The reason I asked for a different interpretation on RP’s comment was to allow for the fact that mine may have been wrong. I see now that I was, and I withdraw my complaint about his comment.
Do you also believe that calling anti-Iraq-War protestors and critics of President GW Bush traitors is a symptom of derangement? Because if so, you apparently waited a hell of a long time to start complaining about exaggeration and hyperbole in the colloquial use of the term “traitor”.
If you didn’t object to conservatives calling law-abiding critics of the President “traitors” back in 2002, you don’t have a leg to stand on for the purpose of objecting to liberals calling law-abiding supporters of the President “traitors” in 2018. If you think such usage is “a symptom of derangement”, then you ought to be worried about the conservatives who started exhibiting that derangement 15+ years ago.
So why aren’t you complaining about Trump using the same terms for people who aren’t breaking any laws, including Democratic politicians for not applauding his State of the Union speech?
If exaggerated use of the words “traitor” and “treason” is a symptom of derangement, that derangement started long ago with Trump’s conservative supporters, and is most noticeabely exhibited by Trump himself.
I understood the OP referring to Republicans in office who aren’t pushing back against Trump, not random supporters who aren’t in office. This is confirmed in post #5, thus proving that you’re putting no effort into actually reading what you’re criticizing. Further, I have regularly and routinely criticized broad-brushing attacks on both sides (this is another false accusation you make against me – I’ve criticized both sides for broad-brush attacks).
That doesn’t excuse your false accusations against me – where’s your integrity and your decency?
The only ones deranged around here are Trump himself and the jim jones motherfuckers who defend him. They have no concept (or defense) of lots of things, most recently why everyone in national politics just attended a certain funeral. Everyone except for one particular deranged pathalogical fuckstick who was explicitly told to stay away.
So what is the clinical term for you and your friends having lost your mind because of your support for an incompetent racist?
Lol. This is the post of a potty mouth and TDS sufferer. Not sure what helps with that level of madness.
I think that’s a bit too much. Were there Pit threads on this MB that he participated in where conservative posters were calling those folks traitors? If not, then I don’t think your comparison is apt.
Also, you can be a hypocrite and still be right. I get that it’s fun and often satisfying to point out hypocrisy, but it’s not a valid argument unless the issue, itself, is hypocrisy.
Are you more invested in making the Democrats fail than in making America succeed?
If so, guess what you are.
Of course I want the US to succeed. What success means obviously differs from person to person.
Still no retraction for your false accusations and your failure to read the posts you’re criticizing, huh? What a shame. It’s not hard to be a decent guy when you make a mistake, but you’re making a different choice.
What is your vision of success, then? And how does it get achieved by cutting half the country out of any power by whatever means you can find?
You saying you didn’t refer to 40 or so million Americans as traitors?
Absolutely. Read the fucking thread. In post #5 the OP makes it clear he is talking about Republicans in high office, and that’s what I posted as well.
It’s not about hypocrisy so much as about causality. The blatant irrationality of octopus’s complaint about “derangement” isn’t simply due to the fact that conservatives lavishly indulge in the same sort of “deranged” rhetoric that he’s now complaining about on the part of liberals. It’s due to the fact that conservatives themselves largely launched and normalized this hyperbolic use of the words “traitor” and “treason” when criticizing liberals years ago.
This isn’t just a matter of “both sides do it so you mustn’t criticize one without criticizing the other”. This is a matter of “your side deliberately chose to start using these words hyperbolically in order to demonize our side as much as possible, and are now calling us deranged for using the same words in the same hyperbolic sense that you yourselves did your best to normalize”.
What’s more, the hypocrisy aspect isn’t restricted to the lib-baiting of past decades, either. As noted upthread, Trump still unabashedly calls law-abiding people “treasonous” just for doing their jobs or not applauding his speeches. If octopus doesn’t consider that deranged behavior, then he has absolutely no logical justification for calling liberals “deranged” when they apply the same term to Trump supporters.
(Personally, I resist this particular instance of linguistic evolution in all its forms and tend not to call people traitors unless they’re actually violating anti-treason laws. But I recognize that that ship has pretty much sailed, and that it was conservatives who gleefully launched it and still constitute most of its crew, even while they try to scold the occasional liberal for getting on board.)
But he doesn’t “pick” them. He’s just told whose names he should put forward. You don’t honestly think he puts any sort of research into it himself do you?
Given that it’s quite possible he’ll escape his legal just deserts, I’d settle for a stroke that left him cognitively unimpaired (or no more than he already is), but a drooling helpless dependent physically.
My apologies. I missed that. I still find the language of labeling one’s political opponents as traitors or treasonous or illegitimate. Eventually we are going to see more political violence as a result of people who are unhinged, like some in this thread appear to be, actually act.
2015 is when I joined this forum. Sorry I wasn’t here to comment on Iraq war protesters. However, someone who has been given a lot of flack over patriotic symbolism is Colin Kaepernick who I have consistently supported.
This is the unhinged and deranged language and poster I think is problematic.
My vision of success? That’s a long answer and one I don’t have time to detail tonight. It isn’t what you’d think though.
I like the concept of a government formed via a charter of delegated powers. I think that a representative democracy with a strong constitution and the desire to hold territory is as fair a government one could hope for and by holding territory we’ll have the power to defend what we have and influence the rest of the world.
I think some of the issues we have and which are being exploited to agitate hostile factions is that certain socially progressive ideals are slightly ahead of the public and are provoking a reaction. So success, for me, would be a lot of the things you folks want and are getting through the courts enacted via the legislative process even if it took a decade or two longer.
Perhaps, I’m overly fearful of the power of reaction. We can already see the beginnings of a reaction to Trump’s impact on the judiciary. That might not end as intended.
Presumably you have some awareness of events before that date, though? As well as knowledge of more recent events such as President Trump’s lavish use of the terms “traitor” and “treasonous”?
Because any conservative having even the slightest familiarity with conservatives’ deliberately hyperbolic and exaggerated redefining of “traitor” over the past couple of decades would be embarrassed to try to portray liberals’ using the word in a similarly hyperbolic way as a symptom of liberal “derangement”. It makes you look either pig-ignorant or outright senile. Or maybe just completely unprincipled, although it seems that a lot of conservatives these days don’t really mind that look.
Look, you guys might as well get used to the fact that 60 million of America’s citizens are not going to pull a George Will and suddenly start voting Democrat because you’ve finally somehow convinced them of the evil, traitorousness, dishonesty or incompetence of Donald Trump.
It’s not gonna happen.
The reality is that most of Trump’s voters aren’t racists and they don’t think Trump’s a racist. Most laugh at the idea he’s a Nazi. He’s about as much a Nazi as Clinton/Obama are Communists. They don’t care about the turmoil amongst his staff. They don’t care about whether he paid off a hooker to keep her mouth shut. They don’t care that Trump met with Putin anymore than you care that Obama and Bill Clinton met with Putin.
They don’t believe what they read in the press, not only because the press has been biased in favor of the left for decades but because it’s ow dropped all pretense of objectivity and has been conducting an all-out war on Trump since the day he won the Republican nomination.
They’re fed up with the insults and the hatred and the divisiveness and the nonstop bitching about what seems to them everything under the Sun. They’re fed up with the problems caused by drugs and crime and the left’s lack of concern about them. They’re fed up with the crass, vulgar and overall lowlife quality of life in America today.
They’re fed up with what they view as crackpot judicial rulings and the fact that for decades the left has used simpatico judges to pervert the meaning of the law in order to thwart the will of the people, and to legislate from the bench in order to achieve victories it could never have won at the voting booth.
Etc., etc., etc.
In other words, what you guys don’t seem to understand is that Trump was elected to do battle with liberalism, the font of everything his voters have had it up to here with. And as long as he’s thought to be accomplishing this, his support will remain undiminished. His personal failings, his business shenanigans, what he knew or didn’t know regarding Russia, whatever Mueller uncovers…none of it matters because people hate what you’ve done to this country just that much.
I don’t think that a traitor has to be someone convicted of treason. To me, it’s just someone who betrays someone or something. In this context, it would be a betrayal of democracy and American ideals.
I generally prefer to use un-American. But traitor works, because the main un-American thing is that they support a wanna-be tyrant and proto-fascist authoritarian.
I don’t care about what the law calls it, any more than I have a problem using murderer or rapist for people who weren’t convicted. Unless I say “convicted traitor,” it doesn’t have anything to do with the law.