Here’s what tyranny looks like at the beginning
I have believed for quite some time that the Democrats will stop at nothing to pass HCR.
They will do whatever it takes, even if they have to trash the entire Constitution to accomplish it.
The stakes are that high for them. And it’s not about health care reform, it’s about the expected entrenchment of such entitlements and the raw power to grow government.
In political terms, “self-executing rule” has the whiff of the suicide bomber to it.
I think if they can’t get the votes now. They will wait until after they lose in November and use the lame duck session to pass it.
Once you have already lost your seat you will need a job. If you don’t play ball then ‘No job for you!!!’
Reading those articles and especially the comments by democrat (fascist liberal) supporters of such attrocious political behavior is absolutely disturbing. These hell bent marxist and the useful idiots they are steadily indoctrinating are quickly moving past any democratic process telling them their ideas aren’t going to be accepted in America.
i dont think most get the idea of how this is being played tactically/strategically.
they already know they are dead given their prior things. and so the idea that this is going to kill them is a null argument.
then there is the idea standing by itself where we are thinking… if they lose it, the gambit makes them lose hard… and if they win it, the gambit makes them lose hard.
i say this is a tactical assesment error
the minute they complete it, they win
it doesnt matter what moves one imagines will come after, there are no afters after checkmate.
and if you play such games, you will remember the player who goes to make their move as you say checkmate and then their surprise that they dont get another move
the minute they get this, every one will fall in line.
they will control who goes into a mental institution. those who want capitalism will be deemed mentally ill. adornos authoritairan personality test concept will be used to decide. politicians will be able to act on behalf of people and make changes to their health outcomes (just as they can do sometimes with law outcomes!!)
the collapse that will come from it will bring in ration books. and you all will not believe how close we are to such.
our cities will nto be supplied food to people who cant pay for it. when things decline and the stae stops paying the welfare people for their beer and cigs, your going to see food shipments decline to cities.
thats when the state will step in with ration cards.
and they will ahve lots of them. progressive ration cards…
and like in the soviet union, and in hitlers germany and maos land, and ceucescaus country…
every politician will know what they have to do next to keep their ass out of the sling… and that will be to side suddenly… and cap and trade and all that other stuff will go throuh easy. why?
because the putting through of health care with such a negative pressure from the people they are supposed to serve, tells those people sensitive and knowledgeable about the game, that the country has changed even if the people don’t know it yet.
very much the same as it was in germany.
after all, they are not capable people, they are copiers and cargo cult!!! so they are going to copy the past as they have no ability to invent the future,.
Will there be elections in November? Now that we have an enlightened ruling class that may be considered passe, old hat and unnecessary.
Why will there be any need to go through the hassle and incur the expense of elections in November? The Demoncrats can simply “deem” themselves to have been re-elected. Saves time and money for all. Then NoBama can “deem” himself to have been re-elected in 2012. Much easier than all the Constitutional garbage.
No it’s not about Healthcare Reform. Marn Steyn said it better though:
http://article.nationalreview.com/427119/its-about-government-not-health-care/mark-steyn
Fools seek out government assistance. The government never gives something for nothing. It is always a deal with the devil.
Why will there be any need to go through the hassle and incur the expense of elections in November?
for the same reason Stalin had them, Mao had them, etc.. for the semblance of validity, and to provide false premise.
there are many ways to do this now… remember the first thing Obama did when getting into office was to look at the census…
Adrian,
That was riveting…
But. . . but. . . . This can’t be happening, can it? Where’s Huxley? He’ll remind us all that Obama has lost with everything he’s tried, and there’s no reason to think these guys are trying to seize power, and anyway the Constitution will protect us, won’t it? Won’t it?
There is a > than 90% chance that anyone seeking re-election will be successful. Even if they fail to be reelected they’ll likely be appointed to some position within the bureaucracy; Or get a position with a firm to lobby their former associates; Or get a comfy position within academia; Or be hired as analyst for the media.
They do not fear us. They do not respect us. We are the targets of their contempt. This will not change until some of these idiots are dragged from their offices and attached to tall light poles with short ropes.
I found Neo’s blog around 2007. As I recall, at the time, most of her articles were about foreign affairs (and ballerinas) . Now they are mostly domestic.
Yes, its a sign of how bad things are looking inside this republic.
I just read a Powerline link to a Masslive article in which Mass treasurer Cahill says that Masscare is not working and that the similar Obamacare will break the country in 5 years. This should go viral.
Cahill was a Dem and is now an Independent. That should give him some street creds among those who are still thinking of Reps as the party of no.
Going right now!
Well, OK. I did look at this, this, and this and I will have to admit it do look a little familiar. Hitler promised to calm the chaos that was largely caused by the Nazis and their Socialist allies and Mussolini ended the general strike he had conspired in initiating and neither the Nazis nor the Fascists were seen as causing the immediate problems in the first place, though they were partly responsible.
Just like now.
kaba Says:
March 16th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
I absolutely concur, and the sooner the better.
Well, getting my DSL back took too many phone calls, a visit from a service tech, followed by another outage, before finally being squared away tonight (fingers crossed).
I also discovered how much I dislike sitting at a dime-sized table in a loud crowded café to get Internet access.
But it’s interesting to go without internet for a while. I didn’t realize how wired in I am, how drawn I was to launch my browser even though I knew it goes nowhere.
And when the isolation was over, I discovered I was about 500 links behind on my RSS aggregator.
For those interested, I have posted some late responses at http://neoneocon.com/2010/03/11/comment-of-the-day-power-and-the-rule-of-law/ .
As usual in this topic area I have a few problems.
Here’s what tyranny looks like at the beginning
Possibly, but as a flat assertion, no. This is what tyranny might look like at the beginning.
My view regarding Democrats today is that this is what desperation looks like and it’s the beginning of a spectacular downfall. Who’s right? Time will tell.
I have believed for quite some time that the Democrats will stop at nothing to pass HCR.
Nothing? Sounds like hyperbole to me.
Will Democrats be assassinating “no” votes, kidnapping families, torturing aides, shutting down Fox News, or putting LSD on Rush Limbaugh’s steering wheel — as was supposedly planned for Jack Anderson back in the Nixon days?
Were the Nixon days what tyranny looks like at the beginning?
J.L. disagreed with my bringing up such possibilities in the earlier topic, but if words mean what they mean, I don’t see how these possibilities can be excluded. If that’s not what is meant, it seems to me that the words ought to be qualified, because in a context of genuine tyranny those are things we expect and fear, and those are the buttons that are being pressed with such rhetoric.
If the purpose of this post is an emotional call to arms, I get the point, but as much as I dislike what Obama & Co. are doing, I can’t honestly characterize their actions as in this topic.
Dickmorris.com has a list of swing congresspeople and their phone numbers. Some may feel this is an exercise in futility… but if youre in the mood to weigh in (especially if you are a constituent of one of these congresspeople):
the list of names and numbers is here:
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2010/03/16/call-these-swing-congressmen-on-health-care/
huxley, it’s nice to have you back. Your point on the old thread was a good one: that inferences of intent can lead to confirmation bias. Fair enough, and we should challenge ourselves to find alternative explanations for the phenomena we observe.
But we are also back to basic definitions. What is tyranny? How far do you need to go before what we sees qualifies? Certainly, if we had assassinations and so one, no one would be debating. We can stipulate that there is too much hyperbole coming from those who distrust this Administration, which confuses the issue to some degree. Still, you are trying to make the argument based on the connotations of the word, as you perceive them. If your opponents on this point are loose with their definition, the proper response is not to respond with Humpty-Dumptyism of your own.
For my part, I go back to the Roman beginnings and suggest that “tyranny” is the antithesis of “republicanism.” Perhaps the right formulation would be “power unconstrained by law.” Neo is concerned here about the pursuit of a policy that increases the power of the government by people who are not overly troubled by constitutional niceties, and I think rightly so. In US history, this would have been exactly the type of thing that American opponents of George III would have cited as incipient tyranny.
I have to go to work now, but we can discuss this more later.
Huxley,
I’ve been thinking of ya. Keep writing here please!
When somebody wrote, “I have believed for quite some time that the Democrats will stop at nothing to pass HCR. ”
That was a figure of speech. People can recognize that for what it is. Nobody claimed families of the no voters will be killed.
You wrote, “but if words mean what they mean, I don’t see how these possibilities can be excluded.”
I do. It’s the norm of discussion. If we have to spell out each and every detail to be on the same page – we are bound to have communication problems. You are one of my favorite commentators here and I want to help.
If somebody says, “I could eat a horse”. You understand them instinctively.
If somebody says, “they’ll stop at nothing”. Nobody is assuming they’ll be bringing forward Stalin’s Order # 270 to have the family killed of dissenters.
You are correct that it is serious to accuse somebody or a group of people of having “no respect for the law”.
But again – we see what is moving forward in the house and Senate and the contempt for the “process”.
The Democrats keep saying, “This has been done 1,000 times before”.
Do you believe them huxley?
Do you see a distinction in how they are moving forward with times in the past? We could discuss that so you are up to speed on those distinctions.. if need be.
huxley: still slaying strawmen, I see.
In the context of this post, I would guess that you actually understood that the word “nothing” was not to be taken literally. This was a very short post, and the word involved the use of measures “to pass HCR” (that is a quote from the second part of the sentence, in case you didn’t notice).
I was speaking here of—and have been speaking here of, in post after post— measures that are very iffy: bribes, lies, twisting of the rules, maneuvers of extremely dubious constitutionality such as the Slaughter solution, and probably a host of other things we know nothing about and never will know. But obviously passing this bill does not include Gulags (which I have never talked about), nor does it involve lining bloggers up against a wall and shooting them, or getting Martians to beam into our brains. Neither does it involve about a million other things that I failed to exclude.
Huxley: Are you old enough to remember 1973 accurately? “Were the Nixon days what tyranny looks like in the beginning?” I am.
I’m not clear if yours is a real or a rhetorical question.
Some of us then fretted about what was up. But that was when I read TNR and thought McGovern made some sense.
In retrospect, Nixon made some serious mistakes. But he had been demonized by the Left long before, and that continues unabated.
Now the Left holds the power. I think you can answer your own question. If not, I can: Nixon at his worst was far better than Baraq at his best.
In the context of this post, I would guess that you actually understood that the word “nothing” was not to be taken literally.
neo: This is hardly the first time that you have written or quoted absolute language — as in your earlier topic highlighting W.D.’s general claim as “the quote of the day” concerning the “false assumption” that “Democrats care at all about the rule of law….”
No, I don’t know what you mean by “nothing.” I’ve read my share of history and groups that are undeterred by “nothing” have done quite a number of nasty things on a routine basis, without including the damage that Martians might do.
And I note that these groups — fascists, communists, nazis, chavistas etc — have been extensively discussed in this blog as a context for who Obama might be and where he might be heading, so I don’t think I can be blamed for considering such measures to be on the table.
On my side it seems to me that there is much equivocation in this blog when it comes to routinely declaring Obama’s intentions and the terrible things that might ensue, — consider Gray’s femoral artery bleeding out — but when I challenge such immoderate language, I get the drill that “No, that’s not what we meant and how dare you suggest that we did.”
If that’s not what you mean, you could qualify what you say.
I would guess that you actually understood that the word “nothing” was not to be taken literally.
I suggest that you stop guessing who I am and what I am thinking.
But we are also back to basic definitions. What is tyranny? How far do you need to go before what we sees qualifies?
Oblio: Sure. I think some definitions would help.
However, my problem here is that possibly moving towards tyranny is not the same as tyranny.
And I am weary and alarmed by the general response on all sides of the American political debate that if whatever the other side does is tyranny or moving us towards it.
“Sic semper tyrannis!” as John Wilkes Booth declared when he shot Lincoln, and he didn’t have a half-bad case to make.
I do. It’s the norm of discussion. If we have to spell out each and every detail to be on the same page – we are bound to have communication problems.
Baklava: Yes, it’s a hassle to strive for clarity.
Perfection will always elude is, but it’s not that hard to drop a clue that one is presenting an opinion or that one is not talking about all Democrats or all actions that Democrats might attempt and so forth.
If you read my posts, you’ll notice that I often use phrases and words like “it seems to me”, “IMO,” “as far as I’m concerned,” “in some cases,” “some,” “at times” etc.
It doesn’t make for crisp, decisive language but it leaves, I hope, room for debate, a range of possibilities, and honesty.
huxley, there comes a point, somewhere short of absolute and depraved tyranny, where there is enough tyranny on display to justify the description. It can’t be the case that we have to wait until no one will defend a regime to agree that it is tyrannical. That would strip all meaning from the word.
You could convince me by saying, “If the Administration does this, I will be very concerned about the risk of tyranny; and if it goes all the way to that, then it will deserve to be called tyrannical.” You can’t responsibly stay in a state of philosophical skepticism. You must judge at some point. You must declare and own your position.
I wish you would comment on my working definition. For my part, I remain troubled by not knowing which laws the Left Democrats will consider to be binding. Perhaps I should be as worried about Right Republicans, but in my lifetime I have been able to count on them to agree what the meaning of the word “is” is.
huxley: “I would guess” means “I would guess.” It doesn’t mean “I would know.”
Actually, a person who guesses that you understood what “nothing” meant in the context of a phrase such as “Democrats will stop at nothing to pass HCR” is indicating a certain faith in your intelligence and judgment. Such a person imagines that you understand how English is usually used, and what “stop at nothing” means in the context of passing a bill in Congress.
To imagine (as you did) or to guess that I meant something like Gulags or shootings in that context is absolutely preposterous.
Now you have officially become a troll here.
“Tyranny” is a word that has fallen out of a favor; an archaic word, perhaps only meaningful in the context of a set of beliefs about republican liberty. Perhaps that’s the scariest thing of all: that words and their meanings and therefore laws will be twisted to serve the purposes of a shameless Will to power. That individuals will prevaricate is to be expected; that a movement would take pride in spinning and Humpty-Dumptyism fills me to despair that compromise will ever be possible. How can you make a treaty with such people? How can you live in peace?
s/b “leads me to despair”
Huxley,
You belabored my point saying we should strive for clarity.
Clarity comes with understanding of conversation norms.
To get bogged down in repeated discussions about gulags or shooting family members or dissenting voters does NOTHING for the conversation.
Let’s say I was talking to my girlfriend – and I got cross or argued with her every time she used the an exaggeration word or phrase.
At some point she’d cease to discuss things with me because I wasn’t “listening” and it was “pointless”.
As I’ve been through enough character building over the years – I know the hardest thing to do is put yourself in somebody elses shoes and make them feel “heard”.
Are you hearing us? Truly? We do hear you. I am not talking gulags or shootings of dissenters. Neither is Neo.
Now you have officially become a troll here.
neo: Does that mean I am banned?
I really do disagree with you on current matters and with your characterizations of my positions.
What do you suggest I do?
I wish you would comment on my working definition.
Oblio: It would be nice but I am dealing with a number of people, including the host, who do not like what I am saying, how I am saying it, and indeed doubt my sincerity.
It’s hard for me to see how this is a workable situation in which to have the conversation you would like.
What do you recommend?
huxley: if it meant you were banned, you would be banned, not posting here. As of now you are obviously not banned.
What I suggest is that you understand common English usage, and understand what the phrase I used in this thread meant in the context in which I used it.
And in general, what I am asking is that you stop with the strawman arguments.
“but if words mean what they mean, I don’t see how these possibilities can be excluded. If that’s not what is meant, it seems to me that the words ought to be qualified…”
Words mean what they mean in the context in which they occur. And the overall meaning flows from the context, not the words or the phrases. The context, especially in the form of a relatively short item such as we are dealing with here, is not that item alone but the greater body of writing and thinking that have preceded it. To pluck out a phrase from here or there and assemble it into a strawman is to make a figure only fit for burning. It doesn’t stimulate debate. It only attracts argument, but in a manner in which the plucker can say, when that argument comes, “Who? Me?”
Too much qualification disqualifies. First of all, a writer who qualifies their writing when it is not necessary is not writing but drafting some legal brief. It may make for some clear obscurity, but it is not interesting or stimulating to read. Indeed, qualification, however qualified, reduces the quality of even the qualifications inserted to qualify the previous unqualified statement. Qualify enough and one arrives at a kind of entropy in which there are no differences except differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
Some people in online discussion seem compelled to dispense with the five-minute argument and opt instead for the full half-hour. They need to scratch their twitch. And that about as unqualified as I can make it.
huxley, I recommend you take the lifeline I am throwing. Start owning your position and misstating those of other people. Make fine-grained arguments. Give other people some credit.
huxley: if it meant you were banned, you would be banned, not posting here. As of now you are obviously not banned.
neo: Obviously I couldn’t tell until my post went through and that was one of my purposes in writing it.
As to my “strawman” arguments — as I said, I don’t accept your characterization as such. It’s like starting from Wolla Dalbo’s comment that declares at the outset that people like me are operating from a “false premise” about Democrats.
We could debate further but I doubt it would do much good.
My take is that I have violated a core belief of this particular tribe: something about tyranny and Obama — I dare not describe it further because I am constantly being accused of misstating or creating strawmen.
But by now I really can’t tell what the point is beyond participants’ not liking Obama or his policies or the Dem leadership and consequently calling it tyranny though in some mini, micro or proto form.
I don’t like Obama etc., but tyranny strikes me as a big and blunt rhetorical hammer to bring to the discussion, that’s not my sense of what is going on, and among the political writers I respect, it’s not a hammer they are using either.
Will Democrats be assassinating “no” votes, kidnapping families, torturing aides, shutting down Fox News, or putting LSD on Rush Limbaugh’s steering wheel – as was supposedly planned for Jack Anderson back in the Nixon days?
I figured it out.
his position is that unless there are actual jack booted thugs in slick patent leather. fitting his ideal of crazy tyranny, then he dont have to care or do anything. and when he sees that happen, he doesnt have to care or do anything, as its too late.
he will NEVER concede a tyranny until he himself is affected to the point where its irrelevant to decide.
Again, all these people have “Grizzley Man Syndrome” and they tend to take others with them in their inability to reason that NOT exercising power is not the same as not having it, or not being able to.
in Huxley universe, a spring can never compress
for all power is never conserved, stored, and can spring as we cant measure whats tested.
to him, a person cant own a gun and not fire it!!
for he cant see how they can collect power, not act on it, and then spring the full force of it AFTER we the peoples leftist liberal idiots protest violently to get back what they had (as they now all fight violently for a much smaller pie than before).
like grizzley man, he assumes every day he lives without being so affected is proof that they are not going to.
but one only has to see that such is no proof of anything. as Grizzley man found out.
its a difference between reality and subjective reality.
subjective moral reality says that a gorgeous woman should be able to walk down a dark alley alone buck naked and not have anything happen to her.
in reality, she is an idiot if she even does it clothed.
problem is that if you live in the first world, the real world eventually craps on your head in a bad way as you never prepare for waht you think is impossible
and you can prepare in ways that if your wrong, its ok… you end up better for it, either way.
What do you think earning millions and cubby holing it away in the world is about? greed? you cant determine greed till you determine final need and you cant determine total need until AFTER everything is done.
so greed is a false concept the way we, or rather the left apply it.
the guys who work really hard to have a lot and are on the world stage are more aware of how the real world works and its long term odds of stability than almost everyone else.
no amount of talking will get a girl in a mini skirt to not do what she things is right and no amount of talking will bring him to a conclusion as he throws away variables out of hand to dispermit the conclusion.
everything is relative
everything is uncertain
everything has dual use
everything has more than one motive
and so, he doesn’t realize that he is a deer in the headlights. that that is the mental moves of someone frozen in place by circumstances and cant move until they have something more tangible.
then whump! tangible hits them.
they didn’t get out of the way.
The context, especially in the form of a relatively short item such as we are dealing with here, is not that item alone but the greater body of writing and thinking that have preceded it. To pluck out a phrase from here or there and assemble it into a strawman is to make a figure only fit for burning.
vanderleun: However, as I explained, the context is tyranny and on this blog that context has a much longer history than this short item.
Qualify enough and one arrives at a kind of entropy in which there are no differences except differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
However, I’m not talking about some endless loop of qualification. I said earlier:
huxley, I recommend you take the lifeline I am throwing. Start owning your position and misstating those of other people. Make fine-grained arguments. Give other people some credit.
Oblio: I’m not looking for a lifeline. As far as I’m concerned I do own my position and try not to misstate other’s arguments, although I’m human and make mistakes and have blind spots. I do give credit to others.
As to fine-grained arguments — I try to fit what I say on a screen or so and I do support what I say.
I would enjoy a careful, fine-grained discussion with you. However my point is that right now I am responding to multiple people at the same time in an unfriendly atmosphere in which the host has declared me to be a troll, although I’m not banned — yet, betsybounds suspects me of being some kind of agent collecting names, and baklava asks “Are you hearing us? Truly? We do hear you.”
Actually I don’t think I’m being heard well here and my positions get misstated and misunderstood too.
Vanderleun and Oblio:
Excellent comments.
Huxley:
Are any of us equating the soft tyranny we are talking about to gulags and shooting of family/relatives?
Huxley wrote, “I would enjoy a careful, fine-grained discussion with you. However my point is that right now I am responding to multiple people at the same time in an unfriendly atmosphere in which the host has declared me to be a troll, although I’m not banned – yet, betsybounds suspects me of being some kind of agent collecting names, and baklava asks “Are you hearing us? Truly?”
Huxley, I’d have this kind of discussion with my girlfriend. It is imperative that we hear each other. Especially the people we care about.
I like you.
BTW,
I come from a background where debates are fun to me.
When I lived on the USS Enterprise, we lived and worked with the same group of people all day long for many months. You HAD to find a way to get along. It was a character building experience that sticks with me today (though I’ve had about 20 more character building experiences)
This is friendly and loving in my mind. Our frustrations will come out. We might end up saying “troll” or you might end up BELIEVING we think gulags are coming.
In the end – I believe most people here would come to your aid if you needed it if they lived and/or worked with you.
You add a lot of spirit here and even with the anonymity most of us probably have a picture of you in our minds and it’s a positive mental image. 🙂
quite unlike a few pointy headed liberals like Mitsu.
huxley:
You write:
Well then, your take is wrong, at least as it refers to me. My problem with you is not that you have violated some tenet of a “tribe” of which I am a member. I disagree with your position on the issue of what Obama and the Dems are intending and planning and wanting, but that disagreement with you is not why I called you a troll. In the comments thread where I called you a troll I wrote that my problem with you was otherwise.
You are either misunderstanding the thrust of what I am saying about you, or you are misstating it. I really don’t know which. But what I am objecting to when I call you a troll is not your disagreement with whether the Dems are showing evidence of tyranny. It is your misstatements of what I have said on this blog in my posts, and your mischaracterization of my words taken in their context.
I have not predicted Gulags and firing squads. I have specifically written about the possibility (or at least the attempt—perhaps successful, perhaps not) of a Hugo Chavez-like action here on the part of Obama and the Democratic leadership, an action I consider a form of tyranny. I suppose gulags and the like would be remotely possible some day, somewhere down a long and winding road (as it always is with the far left), but that’s not what I see right now for us here in this country, nor have I predicted it.
You have mischaracterized my position several times, and I don’t like that. When you do that you are creating a strawman. Get it? Good.
Neo: One of the classic ways you misstate my position is by assuming that everything I write here is a direct response to you. For instance, the “gulag” prediction came from rickl:
While you have not predicted full-blown tyranny — nor have I said you did — for months now you have examined Obama and his administration through the lens of tyranny. At least once you have argued in favor of it as a real, imminent possibility.
I said:
You responded:
Baklava: Obviously I have some appetite for this kind of sparring, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I’ve also enjoyed my stint as HuxleyPundit.
Likewise, I believe I’d enjoy hoisting a few with you and shooting it in a cozy back table somewhere, sometime.
Best.
huxley, this is not your best thread. Go back to your 3/17 6.04 am comment: you fly into hyperbolic excesses of your own based on your misreading of a couple of lines from neo, and from neo alone. She is right to find your behavior obnoxious.
OK, this is a hot button topic for you, just like when FredHjr used to say that he could tell that Obama is a Marxist. You need to explain why. I am quite sure you would find a respectful and attentive audience. I know I would be very interested, because you and I are somewhat alike in terms of situation and background. If you give a little credit to your readers, I think you would find the room not hostile at all, even if some of us disagree with your conclusions.
hux, maybe I can send you some of J.L.’s coffee for those early morning comments.
Best regards.
I concur with Oblio.
It was THIS thread which had me scratching my head. If you were reacting to a past rickl statement it wasn’t apparent at all.
Maybe my reading of the Road to Serfdom helps me see leftism’s coercion problem.
They cannot mold a society as they wish because many people are personal responsibility and personal initiative and entrepreneur minded.
They end up butting up against resistance and then the problem starts.
How to coerce?
Take?
Redistribute?
Subsidize poor choices?
The Road to Serfdom is eye opening. There are quite a few methods and all of them are basically punitive and lead to soft tyranny.
What is this NEW tax on investment income? We are already taxed on investments with capital gains and the income gets added to our income when reporting each year. An additional investment income tax???
This is NOT RIGHT. We need to fight this government and fight now.
Oblio, Baklava: My reaction here has not just been to the topic post or to rickl’s claim months back. The latter was an example and I labeled it as an “instance.” How well are you reading me?
Part of it certainly comes from neo’s declaring me a troll on account of “strawmen” while from my point of view she has been consistently strawmanning my positions as well.
Part of it is my distrust of strong terms like tyranny or general claims such as how Democrats will stop at nothing. My distrust goes back to reading Korzybski and Hayakawa on general semantics back in high school, my ongoing study of fallacies and propaganda, and my more recent training in NLP.
It’s like someone saying “Everyone hates me.” There’s an emotional truth to that, but it’s not really true. Not everyone hates one and even those that are displeased likely qualify that displeasure to certain things and circumstances.
Meanwhile though telling yourself or others that “Everyone hates me” creates an emotional reaction that you live with and can distort your judgment, and reinforce your belief that indeed, “Everyone hates me.”
For instance, twice now on this blog, because I have disagreed with this longstanding concern that Obama is leading the country into tyranny, participants have voiced their suspicion that I was an agent sent to this blog for nefarious purposes.
I get that accusation on left-wing blogs. For sometime now I have had the impression that this blog is becoming the flip-side those left-wing blogs and I don’t like it.
No doubt I have been clumsy or testy at times, but that’s what I have been objecting to.
In recent months it’s been come clear that Obama doesn’t have whatever it takes to for hard tyranny — as I have been saying for sometime, so now the emphasis has moved to soft tyranny, but not long ago people here were very serious about the hard variety.
Again, only last fall neo doubted that a Democratic Congress would impeach Obama for attempting an outright coup. That strikes me as extreme. I don’t see much difference between that and Democratic leaders willing to kill opponents or launch black ops against them.
Oblio: The other problem on this blog for a truly fine-grained discussion is that the half-life of a discussion is around 24 hours.
That’s just the way it is. This topic is past its expiry and I’m not sure anyone will click to it and read what I’m writing now.
It would be interesting to continue this discussion — I can cite more examples — but unless neo starts another tyranny topic that won’t happen.
Also, since I am now officially a troll, I have no idea when or if I will be banned.
huxley: I have been “consistently strawmanning your positions?
I am rapidly losing patience with your baseless accusations towards me.
And your last paragraph is an example of hyperbole if ever I saw one.
And by the way, what is your definition of an “outright coup” as it relates to Obama? After all, he already holds the presidency; he doesn’t need a “coup” to get power. However, I certainly believe that Obama and the Democrats in Congress are showing us right now what their attitude towards increasing their power by unconstitutional means is—and they are for it—but I wouldn’t call that an “outright coup.” But why would Democrats not cooperate with Obama’s further overreach of power in order to get what they want, rather than impeach them? He has actually stated in the Baier interview that he doesn’t care about these petty “procedure” matters, and they have shown that they don’t, at least up to a point. From whence comes your great faith in their moral high judgment at the risk of party and power?
No, they haven’t gotten to the point of dissolving Congress and all the rules, nor have I said they would. But they will stretch and bend them, and it is logical to believe they will become emboldened to do more in that direction as time goes on (in my opinion, in a Chavez-like manner, which of course does not mean it will look exactly like Chavez).
And how do you come to the conclusion that that—or rather, the Democrats failing to vote to impeach Obama for it—is hardly different from killing opponents? Certainly the two things exist on a continuum involving ruthlessness and power, but at very different points on that continuum. But you equate them?? If you do, no wonder you keep thinking everyone here is talking about gulags when they’re not!
(Oh yes, and by the word “everyone” in that last sentence I don’t literally mean “everyone.” I mean “an unspecified number of people, a number referring back to various statements of huxley’s in which he seems to be saying that many commenters here—numbers and names unspecified—as well as the blogger herself, speak about Obama and the Democrats as planning gulags and killings of opponents.” Most people would understand that, I think, but I just thought I’d spell it out for you, since you seem to require such legalistic language.)
After 5 years, looking down stream on Hux, I judge him to be a weakling that has an OCD obsession with internet browsing and arguments.
He can’t pick one person to stick to, one argument, so he flies all around, losing sight of himself as well as the people he likes to argue with.
He shifts the goal posts around like this place is some hierarchy with Neo pulling the strings of Bak or Obl, so Hux only needs to respond to Neo. Then when he responds to Neo, he moves the goal posts and says he was responding to rick.
It’s a kind of gas lighting and I wonder if he is familiar with that technique or if he only appears to be on the Left’s fascist operative list for behavior.