On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Greg Newby wrote:
Do people on this list really believe that the solution to problems is to kill people?
Or are we just getting sarcastic and frustrated?
There are certain problems that no other solution for has ever been found. There has never been a human society that did not kill people. Even countries that don't execute criminals still slaughter enemy soldiers and civilians when they go to war. You can regard killing, of certain types of people anyway, as a service industry. Like all services, less of it is provided (and at a much higher cost) if there is a monopoly on it. Since we tend to like a minimum of killing, but are willing to pay the high costs for the truly necessary amount of killing, humans have mostly seen fit to institute monopolies on killing, regulate them fairly tightly, and refer to them as governments. In a governed state, it is your civic duty to uphold the monopoly. You must refrain from doing the killing yourself unless the power to kill delegated to the government is redelegated to you by the government. In an ungoverned state, it is your civic duty to stop psychopaths and sociopaths yourself, since you've no government to delegate that duty to in the first place. And to do so, generally you must kill. The "Needs Killing" verbiage you see here, I think, is mostly from people who, correctly or not, tend to think in terms either of there not being any governments, or in terms of the government being so ineffective that they are effectively in an ungoverned state. Bear