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[mainiac]

Spoiler: mainiac, you're wrong! Raaaaghh!!!! (click to show/hide)

That argument says that all of Hitlers actions were legitimate!
lololololololololololololololz

No. And I did not claim all of inquisition's actions to be legit, quite on a contratry. However, the underlying reason for detention of heretics was legit.
As for mr. Adolf H., waging a war is regulated by international laws, and as much as you can hate all the pain it caused, as long as every side kept to those laws, it was legitimate. Now, stuff like extermination of civilians had no basis in any law, therefore, it was illegitimate.
See, there you go again - you take the illegitimate part of some entity's actions and call everything else associated with said entity illegitimate(illegitimate, illegitimate... my high school teacher would smack me on the head). If anyhing, it shows how your judgement is tainted with emotional approach.

Let's just consider the religious persecution here.  It's hard to draw many lines between the battle of Leningrad and the Inquisition anyway.  What is the difference in the legitimacy between Hitler and the Inquisitions reasons to harm the Jews?  In both cases, they excused their actions on supposed evils that they unilaterally claimed all Jews were guilty of.

Apologies for not being clear, btw.  I should have said "what hitler did against the jews."

[Aqizzar]

Palazzo: Yes, that would indeed be the grand question of revolutionaries everywhere.  When can we say the law is corrupt enough to warrant violating it to be overthrown?  A very good reason why revolutions must be made of multiple people.

Because someone asked, and I love talking about myself-

You're running for office?  What office?

Next year, I'm running for Justice of the Peace in my county (if you live in Dallas, vote early, vote often).  J-o-Ps are judges who handle things like traffic tickets, marriage licenses, small claims court, property tax, and other such mundane legal infrastructure.  I like the idea of the job because 1) it's the only sort of legal activity 90% of people will ever encounter, and I'd like to make the law work for 90% of people, and 2) I meet all the requirements to run (I'm alive, 18+, and live in the county) and the office pays 94 grand a year.

[Il Palazzo]

That's the point. Both(and the USA too) had every right too detain elements that they'd considered dangeroud to their country, as long as they do it according to their/international law.
But then they all go astray: they start to imprison/torture/kill(with varying degrees of evilness, sure), whomever they find annoying, without bothering with the law that is in principle protecting people from abuse of power.

running for office

Texas-office-ranger. Staring: Aqizzar, as himself.

[mainiac]

Il Palazzo, anything can be made illegal.  Nose picking could be a capital offense.  That doesn't mean that killing people for nose picking would be legitimate.  Legitimate requires people to accept an act as having acceptable reasons to be done.

I agree with you, Aqizzar about the need for good judges at the lower level.  About 6 months back I got a fun victims eye view into the lowest levels of the court.  During my entire time in the courthouse, I saw one person be found not guilty, myself off on a technicality.

Basically, the process from top to bottom is:
1) The cop decides while on the job that you are guilty of something.  He tickets or arrest you
2) You are summoned to court for the arraignment.  The arraignment is a defacto assumption of your guilt.  You are expected to wait around half a day at least before paying your crime.  It is very illuminating to see that 95% of people at the arraignment fall into two categories:
-Young white people who were drunk and disorderly
-Black people with no common tie besides their skin color.  The rich, the poor, the drunk and disorderly and the prostitutes, they're all there together.
3) Should you appeal your guilt, you are then expected to spend another half day in court.  You've now lost a full day off from work without the slightest proof of guilt yet established.  You will not be compensated for this time if found not guilty.  And because you appeal your case, your fines double should you be found guilty.
4) Once your case is heard, you, who are almost certainly a poor black defendant, must convince the judge that the police officer is wrong.  Because the judge, by default, believes the police officer.  None of the defendants I saw on trial had enough understanding of the law or enough common ground with the judge to plead their case competently.  The judge never made more then a question or two of cross examination of the police officers, usually just asking them to reaffirm the defendants guilt.

So, in effect what the petty court did was give the police licence to fine anyone they deemed guilty.  The rich were smart enough to see their odds sucked.  The naive poor were penalized by a doubled penalty for having the presumption of claiming innocence.  It's pretty much everything american justice isn't supposed to be.  Even I, the only defendant found not guilty, was not compensated for my day of lost time and my imprisonment for a crime for which I was found not guilty.

But the social stigma of being dragged before the lower courts for anything but a traffic offense is so great, that no one bothers to complain about how the system blatantly isn't working how it should.

[Aqizzar]

Oh the things I could tell you about running afoul of a small town justice system.  Horror stories of the 19th policies of the county lock-up...

Yes, that is exactly why I want to be a judge, to prove to the defendants, and the police who put them there, that officers of the law are as human as anybody, and their judgment is not sacrosanct.

Mine is!

It's ridiculous how penalizing the American legal system can be before you're even found guilty or innocent of something.  Hours, usually days of your time.  Fines and fees just to handle the paperwork of showing up.  Either an effective automatic conviction if you try to defend yourself, or money out of your pocket to hire an attorney (most of the time, they don't even actually do anything - most judges will look favorably enough on a defendant to find for them just by virtue of the fact that you hired somebody, because they don't want to deal with it).

The first time I went to court, I was 14, after my school district started a new policy of handing out Disorderly Conduct tickets for fistfights.  I got jumped by a guy, and the usual policy of "Causes Don't Matter - Two People Swing, Two People In Trouble" went into effect.  And so there I found myself, in municipal court, against a city prosecutor who halted the proceedings so he could go drag up and brief a surprise witness, with only my father for legal council because we didn't expect the city to actually put a 14 year old school-bullying victim on trial.

Found Not Guilty though, despite a three hour proceeding that delved from physics of viewpoint to child psychology.  And we still had to pay processing fines, and take a couple days out of our respective lives to handle it.

[Strife26]

I've always found that wierd. If I get punched, I can get in trouble?

I've found that life is easier when you can coldly assure people that you can and will break their arm if they fuck with oneself. Deterence is the best policy.

[Aqizzar]

I've found that life is easier when you can coldly assure people that you can and will break their arm if they fuck with oneself. Deterence is the best policy.

Not when the other people in question are a lot bigger than you, disregard reasonable conclusions, know the system is fucked and that they'll be punished less than the person they beat up, or are otherwise undeterred by threats.

[Il Palazzo]

Il Palazzo, anything can be made illegal.  Nose picking could be a capital offense.  That doesn't mean that killing people for nose picking would be legitimate.  Legitimate requires people to accept an act as having acceptable reasons to be done.

Law does reflect the society's consensus as to what is right or wrong. In your example, either nose picking=death would be deemed acceptable, or a "French Revolution" would happen to get rid of those idiots who thought so.
If you won't define illegitimacy as anything conflicting the law, then you're apparently going to use your personal perception of right and wrong, which should not be used to justify or condemn whole society's actions.

[mainiac]

If you won't define illegitimacy as anything conflicting the law, then you're apparently going to use your personal perception of right and wrong, which should not be used to justify or condemn whole society's actions.

Yes, I've been saying for quite a while now that subtext plays a part in meaning!  And if I have to chose between subtext playing a meaning and completely absurd meanings, I'll pick subtext in a heartbeat.  Subtext can be appreciated while absurd meanings make language pointless.

And I'm not using my personal definition of right and wrong.  I'm using common understanding.  It is common understanding that the Inquisition was a religious persecution.

You basically are saying at this point that I can't say anything is true, because it's subjective.  If that's the case then I have to reply "F*ck subjectivism."  Common sense has value for christ's sake.

[Aqizzar]

However, relying on "Common Sense" to make your argument is as subjective as it gets, and about as big an argumentative fallacy as Reducto Ad Hitlerum.  If you can only point to "well everyone knows this is true, even though I'm unwilling to find something to back it up", then you don't have an argument at all.

[mainiac]

I'm making an argument about meaning though.  Surely it's safe to say "everyone knows inquisition refers to religious persecution."

His meaning denies religious persecution.  My argument is possibly wrong due to it's subjectivity.  But his argument is proven wrong by it's objectivity.

[Aqizzar]

I'm making an argument about meaning though.  Surely it's safe to say "everyone knows inquisition refers to religious persecution."

My point is you should be using that at all, because it's easy enough to argue against on factual grounds.  Was religion a huge factor in the Inquisition?  Of course.  But there's nothing important about that, if we're in agreement that underlying excuse means nothing to the civil validity of an action.

[Anfold]

The Inquisition was abut seizing property to bolster the church's failing resources and wiping out a thriving Jesuit(IIRC) community on the Spanish coast.  Really, money was the main motivation, as there had been populations of differing religions living in Europe for centuries before and after, and the church pretty much ignored them unless they needed some newwhipping boy in order to terrorize the general populace.

RE: Gitmo vs Inquisition: It was similar to inquisition in that no evidence was actually needed to arrest and detain these people, other than the word of mouth from greedy neighbors looking to cash in on the reward being offered.

Aquizarr: I hate to say this, but unless you're a lawyer capable of convincing people that you toe the line with the right's ideals of blaming oddly colored poor people, I don;t think you stand a chance.  But I'd vote for ya... if I lived anywhere near there.

[Aqizzar]

Aquizarr: I hate to say this, but unless you're a lawyer capable of convincing people that you toe the line with the right's ideals of blaming oddly colored poor people, I don;t think you stand a chance.  But I'd vote for ya... if I lived anywhere near there.

Oh you have no idea...

I got the idea from a Political Science professor of mine.  A few years back, one of his students tried running for Justice of the Peace, in neighboring Tarrant County (that's the city of Fort Worth, though Tarrant and Dallas are both broken into 8 JoP districts each).  He 'hired' the professor to manage his 'campaign'.  They spent all of a buck fifty on one sign to put in a traffic circle.

He lost - by sixty votes.  Sixty, out of a district of approximately 45000 people.

Obviously, as a municipal vote, you get maybe 10% turnout.  There's also the little fact that most people don't even know it's an elected office, much less how to run.  There's usually just one name on the ballot, the incumbent.  Incumbent Republican without fail.

I'm hoping, that with a few hundred dollars worth of signs, and the local Democratic party's lending of a D, I can ride a wave of Obaman dissatisfaction with the status quo into office.

[Anfold]

Heh, you might stand a chance, but then GW would come over and campaign for the other guy, or Cheney would just shoot you in the face