London is burning...

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Problem is they think this call for violence is okay because it supports their agenda, they won't even remotely feel ashamed for what they have been advocating.

Well, it would seem you're officially on a roll here now. This is what fanaticism does to people, no means are off the table when they believe so much in the purity of their ends. The thing fanatics never think about is that elsewhere there are other, diametrically opposed fanatics who are equally sure that they are the ones who are so indisputably correct and their motivations so pure that no method is off limits in pursuit of their agenda. IMHO most of the world's great atrocities were set in motion by people with the best of intentions who simply couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want to go along with such great plans. It's a pretty short leap from "why can't these stupid/stubborn people see that I'm trying to help them?" to "these selfish/evil people are screwing up my plans on purpose and must be stopped by any means!", and we all know where that leads to.

The really sad thing, is that people have been pointing out how things have been coming to a head for a while, and have been called crazy.

Pots and kettles folks. Like you said, it takes two unreasonable sides to get violence on a grand scale, and we have that here for sure.

False.

It takes two to make peace, only one to start a war.


Again we didn't see violence at the Glenn Beck rally in DC.

Please admit though, that extreme ideology does not just spring up in a vacuum. People turn to fanaticism when there is a public perception of injustice and a threat to people's very existence.

These people were raised to think they were entitled to things that quite frankly weren't theirs.

No compromise politics is completely unreasonable not to mention Unamerican. It leads to a nonfunctional political system--which is fine for small government conservatives, but means disenfranchisement for the rest of us.

When you intentionally break the political system, you leave the opposition with few nonviolent alternatives.

Think about that at your next tea party.

Last edited by GoonSquad on 11 Aug 2011, 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Depends on what you want to call extreme or fanatical. I don't use either label lightly, I invoked it here because there were explicit calls for gruesome torture on top of a general call to violence based on an ideological definition of crime and punishment. No cause justifies that level of violence, hence my distaste.
Also, an existential threat isn't a necessary component of fanaticism, only a complete refusal to consider the possibility of being wrong. Exhibit A would be religious fanatics, they don't need social injustice to motivate them, their faith in the rightness of their cause seems to work just fine.
The thing about fanatics of all stripes is that they are not rational, their zeal for their cause overshadows their ability to process information rationally. Partisans are a relatively benign species or fanatic, the way they selectively process information relative to their political leanings is very similar to the way fanatics are blind to anything that might contradict their cause.

Not really, but whatever. Study history sometime.

You are missing something. Behind most ideological battles is a battle between competing interests for material resources and material livelihood. The ideology itself is merely a wrapping. The storming of the Bastille was hardly an act of irrational fanaticism. They might have believed in the righteousness of their cause, but they also believed they were acting in their own self-interest (as a group at least).

So what would you call the democrats' agenda between January 2009 and January 2011?

There is a difference between compromising to come up with a functional plan and compromising to accept total crap into your plan for the sake of saying you compromised.

What happened to your keen awareness of false equivalency MP? AoS is pro death penalty, and even pro DP for Bernie Madoff, but he's not suggesting that Madoff be extra-judicially tortured to death as VW seems to be calling for. AoS seems to be calling for stricter enforcement and punishment within the judicial system, where as VW is calling for straight up vigilante action, and of a most sadistic sort to boot. There's an awful lot of daylight showing between those two positions, and honestly I think you know it, but don't want to alienate VW who you think of as being on your "side". Feel free to jump in here if I'm going wide of the mark, that's my read anyway. Not your best work IMHO, the spelling and such isn't normally like you either, perfectionism and all. I'd think about walking this one back, I don't think you really want to try and carry this particular water.

What I'm missing is a strong commitment to any particular side because I don't fully agree with any of them, which makes me the enemy to zealots of all stripes. My greater point would be that the people storming the Bastille thought they were acting in their own interest, but so did the people defending it, and zeal alone is no measure of the rightness of a cause.

Different people have different standards by which they determine right and wrong, and I instinctively recoil from absolute certainty on such judgments for the most part on any but the most straightforward things, it's all too subjective for certainty.

We can't even agree on how best to do good, witness the arguments on the proper level of charity to provide utility without breeding dependency. I see it as a difference of opinion while other, such as yourself, see it as a moral litmus test and heap abuse on people who hold differing opinions.

I value objective consideration, and while I don't completely discount emotion I do tend to think of it as "noise" in my thought process. This is what allows me to, say, consider whether a policy that's going to hurt people short term might do more good for more people in the long term.
To use a historical example, the automobile put a lot of farriers and buggy-whip makers out of business in the short term, but allowed huge economic growth in the long. The emotional reasoner could easily get hung up on the damage done to families who were dependent on the now obsolete industries, leading to protectionism and subsidies that do far more damage to far more people in the end.

What constitutes total crap is a matter of opinion.

Bottom line is we will either learn to make real compromise on both sides to make progress everyone can live with or people will stop participating in the system and start killing each other.

We've done it before. Remember a little thing called the civil war? Americans aren't above killing each other to make a political point despite what some folks here might think.

Let me say it one last time. The American political system is not a spectator sport for people too mean-spirited and barbaric to appreciate professional wrestling.

It's a system of governance designed to let us work out our differences peacefully as we strive to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.

When system stops working because one side or the other or both engages in willful obstruction there's no reason to participate any longer. That leaves people with grievances and no peaceful way to deal with them.

What do you think is likely to happen next?

Well, I'm happy you can see this all in the abstract and pretend to impartially deconstruct arguments from an ivory tower. You can't imagine some unforeseen horror that might rock your placid sense of security in this world.

Also, my point of contention with Fnord was that he seemed to imply that he has no moral obligation to pay taxes in support of a social safety net. Nothing, nada, zilch. All because he didn't receive any benefit from the system, mr big strong self-made man.