This maybe isn’t totally relevant, but it’s an excuse to drag out one of my favorite quotes:
Violence and people who will use violence are a fact of life. Saying that you disapprove of them is fine and dandy, but refusing to resist them with the only langauge they understand is foolish.
Wishing that something were not true will not make it false.
Calling the cops = asking someone to do violence on your behalf.
How is he going to get arrested and imprisoned without violence or the credible threat of violence coming into play? You’ve got someone using violence on your behalf to solve the problem even if he complies only to threats of violence. You can’t say that you live by ‘violence is never the answer’ if you also say ‘if someone steals my stuff, I will have armed men recover my property, then take him and put him into a cage, and they will beat or shoot him if he refuses to do what they say’. That’s using violence to resolve the problem whether you want to admit it or not.
(Yes, it’s mostly a rehash of what I wrote before, but you didn’t list any specific disagreement with what I wrote so I’m not really sure what you don’t follow).
Hope doesn’t enter into it. If a mugger says ‘your money or your life’, he hopes that you just give him your money and no trouble but is still quite willing to use violence. Anyway, let’s take a scenario: Some guy cleaned out (robbed) your house last week and told you he’d slit your throat if you called the cops. You do call the cops, and they up to him and tell him that he’s under arrest. He says ‘sod off, pigs!’ and ignores them.
Should the cops A. break out the billy clubs (or other weapons or just lay hands on him) and forcibly arrest him or B. Say ‘jolly good show old chap, let us know if you change your mind’ and leave him alone?
This debate really has nothing to do with guns, we can completely ignore the existence of firearms and still have the same debate. Violence can be done with billy clubs, knives, machetes hands, feet, swords, spears, and a host of non-firearm means, and NZ police are trained in and use some sort of club and unarmed combat as a matter of course.
So, can you take the pacifist challenge? If physically attacked by someone, will you fight back? If someone threatens to kill you, or takes your stuff, or commits some other crime, will you call on the police to do violence on your behalf? If you make a pithy moralistic statement about how violence should not be used to solve problems (like the above) but when push comes to shove use violence to protect yourself, you’re exactly the sort of hypocritical ‘pacifist’ I am talking about.
So, what puzzles me is, what would an “absolute pacifist” do when confronted with a crime? To do nothing is irresponsible since it allows a criminal to continue to act the same way toward other people.
Well, it looks like we might have one genuine pacifist so far - you believe that all violence is wrong, and are willing to stick with that and not just cop-out and get someone else to do the violence for you. You seem to be the only one who’s come along so far, the others are all willing to call on someone else to do violence (and haven’t shown a flaw in the logic showing such). If I get more real pacifists then there’s another debate on the basics of pacifism, but I’m not and would ask that others not go into the ‘but, doesn’t that mean you’re just a victim’ type debate here - I really want to keep this only to the original topic.
That’s a great quote, racekarl.
I’m wondering if the “pacifists” here would allow a child or loved one to be harmed by choosing not to defend them using some sort of force.
They’d need to find a nonviolent solution, if they call the cops then they’re being hypocritical as keeps getting pointed out. It’s the job of pacifists to figure out how to live up to the ideals they criticize others for not living up to.
If physically attacked by someone, I defend myself without striking back, because I truly believe that there is a difference between defence and offence. If someone threatens to kill me or takes my stuff I report the crime to the proper authorities. Most arrests are made without physical violence, and so the automatic inference that police action automatically equals violence and thus a true pacifist may not use the police is invalid. If “push” comes to “shove” then in my opinion you have countered one wrong action with an equally wrong reaction.
Am I a true pacifist? In my lifetime I have never struck another person.
When I told the Army I would not use nuclear weapons, or participate in the mission to use them, I was accused of many things, cowardice among them. And no one will ever know if I am a coward, or a pacifist, not even me.
No one ever know, unless the moment actually comes, whether they have courage, or if they have enough of it to withstand the fear they might fear, in unknown events. You may be sure, but that is simply vanity, unless you have crawled on your belly for a mile, as hostile weapon fire exploding mines slaughtered your comrades all around you. Courage is what we expect of others, and desire to have untested in our selves.
And just as courage, love for your fellow man is a perfect state, to be desired, but never assured in our hearts. Would I kill, if given sufficient provocation? I hope I will never know. But I do know that I will not kill millions. That test, I have faced, and my choice was made. I will never face it again, because I will never be given the choice. Was it courage or cowardice that made me choose? You may believe what you will, and I cannot prove it wrong.
And you cannot know what another will do, or why. If you define the unwillingness to kill itself as cowardice, then you have your answer. But your answer is that his motives make him a coward, you must know his heart. There are cowards with guns, and cowards who kill for gain, or even for patriotism. The killing does not change their cowardice. And there are cowards who claim to be pacifists, if they think that will not cause them danger. But you know only the courage of those who have lived the moment of choice, and given themselves to their ideals, whatever those ideals are.
“It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi ~
Yes. Stopping to ‘help’ contradicts logic of consent to this regard. Not only does it corrupt the mind by proving such an act solves consent issues, but it wastes valuable time with regards to placing pressure on the root cause. I truly wish I had never been born. I certainly am a realist in understanding that this ‘rape’ is permanent. Making the best of the situation from my standpoint is assuring that the discipline required to abstract more truth with which to actually combat this phenomenon is not corrupted… if the process is corrupted, the result will be corrupted. Those children can be ‘ressurrected’ and re-consented, but the path twards uncovering this degree of truth; the discipline for abstraction itself requires non-corruption in order to even present the option, the possibility of uncovering this stage. If everybody acted like myself, the process would still necessarily move forward for resurrection abstraction; and consent violation would stop in my generation. If people don’t act like me, the ability to validate consent will not emerge because people will be too deluded to see what consent even means; how important it is to human beings, logic and rationality, the perception of free-will and the redemption of being rather than not committing suicide at any given second. I personally cannot solve for war.
Tris: That Ghandi quote requires the strength to endure our species suicide should our collective being ultimately be violent of heart. Truth with regards to violence is misdirected from people looking to build a religion - as it always implies murder rather than suicide; the blind ego rather than the truth of being.
The propblem with violent individuals is that they continuously defer the most logical application of these scenarios as validating their stance by inverting the answer which most obviously answers the question.
Violent people by nature consider it ethical to maintain this cloak if our species as a whole is designed for suicide; that is where a double standard and a corruption is being applied here.
It is this gambling on the indentured system of ignorant people which gathers the resource of fame and attention. Ghandi channelled this energy to violate the consent of focus upon his being collectively throughout the species, rather than giving this quality back. He was murdered for this act of consent violation.
-Justhink
Violence is a result of cognitive dementia. There are many solutions which involve consent only violence which we can abstract rather crudely right now to show people actually let them experience first hand the suffering in the world. I guarantee, even with our most rudimentary education along this line; if we installed manual painless suicde machines every 100 yards - people would soon discover what this topic has always been about. Violence is being committed because people who commit it are being shielded from the pain they’re inflicting by the use of technology developed from people who cannot think this way in order to abstract it. By placing suicde machines everywhere, the paying field becomes levelled with regards to technology use and the emotional and psychological suffering that they are so ignorantly shielding to gather ‘success’ will be unavoidable.
You’re correct in stating the truth cannot be denied. That’s why we don’t have painless suicide machines; people are too afraid to face the truth of their embodyment of the very thing they fear being the most; a slave to the thirst of slavery and hiding the slaves and boasting about ones work.
-Justhink
That’s a dodge. Most arrests are made without violence BECAUSE most people recognize how the police will react if they put up any resistance, and are sensible enough not to fight a losing battle. When you place a call to the police department, you are tacitly granting them permission to use violence if necessary to solve your problem, because that’s EXACTLY what the police officers will resort to if needed to carry out the arrest - and you know that when you phone them.
Ultimately, physical force is what backs up our justice system. It’s use may not be required often, but that doesn’t mean it’s trivial to the operation of the system.
If America seriously instituted this policy and stuck with it, then I would conquer the place myself. (assuming I was somehow immune to the phenomenon, unlike everyone else). All I would need is a handgun and a car to drive the DC, running people over along the way. 
Seriously though, I would like to add my $.02 to the pile of people arguing that calling the police is an endorsement of violence of sorts. Because if the police were pacifists also, then they would have zero effect on crime.
All arrests are made with the direct threat of physical violence, and claiming that they’re not is hardly reasonable or honest. “Violence is wrong, but calling someone to threaten the guy and beat him up if he doesn’t give me my stuff back is not violence because the guy might comply without being beat up” is not exactly convincing.
OK, take this hypothetical: Someone is beating you up, you’re not able to run away, so you’re just sitting there taking it. Then the cops happen to show up and say ‘hey, stop beating up on him’. The guy beating you up ignores them. What do you want the cops to do then? If it involves anything beyond harsh language, you’re a hypocrite.
You’re as much of a pacifist as a mafia boss, who also gets someone else to actually do the violence and doesn’t explicitly tell them to use violence.
I once read the personal web page of a pacifist.
During the 60s, he was a protestor, and got a conscientious objector exemption from the draft.
He then turned around and volunteered as a medic and went to Vietnam.
Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers also describes cases like this – where people who didn’t want to kill were medics, and many of those folk were very brace. (Incidentally, a non-insignificant portion of these people wanted to kill people after a few battles).
Its very possible for pacifists to be brave, it just depends on the person.
Until…
“Aaaaah! He’s got a board with a nail in it!”
"That board may have defeated us, But the humans won’t stop there, they’ll make bigger boards and bigger nails and soon they will make a board with a nail so big it will destroy them all…hahahahaha "
XPav, you and your board/nail combo can rule everything west of the Mississippi river. I will take the east coast with my gun.
This is like the Simpsons aliens meet Caligula. But, somehow it’s still oddly relevant.
The implied thread of violence by the police protects us all from rampant criminal behavior and anarchy every day. The implied thread of violence of our military protects all US citizens from being conquered by those who would if we didn’t defend ourselves.
Anyone enjoying all of the things we take for granted every day and claiming to be a pacifist is a hypocrite. It’s like saying you don’t believe in electricity while you are typing on the keyboard listening to a stereo wearing battery heated socks.
I just love being compared to a Mafia boss. If you want to claim that restraining the person threatening violence is the same as hitting the person threatening violence then this conversation is at a standstill. Are you trying to claim that when I stop my child from running out into the streets by holding his hand firmly I am resorting to violence? Let me tell you this right now-If I was being threatened and yelled for the police, and their first reaction were to bring out the batons and mace, I would protest.
I do not resort to violence. Ever. I do not wish for others to resort to violence on my behalf.
My stance on outsoucing violence is: no.
Violence is truly a consent issue at its core. If you understand an activity to be a consent violation, the solution is to collapse the resource which allows the consent violation to occur in the first place; not to combat it with more consent violation. As I stated earlier, such an act is pointlessly self-defeating as it assures your logic will not be fit enough to solve the primary problem - it necessitates laziness on the part of existential work.
-Justhink
These people are only conquering violence. There is nothing to protect here. When societies make existential work a priority, the act of violence will be relegated to sheer purposelessness.
Why kill the person who wants to improve your capacity to express your consent? Even ‘villians’ aren’t this obtuse. If you want to place the existential pressure of these truths into society immediately, painless public suicide machines will accomplish this.
The issue is that people are being sheltered from existential pressure; they are being allowed existential padding with the use of technology which results from pacifism; while not being confronted with the pressure which causes these ‘innovators’ (workers) to become pacifists in the first place, to allow them to abstract the technology. You literally have people protected from the pressure that existential workers understand internally. Existential workers can certainly activate or abstract technology to destroy all of the encryption padding for those who are being shielded from that pressure; a shielding which which allows the delusion to exist in a circular means.
This is the type of corrupt understanding which perpetuates violence. The luxuries you speak of only emerge when people bridge the ability to violate consent by actually solving for consent. It is a subtlety of friendship, observation, listening and solving for peer communication with regards to symbols which allows this technology to emerge. The people who use this technology without understanding the process to procure it, or using it in the same means the the process necessary to procure it are the ones who are violent.
This technology cannot be abstracted with violence. Violence stops existential work in it’s tracks - and is nothing more than a luxury of completely delusional logic.
People have wars over who gets food to survive. People can gather togather to solve for the food problem by querying nature itself and abstracting the technology to automate the eating process through organisms rather than from our need to remember to eat to survive. Just because EVERYBODY is not doing this existential consent work, does not make it justifiable to walk into this delusional world of fighting over a resource which can simply be collapsed if the work gets done. When I observe people in my life, I see that they are mostly retired from life and pretty much always have been. They retired without doing any work, they never once collapsed a resource by doing existential work - they simply wasted their time abusing the loophole until this work gets completed. Using violence assures that this work will not be completed — it’s not that the information won’t surface, it’s that the mind perpetrating the violence will be too young to comprehend the importance of the data; the data itself will be corrupt, and the mind percieving it (the method of achieving it) will be corrupt with regards to collpasing the ‘need’ for violence. The problem is resultantly a cognitive age issue, violent minds are detatched from the problems they are creating, because they cannot formulate actual solutions with regards to their own consent; how their own consent is dependant upon solving for the consent of everyone.
-Justhink