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[wierd]

Your method of definition includes forced subservience (and other horrors) under the umbrella of leadership, and paints it with roses and sunshine.

I would rather not do that.


My contention is that we need a better term to co-exist with "tyrant".  "Good leader" is ambiguous.  Do you mean a leader that does good, or a person who is fantastically effective at getting what he wants?

And yeah, I will stop too.  We can agree to disagree on the need for a more morally specific noun.

[smjjames]

Theres probably one in the dictionary if we look hard enough.

[wierd]

If not, we can always ask the Germans.

[Folly]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Slightly off the topic of American Politics, Brazil now has it's own Trump.

Jair Bolsonaro is frequently compared to Trump because he hates immigrants, reporters, political correctness, and homosexuals. He sexualizes every female he meets before mocking their weak feminine opinions. He favors torture and despises environmental protection and opposes gun control. And, of course, he wants to convert Brazil's democracy to a dictatorship that he can rule forever.

And sadly, last night he took 46% of the preliminary vote, compared to his primary opponent who only got 29%.

Fortunately, Brazil's voting system has a second round 20 days from now, so there is still some hope. People who voted for third-parties in the initial round will now have a chance to vote for their second choice, or just vote against the person they dislike most.

This elimination-style voting system seems like a good way to give third parties a fair chance. I kinda wish America would adopt something similar.

Just a quick update on this, Bolsonaro has been elected president of Brazil.

[misko27]

Crossposting this for choice quotes from Latinthread:

The NY Times has a little compilation of a few quotes from the new president. I'm going to refrain from directly quoting the article here, but there are some... "interesting" quotes from Brazil's new leader. He may well give Trump, and Duterte, a run for their money.

We could also continue the interventionism argument from there over here. I don't think we've had one of those in a good long while.

[Reelya]

Crossposting this for choice quotes from Latinthread:

The NY Times has a little compilation of a few quotes from the new president. I'm going to refrain from directly quoting the article here, but there are some... "interesting" quotes from Brazil's new leader. He may well give Trump, and Duterte, a run for their money.

We could also continue the interventionism argument from there over here. I don't think we've had one of those in a good long while.

We could also cross-post that in the police brutality thread. One of Bolsonaro's other promises is to end crime by giving the police carte blanche to shoot people.

[scriver]

If not, we can always ask the Germans.

Do you want fuhrers? Because that's how you get fuhrers.

[Reelya]

The fast and the fuhrerious

[Kagus]

My contention is that we need a better term to co-exist with "tyrant".  "Good leader" is ambiguous.  Do you mean a leader that does good, or a person who is fantastically effective at getting what he wants?

Technically speaking, "Tyrant" was just the name of a political position in ancient Athens. But yeah, I'm drawing a blank for the savior version of "cruel bigwig"... Possibly because there haven't been enough of them to define a term for it, heh.

Glorious Leader is of course an acceptable alternative.

[ChairmanPoo]

Technically, they stop being a doctor when they cease upholding the physician's oath...  at which point, they are engaged in dubious practice

I disagree. A physician is a physician, regardless of other considerations. They may be lousy physicians, but they still are physicians. A lousy physician might be barred from doing something(ie doing surgery), but he's still a physician. A physician doesn't stop being a physician for not being in active practice. As far as I'm concerned a senile physician in a wheelchair is still a physician.

I heavily question that what a physician does outside his practice should have an impact on his professional standing, too.

In light of your question about physicians and being presented with a circumstance where they could not operate due to a conflict with their oath, the doctor with the conflict would recuse himself, and insist on not performing the surgery.  He might or might not (depending on how his oath is interpreted; If this was a doctor from the Hippocratic school, he would not direct elsewhere, for instance.) direct the patient to another physician that is capable of performing the surgery without violating his tenets.  What he should NOT do, is perform the surgery in violation of his oath.

Depending on where you are arguing conscience reasons not to do X might not fly (depending also on the situation, and the laws of the land).   It has little to do with oaths, which have no real legal meaning. It's a rite; as far as I'm concerned it's important because in a way it makes you part of a millenia-old guild, and I do think some basic concepts should be considered  as moral duties-and I think this is the norm for most physicians-,  but it's not really binding.  You don't see people on trial for "violating the Hippocratic oath"

[Trekkin]

My contention is that we need a better term to co-exist with "tyrant".  "Good leader" is ambiguous.  Do you mean a leader that does good, or a person who is fantastically effective at getting what he wants?

Well, since this derail shows no sign of stopping:

No, we do not. I know they look the same from some viewpoints, but facts and opinions are fundamentally different things no matter how widely or fervently they may be believed, and bundling them together in one neologism just encourages their conflation. Such a word would provide no additional clarity, just a veneer of authority for the pompous when speaking to the credulous and another way to make breezy, pithy value judgements that don't actually inform anyone of anything.

Put simply, Trump would love such a word. He'd love to call himself whatever it is repeatedly, define what it is at his rallies, and claim his opponents dearly wish they were one tenth the whatever-it-is he is. How much more Trumpian communication do we need?

[wierd]

My contention is that we need a better term to co-exist with "tyrant".  "Good leader" is ambiguous.  Do you mean a leader that does good, or a person who is fantastically effective at getting what he wants?

Well, since this derail shows no sign of stopping:

No, we do not. I know they look the same from some viewpoints, but facts and opinions are fundamentally different things no matter how widely or fervently they may be believed, and bundling them together in one neologism just encourages their conflation. Such a word would provide no additional clarity, just a veneer of authority for the pompous when speaking to the credulous and another way to make breezy, pithy value judgements that don't actually inform anyone of anything.

Put simply, Trump would love such a word. He'd love to call himself whatever it is repeatedly, define what it is at his rallies, and claim his opponents dearly wish they were one tenth the whatever-it-is he is. How much more Trumpian communication do we need?

I suggest you take your own advice about being pithy and defining words to suit your own desires, as that is precisely what you have done here.

The mechanical need for this word, is similar to the need for the words "peach", "Kiwi", and "rambutan", vis "Fuzzy fruit".   You can try to conflate it as being a call for some notion of post-truthism all you like but that would not make it so.  Amusingly, something you just condemned.

Please, shake that strawman harder.

[Trekkin]

The problem with that is that a peach, a kiwi, and a rambutan are all objectively different things at some level of detail to which we have cause to refer, so we can come to a testable consensus on what a peach is, for example, and know we're talking about the same thing. The same is not true of a tyrant. All that we know of someone called a tyrant is that the speaker feels they are cruel and oppressive; it tells us nothing about how absolutely they rule or what their particular policies are. All we know is they've made some rules that someone doesn't like, which is kind of why we have leaders in the first place.

A word meaning "benevolent leader" suffers the same problem. All it does is bundle something objective (that they're a leader) with something entirely subjective (that they're doing good things.) Perhaps they're oppressing people the speaker feels need to be oppressed; then they'd be a tyrant and a benevolent leader all at once, depending on who you asked.

[SaberToothTiger]

Would you please drop this inane and pointless chatter and move onto the even less sane subject we discuss here?

[wierd]

A tyrant, in the purest defining sense, is synonymous with a dictator.  It is a ruler that exerts rule through absolute legal authority, without any personal oversight other than the risk of popular revolt. (Famous ancient examination is the Sword of Damoclese, and the moral behind that story.)  It tends to have popular overtones of ruthless exertion of that power to sustain its method of rule, but that overtone is not strictly required, this is true.  This subjective alliteration is what separates the use of the word tyrant from dictator or monarch in popular use.  Technically, all three of those are synonymous, but in popular use they have different meanings:  A tyrant is more ruthless than the dictator, who is more officious than the monarch.

In this case, the word we need describes this exact thing:

A benevolent leader who leads for the benefit of his community, at the defacto exclusion of himself; A leader that increases his own position exclusively through the improvement of the common standard of living of all the people he leads. Further defined as an individual who does not believe in double standards, and so does not seek unbalanced relations with groups other than the one he leads.

This would exclude cases like Augustus Ceasar. While he began the pax romana, and all the public works that this afforded, he still did so through exploitation of outside demographics, and thus embraced double standards.

It is my contention that we need this highly specific word, as well as specific words for individuals like Augustus Ceasar, to contrast them with later emperors, like Caligula.  To do that, we do indeed need specific defining characteristics. That does not obviate the need for specific words.

Words that do not exist, in this case.



(would you please drop the innane chatter)

I would LOVE to.  However, there are individuals who just cant resist the urge to make a neg, and I dont concede to bullies.