# Red button or blue button dilemma

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/red-button-or-blue-button-dilemma/1024041>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [October 16, 2025, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/red-button-or-blue-button-dilemma/1024041 "2025-10-16T22:59:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 300

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**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\
**Post date:** [October 21, 2025, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/red-button-or-blue-button-dilemma/1024041/300 "2025-10-21T20:47:11Z")

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> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> Isn’t that straight out of Thomas Hobbes’s _Leviathan_?

According to the [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence) I linked to that nobody has apparently clicked on yet, yes, along with an earlier work by the “French jurist and political philosopher [Jean Bodin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bodin)” in his 1576 work _[Les Six livres de la République](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Six_livres_de_la_R%C3%A9publique)_.

But this would seem to be a topic for another thread. I’ll start one.

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