EJ

Stop squirming. Either prove the social contract, or admit that it doesn’t exist.

Your argument is only “The State is justified because it’s justified”. Your circular argument proves only that you have nothing.

As for predation, you’ve already lost that argument here,
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16710&page=0
remember?
You went out backwards and ran away COMPLETELY FAILING to defend your blind devotion to State predation and exploitation, just as you’ve failed to defend it now.

Stop evading now and either answer the questions or admit you are wrong:
1. In principle, according to you, there's nothing wrong with shooting people dead or threatening to cage and rape them to force them to obey and submit to anything whatsoever so long as a majority vote for it, or rather, so long as a government voted for by a majority does the predation and enslaving?
2. Please admit that's what you're arguing; but if not, why not?
3. Admit you have changed your justification for predation and slavery? You were arguing it's okay if the state does it. Now you're disowning the state per se, and confining your defence to democratic states.
4. So at what point in Australia's history did the government acquire the right to shoot people for whatever it wants, as you maintain?
5. Isn't the whole purpose of rules of just conduct to have some other principle of social relations than that the stronger will take from the weaker and attack them if they don't submit and obey?
6. You do know, don't you, that Hitler and his national socialist party were democratically elected?
7. So how is your so-called "principle" any different from 'might is right'?
8. Does the State protect us from state-authorised predators?
9. Does it protect us from having as much of our property, liberty or life violated as the state decides?
10. For the sake of intellectual honesty, please either answer my specific questions, or admit that your political and economic ideology has just been totally demolished, even according to your own terms, because it's hypocritical and wrong, because you've never thought it through properly.

Dear Julian,

«Yuyutsu seems to be seeking to describe a state as a sort of tyranny»

Any organisation which includes you in its membership without your consent, forcibly expecting you to follow its membership-rules, is a tyranny - it doesn't necessarily have to treat you badly to qualify.

Now even if I can be made personally safe and comfortable by the state, how could I be comfortable being a part of a gang of people who force themselves on others? I may perhaps be allowed to live like a king, but when even ONE(1) other person is forced to be involved with this state against their will, then cooperating with this state makes me a villain. Unlike you perhaps, I cannot feel comfortable being a villain.

As for safety, even if the state can protect my body while I am alive, how could it keep protecting me once my body falls and on the day of judgement I am faced with the thundering question: "why did you associate with these evil people? why have you aided and abetted their sinister intents?". When I was young, I could possibly respond in my defence: "sorry, I didn't know, I was an idiot, I was brainwashed, this is what they taught me in school, even in kindi", but now that I am aware of the truth, there's no way I could get away with such excuses.

«not constrained by any culture and structure that gives the community any control of it»

What a perfect straw-man: I never claimed that the community cannot control the state.
Why should I care whether or not the community can control the state when I don't even want to control the state myself - or anyone else for that matter?
Besides, what's that "community" for me anyway, as I have never even freely chose to belong to it!

Just for the "privilege" of having a spot on the surface of this planet to place one's feet on, one is currently forced to oblige to the rules of one of those tyrannies or the other. This is wrong.

All

A typical definition of terrorism is this one from Google:
“the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.”

Now just think for a sec. Why say the “unofficial or unauthorized” use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims?

Because if they just said terrorism is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”, they’d be describing *every State and every government*.

Because that’s what the State *is*: a legal monopoly of violence and intimidation. That’s what explains the State and its inputs and outputs, not some fictional “social contract”. Obedience, not consent.

Statists like EmperorJulian can only defend the State by using a double standard, for example defining predation as one thing when non-State actors do it, and then exempting the State from that definition when the State does it.

For if what justifies the State is the need to protect us from predation or intimidation, that doesn’t explain why any more than defensive action would be necessary. It doesn’t explain why the State must itself claim a right to initiate force and threats - aggressive violence - not just to violate person and property, but to be by far the worst offender.

But statists don’t limit their claim to defensive action. The claim of a right of aggression, of expropriation and subjugation, is the very nature of the State.

When challenged, they can’t defend that ethically, so the statists immediately fall back to a defence of the state based on “democracy”. So they immediately concede the general issue as concerns all other, non-democratic, states, even though these have been numerically and historically the commonest.

But this only begs the question when the Australian state became “democratic”. Presumably it was not until universal adult suffrage in the 1920s. So the Constitution is not legitimate, according to the statists’ logic.

And it still begs the question whether aggressive violence and predation is made legitimate by majority vote.

Problem is, it’s nonsense on stilts, however much we might emotionally want to defend it.