It wouldn’t surprise me at this point.
Yeah, If I were president it would be horrible but I think I could actually do a better job than Trump. At this point if we drew names out of a hat and that guy got to run the country for a week we would actually be better off.
Bunpocalypse now has pushed my old #3 pocalypse which was stoatpocalypse.
*blink* What?
Treason, that crime that is defined in the US constitution as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” and that is punished by murder?
Is Russia the enemy?
Did I miss the start of World War III?
Or has the state of democracy in the US deteriorated to the point where giving “aid and comfort” to any foreigners someone disagrees is considered grounds for execution?
Now that sounds reasonable.
The country that invaded and damaged our political process in the last national election, in order to cause someone they knew they could control to take the top office instead of someone they knew they couldn’t control?
Yes.
Does this mean the WSJ had been promoted to Fake News too?
The intelligence community is wary of giving an administration they don’t trust information that could get their assets and field agents killed/tortured/etc? Color me surprised. The Obama-Trump transition has probably been a massive shock; going from an administration that actively worked to protect the IC from oversight and protect its secrets (except for some targeted leaking) to an administration that insults and belittles the IC while being in the pocket of an adversary.
Quite upfront about the difference, eh? In my experience, the clearest intimation of what democracy really meant to an 18th century gentleman comes from Montesquieu-- who implied that sortition (a lottery) played a major role–thus the jury is the most democratic institution in the United States. More abstractly, it implies that political power does not depend on social class, but on being human-- this is why the communist societies described themselves as democratic, as the proletariat was not excluded from holding political power. And of course, there were people who held it to be “a fancy way of saying ‘mob rule’”.
And where “republic” was used it varied from “a state headed by someone who was not a monarch”, to
“a society combining elements of ‘monarchy’, ‘aristocracy’. and ‘democracy’ in a balanced whole”.
What we read is quite often the unfounded prejudice of biased men who were quite content to keep slaves.
Sometimes, “America” is called “the Great Experiment.” We should do well to remember that experimental evidence is most often used to falsify and refine hypotheses. In arguing that the meaning of words has been debased, one fails to recognize that the meanings of democracy and republic and all of these other terms have been refined and altered by over two hundred years of experimental evidence.
One of the greatest inspiration of the eighteenth century political thinkers was Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of the Laws”. Within it, he does a very thorough analysis of the republic. To be clear, he does separate democratic and aristocratic republic (the former being his description of what a democracy is). He very clearly differentiates a democracy (rule of the majority) and an aristocratic republic (elected government, following Locke’s idea of the “consent of the governed”) and clearly favored the latter.
Madison literally equated democracy with “mob rule”, but he wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Never mind the fact that all those people were in privileged position and favored a point of view that put them in a much more favorable light than any other social group (the nobles/clergy were seen as corrupt and the common people as inept).
Of course, looking at what the actions of the supposed ‘enlightened people’ were may cast some doubt as pertain to that stance. I must again refer to the US (but that’s because the process there was very meticulously documented). My first example will be with Madison losing an election because he refused to buy a barrel of whiskey for the so-called elite to drink (the few who were allowed to vote). More to the point, how about the 3/5 representation of the slave states that was bitterly negotiated. I would hardly call that in any way enlightened (greedy, power hungry and so on rather come to mind).
if this is the general feeling in the US (and I believe the BB crowd is more reasonable and politically interested than the average) I am really scared.
Russia’s intelligence apparatus meddling with the election is certainly not a friendly move but business as usual and not better or worse than, say, the troika taking the Greece population as hostage in the merciless fight against the elected government or when the US supported the Bolivian coup in 2002.
Manipulating governments and states all over the world is one of the biggest foreign-policy hobbies of all US governments since decades, if such a behaviour is now suddenly* on the war-side of the international relationsship scale I see a glowing future for this small piece of stone circling sun.
* I assume because the US is on the receiving end
I guess we don’t have the same definitions, but I admit I should have used the proper terms:
A civil servant is someone employed directly by the state and as such bound to obey it. In the end, the state is supposed to obey the public at large, whose will is expressed though its representatives (who are elected to that effect).
the name says it all: if a civil servant chooses to hide things from an elected official they are officially bound to, that’s a form of treason. And it is very difficult to imagine there is no partisanship when the person in question was elected only 2 months before.
Of course, there could be a case of a clear problem with the individual (not going there right now), but in that case, there are procedures and protocols and they clearly are not being followed.
Going back to Trump, yes he is a lout and many other things besides, and he probably isn’t qualified to be POTUS. That said, if you allow such behavior in the people working in the intelligence community, you might as well directly give them power, because they are never going to change back to a more appropriate way of acting.
Well, I hadn’t yet read your reply when I wrote the one appearing right below your post. So you can see I completely agree that Montesquieu was a great source of reasoning.
After that, sorry but I’m not sure which point you’re exactly arguing.
Mine is simply that the word ‘democracy’ has been redefined to mean something that was considered quite the opposite of over that 200 years period. Hence me calling that process ‘hijacking’.
I think that we can deal with each problem in its own time. Which problem is worse, and needs to be fixed first? I believe that Trump being president is the worse situation. When that is fixed, we can, and should, address the IC.
When your house is burning, you pour water on it, even though that water can damage the wiring. You don’t preserve the wiring first, you put the fire out first and then fix the wiring. Of course, each must decide for himself which is the worse problem
Enemy is too strong a word; I believe that’s why opponent and adversary are used more often. Russia is not something to be erased from the planet to most Americans and vice versa. But the leaders of Russian government has its interests, and some of them don’t align with US government interests, nor generally with the interests of private citizens.
It is ideal to have a president that is actually putting the interests of the US first (whether those are corporate, individual, or government), so a president like Trump that puts himself first, Russia second, and the US somewhere further down should probably kicked out as soon as possible.
You left out the part where he boasts about how many electoral votes he received.
“Syrians are making mustard gas. Mustard gas. Unbelievable. You know, they said I wouldn’t get more than 220 votes in the Electoral College. And look what we did. It’s tremendous. Anyway. Yes, mustard gas.”
Would you settle for Trumpocalypse? Because that’s the one you’re getting. It’s the biggest, best, most popular Apocalypse, ever.
I’m perfectly willing to agree that any country can (and should) feel the same way about us when we engage in similar covert activities against them.
Most politicians and diplomats maintain the facade that we’re one world trying to work with each other, but human nature being what it is, most nations (and certainly the powerful ones) are much more aggressive and manipulative than that. I’d love to live in the Star Trek era, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be anything but fiction.
“Nuclear holocaust would be like no other”
He thinks their “withholding” is a tax strategy.
No, Montesquieu differentiates three forms of government, the democratic republic, the aristorcratic republic, and the monarchy.
A democratic republic is a kind of republic.
So is an aristocratic republic.
Montesquieu defines the aristocratic republic as one where the power is limited to a certain class of people (by nobility, by wealth, etc.). But his description of a democratic republic also includes elected officials.
Montesquieu advocates a government with democratic, aristocratic and monarchic elements. He is explicitly in favor of a British-style House of Lords to represent the aristocracy.
So, I still think the terminology of “republic” vs. “democracy” is an American invention. Republic is the general term. You can have direct democratic elements and representative democratic elements. You can have a House of Lords to privilege the aristocracy. You can have a Guardian Council to make sure that only good Muslims get elected. Or you can do your elections by lot to make sure no one is privileged. All republics, some more democratic than others.
The US has always been at least partially democratic. And no real democracy has ever been anything but a republic. Except for those constitutional monarchies that are “mostly democratic” but don’t refer to themselves as republics because they have a monarch.
Interestingly, your shoe size is also his attention span. In seconds.
As @renke said, you guys are being scary.
It is not treason to give aid and comfort to someone the government happens to consider an “adversary”.
After all, executing people for giving “aid and comfort” to someone who’s interests don’t align with US government interests is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
So, basically every country where the National Endowment for Democracy has ever spent money is an enemy of the United States. Like, for example, Albania and Bulgaria just after they held their first post-communism free elections (source).
Or Ukraine.
Basically all of South America.
Also, Austria might be your enemy because you violated Austrian citizens’ right to privacy by having the NSA spy on us, but that hasn’t changed election results. As far as we know. US spying and cyber attacks against EU offices while TTIP negotiations were still in progress might be seen as interference in our government processes. After all, this skews the negotiation results, and the treaty might have become law…
Do you really want that many enemies?
Just be sure you don’t piss off the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.
Also make sure you aren’t nice to me in this forum, for that would be giving comfort to the enemy (me), and you might be executed for it.
I, on the other hand, am free to remain civil because Austrian law doesn’t have such a ridiculously over-broad definition of treason.
