What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Josquius]

I've noticed how your arguments become mere personal attacks when they have (as usual) no intellectual justification and are challenged
This is mere argument by assertion, and easily disproven by any of dozens of failed independence campaigns.

It wasn't meant to be an argument you complete melt.
Interesting you think the concept of self-determination has no intellectual justification though.

You hark on about eduction but clearly something went very wrong in yours.

Mere ad hominism.

I knew it.
Posted right after in the OTT what with the observer effect:

At risk of this being read first a follow up to something in another thread. Just so it's noted.... £10 on "ad hom! Red card! Debate fail!" or some nonsense.

Quote
(Yes. I fed got my ass handed to me by grumbler. Meh, slow day :p)

FTFY 

Yeah, completely what happened.
You made yourself look a fool by doing your usual thing and breaking into full debate club mode over a statement of opinion. Some things truly never change.

[Josquius]

This is why the only real answer is "Well....it depends...."

Right, like FWIW I'm more amenable to things like Scottish secession than most. It's a region that had a very long history of being a politically independent Kingdom, even after the merger into the United Kingdom it maintained a number of its own legal structures, it had its own native languages (that have mostly died out but some enthusiasts still maintain them), has its own cultural expression and identity. But I don't think the way to assert that Scotland should have a right to secede is to blanket say "anywhere can secede", that's an idea that actually would make Scotland itself an ungovernable fragmented polity.

Anywhere can secede....if the secession is for valid reasons of secession in itself.
With micronations the burden of proof becomes far harsher on them to prove the whole thing isn't just a tax cheat or some petty bollocks over politics of the moment.

As to a fragmented Scotland- that would have been an interesting experiment sans brexit. Like something from a hard sci-fi book book. Let the unionist districts remain British and the others be part of Scotland. With Britain as it is of course it would be destined for disaster but out of a more mature democracy it is interesting to think how such an arrangement could work.
Lots of Diamond Age/City and the City social sci-fi ponderances.
Sort of a Bremen/Bremerhaven on steroids situation. I wonder what problems crop up there in reality?

[grumbler]

I've noticed how your arguments become mere personal attacks when they have (as usual) no intellectual justification and are challenged
This is mere argument by assertion, and easily disproven by any of dozens of failed independence campaigns.

It wasn't meant to be an argument you complete melt.

  Did you just write "you complete melt?"  You suck as badly at insults as you do at logic.

Interesting you think the concept of self-determination has no intellectual justification though.

Interesting that you think this obvious strawman argument isn't going to be recognized as an obvious strawman argument.  I have nowhere stated that self-determination has no intellectual justification.  What I stated was that your ludicrous claims, when shown to have no intellectual justification, are defended by you using personal attacks.

I knew it.
Posted right after in the OTT what with the observer effect:

At risk of this being read first a follow up to something in another thread. Just so it's noted.... £10 on "ad hom! Red card! Debate fail!" or some nonsense.

Is this intended to be an intellectual argument, or just the usual red herring argument you like to trot out?

Yeah, completely what happened.
You made yourself look a fool by doing your usual thing and breaking into full debate club mode over a statement of opinion. Some things truly never change.

When you start whining about having your ass handed to you in an intellectual discussion, I can only refer you to the First Rule of Holes.  People can see who looks like a fool.

[alfred russel]

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

Now, my objection to statues of traitors isn't so much that they are traitors, but that they are losers.  Had they prospered, none dare call it treason.

Had he sided with the North, he would have been guilty of violating a similar statute Virginia had on its books against treason against Virginia. And at the time of the US Civil War, Virginia had executed more people for treason against Virginia than the US had for treason against the US (spoiler: no one had been executed for treason against the US). During the war there was talk about executing Virginia officers that sided with the North for treason against Virginia: in the end Lee was going to be accused of treason against somebody.

[alfred russel]

You definitely got me all wrong.

If I was in the American colonies, say New York, during the Rebellion, I am sure I would have supported that rebellion and been proud to call myself a traitor to a regime that did not deserve my loyalty. Still a traitor though.

And I had lived in the South in the early 1860s, I would (barring some very fundamental difference in my basic character) absolutely NOT have called myself a traitor, and would not have supported the rebellion against the legal authority of the federal government.

The details matter. I don't see any problem with rebellion if the reasons for rebellion are just and warrant the expected cost. I also don't see a problem with noting that people who are rebels are, mostly, traitors to whatever it is they are rebelling against.

What an absurd and conceited argument! Are you imagining yourself as a 21st century time traveler to apply your modern morality to events of previous centuries, or that you have some genetic superiority leading you to the correct moral course? We are all products of our environment. If you were born into what would become a hotbed of secession in the late 1830s and family of future secessionists, you would have almost certainly been a secessionist in 1861. If you were born into a Massachusetts family in which the opposite attributes applied, you would have almost certainly been a unionist. The people in the German areas that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis in 1938 or communism in 1918 russia aren't genetically predestined to follow those ideologies. If you were born into a family of Kung! Bushmen you would speak in clicks and follow whatever moral base they have, if you were born a Spartan I doubt you'd join the helots.

More to the point, you should be self aware enough to see that future generations may see you as even more evil than southerners that owned slaves but privately disapproved of slavery. What do you think future generations will think of people like Berkut, who acknowledged that carbon emissions were lighting the atmosphere on fire, but took private leisure flights across the country for frivolous reasons anyway?

[Razgovory]

Tyr, this is not mere semantics.  Rights and Powers are two different things.  A place has no rights.  It's just a location.  A location is also arbitrary.  There is nothing innate about Scotland that makes it "Scotland".  It's just a place that we have decided exists.  It does not exist outside the human mind.  Because an area has no rights and because it's existence is entirely arbitrary saying "anywhere" has the right secede is nonsensical.  People have rights, but their right to do things to other people are somewhat limited.  I don't have the right to make you leave your country by changing the political status of the ground beneath your feet.

So nobody really has a right to secede.  It is political decision, and should not be exercised absent extreme circumstance.

[Sheilbh]

Tyr, this is not mere semantics.  Rights and Powers are two different things.  A place has no rights.  It's just a location.  A location is also arbitrary.  There is nothing innate about Scotland that makes it "Scotland".  It's just a place that we have decided exists.  It does not exist outside the human mind.  Because an area has no rights and because it's existence is entirely arbitrary saying "anywhere" has the right secede is nonsensical.  People have rights, but their right to do things to other people are somewhat limited.  I don't have the right to make you leave your country by changing the political status of the ground beneath your feet.

Sure but if you boil it down what political concept isn't something arbitrary that we have decided exists - rights and powers certainly are. People have rights only because we decide they do - and are willing to use the coercive power of the state to enforce/protect those rights.

And in a democracy that very much includes the right to do things to other people.

So nobody really has a right to secede.  It is political decision, and should not be exercised absent extreme circumstance.

Of course it's a political decision - but so is any right or power or authority - that's kind of the nature of politics. And I don't necessarily see why secession should only apply in extreme circumstances - especially given that we've had a century where secession is the norm not conquest or consolidation or unification. And given that history it feels weird to say it only applies to "extreme" circumstances that those circumstances clearly legitimately applied to most of the world. They weren't extreme, but the norm.

[The Brain]

It has been said long ago that a person who wants to put things in a new order must act through extraordinary means. It's a simplification, but there's still something to it that it's hard to have a good stable system that doesn't have any in-built limitations, and when you want to move beyond these limitations you must act extraordinarily.

[Berkut]

You definitely got me all wrong.

If I was in the American colonies, say New York, during the Rebellion, I am sure I would have supported that rebellion and been proud to call myself a traitor to a regime that did not deserve my loyalty. Still a traitor though.

And I had lived in the South in the early 1860s, I would (barring some very fundamental difference in my basic character) absolutely NOT have called myself a traitor, and would not have supported the rebellion against the legal authority of the federal government.

The details matter. I don't see any problem with rebellion if the reasons for rebellion are just and warrant the expected cost. I also don't see a problem with noting that people who are rebels are, mostly, traitors to whatever it is they are rebelling against.

What an absurd and conceited argument! Are you imagining yourself as a 21st century time traveler to apply your modern morality to events of previous centuries, or that you have some genetic superiority leading you to the correct moral course? We are all products of our environment. If you were born into what would become a hotbed of secession in the late 1830s and family of future secessionists, you would have almost certainly been a secessionist in 1861. If you were born into a Massachusetts family in which the opposite attributes applied, you would have almost certainly been a unionist. The people in the German areas that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis in 1938 or communism in 1918 russia aren't genetically predestined to follow those ideologies. If you were born into a family of Kung! Bushmen you would speak in clicks and follow whatever moral base they have, if you were born a Spartan I doubt you'd join the helots.

More to the point, you should be self aware enough to see that future generations may see you as even more evil than southerners that owned slaves but privately disapproved of slavery. What do you think future generations will think of people like Berkut, who acknowledged that carbon emissions were lighting the atmosphere on fire, but took private leisure flights across the country for frivolous reasons anyway?

Plenty of people in all situations make different choices then their peers. Not everyone supported the Nazi's. I don't think they ever even had a majority.

So speak for yourself - YOU might have been one, but don't presume that anyone else would have - I don't think it takes any great conceit to know myself well enough to suspect that I can mostly surmise where within the context of the time I would come down on various issues. We are not all slaves to some programming of our culture - if that were so, nothing would ever change.

There is, of course, nothing at all "genetic" about any of this. What a weird argument.

And I am quite self aware enough to note that future generations might look at me and think "What an asshole!". What they won't do is look at me and say "Even while people died in droves, he was a lot more worried about whether he could go rock climbing....what an asshole". They might look at me the way we look at a norther Abolotionist who was still very clearly a racist by today's standards, and fairly conclude that they were far from morally ideal, but still be able to notice that while Lincoln at some point though shipping blacks outside the US was a good idea, that was still a hell of a lot better then the "Lee" plan of leaving them enslaved in order to make himself rich while he "civilized" them.

Because even in the moment, there are differences between how people look at the world, and what side of moral thought they come down on within the bounds of their culture. Not all southerners were slavers, and not all northerners were abolitionists, and not all Russians thought genocide was a great idea, and not all Germans were Nazis, and not all modern Americans work really hard to find excuses for the GOP.

Where would *I* have ended up if I were born the son of a planter in Alabama? Hard to know for sure, of course. But it's not like there weren't plenty who found their world abhorrent.

[Berkut]

It has been said long ago that a person who wants to put things in a new order must act through extraordinary means. It's a simplification, but there's still something to it that it's hard to have a good stable system that doesn't have any in-built limitations, and when you want to move beyond these limitations you must act extraordinarily.

That is why we've worked pretty hard to create systems where the people and entities within them ahve a reasonable voice to effect those systems. Because the alternative when people do not have a voice is violence, and that is always destructive.

If change is needed, and cannot happen within the bounds of the system, then you get the French Revolution.

This is why freedom of speech is so critical. And why it is so alarming that it doesn't appear that the modern American political system actually works anymore. Because change will happen one way or another, and history shows us that when the only alternative is violence, it gets really, really ugly. And we now live in a world where the destructive capacity of that violence is truly an existential threat.

[Eddie Teach]

I think the more salient point is that, had you been born in Alabama in 1830, you would be a completely different person. The Berkut we know could not have been forged in that environment.

[Barrister]

I think I mentioned this before.  I was prosecuting this 20-something year old for murder when I noticed that he had the exact same birthday as me, just exactly 20 years younger.  He was native, grew up on reserve, everyone around him drank heavily - sadly the usual story I hear.

If I had grown up in the environment he did I'd like to think I wouldn't wind up killing anyone - but my entire life (and views) would have been very, very different.

[Berkut]

I think the more salient point is that, had you been born in Alabama in 1830, you would be a completely different person. The Berkut we know could not have been forged in that environment.

That is a fair point. It is extremely difficult to say one way or the other of course.

[Josquius]

Tyr, this is not mere semantics.  Rights and Powers are two different things.  A place has no rights.  It's just a location.  A location is also arbitrary.  There is nothing innate about Scotland that makes it "Scotland".  It's just a place that we have decided exists.  It does not exist outside the human mind. 

I agree.
There's nothing special about Scotland that gives it the right that say Yorkshire or California or whatever doesn't have.
Yes it has the whole nationhood thing going on, legally, historically and in people's perception. But this means nothing to me in terms of who can secede or not. It does in the minds of would be secessionists however.

Because an area has no rights and because it's existence is entirely arbitrary saying "anywhere" has the right secede is nonsensical.  .

Come on. You can't seriously believe that's a reasonable interpretation for what a person would actually say.
Obviously when we speak of x going independent we mean the people living there rather than the rocks themselves rising up.

People have rights, but their right to do things to other people are somewhat limited.  I don't have the right to make you leave your country by changing the political status of the ground beneath your feet

That's a bit of a logical leap no?
Surely if you are a citizen living in an area that becomes an independent country then you are a citizen of that country now. There's no obligation for you to leave.
The problem is on the other side of this equation-what happens to your citizenship of the nation you left.
Scots I've seen think you can keep it and there was talk of a legal challenge for Europe but that seems to have vanished

So nobody really has a right to secede.  It is political decision, and should not be exercised absent extreme circumstance.

Interesting you came from the same logic and reached the opposite conclusion.

[alfred russel]

Plenty of people in all situations make different choices then their peers. Not everyone supported the Nazi's. I don't think they ever even had a majority.

So speak for yourself - YOU might have been one, but don't presume that anyone else would have - I don't think it takes any great conceit to know myself well enough to suspect that I can mostly surmise where within the context of the time I would come down on various issues. We are not all slaves to some programming of our culture - if that were so, nothing would ever change.

There is, of course, nothing at all "genetic" about any of this. What a weird argument.

And I am quite self aware enough to note that future generations might look at me and think "What an asshole!". What they won't do is look at me and say "Even while people died in droves, he was a lot more worried about whether he could go rock climbing....what an asshole". They might look at me the way we look at a norther Abolotionist who was still very clearly a racist by today's standards, and fairly conclude that they were far from morally ideal, but still be able to notice that while Lincoln at some point though shipping blacks outside the US was a good idea, that was still a hell of a lot better then the "Lee" plan of leaving them enslaved in order to make himself rich while he "civilized" them.

Because even in the moment, there are differences between how people look at the world, and what side of moral thought they come down on within the bounds of their culture. Not all southerners were slavers, and not all northerners were abolitionists, and not all Russians thought genocide was a great idea, and not all Germans were Nazis, and not all modern Americans work really hard to find excuses for the GOP.

Where would *I* have ended up if I were born the son of a planter in Alabama? Hard to know for sure, of course. But it's not like there weren't plenty who found their world abhorrent.

I went rock climbing and didn't get covid.

You participated in an indoor team sporting event and did get covid.

LOL.