Being able to choose your master does not make you free.
When we abuse words describing terrible things and imply that working for another is slavery what are we to do when the real thing is staring us in the face?
The illusion of choice makes use truly slaves.
Ah, no longer implied. Your belief that we are slaves is not within the realm of reason. You may quit your job. A slave cannot. The list differentiating the two would be so exhaustive that my fingers would get blistered.
We fought a war about this issue and hundreds of thousands of people died and you would compare that struggle to the notion that a person may make his way in life by choosing to work for another? (And before anyone jumps on the state's rights argument.... yes, the constitutional conflict was just that. The issue that gave rise to the conflict was slavery. Absent slavery there would be no War Between the States).
Violence is not virtue, that's illegitimate.
Not sure what you are saying. Is the second clause meant to dismiss the first or were you presuming to impute the notion that "violence is virtue" to me?
Because the first option negates itself I'll ignore it.
Because the second makes a false attribution to be I won't.
Violence is not a virtue. Violence is costly in blood and treasure at the bare minimum. That minimum presents a threshold that is difficult to breach.
Let us consider state X, just a hypothetical country. History illustrates that wars exist. It also illustrates that rarely does a weaker state attack a stronger state (this most often occurs when a weak state believes attack is imminent and preemptive action will offer improved chances of successful results and less often when a state, or more often a nation, realizes it cannot win and hopes to merely harm the stronger state as much as possible).
From this we learn that weakness is provocative to aggressors. This disparity in might is more important than the fundamental dispute. (The dispute between the US and USSR were broad and deep but neither were willing to engage in open war fighting)
Presuming rational actors a state does not embark upon a war without an achievable purpose. This purpose may take many forms but they are necessarily typically limited in scope. Obviously this is not always true as examples of campaigns of genocide are readily identifiable (see
the Avars).
A state may find itself in one of three general catagories: invader, invaded mutual engagement. In only in the first is there much choice. Invading tanks cannot be reasoned with. A state may choose not to fight when attacked for a variety of reasons. However, violence, or in this case the mere threat thereof illustrates the power of violence. It is a method to force settlement.
When should this power be applied? A very difficult question and it is dependent upon many things broadly encapsulated in the goals a state hopes to achieve through use of that force. I think it is easy to suggest that when a state is attacked responding in kind is a reasonable use of violence. The mutual engagement is little different. Which leaves us to apply the question to the case of the invader. The facts and circumstances leading to that choice must be evaluated on their own merits.
And neither is violence necessary to keep society ordered; in fact that's what accounts for a lot of its disorder.
Just one example but it fits. Those guys in China... the ones that got killed at Tienamen... they'd disagree. Violence killed them and cowed a billion in China into submission. Hope is not fact. Do not confuse the world you'd have us live in with the one we do live in.
