“Snakes! Snakes everywhere!” –Barney Gumble, drunkenly pounding the empty sidewalk with a stick

“Getting ready for 'Whacking Day, Barn?” –Lenny, referring to an annual event where Springfielders whack snakes

“What's 'Whacking Day?'” –Barney

You cannot lead with words like “compulsory collectivization” and follow it up with “both of you suck.”

Your need to find a resonant frequency. You're all over the dial.

Moreover, neither Obama nor the person you're writing to has given any indication of wanting “to run your neighbors' lives.”

I'm concerned that your analytical abilities, meager though they were, got melted when you were exposed to prolonged extreme temperatures during your all-too-brief stay in Hell.

Hmmm. How many of the hundreds of posts written by Tuci78 have you read?

How many of Randwulf's posts?

AristotletheHun?

RedGraham?

naturalborn?

drlove999?

Adam?

franknowzad?

GolemCohen?

d2i?

If you read just a handful of Tuci78's posts, you could be forgiven for using the word “bullying,” but not for using the word “progressive” or “ideological.”

If you find this site to be a vomitorium, you might ask yourself what the nauseating odor is. It's the smell of birther posts. The rest of us mock them because they disgust and annoy us.

If you don't want to be here, I'm sure your web browser has a “Back” and a “Home” icon. You'll be missed.

I referred to mattress tags, mud, maracas, and Homer Simpson. Not sure I was going for “formal argument,” but I concede that I did use copious amounts of logic.

If you think my post made no sense, you're welcome to ignore it. The fact that you felt compelled to respond suggests you understood it. Or at least that you want attention. You'll have to get in line, if so. There are a number of birthers here who have more compelling needs than you do. For example, you spelled all the words in your post correctly.

Well, that's socialism. In the Western tradition, that's how it's always been. Animal Farm. Can't be avoided, and never has been avoided.

There are other forms of statism, of course. The wonderfully corrupt Islamic Republic of Iran is explicitly a theocracy, with the ruling mullahs and their thugs governing in the name of Allah and their interpretation (sincere or hypocritical) of Islamic holy writ. It's not in the name of “the people” that individual rights are violated in Iran, but rather in the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.

The obtaining hypocrisy of the West today is socialism, no matter how it might be clumsily and ridiculously disguised. Doesn't matter whether you or anyone else consider socialism “a dirty word.” If the violation of individual rights is undertaken in the name of “society,” that violation is socialist.

Doesn't hurt to call it what it is, does it?

What, do you bear some kind of brief for this peculiar evil? Is there some way in which you personally conceive of socialism whereby it is not inescapably malignant and rotten to its very roots?

So you're a libertarian who doesn't want to see any government stronger than the Articles of Confederation. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that–libertarianism is a reasonable and coherent ideology. But you're literally arguing against the social good, which undoubtedly puts you in a minority of Americans. Most people, for example, support public schools and roads and police and all of the many other areas where yes, we _have_ decided that we're all in this together and would be better off forming a government to provide services for the common good. Hell, almost everyone supports Medicare and Social Security, both of which are far more liberal than anything Obama has pushed though Congress thus far

But we're really only arguing semantics here, and whether you know it or not the definitions you're using were not chosen in good faith. Goldberg and his ilk have taken the definition of socialism and broadened it to cover just about any form of government with a strong state. To pick an example neither of us are probably crazy about, the Iranian theocracy routinely and violently tramples on the rights of individuals for what it views as the greater good. By your metric, it is socialist–but putting it in that category teaches you nothing about Iran. You can't compare it in any but the most superficial ways to the USSR, to Sweden, to Venezuela, or any other country that's not a represive theocracy. That's why normal people would call it a repressive theocracy.

No, when you're trying to shed light on things, you create categories that are more specific, not less. When you take a word that refers to a fairly specific form of government and expand that definition to mean anything strong government that isn't (a very specific form of) right wing, you're obfuscating. You're trying to shut down debate, to divide people, to demonize your opposition.

When you say:

” It's the same old “we're doing it for the greater good” excuse. Call it “progressivism” or “Liberalism” or “fascism” or “Christian socialism” or whatever else you like, it's the forcible and aggressive denial of the individual's ability to say “no” in the name of benefiting society as a whole. “

you're doing exactly what I accused you of doing: conflating “statist” with “socialist.” There's basically no reason to do that other than to capitalize on the fact that socialism is a dirty word.

You can have the last word; unless you surprise me by saying something new (I know I didn't really, which is always a bad sign) I'm done here.

It's the same old “we're doing it for the greater good” excuse. Call it “progressivism” or “Liberalism” or “fascism” or “Christian socialism” or whatever else you like, it's the forcible and aggressive denial of the individual's ability to say “no” in the name of benefiting society as a whole.

The use of government as an agency for “legal plunder” (and I'm reading from Bastiat, not Jonah Goldberg) is as ancient as the city of Ur. But only since the 1830s has the excuse for such plundering been “the good of society.”

Not the divine right of kings or the ordinances of Holy Mother Church but the sanctified “we're all in this together, and how dare you question authority!” majority.

And that's socialism. The legitimatizing factor – that which has been used to disarm opposition, to demonize the defenders of individual rights.

To the extent that government has a legitimate sphere of function in a political system founded upon the validity of individual rights, what goes to the military – to break things and to kill people in defending those rights against “all enemies foreign and domestic” – is about all there is that could possibly justify the “compulsory collectivization” of which you speak.

And even with the imperialism we've experienced since the end of Lincoln's War, that's a mighty low-cost function.

Seems you could do with a bit more reading of Jonah Goldberg, couldn't you? While you're at it, try Thomas J. DiLorenzo as well.