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.

@ekg

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?

@ekg

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.

@ekg @neonsnake

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 @neonsnake this is only true because you in part define a state as violent. Which might be appropriate, but it's not the definition I am used too.

@neonsnake @ekg

The state is not violent because I define it that way; “the state” is a name we give to an intrinsically violent social form.

This isn’t a “he said, she said” situation. There are these things out there, these socio-political institutions of elite rule through violence, and the name we give them is “the state.”

@HeavenlyPossum @neonsnake language is restrictive. By calling these organisations for violent, or evil, it becomes harder to see them as anything else.

I don't want to dismiss all acts of what we might traditionally call state's as violent before understanding what lead to those decisions being made, and the consequence they might have.

@neonsnake @ekg

Not everything every state does is violent. But every state is, fundamentally and pervasively and continuously, violent. Violent in service of elite rule and exploitation.

I do not struggle to “see them as anything else” by correctly identifying and assessing the state.

@HeavenlyPossum @neonsnake okay, that doesn't mean that it doesn't makes it harder.

I truly want to give every subject as much benefit of the doubt as possible.