Comments Elsewhere

Womble: Distrusting any government anywhere anytime in any matter is a case of a clinically paranoid mindset. People like that should seek professional help.

Sham medical diagnoses for political disagreements isn’t going to get you very far in rational argument. It is, frankly, a sleazy rhetorical tactic, and you ought to feel guilty about having indulged in it.

That said, the issue I mentioned didn’t have to do with whether or not you categorically distrust all government action. It specifically has to do with how far you trust incumbent parties (who have the power to set the legal criteria, if we allow legal criteria to be set) to put up legislative barriers against competing parties. Because the ability to exclude your own challengers is a dangerous thing for governing parties to have.

Womble: Believing that the rights of any party, however violent, anti-democratic and racist, must be defended no matter the cost is a case of either total loss of morals or deliberate blindness to reality.

I don’t care about the rights of any “party;” I don’t think they’ve got any. I do care about the rights of party members to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, etc. I don’t really care very much about the ability of folks to challenge in an election either, since I don’t regard government elections as having any legitimate authority (I think there are some weak pragmatic reasons to resist moves like that, but not principled moral objections). But your dark suggestions that you’d be fine with using “harsher measures” against anti-democratic parties is troubling, because it’s hard to imagine what that would mean other than compromising those rights, and suggests that you’re fine with violent retaliation beyond simply delisting their candidates (for what crime? If their candidates can’t be recognized as standing in the election, what “resistance” do you have in mind suppressing through the use of violence? Advocating political views? Electioneering for qualified candidates? Printing literature? Meeting? Assembling in public? Something else?)

N.B.: I am quite willing to take the stance in question for Kach as well as Hamas, for Maoists, for the Ku Klux Klan, and just about any other example of bare-fanged evil organized that I can think of.