I see the DNC unity council actually approved reforms, we will have to see if he 100% establishment rules committee accepts them. The basics: cutting superdelegates by 60%, requiring published budgets and committee approvals for expenditures over $100K, and establishing written guidelines for primaries to attempt to make them common across state lines.
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BTW, that communist army officer is apparently now commanding a company of armoured infantry in Afghanistan.
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For a (very) rough analogy to understand Gough, think of him as Oz’s Bernie. We actually got ours elected…briefly.
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i haven’t been ignoring this question, I’ve been thinking about it. This isn’t the kind of question that deserves a quick, knee-jerk response.
I do not support the death penalty. Period. So when you speak of slavers being at the end of a rope after the revolution is over, no, I cannot get behind that. Go ahead and strip them of their wealth, their influence, any of that. Leave them to be exiled.
The problem is how easily this thinking leads to genocide. Did the Haitians deserve to be able to defend their lives? Absolutely. But once you get into punitive murder, it’s not that hard for the oppressed to become the very thing they were fighting against.
Also, violence =/= murder. Pre-emptive defense does not have to involve mass murder / summary executions.
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(and, once again: Stalin was a mass murdering bastard. Nevertheless, the use of Stalinism to slander socialism and whitewash fascism is utter bullshit)
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For me your attitude of economic “responsibility” is more socially respectable than it is strictly responsible in economic terms. I’m pretty irritated at the left too, for the same reason I roll my eyes at your liberalism, neo- or otherwise, which is that no one seems willing to learn the dynamics necessary to understand what’s going on. Why the rich were able to rebuild the aristocracy in the last forty years. Why they are unassailable, whether through democratic action, disobedience, or revolt.
Unassailable, that is, given the hundred-year-old ideas of the typical left and the hundred-fifty-ish year old murmurations of respectability you hold to.
I have nothing left but to poke at you all. My writing life is on hold right now because idiot greedy bastards are making my work life hell. I wish they were making less money so they’d fucking let up.
This sort of ad is not going to work:
It makes the Dems look weak and desperate. It would also be quite reasonably seen as patronising and offensive by every person in Alabama who isn’t an idiot.
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White #Resistance at it yet again.
The first couple of minutes will do to get the gist of this:
Chem/bio warfare, deliberately targeted at civilians, with China as the main target.
Agreed. Thanks for the reply.
My attitude towards the death penalty is a bit complicated.
I do not support the death penalty in any modern judicial system. However, this is not due to any consideration of “the sanctity of life”.
My objection is based on two main factors:
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There is no such thing as a perfect, incorruptible error-free judicial system. Any such system will inevitably execute innocent people. You can’t appeal a wrongful conviction when you’re dead.
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The psychological impact on the executioners, and the sociological impact on the society. There is no way to make that harmless.
OTOH, if we’re talking about a pre-modern society where the resources for prolonged humane detention are not available, things may be different, and none of the choices are good. In some ways, slavery was invented as an alternative to execution and genocide, and we know where that goes.
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I also probably wouldn’t have hung the slavers, for fear of the cultural impact of mass execution.
I phrased that “would not object” bit carefully; it’s not the decision I would make if I were in charge, but I can see reasons why people might reasonably consider it defensible in those particular, extreme circumstances.
But I certainly would have dispossessed them, and I might’ve given serious consideration to exile (although that raises the issue of: “what right do we have to inflict these bastards on the rest of the world?”).
I don’t know. Denazification is never an easy task.
Yup.
Again, I don’t endorse the Haitians’ killing of the French. I wouldn’t have chosen to do it myself.
But, again, OTOH…I can easily imagine that there weren’t a lot of good options at the time.
A residual French population would have virtually guaranteed continued insurrection and eventual reinvasion by France. I doubt the Haitians had the resources to organise a “peaceful” expulsion. And, if we remove the euphemisms, that would itself have been an ethnic cleansing.
I don’t think peaceful coexistence and integration of the French was a realistic possibility at the time, and I don’t think it would be reasonable to demand that the newly emancipated Haitians try it. Haiti made the American cotton plantations look relatively civilised; centuries of merciless, murderous terrorism on a massive scale.
The massacre was dreadful, but I think it is important to remember that most of the responsibility for that event lies with the Europeans who were the first to turn Haiti into hell on Earth.
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Related to this is a factor that comes up both here and on BB: how to judge the ethics of revolutions?
Approach A: did the revolutionaries do bad things, or did the revolution cause bad things to happen?
Approach B: if the revolution caused bad things to happen, are those things better or worse than what would have happened without the revolution?
I’m obviously in the “Approach B” camp.
Revolution is dangerous, even if peaceful. Violence is dangerous, even if justified. But when reading history and politics, we need to “imagine it complexly”, as John Green likes to say. Context is crucial.
IMO, anyway.
Ye olde context:
Post-revolutionary troubles predate socialism by a long time.