>If I'm an American and I arrange to kidnap Joe Biden and hold him for ransom, does that sound like "treason" to you? All I want is money. But someone might think there's an important difference between the effect I'm trying to produce and the effect I actually do produce.
No, because those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.
But an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened, does not make for a compelling argument that particular actions do not constitute treason. To make that argument, you'd need to have a definition of treason that included something.
>But an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened, does not make for a compelling argument that particular actions do not constitute treason.
I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened". I don't have a ready definition for you to examine, but based on the examples it's pretty clear that executive and/or judiciary don't share such an expansive definition of treason as you. Moreover, aren't you engaging in the opposite? Is any crime that's vaguely against the state "treason"? [see my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38540252]
I'm not the one arguing that scamming money from the government is treason. I'm arguing that this is a very direct harm to the state. A very close analogy would be if I somehow contrived to break every interstate highway in the US so that planes could no longer use them as runways. Here I've specifically defeated what the government has (credibly!) identified as a crucial logistical military capability. If you believe that treason exists at all, you should also believe that this is close to the core of the concept.
If another state did exactly the same thing, it would be an act of war. Is that not enough to make it treason when done by a subject of the state?
> I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened".
Because what you wrote was "this can't be treason, because even things that are definitely treason still aren't treason". Take a look:
>>> those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.
[I assume you meant to say "treason rather than espionage".]
No, because those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.