Contrary to what you may believe tw, Sundae isn't here as the cite police. It's not double standards, it's just an organically evolving thread in which something somebody said sparked her interest.

Cite? You mean other than Indonesia, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Eastern bloc nations (Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, etc. ) Venezuela, nearly every African nation, etc.?

Socialism and Communism are just different spots on the same scale. The more a nation embraces socialism, the worse off they will be. European socialist nations like England, France & Germany support socialism in some form, and they suffer in those areas. Germany is still having a lot of trouble because of their socialism and some would claim they are successful. Some people actually claim Sweden is a successful nation. I don't call any nation where the government keeps over half of what you earn to be a successful one.

I consider America to be a partly socialist nation in that it has government programs that steal from those who work and create wealth, the government keeps a huge portion of it, and then gives what's left to those who are too lazy, inept, or incapable of earning their own way. It's false charity and it does more harm than good.

When a nation openly nationalizes the means of production you're talking about communism or full socialism.

Yea, you and cite your ramblings all the time. Even when they are incorrect. Carry on.

There is a God!

Ok big boy which of these are socialist which are communist, which are other? Radar is an idiot because he stated that 80% of the third world is either communist or socialist. That is false.

This article lists forms of government and political systems, according to a series of different ways of categorising them. The systems listed are of course not mutually exclusive, and often have overlapping definitions (for example autocracy, authoritarianism, despotism, totalitarianism, monarchism and tyranny).


Alphabetical list with hierarchy
The following list groups major political systems (recognized by political science) in alphabetical order. The various subtype political systems are listed below the main system of government.

Anarchism
Anarcho-communism
Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-primitivism
Anarcho-socialism
Anarcho-syndicalism
Eco-anarchism
Isocracy
Mobocracy
Tribalism
Authoritarianism (Autocracy or Oligarchy)
Absolutism
Enlightened absolutism
Aristocracy
Communist state
Corporatism
Despotism
Diarchy
Dictatorship
Military dictatorship
Benevolent dictatorship
Gerontocracy
Hagiarchy
Kakistocracy
Kleptocracy
Matriarchy
Meritocracy
Monarchy
Absolute monarchy
Constitutional monarchy
Feudalism
Despotate
Duchy
Grand Duchy
Elective monarchy
Emirate
Hereditary monarchy
Popular monarchy
Principality
New Monarchs
Self-proclaimed monarchy
Viceroyalty
Patriarchy
Patrimonalism
Plutocracy
Timocracy
Police state
Corporate police state
Puppet state
Robocracy (fictional)
Theocracy
Caliphate
Halachic state
Holy See
Islamic republic
Sultanate
Totalitarianism
Fascism
Tyranny
Technocracy (bureaucratic)
Democracy
Deliberative democracy
Democratic republic
Democratic socialism
Direct democracy
Participatory democracy
Representative democracy
Parliamentary system
Westminster system
Consensus government
Presidential system (Congressional system)
Semi-presidential system
Republicanism (Republic)
Presidential republic
Parliamentary republic
Constitutional republic
Totalitarian democracy

By approach to regional autonomy
This list focuses on differing approaches that political systems take to the distribution of sovereignty, and the autonomy of regions within the state.

Sovereignty located exclusively at the centre
Empire
Unitary state
Sovereignty located at the centre and in peripheral areas
Federation and Federal republic

By political franchise
This list shows a division based on differences in political franchise (suffrage).

anarchy - rule by no one
autocracy - rule by one
oligarchy - rule by minority
republic - rule by law
democracy - rule by majority
socialism - rule by all

According to Weber's tripartite classification of authority
Max Weber in his tripartite classification of authority distinguished three ideal types of political leadership, domination and authority:

charismatic domination (familial and religious)
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
legal domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

Here is a better link.

Some have elements of many forms of government, including socialist and or communist ideology. Few are one or the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._of_government

I thought you'd try this one. But you run aground on the question of what the common defense truly is. Who, being an American and having business in foreign parts, would exclude American business interests from inclusion under the common defense rubric regardless of where those American business interests are? American interest has always been more or less global and globalized. In practice there is no definable endpoint to where the common defense of Americans and of American interests lies. This is particularly true in nations where property rights are not secure from official cupidity -- and these nations are numerous. They do not secure property rights well, which leaves it to our government's protective function to cover for our nationals, on the assumption somebody has to or the economy goes to pot and everyone's poor, because no one can do business if his gains are euchred from him. In the fourteenth century, this happened to the Chinese iron smelting industry -- it was wiped out inside of ten years and it never returned. It took the laissez-faire of Europe to make a success, and a general prosperity, of large scale efficient smelters.

Your approach is only workable in the absence of any other nation over the entire Earth -- and for that matter, the complete absence of foreigners, as well. Is this even clinically sane? The vehemence with which you adhere to this suggests intense xenophobia -- your whole "screw the rest of the planet, they don't get to be free or wealthy as far as I'm concerned -- if I'm concerned at all" attitude, that is. One can scour your posts for any interface with other lands, languages, or cultures, and come up with -- zero. Strategically, this is unconscionable, and that calls for reading between your lines, to diagnose what's behind the screen of words. What I'm seeing isn't pretty.

The clauses containing the term common defense do not limit the role and scope of our military -- as the whole, every last syllable, of historical precedent demonstrates. You pointedly avoid acknowledging this reality. What does that say about you? I say you worship the golden calf of bullheadedness. Fortunately, I do not.

A bullheaded eccentric who yells "Treason! Traitor!" at every second opportunity is guilty of ranting each time he does so, and can make no defense -- not even a Constitutional one, particularly if you actually are a strict constructionist, at which point you have to confine your definition of treason to the Constitution's: if I haven't made war upon the United States, I am innocent of treason; if I haven't given aid and comfort to America's enemies, I'm innocent of treason. Since I cannot be sanely imagined to have done either, you do the math. You rant, and your narcissistic personality makes you thoroughly unfit to do politics -- it keeps you from exercising judgement. Really, by your reasoning, every government employee anywhere at any time who ever formed or executed policy from 1776 onwards is "guilty of treason." Hard to credit, putting it mildly.

Radar has a wife of a different land, language and culture, and a child by that wife.

He's posted about her often for many years.

That's your level of reading comprehension when you "scour". You should hear yourself after you "skim".

Common defense doesn't mean defending American "interests". It means defending America. No more, no less. The American military is also not here to defend the economy. The furthest America was to go in defending American interests was to defend our ships from pirates. When you choose to do business in other nations, you are gambling. You are taking the chance that you will be able to do business without having your business stolen from you. If they are stolen from you, the American government isn't here to protect your poor investment choices.

My approach works with a planet full of nations and is not isolationist or xenophobic in the slightest. It welcomes trade and friendship with all nations and keeps us from entering into alliances that require the use of our military. These are the same principles that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, etc. shared.

The phrase "common defense" defines and limits the role and scope of our military to being solely for the defense of America...not America's foreign interests, not the American economy, etc. The truly insane are those who think it has any other legitimate use.

I've traveled the world many times over while serving in the Navy and since then. I speak 4 languages. I have a better understanding of global trade and of the opinion others hold of America than you are likely to ever have.

I don't think I'll be seriously pursuing the claim that most 3rd world countries are socialist/ communist. We have a different understanding of the words.

Any time the government takes money from those who have earned it by force or coercion (fear of going to jail) and gives it to those who have not earned it .... it's a textbook example of socialism.

Really, UT? Then why the weird quality of radar's posts? Why his absence of a global libertarian vision? Why his reluctance for us to help remove political obstacles (almost the only kind that seem to have effect) to engendering prosperity worldwide? He ought to remember that prosperity is good for business, and that the business of America is business. His noncomprehension of the value of liberation from the oppressions of too much government, whenever foreign peoples are concerned, strikes me as, well, thoroughly bad. Too much government equals not enough business and not enough wealth or wellbeing. It is hardly unlibertarian to liberate those ground under tyranny's heel, and thus I consider it our responsibility as human beings. Radar definitely won't take this responsibility, leaving him vulnerable to accusations of inhumanity. I don't get hit with these any too often. Which of us, then, is the friendlier to the global body politic?

It does not follow that because he married foreign he's thought foreign policy through. He seems to me not merely uninterested, but actively against thinking about it -- have you noticed his insistence that America retreat within its own borders, becoming this continental cloister? It's all over his writing -- any excuse whatsoever to withdraw from the world, he makes it. There must be a reason for such consistency, and I don't think we can lay this one directly at narcissism's door.

That's never been how these United States have functioned, not long-term, and especially so once we became a world power around the turn of the twentieth century. Sure, many other nations put together don't spend but a fraction on the military we do -- they can afford to do that precisely because of what we spend on it, and what we get for that expenditure is power projection like nobody else can manage. What's more, a century of experience with us has shown us trustworthy; the good actors among nations don't need to arm up against the United States, and this fact is reflected in the size of their military establishments, particularly in their navies, which by comparison with the US Navy look more like the Coast Guard, and have similarly coastal missions and areas of operation.

American interests I believe are not separable from America in general, nor separable from the economy, for the reason that we're too interconnected with the rest of the world.

You will have to show proof, proof mind you, that the "common defense" clauses are limiting clauses. So far, you've only repeated your assertions, not proven them. I do not recall a "common or territorial defense only" anywhere in there, and I say you couldn't find one. I read them as: this is one purpose. It is tacit about others, but does not forbid them. The Constitution doesn't set forth how foreign policy will be conducted, it merely apportions who does what parts of the whole. Except in matters of funding, that is the Executive Branch. It takes the Legislative to ratify foreign aid.

I think, radar, that you're more interested in being radical than in getting it right, or practicing "the art of the possible." You look to an eccentric reading of the Constitution in an effort to pare down the size and scope of the Federal level of government, but I don't think the Constitution supports you in the endeavor -- you're trying to have trade without security, and that is unwise. Better, I think, to concentrate on paring down the Federal welfare-state departments.

I've been around the world with the Navy; I've crossed the longitude of Diego Garcia going both east and west. I've been close to war. I speak four languages myself, English, Spanish, French, and Russian, and can still order lunch in Turkish, and am looking into taking some German. Don't try getting haughty with me.

Libertarians are against the initiation of force against those who pose no threat to you. Those who are being oppressed do have a right to take up arms against those oppressing them. You do not, unless they have hired you as an agent. You also do not have the authority or right to use the U.S. Military to carry out your so-called "liberation".

Who are you to decide who is or isn't oppressed? Who are you to decide what kind of freedom others will have? You are nobody. You are nothing, but a war-mongering loser who hates libertarian principles. And yes, you are far more inhuman than I will ever be accused of being.

The U.S. Military has one and only one role. To provide a common defense for AMERICA. It's not to police the world. It's not to fill in security gaps. It's not to act as a peace keeper between other nations. It's not to enforce UN sanctions. It's not to practice nation building or humanitarian aid. It's not to "liberate" oppressed people. It's not to overthrow or to prop up leaders in other nations. It's not here to defend foreign interests of American investors. It's not here to protect the American economy. It's not here to secure sources of oil. It's not here to prevent other nations from developing nukes or other weapons. It's not here to start unprovoked wars. It's not here to do any kind of "pre-emptive" attacks.

Defense means defending against an attack. Not against a possible attack by someone who might have a weapon some time in the future and who doesn't like us.

The stated purpose for our military is to provide a common DEFENSE for America. The 10th amendment limits the federal government from doing anything that isn't specifically enumerated (listed) in the Constitution. Using the military for non-defensive purposes is not listed. END OF STORY. You lose. Get over it.

You claim to speak English, but you can't seem to read it. You're virtually retarded. My reading of the Constitution isn't eccentric. It's in the exact context that the founders wrote it. If that seems eccentric to you, it's because you have no comprehension of the fact that it was written to limit the government. The founders didn't want us in a constant state of war or to act as the world's police or to liberate others. They wanted us to be the champion of our own freedom and the well-wisher of freedom to others.

The Constitution most certainly does say that the role and purpose of the military is to provide a common defense for America. It limits this role through the 10th amendment. Congress is given the limited ability to make war if and only if it is in the defense of America which means we were attacked first. The president has absolutely zero war making powers and is NOT the commander in chief until called upon to serve as such through a formal declaration of war. He has no legitimate authority to send a single soldier into battle for a single day.

You support wholesale murder in the name of your "vision" of freedom. You think it is up to you, or to the United States to determine how other governments will treat their citizens, or what kind of government they will have, as though democracy were the best form of government. You are no different than any other petty tyrant who tries to justify the use of force. I already know you are a in inhumane scumbag. Just don't pretend to be a libertarian. You aren't fit to stand in the shadow of a real libertarian.

Each and every single time you lie about the federal government having powers that are non-enumerated, I'll set you straight. Every time you try to support an unconstitutional use of the military to carry out illegal actions, I'll set you straight.

That explains everything, she is probably an illegal alien living here an breaking our laws. Figures. Makes perfect sense.:rolleyes:

The important thing is that we need to differentiate between ideology and actual labels which describe how governments work. Nothing is so pure. As usual he is talking out of his dogmatic ass.

By Radar's definition I agree that every country in the world is socialist. From the far left to the far right, from laissez faire to oppression, all Governments take money from those that have earned it and give it to those who haven't. Whether that means it goes to the rich or the poor, to starving children or to oligarchs is unimportant.

I bid this thread adieu, I'm off to the Cite Policeman's Third Ball.

Your policemen have three balls?!?!? is that a requirement for employment? :D

Gimme a break. I don't care for Radar either. But fair's fair. His efforts to jump through many many legal hoops to get her into the country are recounted here in a bunch of threads.

I could give a crap about his personal efforts to circumvent our laws. I would love to see ICE find a way to jump through hoops to send her ass back home.

Uh, dude? That's pretty fucked up. I'm a big proponent for fixing the system to stop the illegal immigration problem. Radar may be fucked on a lot of his ideas, but you don't deport his legal immigrant wife just because of his ideas. He actually followed the laws IIRC. That's what we want.

Jeez Merc, that's a deeply shitty thing to say.

Well I apologize then, I never would have thought him to follow the laws, ever, only is own screwed up way of viewing the world in which we all live in. I would have fully expected him to circumvent the laws as we all know them. I have no desire to go back and read any bull shit he has posted in the past explaining himself and his personal shit. I could care less.

Given his extreme positions on a number of issues it really is not a very fucked up view on my part. Karma is a MoFo.

:headshake

Except you weren't saying a shitty thing about Radar, you were saying a shitty thing about his wife. Neither you nor I know a damn thing about her views.

Point taken. :cool:

It doesn't change my veiws.

lol

vir est a baro

res fatur pro ipsum

Due to the response of others, I viewed this idiot's posts concerning my wife. Of course, once again he is talking out of his ass and his Latin, like his English, is poorly written.

res fatur pro ipsum - In legal circles this means "the law speaks for itself". I think this moron was trying to say "It speaks for itself" or "Is fatur pro ipsum"

Also, vir est a baro translates to "Man is a fool". I believe our resident dickhead was trying to say "Sit an fossor" which means "He is a fool" and of course he'd be describing himself.


The fact remains that nothing I've said about the Constitution or our government is false. Each and everything I've said about the strict limitation that our military be used solely for the defense of the United States of America, and then only when a formal declaration of war is made by Congress against another nation and that our military is Constitutionally prevented from ever taking part in "pre-emptive" military actions, is an indisputable fact and the absolute truth; not my opinion; but independently verifiable, unbiased, and undeniable truth. I'm also right about the federal government having zero authority over immigration.

As usual, he has nothing to back up his idiotic reading (assuming he actually reads) of the Constitution, or his outlandish and retarded claims that the American government has any authority outside of our own borders, that our military is here to "liberate" others or to police the world or fill in security gaps globally.

Since he has nothing to back up his stupidity and I've got facts, the Constitution, logic, reason, history, and common sense on my side he's got no choice but to make attacks against my wife.

How pathetic. What a fucking pussy.

[quote=Radar;457974]I believe you.

Figures.:D

{I will show him NO mercy}

Uh, dude.. intentionally misquoting somebody ONLINE by simply MAKING UP bullshit for them to have said, then responding with inane comments possibly intended to be remotely witty... is juvenile to say the least. I know middle-schoolers who 'argue' better than you do.

This latest bout of merc's putrescence is only marginally less sickeningly bigoted and disgusting than...

This is a good time to STFU merc. Good luck getting your credibility back.

Ibrey, I don't read your posts, so what ever.

Double standard much?

wtf Merc? where's the double standard here?

Giving Radar a pass.

I disagree with 99.9% of Radar's views. Some of them vehemently, some of them with open-mouthed incomprehension that anyone capable of using a keyboard could actually hold them.

That doesn't mean it's okay to make baseless accusations that someone who doesn't even post here is a criminal. And, what is more, is the type of criminal most loathed in your country with the possible exception of paedophiles.

That's like someone saying your wife's a whore and your not the real father of your kids. A hurtful statement with no intention other to belittle the poster in question.

If you enter this country illegally and stay here, that is an illegal act and you have violated the law. That make you a criminal subject to arrest. That was my only point.

No, that wasn't your only point.

If you stick your cock up a little boy's arse you're a criminal too.
Are you going to start claiming other people on this board are doing that?

Ok, you are right, these were the other ones. I think we should send illegal aliens home. I don't think we should pay for them or their children. I think to many of our tax dollars pay for them to have babies and suck off our health and social system. And I could care less what Radar thinks. Happy? You win. :D

Yes, absolutely. And you should be executed.

God I would hope not!

Funny, that in America youse say 'could care less ....' whereas over here we say 'couldn't care less'.

The phrase is "couldn't care less" over here too, Dana. Don't take Merc's word for anything. :)

Yea, ask Radar, he will tell it like it is... :lol2:

If so, why doesn't it sound like it?

Foreign Policy and Liberty: A Manifesto – by way of a rebuttal.

Radar’s trying to claim a primacy he simply doesn’t have, and especially not in foreign policy. He can’t engage and defeat tyranny in foreign parts, what with insisting, in effect, that it’s not our responsibility. How he therefore expects tyranny to depart and libertarian democracy to arrive becomes a question he’ll never answer, bobbing and weaving and assiduously prostituting his integrity to protect his narcissistic self image.

His priorities are thereby backward: they should be his integrity first, then his self image. But a narcissistic personality can’t do that – and this will become clear as radar disputes the point. I’m very glad my mind is not so crippled, so trammeled; to be that way would disgust.

I think I’ve got a better answer.

Much depends on how important you think human liberty is. I regard it as about the supreme secular value, for with a broadranging set of individual rights, secure property rights, and an orderly but fluid social order, such as we find in the United States in particular and England and Europe to rather lesser degrees, a calm and prosperous society is assured. Nothing is absolute, but the record shows doing things this way does things well.

Assigning this supremacy to human liberty, I turn to the question of how liberty is gotten. Very often, the answer is spoken from the cannon’s mouth, by “reeking tube and iron shard.” Slavemongers and tyrants rarely give up without a shooting match, right? There is a human instinct to dominate the environment, and dominance in politics is just one more manifestation of this. It causes people to fight like mad dogs for power and privilege. Some people cannot be satisfied with any power or privilege less than absolute; their personalities range from the ambitious to the sociopathic. These people are intolerable to the rest of us, and require to be denied power by any means necessary or imaginable if the rest of us are to have good and prosperous lives. That same instinct to fight like mad dogs for power lives as strongly in the breast of those without overweening ambition, and can be harnessed to defeat the threat the overambitious and sociopathic present.

So if removing tyranny is somehow, whatever way just not our business, then whose business is it, for all love? Liberty is good for humans, is it not? Are not the nations of the Earth inhabited by humans (as a rule)? If human liberty is so important, and libertarians say it is, does it very much matter what group of humans does the liberation of any group in fetters? I can’t see that it does: you don’t have to be native born to a given patch of land to cause it to become a place of freedom, and legitimately so. Remember how much aid we got from France – an absolutist monarchy at the time – during the Revolution, and remember how decisive that aid was. The French contribution to the success of the American insurgency was enormous – not only a good-sized army, but a fleet to match. That’s a lot of louis d’or. Human liberty gained with aid is not less than human liberty gained without.

With the interconnectivity of today’s world, the idea that entangling alliances should be shunned as you would shun murder simply doesn’t work. It’s not Constitutionally objectionable either, but was a matter of policy. Nor is there only one degree of entanglement, come to that. With trade, however, inevitably comes interdependence and with interdependence a broader notion of the commonweal. I have this broad notion; radar shows he does not – and he doesn’t think I should have it either, that I might be more like him. Ho. (Shouldn’t I be the best me, rather than a secondhand radar?) So furiously does he rage against what he thinks are entangling alliances that it is clear his idea of a solution to the problem is an America that doesn’t interact with other nations. I can’t think of anything worse for business. Bad for business is bad for thee and me. It appears he thinks economics is sufficiently separate from politics and manifestations of politics that you can deal in the former without any doings in the latter. A moment’s reflection will show this is not so, never was so, and hasn’t a likelihood of ever being so.

Even the occasionally dubious practice of foreign aid is not wholly to be eschewed, as evil or even as too expensive. An absolute refusal to do foreign aid would have meant no Marshall Plan, and no Marshall Plan would likely have yielded a Communist Europe, with all the tyranny, poverty, and nastiness that would imply.

Put briefly, you can’t fight tyranny – which is important – if you haven’t got money.

That tyrannous, oligarchic regimes can find ways to siphon off aid money goes without saying, but does not invalidate the above. We can and do still aid the Contras of our time, as we of course should, being human beings after all.

So, assuming as I do that we are the freedom people, where do the troubles of the freedom people come from? Do democracies regularly get in shooting wars with other democracies? Have democracies ever shot at other democracies? Where do our troubles come from? Do they not spring from places of no democracy? Are not terrorist movements engendered in undemocratic failed states? Point out on the globe which states are failed states – you won’t find a democracy among ‘em. You won’t find security of property rights either.

Property rights get messed with generally in the name of organizing scarcity – in this case a scarcity of wealth. Whether this is only perceived or it is actual, it is a view that there is somewhat less wealth to go around than there are people to surround with it. Some political philosophies are based around dividing it up as a sort of ration and distributing it – a scarcity, organized.

And it’s stultifying, stagnating, and without creativeness.

That is where socialism in any of its variants from Stalinism to Swedishism falls right on its face. Socialists get all excited about wealth disparities and how some people are bad off. Trouble is, the solutions Socialism finds for the badly off are all anti-wealth. What?!

Your choices boil down to two: you can create wealth, or you can organize scarcity. In an organized-scarcity system, to rise in the world, to improve your station, one way or another you have to cheat the system, either by defrauding it or by rigging it. Concentrating on a system to create wealth, on the other hand, places no such requirement – the improvement gets spread around in and by mutually beneficial transactions.

Non-democracies have fewer mutually beneficial transactions in their economies, of course.

So there you have it: if you aren’t a capitalist democracy, you ain’t shit. Become a capitalist democracy in full, and you’re both golden and in clover. Look at those Chinese, emerging from the dark night of that narcissist Mao Tse-Tung. How many years does the Communist dynasty have left?

And in the place of proof of his view of whether our military has any role in our foreign policy, radar offers repetition and only repetition of his idée fixe. Noted.

I think we've let the extremists rant about illegal aliens too much without calling them on it. The hate you see promoted on the net probably doesn't accurately reflect the view of a nation of immigrants.

Actually, being a bit of a grammar nazi, "couldn't care less" implies that one does not care at all, while "could care less" implies some level of caring.

First it is not an extremist view to deal with the issue of illegal immigration. If you think there is no problem you have your head in the sand.

We are a nation of immigrants. Legal immigrants.

Actually my American date-non-date said much the same thing. He was surprised at my perception of the mood of the country and pointed out that America was a nation of immigrants. It was a new perspective for me (and I wasn't basing my opinion wholly on the Cellar).

The expression is "couldn't care less" and it means exactly that - ''I do not care at all.''

Hello, Pot. What were saying about Kettle?

Dude, you can't take me that seriously.

well...why not? We only know of you what we read, just like radar or any other poster.

Because you only read what I am posting to Radar. (oh, and to tw). Rarely to the rest of you...

you post to us too? I was just bustin on ya.