I agree, as I said, I am not defending Weirddave, I just find it annoying that **BG ** gets away with a statement that is clearly wrong and at least to me insulting to the man I consider our great President.
Ok, I get it, **Weirddave ** gave personnal insult, **BG ** only misused the word Patriot about an obscure dead political figure.
Jim
But if you agree then you should also see the important distinction. If *patriot *doesn’t necessarily carry normative judgment, but *traitor *does, then you shouldn’t be surprised that we leap on one but not the other.
Apologies for paraphrasing your cogent argument. 
You may well be right, but I seem to be woefully impaired in my ability to grok economic/statistical arguments. I’m sure the fault is mine and not yours, but to accept your position I would first need you to explain what exactly GDP is, why it is the best measure, which would require me to learn about the alternatives…
Halberstam’s prose arguments greatly appealed to my gimpy little lawyer’s brain.
That was the second half of that post in fact:
I was affronted as he brought Teddy Roosevelt into this, but that is very different from **Weirddave ** calling **BG ** a traitor with full negative tones implied.
My apologies to everyone except BG, from whom I would still like to see a retraction. I don’t expect to see one however.
Jim
My bad.
[Extended article quotation removed]
Not always right about everything, IMO, especially his dismissal of the electoral process and “Sewer Socialism.” (American Socialists, perhaps because of their roots in the New England Puritan heritage, perhaps simply because of their comparative marginality, were always more ideological and resistant to compromise than their more practical European counterparts – see discussion of It Didn’t Happen Here, by Lipset and Marks, in the OP of this old thread.)
Nevertheless.
That, sir, is the life of an American patriot.
Go thou and do likewise.
I’m not sure what calling Bush a traitor has to do with calling you a traitor. I wouldn’t dream of calling you, socialists, most American communists, other partisans or general assholes traitors.
But I absolutely think that Bush is a traitor. I think he is undermining the Constitution of the United States of America. He took an oath to uphold it. He has deliberately lied to the people he was elected to serve. He is trying to upset the balance of power. I think Nixon pales in comparison.
**Guin, ** I think I have no real quarrel with you. I seldom do.
Regarding socialism: Libraries, fire departments, schools and police departments are socialist efforts organized for good causes. Health care can also. We have been fed a lot of misinformation about how socialized health care has not worked in other countries. I have seen it work beautifully in France. And Danish friends say that it works fine in Scandanavian countries. What countries with socialized medicine have we seen complaining at SDMB?
And there are no other ways to be a patriot?
:rolleyes: What a well written post, you copied the bulk of a large wiki article to make a point. Great, anyone that cared already read that article. He was not an American Patriot. You might admire him, but he worked against his country, celebrated revolution and was an internationalist. That is not a Patriot.
Going back to the Op said about your posting style, this is what I would expect from you however. I guess I will give you credit for expounding upon it a little. More than usual at least.
If my prior reading are correct he was actually working towards (ineffectively) the overthrow of the US government of the time. That is not a patriot no matter how much you wish he succeeded. There is a difference between your admiration of a man and his ideals and being a Patriot. One man’s patriot is another man’s rebel and Debs was pretty clearly at odds with the USA.
Jim
No offense taken. 
I’ll cheerfully give it one more try before giving up. GDP, gross domestic product, is the sum of a country’s yearly economic output. It’s kinda like household income, only at the national level, rather than the household level.
And it’s pretty obvious that a rich household can afford to carry a lot more debt than a poor one can. If I’ve got a $500,000 mortgage, it doesn’t mean I’m worse off than someone who only has a $200,000 mortgage. If my wife and I make $200,000 a year, and he and his wife only make $60,000 a year, we can more easily afford our mortgage (at 2.5 times annual income) than they can afford theirs (at 3.3 times annual income).
So how much you owe is less important than what proportion of your income it is. And that’s what the ratio of debt to GDP measures, only at the national level. The smaller the ratio, the more affordable the debt.
Conclusion: LBJ was right about guns and butter. The supply-siders weren’t right about tax cuts paying for themselves.
This, I do not understand. I’ve always interpereted patriotism as love of one’s country not love of one’s government. Do you really think that one cannot work to effect change in a country’s government and still be patriotic?
He wanted more than change and he believed in world socialism over the US constitution. So while your question is valid and supports the idea that Martin Luther King was a great Patriot and he was seeking to strengthen and improve the USA. Debs is not in this category and far from the category of being as a much a Patriot as Teddy Roosevelt.
Jim
That, BG, is the epitome of your mindless leftist “posting” (I hesitate to use the term, which implies originial thinking and writing). At least this time it was copied from a reasonably neutral source.
Wow. What a thread. I don’t even know where to begin.
Oh wait, yes I do.
Fuck you, Weirddave, for calling your fellow American a traitor. Fuck you. If the Republic falls, it’s going to be because of people like you. Fuck you.
I am hardly a socialist, but I do not see how socialism nor world socialism is inconsistent with the constitution.
He never “worked against his country” except in opposing America’s entry into WWI, a matter on which reasonable minds could disagree. My view is that the war as such was a Very Bad Idea from day one, but America’s entry into it was not necessarily a bad idea. Nor was the war really about corporate profits, it was about Kaiser Wilhelm’s proud ambitions for Germany. Historians are now convinced he was set on war, to elevate Germany to the first rank among great powers (i.e., the level of the British Empires), and was going to find some pretext for it sooner or later. The war might have been averted, perhaps, if only the socialist members of the German and French parliaments had been true to their declared principles of international proletarian solidarity and voted against war credits; but instead they put national loyalty first, and disaster ensued. Yet another instance where the “unpatriotic” course of action would have been better by far for one’s country.
Debs never really tried to stir up revolution here – that may have been a distant dream but he always worked within the system even when working against it. (Nor do I wish revolution had happened here, for reasons I’ve already explained at great length.)
But you are a lying sack of shit if you try to tell me a revolutionary can never be a patriot. (Paging Thomas Jefferson!)
Serious question; what, if anything, in The Constitution, would bar your nation’s political system from moving from the current, mainly Capitalist system clearly favoring the upper classes (as the OP gladly admits), to a Western European-style Social Democracy? Which is basically capitalism with a built-in safety net for the less fortunate, not the Communist strawman many here make it out to be. Especially if it turns out that is what the majority of people want.
I mean, would that be “unpatrotic” and if so, by what legal standards?
Nothing, really, but anything more radical than that would run up against the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on taking private property without compensation. (That does not apply to income taxation, which is expressly authorized by the 16th Amendment – but it authorizes tax on annual income only, not on accumulated wealth or assets.)
“Legal standards”? Patriotism has no legal definition.
Thank you. And yes, I was specifically referring to the current WE system as it stands now. Which you only really a couple of steps away from having anyway. Socialized health-care being the most prominent of those. No more, no less.
Apparently, unless I am reading him wrongly, to What Exit? (see quoted post and the ones prior to), it does. Thus this particular query.
Nothing, that was not Debs aim. He was a Marxist, not a warm fuzzy quasi-socialist like today’s European-style Social Democracies. In fact, I already stated I am in favor of UHC, I did not bring up any communist strawman that I can recall.
Debs aims were closer to the Lenin ideal than the France or Germany of today.
BrainGlutton, you made an outrageous comparison of Debs to Teddy and Woodrow. As far as the Thomas Jefferson strawman, that is a matter of perspective, to King George III he was strictly a Rebel to the Soon to be American Nation he was among are greatest Patriots (though flawed in so many ways).
Now apparently you are comparing Debs to Jefferson. Again, Bullshit!
Jim