*grins* My local party buys it to cover the whole borough (ie. all the local labour candidates) it is in case, for instance, one of your volunteers has an accident whilst volunteering...or gets badly mauled by a dog f'r'instance..

...or gets caught handing out leaflets with lies about the opposing candidate?

That generally doesn't happen. Doesn't play well with the electorate if you slam your opponents. Their party maybe, you can slam someone else's party and that tends to be accepted, but generally not the personal attacks. They prefer you to say what you're going to do.

There are those who try deriding them -- claiming that reasons or motivations they cannot articulate are superior to what I explicitly lay out, for reasons I can articulate. These people don't come off so very well. About the best they can do as they finally throw in the towel is squeak, "You're not worth it!" which is the left-winger's code for "I got nothing left, none of my ideas are good enough to persuade." It's the American Left's want of wisdom that puts them in their sorry shape -- the Right tends to study wisdom and adopt it.

Sometimes these collapses are spectacular, such as Spexxvet's recent meltdown over guns. He didn't merely lose the argument to the combined efforts of xoxoBruce and myself, he jettisoned it over the side when his pacifism cracked and crumbled; the whole of the Cellar that was watching stared him down. I understand that gun rights are human rights -- not everyone does, not yet -- and that gun rights, made real, support in many ways the natural human right not to be wrongly slain by other humans, as in crime (retail, as it were) and genocide (wholesale). Literally, being able and equipped to fight preserves your right not to suffer death, in all imaginable circumstances.

This Republic is all about the widest possible distribution of political power in its truest sense, both in the Law's say-so and in the physical sense, with power delegated for use by the people's representatives from judges through Congress to the President being limited in time and in scope. This approach serves us well, though any corrections that from time to time become necessary tend to be noisy, and very public.

Though I do -- on the grounds that totalitarian regimes are fundamentally more alike than different. Dictatorship is dictatorship, no? That all such governments are much poorer at caring for a population's needs than democracies are hardly needs mentioning, and is among their salient characteristics.

When you've fallen into the heart of darkness, do you care what color it is?

UG, how can you be so blind?

You're right, totalitarians are totalitarians regardless of their left-right stance.

So how can you possibly support the Republican party, in spite of all its shameless authoritarianism? The only, only aspect of your life that the Republican party doesn't want to regulate is whether or not you own a gun. Who you sleep with, who you marry, who you talk to, what you think, where you live, everything else about your life, the Republicans want to regulate.

Do they? They don't seem to be working at it hard enough for me to notice, and I think I should if they were. They're certainly not chaining up any Log Cabin Republicans.

No, Ibbie, don't believe everything you read from people bigoted against Republicans. It's really no better than the other sin you can find among that claque: bigotry against Jews. In fact, if you believe nothing they write, you're likely on the right track. You've been told "Oh those awful Republicans this and those awful Republicans that" by people whose primary agenda is less partisan politics than it is sheer anti-Americanism. I've been hearing it from them for longer than you've lived, and you know what? It's all crap. Shoddy antidemocratic goods.

I do not mistake Republicans for totalitarians, for I've lived totalitarianism, as you may recall. This quite clarifies my vision. It may do that for yours.

Continuing developments -- at least among the chattering class:

Must Be Dubya's Fault

A sober account of a cause for snickering.

I have it on good authority that the Mothman did it.

There was a sighting just before the collapse. Or a couple days before. Or something. The wings were "as wide as a Ford"

Okay, I call shenanigans.

No, Urbane, as a matter of fact I don't recall. I recall you saying it, over and over and over, but I don't recall you ever backing up the claim.

Do tell, UG. What totalitarian state have you lived in?

I am chatting to my friend who is in IT, he is heading for collapse site tomorrow to layer on security elements for the Minnesota Department of Transportation.

Ibram, any military service is a totalitarian social organization: mine was the United States Navy -- the experience was an instructive one. My nine years in it amounts to roughly half your entire lifetime's experience. You may sputter, "But that's not a state, you fool!" I am here to tell you it doesn't have to be, for one to learn.

For the umpteenth time I call BS on that, UG. You don't know jack shit. Actually try going to a totalitarian state someday, UG.

I've been to China, Cambodia, Taiwan... And I know people who've been in the REAL real thing, I know at least one person who has been to Pyongyang. Don't bullshit me with your 'being in the military = totalitarian experience' load of crap. My dad's in the military. It's rough - I certainly would never join it myself - but it's a far cry from genuinely being part of a totalitarian state.

It is a totalitarian society, and the experience was most instructive, Ibbie. I do not bullshit you, however hard you're moved to pretend I do. That a totalitarian society is or is not part of a totalitarian state is not the point; what is is that inhabiting a totalitarian organization allows an up-close understanding of the character, features, and failings of a totalitarian state. It is no great leap of extrapolation.

Now I'm calling BS on you. I'm not saying you couldn't learn from your experiences, but you're going to have to quit telling me I can't learn from mine.

And my experiences tell me not to mistake Republicans for totalitarians.