LogFAQs > #926142082

Gaawa_chan posted...

More importantly, and what I should have said earlier, is that it is a completely worthless way of framing political orientations because you run into non-stop exceptions.

Only if you don't understand the difference between social and political alignments, which you clearly don't.

Political liberals believe the government is a force for good and encourage government involvement in business and the economy to address unfair business practices, while political conservatives believe that the government is inefficient and should be restricted to only those duties that cannot safely be handled by the private sector (national defence, education, etc.), with minimal intrusion into the world of big businesses so that the laws of commerce can be allowed to produce the most efficient and effective economy available, thus maximizing profits for all.

By contrast, social liberals generally favour community and collectivism, equality (especially of rights), cooperation, and new solutions to old problems, whereas social conservatives generally favour individualism, respect for a central authority, competition, and tradition.

And even those are gross simplifications. The framing is fine, it's just that "left-wing" and "right-wing" can't be easily boiled down to a single-sentence descriptor without losing a lot of accuracy.

VioletZer0 posted...

Should the people own rocket launchers and C4? Yes absolutely because the government has armored vehicles.

Can we please put this tired old myth to bed?

No, the government is not going to quake in its boots about being overthrown by Farmer Joe and his 12-gauge, because the government has tanks, drones, aircraft, battleships, and a variety of other military technology - some of which is classified and completely unknown to the public at large (like stealth helicopters prior to the Bin Laden raid). Any civilian uprising against the government will fail - that is simple fact.

And history is on my side here. We like to lionize the idea of the populace banding together, rising up, and overthrowing a dictator, but the truth is that in the last 100 years no civilian uprising has successfully deposed a dictator without the help, or at least the approval, of the military. It is the military - not the general populace - that decides when a government is overthrown. If the military stands by the government, a civilian uprising would be crushed in short order, unless they can find a foreign military to support them (see: Libya); by contrast, if the military decides not to support the government in power, either by directly supporting the rebels or by looking the other way while they storm the palace gates, then and only then will the uprising succeed (see: Egypt, Tunisia).

And that's not even touching on the fact that the idea of a dictator ever coming to power in the US is farcical to the point of fantasy. The US, being the most militarized nation on the planet, is not going to be taken over by a hostile power in our lifetimes, so no dictator could install himself by force. Thus, the only way a dictator is coming to power is democratically, and even ignoring the questionable idea of forcefully overthrowing a democratically-elected government, any government that was elected will have the support of half(-ish) of its citizens. Accordingly, the government's supporters are going to have access to those same firearms that everyone else is free to bear and any rebellion to overthrow the government is going to meet a counter-insurgency pretty quickly.
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