates the individual freedom of others).

If the police was allowed to search anyone at any time for no special reason it would be a dangerous step toward a surveillance state (Big Brother -state at the end).

As laws are different in every country the information on the video applies only to the United States (but apparently not if you are suspected of terrorism as described in the Patriotic Act). Local laws of other countries should be checked.

I’ll make a small research about the rights in Sweden in similar situations when I have a bit more time. I’ll put a link here when I’ve done it.

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Today the Democrats took over the Congress and now control the whole Congress. Many hope for a change in American politics, but how much will change after all? Democrats are often not much better than Republicans. The power switch at least gives hope of a change in the Iraq war strategy. But one thing is sure: the United States got its first woman speaker of the house of representatives as Nancy Pelosi was elected to that post.

It is the first time in twelve years that the Democrats have a majority in the whole Congress. The Democrats have announced that they intend to change how the situation in Iraq is handled. Time will show what that means but we have to remember that some Democrats are still supporting Bush’s Iraq policy.

The war in Iraq was a big mistake. Saddam Hussein violated human rights, that’s true, but the situation is not much better today. The country is highly insecure with daily bomb attacks, kidnappings and killings. Furthermore with the Abu Ghraib scandal showing American soldiers torturing Iraqis, we may well ask if the human rights are more respected in Iraq nowadays than they were before.

The election of a woman, Nancy Pelosi, as the speaker of the House of Representatives is hopefully a sign that woman and men are becoming more equal in politics. It is a historical event, but there is still a huge way to go to achieve equality: women still represent only about 20% of the representatives in the U.S. Congress.

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