Well, I dunno - I guess you’d have to ask Weirddave ;).
I wasn’t making any statement about MY beliefs. One man’s jingoism is another’s patriotism and personally I tend to incline more towards the non-nationalistic definition. So I’ve got no particular beef with you calling yourself patriotic. I just said that depending on how you define the term one could make a reasonable argument that internationalism is ipso facto non-patriotic. Doesn’t mean I’d necessarily agree with that argument.
See, politically I’m somewhat to the right of my parents and probably a wee bit to the right of you. But I’m also well to the left of Dave ( at least in regards to this issue ) and am myself more inclined to some brands of internationalism than not. I have a deep suspicion of modern nationalism and tend to regard linguistic/religious tribalism and the like with distate. I’m a big fan of the EU - at least in abstract.
So I don’t know if your average American folks would consider ME patriotic or not. I also could give a fuck :). The word has no sacred resonance with me and I regard it as neither a compliment nor an insult. I mean, shoot, I like the U.S. an awful lot - it’s where I keep all my shit. I just had a blast criss-crossing 4,000 miles of the southwest on a little two week road trip last month. I fully intend to retire here and be a good little consumer for the rest of my misbegotten life. But honestly, I imagine I wouldn’t be all that much more unhappy ( or happy ) in Vancouver than Seattle. It’s close enough for government work, as we say at my government job.
If that makes me less of a patriot than anyone else…eh. Who gives a shit?
Bullshit. I am. Or maybe Der Trihs. As far as I can tell, BG still believes in the fairy tale of (he’d say former) American exceptionalism as promulgated by the likes of Glenn Greenwald.
I think invading Iraq gives the lie to the “good”, and there’s an unpunished hole in NY and half a city missing in Louisiana that gives the lie to the “strong”. I personally believe incompetence negates strength, every time.
Tell me you’re not seriously equating BrainGlutton to pedophiles and the KKK. :dubious:
Benedict Arnold was a traitor.
Jefferson Davis was a traitor.
Julias and Ethel Rosenberg were traitors.
John Walker Lind was a traitor.
And you can probably make a case that Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon were traitors.
But don’t you fucking DARE equate people who believe in socialist health care, or think that Bush is violating the law and fucking up to traitors. Because I’ll be goddamned if anyone tries to call me a traitor.
And don’t sit there and say it’s all the left’s fault. The right does it too. BOTH sides are assholes when it comes to politics and partisan issues. Neither one has the high ground.
The Founding Fathers believed a lot of things we have changed today. Does that make all of us traitors?
(And socialist =! communism no matter how many times you try to insinuate it. Just as capitalism does not equal fascism. There IS a middle ground, you know.)
“What do you think the word traitor means, Weirddave?”-Richard Parker
I intimate he's using Ann Coulter's definition which ,from reading the SDMB,I understand is highly nuanced.
Wouldn't know,myself.My diet has coprophagic proscriptions.
Well I suppose its something that while you believe BG should be shot for his political beliefs that you don’t actually “advocate” this.
You are apparently incapable of distinguishing between attachment to one’s country and support for a particular political and economic system. The two have nothing to do with each other. Blue, red, capitalist, socialist, its still America.
George Orwell, from his essay My Country Right or Left a title you’d do well to think about.
Well I don’t know what you lot are all complaining about. I had a wonderful night’s sleep, safe in the knowledge that the likes of Weirddave cannot and will not stand idly by, while our precious bodily fluids are contaminated.
Oh and speaking of contamination of bodily fluids… Weirddave, how about a little more of the rainwater, and a little bit less of the pure-grain vodka, before you start posting tonight? Just a suggestion.
This is the board at its leftist worst. Yes, I too acknowledge that Weirddave’s definition is out of sync with everything I believe and know about America. However by the same standard, not one other person is condemning BrainGlutton’s misuse of the word Patriot. It has a very specific meaning in both the dictionary and I thought in common use.
Everyone is lined up to condemn Weirddave, so I will leave that to you. BG considers Debs a patriot. He compares him to Teddy and Woodrow Wilson. This is about as false a post as I have ever seen. Factually it is wrong. I don’t know crap about the other socialist/Marxist he listed, but the odds seem high that he was no patriot either.
And if we need to supply credentials, I disagree with Weirddave and especially Carol almost all the time. I am very much in favor of UHS and I might be the loudest proponent of actually stopping AGW on this board. I am very vocal about how Bush/Cheney have betrayed my party and my country with their incompetence and greed. So please don’t accuse me of being a right wing hack. **BrainGlutton ** is almost as full of shit in his posts as Weirddave. Why does he get a free pass?
I think it’s more the manner in which people express their disagreement with other political views, that has put Dave in the firing line here. (and I suppose the fact that no-one has a clue who Debs or the other guy was)
BG could be a total loon, I haven’t seen enough of his output to decide, but I can’t remember him saying that people who want to change America’s system of government should be lined up against a wall and shot (whilst saying, out of the other corner of their mouths, that they don’t advocate this, and are very glad the political system prevents this :rolleyes: )
But sure, in so far as I know anything about Debs from reading that Wiki article, BG, I think you’re nutty.
Well, BG has mentioned in the past his support for suspension of the rule of law in cases where the perpetrator is otherwise acting against those with whom he disagrees. For instance, he said that he wished that the assaults committed by McKinney would be overlooked, because she was advocating for the impeachment of Bush. So he supports the sort of “brownshirt” tactics common a few years back, in a country with which the rest of the world had some trouble.
Sure, it’s just blather on a messageboard, but I get the feeling that he means it.
In a sense it’s no different from the rest of those who pick and choose their principles, depending on what they think they will get - those who depend on a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment for gun control but emanations and penumbrae for abortion.
I see your argument, but I don’t see that it’s of such unquestionable rightness that one must oppose BG on it.
You ask, “Why is he a great patriot, for trying to keep us out of WWI or for helping to found Unions? He was a strong anti-capitalist.” For the first two and a half years of WWI, staying out of WWI was the majority position in the U.S. (a platform Wilson got re-elected on), so it can’t have been that much of a stretch to continue to see the U.S.’ interests as being best served by staying out of the war, even after the Zimmerman Telegram. In a country whose Constitution begins, “We, the people,” I can’t imagine anything more patriotic than founding unions. Ditto being anti-capitalist, in an era where the U.S. Army and other armed government forces were used to break strikes at gunpoint.
Saying that Debs was a convicted criminal before becoming a socialist is somewhat misleading, if I have the facts right, since AFAIK, he wasn’t a convicted criminal before being a union organizer, and his conviction was for his role in the Pullman strike of 1894.
I don’t want to get into a long argument about this - my point here is simply to show that the issue isn’t a gimme, that there’s not necessarily any hypocrisy in play in failing to oppose BG’s stance while criticizing Weirddave.
But Debs own quotes show he was not an American Patriot. I am not claiming he was a bad man or even a traitor, but he was no patriot. I happen to also disagree with most of his life’s work, but being objective about, he was clearly not a patriot.
Is this simply a case of people not knowing or caring about who Debs was?
We’d have to disagree on that. No doubt he did not regard himself as a patriot, but ISTM that there is room for one to conclude his actions were patriotic nonetheless.
Admittedly, this is based on a quick, hence limited, refresher of Debs’ life and career, and might be proven false by a more detailed knowledge of Debs’ work. But if it takes a deeper study of Debs than the info about him in this thread and in Wikipedia to make that assessment unreasonable, it means that you would need to provide the info that such a deeper study would reveal in order to bring the state of the thread to the point where we lefties really have to criticize BG’s stance.
And the thread isn’t there yet. That’s all I’m sayin’.
