(10-26-2011, 09:42 PM)FireIceTalon Wrote: Maybe you find it ok to follow the rest of the little white mice in the world and agree with norms. I prefer, however, to think critically and question the stereotypes and norms in history that distort the truth. I could care less if 90% of the world disagrees with me, I'm only concerned with the facts. If the facts point to what the majority says, fine. But if I see distortions, half truths, myths, or anything that is otherwise flawed or misconstrued, I will form my own view and stand firmly by it regardless of how much in the minority I am. If the sheep don't like it, I really couldn't care less.
There are two types of "fact," as you call them. For the philosophers, these would be synthetic and analytic. Synthetic propositions actually say something about the world. "It rained today." That can be true or false. If it's true, we call that a fact. It has content.
Analytic propositions are questions of theory and definition. They are true and false entirely based on how you define your terms. They do not say anything about the world.
Your distinctions take what are perfectly decent synthetic facts, and contradict them, not by contradicting evidence, but by simply defining the problem out of existence. You have transformed a synthetic fact into an analytic "fact" that no longer has any meaning we care about. In logic, the classic problem of induction is usually illustrated with the proposition "all sheep are white" - what happens when you discover a black sheep? Apparently, if we follow your reasoning, we just define the black sheep as not a sheep, and go on our merry way.
In your example, Communism hasn't killed ayone, because everyone who ever killed anyone is not a Communist; you have basically defined it thus. But pacifism has never been any part of Communist doctrine, and its relationship to democracy has been shaky at best. But that doesn't matter; your Communism is a pure, theoretical entity, shorn of anything that might blemish it, and, in the process, completely severed from all but the most harmless bits of its historical content. This leaves only harmless, killed-before-her-time Rosa Luxemburg, and presumably a handful of other people who never had to govern anything larger than a breadbox. And even she gets Bowdlerized.
-Jester