Does it now ? Sez who ? And, perhaps more importantly, who decides what constitutes “rightly” ?
I see. So the problem is that We, The People are the wrong kind of People ? Damn.
(BTW, seems to me that were this the case, improving education would be a better and more long-term solution to the issue than yanking votes on the say-so of Übersturmbanngeneralissimo Smapti. But what do I know ? I’m not a crazy neo-fascist)
Not really. The architects of La Terreur saw and hunted down conspiracies and counter-revolutionaries everywhere, real or imagined. A great many imagined ones. Which is a surefire way to generate a whole lot of conspiracies and counter-revolutionaries.
In this specific regards, Napoleon’s saner albeit heavy-handed way of restoring the peace actually did bring back order and the rule of law in France. *He *didn’t prosecute thoughtcrimes, he just had proven troublemakers immediately shot. Which had a sort of chilling effect, if you will.
As for the rest, while he didn’t lack for ego, there’s a case to be made for “pre-emptive self-defence” to quite a lot of his conquests, as Revolutionary France didn’t have many friends among the next door royals.
Nappy certainly fell in love with himself and power along the way (very early on, judging by the diaries he wrote while he was making his way from Corsica to Paris at the head of his revolutionary militia), but had he not kicked ass up and down Europe, Europe (Great Britain especially, but the Prussians were not exactly Canadians either) would almost certainly have kicked *derrière *up and down metropolitan France in short order.
Which, as a Frenchman myself, I’m duty bound to deem a far worse alternative :o.
Back on topic : the Revolution was subverted way, way earlier than Napoleon when the bourgeois class wrested the reins of a popular, proletarian uprising into making them the new all-powerful de facto aristocracy. It was bullshit all the way up. Which is probably why guys like genuinely benevolent utopist Robespierre got very, and terminally, frustrated with the whole thing.
But then they, too (and Lenin… and Mao…) wound up having the wrong sort of People. Odd how that always seems to happen
Because the Dems and Reps are fairly similar big business parties. Because they both get chances to put their policies into effect and most people just shrug and move on or don’t even vote because for most practical purposes it barely matters to their lives. Because right now you can visit states run by Dems at every level and, well, they’re not exactly utopias.
But if you mean realigning the whole spectrum, nevermind then. Knock yourself out. Ban the Dems while you’re at it.
That is the ideal long-term solution. The problem is, first we have to get rid of the people who are opposed to education, because they know that an educated populace would never tolerate their nonsense.
I live in one. It’s a much better place than our red neighbors to the south and east.
One has to start somewhere, and the Democratic party is far more suited to becoming the vanguard of the people than any other existing organization. Once the people’s enemies have been disfranchised and they’re not afraid of speaking their minds for fear of losing the idiot vote, they’ll be free to get real work done.
Smapti still hasn’t answered a practical question. Just how does one outlaw the Republican Party as a “terrorist organization” without enormous upheaval and chaos? We’re talking tens of millions of Republicans here.
Not to mention the fact that there are numerous Republicans who work in law enforcement and won’t go along with this?
I wanted to add this gem from Smapti. In a discussion about a police shooting of a mentally ill man with a knife, he asserts that some mentally ill people who act erratically in public should be killed out of hand.
Mentally ill people who are acting erratically aren’t “asking to be killed”. And even if they were, we should strive to not fulfill their request.
But this isn’t even what you said – you said that society shouldn’t suffer them to live. That’s the evil sentiment – that mentally ill individuals should be killed – with such a long and ignoble history.
Why? What does society gain from preserving the lives of people who do not wish to live? In an age where we accept the rights of people who want to change their gender, who want to engage in same-sex relations, who want to do all sorts of other things that for decades have been deemed taboo, why should we not accept the rights of those who wish to die?
Sometimes the best way to help a mentally ill person is to grant their wish.
Mentally ill people who act erratically in public are not acting rationally with rational motivations. In many cases, they can be treated and go on to live fulfilling lives.
Mentally ill people who are acting erratically in public are incapable of making such judgments in that moment, and in that moment they are incapable of making rational decisions about what they want in their lives.
Not when the wish is self-harm. The best way to help a mentally ill person is with mental health treatment.
All the more reason that the desire of a law enforcement officer to see his wife and kids again should trump their inability to operate as human beings, then.
Then it falls upon the state to make those decisions on their behalf, and when they choose to lunge at a policeman with a deadly weapon, then it seems to me that it’s an easy decision to make.
So I take it that you are opposed to doctor-assisted suicide in all forms, then?
And they should act with the minimum necessary force, which is very rarely killing them. You stated that society would be better off if the police always killed them.
Not surprisingly, your judgment is pretty way off here. There are ways to apprehend erratic, mentally ill people without shooting them, and those ways should be exhausted before shooting them. In the case we were discussing, those ways were not exhausted – the police could have parked farther way, for example, just to start with.
For those with mental illness, yes. There are rational reasons one might wish doctor-assisted suicide, but erratic behavior due to mental illness is not one of them.
