The misuse of "treason" is another of my pet peeves.
What *IS* treason? The willful act of assisting the established enemies of a nation, so as to enable those enemies to strike, and cause harm to the nation.
What is treason?
Treason is joining a terrorist group, and planting bombs.
Treason is telling foreign intelligence agencies where the president's plane will stop for fuel so it can be blown up with him on board.
Treason is is giving away the plans and sourcecode for missile defense systems to hostile nations.
Things that are NOT treason:
Exposing the wrongdoing of the nation's political elite.
Exposing systemic faults in policy and process that puts everyone at risk, that go unfixed because "that's hard." (allowing the faults to exist is what puts people at risk. Exposing the faults is the first step toward forcing a fix!)
Expressing anti-government sentiment about how the nation is being run, especially when backed with real, credible evidence of mismanagement (Because the mismanagement is a far bigger threat to the actual safety and security of the country! See the Holodomor and pals comments from the previous pages)
However, people are reactionary things that dont like using their brains for some reason. As such, they see anything that upsets the "Comfort zone" (which includes ILLUSIONS of safety, without considering ACTUAL safety) as threatening, and thus make absurd leaps about what constitutes "Treason." This allows the psychopathic a-holes in political office to galvanize absurd responses, and as Voltaire rightly pointed out over a century ago-- "those that can be made to believe absurdities, can be made to commit atrocities."
As such, I am NOT in favor of branding things that are totally NOT treason, as being "Treason." That just hands carte-blanche to the police state to do whatever, which is antithetical to my views on how government is supposed to be.
No-- willful misrepresentation of vital information for political gain is and should be its own separate offence with its own, specifically prescribed, remedy(ies). Completely independent and legally distinct from treason charges. The bar to prove it NEEDS to be pretty high, otherwise it too can be misused as a weapon of the police state. (You need to prove the WILLFUL part. Much like proving premeditation in murder-1 cases. That means establishing motive, and producing a chain of evidence and testimony to prove beyond reasonable doubt.) It also needs to have some granularity in enforcement, because zero tolerance is absurd. (Say I use a sarcastic comment that is clearly intended to invoke poe's law on twitter, or on a forum. It is intended to cause confusion about information that has been presented (officially), so that people think about the information, and ask if it has been misrepresented, by presenting it willfully misrepresented-- a kind of strawman argument intended to promote discussion-- a caricature, a parody. It is willful misrepresentation, AND for political reasons! Should I be jailed for life for doing it? ;P What about actual acts of parody-- that is willful misrepresentation as well.)
The trouble here is that we have politicians that are working out of Cardinal Richelieu's playbook. "Give me 10 lines written by the most honest man on earth, and I shall find something with which to hang him." Etc. Laws intended to entrap the oppressors, are captured and picked up by the oppressors to enslave the masses. That's why the weapons we make against them need to have strong requirements for use and employment. It should NEVER be "easy" for government to "Do something", no matter how many children and single mothers are involved. Tugging on heart strings should be interpreted as an instant red-flag, not as genuine heart-felt empathy-- Sociopaths are incapable of empathy. Only exploitation. Government should always be considered to be a sociopath. Don't trust it. Ever.
Personally, if I were the one trying to produce a national framework from which to genuinely assist the public in defense, civil liberty preservation, and improvements in quality of life for all--- I would would outright spell out that government is evil, and not to be trusted in the very foundational framework of that new government, and outright inform the public in that document that it is THEIR duty to ALWAYS hold animosity toward the workings of government; to FORCE transparency and never relent on it, no matter how many claims of "national security" there are-- to FORCE the prevention politicians becoming politicians for life, no matter how many claims of "experience" there are-- etc. That the government is a sociopath on a chain, kept there to protect the citizens of the country when and only when needed. It is brutal and unfeeling in its modes of operation, and will crush you just as easily and willfully as it crushes the enemies of the public. Freeing it is to let loose a destructive force unimaginable upon themselves, and as such it's hands must always be tightly bound, and control tightly retained by them, the general public.
THAT's the kind of baseline I would approach it from.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1582517 times)