Quote from SWhiting:
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How about Cheny trying to declare that the office of Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch !!! He's making this claim so that he's not required to keep his papers under the Historical Documents act.
Secrecy, fraud, and lies are the best words to characterize this adminstration. I wish there was a Hell so that they could go there.
This is in line with Neo-conservativism and elitism...
With them - the censorship, surveillance and policing increases rapidly - as they start to control and legislate all of society.
They see their "mission" as one derived from "leadership" , "insight" or "logic" from their building up support from a single ideology. The sad thing is that having such an absolute root, makes the ideology unfit for application to most of society and reality. Therefore it is akin to the "false premise" fallacy or the "principle of explosion".
I am going to make a more extensive post on political radicalism later. The thing is that they are totalitarian just like communism, but use legislation rather than "public commissions". Surveillance and policing is similar to communism. They are authoritarian rather than "collectivist," so they believe in the abilities of the few of the elite - rather than the "inherent good of/for all" as in communism. They are however both rooted in political radicalism - saturating society and forcing their beliefs on every aspect of humanity.
You can compare it to Abrahamic religions - they all are monotheistic and believe in a supreme being etc - but they are mortal enemies within - because of infighting and polarization - rooted in their beliefs of "universally absolute truth," which the all claim to possess. Neo-conservatism, Objectivism and Communism - they are all radical from a single belief system extrapolated to everything in society - and built up through the use of supporting "logic" and sciences ... only that it's useless to analyse it mid-in ... you need to see the roots, and few people are that educated in epistemology and philosophy - therefore the "fights" are mostly revolved around things in "the middle" of the ideologies, but there is strong logic and science supporting those parts - so it's a difficult challenge. You need to understand the whole, and see how it is erroneously applied and evolved.
People don't become Neo-conservatives, Objectivists or Communists by lying in bed pondering - they read articles by ideologists and debate to "educate themselves" into the idiosyncrasies of the belief systems and learn the logics, evidence supporting some legs of the theories -- what has been applied to "flesh out" the ideologies. Unless you go much deeper and actually understand the whole and the roots of the ideologies, you can never "disprove them." That makes it difficult to debate them - since they are most often not even aware of the foundations of their ideologies - just being aware of the "evident cohesive logics" of the middle - and that is what attracts them by accident in the first place.
This is what happens when I debate with my Objectivist friends - they are simply unable to understand the roots, or comprehend that there might be something else than their epistemological axiom. But they are experts at understanding the full body of Objectivism - the innards of the philosophy and the "evidence and logics." That is the same for Neo-conservatism, which uses a similar structure for it's ideology and a lot of supporting "science" from AEI, RAND Corporation etc to flesh out their innards and grow outwards to extrapolate their beliefs. I get more than a little "annoyed" when e.g Anderson Cooper and others on CNN call William Kristol a "leading conservative" when he certainly is NOT representative for generally conservatives.
