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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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pacifism

21 Aug 2023 - 22 Jun 2024
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    • Thinking maybe I am more of a pacifist these days. It appealed to me a bit as a kid but it didn't match my contentious nature. But now I think those spiritual wimps were right; pacifism is the only consistent good political philosophy. And its not impractical like its cousin anarchism.
    • That is to say, war and the state are tightly linked but not quite the same thing, and opposing them is not the same thing. An anarchist, who opposes the state in toto, has to answer the question of what replaces it, or performs the social funcitons that the state is usually responsible for. The anarchist answers tend to be either unconvincing or end up smuggling everything hated about the state back in.
    • The pacifist, on the other hand, is not opposed to the state as such, only its violent and evil actions. He doesn't have to replace anything. The state is composed of human beings, and if those human beings awaken their human compassion, the state will concentrate on its positive functions rather than its violent ones.