Brainglutton, I am so tired of your BS

[Fear_Itself]

@Weirddave

No, the reason BG is a traitor is not because he holds a political opinion that I disagree with, the reason he is a traitor is because he wants to tear down the entire foundation upon which our country was built and replace it with one where the government steals from the capable to subsidize the lazy and does it in the name of the “common good”.

You know, it is usually the liberals who get tagged with the playing the class warfare card, but you seem to be conflating the rich with “capable” and the poor with “lazy”, so I think you are the one guilty of class warfare now. You are sweating desperation Dave, terrified that Hillary will actually pull it off and overturn the trough the his cronies have been gorging themselves on for 7 years. Just because we want to gore your ox does not make us traitors.

[RTFirefly]

@Weirddave

I can’t recall anyone here challenging the notion that “Bush is a traitor” is a legitimate viewpoint.

Your inability to recall isn’t exactly a good cite, but the least you could do is cite some instances where that POV is argued here, and nobody contradicted it.

Contrast that with BG who fervently believes in a political philosophy that maintains the U.S. would be a better place if the government insinuated itself into every corner of our lives (like they aren’t already), took over all industry, distributed the wealth of America in anyway that it saw fit to, all in the name of, as I said, the common good. That’s not a dissenting opinion, that’s destroying what America is and turning it into something else.

Does this simplify to “regulation and progressive taxation are anti-American” or is it something more than that?

I’m an historian

Cite to your original research in the field?

Maybe you meant to say you’re a student of history.

[Richard_Parker]

What do you think the word traitor means, Weirddave?

[nameless]

@Fear Itself

you seem to be conflating the rich with “capable” and the poor with “lazy”, so I think you are the one guilty of class warfare now.

Good catch. I’m capable and poor!

[Spit]

@Weirddave

…where the government steals from the capable to subsidize the lazy and does it in the name of the “common good”. THAT is what I take issue with and that vile, disgusting, warped philosophy must be opposed whenever it rears it’s head in America, with utmost vigor. Someone who seeks to destroy the very thing they falsely claim to venerate is no type of patriot at all.

I salute you sir.

[Tamerlane]

@Weirddave

A Fascist system of government is incompatible with the democratic republic we have in the U.S. The exact same is true of a Socialist system of government.

Which really isn’t true. A socialist system can be either authoritarian or democratic. Fascism is always authoritarian by definition.

If one defines patriotism as a subset of nationalism, then it is probably fair to say that an internationalist ( like for example one of my Marxist parents ) probably would be excluded by defintion. A definition of patriotism as pure love of country probably wouldn’t ( one can love ones country and still sincerely believe the best thing for it would be an extranational government ). But regardless, one needn’t be an internationalist to be a socialist - there are certainly scads of nationalist socialists in Europe.

And our system is hardly a pure bastion of free market values anyway. Like every other western country it’s a hybrid, with a number of loosely “socialist” programs, from public schools to the G. I. Bill to unemployment insurance. The concept of the U.S. moving to, say, a Scandinavian-style socialism, is hardly a traitorous meme that would inevitably destroy all we hold dear as good Americans. It would just being sliding over from one end of the spectrum to the other.

I honestly don’t know where BG falls on the spectrum of socialist belief. But if he is an internationalist, I think one can make a reasonable, if not airtight, argument that he isn’t a patriot as re: above. However unless he truly advocates overthrowing our system in an non-democratic fashion and/or instituting an authoritarian brand of socialism ( say your average-brand “dictatorship of the proletariat” ), I’d say the traitor/treason thing is wayyyy over the top.

[Weirddave]

@Hentor the Barbarian

Wow! Anyone who can seriously write something like this is a cunt. Fuck off, right now.

We seem to mistake fascism for patriotism in the US these days, and dullards like Weirddave and smiling bandit can only drool and pick and wonder what the hell is keeping the jackboots from coming to clean out the riff raff.

You’re an idiot. You read not what I wrote, but rather what you wanted to see. Yes, I think people like BG deserve to be lined up against a wall. I think people who molest and murder children for their sick sexual pleasure deserve to be crucified in the town square at high noon, people who join the KKK deserve to be enslaved on a cotton plantation under black masters and people who repeatedly rape other people deserve to be castrated with a rusty can opener. That does not mean I advocate any of these things happening. The beauty and the strength of America is that each individual’s right to believe traitorous things is guaranteed. BG can post here to his heart’s content, march in front of the White House in support of his imaginary worker’s paradise and distribute leaflets outside of factories all day long. Such actions are constitutionally protected, and I’ll vigorously defend those rights. That doesn’t mean that the people doing them don’t deserve something else entirely.

[samclem]

Geez, Tamerlane. How dare you be so insightful and incisive. I thought all the wise old ones left, and we only have mindless newbies here.

[Weirddave]

@nameless

I think the label is equally stupid when applied to Bush. The president may be a simpleton, he may be operating from a ludicrously polarized view of international relations, and he may have initiated horribly disastrous things, but I do not believe he is not a traitor. If BG calls Bush a traitor (I am not certain if he has or not) I will say, “Hey BG. That’s stupid.”

Innocent typo or Freudian slip?

@nameless

See, no. As long as BG works within the confines of the American constitution while he is trying to change what America is, I’m not that worried about it. Nor does it make him a traitor.

It depends, see above. Hitler worked withing the confines of the laws of the Weimar Republic to overthrow it. (yea, yea, Godwin’s law, blah, blah. I simply use this as an historical example, nothing further, save it) Certainly Democratic Socialist systems can exist, see most of Western Europe, and as such would not necessarily necessitate the overthrow of the Constitution(I don’t think they’re a very good idea, but that’s another issue), but BG has said “I’m a Socialist”. Socialism by definition-

@M-W.com

1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

is not compatible with American style Constitutional government.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

I think I’ve figured it out. Weirddave is a Democrat because he is on the extreme left wing of non-treasonous political thought in the US. It all makes sense now!

[Jackmannii]

@Weirddave

The beauty and the strength of America is that each individual’s right to believe traitorous things is guaranteed.

This brought tears to my eyes. Is there a short version I can use on a bumper sticker?

@Fear Itself

You are sweating desperation Dave, terrified that Hillary will actually pull it off and overturn the trough the his cronies have been gorging themselves on for 7 years.

Oh my. Does anyone actually think that Hillary is a threat to the “trough”?

At best, a slightly different set of characters might end up gorging from it. :dubious:

[nameless]

@Weirdddave

Innocent typo or Freudian slip?

Oh dear. I have tipped my hand

@Weirddave

Hitler worked withing the confines of the laws of the Weimar Republic to overthrow it. (yea, yea, Godwin’s law, blah, blah.

Did he? I’m no historian. If Hitler really and truly did alter the law as he saw fit with the consent of the governed as he did so, then I wouldn’t call him a traitor either. That’s a lot of assumptions though. I’m not sure they’re borne out.

@Weirddave

That does not mean I advocate any of these things happening. The beauty and the strength of America is that each individual’s right to believe traitorous things is guaranteed. BG can post here to his heart’s content, march in front of the White House in support of his imaginary worker’s paradise and distribute leaflets outside of factories all day long. Such actions are constitutionally protected, and I’ll vigorously defend those rights. That doesn’t mean that the people doing them don’t deserve something else entirely.

Barring the fact that you believe BG deserves to be executed (which I still find somewhat odious and troubling), treason is a fairly serious accusation and I’m curious as to what BG has done to warrant that charge. You are saying he has committed treason? That is what a traitor is, yes?

We’re coming down to a question of definitions. You seem to believe a traitor is one who advocates for a system of government that is incompatible with the current style of government. I belive government is derived from the wishes of the people, and if the wishes of the people change, the government necessarily must also change. I believe that traitors are those who (1) levy war against the government (2) adhere to an enemy of the government (3) give enemies of the government aid and comfort.

Perhaps you argue a concept such as socialism is an enemy of the government. I prefer not to declare wars on concepts.

[nameless]

@Weirddave

Someone who wants to destroy the current system of government and replace it (no matter with what) is a traitor to the United States

(bolding mine)

Here’s something. I believe the electoral college should be abolished and the popular vote adopted. I espouse this position everywhere I go. Am I a traitor? My position is completely incompatible with the American system of government established by the founding fathers isn’t it?

[BrainGlutton]

@Tamerlane

If one defines patriotism as a subset of nationalism, then it is probably fair to say that an internationalist ( like for example one of my Marxist parents ) probably would be excluded by defintion. A definition of patriotism as pure love of country probably wouldn’t ( one can love ones country and still sincerely believe the best thing for it would be an extranational government ). But regardless, one needn’t be an internationalist to be a socialist - there are certainly scads of nationalist socialists in Europe.

Well, what about a European who thinks yielding some of his/her nation’s sovereignty to the European Union is not that bad an idea? Such a person is an internationalist to that extent – does that make him/her unpatriotic? Suppose that is based on a belief that there is no essential conflict between his/her own country’s national interests and its federation with a larger community?

Not a purely academic question. According to T.R. Reid’s The United States of Europe, there is a rising young generation who think of themselves as “European” first, as French or Italian or British second, and who all speak English as a second language and may live and work in several different countries in the course of their lives, as you or I might live and work in several different U.S. states. Are such people in any sense “traitors” or “unpatriotic”? The very idea is laughable.

And if an American thinks it would be a good idea for the U.S. and EU to get together to form a new “International Union” of industrialized democracies, with the ultimate goal gradually building a world government by admitting new states as they reach a certain basic level of democracy, human rights, stability and economic viability – an idea I have argued for on this Board – what’s unpatriotic about that?

@Tamerlane

I honestly don’t know where BG falls on the spectrum of socialist belief. But if he is an internationalist, I think one can make a reasonable, if not airtight, argument that he isn’t a patriot as re: above. However unless he truly advocates overthrowing our system in an non-democratic fashion and/or instituting an authoritarian brand of socialism ( say your average-brand “dictatorship of the proletariat” ), I’d say the traitor/treason thing is wayyyy over the top.

Well, I’m not a Marxist in any sense and never have been, and I have my skepticism about the traditional socialist “theology of the final goal,” the idea that socialism is something to come after capitalism. I think of a socialist political movement more as something a democratic capitalist society needs to keep it civilized. That’s enough, I feel, to justify keeping my DSA and Socialist Party USA cards in my wallet even if I don’t fully endorse every little thing on their platforms.

I’m a “reformist,” not because reformist socialism is the only kind that might be politically viable, but because of the law of unintended consequences. I don’t utterly rule out the “final goal,” but if we ever turn socialism into something more than ameliorative, something that really represents a fundamental restructuring of class relations in society, it will have be something built by a long process of trial and error, learning from our mistakes as we go; a process for which the corrective feedback of multiparty democracy is indispensable. (Revolutionaries try to do everything at once, assuming it will all work out as they foresee just because they have the right ideology, but the resulting track record is poor.) And for that matter, if we ever get a libertarian utopia worth living in, it will have emerged by a similar process of gradual evolution. (Just imagine the shock and disruption that would follow from abolishing the state all at once! No, you don’t have to imagine, just look at any failed state.)

And it may be that as we go along the best choice will be neither socialism nor capitalism, but something for which we have no name because the conditions for it do not yet exist and we can no more conceive of it than Europeans of the 17th Century could conceive of the political movements that would follow the Industrial Revolution.

At any rate, smoothing out that process, helping it adjust more rapidly and readily to changing circumstances and become more open to new ideas as they emerge, is one reason (of many) I support a multiparty political system as being preferable to a two-party system. (A one-party system is not even to be considered no matter what the party in question.)

As for internationalism – socialists, like Christians, are supposed to be loyal to something that transcends nationality, but at this stage in history it’s all purely theoretical, from my POV. I have vaguely internationalist goals as stated above, but there really aren’t any internationalist movements worth mentioning that one might support.

And I remain a better American patriot than smiling bandit, or Weirddave, or anyone who identifies the capitalist system with America’s identity as a nation.

[BrainGlutton]

Put another way: From From “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind – Prospect, 10/25/01:

The most influential attempts to define the post-cold war world have been those of Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and Samuel P Huntington, in his essay “The Clash of Civilisations” (1993). Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political evolution. Huntington emphasises the persistence of pre-modern linguistic, cultural and religious divisions, like those between western and eastern Christendom and Confucian and Hindu Asia.

Each of these schemas captures aspects of reality. But an alternative that deserves consideration is one that defines “civilisations” in terms, not of technological development or culture, but of world view. This approach gives us fewer civilisations than those listed by Huntington-but more than the single end-stage civilisation proposed by Fukuyama. From this perspective, the most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). The two major Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, conquered most of the world’s territory and people, including south Asia and the Americas. Only China and Japan, among the major non-western nations, escaped Muslim or Christian rule. Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

On that organizing system, I would place myself about midway between the humanist tradition and the socialist wing of the rationalist tradition, tending towards the former in any close call. I believe in the power of Reason to reshape human life and society for the better – but not so far as to abandon caution or common sense.

[Carol_Stream]

@BrainGlutton

On that organizing system, I would place myself about midway between the humanist tradition and the socialist wing of the rationalist tradition, tending towards the former in any close call. I believe in the power of Reason to reshape human life and society for the better – but not so far as to abandon caution or common sense.

Bullshit. You want to take money away from people, and redistribute it to others. That’s your end game, isn’t it? You’re worse than a common thief.

[askeptic]

Weird Dave and others of his sick kind are the most disgusting piece of shit traitors to the American way of life I have seen.

No, I have nothing more to say. Excrement like him and his sick ilk need no debate or argument.

I say this as a Human a Citizen of the US and a Veteran who has served this country in Iraq.

[Liberal]

@askeptic

No, I have nothing more to say.

Hope springs eternal.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

@Carol Stream

Bullshit. You want to take money away from people, and redistribute it to others. That’s your end game, isn’t it? You’re worse than a common thief.

Another beauty from the mistress of the pithy ejaculation.

[nameless]

@Carol Stream

Bullshit. You want to take money away from people, and redistribute it to others. That’s your end game, isn’t it? You’re worse than a common thief.

@Monty Python

Chorus: Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, without a merry band. He steals from the poor and gives to the rich. Stupid bitch!

Dennis Moore: Wait a tic… blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

Seemed appropriate for some reason.

And on preview, Liberal is here. Hey yeah! Weirddave what about Liberal? His political philosophy is pretty different from the one we’re running right now. Is he a traitor too? I’m just trying to see where the lines are.