While the Trump Team seems slightly more willing to murder random people (ie Mike Walz: “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”), but the whole bombing Yemen thing is hardly a new policy. There’s not much daylight between what the Signal group chat is doing and what the Biden administration did.
Too many people are still smitten with the idea that the US state, or any state, can be a force for good if it’s just run by the right, good people in the right, good way, and that the state’s violence will only be used against bad people in the right, good way.
@HeavenlyPossum you do realise that a sate doesn't necessitate a global war on civilisation?
Their exist plenty of states that doesn't have the capacity for indiscriminate bombings against targets they don't like on the other side of the globe.
The foundational aspect of the state—any state—is violence.
@HeavenlyPossum I disagree. But I have been down this road before and knows it lead nowhere.
What would you call a higher order social structure that make civilisation possible, if you don't call it a state?
If you expect this to lead nowhere, then don’t engage me about it.
@HeavenlyPossum @ekg me, disagreeing with a point I didn't make, on someone else's post
Them: okay, fine,
Me: WELP, THIS IS GOING NOWHERE
@neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum no.
I said that the specific violence reference is not universal. And only a select few state has the capacity for that kind of violence.
Me saying that a debate on whatever a state necessary means violence is me ending that debate before asking an related question to the topic.
Every state, everywhere, that has ever existed, has been violent every single day of its existence.
A “capacity for that kind of violence” might be unique to a handful of states that can project force globally. That does not somehow mean that other states are not intrinsically, fundamentally, pervasively violent.
@HeavenlyPossum @ekg @neonsnake
Pretty much every living thing exercises violence or the threat of violence to exist. Even trees. Anarchy is violent, States are violent. So it's a facile point.
I don't like violence, but moralizing without describing any alternatives is just patting oneself on the back. We've been doing that for centuries, and look where it's gotten us.
@Phosphenes @HeavenlyPossum @neonsnake you aren't wrong, but it necessary to define what you want to see less of in the world. Saying that states are violent and I don't like it isn't bad.
Where things get iffy is when you denie states the ability to use violence to protect people from it.
