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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?
I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.
I get it.
Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.
If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.
So we are stuck.
But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.
But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.
I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."
Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
The United States exists in the first place because a bunch of people committed treason. Treason is not automatically bad. It's kind of incoherent for an American to criticize treason. What even is treason? It's a very "in the eye of the beholder" thing, isn't it? Is the US government currently encouraging Iranian civilians to commit treason against their government?
If we follow your logic, the US government will be able to start any war it wants to at any time and, if stopping it half-way might cause chaos, we'll have to support it. We will have to suspend attempts to attack the ruling administration, since that might interfere with the war. Basically, we would turn the US into a country that is regularly ruled by military dictators. Maybe we'd even bring back the Espionage Act and make it illegal to criticize the war effort. I don't like that idea.
Having had a British education, I always find myself chuckling when extremely-online libs start fulminating about how Confederates were "traitors". Maybe you should have paid for your tea!
More seriously, I think the motte definition of treason in an American context is "aiding enemies of the country in a context where the right of revolution does not apply". The concept of the right of revolution is critical to the Founders' political thought, for obvious reasons (vide), but it was a complex concept that is inextricable from the right of self-defense in e.g. Hobbes/Locke and can't easily be applied in a modern context.
Former commentors here like David Friedman and HlynkaCG would disagree but that's also a big part of why they're former commentors.
I'm assuming those two people were banned (I've seen references to Hlynka before) but what does that have to do with Hobbes/Locke? I'm assuming the mods aren't massive haters of those two philosophers lol
Hlynka talked about Hobbes a lot (that wasn't why he was banned though).
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