On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
There has never been a human society that did not kill people.
People kill people you idiot. Don't confuse WHAT and HOW something is done with the WHY.
My point is that people HAVE TO kill people. The presence or absence of a government has no bearing on that fact, only on how it is done, by whom, and how often. There are certain people who, if not removed from society, will terrorize populations and cause huge amounts of economic and other damage. In places where there are laws, they are called "criminals". In populations that can afford to build prisons, and which work together (whether working together is accomplished by government coercion or voluntary cooperation) enough to build prisons and courts, we don't have to kill them as often because there is another method for removing them from society available.
Even countries that don't execute criminals still slaughter enemy soldiers and civilians when they go to war.
So? Self-defence isn't the same as murder.
And war killing isn't the same as self-defence, either. In the absence of laws, killing is just killing. It is law that designates some killings as murders, others as executions, others as self-defense, others as duty. But I really don't care what anybody calls it. I'm just pointing out that some killing is evidently (judging by history) necessary in every culture.
You can regard killing, of certain types of people anyway, as a service industry.
I believe this is called bigotry.
Believe whatever you want. A sorry waste of living tissue made headlines here the other day by being found with a woman's breast in his pocket. On searching, the police officers discovered several corpses in various states of hacked-to-bits-ness, all showing evidence of having been raped violently and tortured before being killed. All of the victims were people whose history did not connect to the killer in any way -- he didn't even know them, and he did this. If I didn't have police, courts, and prisons available, and such an individual came to my attention, I would regard it as my civic duty to personally remove such an individual from the gene pool, and I would not hesitate to chamber the round and pull the trigger. Moreover, I would regard anyone who didn't feel the same way as a coward to be shunned. So, I'm bigoted for feeling this way? Fine. You use your words, I'll use mine. It is an act of cowardice, and destructive to society at large, to permit such individuals to live. Right now, we use governments to regulate that kind of force -- it's a protocol, to see that it is applied consistently and with due process, rather than at whim and as a result of poor judgement. And, despite a few spectacular failures, it works most of the time. I participate in the Government protocol because I like for there to be some accountability regarding killings and other uses of force. But in the absence of the opportunity to use government in this way, I would have to carry out killings and other uses of force myself. And so would a lot of other people, including some whose judgement does not agree with mine or yours nor with what we now get through government.
AP, and anarchy in general, is the scream of the failed. Those who have given up and agreed to be subsumed by their basest nature.
AP is a proposed replacement for the "government protocol" -- Its proponents claim that we can cut down on killing in general by trading war, genocide, etc for a relatively smaller number of paid assassinations. This is interesting, of course, but there is no evidence for the claim. I believe that it would have the very bad side effect of making it impossible for anyone to amass substantial capital, simply because having substantial capital means you or your property or employees interacts with, and pisses off, more people. So anybody who was rich enough to get much of anything done would become a target. Then you'd never get bridges or skyscrapers or large-scale data switch centers built. That makes AP a colossally bad idea, regardless of whether it would result in more or less killing. Bear