11-27-2018, 07:23 PM
(11-27-2018, 11:19 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-27-2018, 11:02 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-27-2018, 03:54 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Not am sure if the red are right anymore. I have my doubts. Letting go of the violent trump card and trusting softer forms of power may be risky.
Self-defense is often even more violent than overt aggression.
Maybe it is supposed to be that way? If you are always equipped, trained and ready, civilized folk can beat the barbarians? Thus, stay equipped, trained and ready?
Civilized folks are better at making aggression futile. They are good at establishing rules of engagement and giving people good reasons to not turn violent. Contract law is a better way of resolving disputes than is a firearm. opportunity is better than violent crime.
Quote:Fighting guns and armies with dogs and orchestras doesn't get it done.
I've heard of people who killed for a pack or cigarettes or a six-pack of beer -- but never for a ticket to a concert of the Chicago Symphony. The latter is far more expensive. Maybe appreciating the symphony, impressionist art, the ballet, the opera, or poetry makes someone more capable of subtlety in thought and thinking beyond the immediate desire. Violent crime is almost never a thinking man's activity. Maybe in a really sick society whose leadership is gangsters there are sophisticated people plotting enslavement and mass murder or at least the killing of dissidents or heretics, but that says more about how uncivilized the political order got.
The only way to defeat an invading army is with a bigger or better-run army. Dogs and guns? In South Africa, a violent society, people have dogs defending their guns. Three 80-pound dogs make one 240-pound lioness as a predatory force. Even small dogs have bitten gun-wielding assailants behind the wrist and separated the gun from the crook. A well-behaved dog is safe. A dog with defends itself or loved ones with the methods of a lethal predator.
It's telling that the Nazis quickly prohibited Jews from keeping dogs. SS men and the Gestapo did not want to experience painful bites from dogs that could figure easily that the SS or Gestapo was up to no good.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.