But it you define justification solely by success you’ve reduced the debate to the level of “what color is blue?”
I’d rather see more objective standards of justification that are distinct from winning and losing. Because I feel that a justified force can sometimes lose and a non-justified force can sometimes win.
Did you miss Republicans filibustering pretty much everything?
Objective?
I’d love objective standards.
Tell me what that is.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that personal action against anything can pretty much be boiled down to this at any point. It’s always ‘how do you know when it is right’? And then ‘is that evidence really convincing enough’ and at some point, you have to say that you can’t stand any more, and you have to take action.
And that’s an individual point. I don’t know if you can ever say an individual action is completely logically justified. You can say if the actions of a movement are, but individual actions always have some amount of human nature thrown in.
So I suppose the key is when it turns from individual action to a movement.
Because if I do anything, the guts of it, at the end, always boil down to ‘because I say so, and it convinces me.’
However, I’ll say there is something in the Constitution worth using as a bright line. It’s the First Amendment.
If these freedoms, these very base freedoms, are not only infringed upon but negated by a government, it is no longer supporting the people, but oppressing them. And they have no peaceful path to redress.
I’d call that a good rule of thumb for thinking about taking up arms against a sea of troubles at that point. (There may be an exception for religion if the originating country is sufficiently monoculture, but it’s still a pretty hefty sign something is wrong if it happens in this day and age.)
I disagree with that.
First because in many places, trying all legal (even according to the local standards of legality) peaceful methods might get you behind bars for a long time (or worst) which isn’t productive at all.
Second, because having tried all legal peaceful methods doesn’t make your stance moral or even sensible (for instance you think you shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes).
Obviously, the first applies mostly for oppressive regimes and the second for democracies.
I’m having visions of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Adolf Hitler. We know where that got us.
What does “all legal and peaceful means” mean?
Where do you draw the line?
I hardly consider Republican filibustering to be a legitimate reason to start a violent revolution. Those Republicans were elected, and they were elected to stop Obama’s agenda, which a very large percentage of the American people oppose.
25 Jun 2010
Conservatives in the United States are on track to record their highest annual statistics in the Gallup poll’s 18-year history of measuring conservative/liberal ideologies.
That nugget emerges from the results of a USA Today/Gallup analysis of eight surveys taken between January and June, which noted that 42 percent of Americans describe themselves as either very conservative or conservative. That’s up from the 40 percent figure recorded for all of 2009 and trounces the 20 percent who call themselves liberal or very liberal.
http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Gallup-conservatives-Republicans/2010/06/25/id/363123
I’m surprised that no one is correcting the notion that the United States is, or has ever been, a democracy except in a loose sense. A republic is not the same thing as a democracy; and indeed the Founding Fathers were quite wary of the latter concept.
As for the OP, I don’t think there ever can be an answer in terms of legal justification. No state AFAIK acknowledges in its laws the conditions for its own overthrow or outright dissolution.
The notion that the United States is a republic, not a democracy is a quaint right wing cliche, but there is no contradiction between a republic and a democracy
A republic is a government where the chief of state is not a hereditary monarch. That distinction does not matter now, but it was important during the eighteenth century.
A democracy is a government where the leaders are elected in regular, contested elections. That distinction does matter, but many contemporary democracies have figurehead monarchs.
Fuck the “state”, long live the Nation.
What is armed struggle these days? Is hacking, defacing or carrying out dos attacks against government websites armed struggle? How about Wiki-leaks. Is that a form of armed struggle?
What’s so magical about democracy (so-called) that it gets free hands committing atrocities against the individual? In any case, there is no democracy in the world today.
Cite?
Maybe not, but I’m referring to our particular Republic, which was not designed to be a democracy and still has numerous, purposeful safeguards in place against unbridled democracy.
Or not even pursuing change, but staying put, means that your life is at risk - the state has decided that you are a target period, as you happen to be the wrong ethnia, religion, ideology, gender, orientation… or related to/living near someone who is.
n-m
A core tenet of the JBS was that the US is a republic not a democracy, and that collectivism has eroded that distinction. That this distinction was largely a semantic trick–used to cover the essential autocratic elitism of Welch and the JBS philosoph–was examined by Lester DeKoster, a conservative Christian who warned of the JBS anti-democratic agenda in his monograph titled The Citizen and the John Birch Society.
It seems to me that insisting that the USA is a republic, not a democracy is, for some reason, an US peculiarity. “Democracy”, in general include US-style “representative democracy”, and using this word gives a good idea of what kind of system we’re talking about. While “republic” doesn’t mean much. China and Syria are republics, while the UK and Japan aren’t.
Dammit, all of you.
OK, Koxinga, I’ll run with it.
“Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Buncha savages in this place.
Is the majority always right?
It is more frequently right than any minority. Also, how do you determine what is right?
I dunno. What if the 60% majority elect governement representatives to enact their desires to arrest, imprison, and execute the 40% minorty?