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[mainiac]

I didn't say either side was consistent.  But I think you miss an important distinction w/ states rights.

The three big "states rights" claims:  Abolition/Civil Rights/Hate Crime legislation were opposed by majorities in the regions the old south, (though they had strong supporters in that region as well).  They were supported by majorities of the country as a whole but they were all measures that forced millions of people to abide by a mandate they did not approve of.  The people who approved of these measures were largely unaffected, but they approved of interfering with other people's freedom to be backwards.  They were  impositions of the government's will on the popular will, not the other way around.  Had the public will in the deep south been in favor of Abolition/Civil Rights/Hate Crime legislation, there wouldn't have been a need for national action (and there wouldn't have been a need for hate crime laws at all if racism wasn't distorting local trials.)

The conservatives champion real, honest, decentralization when it suits them.

[E. Albright]

I'm going to bite my tongue instead of getting into a semantic argument about what sense of decentralized we mean. I concede your point regarding decentralization in locality of government willingly, however.

[e] Hmm... maybe I should have used "distributed" instead of decentralized. Would that have been more or less clear? Meh, probably just as bad.

[mainiac]

Distributed as in allocating power to different regions like the electoral college?

[E. Albright]

Distributed as in responsibility and authority resting in relatively many people (legislatures, direct referendums, town councils, etc.) rather than in relatively few ("unrestrained" executives at whatever level, dictators, etc.). This also tends to turn on rule of man vs. rule of law; should we be restraining our Chosen Leader with cumbersome restrictions and nitpicking bureaucratic details, or should we be letting him do as he thinks best, relying on his character to make the proper judgments?

[mainiac]

Ah yes.  The "decider" model is quite conservative.  Liberals will rally behind a leader in times of urgency, but conservatives seem to regard decision making like a hot potato, to be passed off to someone else with all haste.

[Samyotix]

That's what I mean though.  I get that they're cannon fodder, but why would fodder make such good hitmen?

I can only report for the German terrorist cells of the 1970s; these guys regularly trained with Arab resistance groups. The very same people that blew up german politicians because of their nazi past trained with antii-israeli terrorists and, during an airplane abduction, separated out and shot the jewish passengers.

So it looks like hippies make good cannonfodder because
a) they don't realize they're being used
b) they don't realize they're basically just slightly worse than the people they claim to be fighting,
c) they can be militant enough, especially in fringe sects like PETA and similar, to spend quite a lot of time and resources in preparing whatever "action" their leaders demand.

Not that nazi idiots are any better: If a young arab attends a camp where uniformed militants sing songs that oppose the constitution, glorify murder(er)s, practice with assault rifles and so on, he'd probably wind up in prison as a suspected terrorist, silenced with gaffa tape and with a 220 volt cable around his genitals.
If a young Nazi attends such a camp and is dumb enough to have himself photographed showing nazi greetings while uniform-clad skins march past wielding assault rifles, he can later succeed Jorg Haider as the head of Austria's so-called Freedom Party and joke about "playing paintball".

[mainiac]

Wait, germany kidnaps and tortures arabs?  This is news to me.

[EuchreJack]

EDIT: Eh, some things are better off unsaid.