“I’m only saying the earth was created in six days! Why are you so intent on discrediting me?”
“I’m only saying that the moon landing was faked! Why are you so intent on discrediting me?”
“I’m only saying that vaccinations cause autism! Why are you so intent on discrediting me?”
The answer is pretty much exactly the same in all those cases AND in yours. Because you’re wrong in such a radically woo-woo way that it’s important to make sure that you don’t get the opportunity to spread your wrongness without someone refuting it in the name of factuality.
:rolleyes: No, I was saying just exactly the opposite: We still have a common-law system (except for Louisiana, which never did). The growth of the importance of statutory law over the past two centuries does not change that, our system is still very different from a civil-law system.
The delusions are held by people who think they can appeal to some kind of (a)historical “common law” that trumps statute law to the extent of allowing them to unilaterally opt out of the latter and become “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land.”
You really ought to read up on pseudolaw in general.
Oh, that? That’s just a matter of holism vs. reductionism – each POV is true without discrediting the other; it’s simply a matter of changing focus. Any human society is a collective of individuals.
But, what exactly does “except maybe human” mean in that sentence? There are no non-human individuals, except perhaps for animals, who are irrelevant to the discussion.
:rolleyes: Psychological projection is a sad thing, orchid. You are the one filling this thread with obfuscation and red herrings – or, simply, confusion – which everyone else posting in it is industriously struggling to straighten out. Is English even your first language? You do seem to have a real problem with using it coherently.
I think he was referring to the Austrian School dude Human Action
You did start off by kind of “poisoning the well” in the OP,
But mostly you have drawn a false dichotomy between Collectivism vs. Individualism, when the reality is that a functioning society is not one or the other but a combination of both. You want people to pick a side in a fight where neither side is going to win, because an all-out victory will lead to an ill-founded, ill-fated social construct. Then, of course, there is the fallacy that members of a collective must needs be less free and lesser individuals without entertaining the possibility that the opposite might be true. Freedom can in fact become oppressive shackles, and working together can be more liberating than trying to struggle through on your own.
Oh, and multiple-family housing is not the same thing as “Gulags”. Your language seems to be getting more paranoid-sounding with every post.
what does ‘black helicopters’ mean?
what does that phrase contribute to this supposed ‘discussion’, which has turned into you all trying to put out fires while using one fallacy after the other.
If this was a real debate, with points, you all would be getting crushed…
Ive produced many cites; Un documents, fabian society journals, ect… you all: zero… you have presented zero except for wishful thinking…
you all make generic denials based on disparaging me, and present nothing except yourselves as an authority, which is the ad verecundiam fallacy.
now i’m sure i will hear ‘no, it’s not’…
but the appeal to authority is a fallacy, even when you say “I’m right because I’m an authority, and youre not”
now, if i’m poisoning the well, which individuals am i trying to dis-credit??
and how is bringing ‘black helicopters’ (whatever that is supposed to mean) into it to smear myself, and to thereby discredit what i’m presenting NOT poisoning the well??
glutton, i saw you posted; FYI, i’m not reading your posts anymore; …btw, does this forum have an ‘ignore’ option?? no offense, but repeatedly youve brought nothing to the table besides non-productive invective intended to poison the well, and hollow claims of authority and ‘expert’ status while attempting to prove negatives …(logic fail).
done.
“Black Helicopters” refers to THEM, a mysterious cabal who are out to get/subjugate us.
The cites you have provided have not been particularly convincing in terms of providing support for your argument. And in a way, with this modern Internet thingy, it is often almost better to not provide cites: using the proper keywords (which you can suggest), others can run searches on the subject, obtaining a broader view on it than they might get from your particular link. I can see that as being at least as intellectually honest as linking to sources, if not possibly moreso, unless a particular topic is very very difficult to search on.
When you throw out phrases like “warm and fuzzy” and “unicorns and rainbows”, you are depicting the people you disagree with as naïve hippies. This from the very OP. You are saying that if someone disagrees with you, they are an idealistic idiot. So, really, you began this thread with a broad ad hominem of sorts.
Which, again, is not very useful. From your link, right below “Freedom –”, Racism and group superiority—refers to the linking of personal worth to social categories based on race, ethnicity, social class, and gender.
In other words, where Williams says “Core American Value”, it does not appear that he is assigning any kind of moral grade to it, just identifying it as something that most Americans subscribe to. He seems to be saying that a lot of Americans believe in freedom, as defined, not that it is necessarily “good”.
Yes, click “User CP” in the bar above the top of the thread, you will find it in there.
Yes, that’s explained in another post. And by the way, telling someone you are putting them on your ignore list (or that they are on your list) is not allowed in this forum. Don’t do it again.
I repeated it because Dissonance accused me of backpedaling; I didn’t repeat it to strengthen the claim, as you may have thought.
The tactics were an inseparable part of the ideology, and form a basis for comparison.
As this Nazi / Soviet / Western liberal democracy discussion was a digression, and wildorchid has returned to support the OP, I’m fine with agreeing to disagree. Up to you, Dissonance, and BrainGlutton
I’ve fallen behind the discussion by a couple days, but here’s how I’d address your main points.
The balance any system of government strikes between the individual and the group is part of what defines it. This should be viewed as a spectrum, as BrainGlutton illustrated well in post 106. Either extreme is highly destructive to human dignity in practice, whether it’s Stalin’s Soviet Union or present-day Somalia’s anarchy.
I agree that there is a strain of authoritarianism that underlies some environmentalist thought. For the sake of discussion, I’d be willing to concede that Agenda 21 and Eco-Science might exhibit those authoritarian tendencies.
However, then you made this remark:
Even if you’re right, and the UN’s 1992 Agenda 21 and Eco-Science from 1978 and the Fabian Society all advocate Marxist collectivism, I ask you: what evidence is there that this viewpoint is gaining steam with Americans? As you’ve written (rightly, I’d say), such a massive change in American governance would require an equally massive change in the American people.
Anyone can write a book, it’s not evidence of a popular viewpoint. The UN isn’t representative of the U.S., and Agenda 21 has no binding power over the U.S. or anywhere else. The Fabian are British, and have less than 7,000 members.
So, in brief, I agree that Americans (everyone, really) should be on guard against a return of totalitarianism dressed up as effective, necessary government, it seems to me that the ideas you warn against are at a particularly low ebb in America at present. If you made this argument in the '30s, '60s, or '70s, I think you’d be able to present a decent amount of evidence. But today there simply isn’t any support to speak of for abolishing private property, wage and price controls, or any of the economic policies of collectivism regimes.
And a comparison demonstrates that they were very different. While each suffered from such phenomena as secret police and an imposed executive government, the genuinely socialist policies with central planning of the Soviet Union resulted in frequent, (some would say constant), shortages of commodities, requirements that one apply to the government even for such basics as where one might live or work, strict control of movement within the country with, generally, prohibition against leaving the country, etc. Under the Nazis, however, there continued a form of capitalism for industries that were not considered essential to a war effort, store shelves were rarely bare, (prior to wartime shortages), there was relative freedom of movement (for the majority of people who were not characterized as Untermenschen), with the Nazis encouraging travel both within Germany and even outside it, etc.
Claims that their ideologies were simply rivals in the same sphere misses the point that they truly had very different origins and very different ideologies. Each used totalitarian means to maintain and exercise power, but their motivations and goals were quite different.
I brought up Black helicopters because you were and still are being incredibly vague about what the threat is. What specific laws and actions are being pushed through congress that would lead to the nightmare totalitarian state you vaguely fear? I’m not going to wade through a thousand page book by a low level official in the current administration or a non-binding UN article to figure this out. Please explain to me in specific detail what actual steps are being take by the Fabian society or whoever to undermine the US.
I’m probably not going to respond to you again, because your ideas are incoherent and utterly false, but I will say that my calling you a conspiracy theorist was not meant to be “shaming language” but rather a neutral descriptor. You are a person who theorizes about conspiracies, namely some sort of conspiracy that the Fabian society (again, WTF?) is running to infiltrate and undermine the US and the entire world. It’s no more “shaming language” than calling someone who is a fan of football a “football fan.”
And I imagine once the Fabian society seizes power and implements their brutal regime, they will probably use helicopters to subjugate the masses, some of which may very well be black.
Let’s go back to the start of this digression. BrainGlutton quoted Orwell in post 13, who claimed that Nazism was a form of capitalism optimized for war, not socialism. I replied with von Mises in post 19, who argues the opposite: that Nazism and Communism are both socialist, because the government has full control of the means of production.
Everything after that was just trying to nail down just how alike or different Nazism and Soviet Communism were. In relation to Western, capitalistic, liberal democracy, the two are quite similar indeed.
Also, human action, Brain Glutton and dissonance, your debate is actually interesting and substantive, and not at all a hijack, IMO, so this lurker asks you to please continue, if you want.
:rolleyes: No, I was saying just exactly the opposite: We still have a common-law system (except for Louisiana, which never did). The growth of the importance of statutory law over the past two centuries does not change that, our system is still very different from a