Violence

[HopAlongBunny]

I am kind of surprised at the turn this topic took.

Clausewitz picked the duel as his metaphor for war. A duel or a series of duels the end result is the same: one living (victor) one dead (vanquished). Where does this fail to meet the definition of murder?

Just because "Clausewitz sez!" doesn't make it so...do you have a better metaphor?

[Fragony]

I am kind of surprised at the turn this topic took.

Clausewitz picked the duel as his metaphor for war. A duel or a series of duels the end result is the same: one living (victor) one dead (vanquished). Where does this fail to meet the definition of murder?

Not so sure you understand the metaphore he was using, beaten, not vanquished. For Clausowitz it wasn't the destruction of an enemy army that was important but making the situation so dire for the opponent that they simply couldn't win. For Clausewitz war was an extention of politics

[Fisherking]

You are not going to divorce Politics from Military Might. The military is the servant of political will, vested in the Executive Branch.
War is a political policy. If you find that it is too frequent then we need to find more stable and less aggressive politicians.

[Kadagar_AV]

Well yeah. I don't mean to literally forget about war as an instrument of policy, because that would be inviting disaster. But certainly it would be ideal if it were understood by every American that we enjoy an incredible advantage, nobody can seriously hurt us, and there are better ways to approach this anyway. We could easily withdraw from the world stage militarily (aside from the UN, and we could simply scale back and offer up the same amount of troops as European nations do). The threat and promise of reciprocity would benefit us in the long run way more than this active way of trying to clamp down on the whole world.

Such a policy track would require politicians, economists, and common voters to exhibit way too much common sense though. Too many people would have to swallow their pride for it to ever work.

[Husar]

You could privatize the military and the whole war-making thing. That way wars wouldn't be decided by lazy warmongering politicians but by upstanding investors and stockholders who just want to make a huge profit.

[HopAlongBunny]

That goes to the heart of what Eisenhower was warning about in his speech. Instead of an abstract fear placed at some time in the future, I think he was illustrating a process and a mechanism already in place.

It dovetails so nicely into "national pride" and "place in the world" that private control of public space becomes essentially invisible (so long as it remains within the shroud American Might)

It also has implications for the servant/subject relation of politics/war. Indeed who serves whom?

[Fragony]

Anti-violence! The 4th of may isn't just Starwars-day but also our memorial day for those who died. This was last year but it's pretty impressive how the country falls completily silent for two minutes

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eds5t2WEPxs