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Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.

Wendy Kaminer

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Wendy Kaminer
Age: 74
Born: 1949
Born: December 28
Journalist
Lawyer
Writer
Giving
Powers
Dissidents
Thousands
Monitoring
Terrorism
Harmless
Instead
Intimidating
Political
Preventing
Harassing
Doe
Focusing
Revert
Give
Domestic
Spying
Best
Immigrants
Unchecked

More quotes by Wendy Kaminer

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I don't think of myself as having a particular role. I'm lucky enough to be able to make my living essentially by expressing my opinions. But, you know, I think the world would manage quite well if I weren't doing it.
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Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.
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I don't see a direct conflict between the rights of individuals and the rights of communities, because I don't perceive of communities as having rights in a way that individuals do. Communities certainly have interests, but they don't exactly have rights.
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As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought.
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The dissemination of pseudoscience, including such things as the fascination with near-death experiences and the growing belief by Americans -- 34 percent of them -- in reincarnation are dangerous. They help to break down the standards of reason.
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Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.
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Under the rubric of religious freedom, we respect the right to worship differently much more than the right to worship not at all.
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Tolerance is thin gruel compared to the rapture of absolute truths. It's not surprising that religious people are often better protected by atheists and agnostics than each other.
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The phenomenal success of the recovery movement reflects two simple truths that emerge in adolescence: all people love to talk about themselves, and most people are mad at their parents. You don't have to be in denial to doubt that truths like these will set us free.
Wendy Kaminer
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There are only two states of being in the world of codependency - recovery and denial.
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.
Wendy Kaminer
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Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.
Wendy Kaminer
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Patriotism does not oblige us to acquiesce in the destruction of liberty. Patriotism obliges us to question it, at least.
Wendy Kaminer
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The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases. But real science thrives on the capacity for doubt.
Wendy Kaminer
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For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.
Wendy Kaminer
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The magical thinking encouraged by any belief in the supernatural, combined with the vilification of rationality and skepticism, is more conducive to conspiracy theories than it is to productive political debate.
Wendy Kaminer
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If all issues are personalized, we lose our capacity to entertain ideas, to generalize from our own or someone else's experiences, to think abstractly. We substitute sentimentality for thought.
Wendy Kaminer
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What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.
Wendy Kaminer
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I don't care if religious people consider me amoral because I lack their beliefs in God. I do however care deeply about efforts to turn religious beliefs into law and those efforts benefit greatly from the conviction that individually and collectively we cannot be good without God.
Wendy Kaminer
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Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
Wendy Kaminer